The

The quarterly magazine of conservative thought

Exile & Return Moral Combat Ladies Without Mattiya Kambona M R D Foot Lamps Jane Kelly Palace of Lies A Veiled Threat Sea Blindness Theodore Dalrymple Christie Davies John Parfitt

Autumn 2010 £4.99 Contents

3 Editorial

Articles

4 Exile and Return 18 Twelve Good Men and True? Mattiya Kambona Nigel Jarrett 6 Ladies without Lamps 20 A Curriculum of Errors Jane Kelly Frank Ellis 7 Palace of Lies 22 Real Rebels on the Right Theodore Dalrymple Nigel Jones 9 A Veiled Threat 24 American Funny Money Christie Davies Russell Lewis 11 Cooking up a Storm 26 650 Hands in the Till Brian Ridley Richard Packer 13 Will the Germans set us Free? 29 Writing for Frankie Howerd Mark Griffith Marc Blake 15 Sea Blindness John Parfitt Columns Arts & Books

38 M R D Foot 28 BBC Watch on Michael Burleigh 30 Conservative Classic — 40 39 Nigel Jones When William Came, Saki on Hugh Trevor-Roper 33 Roy Kerridge 40 Patricia Lança 34 Eternal Life on Generational Conflict Peter Mullen 42 Will Robinson 35 Reputations — 29 on Lord Denning The Queen Mother 43 Michael St John Parker on de Tocqueville 45 Jan Maciag 27 Letters on Lost Cities 46 Frank Ellis on Waziristan 47 Alistair Miller on Positive Thinking 48 Anthony Daniels on Democratic Despotism 50 John Constable on an Angling Family 52 Film: Please Give Jane Kelly 53 Art: Andrew Wilton on Portraits 55 Music: Gerald Place on Shakespeare’s Songs 57 In Short Managing Editor: Merrie Cave Consulting Editors: Roger Scruton Lord Charles Cecil, Myles Harris, Mark Baillie, Christie Davies, Literary Editor: Ian Crowther

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avid Cameron is a descendant of King William IV entry. Neither has there been any hint of reforming the and the actress Dorothea Jordan. Like Cameron scandalous EU arrest warrant, or a similar agreement with Dthe king had a certain informality of style. the US, which allow both powers to seize our citizens for Hearing that the First Reform Bill of 1831 ridding Britain trial purely on the flourish of a pen. of its rotten boroughs was to be voted down in the House Nor has that elephant in the room, immigration, been of Commons he insisted on being driven immediately to addressed. The UN Convention on Human Rights has The Lords ‘in a hackney carriage if necessary’. There, by resulted in Britain having a revolving door immigration entering the chamber wearing his crown, he caused the policy, with lawyers taking fat fees to ensure each arrival automatic prorogation of Parliament. The Act was passed stays as long as possible and goes before courts whose in the next Parliament. decisions frequently border on the hallucinatory. To opt William lived at a time when the American War of out of the Convention would be the political equivalent Independence had underlined the power of the free of the US Declaration of Independence. By definition the citizen, and while Britain fumbled her way toward coalition has no mandate for this, and mass migration will democracy, most of Europe was retreating from it, but continue. This is perhaps why The Guardian in ‘Cameron, William understood its importance. Man of Grace’ described him as far better than either Today’s rotten boroughs are further afield than Old Brown or Blair to promote the type of ‘consensus’ politics Sarum, the uninhabited hill in Wiltshire which sent two in which the left so fervently believes. MPs to Parliament. The new Sarums are in Brussels, What else one of the rotten boroughs, the EU, has in mind Washington, Beijing and the digital entrails of companies for us is described in this issue by Theodore Dalrymple in like Goldman Sachs, which, despite breast beating ‘The Palace of Lies’. He writes: ‘the Secretary-General by politicians, has escaped virtually scott free from of the European Union, Juan Manuel Barroso, was once impoverishing a generation. People we have never elected asked by a journalist what the European project actually increasingly rule our lives, tax us, buy up our industries, was. The former leftist said that it was the creation of an tell us who we may admit to live here, and, even worse, empire. Subsequently every effort was made to expunge have acquired the right to seize our citizens and carry this remark from the historical record.’ Mark Griffith in them off them for trial in their own countries. a more hopeful mood tells how intelligent Germans have Just as William IV was faced with the question ‘Who woken up to the threat posed by the modern, electronically governs Britain?’ so Cameron must decide if we are to be tentacled state in ‘Will Germany set us Free?’ but John an independent state. Is he up to the job? There is little Parfitt in ‘Sea Blindness’ sorrows over the laying up evidence of it. of our great mercantile fleet and how vulnerable it will After a visit to Washington he flew to Istanbul to make us to countries like China. There are more personal reaffirm US policy in the region: Turkish entry into the ways to lose your freedom. Jane Kelly in ‘Ladies Without EU. This was despite his promise to the British electorate Lamps’ describes the loss of dignity that attends being that he would not agree to major changes to the EU nursed in an NHS hospital, while Christie Davies in ‘A without a UK referendum. If the entry of 90 million Veiled Threat’ peeps behind the burka. Finally in ‘Coming people from a non European country to the EU is not a Home’, Mattiya Kambona describes his midnight arrest major change to the EU what is? Tories might shrug this and ten years in a Tanzanian prison without trial and his off as a mere gesture. France and Germany, they chuckle subsequent return to his homeland after 30 years of exile. knowingly, will never agree to Turkish entry, but wait ten Only those who have lost their freedom can know its years when, with catastrophically falling birth rates and sweet taste. We in Britain are tossing it away. desperate for workers, Italy, Germany, plus a Muslim dominated Holland, outvote the French on Turkish

The Salisbury Review — Autumn, 2010 3 Exile and Return Mattiya Kambona (return to Contents Page)

Editorial note: The Salisbury Review has had a The British government which had so painstakingly long connection with the Kambona family and three drawn up our constitution, which provided for a multi- brothers have now written for it. Oscar Kambona was party state, should be concerned. Otini was working a prominent Government Minister in the sixties but as a journalist and I was employed in the Ministry of resigned in 1967 in protest at the introduction of the Industry and Power. I am a Cambridge graduate so we one party state and the brutal collectivization of the thought perhaps we were safe. countryside. He left Tanzania for a 25 year exile in However late at night when I was working at home, I Britain and terrible reprisals were taken against his become aware of a tremendous commotion in the street family and friends. (v SR vol 3 No 4, Vol 9 No 4, Vol outside. There seemed to be police cars everywhere. 12 No 2, Vol 23 No 2, Vol 26 No 4) Then came the dreaded knock on the door. The police searched my home for several hours, then told me hen President Julius Nyerere’s dictatorship to accompany them to Ukanga prison. I thought of Tanzania finally came to an end in 1998, that, perhaps, was some mistake as I was not being Wmy close relatives gradually became more accused of any crime, but it was to be more than ten at ease when they spoke to me on the telephone. I had years before I saw the outside world again. On that been living in exile in Britain for more than thirty years, dreadful night, I realized that my brother Otini had also and during that time conversations with people ‘back been arrested, although I was not able to talk to him; home’ had necessarily been very guarded. Then one indeed during the following years when Tanzania was day I was somewhat surprised when someone asked developing into a completely inefficient state where me, ‘When are you coming home?’ nothing worked, my brother and I, while being shunted During the dictatorship I had spent more than ten around various prisons from time to time, were very years in prison (without ever having been accused of efficiently kept apart for the whole of our incarceration. any crime) so I could not understand why my people Otini was married to a girl from Martinique and had seemed so keen for me to return to a place which two small children, my wife was from the Gambia could be so dangerous. Had my relatives become and I had a three-month-old daughter. Both families Government agents? Cautiously I contacted some were immediately expelled and our properties were friends who assured me that it would be safe for me to expropriated. It was to be ten years before we saw return. ‘Come back’, said one, ‘the dark days are gone. anything of them again. So I decided to visit my country to ‘test the waters’. In 1978, we were just as suddenly and inexplicably In 1968 my brother Otini and I had had to consider released — probably through the intervention of escaping from Tanzania, as we had realised that our Prime Minister Muldoon of New Zealand, who by a situations were precarious. Our elder brother Oscar, fortunate chance had heard of our plight and had made who had been Vice-President, had already had to it known to Nyerere that aid from New Zealand would flee with his wife and family because he had had a cease unless we were released. This happened almost disagreement with Nyerere over establishing Tanzania immediately. as a one party state and collectivising the peasants We were still not safe, however, as it was common soviet style. (see The Time I met Mao, SR Summer practice that when people were released from prison the 1990) President would order their re-arrest. We knew that we Oscar was bitterly opposed to any such move. would never be given official permission to leave the One day he had a warning from a friend who was a country; we would have to escape. One day we went high ranking official in the police that he would be north to Moshi, a town near the border with Kenya. We arrested very soon for opposing the President’s wishes. were not sure where we would go from there, but by Nevertheless Otini and I had hoped for the best and another lucky chance, I met a man whom I had known put our trust in the International community who we in Moshi prison. He agreed to take us to a path in the hoped would protect us, or at least would speak out forest from where we could cross to Kenya. Under for us, if we were arrested, and make the world aware no circumstances, however, could he be seen with us, of our situation as they did in Nelson Mandela’s case. because as soon as the authorities realised that we were

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 4 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 no longer in Tanzania, he would be arrested and put accompany someone to the Land Rover, which I felt into prison again, as it would be assumed that he had just had to be waiting outside to take me to Ukanga. I helped us escape. We could only make our way after was so preoccupied with these thoughts that I scarcely dark and he would have to return before dawn. And so heard the Immigration official tell me to go on my way. we managed to reach Kenya. I thought that I had misheard. Was he really waving Here we had friends. President Kenyatta, who knew me away? Oscar, was no admirer of Julius Nyerere. We were able ‘You mean I can go? I heard myself asking to travel with the help of these friends to London and ‘Yes of course’, came the rather startled reply, ‘What safety, or so we thought. We applied to the Callaghan else do you want?’ government for asylum, which was refused. Then I could keep my freedom. I surveyed the area again. one morning I received a letter from the Home Office I could not see a single member of Nyerere’s agents signed personally by Dr David Owen, who was Home around. It was amazing. My legs became light and the Secretary, to go to Heathrow Airport, for deportation heavy lump sitting in my chest began to disappear. back to Tanzania. I was in a complete panic: some When I left the building I thought for a moment that day I should like to confront Dr Owen and ask him I must be back in London. I was surrounded by smiling why he was so keen to send us back to certain death. faces! (In the Tanzania that I had left, all those years Fortunately, thanks to the delay pending an appeal there ago, one scarcely saw anyone smiling: there was little was a change of government at the 1979 election and to smile about in those days) As we drove away I kept Margaret Thatcher’s government granted me asylum. looking behind. Nobody was following us. Was this I was safe and free at last. really my country? Yet I still could not help feeling that And now thirty years later after working for the Sickle this was some kind of calm before a storm. Cell organization and later with Alliance Security and Next morning I gingerly looked outside into the having retired, I decided to return to Tanzania to ‘test street. Apparently there was no informer watching the waters’. On the plane from Heathrow to Nairobi I the house. I began to feel that the disappearance of was very happy — I was back in Africa but afterwards the all-pervasive fear, which I remembered so vividly, my heart began to sink. Had I made a terrible had infused my country with sweet fresh air. But as mistake? Had my desire to see my country blinded the saying goes ‘old habits die hard’. I was not yet me to the dangers that I could be facing? As the plane totally convinced and I was still worrying at every approached Dar-es-Salaam I began to feel that I could unfamiliar face. be experiencing my last moments of freedom. Would I went into the city centre and bought every available there be government agents waiting at the airport? newspaper expecting to see the names of people who After all, I had not had permission to leave the country. had been dismissed from their jobs, which groups had Perhaps I was stupid to have returned. As the plane flew been rounded up and thrown (without trial) into prison, over the city I saw Ukanga prison where I had spent which Trade Union officials were being harassed, so many months and I felt on the point of collapse. which government critic or politician had been arrested ‘Dear God, help me’, I prayed almost aloud. I tried or had mysteriously disappeared and had his property to take comfort from a favourite saying of my brother confiscated, but as I searched I found nothing. I looked Otini — ‘God is greater than human beings’ but all I at the faces of the people around me, and gradually could think about was those government agents who realised that of Dar-es-Salaam’s four million people, would undoubtedly be waiting to take me to Ukanga only one — me — was worried about Presidential probably after taking me first to an interrogation room tyranny. I bought a cold drink and sat in the garden within the airport building. opposite the Cathedral and imagined that I could see As I put my foot on Tanzanian soil for the first time the smiling faces of Angels. Eventually a mood of in thirty years I was extremely nervous and shaking thanksgiving came over me and I thanked God for the almost uncontrollably. I felt that I was jumping from wonderful changes that He had brought about in the a comfortable warm bath into a boiling cauldron. As wonderful country of Tanzania. we entered the airport building I felt that my years of When Julius Nyerere was in power, anyone who freedom were coming to an end. criticised him or his government could look forward to I looked around me, but did not recognise any of perhaps a week of liberty. In the new Tanzania people the officials. I chose to give my documents to a young are free to say what they like and can live and die a man who looked about thirty years old — he could natural death. It was wonderful to be home! have been born when I left the country. In spite of his youth I was expecting that he would call someone to Mattiya Kambona worked for the Sickle Cell search my belongings after which I would be told to Association and Alliance Security.

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 5 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk Ladies Without Lamps

Jane Kelly (return to Contents Page)

hey were going to gut me like a fish, everything another floor, even though I was sobbing hard all the had to go, including the tumour on the ovary way. People kept looking at me and turning away. It Tand an enlarged lymph gland. was like going to the guillotine.’ I arrived at the Victor Bonney Ward, Queen In the afternoon I too walked to the guillotine, but I Charlotte’s Hospital, at 11am on May 4th, 2010, as don’t remember a thing about it. instructed. They were not expecting me — in fact they I woke to see a line of doctors at the foot of my bed, in had never heard of me. The nurse in charge looked the middle of them a nurse in a rather traditional Royal annoyed, making a noise through her front teeth she Blue uniform, glaring at me as if I had just committed skimmed some papers. some heinous crime. ‘Your operation is tomorrow,’ she said. ‘There is no I only ever saw her like that, apparently furious with bed for you.’ me. I could have imagined her of course, hallucinating I had obviously spoiled her day. After twenty long the ghost of Hattie Jacques. minutes I went to find out what was happening. ‘We I was attached to several tubes, with little buttons in are making a bed up now,’ she said, without looking up. the back of my hand that look like candle holders on Why didn’t she come and tell me? Not her job to a birthday cake. One line was attached to a morphine be polite or give me peace of mind. This was my first pump which came with a kind of black handbag. in-house taste of today’s NHS nurse. I could only walk leaning forwards, as if I was At 12 noon a nurse, calling me, ‘Kelly Jane,’ led me clutching a smashed water-melon in front of me. to my bed in VB. When I tried to brush my teeth I realised that there Although termed a ‘ward’, it looked like an adjunct was no cold water on the ward. Our communal sink of an operating theatre, functional, not at all cosy. There only gave warm to hot. I also wanted to wash some was no one in there but a very old, toothless lady who blood out of my new nightdress, not possible without seemed almost dead. She told me in a whisper that cold water. she’d been waiting to go for her op since the early Nurses appeared to give us pills, laxatives and morning, but no one had come for her. injections. Mostly we were left alone. I trundled off Watery macaroni cheese and treacle sponge arrived. to the shower but I couldn’t get my nightdress off I am a lover of traditional canteen food, but I would as the morphine bag wouldn’t go down the sleeve. I have liked at least a slight savour of cheese, and a sauce felt tearful, struggling like a toddler to undress, and made with milk not water. All the food looked pale as pulled the orange cord to get a nurse. A Philippino who death which was not encouraging. looked about twelve appeared and began to untwist me, The old lady was not collected until 4pm. struggling with the sleeve. She stared at me, looking A Middle Eastern woman was put into the bed right really scared, as if she’d never seen anyone even mildly next to me, although the rest of the ward was empty. distressed before. She was having an ectopic pregnancy, aged thirty one, Untwisted and naked at last, she left and I put on the with two other children at home. I couldn’t help hearing shower. The water was scalding hot. Another nurse it all, and there was no radio to plug into to avoid it. reluctantly appeared and said that if we wanted to wash Night came but you hardly knew it. A large angle- we would have to go to another part of the ward. She poise lamp was switched on next to the woman, so they led me up the corridor, near the desk where I’d come could check her in blinding light all night. It seemed in, to a small bath room, then vanished. Balancing my there were no small night lights. Too late I realised that black bag as best I could I sat in the bath and put on I had forgotten my flight mask. the hot water. It came gushing out, but unfortunately By the day of my op I felt tired out. In the TV I could not turn on the cold tap at all. room I met a woman lawyer called Jan. She’d had a ‘I just can’t do it,’ I wept. I could hear laughter hysterectomy by key-whole surgery and seemed a bit from the desk. They were obviously having a good traumatised. time on the nursing station, but no one was interested ‘They forced me to walk all the way to the operating in patients in the bathrooms wrestling with hot water. theatre,’ she said. ‘Down several corridors and up to I gave up on washing.

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 6 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 How times have changed. I remember going to offended by hierarchy, so no one gets any tea. hospital when I was eleven and getting a bed bath Two days after our ops the nurses had one message after an operation. I was very shy, but it was done with — no one could go home until they had moved their such kindness that I didn’t mind. In 1981 after having bowels. This Victorian pre-occupation became our a cyst removed, again there was the wash, carried out main aim in life. by two nurses. Five years ago, when I was working at But the following morning we were told we were the Daily Mail, I had a bunion removed at the private better and fit to go home. Bowel action was suddenly Princess Grace hospital. The next day, two sprightly forgotten. nurses offered to help me to a bath. I told them I could We were issued with a ruck-sack size pack of pills, manage as only one foot was in plaster. Now I was hastily shown how to inject ourselves and shown the desperate for some help and there was none on offer. door. I wondered about the fate of the old lady. No Florence Nightingale once wrote that before her time matter what your age or circumstances, you were nurses were there to simply give out medicine. It seems booted out. that history has repeated itself. NHS Nurses are like I went home to a cold empty flat and morphine automatic dolls wound up to perform single tasks, any dreams. I quickly discovered that GP home visits have kind of multi-tasking is beyond them. I asked a nurse gone the way of leeches and there was not a district for some water but she said she didn’t have time to nurse in sight. get it, even though she was standing by the sink. Most Come back Hattie Jacques, come back Florence requests were met with a sullen stare. Nightingale — before it’s too late! One thing was certain, you would never ask one of them to make you a cup of tea, any more than you would ask your consultant to do it. No one can be Jane Kelly was a staffwriter on the Daily Mail Palace of Lies Theodore Dalrymple (return to Contents Page)

henever I hear the word ‘project’ used in a Ministry of Overseas Development, and it was while political connection I reach for my… well, working for it that I first had an intimation of what a Wat any rate, I feel an irritation bordering terrible fraud foreign aid, at least in its British variant, on rage. was. It was primarily a subsidy to British companies, The two great political projects of recent times have that gave them contracts that they could not possibly been those of New Labour and the European Union. have won any other way, for example by fair or genuine That of New Labour may now be dead and discredited, competition. but its effects will be with us for a long time; indeed, The company had negotiated a new kind of contract there are good reasons to think that the damage that with the grotesquely negligent Thatcher government. it inflicted on Britain was irreparable. As for the It was called ‘cost plus’. This guaranteed the company European ‘project’, it is still very much alive. The a margin of profit on whatever it spent on building recent crisis in Greece only strengthened the European the road. You wouldn’t have to be an expert in human political class’s belief in it: for members of that class nature to know that this was hardly an encouragement the crisis revealed only that the ‘project’ had not yet to parsimony or efficiency on the part of the company. been carried far enough, and there was a need for more Indeed, its profligacy was staggering ­— I had never ‘solidarity’, that is to say, power for itself. seen anything like it. An habitually drunken worker I have no objection to the word ‘project’ as such. For wrecked a machine costing £250,000, and another such example, I once worked on a road-building ‘project’ machine was flown out, thereby increasing the profit of in Africa, as doctor for the workers employed upon it. the company at the expense of the British tax-payer. The There was a ‘project manager’, and the title did not all-too predictable result of the project was a beautiful seem to me to be absurd or evasive. It was obvious that swimming pool and excellent living conditions for the he was in charge of the construction work. British workers, but a barely serviceable road whose There were, of course, many objections to the project surface was sure to break up after a short time — thus other than its name. It was funded by the British creating the need for another contract that the company

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 7 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk hoped to win. Of the supposed justification for the the one hand, tired with and bored by (for admittedly road in the first place, funded by the British taxpayer, understandable reasons) the need to seek re-election, I will not speak. Indeed, the whole project could have and unwilling to play the Cincinnatus, and of their served, except in one vital respect, as a model for the apparatchik followers and dependants on the other. New Labour ‘project’. What the European project is to Europe, the New This vital respect was that the project had a definable Labour project was to Britain. It was permanent end point: when two places on the map of the African revolution, or at least a permanent effervescence of country were joined by two lanes of tarmac. It was reform, but always under the direction of the same badly done, perhaps, and very expensively, but it was people or the same class of person, and tending to done. It was possible to say at every moment in the reinforce their control. The goal of the project was thus project approximately what percentage of it had been both definite and indefinite: there was no endpoint at carried out, and how long (more or less) it would take which one could say the goal had been reached, and yet to complete. When the end was reached, the project at the same time there was a goal, namely the permanent was over. domination and control of the Political projects like that of country by what was in effect New Labour and the European a nomenklatura, for its own Union, by contrast, have no benefit. The ‘project’ formed an defined end. There is no point unbreakable alliance between at which the political bulldozers complete mediocrity and the and graders, and those who most ruthless ambition, of operate them, can go home, which Mr Blair was the almost their work accomplished. And Jungian archetype. The ruthless yet, at the same time, the use and ambitious mediocrity is, of the very word ‘project’ of course, the most significant suggests some definite end, product of our current tertiary some specific goal in view. educational system. Once again we see the terrible Whether the ‘project’ is really disease of modern political reversible remains to be seen, language: the obfuscatory either in Britain or in Europe. resort to connotation without It is unlikely that the will to denotation. reverse it is very strong, for To understand the real aims of the political projectors, to do so would self-evidently take moral courage as we must examine both their conduct and the words they well as intellectual clarity, neither of which has been occasionally let slip that reveal their thoughts better the Conservative Party’s strong point of late; but than their official, pre-digested pronouncements. Even sometimes a revenging reality imposes itself on the the most wooden-tongued apparatchik occasionally unwilling. Reality, after all, is that which cannot be says something that has meaning. For example, the mocked, at least not for long, not even by the most Secretary-General of the European Union, Juan ruthless political projectors. Eppur si muove. Manuel Barroso, was once asked by a journalist late In a way, the use of the term ‘project’, without any at night what the European project actually was. The specification of what the project consists, perfectly former leftist said that it was the creation of an empire. captures the deviousness of both Labour and European Subsequently, every effort was made to expunge this politicians: there is a project with an end, but it is one remark from the historical record, for two reasons: first, that cannot be avowed. It might be objected that politics it was discomfitingly truthful, and truth is the enemy always consists of definite and indefinite goals, but in of those who need secrecy to carry out their purposes, the new politics of Labour and Europe there is a curious and second it is a general principle that he who controls reversal in the clarity of the near and distant goals. the past controls the future. Look into any journal that advertises a bureaucratic The empire of which Barroso spoke is not the post in the public sector, and you will have no idea empire of Napoleon, of course, with all the pomp and what the post entails; you will be mystified; but you slightly kitsch majesty that went with it. Neither will will understand perfectly that one more person is being it give rise to any worthwhile style of furniture or recruited into the nomenklatura. create durable educational institutions, for all its many other drawbacks. It will not even be strong militarily. Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Spoilt Rotten, The Rather, it will be an empire of former politicians on Toxic Cult of Sentimentality, Gibson Square.

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 8 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 A Veiled Threat Christie Davies (return to Contents Page)

he prospect of a legal ban in much of Europe in women’s clothing, though if they wore veils it might on Muslim women covering their faces with be difficult to know. There is no intrinsic reason for Ta veil in public places has produced the usual these restrictions and they did not exist among the stupidities from British politicians anxious to prove indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands and of that they are not ‘Islamophobic’. It is partly about Tierra del Fuego, who lived in happy near-nakedness Muslim votes and violence but even more about not before the time of European imperialism. The reason appearing to be populist in a Britain where the great for forcing the people of Britain to cover up is purely majority of the people want such a ban. Better a pinko social. The liberty to dress as you choose is constrained than a democrat is the basic belief of the Cameronian because the majority want it that way. Conservatives. The same argument applies to veiling the face. To The immigration minister Damian Green seems to non-Muslims, such a practice is offensive, indecent and think that the issue of whether to ban or not to ban to borrow a phrase from Damian Green ‘un-British’. has nothing to do with immigration, but it obviously We are far more tolerant than Muslim societies in does. If face-veiling is banned in France, Belgium, relation to what women may or may not wear, and the Netherlands and Catalunya, then all the Muslim far more diverse, from the strict decorum of a female husbands in those countries who want to keep their Anglican priest to the brashness of an Essex Girl but wives in total veiled subjection will bring their massive like all forms of freedom and tolerance it has its limits. families to Britain, as under EU rules they are entitled to You cannot wear too little and you cannot wear too do. They will not wish to remain in countries that have much. No nudity, no veils. stigmatized the faceless face of Islam and will migrate Likewise, we are extremely tolerant in matters of to wishy-washy Britain. Those who are not citizens of religious belief and practice but this cannot be used as an EU country may even have the impudence to claim an excuse for transgressing the central moral precepts refugee status. France will get to keep her progressive of our society. In the United States, where there is a and productive Muslims and we will get those who are strict separation of church and state, the criminal law fundamentalists and an economic liability. Wanting to was used to prosecute Mormon polygamists to the keep women in thraldom is a good indication not only point where most of them abandoned the practice. In of a willingness to countenance extremism but also Britain polygamy is only permitted to Muslims who of social and economic failure. Social and religious already had more than one wife before they came to inflexibility goes with an inability to adapt to new live here. Is this ban on polygamy condemned by the economic circumstances. They will claim welfare on Muslims as a form of Christian and liberal contempt the basis of their voluntary unemployability and will for Muslim tradition? In practice, full British toleration not allow their wives to work. Veils are very much an is only extended to acceptable ‘religions’, in the case immigration issue. of Christians those labelled churches. If your group is The obvious response on Britain’s part is to introduce not numerous and its members’ behaviour is seen as a similar ban on face veiling to that being imposed by aberrant, it is labelled a sect and policed by the law the French. France must be an inspiration to us all. and if it is very small and seen as very deviant, it gets Then the veiled ones and more importantly their male called a cult and is persecuted. Can it really be said that veilers will be forced to go somewhere where they will full acceptance has been extended to the Unification be more welcome like Bulgaria or Cyprus. Church (the Moonies), Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Damian Green and his green ministerial colleague Exclusive Brethren or the Scientologists. By this Caroline Spelman have falsely argued that women in standard Muslims are in fact privileged and allowed Britain, and indeed men, have the legal right to dress in far greater latitude to flout the shared values of our public exactly as they choose. This is not true. Except society and to be un-British. on secluded beaches it is not possible for women to There are strong practical arguments against walk around bare breasted because it would cause permitting the wearing of veils that are in fact masks. public offence and possibly even a breach of the peace. Unless they are used as part of the comic world of play, A similar view is taken of men who take to the streets masks are rightly seen as a threat, a deception and an

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 9 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk underminer of trust and bona fide communication. But problem would have occurred’. the main objection to the veil is that it is a symbol of We can now see that Muslim veils and headscarves, the morally unacceptable. attitudes to rape and indeed forced marriages are part Perhaps the most foolish, indeed ludicrous comment of a single outlook that all decent people of any religion on the burkha problem was made by Caroline Spelman and none should condemn and which it is the duty of after her brief trip to Afghanistan. She called the burkha the state to combat vigorously through the use of the ‘empowering’ and as conferring ‘dignity’. Her very law. Banning veils is merely one part of this moral choice of these words indicates that she is living in imperative. Not banning veils is far more un-British the world of rhetoric and not that of reality. I too have than banning them. been to Afghanistan in the days before the Russian I am sure that Muslims will object that this is not the invasion. In the south of the country and indeed across ‘real Islam’. I can see no way of deciding what the ‘real’ the border in Peshawar in Pakistan the women wore version is. But if this is the case, then it is the duty of heavy burkhas in which even their eyes were hidden true Muslim believers to stamp it out. Others will say behind a cloth grille; a perfect metaphor for their social that most Muslims in Britain are not like that. I have prison. Three of the British Christians in our party were never said they were. It is enough that a very significant invited into their house by curious local women. When minority are. The sin of the Muslim leadership is there, they asked if they might try on their hostess’s merely their unwillingness to use very severe social burkhas. They felt hot and uncomfortable and could sanctions against these evil miscreants, which is in not see properly. Where is the dignity in that? In what marked contrast to their attitude towards those seen as way were the local women empowered? They had far too lax in their allegiance. The real villains, though, less autonomy than the three adventurous but sensibly are as usual the indigenous British leftists who have and by no means immodestly dressed English women. rushed in to denounce any possible banning of the veil, In Kabul at that time, where the women were more despite the presence among them of many fruitcake likely to be enlightened and freer of suffocating social feminists who are happy to propose all manner of far pressure, the burkha had been largely discarded. It was more draconian attacks on personal behaviour. these emancipated women of Kabul and they alone who In the past leftists were prepared to denounce the veil had dignity and a degree of autonomy. even to the point of supporting the murder by the Soviet The idea that a veil can confer dignity and be authorities of those Muslims who upheld the veiling empowering is merely a piece of deceitful Muslim of women. Hewlett Johnson, the communist Dean of propaganda that makes use of the absurd jargon Canterbury, wrote with passion of the ‘unbelievable of feminism, much as they have mendaciously degradation’ of women in the Muslim areas of the appropriated the language of rights and democracy. Soviet Union. The problem rather lies with Muslim men who regard The eastern woman was a chattel, a piece of property, women as mere property. An assault on a woman is a domestic-slave and an economic slave….The merely theft and an insult to her kinsmen’s ‘honour’ Mohammaden religion in practice had increased that should be avenged and not as an affront to her the degradation, women became mere objects of personal freedom. Jack Straw has told us that there are lust and were in consequence regarded as morally a disproportionately high number of Muslims in British inferior to be isolated in the dwelling and hidden prisons (the number of Hindus is negligible). Is it behind the veil…. Highly typical of the past is the unreasonable to ask whether they have been even more woman’s veil…. Strife ranged fiercely around it. disproportionately jailed for crimes against women? Its abolition in Uzbekistan cost fourteen murders... On March 8th 1928 these symbols of degradation What gives this point relevance are comments ‘were piled in rapidly growing heaps, drenched with made by Sydney-born Sheik Feiz Mohammed of the paraffin and soon the dark clouds of smoke from the Australian global Islamic Youth centre and Sheik Taj burning common abjuration of a thousand-year old Aldin al-Hilali, Mufti of Australia, around the time convention, now become unbearable, flared up into when there had been a series of brutal gang rapes by the bright sky of the spring day…. As the course Lebanese Muslims in Sydney. Sheik Hilali said in a of knowledge grew and women learned of their religious address: ‘If you take out uncovered meat and new rights they would act suddenly and resolutely. place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the Gul Bibi refused a forced marriage at the wedding park or in the back-yard without a cover and the cats ceremony itself and the paranya (veil) was torn off come and eat it…whose fault is that, the cats or the and all the women cried ‘Long live free women’ . uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem’. The only consistent threat that runs through leftist He added ‘If she (the victim) was in her room, in her thought and behaviour from the 1920s until today home, in her hijab (Muslim scarfy head-covering), no is that they hate Britain, its history, customs and

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 10 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 traditions, its democratic capitalism and its freedom It is distressing to find sensible Conservative of speech. They automatically support any political politicians even hinting that the veil is acceptable in movement that is opposed to what Britain stands for Britain. and might conceivably undermine British society. In the 1930s it was the Soviet Union and today it is Christie Davies is the author of The Strange Death of Islamic obduracy. Moral Britain.

Cooking up a Storm B K Ridley (return to Contents Page)

he concept of consensus in science seems atmosphere. Grave concerns were raised over the innocuous, but it conjures up dangerous inevitability of the melting of the polar ice caps and Tpossibilities. On the one hand, there are whole the consequent huge rise in sea-level. Even worse, swathes of our understanding of Nature that are there was the possibility of a runaway effect in which, uncontroversial and accepted by the vast majority of beyond a tipping point, global temperatures would scientists as pretty good accounts of reality. One thinks rise uncontrollably, and Earth would become like here of the classical physics of Newton and Maxwell, Venus, uninhabitable. It was a brilliant campaign that the basic ideas of Darwin regarding evolution, and the convinced all but a few of the world’s politicians that genetic process of inheritance. To speak of consensus something had to be done to limit the emission of with regard to these matters is to use ordinary non- CO2. Politics was thus amalgamated with religion, technical language in an unexceptional way. It is, the politicians believing that the scientific consensus nevertheless, dangerous. The meaning of consensus gave them authority to order wide-reaching change in carries with it the implication of counting heads as the fundamental operations of our technico-industrial assessing opinion, and science is most definitely civilization. The New Political Science had been born. nothing to do with that. A Law of Nature is not decided To persuade the masses, Al Gore’s filmAn Inconvenient by a referendum, nor even by a committee of the Great Truth spread the gospel, and David Miliband (then UK and Good. Scientific knowledge is gained by the insight Education Minister) directed that no school should and talent of the individual scientist and discussions be without a copy. In 1990 the United Nations had with his peers. In this sense, the idea of consensus in already set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate the scientific sense is an oxymoron. And here is where Change (IPCC) which reported regularly on evidence the danger lies: in politics, consensus is anything but an that global warming was happening according to the oxymoron, it confers authority. To claim the existence alarming predictions of computer simulations. Such of a scientific consensus is for politics to sanction all was ‘the scientific consensus’, that reports began to be kinds of action based upon scientific authority. heard of journals rejecting papers critical of the science Nowhere, and indeed no when, has this been more that was propagated, and ‘deniers’ being hysterically evident than in the recent furore on global warming. defined, by some parts of the media, as criminals. Though now massively political, it was initiated by the Inevitably, given the impossibility of a scientific religious beliefs of the environmentalists (Greenpeace, consensus in such a controversy, a few ripples of Friends of the Earth, World Wildlife Fund). Fuelled, protest eventually became a tsunami of criticism. An it seemed, by the concept of original sin from an objective statistical analysis of the data that went into older religion, the claim was that dangerous global the hockey-stick graph showed that the science that warming was taking place, that human activity was produced it was flawed and, some thought, fraudulent. responsible and that the science that underpinned the Much of the science publicised in Al Gore’s An claim was settled and beyond question. Their icon Inconvenient Truth was shown incontrovertibly to be became the now famous ‘hockey-stick’ graph that simply wrong. And then, in 2009, emails associated depicted the time-dependence of temperature from AD with the Climate Research Unit at the University of 1000 as deduced from tree-ring data, supplemented East Anglia revealed unequivocal evidence of data by computer predictions based on the observed rise manipulation to support the official global-warming of the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), in the message. After this revelation, dubbed by the media

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 11 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk Climategate, the game was up. That this was so was since1998, as opposed to the computer prediction of underlined by the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen warming. The complexity of climatic processes — Conference on Climate Change to agree any global the role of that most powerful greenhouse gas, water consensus, thanks to the scepticism of China, India and vapour, its associated clouds, atmospheric and oceanic Brazil. The fact of these being developing economies circulations, sunspot activity, volcanic eruptions, served to focus the mind wonderfully, something that planetary and galactic variations — is overwhelming. still has to happen in the West, in spite of the efforts Given this complexity, it is arguably the case that a of the Czech President Vaclav Klaus and the English computer, no matter how powerful, cannot hope to former Chancellor, Nigel Lawson. make reliable predictions of climate change a decade It has been a scandalous episode for science. The or so into the future. An alternative is to look at the authoritative consensus that global warming existed, statistical behaviour of the climate during the recent and that it was man-made, never existed. Scientific Interglacial Warm Period, which reveals oscillations academies everywhere, including the Royal Society, in temperature with multi-decadal regularity (nothing should have been at the forefront to refute the idea of to do with CO2 emissions), and to use this to predict a consensus, but they weren’t; and they should have the future. This carries the assumption that there is unambiguously broadcast the actual controversial zero man-made global warming. This, perhaps, is as nature of the science, but they didn’t. On the one good as anything, provided we don’t plunge into an hand there were meteorologists, such as members of unforecastable Ice Age. the UK Meteorological Office, whose predictions of There are now hopeful signs that, far from there alarming global warming were based on computer being a consensus, a good red-blooded scientific simulations of climate. They were naturally sincere in debate is under way. Warmists now readily admit the what they predicted, but their faith in their computer real difficulties in computer modelling the climate, but programs to handle the vastly complicated, non-linear, they, nevertheless, point to the back-of-the-envelope chaos-prone equations that describe the physics and physics that clearly shows that more CO2 means chemistry of the oceans and atmosphere seems to higher temperatures. Critics note that it is not linear some of us naïve in the extreme. (Perhaps some of us but logarithmic, meaning that the relation is one of have too much experience of the garbage in, garbage diminishing returns — a smaller rise in temperature per out, type of computing.) On the other hand, there were unit increase in CO2 concentration. And, in any case, climatologists who had made a deep study of climate a modest warming and more CO2 is a good thing for in the past, who wrote books attempting to put global plant growth. Possibly, but not for marine life, which warming into its historical context. (Heaven and Earth needs a gently alkaline ocean and dissolved CO2 pushes by Ian Plimer; Climate: the Counter Consensus by the balance towards acidity. These issues and a myriad Robert Carter; both Australians.) They accept that a others including measurement techniques, past and modest global warming does exist as a result of the future, will continue to be argued over by the scientists globe’s recovery from the Little Ice Age (AD 1500- involved. It is to be hoped that the age of caveatless 1900), but they argued that it is highly unlikely that statements about global warming, those tailored for it has anything to do with man’s activities. More politicians and the media, is past. But I wouldn’t alarmingly, they remark that presently we live in an count on it. Maybe, once the media and our politicians Interglacial Warm Period and that these periods last realise that the famously-claimed scientific consensus typically for around 10,000 years. They also remark on global warming doesn’t exist and never has existed, that the last Ice Age was about 10,000 years ago. we can look forward to the demise of the New Political (Do I hear you say come back global warming, all is Science. Maybe then our governments, released from forgiven?) being besotted by global carbon footprints, might After 20 years of politicised scientific hype, it is begin focussing on real science issues bearing on now possible for a rational debate on climate change local climate change. But, again, I wouldn’t count on to happen, and the first thing to note is that the climate it, riddled with environmentalists as the members of is always changing. Unfortunately, to be realistic, government are. One thing is scientifically sure about change cannot be forecast reliably. The Met Office the climate — it changes. The record shows that a found this out recently when they predicted a ‘barbecue serious change of climate needs no help from mankind, summer’ last year followed by a warm winter. Last and, what’s alarming, is that it is largely unpredictable. summer was anything but a ‘barbecue summer’ and this winter has been unusually cold, so red faces at the Met. As a result, they have given up seasonal forecasts for the UK. It has been gently cooling Brian Ridley is a Fellow of the Royal Society

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 12 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 Will the Germans set us free? Mark Griffith (return to Contents Page)

t the start of Walter Abish’s sardonic 1980 The Krauts have been worried for some time about novel, How German is it? the narrator crossly our transition into a police state, and they want to Aasks what is it a visitor to Germany first hears help us stop the slide. In recent months a new German at the border: Good morning? Welcome to Germany? party, the Piraten Partie, has been sending groups of No, mutters Abish, it is ‘Ihr Pass, bitte /Your passport, people into airports to strip off to their underwear, please’. His is the officious Deutschland we Brits protesting that if new US-mandated full-body scanners chuckle at, the country where people get sued for using see everyone naked, why bother wearing clothes? a washing machine at the wrong time of day. Modelled on Sweden’s Pirates Party, the Piraten Partie North of Dover we still see the Teutons as an is growing fast. Meanwhile in Britain we know today’s obsessively sterile nation of bossy types who adore ‘terrorist threat’ is small-scale and bogus compared to red tape. Yet not only is this cliché out of date — 30 years of the IRA, but we just grumble and shrug at it’s the other way round now. Even with the new each new imposition. coalition government, Britain’s woefully shrunken Recent pointed remarks from T-Mobile, the mobile- civil liberties should still worry us deeply. The New phone arm of Deutsche Telekom, that Britain’s state Labour surveillance state has already put down many demands more details on its phone subscribers than roots and tendrils. Worse, there is an authoritarian wing communist East Germany required, also show how in the Conservative party too. Parties in opposition are far the UK has drifted. Of course, comparing 1980s quick to condemn spying on citizens and use of the law fixed-line phones to 20-noughties mobile phones isn’t to harass critics. Parties in government, however, are entirely fair. In the digital era detailed logs of customer soon seduced by the delights of power and the siren calls are easy to collect. There is a lot more data to song of those who say they need more of it. snoop on these days — but Britain’s state is still leading We cannot hope that a better party wins an election the pack in greedily gorging itself on our information. to roll back bureaucracy and control of our lives. To see how much ahead of us Deutschland’s critics NuLab very nearly retained power in May: this alone of arbitrary power are, recall the no2id.org stunt of is a sobering thought. Britain’s most authoritarian and November 2008. Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Orwellian government for several centuries almost Smith was at a public meeting — anti-ID-card won. More disturbing still was that it was able to pass activists whisked her drinking glass away to copy these laws at all: the end to double jeopardy, innocent her fingerprints and DNA. The point was to show witnesses unable to have their DNA destroyed, the how dangerously pro-crime New Labour’s push for spread of administrative punishments where the biometric identity was. As one security analyst phrased suspect is intimidated into relinquishing his right to it to me, basing identity on the cells of your body is like even assert his innocence. Suppose some civil liberties forcing us all to tattoo our cash-machine PIN number are restored and then Labour returns to power. How on our foreheads. will we stop them, or another government, passing What’s interesting is that this confiscation of the laws like these again? Jacqui Smith biometrics exactly followed a similar We need allies who know how insidiously like stunt seven months earlier, in Germany. At the end of knotweed the modern state can grow round us. The March 2008, freedom activists there also purloined a Germans understand this very well. A change of drinking glass used at a meeting by Interior Minister government at Westminster is only part of the solution, Wolfgang Schauble. Schauble, like Jacqui Smith, because the control freaks have won the battle for most loudly supports biometric identity, a topic neither British voters’ minds. To rip out the ‘snoopocracy’ Schauble nor Smith even faintly understand. The root and branch we must study lessons that German German activists went one better though — they not liberals learned in the last thirty years. They swung only published one of Schauble’s fingerprints in the public opinion in the EU’s largest country the other magazine Die Datenschleuder, they also included in way. Intelligent Germans today value freedom and see 4,000 issues of the magazine a rubber strip bearing his Britain as an authoritarian land of street cameras, petty print that interested readers could wear so as to leave commissars, and prying databases. Herr Schauble’s supposedly unique index-finger mark

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 13 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk wherever they went. cases they need to follow strict rules, and obtain court A century of uncritical belief in the clinching permission, the way they once had to in Britain. Kurz certainty of fingerprint evidence has begun to crumble proudly explained that the Chaos Computer Club were in the face of research by American criminologists. formerly seen as criminals, but are now grudgingly The point here is that not only should fingerprints be respected pro-freedom lobbyists. Courts and Berlin taken with a pinch of salt at crime scenes, but they are committees call them as expert witnesses. The CCC (like iris patterns in eyes, or DNA, or face scans, or helped sponsor this new principle that hard drives in voice prints, or any other biometric) dangerous and Germany are private. stupid choices of markers for identity. A few seconds The Chaos Computer Club also pushed for last of thought show this. First visualise some thugs autumn’s constitutional court decision, unique in the withdrawing money from a cash machine with one world, to ban electronic voting. Almost unnoticed in of your fingers, one of your eyeballs, or just you at Britain, this German decision caused great interest in knifepoint. Next visualise how your DNA now kept on the US, where allegations of cracked voting machines file (we know how carefully our government guards rigging elections have been rumbling for years, even our private information, don’t we?) can be used in an before the curious ‘hanging chads’ case in Florida increasingly cheap lab process to grow a few drops of that made the younger Bush president in 2000. blood bearing your DNA, grow a few hairs in a culture More precisely, the German court decision only says dish with your DNA, grow some skin cells whose DNA that the voting process must be comprehensible to shows — irrefutably given the scientific ignorance of someone with absolutely no technical knowledge — most jurors and MPs — that you were at a crime scene by implication barring everything except bits of paper though you were not. counted on long tables in church halls. Town councils Behind both Die Datenschleuder and the Schauble across the Federal Republic are now gloomily junking fingerprint stunt is a decades-old Hamburg forum of their voting machines. For the nation we often mock around 2,500 hackers, the Chaos Computer Club. as a land of technology-obsessed engineers, this court Constanze Kurz of the CCC told me, ‘The UK is now decision is daringly conservative. It asserts that here used as an example all across Europe of how not to the traditional way of doing things is the safest and do security.’ She explained what the Chaos Computer hardest to corrupt. Club believes in. British press coverage of these activists usually It’s simple. We believe that public information should misleads. ‘Anarchist’ is a word used very precisely be public, and private information should be private. across the Rhine, and it doesn’t mean being a Sex It’s our right to keep an eye on the state, not the other Pistol. It means organising as much as you can locally. way round.’ In this sense, many shire Tories are anarchists. ‘Hacker’ is another badge of honour among Germany’s freedom Britain’s 13-year NuLab government certainly campaigners. Unlike ‘crackers’ or data thieves, Chaos wanted it the other way round. Tony Blair, Alistair Club hackers are thoughtful liberals who know Campbell and Gordon Brown all reacted with rage to information is power. They know that’s why states press coverage of their family lives or any intrusions always want to know more about us, and want us to into their privacy, while crafting laws to give officials know less about them. Why loudly control steel or rail, deep access to our private lives. Our bank accounts are when a government can quietly control information or, no longer private, state officials no longer need court better still, monopolise our very identities? orders to force entry to our homes, our phone calls, A retired City of London police officer described to e-mails and letters are no longer private — and under an me an official visit to the UK by some German coppers act from 2000, Britons now commit a criminal offence several years ago. He showed them the Kent police by even trying to keep them private, like not giving database, and the visiting detectives were horrified at its decryption keys to the police. Cambridge University scope and lack of safeguards. They warned him darkly, security specialist Ross Anderson drily remarks that the ‘We Germans know from experience what happens in countries that give their police this power, requiring no countries where the police have powers like these’. court order, ‘include Russia, Zimbabwe, and the UK.’ In stark contrast, Germany’s constitutional court in February 2008 ruled that the hard drive of a citizen’s computer is now considered private space, like his Mark Griffith is editor of the bookCollateral Damage: home. Global Crash Phase Two, a collection of articles about Of course as anywhere, police there sometimes need the deepening financial crisis, which went on sale in to raid someone’s home, or their hard drive, but in both August 2010.

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 14 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 Sea Blindness John Parfitt (return to Contents Page)

ritain’s wealth has depended on the sea for like television, computers, radar and nuclear power, centuries: sailors may know that, but does the invented here, now being produced or controlled BBritish Public? Today, with few ships under the abroad. We must rebuild and reclaim it, not by shoring red and white ensigns, and ships unloading in container up dying industries but creating infrastructure and depots miles from anywhere instead of city ports like attitudes where we naturally develop and produce London and Liverpool, people seldom see the ships new things in Britain. That must include moving many and the trade that brings the food and the luxuries people now trapped in dubious financial wizardry and they take for granted. Sea blindness is everywhere and unproductive pen-pushing to work in new high value- politicians suffer too so their poor judgement is not added industries to support our trade and the wealth surprising. Too many well-fed wiseacres who would it should bring. be seasick on wet grass think that Britain’s terminal In 2000 the US and EU each had some 25 per cent decline since 1945 does not matter, yet think that our of world GDP with China and India together having glorious past entitles them to living standards most of just 10 per cent, but by 2030 China will have overtaken the world can only dream about along with seats won both and by 2050 world population will have risen by their forebears at the world’s top tables, even if they over 30 per cent to nine billion, one-third of it in India cannot bother to keep them warm. and China. Many western markets are saturated (how Britons have been sailing the seas ever since many cars can you drive at once?) but there are new King Alfred built the first Royal Navy in 875AD to opportunities in the Pacific which is where the money fight marauding Danes, and over the last 450 years is. Dismantling the Victorian Empire did not mean seafaring has made us rich Dismantling the Victorian Empire did abandoning our world beyond the dreams of the not mean abandoning our world trading trading interests and we Elizabethans. Ninety-five interests and we would do well to revive our would do well to revive our per cent of our trade goes old ‘three circles’ vision of Commonwealth old ‘three circles’ vision of by sea, even in peacetime (world-wide), US (transatlantic) Commonwealth (world- e x p o s e d t o h a z a r d s and Europe, in roughly equal measure. wide), US (transatlantic) everywhere, and while and Europe, in roughly some land-based states like equal measure. the US might run self-sufficient economies we depend Our eastern routes go through the Gibraltar Straits, on ships and secure trade routes. But it is not just ships: Suez, the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb off turbulent we can build all the ships we like but without proper Somalia, the 500-mile Malacca Straits between industrial and financial backing they might as well Indonesia and Malaysia, the Taiwan strait between stay in harbour. the two Chinas and on to magic names like Sunda One hundred and twenty years ago in his Influence of and Shimonoseki. Each forms a narrow ‘choke point’ Sea Power upon History the American sailor-historian with no easy alternative route, where shipping can be Mahan remarked that, unlike others, Britain had found disrupted by mining, sabotage, terrorism or just bad riches overseas ‘not by the sword but by labour (and) old-fashioned crime. Nearer home are the Channel the production of something to trade with’. We still routes to our own ports and the Europoort ‘gateway need that, so beware armchair think-tanks crying to Europe’ complex centred on Rotterdam: there are that ‘our maritime and manufacturing days are over’ 20‑odd such big container transhipment ports world- Such talk chimes with every planners’ instinct to hit wide and our cargoes pass through them daily. So as the ‘shopping, leisure, tourism and housing’ button well as protecting our home ports and sea lanes we for every problem, but without international trade must stand ready to help our friends in places like India, supported by manufacturing who will live in the Indonesia and the Gulf with anything from intelligence houses or have money to enjoy the shopping, leisure co-operation to naval support if necessary. and tourism? Two-thirds of the world’s population lives within We have let too much British manufacturing be 200 miles of the sea so that is where most naval tasks, run down or fall into foreign hands, with things including transporting and supporting the army, will

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 15 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk be. And the sea is now not just about trade and fish but list would not have surprised our forebears and was undersea fuel and minerals as well, so the old three- supported by a just sufficiently large fleet including mile territorial limit has acquired various ‘add-ons’ up 40 escorts and 16 submarines, funded from a defence to 350 miles out to sea, which bring new problems. budget of 3.8 per cent of GDP, in today’s money about Poor countries like Somalia ‘own’ far more sea than £50 billion, about half its Cold War size. they can police alone, rogue states like Iran would like Percentages are not sacred but nations who take to interfere with shipping far from their coasts, while defence seriously usually spend about 3½ per cent of the laws of the sea behind all this really depend on GDP, more in the US. But unlike other departments, the willingness of the old maritime powers to survey, diplomacy and defence have had their real budgets police and enforce them: that includes us. slashed year after year with defence now £42 billion, 3 G o v e r n m e n t per cent of GDP, a real- approaches to budgets terms cut of over 10 often look like ‘here’s per cent despite having s o m e m o n e y, d o more work to do than what you can with it’ in 1995. The navy’s followed by shock- 40 escorts are down horror when things to 23, its submarines go awry. Looking at to eight, its skills and costs should include all supplies support eroded overseas policies like by arbitrary cuts and defence, intelligence, its overdue aircraft diplomacy and aid carrier and logistic fleet together. For instance renewal programmes diplomats need fighting s a v a g e d b e y o n d men for credibility even credibility. The criminal if they are many miles folly is ‘capability away, while aid may gapping’ which pays need protection for its off ships before their deliverers as we can replacements are ready, see in Afghanistan, so delays new programmes we need a joined-up (which only increases approach. Some serious their final costs) and heavyweights from hopes that nobody will the forces, business, declare war for ten academia and politics years — just like the recently called for ’thirties. a P r i v y C o u n c i l Sea power is not committee to get the about occupying the relevant departments sea as armies occupy working together, but territory, but about their report disappeared being able to use it into a ‘too-difficult’ whenever and wherever file somewhere. The needed. That might be services might get together too: admirals, generals and to protect home waters, overseas territories, trade and even ambassadors publicly arguing about budgets just resources or support our national interests by projecting get seen as grandees arguing about ‘toys’ which gives power: anything from flag-showing to armed force. politicians an excuse to squeeze them all to fill the That is what the navy is for and it still needs that 1995 begging bowls regularly paraded in Downing Street. fleet as well as new aircraft carriers which are essential Ships, aircraft and guns are not toys, but tools of the for operating outside home waters, because command fighting services and even if, as for much of Victoria’s of the sea depends on command of the air above it. reign, they never get used in anger they will have done Carriers need no access to foreign waters or bases, can their job. travel 5000 miles a week, command a million square In 1995 the navy did its own sums and published its miles of sea from a self-contained mobile air base and official handbook,British Maritime Doctrine. Its task- provide air support for anything from humanitarian

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 16 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 assistance to all-out war. We also need a makeover of no organic political unity will seldom be able to find the navy’s infrastructure. It is too easy when money common positions on major issues: accession, climate is tight to cut non-lethal bits, like design, building, change, Israel-Arab relations, Turkey and Kosovo, and training, auxiliaries and stores back-up: but disastrous its long-awaited 60,000-strong Rapid Reaction Force when the guns begin to shoot. still only exists on paper. Worse, as Chalfont foresaw, Magic bullets are tempting, and the biggest is EU posturing is undermining NATO’s defensive ability ‘Interdependence’. In his 1985 Diplomacy at Sea and alienating the US, while NATO Secretary-General Sir James Cable dubbed it a ‘drug of addiction’ and Rasmussen has publicly accused Europeans of being a pointed out that it usually means dependence. But paper tiger: undiplomatic but true. Cable had remarked too many politicians have been willing to accept it, that ’60s France lost nothing by keeping her political staggering like drunks along a foggy political street and military independence, and we should follow: our where clutching any lamp-post, however dim, seems military and diplomatic expertise are scarce resources better than sobering up not to be distracted into and getting home unaided. Too many well-fed wiseacres who would agencies of pan-European Cable was writing of the be seasick on wet grass think that irrelevance when they are US, but the EU is now also Britain’s terminal decline since 1945 does needed for our national and a problem. not matter, yet think that our glorious NATO interests. The first lamp-post is past entitles them to living standards We did not build an America. We need good most of the world can only dream about economy half as big as US relations and the ability China’s with 5 per cent to work with its forces but of China’s population by dependence is risky. There is a history from scrapping doing everything wrong, so it is time to stop beating our our wartime nuclear-sharing deal, Suez and unequal breasts, ignore academic declinists muttering into their treaties to dealings with British arms firms. Today’s high-table port about ‘diminished roles’ and set about problem is our jump-jet project, begun here but now a correcting the mistakes of the recent past. Rebuilding joint venture with the US in the driving seat: our new our position as a major maritime trading power means carrier programme depends on it for its completion and ensuring that our defence, diplomatic, commercial and in-service support, but will it be forthcoming? The US industrial policies combine to maintain British seats and blatantly uses such deals to dictate policy to its allies, credibility at the international conference tables where as in post-war years when navies with US-built ships many future battles will be won. We have been here knew that if they used them in ways disapproved of in before in our long history, something the old American Washington spares and support would be cut off. And sea-dog Mahan knew when he identified ‘Character the business of America being business and the politics of the People’ and ‘Character of the Government’ as of America being pork-barrel, foreign companies had essential ‘Elements’ for a prosperous seagoing nation. better get used to sloping playing fields, while we Our opportunities are world-wide and not confined to need to think seriously about ‘plan Bs’ for things like Europe and the USA (back to those ‘three circles’ of those jump-jets. post-war new-Elizabethan thinking) No one else will The other lamp-post, the EU, has problems enough do it for us, we must not let others stand in our way and with its democratic deficit, bureaucracy and high it will not be done overnight. Realistically it will take costs and needs major reform, but here we will stick five years for others to understand that we really mean to trade and defence. On trade, we can all cook figures it and ten before we start to reap the big benefits, but to claim that our EU trade today is anywhere between it is worth the effort and the sooner we start the better. 45-55 per cent of our total, depending on the answer we want, but by 2015 it will probably be under 40 per John Parfitt is a former naval officer who is writing a cent and falling as other economies outpace Europe’s. book Sea Power and Trade in the 21st Century, New Prosperity will not come from taking in European Britannia. washing. The EU has wanted a common security and defence policy and military role to back its foreign policy aspirations for years, but it has been dogged by problems: in 2001 a former foreign minister, Lord Chalfont, published a critique of them (The European Army) in the Salisbury Review, but after nine years the problems he identified remain. A 27-state group with

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 17 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk Twelve Men Good and True? Nigel Jarrett (return to Contents Page)

ritain’s jury system is often held up as the may not be able to serve, but trying to wriggle out of a mainstay of a fair and unprejudiced legal jury summons is almost impossible and, if successful, Borganisation, ensuring that the conviction of simply results in a postponement of duty. There may defendants in tried cases is ultimately taken away also be friction between juror and employer (human from the judiciary. The ‘twelve good men and true’, a nature will often irrationally apportion blame for description long out of date on gender grounds at least, disruption), transport difficulties and feelings of are expected after listening to sometimes complex inadequacy, of not being up to the job; all of which arguments and evidence to marshal their thoughts and may prevent the jurors from paying close attention to bring in a disinterested verdict. Where the jury might what they are being told. Above all, they know that make a complete ass of itself — for example, in finding their verdicts might result in fellow citizens being guilt where it cannot possibly have been proved and deprived of their liberty. To be told that one’s task is probably forcing the prosecution to appeal against a onerous does not make performing it easier; for some, wayward conviction — the judge and legal teams step it’s quite the opposite. in and save both the defendant from an unjust fate and The costs of the jury system must be astronomical. the jurors from confounding embarrassment. Crown courts, having taken the place of assizes and Despite having probably never been inside a court quarter sessions, are almost continuously active, of any sort before, and increasingly swayed by the new jurors turn up every week and a separate absurdities of courtroom Before the case starts, then, our ‘unprejudiced’ staff is employed to meet ‘dramas’ on television, citizens are faced with what already resembles their needs, organise their jurors turn up on Monday a scene of impartially differentiated deployment and pay morning in crown courts elements, to join the ‘no smoke without their expenses for daily t h r o u g h o u t t h e l a n d fire’ thought that arises when they see subsistence, travelling to (200,000 of them serve each someone arraigned before them, especially and from court (sometimes year in the UK) and receive if they are tattooed and/or bare-skulled. also to a court farther away) an induction that ranks the and, where applicable, loss bureaucratic procedures for of earnings. The cost to the claiming expenses as almost equal in importance to the country of taking employees out of the economy for essential protocols of the court and the legal processes. up to two weeks could be calculated if anyone wanted Within the hour they may be tossed into the cauldron to work it out: it is done for absence from work due to face not only a scene of intimidating seriousness, to sickness and for reasons that point to the need for despite the attempts of judges and barristers to put them improvement and revision. Perhaps the results for the at their ease, but also the dock and its defendants, now law would be equally startling. as likely as not behind protective glass and flanked by And is there any guarantee that, with all these court officials to stop them absconding — or so the reservations considered, the verdicts juries bring in are jurors have been told on their crash course. But, surely, the best available in terms of intelligently reckoning only the guilty would attempt to escape; the innocent the evidence? To say that a verdict must be based would want to stay to clear their names. Before the case on the weight of evidence for and against guilt (or starts our ‘unprejudiced’ citizens are faced with what innocence) is to assume that juries are fit for the job. already resembles a scene of impartially differentiated What is ‘fitness’? Is it not possible for jurors to steel elements, to join the ‘no smoke without fire’ thought themselves against the importuning of their instincts that arises when they see someone arraigned before or the need to remember and understand labyrinthine them, especially if they are tattooed and/or bare- evidence, particularly over a long period? To suggest skulled. that it is human nature to assess reasonable doubt (what Jurors, selected randomly from those aged between is ‘unreasonable doubt’?) and bring in a ‘not guilty’ 18 and 69 on the electoral register, may have much verdict is as flawed as the idea that jurors, individual or on their minds, not least a feeling of unwarranted collective, will set aside their fears and prejudices and imposition. If you have a criminal conviction you find innocense in a defendant who looks nefarious as he

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 18 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 sits in the dock. The judge’s address to the jury includes the randomness of the process but against the inclusion the direction that it should arrive at a rational verdict in the pool of those who have already served, even based on the evidence, employing its ‘experience of though there will obviously come a time when former life’ to help it come to a decision, a rider that surely jurors will have to re-enter it. Surely everyone eligible cannot prevent brighter jurors from stifling a titter, should do his duty and the blind choice of names as most people’s so-called experience of life might should be from the legion of those who are eligible reasonably bear comparison with a hermit’s trepidation but whose names, because of the random method, on straying too far from his cell. Being in the main free have never been chosen. This, of course, would be of criminal conviction, and in some cases learning with difficult. Bureaucracy, while relishing the labyrinthine, the agreement of opposing counsel during the course of may be averse to change conditioned by an appeal to a defended action of the criminality of others, including fairness — and justice. And if you are aggrieved by the defendant, the average juror must spend much of his the protocol, its niceties may become the target of or her time wondering if the lifestyles emerging during your discontent. witness testimony are at least cause for astonishment One often wonders how many defendants are sent if not disapprobation. A juror’s comment after a trial down or massively fined with no inclination to appeal involving some pretty dubious characters on both sides against conviction. Our jury system is often said to that ‘It was like listening to life on Mars’ would reflect be the best of all possible methods of separating the the implication that this was guilty from the innocent on a foreign land, beyond the Our jury system is often said to be the best the grounds that its virtues wildest experience, and one of all possible methods of separating the outweigh its faults; but, if with which a juror could guilty from the innocent on the grounds the actual price paid is the not possibly come to terms that its virtues outweigh its faults; but, if loss of liberty as a result of in favour of a true verdict the actual price paid is the loss of liberty questionable jurisprudence, based on the evidence. It as a result of questionable jurisprudence, that system needs looking goes without saying that that system needs looking at again. at again. bringing in a verdict based It is a brave person on some other criterion can who would advocate never be punishable. unreservedly any of the well-rehearsed remedies for What goes on in the jury room can be fairly safely the deficiencies of the jury system: professional jurors guessed at based on the aforementioned ‘experience (dependent on consistency of intelligent appraisal and, of life’. One can assume that forceful personalities, like qualified drivers, not incapable of causing damage); even ones eager to get the whole business done more trials without a jury (apart from anything else, with as quickly as possible, dominate proceedings dependent on the ability of judges to match their legal and that, equally, more timid ones, fearful of knowledge with commonsense evaluation of evidence) expressing a contrary view, go with the flow. In his and a change in what constitutes an indictable offence recent autobiographical memoir, Sir Harold Evans (resulting in fewer jury trials and more cases to be dealt (no stranger to the courtroom when defending his with by the lower courts). newspapers against libel suits) warns that a ‘silent’ All of these might create as many difficulties as they member of a group seeking to reach consensus may remove. But no seemingly intractable problem should be taciturn for any number of reasons. In a jury room, be considered beyond questioning. Only by continually these can range from weltschmerz to unexpressed bearing in mind the shortcomings of any system can animosity towards the group’s leader/spokesman, or one hope to arrive at a better one. envy of his/her instinctive grasp of dialectic. How easy it is in normal life to be swayed by an eloquent Nigel Jarrett is a freelance writer, music critic and a but deeply-flawed submission, the flaw only revealing former court reporter itself much later and giving rise to a retrospective change of opinion. And how many jury verdicts bury contrary views in the interest of unanimity? Even when all these reservations are considered, we are still left with the random method of calling jurors to court. One may be lucky (or unlucky) to have served on a jury twice in 12 years yet know of no-one in one’s immediate circle of friends and family who has served at all. The objection might not be against

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 19 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk A Curriculum of Errors Frank Ellis (return to Contents Page)

Since our inception in 1997, we have broadened about the benefits and costs of higher education, lied our intellectual framework and built on our existing to the British taxpayer and will almost certainly have specialisms within gender relations. We now inflicted severe long-term damage on higher education incorporate ‘race’, masculinities, sexualities, queer itself. I wonder whether Michael Arthur, the vice and trans-theories into our research work which has chancellor of Leeds University and chairman of the a core focus on the body. (Centre for Interdisciplinary Russell Group of universities, who presided over this Gender Studies, Leeds University). porcine rush after fool’s gold, is competent to deal with Please mark for content only — Do not penalise for his own local crisis and the national one that he and his errors of spelling, grammar or punctuation (written fellow vice chancellors have done so much to create. instructions given to Dr Frank Ellis at the University Between 1992 and 2006 I taught in the Department of Leeds before marking a 2nd year grammar exam, of Russian Studies, part of the School of Modern 2004-2005). Languages and Cultures (SMLC), at Leeds University. In addition to my specialist Russian media course, I used The University of Leeds has aspirations to world- to teach two general courses on nineteenth-century and class status (University and College Union, Leeds University). twentieth-century Russian literature. I also prepared a special subject course on Russian war literature. Over he financial crisis which now confronts Leeds this period, I was able to see the consequences of the University (and other universities) has its expansion referred to in educational bureaucratese Torigins in the egalitarianism of both New as ‘widening participation initiatives’ on academic Labour and, it must be said, the Conservative Party. A standards and to gain some insights into its impact on Tory government abandoned the distinction between financial planning in the SMLC. polytechnics and universities, so imposing unitary Russian literature in British universities is no status and allowing the influx of large numbers of longer read and studied in Russian. Very few first-year poorly qualified students into tertiary education. students come to university with a Russian A level, and Further inflaming this expansionist fever was an even when they do, such has been the decline in the A assumption, encouraged by politicians and academics, level over the last 15 years, that the top grades do not that all who wanted to go to university should be able indicate much about a student’s abilities. Teachers in to do so; since going to university was akin to a human secondary education have presided over a deliberate right. Potential students should be able to go to a and systematic inflation of A Level grades which has university, if they can meet the academic requirements undermined confidence in the examination. Teachers and get funding. If they cannot, they must seek other generally, and teachers’ unions specifically, detest the avenues of personal advancement. sorting effects of examinations. Indeed, many teachers The huge increase in the numbers of students that hate examinations and would, if they could, abolish overwhelmed universities from the mid 1990s onwards them completely and rely on course work. I frequently resulted in course requirements being watered down to met students at Leeds with A and B grades at A Level accommodate students who would have been rejected Russian whose knowledge of basic Russian grammar earlier. Even worse, they soon discover in the world was pitifully weak. These students, supposedly good of mortgages and council tax that the much-vaunted linguists, are unable in their first year to cope with degree in gender studies or film studies does not reading even short Russian novels in Russian let alone impress a hard-headed employer. Over the last fourteen something substantial. This is an appalling indictment years the governing bodies of British universities have of modern language teaching in our secondary system. behaved in a way which resembles those other would- The situation may never improve while universities be masters of the universe, the banks, now rightly collude with politicians to accept students who cannot castigated for their incompetence. In pursuit of a sub- meet the demands of higher education. Most students prime clientele, the universities encouraged a reckless who study Russian at university these days study the increase in student numbers regardless of academic subject ab ovo. Most of their effort will go to gaining ability. They thus cruelly deceived many applicants sufficient mastery of the language and they will have

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 20 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 little time for, or interest in reading a major Russian Russian department’s status in the university and novel in Russian. In 1993, Leeds University, like other the wider academic world depends on its expertise universities, went over to a modular system. This in analysing and interpreting the primary texts in the allocates a certain number of credits to a module and Russian language. If the transmission of that expertise the student must amass a minimum number of credits is neglected out of non-academic considerations — to qualify for his degree. The modular system also administrative, timetabling convenience and financial provided for students to do a course outside his main pressures — then that status is undermined and the subject. One direct consequence was to reduce the justification for retaining a Russian department is amount of time available in the curriculum to cover further weakened. The trend towards teaching literature material in any depth. in translation makes a strong case for teaching all The twentieth century Russian novel course literature in translation within a large department, highlights the problems of the modular system. maybe a new entity, the Department for the Study of Students taking this course must read and study four World Literature in Translation. Russian literature novels, like Vasilii Grossman’s Life and Fate (1988) would then enjoy no unique status but would be one of or Boris Pasternak’s Doktor Zhivago (1957). Most a number of foreign literatures to be studied. If a student students make decisions about their work at the start had no interest in literature — and many do not — and of the academic year and leave themselves very little his sole aim was to learn Russian then there is no need time to complete the reading before the relevant class to retain a Russian department. He would be sent to begins. When the twentieth century Russian novel the University’s Foreign Language Centre where much course begins with, say, Life and Fate few students of his pursuit of Russian could be self-directed (or he will have started to read this major novel, let alone could pay for private tuition). Experts in the Russian have completed it and made notes. Seminars based economy, history, media and philosophy would be on the novel are predictably one-sided affairs. A small allocated to the various departments specialising in group of students who have read it and the lecturer end economy, history and so on. up doing all the talking. Students who have not read Modern-language students in most British universities the novel or in some cases not even bothered to buy spend part or all of their third year abroad. It is a copy are not able to make any useful contribution taken for granted that the time they spend there is in class. The twentieth-century Russian novel course excellent value for money: there are, it is claimed, is assessed on the basis of two essays, which must be dramatic improvements in the language being studied; written on two of the set texts. Many students, having institutional links are established and fostered and decided on which set texts they will write their essays, students experience different cultures first hand. It is do not bother to read the other two and often do not argued that the benefits are indisputable: I disagree. The bother to attend the class in which they are taught. arrangements are expensive, represent an unacceptably This is common practice and something I found deeply large drain on staff time, unnecessarily lengthen the dispiriting. degree course; and perhaps worst of all do not deliver The modular system is designed to be open to the academic benefits cited to justify the time and students from other departments in the university. A trouble. There are undoubtedly benefits from time spent student in the Department of English taking a course in a foreign-language environment, but these benefits in the nineteenth-century English novel might like can be delivered in Britain much more cheaply. to study the Russian novel or a student majoring in Modern-language teachers have an almost mystical Russian history might want to study Solzhenitsyn. faith in the power of the time spent abroad to improve Students from these departments were generally of a the language skills of even the least able students. There much higher intellectual calibre than those majoring in is no guarantee that the command of a student’s German Russian studies. As there was great financial pressure will improve in Germany. Discipline and application to attract such high quality students, this was another are necessary. A student with poor attendance and factor that favoured studying literature in English weak language work in Britain is unlikely to suddenly translation. improve when abroad, especially when the temptations A Russian department in which Russian literature and excitement may well overcome his limited self- is primarily read in English translation and not in the discipline. There is a strong case for using time abroad Russian original is an academic Potemkin village. as a way of rewarding those students who meet certain Lecturers in the English Department could argue that academic standards before being awarded a place. since the Russian department does not offer Russian Competition would be fierce and would raise standards. literature in Russian but in translation, there is no Time spent abroad would be an indicator of academic point in having a dedicated Russian department. A quality control, conferring superior status on selected

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 21 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk students. The pursuit and enjoyment of some of the The most efficient and cost-effective way to cultural and less rigorous educational benefits can come linguistic mastery and cultural understanding is after the degree course and at the former student’s own through reading, which does not require that the student expense. Most of the languages offered by SMLC at be located in Moscow despite the claims of modern Leeds and other similar departments are those of EU language departments’ promotional literature. When states. Travel to and from these states has never been student numbers were much smaller, the leisurely easier so that a mandated year for language learning is passage through a modern language degree course not required within the degree course. Physical access with a year abroad was feasible. In straitened financial to the Middle East (Arabic), Russia, China and Japan is circumstances, the year abroad can either be retained not as easy but not insuperable. However, the Internet for a few elite students or abolished. It cannot continue and satellite television properly used — al-jaziira in its present form. is outstanding — are excellent and cost-effective Not all student applicants are equally endowed substitutes. The opportunities provided by the Internet, with sufficient self-discipline and intellectual ability satellite television and other electronic media should to be able to pursue a worthwhile course in tertiary be fully exploited. As the SMLC will now have to education. These arguments against mass higher abandon its ambitions to remain ‘the UK’s largest education are not new. They were made during the institutional provider of modern languages’, Russian, expansion of higher education during the 1960s and Chinese, Arabic and Japanese departments should be those who advanced them were soon vindicated. The considered for closure or downsizing. latest round of expansion which accelerated in the The key to the mastery of any language to degree mid 1990s has threatened the university ethos. Higher standard is regular and serious reading. Unfortunately, education is now expected to be inclusive so that it students no longer read. They read as little as possible must host a miscellany of pseudo-intellectual misfits in English and only a fanatically dedicated handful — gender studies and black studies are two obvious will attempt something like Gogol’s Dead Souls in examples — which are hostile to notions of intellectual Russian, let alone The Brothers Karamazov. Students rigour, above all, to free speech and academic freedom. who graduated before the introduction of the modular Gender studies and black studies have no place in a regime had no excuse for not reading major works of university: they are little more than grievance factories literature, like Ivan Denisovich in the original Russian. and should be closed. Vice-chancellors, university In the days of the modular supermarket, any tutor who secretaries, the heads of departments and schools, who is foolhardy enough to demand that students read the do not defend the essentials of a university for reasons set texts in Russian would soon be addressing rows of ideological and financial expediency, or who fail of empty chairs; but some of those chairs should not from cowardice to confront the charlatans, cease to be occupied in the first place. Students who do not preside over a university. wish to immerse themselves in the great canonical Russian texts are denying themselves an opportunity Frank Ellis was a lecturer at Leeds University. to experience Russian culture. The Real Rebels should be on The Right Nigel Jones (return to Contents Page)

ne of the major attractions of the Left — all subverting the social order by robbing the rich and especially to the young — has always been giving the proceeds of their muggings to the poor. Otheir identification with romantic rebellion Even though Robin himself may be a myth, his outlaw and revolt against the stuffy, conventional established image expresses a timeless ideal of the discontented order. In England, this goes right back to the legend of and the restless. Robin Hood and his Merry Men — cocking repeated It was no accident that the left-wing Hollywood snooks at authority in the shape of the Sheriff of screenwriters Ring Lardner Jr and Ian McLellan Nottingham; living free under forest skies; and above Hunter, blacklisted in the US by anti-Communist

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 22 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 McCarthyism, found a refuge in Britain where they In the end it was not the Sixties and Seventies anonymously wrote the teatime children’s TV series ‘fun’ toy revolutionaries — the Tariq Alis, the Danny The Adventures of Robin Hood which slithered a Cohn-Bendits, the Weathermen, the Baaders and the seductively attractive message of social equality and Meinhofs — who triumphed, but those who — in the anti-establishment revolt into millions of homes and main peacefully — overthrew Communism in Russia impressionable young minds in the grey 1950s. and across Eastern Europe twenty years later. After half The arrival of rock and roll in the same decade fed a century of unfettered power, the original revolutionary into the same stirring zeitgeist of revolt. The prevailing impulse of Communism had ossified into a grey heroes of the hour were James Dean in Rebel Without bureaucratic dictatorship, no longer capable of inspiring a Cause; Marlon Brando in The Wild Bunch and Elvis loyalty even among its own salaried apparatchiks. Presley, whose curled lip and gyrating hips seemed Two decades after those great upheavals, the ‘long a permanent sneer and thrust against the old and the march through the institutions’ advocated by the more conventional. The music spawned a succession of thoughtful and dedicated of the 60s revolutionaries — youth movements — the Beats, the Teds, the Mods, though grown grey and pot-bellied now, is nearing their Rockers and finally the Hippies, all dedicated in their desired destination. An entrenched new class, holding different ways to beating a path away from the routes to the neo-Marxism of ‘political correctness’ as if to a taken by their parents’ generation. new religion, has its sweaty hands clammily clasped Inevitably, the global youthquake of revolt found round the levers of power. A new Establishment — in political causes to hitch their wagons to. Nuclear politics; the civil service; the judiciary; the media; local disarmament in a world threatened by atomic government; academia — even the police — the hated obliteration was an obvious one; and soon TV pictures ‘pigs’ of yesteryear — sits in air-conditioned offices in beamed out from the atrocious war in Vietnam offered London and Brussels spinning a fine mesh of rules, laws another. The political establishment on both sides of and codes to bind, control and slowly enslave us all. the Iron Curtain in the 1960s was dominated by old Faced with this reborn Establishment, is it not men; (emphasis on the ‘old’ and the ‘men’) — from time for Tories to take on the unaccustomed role of the geriatric tyrants of Communism — Brezhnev, Mao the rebel? For, in a curious reversal of history, any and Ho Chi Minh — to the World War One generation: resistance to the stifling blanket of conformity that Adenauer, de Gaulle and Macmillan — who still held has been flung over our liberties must come from sway in the West. When a young charismatic leader — the Right. Even though Labour were ousted from President J F Kennedy — appeared to break the mould, office in the election, their nanny statist mindset will it seemed only inevitable that ‘they’ — unidentified continue to dominate our culture until it is challenged dark forces — should kill him and resume business by a Conservative revolution. It is their placemen and as usual. women who sit on the quangoes and the judges’ bench, To the post-war baby boomers who marched to teach in the classrooms, pontificate in the studios, and Aldermarston nuclear weapons research establishment write the editorials in the Guardian and Independent every Easter, or gathered outside the US embassy in (the Pravda and Izvestya of our time). Grosvenor Square to protest about Vietnam, their How long will the young, the traditional foot soldiers elderly rulers represented reaction, repression and of revolution, continue to tolerate the lazy-minded, finally death. While they — at least in their own eyes dispiriting, disempowering and frankly tedious — with their music, their mind-expanding drugs, their nostrums of the Left? flower power and free love, were on the side of life How long before they yearn to snip through Nanny’s and the future. apron strings and run free? In 1979, at the fag end of Somehow — it may have been the strength of the the Sixties and Seventies revolutionary wave, a brave dope they were imbibing — it quite escaped the Love woman modestly proposed that startling paradox: a Generation that the heroes whose posters plastered conservative revolution. their bedsit walls: the bearded Fidel Castro, and above No wonder that a popular poster shows Che all his murderous failure of an acolyte, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s iconic beret and curling locks framing the Guevara — were brutal dictators far more repressive face of Margaret Thatcher. With the Left once more and grim than the tolerant old democrats against whom occupying the commanding heights of our culture, it they were marching and chanting. The Trade Unionists is time for Tories to storm those heights once again. who made pilgrimages to Cuba and East Germany did not pause to reflect that strikes were unknown in Nigel Jones is a historian, biographer and journalist. these socialist paradises — not because they were not He is currently writing a history of the Tower of London needed, but because they were banned. for Random House/Hutchinson.

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 23 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk American Funny Money

Russell Lewis (return to Contents Page)

ast February, the US Congress passed the • $264 billion on direct welfare payments, which American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. rewarded states with federal handouts based on the LObama’s officials predicted that the near 800 number of people they put on their welfare rolls. billion dollar stimulus package it involved would • $53.6 million for a ‘state stabilisation fund’ to help jumpstart the economy and create 3.6 million jobs. states and local governments which had got into This confident forecast was based on the simple old- debt to avoid budget cuts — more money for the fashioned Keynesian idea that government spending feckless. would send consumers scurrying into the shops and • $300 million to buy cars for federal bureaucrats. cause money to pulsate round the economy in ever • $2 billion for ‘neighbourhood stabilisation’ to radical widening circles. Through this so-called ‘multiplier groups like ACORN (for whom Obama used to work effect’ the GNP would then increase by a larger amount in his earlier career). than the stimulus money spent, boosting the demand • $529 million to ex-Vice President Al Gore to finance for labour and propelling the unemployed millions the development of a new hybrid car. How weird back into work. However, three and a half million when there is huge overcapacity in automobile jobs were actually lost since the stimulus began. The manufacturing worldwide. unemployment level has stuck just under the 10 per There was the ‘Cash for Clunkers’ scheme under cent level. So as the leading Harvard expert on the which car buyers were given a $4500 incentive to trade subject, Robert J Barro, pronounced after the first six in their jalopies for brand new cars. This produced an months, there was no net stimulus effect on job creation immediate jump in sales in August, which was offset whatsoever. by a plunge after the subsidy ended in September. This stimulus exercise, though it has coincided These grants look less like stimuli for job creation and with the US Federal Bank’s more like the ingredients of Keynes’s idea, ... claimed that if there rescue of the credit system, a slush fund. are idle human and physical resources, is not to be confused with Obama’s plan was based why not finance their return to productive it. The Fed’s reduction of on Keynes’s idea, which work by boosting demand for them... interest rates and monetary originated in the midst of If you feel that this prescription has echoes of easing has been quite the 1930s depression. Its the South Sea Bubble, your instinct is sound. rightly aimed at preventing theory was plausible and the money supply, bank optimistic and it claimed deposits and interbank credit nose-diving. Without that if there are idle human and physical resources, this action there could have been widespread financial why not finance their return to productive work by breakdown, spiralling deflation and a slump similar to boosting demand for them — throwing bank notes that of the 1930s. I am not criticising that very necessary out of helicopters, as some of Keynes’s recent apostles intervention, though this salvaging of the credit system have suggested — or giving cash to firms that would by monetary expansion should not be overdone or it otherwise go bust ? Indeed, if there is a multiplier, these will undermine the international value of the dollar. exercises might pay for themselves. The ruling principle of the Obama administration If you feel that this prescription has echoes of the that government can combat unemployment by, as South Sea Bubble, your instinct is sound. If you want the phrase has it, ‘spending its way out of depression’ recent evidence of what happens when the theory is put will fail. Here are some examples of where American into practice, then look at Japan, which has been deficit taxpayers’ money has gone: financing for two decades without any effect other than • $288 million in short term tax cuts. Critics, looking increasing government debt. There are many reasons back at similar temporary tax cuts by George Bush in for believing that government action to boost industry 2008, which were ineffective, claimed that, precisely directly won’t work mainly because politicians and because they were transient, they would be largely bureaucrats haven’t a clue about picking winners. saved by households fearing future wage cuts or loss Public choice theory should also make us wary of of employment. deliverance through government largesse. For, when

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 24 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 it comes to choosing who gets the prizes, the power supposed to be paid for by an additional income tax elite will always favour their friends. In Obama’s case of 5.4 per cent on those with incomes of half a million this means, among others, Al Gore, and party stalwarts dollars a year. It is a means, in his own phrase, of in Democrat state governments. There are also the ‘spreading the wealth around’. unions who contributed so handsomely to the Obama It would clearly be a waste of time trying to campaign — the Autoworkers gave 400 million dollars convince Obama that fierce taxing of the rich is and got their payback in the form of a chunk (or clunk) counterproductive, because the anticipated revenue of General Motors’ equity invariably contracts. He must also be deaf to pleas It may seem rather curious that Obama should attach that the best way to stimulate employment is to make himself to such an outmoded economic model, with its permanent cuts in marginal tax rates on productive emphasis on effective demand, the multiplier effect and activities. Even the super-cautious Mrs Merkel and her steering the economy through tax and spend. As one German government have grasped that. For Obama’s Chicago economist remarked, the multiplier effect is overriding aim, whatever the revenue loss, is to ‘close now only taught as an illustration of a popular economic the gap’. So expect US deficit spending to continue, fallacy. Certainly, in post-war Britain and America, the provided Congress plays ball, and, with a rising policy of fiscal fine-tuning of the economy has been defence commitment and the new burden of the tax- tested to destruction after World War II, and culminated heavy Health Act and Cap and Trade bill to come, don’t in ‘stagflation’, which we had in the seventies, when be surprised if annual US budgetary deficits linger in the attempt to promote employment by fiscal measures the trillions, however much the top one per cent are resulted in simultaneous inflation and recession. In squeezed. With the economy thus burdened, America’s Britain the Keynesian prescription was dramatically dole queues are not likely to shrink through the rest of discredited when 364 Keynesian economists signed a Obama’s term. Nor will the Obama stimulus packages letter to The Times, which condemned the fierce fiscal speed up growth but hinder it — like Roosevelt’s New squeeze in the budget of Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Deal, which delayed American economic recovery by Exchequer, Sir Geoffrey Howe, and claimed that it a decade. would result in prolonged economic decline. In the President Obama has returned from a G20 meeting in event, the economy turned into an expansionary phase which he failed to sway his European partners in favour for at least five years. of more government spending to foster economic Recent extensive research on the effect of government revival. At home he faces a popular revolt against spending on employment in America from Roosevelt to excessive government — his stimulus programme the present day indicates that the multiplier generally mainly stimulated the tea party movement. With the has been a flop. Barro concludes that the multiplier stock market falling there is now talk of a double dip reaches one — that is the point when GDP grows at American depression which could rock the rest of the the same rate as government spending — only when world. We shall see. unemployment reaches 12 per cent. On the other hand, based on data since 1950, he reckons that an average permanent marginal tax rate cut of one per cent raises Russell Lewis was a leader-writer on both the Daily the following year’s GDP growth rate by around 0.6 Telegraph and the Daily Mail and was Acting Director per cent per year. History is replete with examples of General of the Institute of Economic Affairs. He wrote the striking success of permanent tax-cutting stimuli, the first biography of Margaret Thatcher, a best seller. notably during the presidencies of John Kennedy, Email: [email protected] Ronald Reagan and the Margaret Thatcher premiership in Britain. So, given the discouraging evidence of government outlays as a cure for unemployment, what was the drive behind the Obama team’s love affair with Keynes’s legacy? Certainly the now dominant intellectual left in the Democrat party has become obsessed with the inequality of American society, summed up in the claim that the top 1 per cent of American earners have 22 per cent of the nation’s total income. Obama is eager to tax these aristos, not just to support the public services, but to make them pay for their wealth. That approach is apparent in his health care programme which is

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 25 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 650 Hands in the Till

Richard Packer (return to Contents Page)

very so often events show that all one’s necessary by those making it — which fall outside cynicism about the nature of political debate the definition of eligibility. This is pernicious because Ein our country, about which attitude one the result is that those affected will tend to submit occasionally feels almost guilty, only underrates the inflated claims for other items in order to ‘make up’ folly of politicians and the gullibility of the public. The the deficiency. expenses ‘scandal’ about expenses incurred on ‘second’ A careful examination of the claims submitted by a homes is an excellent example. Most comment has large majority of MPs will show all these tendencies in been vacuous and the remedy apparently to be adopted operation. Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Alistair expensive and ill-judged. Darling, for example, are no exceptions. All have Backbench MPs receive modest salaries, currently distorted behaviour to increase claims, Brown by his £65,000 per annum; this is more than twice the average peculiar cleaning arrangements, Cameron by taking out wage, but it is very much less than the pay of almost a mortgage the costs of which are claimable when he everyone an MP will meet professionally. Even in the is unlikely to have needed one and Darling by buying public sector it is below the pay of middle-ranking, and selling property in effect making capital gains at let alone senior, civil servants. Most MPs need homes taxpayers’ expense. This serves merely to reinforce the in at least two places, one near Parliament and one obvious. If a system provides incentives for a certain in their constituency. Only a minority of MPs have a type of behaviour then such behaviour will increase constituency near Parliament. All parties have proved in frequency. reluctant to take Parliamentary action to increase MPs’ Unfortunately the remedies proposed by the Kelly salaries. report will not put the situation right, because they The remedy adopted to deal with this awkward merely propose continuing the present system but conjunction of facts, sanctioned explicitly and making it tougher. A significant increase in MPs’ implicitly by all Governments, has been to adopt a salaries is already being mooted as a consequence. relatively liberal regime about expenses on ‘second’ Further, it is also envisaged that a substantial homes. One bad mistake which has been widely bureaucracy should be established to police the new commented upon was to have a system that was regime. Why taxpayers should feel happier to pay for effectively secret and screened from public view. a needless bureaucracy is not explained. This was a direct encouragement to abuse. There was, What is needed is something quite different which however, another fatal mistake, unnoticed in all the reflects the realities of economics and human nature. many tons of newsprint devoted to the issue, which was Most MPs need two bases the cost of which should be to adopt a system which reimburses actual expenditure. recognised. All those who qualify under this simple test The worst aspect of a system which reimburses should receive a flat rate allowance which could be at actual expenditure is that all the incentive for economy a rate below that in fact claimed by most MPs until is lost. Indeed incentives operate in the opposite recently, that is below £20,000 per annum. They should direction. There is every incentive to obtain the very spend this as they please without any check. The whole best of everything provided only that the cost will in system could be operated by less than one person. Such fact be reimbursed. Thus under such a system many a system would have none of the unnecessary checking individuals will buy more expensive goods than they and arguing which on current form we seem destined to would have done if they were using their own money have and to pay for in perpetuity. MPs would have the even had they been richer than they are or were. This same economic incentives as everybody else, namely unfortunate tendency is reinforced by another factor to maximise utility and minimise expenditure. Thus which is probably only noticed by those who have giving MPs more freedom to choose what to buy for submitted expenses claims over a very long period second homes would, contrary to most assumptions, — like MPs. However widely an expenses regime is reduce the cost of MPs’ second homes to the public drawn there will always be some types of necessary purse and eliminate the scope for abuse. expenditure ­­— or at least expenditure regarded as The whole saga demonstrates yet again that quick

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 26 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 fixes, in this case the decision to pay generous expenses simple solution rather than taking public attitudes — secretly administered as a covert means of increasing which in this case might be said to comprise ‘screw MPs’ pay, rarely work in the long-run. When a the bastards’ — as the main determinant of a solution. problem emerges about which the public is believed to feel strongly, time is better spent reflecting on the fundamental causes and whether there might be a Sir Richard Packer is a company director

LETTERS (return to Contents Page)

Sir incarnation as women were massively employed during I much appreciated the article in your Summer issue on WWII in the manufacturing sector, whereas the current Nesta Webster, a very good writer who deserves to be better incarnation has witnessed women dominating the service known. H E Taylor hits the nail on the head when he writes sector while also moving up the management ladder. Both of one of her books that it is ‘a comprehensive directory of situations are similar in that the national debt ballooned, past and present revolutionary organisations.’ She knew a albeit for different reasons. formidable amount about the subject, even by present day Whereas the post-war nation inherited a strong industrial standards, and wrote about it both reasonably and rationally. base to pay off its wartime debt, it’s difficult to conceive of I lived for some months with her and her disabled the current welfare state as a good business case, although daughter in London in 1945. This had been organised by it doesn’t take much imagination to visualize the welfare my grandfather, who for many years had conducted a very state being repurposed to serve the rapidly growing needs nineteenth-century friendship with her (she was a beautiful of the greying boomer generation. woman, and she would perhaps have called him her cher The real issue of the feminization of the economy is ami). She had a large flat, but couldn’t cook; I could cook whether it has created a successful economy. The answer but had nowhere to sleep. I was 23-4, she in her late sixties. thus far is not encouraging given the massive debt-to-GDP We got on very well so long as I was careful never to say ratios in all modern economies combined with the largely anything on the dangerous subject of the Jews, or anything unfunded contingent liabilities for public pensions and that might lead to it. Otherwise she was a charming medical services to be paid for by a shrinking labour force companion and had a rare gift for treating one always as because of low fertility rates. if one were her intellectual equal. Unfortunately she did The prospects are further dimmed by the rising economic not extend this to her daughter, a sweet natured and self- overhead to deal with social and economic dysfunction effacing 45 year old. It took me a few weeks with Nesta to stemming from pandemic family breakdown. realize that what was still a first class mind was beginning It would be wrong to place all blame on feminism, to give way. Once after one of her anti-Jewish statements especially as the gender equality aspects have been liberating I dared to ask why she felt so strongly about them? ‘They to mankind. However, radical feminism is a corrosive killed my husband!’ she cried, and snatching off her shoe Marxist force using women’s rights as a façade to impose hurled it at me ­— unfortunately, missing me but smashing the same system of elitist socialism that drove the former a Meissen figurine on the mantelpiece. Later when the air USSR bankrupt. had cooled I asked what had happened to her husband. He We are now in a post-feminist era where gender equality had been in charge of some kind of police operation in the is not only the accepted norm, but is guaranteed by the Northwest Frontier Province, now Taliban-ridden in today’s economic realities of a shrinking labour force. I agree with Pakistan. An ‘incident’ had arisen, he had gone to sort it out, Baskerville’s thesis, but framing the discussion in gender and had not been shot but had died of a heart attack on the terms detracts from the real discussion, namely the need to mountainside. How the Jews were responsible for this she deal with radical feminism as a political ideology rather than did not explain, and I had not the heart to ask. Apart from as an equality issue. this she had a delightful sense of humour, great courage and Hoff-Sommers correctly characterized feminism in terms a total absence of stuffiness or self-importance. of the beneficial equality feminism and the destructive gender feminism camps. The latter has morphed into a Penelope Tremayne, pure political Marxist ideology. The starting point for any Wadebridge, Cornwall meaningful discussion is to frame radical feminism as a political threat to national security, no different than offshore terrorist ideologies save for one distinguishing characteristic Sir — we fund radical feminism. Once we recognize the wolf ‘Women on Top’ (SR Summer 2010) was an excellent piece in sheep’s clothing, the discussion can proceed. inviting us to consider the consequences of the modern incarnation of the feminization of the economy. I term it George Piskor, Niagara Falls, Canada

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 27 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk The Salisbury Review listens to the BBC The Sunday Programme. 13/06/2010

In a feature about a ‘woman friendly mosque’, in from a noisy minority who see the Koran as suspect.’ Manchester. Ed Stourton interviews Sabina Hammed, ‘There are US flags here and speakers denouncing who says she has ‘the very rare privilege of being able the mosque.’ (He mentions that one of them lost three to come and go as she pleases’ at the Mosque. She relatives in the 9/11 attack.) notes the separate entrances ‘Most people here adhere and boys as young as to the fundamentalist view eleven being banned from that American values and the women’s room inside. the phrase Judeo-Christian Stourton never challenges are indivisible.’ her about sexual segregation He asks a Muslim in charge in Islam or the attitude of of the project: ‘Aren’t there other Mosques which are extremists in all religions?’ breaking English law by Back to the harmless keeping women out. At one sounding ‘discount coat point she trots out the ‘It’s store,’ the reporter says ‘It is cultural, nothing to do with the focus for much fear and Islam,’ argument. suspicion.’ Congregations Later there is a report about are ‘struggling to understand a discount coat store being the condemnation that has turned into an Islamic come their way.’ He mentions community centre/ mosque ‘A hail of propaganda.’ He only two blocks away from then refers to ‘the extreme Ground Zero in New York. and very emotive criticism of the mosque.’ Right at the Stourton tells us: ‘There are strident voices attacking end he mentions the recent car bomb in Times Square. the proposal and using it as a vehical to strike at Islam.’ But we are quickly reminded by an Imam that ‘it has A BBC reporter goes on: ‘Islam is once more under fire happened in all faiths.’ Sunday 4/07/2010

Invited to look over the Sunday papers are left-wing poet Michael Rosen, Baroness Billingham, Labour peer, formerly from the Institute of Education and black Jazz composer Julian Joseph. Billingham declares that ‘the Tories hate all public services,’ and insist that the economic cuts are a conspiracy to destroy the public sector. Paddy O’Connell puts it to her that perhaps Labour would have made cuts too, but this is not followed up. Michael Rosen then explains that our failure in the recent World Cup was because there is no England so there can’t be an English team. The UK team were ‘forced to play for an entity which no longer exists and who would want to do that?’ No one disagrees with him although Julian Joseph slightly demur and Paddy O’Connell who presents the programme immediately accuses him of being ‘very old fashioned’.

Thursday July 8th, Radio 4

Andrea Levy started by gleefully telling us that one in three Londoners was born abroad, then quoted the number of languages spoken in the city now. This is the usual preamble to asserting that London is no longer an English city and that it never in fact was. Sure enough she continued, ‘London has always taken people in, after all it was founded by the Romans.’ Not true of course; it was inhabited for centuries before they arrived and founded by the Trinovates in the Iron Age. After their conquest the Romans took years to actually settle here. The BBC loves the lies of multiculturalism.

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 28 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 Writing for Frankie Howerd

Marc Blake (return to Contents Page)

rankie Howerd was a clown and a buffoon, star faded once more. In the late Eighties, Channel 4 which was why the British public took him made a series SuperFrank and a fresh student audience Fto their ample bosom. His act was pure camp; latched on to his inimitable style of humour. an arch knowingness drizzled with double entendres When I arrived at Central TV offices I was told that that placed him as moral arbiter and simultaneously they were planning a six part series, Frankie’s On... in engineer of all that seemed improper. On stage, TV which he would appear live at a University, on board and film he teased us with a wink and a come-hither a ship and in various other locations. There were five gesture, before turning on a sixpence, huffing and other writers in the boardroom. It transpired soon that puffing in complete umbrage at whatever naughtiness not only had I got the job but the great Frankie Howerd we had dared to imagine. was actually coming in. So how was I going to write that? I began to wish I had not worn T-shirt and shorts. As a fledgling stand-up and comedy writer, I had We sat nervously as a TV was wheeled in on a donated lines to BBC Radio’s satirical Weekending and trolley. I glimpsed Mr Howerd arriving through the the rather better News Huddlines plus the odd piece for glass office wall. He was taller than I had imagined, Punch. Considering these shows were going down the slightly stooped, wearing a mis-matching jacket and tubes I was starting to see myself as the Mary Celeste trousers with a black silk shirt and a terrible wig that of Comedy until, in the summer of 1991, I received resembled a sparrow’s nest. I decided not to mention a call from my shiny new agent, who was known as this, or the obvious pun on Wigmore St. He was polite Tooting Broadway Jerry Rose. and respectful to all as he shook our hands and stared Are you free on Thursday? at my legs. When am I not free? He sat next to me and whispered sotto voce — ‘Are There’s a meeting. Central TV, in Wigmore Street. you married?’ What’s it about? Luckily I was. I showed him my ring. They’re looking for new writers for Frankie Howerd. I later heard that the script editor was frequently He has writers? chased around his living room. Frankie was known Oh ye of innocence and stupidity. They all have for his peccadilloes. The TV was fired up and we were writers. But I’m an alternative comedian. shown a videotape of his recent sell-out show. So was he. Are you trying to talk yourself out of this? ‘Do you know the Garrick?’ asked Frankie. I’m just overawed. Won’t it all be Oh, no, missus? Time for my first faux pas. If it is, then it’s easy money for both of us. ‘Isn’t that the little theatre?’ I asked. Born in Yorkshire in 1917, Francis A Howard first ‘A two thousand-seater.’ He said, graciously. came to prominence in BBC radio’s Variety Bandbox. I went red. It was brilliant. At seventy-five he was His writers included Eric Sykes, Johnny Speight in his prime. They stopped the tape after the first 25 and Galton and Simpson — so no pressure there. He minutes. achieved fame in his first film role The Runaway Bus ‘Do you know how many jokes I told?’ he enquired opposite Petula Clark, going on to star in two Carry On of us. films,The Ladykillers and the Great St Trinian’s Train We all had a stab. Thirty, seventy. Not even close. Robbery. By the 1960’s he had fallen out of fashion ‘Five.’ — only to have his career resuscitated by appearances Five actual jokes. at Peter Cook’s Establishment Club and on BBC TV’s Every nuance, double take, sideways glance, pained That Was the Week That Was. Between 1963 and 1965 moue and outraged exhalation had been staged and he appeared in the Broadway musical A Funny Thing rehearsed. He knew exactly what he was doing, how Happened on the way to the Forum, which sowed the to work the audience, how long to hold off, how far he idea for the sitcom Up Pompeii for which he became could take a word or a moment until he wrung laughter best known. This was also the progenitor of Black from it. What was needed now was fresh material. He Adder as later series had him placed in further historical had used the best and now it was our turn. He rose and periods. Two seasons and three films were made but his with another glance at my foolishly bare legs, he went

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 29 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk off to be lunched. trip to the Amazon and died in April 1992. Only two I was commissioned to write twenty minutes over shows were ever broadcast. On the morning of his the six part series, so I went home to toil, producing demise he was still speaking to the producer, making several surreal tales and reams of innuendo-laden one- suggestions, trying to improve the show. He had liners — anything I felt he could use. We never met become, rightly, a comedy legend. It was a pleasure again. The Script Editor delivered the work to Frankie’s and a privilege to have met and worked with him, Kensington Home and started wearing running shoes. however briefly. I learned so much: how to tailor the There were problems though. Technically brilliant, material, how to use comic punctuation, the value of Frankie was resistant to leaving his comfort zone. The the beat and the pause and most of all, how to dress routines were too complex and had to be cut to fit. A more appropriately for meetings. lot of whittling was done. I didn’t mind and nor did my agent, because he liked getting paid. Marc Blake is a stand-up comedian. Sadly, Frankie fell ill after contracting a virus on a Conservative Classic — 40 When William Came (return to Contents Page) Timothy Kidd

he Edwardian writer Saki, or Hector Hugh The story begins in an elegant Mayfair drawing- Munro, is best known for his short stories and room in high summer. Cicely Yeovil is entertaining a Tsketches — witty or macabre pieces, with a young male admirer to luncheon. They are awaiting the sharp-eyed, sardonic view of the contemporary British return of her husband, who has been away for months and European world. He was also the author of several in Siberia, cut off by distance and then by illness from plays, a history of the Russian empire and two novels, the events of the outside world. It becomes clear that the second of which was published in 1913 with the he will be returning to a very different homeland: ominous title of When William Came. He’ll come back feeling sore and savage with There had been a number of ‘invasion scare’ novels everything that he sees around him, and he won’t and plays in the previous decade, warning of the realise just at once that we’ve been through all that German threat. Liberals and progressives scoffed ourselves, and have reached the stage of sullen at the whole notion that war was coming and that acquiescence in what can’t be helped. Britain would do well to prepare for it. In his Preface Murrey Yeovil is the half-hero of the book, described to Misalliance, Bernard Shaw jeered: as ‘a grey-faced young man, with restless eyes and The grown-up Englishman is to the end of his days a rather wistful mouth.’ He represents Saki’s own a badly brought-up child: afraid that the Germans perspective on what has happened. Arriving at Victoria will come and enslave him ... unless his nurse, his Station he takes a taxi, with a German cabbie, who parents, his schoolmaster or his army and his navy drives past Buckingham Palace on the route home. The will do something to frighten these bad things away. alien uniforms at the gate, and the eagle standard flying The publication of this effusion was early in 1914. at the flagstaff, indicate what has occurred. Kaiser It is not hard to see who had a better grasp of what was William has come and conquered, and the British Isles about to happen. are now a province of the German empire. Subtitled A Story of London under the Hohenzollerns, How this came about is described later that evening Saki’s novel is in a sense a history that never occurred. by a doctor friend. A weak Liberal government, beset Yet it is not just a superbly written, if somewhat by internal quarrels, had neglected or undermined dated, Edwardian classic. The book contains much Britain’s defences. Germany engineered a minor of valuable relevance for us nowadays; and it may in frontier dispute in East Africa, which then escalated particular engage those who are concerned with what into open war: has happened, or is happening, to our shared national It burst on us with calculated suddenness, and we identity a century later.

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 30 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 were just not enough, everywhere the pressure came. but the setting of the ancient home where the old lady Our ships were good against their ships, but were not resides is unmistakeably a portrait of Hatfield House, able to cope with their ships plus their superiority and the family traditions evoked are those of the Cecils: in aircraft. The enemy were a nation apprenticed in arms, we were not even the idle apprentice: we Torywood was not a stately, reposeful-looking house; had not deemed apprenticeship worth our while. it lay amid the sleepy landscape like a crouched The collapse was so complete that I fancy even the watchdog with pricked ears and wakeful eyes ... To enemy were hardly prepared for the consequences and fro the squires and lords of Torywood had gone in of their victory. No one had quite realised what one their respective generations, men with the passion for disastrous campaign would mean for an island nation statecraft and political combat strong in their veins. with a closely packed population. And now one tired old woman walked there, with names on her lips that she never uttered. Britain having lost command of the sea, the Germans are able to dictate terms. Any further attempt Broken in health if not in spirit, the old lady at resistance or insurrection would simply lead to disconcertingly advises Murrey to become a blockade, starvation and surrender. As a shrewd commercial traveller. She urges him to travel up and German politician remarks: ‘Every wave that breaks down the country, in contact with all types and classes on her shore rattles the keys of her prison.’ of people, to remind them of the great things of the Not all has been lost. The Empire has stayed past, and instil a determination to win them back. In loyal; the King and court have moved to Delhi, and the course of time, she warns him, the Government many families have sold up and moved overseas, would find out what he was doing, and he would be their places being filled by German immigrants. As ‘sent out of the country’, but others would be left to the story progresses, Murrey wanders disconsolate carry on the work. through a changed London, The latter suggestion observing the bright A century on, we may regard Saki’s last reveals perhaps that the military uniforms of the novel as a fictional prophecy which has not author underestimates conquerors, the continental come about in quite the way anticipated, what a German military cafes and Bavarian bands, as is often the case with prophecies occupation would mean the proliferation of bi- in practice, since such a lingual signs and petty regulations, with numerous counter-agent would have petty officials — some of them British — eager to been summarily shot. But Saki takes pains not to enforce them. make his account melodramatic or sensational. All The question the book expounds is: under such the German characters in the book are sympathetically circumstances, what can be done? Cicely Yeovil and portrayed. Having delivered the first paralysing blow, her sophisticated friends have settled for acquiescence; their subsequent methods are those of absorption, her husband Murrey, angry and frustrated, searches for dissimulation, even an unequal form of partnership. some form of resistance. As he says: ‘It is one thing to Indeed, the author shows a respect for the enemy’s face the music, it is another thing to dance to it.’ willpower and self-belief, qualities that are slipping A musical evening at the theatre, in the presence of away from his central character, and those of his kind. His Majesty himself, indicates how far submission to Murrey returns to London, where a chance meeting at the new regime has gone, at least among the artistic and his club leads to the purchase of a horse and the lease metropolitan crowd. The programme of songs includes of a house in the West Country for the autumn hunting- such popular numbers as ‘They Quaff the Gay Bubbly season. The scene then shifts to the countryside where in Eccleston Square’, and concludes with the daughter Saki spent much of his childhood, and where (for all of a once-powerful aristocratic family performing her his later urban polish) he acquired an abiding love of ‘Suggestion Dances’, illustrative of such topics as country pursuits: The Life of a Fern. As one of the audience remarks The dry warm scent of the stable, the nip of the afterwards: ‘At any rate we know now that a fern takes morning air, the moist earthy fragrance of the autumn life very seriously.’ woods and wet fallows, the whimper of hounds Disgusted with the spectacle, Murrey leaves London and hot restless pushing of the pack through ditch for the provinces, where much of the traditional British and hedgerow and undergrowth, the birds that flew up and clucked and chattered as you passed, the way of life is still carried on. He goes to visit an old hearty greeting and pleasant gossip in farmhouse acquaintance, the Dowager Lady Greymarten, now kitchens and market-day parlours — all these well- widowed. The character is based on Lady St Helier, a remembered. political hostess whom the author knew and admired, But the quiet comfort of country life turns out to be an

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 31 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk enervating force, sapping what is left of Murrey’s will. A century on, we may regard Saki’s last novel as a An encounter with a courteous young German officer, fictional prophecy which has not come about in quite who shares his love of field sports, both entertains the way anticipated, as is often the case with prophecies. and repels him. His settling down to a life of rustic It was Germany who lost the war, and all her overseas littleness is marred by self-accusation, ‘ignoring the possessions; the British Empire growing even greater struggle-cry that went up, low and bitter and wistful, as a result. A second war with Germany and her from a dethroned dispossessed race, in whose struggle allies also ended in victory for Britain, but at the cost he lent no hand.’ of her own Empire Although his central and her national character accepts wealth. Subsequent defeat, the story does membership of the not end there. The European Union has final chapter depicts a rendered the British festival day arranged Parliament and law in Hyde Park, on subject to Brussels which the Boy Scouts a n d S t r a s b o u r g of Britain are due to rather than to Berlin, parade in front of the but the outcome is Kaiser and a host of m u c h t h e s a m e . dignitaries. The event The denationalised is intended to set the culture that Saki saw seal on submission to and described in the new regime. As the London in his own crowd — including a day has extended, with shame-faced Murrey American influence — stand waiting now predominant. and the minutes tick A l t h o u g h t h e past, it becomes clear c o u n t r y s i d e h a s that the parade will remained much as not take place. ‘The he knew it, mass Emperor and princes, i m m i g r a t i o n h a s Generals and guards, turned parts of our sat stiffly in their cities into foreign saddles, and waited. territory. The prospect And waited ... The o f t h e y o u n g e r younger generation had barred the door.’ generation barring any door seems remote, since state The world itself did not have long to wait. Within education is now given over to ‘equality, diversity, a year the guns of August spoke, and Britain and her and climate change’. The armed forces have been run Empire was at war with Germany. Although he was down and deprived of men and matériel, although still now aged 43, as H H Munro he immediately joined required to engage in endless wars. A bloated public the army, saying that having written When William sector is mainly devoted to serving itself rather than Came he ought at least to go halfway to meet him. the public. Once-respected institutions such as the He served a private soldier and then as corporal in the Church of England or the BBC are now dedicated to Royal Fusiliers, posted to the Western Front. A fellow- apologetics or appeasement. The United Kingdom soldier recalled his courage and coolness in action, and itself may be moving from devolution to dissolution. his cheerful kindness to others when they were out of And all of this has occurred, not as a result of defeat the line. The end came on a dark winter morning in in war, or through foreign invasion, but simply through November 1916, during one of the last battles of the negligence, self-distrust, or through our own volition. Somme campaign. Munro was resting with his section If Saki had lived to see these things come about, he in a shell-hole, waiting for the order to attack. One of might have wondered whether his sacrifice, and that of the soldiers struck a match to light a cigarette, and in his entire generation, had been worthwhile. But then, the brief flare of the match-flame, a German sniper as his central character realises in a despairing moment took his chance. of recognition: ‘One cannot explain things to the dead.’

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 32 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 (return to Contents Page)

y grandfather prided himself on owning a and romantic figure, had once lived there. Nature writer Regency house in Hove, but the present Richard Jefferies loved Brighton, and in an essay of Mowner told me that the place was built in 1884 he noticed that people who live there (apart from 1875. I was shown my old bedroom, which is still a fishermen) never look at the sea or go near the beach. boy’s room. Instead of my self-drawn and coloured This still holds true today. He also described horses cut-outs of birds on the walls, he has banal stickers of on the beach, going round and round to winch the The Incredibles, a modern cartoon family. fishing boats up onto the shingle. In my younger days, Nearly all the Victorian terraces of Brighton are mechanical winches, cemented onto the beach, wound now homes to people who once went to nearby the boats up on huge chains. Now winches and chains Sussex University, and have never been able to leave are red with rust, seldom if ever used. How much the town. There are fishing still goes scarcely any normal on is a mystery for shops any more Sussex fishermen — e v e r y w h e r e are a secret people trendy gifts are on now, as in Jefferies’ offer, like lavatory Day. brushes that look Little Preston l i k e b o w a n d Street, almost an arrows. Working alley behind the class people no real Preston Street, longer live in the at first looks bleak terraces, paying and featureless but rent, but are all on on examination council estates. proves to be a place One such estate I of architectural visited at Portslade curiosities. The was mildness itself, drainpiped backs full of fat sleepy- of tall slate-roofed eyed women and houses show a freckled children with dogs. Little expeditions set off strange array of alcoves, annexes and windows small here and there within the estate ‘visiting Nan’. and large, some neo-gothic, some imitation Regency. On my last visit to Brighton and neighbourhood, a When the hurricane of 1987 hit Brighton, many of few weeks ago, I noticed a few changes. Hove Library, the elm trees that had been spared death by Dutch saved from closure by a hair’s breadth, has thrown Elm disease, had their branches blown away. Only the out half its books and has a demoralised proletarian sturdier limbs survived, bereft of twigs. Where could air. No wonder — the majestic old brick and flint Gas the leaves grow? To my surprise, The leaves grew along Company mansion opposite has been pulled down, the main boughs, making the trees look like strange replaced by a terrible gleaming airport of a Tesco’s. twisted hands in ragged green gloves. Each bough was Near the Volk’s Railway Station on Brighton’s pebbly a mass of leaf, and more leaves grew straight from beach, lorry loads of bright yellow sand have been the trunks of the trees. New twigs eventually became tipped, to encourage tourists. At Vernon Terrace, near branches. Elm lovers should go to Vernon Terrace, to my old school, I noticed a painted-over plaque I had the Level and to the aptly named Elm Grove. never seen before. Apparently Eleanor Marx, a tragic

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 33 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk ETERNAL LIFE(return to Contents Page)

ast week the Synod confirmed its determination that women cannot be priests or bishops does not deny to have women bishops but the resolution does ministry to them. We sometimes have women to preach Lnot include any proposal to provide statutory at St Michael’s, and not only Christian women. Last provision for those who in conscience cannot accept week we had a lady Rabbi to preach at the Drapers’ women’s episcopacy. So the benign genius of Dr John Installation Service. Habgood, when Archbishop of York, which offered the After agonised prayer, Christ appointed twelve male notion of two integrities at the time when women priests apostles. The Gospel says he ordained them. (St Mark were originally approved by the General Synod, has 3:14). He had warm and close relations with women, now been overthrown. The latest synodical resolution and was even accused on occasions of being too friendly will also abolish the roles of the Provincial Episcopal with them, but he did not ordain any of them — not even Visitors ­— flying bishops — created in 1993 to provide Mary Magdalene, the first witness to his Resurrection. pastoral oversight for those conscientiously unable to This decision was not just a matter of cultural relativism: accept the priesthood of women. As Bishop Broadhurst as if Jesus were merely primitive and reactionary and said on Radio Four the other day: The Synod has lied stood in need of correction by the militant feminists of to parliament and it has lied to the church. our day. He did not ordain any women and we must Dr Habgood’s agreeable compromise has been assume that there was a reason for his decision. arbitrarily done away with and now, by implication, Supporters of women’s ordination cite the example of there is only one integrity in the Church and it belongs the other professions: women doctors, women judges, exclusively to the supporters of women priests and women astronauts — why not women priests and bishops. Synodical approval for women priests was bishops? The question misses the point by substituting obtained in 1992 providing that alternative pastoral secular standards of judgement for legitimate church arrangements were made for those opposed to it. order based on biblical and patristic authority. Many members of the Synod would have rejected the As an old-fashioned liberal, I do not expect everyone innovation if the safeguard of the flying bishops had to agree with me, but I believe that allowances must not been forthcoming. be made for people who beg to differ. John Stuart The integrity which opposes the ordination of women Mill understood that democracy is about more than is no mere misogynist whim. It is a theological integrity counting heads; it is about ensuring that dissenting and it was outlined by the great Christian apologist C S minorities have their views represented. Eighteen years Lewis: ago, allowances were made for those who could not Suppose the reformer begins to say that God is like a conscientiously accept women as priests. The same sort good woman. Suppose she says that we might just as of provision should have been made for the significant well pray to Our Mother which art in heaven as to Our minority who cannot accept women bishops. The Father. Suppose that the Incarnation might just as well radical feminists who pushed through the motion call have taken a female form. Suppose the Second Person themselves liberal and inclusive but their liberalism of the Trinity be as well called Daughter of God as only extends as far as those who agree with them. They Son of God. Suppose finally that the mystical marriage are the Church Militant Tendency. I have had reports betwixt ‘Christ and his Church’ were reversed, that of that Synod and of the savage triumphalism, which the Church became the Bridegroom and Christ the followed the announcement of the vote. Bride. All this is involved in the claim that a woman The first women bishops will not be traditionalists; can represent God as priest. If all those supposals were ever carried into effect, we should be embarked on a they will be chosen from among those who were most different religion. strident in favour of the innovation. You won’t find one coming into St Michael’s — after my retirement — and There is a profound shift in original mystical theology, celebrating the Parish Communion on a Sunday from in the psychology of ritual and in our beliefs concerning The Book of Common Prayer. The female ascendancy the Divine ontology when a female stands at the altar in the church is broadly feminist, left-wing in politics and declares, This is my body. These things are not and obsessed with environmental issues. On Ascension trivial: they go to the heart of Christian apprehension Day a couple of years ago, a sermon was preached in where they actually make the relationship between God the City of London — and broadcast on the BBC — by and humankind a matter for experimentation. To claim a woman priest very widely tipped to be one of the first

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 34 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 of the new bishops. She said the original Apostles of will be a corresponding dearth of doctrine and theology. Jesus thought the world was about to end. They were Many of the people who will assume control of the wrong, she said. But we today know the world is coming church are generally uneducated: they attended dumbed- to an end — because of global warming. I have attended down theological colleges where little was taught services where the worship was devised by this female except about diversity, feminism, environmentalism, ascendancy. We were asked to place little nightlights in institutional racism and the evils of English history. the sanctuary, then prance around them as if we were Perhaps even late in the day there is yet hope for enacting some pagan ritual in a woodland glade with those conscientiously opposed to the consecration of sentimental choruses instead of robust hymns. women bishops? It is just possible that there are enough The church will become dominated by a single party members of the Synod who will hold in revulsion the — the politically-correct party. There will be demands palpable injustice of the proposals in the draft measure for equality between traditional views of marriage and when it comes before them and refuse to vote for it. This same sex partnerships and we are already hearing a lot would effectually scupper the whole process leading to more about light bulbs and carbon footprints. There the consecration of women — God willing. Reputations — 29 Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother A W Purdue (return to Contents Page)

ueen Elizabeth remains a sphinx full of cerebral, while George, Duke of Kent, was clever, riddles. She combined sweetness and charm good looking, bisexual and, for some time, addicted Qwith steel and intransigence. ‘Powerful’ may to cocaine. She appears to have shared her husband’s seem an inapposite word to describe a Queen Consort admiration for David, the glamorous elder brother. The who lived during a period when the political power of brothers were united in fear of their irascible father the monarchy was confined to a few rarely exercised but only the Prince of Wales openly showed defiance. prerogatives, but its immense social influence and its Elizabeth got on well with George V for whom she role as the expression of national identity is a diffused played the role of not being a ‘modern girl’ for the form of power. No one, perhaps not even her daughter, King disapproved of them. Queen Elizabeth II, did more to enable the monarchy Edward VIII’s abdication was not a mere hiccup to maintain its position at the head of civil society as in the successful history of the monarchy during the well as the ceremonial expression of the state. twentieth century, but a real crisis and the apparent Most biographies portray only the sweetness smoothness with which it passed off was due to a and charm although Penelope Mortimer’s of 1986, carefully contrived public relations exercise in which representing her as a female Machiavelli, is an the government and the court, utilising a compliant exception. Was she the power behind the throne, and media, pulled out all the stops to ensure that the how ruthless was she? ‘year of the three kings’ was forgotten as quickly as Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon only accepted the diffident possible. This was a difficult task. Edward VIII was Duke of York at the third time of asking, but how not an admirable man but he possessed a charisma much did his status influence her final decision to that was not the less effective for being purely marry him? Had she, like many girls of her class and physical. The media, the nation and a good part of the time, occasionally imagined that she might marry his world had adored him as Prince of Wales and, as the older brother? After enjoying a happy and informal exemplification of youth and modernity, his accession family life, she was marrying into an odd family, with a to the throne had been widely welcomed. He was the tradition of disliking its heirs. George V had some good first royal super star and there have only been three. qualities as a king, but few as a father, and Queen Mary, Two of them, Edward and Princess Diana, nearly who stood in awe of her husband, had been cold and destroyed the monarchy, the other, Queen Elizabeth, distant to her children. The daughter, Princess Mary, the Queen Mother, did much to save it. was shy and self-effacing, and of Elizabeth’s brothers- Many people thought that Edward VIII should have in-law Henry, Duke of Gloucester, was decent but not been allowed to marry Mrs Simpson, and remain king

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 35 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk and as Duke of Windsor he continued to be a popular Mother. There was constitutional sense in his view for, figure. Once the die was cast, Queen Elizabeth’s if Queens’ reigns are not named after their husbands attitude towards the Windsors quickly turned from (Queen Victoria was the last monarch of the House regret to outright enmity, tinged with disappointment of Hanover, not the first of Saxe-Coburg), Queen for the Duke but which was personal for the not Elizabeth II had been married to Prince Philip before HRH, Duchess. When in 1940 it was decided that the she ascended the throne. Nevertheless the two dowager safest post for the troublesome duke was to make him consorts won and George V’s invention of the House Governor of the Bahamas, the Queen objected: Britons of Windsor continued. She showed good judgement in were used to ‘looking up’ to the King’s representatives favouring Eton as the school for Prince Charles rather but the Duchess was the ‘lowest of the low’. than Gordonstoun, the choice of Lord Mountbatten and Queen Elizabeth loved and respected her husband Prince Philip, but this was an occasion when she lost; and, always careful to disavow any suggestion that she the heir to the throne went to Gordonstoun and hated it. provided the force and the will for his reign, objected The Queen Mother’s long widowhood was to be her to Sir John Wheeler Bennett’s biography of George apotheosis. Her great achievement was to do almost VI, which ascribed to her a dominant role. She had a exactly what she liked and to be loved and admired. She far better grasp of public relations than he did and the lived in the style of a bygone age with little criticism recovery of the monarchy, accomplished by projecting from a press alert to the slightest extravagance when the image of a family on the throne and by successful it came to other royals. Her opinions were reserved visits to France, Canada and the United States, owed for her circle but it was well known that she despised much to her grace and popular touch. She will forever socialism even if she liked some Labour politicians. be identified with her wartime persona: the Queen who Like her daughter, she cherished the Commonwealth, would not have dreamed of deserting her people and but unlike her was a great supporter of Rhodesia after the sympathetic visitor to the East End. The emotions UDI. She valued her positions as Colonel-in-Chief were genuine but the performance was carefully of regiments, amongst them her position with the calculated. She understood that the monarchy’s appeal Canadian Black Watch which enabled her to combine was to combine care for a suffering population with her love of Canada and the army. formality and that people wanted a touch of glamour, She was a complex person and, though she can be even when they or their neighbours had had their homes presented as representative of an older Britain and destroyed. Decades later the TV satirical programme as deeply conservative, there are paradoxes. She Spitting Image would portray her as a jolly ‘gorblimey’ disapproved of divorce but modified her attitudes cockney in the dress of a pearly queen, a veiled tribute over time. She was blamed, unfairly, for helping to her wartime success. The King and Queen were to persuade Princess Margaret not to marry Peter officially living in Buckingham Palace which was, of Townsend, enjoyed a friendly relationship with the course, bombed but they returned to Windsor for the upper-class bohemian, Lord Snowdon, and did not nights and Eleanor Roosevelt’s experience of being allow the Princess’s affair with Roddy Llewellyn or a guest in a freezing palace with broken windows her subsequent divorce from Snowdon to upset her and being served an austerity cuisine was not typical, relationship with her daughter. She didn’t like rows. though certainly the royal family lived frugally and The disaster of Prince Charles’s marriage and his much less comfortably than their prime minister. All liaison with Camilla Parker-Bowles brought new great public figures project an image of themselves problems and old memories. Was Charles behaving which is part spontaneous and part contrived but, at like David, was Princess Diana another Wallis, the core of those who do this successfully, there has or was Camilla to be cast in that role? In the end, to be an empathy which enables them to understand one supposes, it was Diana whom she blamed for what is wanted. letting the side down and for being neurotic and self- After her husband’s death, she did not welcome indulgent but, as Princess Margaret subsequently taking a subsidiary role and the title ‘Queen Elizabeth ‘sorted’ her correspondence, we shall probably never the Queen Mother’ was invented especially for her. She know for certain. She was close to Charles and may continued to be a formidable force as Lord Mountbatten well have considered that he should have married the soon discovered. If war with the Windsors had been countrified and supportive Camilla in the first place. open warfare, relations with Lord Mountbatten were a She had moved on and accepted several divorces; if cold war. His raising of a glass after George VI’s death she regretted them, she was probably more attuned to in salute to the beginning of the House of Mountbatten, changing more than her daughter, the Queen. saying ‘The House of Mountbatten now reigns’, did We now have William Shawcross’s long official not go down well with either Queen Mary or the Queen biography of the Queen Mother. Official biographies of

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 36 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 kings and queens are rarely exciting. The biographer is person, if not all of the person, then particularly the given the enormous advantage of privileged access to private personality and tastes of his subject. the source material in the Royal Archive but with the Although she had not had a good education, Queen unwritten command that the work must be respectful Elizabeth appears to have been far more interested in and not controversial. Some have found the work hard modern art and literature than most of the royal family. going and Harold Nicolson revealed how tedious a Kenneth Clark, when Director of the National Gallery, subject he found George V when, as Duke of York, he helped develop her appreciation of art and she built seemed to do nothing for years but stick stamps in his up a considerable collection of paintings. She sat for album and massacre game birds. These biographies are Augustus John, whom she found great fun, and John a necessary genre but are necessarily circumscribed. Bratby as well as the more traditional Pietro Annigoni; Nicolson produced a fine book but Kenneth Rose’s Graham Sutherland did a preliminary sketch of her but George V cast more light on his subject. abandoned the project. Her cultural tastes were not Shawcross is admiring but not hagiographic and confined to art and in her eighties she became a close locates her attitudes firmly in the context of the social friend of the poet Ted Hughes. mores of the period and social milieu in which she grew Here was a woman who got on well with landed up. He assesses the degree to which she modified them families, soldiers, racing trainers and jockeys, gay during the immense social changes of her lifetime. retainers, artists and poets, and who was open-minded, With its detail and information derived, not just from genuine in her emotions but tough when it came to archival sources, but from the many who have confided getting her own way. She was, all in all, wonderful in him, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother will be of and became in her later years a venerated national great value to all historians. It is a perceptive book but institution. The first commoner to become a queen its provenance as an official biography means that it since the sixteenth century, her personality and interests will be far from the last word on its subject for it only were, perhaps, more those of the aristocracy into which hints at or elides over some of the tough questions she was born than of the royal family she married into. which a less constrained biography would have been No chocolate-box figure, the monarchy and nation are asked. Shawcross seems to stand back and let his indebted to her. sources tell the story. He in fact skilfully reveals a

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Who knows, one day, in a future conservative Britain, when your grandchildren ask ‘What did you do in the war?’ you can reply with pride, ‘I was in the Resistance.’

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 37 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk ARTS AND BOOKS(return to Contents Page)

abetted by the German army, whose apologists now A Beastly Streak like to pretend that it kept its hands clean. On the other side, the NKVD behaved no better: many prisons they M R D Foot abandoned to their advancing enemies contained scores of corpses, beaten to death after torture. He does not attempt chronological cover; for instance, Moral Combat: a History of World War II, Michael his reader is cast back, after a trenchant chapter on the Burleigh, Harper Press, 2010, £30. justified use of atomic bombs in August 1945, onto an account of what became of Mussolini in September Thucydides, head and shoulders above all other 1943. But every chapter is a closely argued account of historians, believed when he wrote his history of the one sort of horror or another. He has a particularly vivid Peloponnesian war that it would help his fellow Greeks account of life in France in the summer of 1944, far to be aware of the errors of their forebears. Not many behind the fighting fronts — missed rendezvous, abrupt modern historians dare as much; changes of allegiance, muddle and but Michael Burleigh has ventured sudden death. Historians of strategy on an account of the last world are often weak on tactics; he is strong war from a moralist’s rather than a on tactics as well as strategy, and military commentator’s viewpoint. devotes a score pf pages to explaining He believes in Blake’s aphorism, what a fighting soldier’s life was like now some two centuries old, that in action. Nought can deform the Human Race Much of his work deals with what Like to the Armour’s iron brace. happened to the Jews of Europe who He begins with an austere review were mown down by the scythes of of how the predator powers behaved the Sicherheitsdienst and of its many in the nineteen-thirties: the Italians supporters, German, Hungarian and using blister gases against a barefoot Roumanian: ‘a history in which there Abyssinian army, the Japanese was no happy ending’. He shows that murdering over a hundred thousand many of these monstrosities were Chinese of both sexes at Nanking, raping most of the carried through by men who had become convinced, women before they butchered them. His contempt so twisted were nazi doctrines, that what they were for the ineffectual righteousness of Chamberlain doing was the right thing to do. Others simply showed and Halifax is clear. He then shows how the internal that a beastly streak lurks in most of us, and — given regimes of the German and Russian dictatorships an excuse — will get indulged. He knows enough law sapped the capacity for normal fellow-feeling of their to keep abreast of the lawyers, enough philosophy citizens, by overturning accepted ideas of behaviour to keep abreast of the philosophers; he understands and encouraging children to betray their parents. human behaviour, even when it runs berserk. As for His record of the Polish campaign emphasises politicians, ‘the will to ignore the inconvenient can the savagery of the mopping-up that followed on ride over any amount of evidence’. the Germans’ and Russians’ military walk-over. He is always alert to the probability that a generally Everybody who had the least traces of education — received doctrine may be mistaken; noticing the dons, schoolteachers, engineers, doctors, as well as continuing tendency to assume that the USSR cannot officers and priests — was herded away into camps, have been as bad as Hitler’s Reich, and indicating where most of them were shot; the Germans huddled that Hannah Arendt though nowadays usually taken those Jews who were not shot on sight into ghettoes, as infallible could make grave errors of judgement. pending a ‘final solution’. The police did most of This is not a comfortable book to read, but war is the work; the army watched, lending an occasional not a comfortable business, and atrocities remain helping hand. When it came to the invasion of Russia, atrocious. It deserves to be widely read, and will deepen Burleigh makes it abundantly clear that the bestial understanding. behaviour of the SS Einsatzgruppen was aided and

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 38 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 almost authorised biography. Sisman — a former student Hugh and Cry and friend of his subject — sometimes lets him down a tad too easily, and pulls his punches when harsher criticism Nigel Jones might be justified. The biographer — who has also written a Life of Trevor-Roper’s great rival, A J P Taylor — is never less than thorough, and tells the truth as he sees it, Hugh Trevor-Roper: A Biography, Adam Sisman, but as someone who knew and liked his subject, this is Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2010, hb £25, pb £12.99. certainly the case for the defence — and a very convincing fist Sisman makes of it. Chummily — and significantly — Hugh Trevor-Roper was arguably the greatest British Sisman calls his subject ‘Hugh’ throughout, and admits historian of the 20th century. The fact that this claim that he was chosen for the hard task of presenting him can be made despite him never having written the ‘big favourably to posterity. The old boy chose well. book’ that was expected of him as the crowning of his Writing about the notorious Hitler Diaries, for life’s work justifies publication of this informative example, Sisman’s considered verdict is that it was and enjoyable biography. The Regius Professor of merely a ‘blemish’ on an otherwise distinguished Modern History at Oxford, and in his latter years career, citing other great men (Dr Johnson, David Master of Peterhouse College, Cambridge, his outward Hume) who were also taken in by literary con-artists, life was appropriate to those positions: that of the yet whose reputation has survived their gullibility. He prolific, snobbish and pompous academic. But — as gives an extremely detailed account of the whole affair, this enormous yet always readable Life shows — which I found gripping, from anxious calls from Times appearances were deceptive. executives to Lord Dacre (as Trevor-Roper had by then Unusually for a scholar, Trevor-Roper led a life become) and his snobbish, silly wife Xandra while of continuous adventure and controversy, in which they were dining with the Queen at Windsor Castle; danger, adultery, secret service, code breaking, and through Dacre’s growing doubts about being bounced continuous — almost manic — disputes with his by his Murdoch minders into verifying the Diaries too academic ‘colleagues’ and rivals played a constant part. quickly; to Rupert Murdoch’s own characteristically Of the many storms which crackled across the calm blunt reaction when told that the paper’s tame eminent surface of Trevor-Roper’s scholarly career, these are expert (and Times director) Lord Dacre was having just a few which made him famous: second thoughts; ‘Fuck Dacre!’ quoth the blunt • His cracking of the German military intelligence Australian magnate: ‘Publish!’ [Abwehr] codes early in the Second World War. Born the son of a doctor in Northumberland, Trevor- • His wartime friendship in MI6 with the Soviet Roper had a distant relationship with his chilly parents, double agent and traitor Kim Philby. and — no good at games, except riding — was a • His key role in establishing for the first time the fish out of water at his grim Prep and Public Schools truth about the last days and death of Adolf Hitler (Charterhouse). Chronically myopic, he retreated into by tracking down and interviewing survivors from his books. Recognised early as a brilliant scholar, he the Berlin bunker. started reading Classics at Oxford, switching to history • His adulterous affair with and subsequent marriage because he was bored with Greek and Latin. A somewhat to the eldest daughter of Britain’s Great War aloof youth who seems to have enjoyed hating as a sort Commander-in-Chief, Earl Haig. of hobby throughout his long life, he conceived early • His lengthy and acrimonious disputes with fellow lifelong prejudices — notably against the Scots and historians — especially Marxist ones — including Roman Catholics, but more generally against any religion. A J P Taylor, A L Rowse, Christopher Hill and Eric Far from Puritanical, he regularly enjoyed Bullingdon- Hobsbawm. style benders, though as a middle-class student he was And last, but certainly not least: his hasty and ill- not invited to join the notorious club itself. advised authentification of the forged Hitler Diaries Publication of his first book, a biography of Charles in 1983, which sped their publication in Times I’s ill-fated Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, Newspapers and blighted the rest of Trevor-Roper’s coincided with the outbreak of World War Two. Like life to the delight of his many enemies. many brainy academics, Trevor-Roper joined the secret So Trevor-Roper’s controversial career certainly services, working in the RSS, a branch of MI6 which justifies a big biography, and in Adam Sisman, an ex- analysed enemy radio traffic and was a forerunner publisher turned historian and ghostwriter, he has been of GCHQ. Expertise in German helped him crack an fortunate in finding a knowledgeable and sympathetic Abwehr code, which stood him in good stead when his Boswell. It must be emphasised, however, that this is an typically vicious comments about his less intellectually

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 39 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk gifted superiors almost got him fired. Sisman gives a in the Pantheon than some of those whose ‘big books’ good account of these secret service turf wars in which clunk dead from the press. the real venom was reserved for one’s colleagues rather We get a strong sense, however, that Trevor-Roper’s than the ostensible enemy. deepest love was not history but High Table bitchery After the war, Trevor-Roper was given the task of and banter. He certainly enjoyed baiting his fellow putting an end to the widespread rumours of Hitler’s historians and the mass of those who did not attain the survival by tracking down witnesses from the Bunker rarefied summits of intellect where he walked. His fall, and writing the first comprehensive account of The when it came, was therefore all the more sweet to the Last Days of Hitler — a book which became a lifelong many who had suffered his barbs and put-downs over the bestseller, and the basis for many that followed. Sisman years. Sisman glosses over the embarrassing post-Hitler is frank in detailing the late-flowering affair between Diaries years, but they could not have been pleasant HT-R and Xandra — then married to her first husband for such a proud and sensitive man. He certainly paid — describing how they would meet for adulterous dearly for his brief lapse. Curiously, for an experienced afternoons in Home Counties hotels, before Xandra got interrogator one of whose best books — The Hermit a divorce and they lapsed into Oxford respectability of Peking — exposed China’s historian Sir Edmund in large houses they could barely afford, but which Backhouse as a liar and fantasist, Trevor-Roper did not the couple snobbishly considered essential to their spot the same thing when it was placed in front of him. elevated status. There is more than enough absorbing human material Equally late-flowering was Trevor-Roper’s conversion in this huge book to justify a purchase, even though to Conservatism. Previously apolitical, partly in reaction few may readily recognise Hugh Trevor-Roper’s name to the idiocies of Marxist historians, and partly because today. Episodes from his life, like the time he followed of the Cold War, he became involved in the CIA’s 1950s a pack of foxhounds (on horseback) into the top secret cultural crusade against Communism. This was mirrored grounds of Bletchley Park code-breaking centre; or the by his academic battles against left-wing colleagues who occasion when the ineffable Frank Pakenham (later Lord saw the Civil War — one of his specialisations — as an Longford) shopped him to the Irish Police in Dublin as English Revolution, whereas he correctly viewed it as an English spy, vie with the better-known episodes of a much more complex struggle, involving religion as his career to make this an instructive, often enthralling, well as economic and political factors. Sisman makes sometimes hilarious, and thoroughly enjoyable read. excuses for Trevor-Roper’s failure to deliver his long- awaited masterpiece. He puts much of the blame on Breaking the Social Contract Xandra’s demands for money to sustain her pretentious lifestyle, forcing her husband to produce more hack journalism than was good for him. (Though he was, it Patricia Lança must be said, an excellent hack journalist). As often, however, Margaret Thatcher put her finger on the nub The Pinch, How the baby boomers took their of the matter when she asked him when his next book children’s future and how they should give it back, would appear. He assured her that he had one ‘On the David Willetts, Atlantic, 2010, £18.99. stocks’. ‘On the stocks?’ she characteristically echoed, ‘On the stocks? A fat lot of good that is! In the shops, Cobbold: The National Debt represents the sums of that is where we need it!’ money which the Government have over the years Despite this failure to deliver, Sisman leaves us in no borrowed from the public, mainly in this country and, doubt about his subject’s importance as a historian. His to some extent, abroad. That is really the amount of wide-ranging work on such diverse subjects as Nazi expenditure which they have veiled over the period Germany (he believed Hitler was primarily a racial to cover by revenue. ideologue rather than an opportunist with no serious Day: Have we paid for World War II? Cobbold: No, agenda which was the view of Alan Bullock and A J Day: Have we paid for World War I? P Taylor); European witchcraft; the rise of the gentry Cobbold: No class; and even Chinese history — deservedly won him Day: Have we paid for the Battle of Waterloo? the highest honours that a historian can earn. Even if Cobbold: I don’t think you can exactly say that.’ he never quite produced the ‘big book’ on the Civil From the first ever interview ever given by a War that was always expected of him, elevating him Governor of the Bank of England to Robin Day, to rub shoulders in the clouds with Macaulay, Carlyle, 1958, in Willetts, p168. Gibbon, Trevelyan and Elton, his many lesser books This strangely-titled but important book has an — especially his essays — earned him a higher place

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 40 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 explanatory sub-title: How the baby boomers took their part of his breaking of faith not only with his own children’s future — and why they should give it back.’ In electorate but with future generations. Proclaiming he one short sentence the author indicates the first principle had abolished the boom-bust cycle did not make it so on which his book is based and which he believes has and events in finance and industry over the past two somehow been transgressed. Baby boomers are those or three years have shown this. born between 1945 and 1965 and Willetts believes they Everybody knows the dilemma that now faces us: have been guilty of a monumental failure to protect the how to pay for the pensions and health care of the interests of future generations. cohort now reaching retirement age? How to pay The social contract, Willetts believes as did Edmund for the education and welfare of the young? And if a Burke, is essentially between the generations. We who significant number of these are not employed, where live now owe our condition to those who came before will the taxes come from? This is what Willetts means us just as we in turn have a debt to those who come by ‘the pinch’. after us. It is essentially this contract that makes us Brown, Blair and their Nulabour acolytes always human. More than once he cites the tribe of North maintained that these questions were of little concern American Indians whose elders in council would because future productivity would inevitably be much take no decision without considering what its effects higher and thus compensate for any shortfall. Against might be on the forthcoming seven generations. The all the evidence, they still continue with this mantra. author delves into anthropology, social history and Willetts shows convincingly that apart from the evolutionary psychology for some of his insights. global economic crisis now besetting us the problem He provides a brief outline of English family history, is far more complex. He devotes the greater part of describing how it differs from that of most continental his book to examining these complexities, especially countries except Holland and Denmark. He shows from the different shapes cohorts may take and their documents that the continental extended family, like consequences. The history books do not usually true feudalism, never really existed in England and that mention these matters. And yet when we look at the last the nuclear family has been the rule for 1,000 years. two centuries we find that they were crucial. During the This had its effect on the development of trade, finance, 1917 Soviet Revolution in Russia the median age of the the judiciary and industry — and on the outlook of the largest cohort was fifteen. During the Chinese cultural people and their sturdy individualism. revolution and the French Revolution the average age The second consideration, often overlooked, is was also fifteen. that generations are frequently unequal in size. Young people aged 10 to 19 are the largest age group Demographers call such groupings ‘cohorts’ and it is in the world making up close to 20 per cent of the 6.5 the size and composition of a cohort that makes a great billion estimated in 2005 and 85 per cent of these live deal of difference. As in the economic cycle there are in developing countries. So if we list current trouble ‘booms’ and there are ‘busts’. The baby boom refers spots we should not be surprised at the median ages to that bulge in the birth rate that started in the 1940s of those involved: and reached its peak in the 1960s. Because of its Iraq — 9; repercussions on the life-style and ethos of most of the Yemen — 17; boomers — more material goods and fewer babies — the Democratic Republic of Congo — 16; next generation was considerably smaller. Not so small Somalia — 18. in Britain as in other parts of Europe but small enough Zimbabwe, Nepal and Sudan — 20. to cause the concern that now inspires all responsible The CIA, which keeps its eye on these matters, political thinkers. The contract between generations reckons that of the world’s 25 youngest countries, means essentially that parents will look after and educate sixteen have experienced war and civil bloodshed in their children who, in turn, will look after them in their the past decade. old age. Whether or not we think of these proceedings China, alone, because of its one-child policy and being conducted directly by individuals and families or the wholesale abortion of female children, presents through some kind of a welfare system, public, private a special problem and the terrifying prospect of a or mixed, the provision or lack of it must come from generational cohort where tens of millions of young the present generation’s work and taxes. men will be unable to find wives. Willetts scarcely All this is familiar enough to the serious newspaper mentions China, neither does he talk much about reader and the poor showing of Gordon Brown and his immigration and its problems but what he has to tell Labour Party in the recent elections was due in large us about Britain and its prospects, unless government measure to widespread recognition that the former policy can reverse present trends, provides no comfort. chancellor’s reckless spending had in fact constituted There are political as well as economic and financial

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 41 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk problems connected with big cohorts. They carry a hoping to understand Denning’s values. In doing so, great deal of electoral clout. Here are some of Willetts’s Stephens echoes the sentiments of the great jurists of figures: ‘71 per cent of 54-64-year-olds vote and 75 the nineteenth century by noting the main achievement per cent of over 65s as against a national figure of 61 of the period to have been the recognition that even the per cent. Between them these two groups cast 40 per king was under the law. This was institutionalised in cent of votes in the 2005 election. A 55+ party could the seventeenth century, if not well before, by the ‘legal sweep Parliament’. He concludes that ‘we are in for big personality’ of the Crown. changes in the age of our voters over the next decade To Denning, this represented the most important and more.’ This prediction is, of course, the answer aspect of the history of English law; but he cared little to those who are sceptical about the practicality of whether the tyrant be Charles I or a post-modern theory Hayek’s recommendation that both voting and office- of Parliamentary Sovereignty, now virtually ubiquitous. holding age be raised to above 45. Unlike its former manifestation, personified by Oliver Willetts is not pessimistic. His book is an essentially Cromwell, whom Denning greatly admired, the new moral work, reminding us about what conservative version holds that it is permissible for any government policy should be based on and how it may be applied. to re-shape the laws of the country simply by forcing The author’s new job as Minister for Universities will legislation through parliament. Denning rightly thought give him opportunities for putting some of his ideas that this could potentially be little different from the into practice and test the mettle of the Coalition. Roman Law maxim beloved of medieval kings: that ‘the will of the prince has the force of law’. Only by having Denning’s Achievement some inviolable benchmark could the liberties of the ‘common man’ — a distinction Denning thought every Englishman should bear with pride — be defended. Will Robinson In contrast to many who have shared this view, Denning rejected the idea of a written constitution or a new Bill The Jurisprudence of Lord Denning: A Study in of Rights. His defence was firmly rooted in the fact that Legal History, Charles Stephens, Cambridge Scholars English law has never been ‘black letter law’, as it has Publishing, 2009, £99.99. been in France and elsewhere, but is founded in the fairness and independence of the judiciary. This, in turn, is For many years it has been distinctly unfashionable for kept in check by members of the public, who have served politicians or respectable journalists to go anywhere as jurors since the dawn of the Middle Ages. near the thorny topic of English national identity. As is discussed in the next two volumes, The Last of Indeed Lord Denning wrote an article in the Salisbury England and Freedom Under the Law, these views led Review on the then EEC in April 1987. Denning into direct conflict with various governments during The concept has become redolent of nothing short the 1970s and early ’80s, ultimately leading to his forced of fascism, intolerance and shirtless men waving red and resignation at the distinguished age of 83. ‘Progressives’ white flags outside unloved Essex pubs. Yet the term still such as J A G Griffith claimed with some truth that he has some meaning, and those who care about England preferred to pass judgments in favour of litigants whom need to think very hard about how they are going to save he found attractive — policemen, individual workers and it from being subverted either by educational experts or, Grammar Schools — ‘and against those whom he did not — at the other end of the spectrum, a dedicated clique of Trade Unions, squatters and adulterers. This criticism was nationalist extremists. apparently shared by the House of Lords, which quashed Charles Stephens’s attempt to do this through a many of his dissenting judgments. vigorous three-volume study of the life and thought of The crisis that ended his career, however, was brought the controversial Appeal Court Judge, Lord Denning, about by comments he made on the subject of immigrants is most timely. The central premise of his work — that serving on juries in his last book What Next in the Law Englishness is rooted in a respect for the country’s law (1982). In this work, he opined that the huge increase and constitution — is well reflected in three thousand or in the numbers of immigrants living in England since so judgments that his subject passed between becoming 1948 threatened the principle of trial by jury, since this Master of the Rolls in 1962 and his retirement amid had always presumed the existence of an ‘homogeneous controversy twenty years later. society’, underpinned by adherence to Christianity, if The first volume, Fiat Justitia: Lord Denning and the not exclusively the Church of England. As this could no Common Law, is an attempt to integrate the development longer be taken for granted, he feared that many jurors of the common law, from Bracton to Coke, within the would bring with them prejudices that were distinctly broader historical context: a task essential for anyone un-English — a most serious problem for English law.

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 42 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 Though many may find this objectionable, it is like to meet. entirely consonant with reason, and throws much light Born of a noble Norman family which suffered in on contemporary politics besides. Solutions — ranging the French Revolution (he used to say that his father from Rowan Williams’s suggestion that aspects of Sharia would have gone to the guillotine if Robespierre had Law be incorporated into English law to Jack Straw’s fallen two days later), Tocqueville had a warm regard plan to do away with the jury system – have so far been for the aristocratic physiocrates like Turgot of the unacceptable to the values that Stephens characterises as preceding generation. By the second quarter of the innately English. One can but agree with both him and nineteenth century, however, the social, economic Denning that multiculturalism, at least as defined by New and fiscal questions which had preoccupied these Labour, is inconsistent with the premises of our legal elegant ratiocinators were subject to new modes system — race has nothing to do with it. of study. Tocqueville is known to have studied the The only surprise of Stephens’s work is that it contains works of Jean Baptiste Say, and he corresponded relatively little on the Profumo Affair, after which with John Stuart Mill. But he was not at the cutting Denning conducted the official inquiry in 1963. This may edge: he seems never to have read either Comte or be because many works have already been devoted to the subject, whereas few have focused so intensely on his Marx, and while he collaborated in politics, to a contributions to law and the constitution. Undoubtedly, certain extent, with Adolphe Blanqui (economist, Denning found the whole incident rather unseemly, but and elder brother of the socialist revolutionary of it is surprising how much his findings were sympathetic 1870), he shows few signs of having been affected to the ailing government of Harold Macmillan, which by Blanqui’s ideas on free trade. was responsible for many of the cultural changes that he Richard Swedberg says he aimed to present privately abhorred. Tocqueville as a thinker about economic phenomena One finishes the trilogy knowing more about Denning — an aspect of Tocqueville’s work which, he that a conventional biography could ever hope to supply; maintains, has been under-studied until now. This but the book’s formidable length may deter some readers. does not mean that we are to see Tocqueville as a This is unfortunate because it is impossible to understand newly-discovered luminary of the early history of the views of Denning without also knowing a fair economics — nor would Tocqueville himself have amount about constitutional law, a most unfashionable countenanced any such idea. subject. Those who persist will be rewarded with a new Tocqueville’s sympathies, and, the methodology understanding not only of a great judge, but also of many of his work, remained rooted in an earlier period. of the inconvenient challenges that we must face up to Tocqueville was not just an early, and perceptive, as a society if we are to protect the root of our common commentator on the emergent politics of the USA. identity: freedom under the law. Swedberg demonstrates that his thinking about matters as diverse as prison reform, the French A Special Way of Thinking colonial enterprise in Algeria, the development of the French railway system, pauperism, and the problem Michael St John Parker of abandoned children, let alone his major work on the Ancien Regime, show a man fascinated by the Tocqueville’s Political Economy, Richard variety of human social activity, and the interplay Swedberg, Princeton University Press, 2009, £19.95. of the individual with the group dynamic. Tocqueville’s preferred method of working was to Alexis de Tocqueville is an attractive figure — an identify a phenomenon by factual inquiry, and then eighteenth-century ‘man of feeling’ born out of to amplify understanding by examining its context. his time, torn between the delights of scholarship He was the product of a disturbed inheritance, and the obligations of political action. Even the living in disturbed times and trying to understand inconsistency and incompleteness which marked all societies in a state of rapid evolution. His work is his efforts — he died of consumption in 1859, aged marked by inconsistencies and uncertainties — so 54 — serve to emphasise his sympathetic humanity. much so that some commentators have written Richard Swedberg remarks in the Introduction to his of ‘the Tocqueville Problem’. It is a striking fact new study of Tocqueville that many have ‘come to that he shares this methodology with the thinkers regard him as a friend with whom to argue, agree of the Scottish Enlightenment, who had written, and disagree’; his portrait shows a face one would only a few decades previously, on much the same

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 43 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk subjects as those which attracted Tocqueville, but which limits the interest as well as the value of this with conclusions as robust and decisive as his were very academic production. And sometimes even the qualified and hesitant. pedantry becomes imperfect, as when we are told, Apart from frequent references to Adam Smith’s first that Tocqueville was ‘an avid newspaper reader’, influence Swedberg makes no mention of the and then that he wrote that ‘he reads practically no Scottish Enlightenment thinkers. Yet their ‘Science newspapers’. Most seriously, Swedberg might be of Man’ covered the same ground that Tocqueville described as showing limited understanding of the was exploring throughout his career, and was realities of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- founded on the same holistic propositions. The range century European history. of his work as well as the structure of his thought This limitation becomes significant when Swedberg stands close comparison with that of the Scots. attempts to discuss Tocqueville’s L’Ancien Regime et Whereas Smith and his contemporaries wrote from la Revolution, a work which has been hailed as one within a secure and prosperous society, Tocqueville of the most valuable early accounts of the events that had to make his way amid the flashy uncertainties ushered in a new era of history. Tocqueville disliked of the July Monarchy and the 1848 Revolution. Nor historians as a species; but that may have been a did he experience the benefits of a rigorous Scottish reaction to the highly politicised style of history education; the French university system in the early practised in France, as represented par excellence by nineteenth century held few attractions. his political opponent, Guizot. Like so much else that His writings resonate strongly with our experience Tocqueville did, L’Ancien Regime was unfinished at in the early twenty-first century. His analysis of the his death, but as J S Mill put it ‘The value of his work dangerous potential of unfettered, greed-fuelled is less in the conclusions, than in the mode of arriving capitalism, as he observed it in the USA, eerily at them’. His analysis of the interaction of forces foreshadows the reality of our own banking crisis. in pre-Revolutionary France, like the comparable His summary of the materialistic tendencies of analysis of the forces that he perceived at work in democracy seems peculiarly relevant to contemporary the infant USA, is of lasting significance. Britain; indeed, his own personal alternation between Perhaps Tocqueville’s most important single visionary speculation and uncertain action might be contribution to socio-political thought was his a model of our current politics. perception of the tendency for industrial capitalism Not that one could envisage Tocqueville, the to lead both to a growth of democracy and to committed ‘moralist’, finding the cynical opportunism a centralisation of power and the restriction of of the Blair era anything other than repellent. His individual freedom of action. But, he was not a condemnation of what he called the ‘friponnerie’ of determinist — he rejected the gentle mechanisms the Guizot administration of the l840s in France was of Montesquieu, and never encountered the harsh quite unequivocal. On the other hand, he might have syllogisms of Marx. His observation of human had more to say to David Cameron; his theory of the behaviour, in the USA, in England, and perhaps least, essential importance of what he called ‘associations’ in France, convinced him that individual actions, as the catalysts and enablers of political morality in arising from what he termed the mores of a people, democratic societies has a striking resemblance to were the motivators of history. the idea of the ‘Big Society’ which is being urged In his insistence on the primacy of mores on an uncomprehending electorate by the present Tocqueville may be seen as a truly conservative Government. thinker. If Tocqueville’s thinking on the autonomy Richard Swedberg is, of course, not concerned of the individual, and the power of individuals in with the relevance of Tocqueville’s thinking for voluntary association to mould their fortunes and twenty-first century Britain; rather more surprisingly, their environments, can be seen as lying at the though, he makes no attempt to refer to the situation heart of a conservative political philosophy, then of the modern America. Indeed, an academic Richard Swedberg’s book must be welcomed as an study is under no obligation to be ‘relevant’ — but addition to the literature of the field.It is a pity that Tocqueville himself, in L’Ancien Regime, made a so valuable a subject could not have been given a powerful case for exploring the past as a means more accomplished treatment. to understanding the present. There is a wooden stiffness of approach, tainted by political correctness,

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 44 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 prepare the reader for the rest of the book. And the rest Farewell to Beauty is akin to a chapter by chapter lament…an obituary of individual cities — Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Jan Maciag Canterbury to Portsmouth and Worcester…so that the reader may know why and when this terrible destruction was carried out. But the photographs of Britain’s Lost Cities, Gavin Stamp, Aurum, 2010, these wonderful towns, their architectural wealth £16.99. and human scale, left me impressed at what had been created and incredulous that it had been lost and In 1968 our family moved into a modest 1930’s villa discarded so easily. In some places, like Coventry, the in Ealing, West London. It had been built in the side process started in the 1930’s (the wartime destruction garden of a grand Victorian gothic house and our lawn now providing a convenient fig leaf), while in others was especially delightful as it had once been the tennis it was the ‘lack of will’ to repair and preserve after court. My father, an engineer and a practical man of his bomb damage. In a surprising number of cases the time, at once set about the ‘modernisation’ of our house demolitions happened in my own lifetime and this by truncating the tall brick chimneys that had given the seems to strike at some recurring if contradictory myths house so much character, blocking up the fireplaces, of post war Britain; that our decline was someone replacing the elegant brass door handles with the latest else’s fault and that it was inevitable. Instead, I would brushed aluminium products and fixing hardboard over suggest that by the early part of the 20th century we the turned wooden spindles on the staircase. This was had become so accustomed to our Western inheritance followed by a brand new ‘up and over’ polyurethane that we had begun to believe it to be infinite and sealed cedar garage door. indestructible. We could afford losses and with that Some months later, the architectural degradation of delusion, from 1914 to 1945, Europe conducted a civil the area took a momentous leap ‘forward’ with the sale war (with a half time break for some to switch sides) and demolition of the Victorian house itself. It had been that left it bewildered. But it was the ideals of a perfect neglected and ended its days grubbily converted into high-tech future built off a loathing of tradition that flats. Naturally, we children saw this as enormous fun; left it prostrate and suicidal. Those ideas continue to the building was universally described as a ‘hideous gnaw, seemingly untroubled, now that only whitened monstrosity’ and it seemed appropriate that the gloomy bones remain. beast should be clubbed to destruction. To my enduring Stamp describes ‘Bomber’ Harris as a ‘repellent shame, I contributed to its demise by throwing bricks figure’ for the destruction of Lubeck and Rostock and through what had been the billiard room windows. for provoking Hitler (as though he needed provocation) We moved out in the mid 1980’s and, in due course, into bombing our cities and towns but forgets that the our own house also met its fate at the hands of a duties of war are imposed whilst the misguided and demolition crew to be replaced by yet another banal desperate treatment of our own Western culture is self- block of flats. flagellation. Harris’s war ended a long time ago and, Gavin Stamp’s book, Britain’s Lost Cities, culminates to be fair, Stamp identifies the ideas and individuals in those same years of despoliation that also featured such as Le Corbusier who were busy before the in my own childhood. However, it starts before the fighting, during the fighting and, under the inspirational 1939-45 war and demonstrates that our collective leadership of men such as Harold Wilson, a long time will to implode our civilisation’s inheritance started afterwards. He identifies those like Colin Amery, Dan well before the bombs were dropped or the rockets Cruickshank and, of course, Sir John Betjeman who first fired. The city planners were itching to demolish did so much to awaken a late interest in what was being and rebuild, not in the aftermath of desolation or, discarded. This, therefore, is a very sad book about indeed, due to pragmatic necessity but, like my father’s defeat. But extending its content beyond what Gavin modernising efforts, because it was then fashionable, Stamp has written about architecture is additionally righteous and modern. All that was needed to set the thought-provoking. ball rolling at full speed was the government’s looting Could something have been done to prevent the of private property rights through post-war planning destruction? Is looking at these pictures simply pathetic legislation. nostalgia? It is a truism that change is inevitable in all This book begins with an introductory chapter that strands of human endeavour. It is a sign of life but it lays out Stamp’s history of this awful period. It is is no more a sign of life than the efficacy of previous well described and, in today’s modern parlance ‘kicks solutions passed down as tradition. Comprehensive re- the right ass’ with a detailed explanation that tries to development is no more likely to succeed if it involves

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 45 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk buildings than if it involves customs, populations or that they would in turn exert a measure of control over education. While memory is deceptive and selective, the more rebellious and unruly elements among them. architecture leaves behind the evidence of its physical Eventually, the British decided that containment was existence even if only as drawings or (as in this case) the best policy with various irregular forces and the in photographs. This book is one of several (England’s British Army being deployed if the tribes stepped out Lost Country Houses by Giles Worsley, Lost London of line. In the 1920s and 1930s, air power dramatically 1870-1945 by Philip Davies) that allow us a reasonably enhanced the ability of the British colonial forces to direct appraisal of what the past looked like. And while impose their will. art can be kept alive in galleries and old music can be To a large degree the British colonial policy in reborn at the whim of a musician, architecture dies as Waziristan worked and Roe maintains that the British people die. Old photographs don’t just show us scenes experiences in administering and appeasing the tribes from the past. Uncomfortably, they often demonstrate of the North-West Frontier ‘have undoubted utility in that, despite poverty and disease, our towns and cities helping address present-day challenges in the same were once more delightful and humane places in which geographical area’. Roe rightly sings the praises of the to live than they are now and that what has gone has British officials who administered the tribal regions. indeed been a grave loss. ‘They possessed’, he notes, ‘a deep sense of duty, a While this book demonstrates our architectural strong national identity, and were culturally astute’. losses, it is clearly much more difficult to show Moreover, many of them spoke Pashto and were associated ‘soft’ cultural losses: those that once able to communicate directly with the tribal leaders. constituted a civil society. How do you show the loss However, this degree of familiarity, linguistic skill and of self esteem, the loss of good behaviour and civic prolonged exposure to Waziristan was, and is, not risk purpose and the dissipation of liberty? This volume free. Roe cites cases in which these brave and dedicated describes the effects of progressive thought on its colonial officials became psychologically and ‘long march’ through our towns and cities leaving them culturally detached to such an extent that they tended uglier and disfigured. Do we think that it has not had to identify with the tribes they administered. Army the same effect on our spirit, on the way we live with officers were also vulnerable to the same processes of ourselves and with others? being acculturated to the ways of the tribes (or seeing It all makes Burke’s suggestion that ‘To make us things that were not there). One former soldier liked love our country, our country ought to be lovely’ the enemy and recalls that ‘they reminisced about increasingly hopeless. And yet, I suppose, we must try. the fighting, almost as if talking about some hard- fought cricket match’. This approach might well have been appropriate in the 1930s, though it was clearly Wearystan something more than a hard-fought cricket match when British officers captured by the tribesmen ran the risk Frank Ellis of being castrated and skinned alive. In the twenty-first century metaphors of cricket matches are irrelevant and Waging War in Waziristan: The British Struggle in dangerous. There was nothing Kiplingesque about the the Land of Bin Laden, 1849-1947, Andrew M Roe, terrorist attacks of 11th September 2001. University Press of Kansas, 2010, £31.50. One example of opposition to British rule in this region would seem to offer a striking parallel with A remote mountainous area of Pakistan on the border Osama bin Laden. In 1936, a Muslim priest, Mirza with Afghanistan, Waziristan is currently one of the Ali Khan, eventually known as the Fakir of Ipi, main battlegrounds between Taliban insurgents, their agitated for rebellion against the British. Over the al Qaeda allies and NATO. Indeed Waziristan may turn next decade the British tried and failed to capture this out to be the decisive battleground in the struggle to charismatic and elusive cleric. Essential to the Fakir’s impose stability in Afghanistan. Inhabited by fiercely successful evasion over so many years was the code of independent tribes that are resentful of outsiders, the Pashtunwali (the way of the Pashtun): renegades must area has a long history of lawlessness and violence. be offered safety and protection; hospitality must be During the nineteenth century the British colonial offered at all times; and an affront must be avenged. administration was responsible for the onerous task Even among tribal opponents or among those who of maintaining law and order and employed various were lukewarm to his religious demagoguery he could methods in order to find some kind of modus vivendi always find shelter and sanctuary from the British. with the tribes, mainly the Wazirs. Tribal leaders, Osama bin Laden and his cohorts will also have availed maliks, were bribed, co-opted and flattered in the hope themselves of this code to avoid capture and death.

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 46 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 Roe is concerned by the failure on the part of the of this counter-insurgency campaign? Is this a sign of coalition to learn the lessons of British colonial a superior civilization or political cowardice? If the experience ‘This important oversight is in part due to a Taliban in Waziristan and al Qaeda in Iraq see nothing fear of a quasi-imperial occupation of the region as well wrong in sawing a Westerner’s head off why should as being a consequence of the dearth of contemporary the perpetrators enjoy a semblance of legal protection analysis into the methods of British colonial control’. when caught? It was and remains demoralizing for our These two considerations are related. The lack of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan to know that they will analysis is because there is an assumption, often quite be held to a much higher standard in their conduct than explicit, that anything to do with the colonial past, the insurgents and terrorists they are fighting. because it is colonial, can have nothing useful to say Some of the parallels between the British experience and so it is not studied. The colonial period does indeed in Waziristan before 1947 and with NATO which Roe provide valuable insights: those who deal with the discusses are robust and insightful; others are rendered tribes must have specialist linguists; they must know, less so by the passage of time and the change in and be sensitive to, the culture; they require great technological and political circumstances. That said, patience; and they must be allowed to take decisions. Waging War in Waziristan brings together a great deal However, this must be subject to the caveat that we of valuable ethnographic, historical, political and study the language and culture of our opponent not in military detail. This synthesis alone makes the book an pursuit of cultural and spiritual enrichment — worthy important study and one that certainly should form part aims in the right context — but to understand him so of any officer’s pre-deployment training for Afghanistan. that we are more likely to achieve our goals, one of which may be to kill him. Compulsory Optimism There are significant differences separating the British colonial experience in Waziristan from that Alistair Miller which now confronts NATO in the twenty-first century. These differences set limits to what can be Smile or Die, Barbara Ehrenreich, Granta, 2010, derived from the past. First, for all his objections to the £10.99. British presence and his desire to see an independent Pashtunistan, the Fakir of Ipi had not declared war on In Smile or Die, Barbara Ehrenreich exposes the dark Britain, let alone the West. Nor did he engage in, or side of positive thinking, the cult that has come to sponsor, acts of terrorism in the West. Second, media grip America. With its outrageous cast of overblown coverage of the British presence was far less intrusive motivational speakers, life coaches and prosperity in the 1930s than now (the Fakir, unlike Osama bin preachers, Ehrenreich’s meticulously researched yet Laden, could not exploit the Internet to plan and carry entertaining account would read as a comedy if only out attacks). Third, oil was not a factor in British the consequences were not so dire. considerations, which is not so in the NATO mission. The cult of positive thinking has its origins in Fourth, there was no Israeli state to serve as focal point nineteenth-century America. It was inevitable that the for rallying jihadis. Fifth, Pakistan did not exist and harsh, unforgiving Calvinism of the early settlers, their there was no large Pakistani population in Britain from ‘system of socially imposed depression’, would evoke which jihadis could be recruited. Sixth, Iran’s nuclear a reaction, and it eventually came in the form of what ambitions and declared hatred of Israel were absent. came to be known as the ‘New Thought’ movement. Seventh, the British were the sole power running New Thought replaced the punitive God of the Puritans Waziristan. NATO is a multinational coalition with with a boundlessly benevolent Spirit with which specific national and cultural agendas that complicate, man was coterminous, and it encompassed figures even impede, a united approach. as diverse as the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, Roe is well aware that free markets, human rights Mary Baker Eddy (the founder of ‘Christian Science’), and Western democratic standards mean nothing to the psychologist William James and the self-educated the tribesmen and that ‘Protestant European logic watch-maker and ‘amateur metaphysician’ Phineas and rules of behaviour do not apply to the tribal belt’. Parkhurst Quimby. It was Quimby who cured Mary Roe’s sound observations highlight a problem for the Baker Eddy of her neurasthenia or ‘invalidism’ (a form NATO forces in this part of the world. If the rules and of religious melancholy afflicting nineteenth-century customs of free markets, human rights, democracy middle-America), and a former patient of Quimby’s and European logic are deemed not to apply, why who cured William James. James had misgivings must NATO and Western states adhere to these legal about the movement’s underlying philosophy but instruments and cultural artefacts in the prosecution

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 47 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk nevertheless praised its ‘concrete therapeutics’. attracted to you. The law is, its proponents claim, The generally benign New Thought movement declined firmly grounded in science, but precisely what in influence in the early years of the twentieth century with science — gravity, magnetism, quantum physics the rise of scientific medicine, but was to return later in a or simply ‘vibrations’ — has yet to be agreed on. new and virulent form — ‘positive thinking’ — that was However the ‘good news’ of the Law of Attraction is peculiarly well attuned to the needs of business America. widely promulgated, not only by ‘life coaches’ in the A string of classic motivational self-help texts have since motivational industry, but by evangelical preachers paved the way to the twenty billion dollar motivation versed in ‘positive theology’. In other words, ‘God industry of today, including Dale Carnegie’s How to Win wants you to be rich’. The new ‘prosperity gospel’ is Friends and Influence People, Napoleon Hill’s Think and popular, with an estimated 17 per cent of American Grow Rich! and Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 classic Christians subscribing to it. In the new ‘mega- The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale ministered to churches’, humility and sacrificial love are, Ehrenreich the ‘lonely salesmen’ of America, who lived in constant regrets, distinctly thin on the ground. fear of rejection and needed a positive outlook if they Ehrenreich’s own interest in positive thinking were to survive. But in modern corporate America the arises from her experience as a breast cancer sufferer, productivity of everybody can be raised through the when she encountered the sugar-coated dogma that a exhortation to be more positive, more motivated, more relentlessly upbeat, positive frame of mind helps the committed and more devoted to the firm. And, handily for body fight disease — a notion that Ehrenreich, a former managers seeking to maximise short run profits, it is the immunologist, knows has no empirical or scientific victims of ‘down-sizing’ that are to blame for their own basis whatever. The problem is that when positive misfortune. No need for redundancy pay or re-training, thinking fails to halt the spread of the disease, as it no case for improved conditions or better pay: just enrol inevitably must, the patient can only blame herself. on a positive thinking course. As the Christian motivator Perhaps it was even her negative attitude that brought Zig Ziglar comments, ‘It’s your own fault; don’t blame on the disease in the first place. In one particularly the system; don’t blame the boss — work harder and disturbing case, a patient worries that ‘I know that if pray more’. When Wall Street crashed, it was of course I get scared or upset, I am making my tumour grow obvious that there was something wrong with the system faster and I will have shortened my life’. and with the new breed of charismatic executives, who, The cult of positive thinking claims academic ‘pumped up by paid motivators’, felt able to forgo ‘the respectability in the guise of ‘positive psychology’, tedium of detailed risk analysis’. Unfortunately, there now Harvard’s most popular course. But though was good reason for those who were still able to think positive psychology distances itself from its wackier rationally to remain silent: if they voiced any ‘negativity’, cousin, the empirical research on which it founds its they were thrown out. claims (for example a study that purports to show Eliminating negativity is, of course, central to that happier nuns live longer) is, as even some of its positive thinking. Motivational speaker Jeffrey proponents admit, distinctly shaky — mainly because Gitomer enjoins us to ‘GET RID OF NEGATIVE the results are ‘correlative’ rather than ‘causative’. In PEOPLE IN YOUR LIFE’, and J P Maroney is even any case, the message is the same. more succinct: ‘Negative People SUCK!’ Other notable Is there an alternative to the reckless optimism and motivational speakers include Joe (“Mr Fire”) Vitale, self-delusion of positive thinking? Yes, concludes the author of Zero Limits: The Secret Hawaiian System Ehrenreich. It is to have the courage to face things as for Wealth, Health, Power, and More who ‘claims they really are. doctorates in metaphysical science and marketing’ (a useful combination), and Sue Morter, who argues that Democratic Dangers ‘infinite power’ can be achieved so long as you resonate in tune with the universe, and orders her audience to Anthony Daniels stand and engage in rhythmic clapping. The Orwellian overtones are all too obvious and Ehrenreich reminds us of the fate of the character in Milan Kundera’s The Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Joke who sends a postcard bearing the line ‘Optimism Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect, is the opium of the people’. It is but a small step from Paul A Rahe, Yale, 2009 hb £27.50, pb £16.99. compulsory optimism to totalitarian repression. Lurking behind positive thinking is the Law of Although we live longer lives, suffer less pain and have Attraction, the notion that if you focus your mind more choices than any previous human inhabitants strongly enough on the thing you want, it will be of this planet, we feel uneasy, as if we were holding

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 48 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 a drunken party on the brink of a precipice. Are we something must stand between the power of the right to feel uneasy, or is this merely an instance of government chosen by the majority and the rest of the the law of conservation of anxiety, according to which population, if tyranny were not to result. This tyranny mankind’s worry will attach to one thing if not to would be different, softer than previously known another, irrespective of the objective justification for it? tyrannies, but perhaps all the more efficacious for being Many readers of this review, I suspect, will have less easily discernible. experienced a curious psychological paradox: while Tocqueville thought that the United States was far their own lives are about as satisfactory as it is possible better placed to avoid the soft despotism of democracy for any lives to be, given the limitations of sublunary than European countries. This was for a variety of existence, the general state of the world alarms them reasons, among them the religious mores of the people, so deeply that it casts a gloomy pall over them. The the devolution of power down to township level, a gross financial irresponsibility of governments, banks history free of kingly or aristocratic privilege, and a and general population alike, the rampant criminality, pronounced tendency in the part of the population to the surveillance state that spies but does not protect, form associations to pursue cultural, social or moral the militant vulgarity of inescapable popular culture, ends, independent of any public authority. All these are indeed sufficient to reduce even the best-off among things had either never existed in France or, if they us to despair. It sometimes seems as if the cultivated had existed, had been destroyed or suppressed by and refined person in our society is doomed, like the the Revolution; and France, as a French newspaper decent person in Hitler’s Germany, to inner emigration. recently put is, is not merely European, it is Europe. This philippic is preceded by a long, scholarly and The author is less sanguine about his country than somewhat dry analysis of the relations between the was Tocqueville. American religion is a weak reed to thought of the three political theorists on the one hand, sustain anything; not only is there very little in it by and our current discontents on the other; and, truth to way of transcendental belief, but the reaction against it tell, the philippic could easily have stood on its own is strengthening, freedom of religion now being often without the preceding disquisition. Plenty of intelligent interpreted as freedom from religion. The mores of people have come to very similar conclusions about the people is libertine rather than biblical; its sacred the modern state without having read, or even heard text is a few famous lines from Mill’s On Liberty, not of, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Tocqueville. the Pentateuch or even the Gospels. Power has been In a sense, then, the reader gets two books for the increasingly drained from the periphery to the centre, price of one, the pair of which are unlikely to suit a such that local choice often consists of little more single type of reader. But neither of the two books than that between methods of carrying out directives encourages the facile optimism about the end of history formulated and imposed by unelected officials in that in some quarters greeted the west’s victory in the Washington. Judges twist the Constitution in any way Cold War, and gave rise to a dangerous hubris. Only if agreeable to the moral preoccupations of the day; and history is teleological can it have an end; and history private associations are increasingly forced to comply is not teleological, therefore it cannot come to an end with laws or regulations with which they disagree, and (except with the extinction of the human race). And may even have been set up specifically to oppose. there is absolutely no guarantee that liberal democracy As it happens, there is an excellent linguistic example cannot transform itself into something much nastier. in this book of the reach of soft despotism. The author The relationship between the character of a people and animadverts (with what justice I cannot claim to assess) the political regime that rules it was of interest to all three on the conformism of American universities which, of Rahe’s political philosophers, and is a question that is though private institutions, proscribe certain opinions not susceptible of a definitive answer, except perhaps the and impose ideologically-inspired codes of conduct on rather mealy-mouthed one that it is dialectical. It would be teachers and students alike. On page 258, however, we a terrible thing to say, for example, that the British people read the following sentence: deserved the leader they got in Anthony Blair; on the other We are now ruled by women and men who make a hand, it would be vain to suppose that his characteristics — profession of politics, and re-election is all too often lack of real character apart from ambition, sanctimonious their overriding idea. ruthlessness, sentimentality in the service of absence of It seems to me that the normal way of putting it would scruple, self-interest masquerading as compassion, and have been ‘We are now ruled by men and women moral cowardice posing as principle — did not correspond etc…,’ not because men are still more important in to or harmonise with the character of an important and politics than women (though no doubt they are) and significant sector of the British population. It was Tocqueville’s insight that, in a democracy, therefore ought to be mentioned first, but because the

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 49 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk rhythm of the language demands it, just as it demands life in contemporary North London. that we begin a speech ‘Ladies and gentlemen’ rather Most of these elements are connected by longer or than ‘Gentlemen and ladies,’ which would sound very shorter filaments to fishing, and several with angling awkward. for pike. Indeed, these fish both open and close the There are two possibilities here. First, the author book, and break surface frequently throughout, though wrote the sentence in its natural form, and it was the eels, perch, roach, rudd, carp, and trout also appear. press’s sub-editors who changed it in accordance with Fortunately, there is no technical advice offered and an ideological prescription; or second, the author had all the tackle described is antique or obsolete, so the internalised the requirements of political correctness, bad odour of product placement does not sully the pure against his obvious inclinations. If it was the former, ceremonies of homage that are the larger purpose of he probably felt that the effort required to restore the book. Indeed, far from being an advertisement of the sentence to how he wrote it was too great. But any kind it seems unlikely that Blood Knots will make whatever is the case, the sentence is a tribute to a soft anyone want to venture, rod in hand, to the waterside. and sinister power. The author’s father did not fish, but Robert Nairac, we I wish I could wholeheartedly recommend this book learn, was an angler of a very high standard and some to others than those professionally interested in the considerable subtlety. There are further distinctions, three philosophers mentioned in the title, for the author and these two dominant figures are presented as partial is a learned man with (at least for my taste) his heart opposites, one being the undemonstrative yet deeply in the right place. But as I grow older, I value — as a affectionate parent, making silent sacrifices for his general reader — concision and pithiness more than children, while the other passes over the book’s stage an accretion of detail that ultimately leads to precisely as an hypnotically compelling personality whose the same conclusion. Burke put the essential argument example is never quite free of self-satisfaction; both of this book in fewer words than it has pages: are admirable soldiers, though with styles of courage Man is qualified for liberty in exact proportion as so different they appear to emerge from entirely he is prepared to place a limit on his own appetites. different psychological foundations. This father-friend axis is the measure of all others for Jennings, Berg The current crisis might, of course, place a limit on being revealed in comparison as a sadly wrecked the satisfaction of our appetites, if not on our appetites and incompetent personality whose sole redeeming themselves. feature seems to be his interest in and understanding of England’s largest predatory fish. Nevertheless, desert A Family of Anglers and reward are barely lashed together here, for though Nairac still holds the record for the largest pike from John Constable one of Ampleforth’s lakes, a modest mid-double, it is the drugged rocker in mascara and latex trousers who Blood Knots, Luke Jennings, Atlantic Books, 2010, draws leviathan out, a Thamesmead forty pounder, in £16.99 which, however, as fitting reproof for his transgression of the rightful order, few believe. The dust cover of Blood Knots tells us that the subject Indeed, virtue seems often punished in these pages, or of the book is ‘Of Fathers, Friendship & Fishing’, only ambiguously acknowledged. The astounding cast to and though this is accurate the net is in practice cast an almost inaccessible rising fish yields not the great trout wider. While the heart of the book is concerned with it merits, but a dace; medals are posthumous. Throughout his father, who was a distinguished King’s Royal the text we see an agonised religious conscience toying Hussars tank commander in the 1939-45 war, and with with evidence of universal malice or indifference, and Captain Robert Nairac, GC, the Grenadier Guards while Sartre is mentioned and dismissed as the juvenile officer tortured and killed by the IRA in 1977, the enthusiasm of over-sophisticated schoolboys, the néant is circumstantial text is made up of a series of interlocking never far away in Jennings’s own geography lesson, the memoirs, in which many other incidental but never Catholic church having abandoned the field altogether, irrelevant figures appear, for instance René Berg, the singing ‘Domine vobiscum’ as their recessional but to minor glam-rock guitarist and obsessional fisherman, the tune of ‘Bobby’s Girl’. and the communist publisher Ernest Wishart and his This frustrated will to faith finds its outlet in a scandalous wife Lorna Garman. The author’s own mysticism derived in large part from J W Dunne’s life is sketched with indicative episodes of narrative, speculations on the philosophy and parapsychology of these mostly being concerned with his schooldays, or time. That Dunne was also a fly-fisherman is a gift to composed of glancing asides sketching his day-to-day Jennings, who can thus attempt to tie his scattered and

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 50 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 perhaps disconnected memories into a pattern implying may seem incurious, anaesthetic and superficial, but the existence of a coherent stream of thought, each perhaps the average man-on-the-bank is right; fishing element not only individually profound but coming is simply trying to catch fish, an activity through which together to offer a synthesis suggesting something you escape to some degree, not only from the family, altogether deeper. from work and colleagues, but also from any sense The result is entirely satisfactory as a literary artefact, of wider or greater significance and the oppressive the mechanics of the text being neatly engineered, existential responsibilities that are bound up with such while the juxtapositions and transitions rarely, if ever, thoughts. Perhaps it is perverse to wish it any other way. result in redundancy and the component elements In one of the passages on the author’s school-life we are fascinating and often moving in themselves. Yet learn that he was an enthusiastic actor in a production of the resolution towards which Jennings marshals his Marlowe’s Edward II, and over-reaching is a recurring material is idiosyncratic and specious. Forgetting theme throughout the text, and even embodied in it. In Keats’s observation that we hate all art that has too small things, angling and even the literature of angling, obvious a design upon us, the book closes with an as well as in grand adventure, it is possible to go too interpretation of angling which is also offered as a far; one ends in tragedy, of course, but the other only summa of everything else that has been discussed: in a slight touch of bathos. No one who reads Blood ‘Deep down, something is moving, and I know that Knots will be disappointed, but it does confirm the view this is the moment, this is why we do it. For that heart- that philosophy and field sports should not be braced slamming infinity. For the knowledge that, this time, together in the hope that one will teach the other. it might not be a fish at all.’ Metaphysics aside, this is a splendid book in its This is clever and striking, thought-provoking elements and in so far as they are focused by the even, but unfortunately it isn’t even remotely true to author’s own experience. No god or para-deity is the experience of most other fishermen. The nervous needed to redeem the accounts of fishing or falconry; anticipation of what precisely has been hooked in the they stand up for themselves. No one else could write viewless water, eel, pike or perch, minnow or monster, about Michael Jennings or Robert Nairac in this way; is real, but it goes no further. Our uncertainties are the observations and the feelings are peculiar to son about the practical and the physical, not whether the and friend, and their expression is not only elegant but tight line leads to the Great Fish Jesus Christ himself. entirely convincing and sincere. These are unique and Ask the common angler for an explanation, and they compelling tributes decently made, and they may stand will say that they fish to ‘get away’, that fishing is both as honourable memorials to both men. relaxing and exciting, and leave it there. Such remarks

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film is mainly about women, by women, but it’s far Please Give removed from any kind of ‘chic lit.’ Kate’s character is used to skewer middle class self-obsession and self- Directed by Nicole Holofcener pity. She is trapped in the dilemma of the rich: how to get even richer while remaining morally sound. Jane Kelly She aims to help people who are less fortunate, but is baffled by how little effect she has. Please Give is not high minded or preachy; based On the way to the cinema in the tube a man shaped like on close observation of human foibles it has a gentle Wibbly Pig sat opposite wearing a base-ball cap and laugh at the niggling imperfections and pressures that red vest bearing the slogan: ‘Some people are fat. Get upset us all at different times in our lives. In the land of over it.’ He could have been an extra in Please Give, the teen-queen Abby is fat, with some luridly realistic the film I was going to see. looking spots. A skin like that is not often seen outside Something has happened to Americans since the horror films. Everyone in the film, apart from Kate and economic crash, or perhaps it is the influence of Mary, looks odd. Even youthful Rebecca Hall, who Obama, but if this film is true, they are more concerned sometimes plays romantic leads, looks toothy rather than ever about being good and doing the right thing than toothsome. In a touching and funny scene we see when poverty and homelessness are right there in her on a date with one of the grim nutters you typically front of you. meet on dating web sites. At least intellectual urban folk are worried about it. When she gets a decent boyfriend Andra tells her, Please Give is a comedy of manners, worthy of Woody ‘he’s only going with you because he’s so short. He Allen at his best. Kate, played by Catherine Keener couldn’t get anyone else.’ and her fat, boorish husband Alex (Oliver Platt) live Andra is played by Ann Guilbert, once a regular on in a New York apartment with their unhappy fifteen the Dick Van Dyke Show. Cruel and harsh in old age, at year old daughter Abby, played by Sarah Steele, who her funeral we are told she was once a charitable, giving in real life is a student at Columbia University. They woman. Somewhere along the line life poisoned her. own a furniture store selling tasteful retro furniture With its crumblies and gargoyles this film takes a bought from dead and dying people. They also buy an delightful swipe at celebrity culture. In an interview apartment next to theirs, belonging to Andra, a very with BBC Radio 4 Rebecca Hall said that she aimed to nasty nonagenarian, who will stay until she dies. make her character as self-effacing as possible, make Andra has two granddaughters, the dutiful and her almost disappear from the screen. Keener is no generous Rebecca, played by Rebecca Hall, (daughter show-off either. She relishes being a supporting actress. of Sir Peter) who works as a breast cancer radiologist, ‘The interesting characters are very few if you want and Mary (Amanda Peet) a bitterly angry beautician to be the lead, and they depend on you being beautiful,’ who shares her grandmother’s vicious tongue. Kate and she says. ‘Since I’m not interested in those parts, the Alex circle Andra like vultures, but Kate worries about pressure’s off, in a way. I’m not cast for my physicality.’ the profits they make from people who do not know the This is real ensemble playing; no posing or staring value of what they are selling. She assuages her unease into the camera allowed. But you have to wonder, by giving $20 bills to people living on the street and where do these actors normally work? There can’t attempts some charity work which is not a success. A be much of it about in these glamour obsessed times. friendly group of kids with Down’s Syndrome playing The film accurately reflects real life. Keener, who basketball reduce her to a pathetic flood of tears. is beautiful and a close friend of Hollywood A-listers She is frustrated by her own and other people’s lack such as Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, has had trouble of principle, and increasingly at odds with young Abby measuring up. who seems to her nothing more than a grabby little ‘One director said I just wasn’t sexy,’ she says. ‘It princess. Meanwhile Alex strays into a sordid affair was really hard. I left town for two months with my with Mary. tail between my legs. But you have to kind of go, okay, The film is written and directed by Nicole Holofcener, maybe I’m not their idea of sexy but what the hell.’ who worked on four episodes of Sex In The City. This In Please Give, the destructive emphasis on samey

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 52 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 good looks is ridiculed. It also has a profound message our only hope is to live in a way which makes kindness about mutability and human frailty. Death haunts the and love possible, so that we can die well, among loved picture. It begins with some startling photography ones — or perhaps we should say, tolerated ones. Its set in a clinic testing women for breast cancer. Andra old fashioned message, one espoused by Dickens, dies in her chair having successfully made everyone emphasizes the importance of fellowship, generosity unhappy, while a good granny, played by Lois Smith and faith in others. (once a stalwart of Dr Kildare) gets breast cancer. We In its only nod towards Hollywood tradition, the are made to look, and smile at the unfairness of fate. film’s ending is slightly sentimental, when Kate Even in America no one lives for ever and the wrong finally buys Abby the pair of jeans she craves, costing people get a raw deal. As Roger Scruton likes to point over $200. In a move towards real compassion and out, there is always death, aging, failure and darkness closeness with her daughter, she puts aside her narrow out there. Now it seems that the American cinema, disapproval of frivolous materialism in favour of once the last bastion of mindless optimism, has noticed. making someone really happy. It is a black comedy, not a sad film, but it tells us that A Popular Art Form: Portrait Painting Today Andrew Wilton (return to Contents Page)

he National Portrait Gallery’s annual BP Portrait often the social requirement that the sitter’s status is Award exhibition* is, as usual, packed with demonstrated. All these qualities in addition to the Tvisitors. People love portraits: paintings in hope that the likeness will be vivid, and will reveal which there is a three-way relationship between artist, something of his or her internal character: it’s a tall sitter and viewer; that engage our interest on several order, and yet it has been fashionable to suggest that, levels. There is the direct appeal to our humanity; and if thanks to photography and the inexorable ‘progress’ sometimes humanity seems in short supply, there is the of art, portraiture is dead. interest of the sitter’s position, role in an organisation Photography has indeed struck a blow against good — government, university, school, business — where portraiture, but not by making it redundant: as the NPG the individual stands for a body corporate, academic exhibition shows only too clearly, it has become an or political, transcending his or her private personality aspiration of some painters to produce portraits that yet doing so only, and precisely, in terms of their mimic photography to an almost ludicrous extent. individual qualities. Examples of this tendency commonly use photographs The Royal Society of Portrait Painters (RSPP) has as their starting-point, and simply replicate them — acted as an academy of professionals supplying such often on a very large scale — with the result that we images to such organizations, as well as providing see many freckles, wrinkles, individual hairs and the more private and personal sort of portraiture. It’s capillary veins, in a plethora of undifferentiated detail the latter type, though, that has always dominated the through which the personality of the sitter emerges BP Portrait Awards, and at times in the past it seems with difficulty. There’s nothing shameful about the to have been almost too loose in its definitions. Is a use of photography in painting, but a painting that picture of the artist’s girl-friend, seen in a dim light does nothing more than imitate a photograph is labour from behind, peeling potatoes, really a portrait, or a wasted. Michal Ozibko’s iDeath, the head of a young study, using the girl-friend as model? In such a case girl wearing earphones, which measures 87 x 67 inches, the work is surely a picture pure and simple; whereas a is typical of this tendency. portrait must combine several aims: not only the artist’s There is a greater chance of success in portraits that desire to produce a ‘good picture’, but the sitters’ desire present their sitters ‘warts and all’ but nevertheless to be well — perhaps flatteringly — represented, and give the viewer the experience of looking at a painting,

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 53 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk of enjoying the interplay between technique and bed portraits generally show the deceased arranged representation that is one of the great delights of art. beatifically as if asleep, or as the undertaker displays Anthony Williams is well known for his remorseless them to their relations in the chapel of rest. Here, no scrutiny of faces and limbs, but a portrait like his small such cosmetic attentions have been afforded: rigor head of Eli maintains this balance. There are times mortis has set in, the gases in the stomach have begun when that balance tips too far the opposite way: the to ferment and swell the old woman’s papery flesh. It surface of Giampaolo Russo’s Portrait of Giuseppe is is certainly an ‘unflinching’ picture; I wonder whether so thick with impasto that we barely discern the head the ever-truthful Lucian Freud has painted a corpse and shoulders that loom through it. This is a style made in this condition? Todd has said that she is in a sense familiar by the portraits of Frank Auerbach, and with ‘in love’ with her sitters while she is painting them. Auerbach too the technique is so obtrusive that the (Freud too, in the act of transcribing so painstakingly picture seems more concerned with the artist himself what he sees, can be said to express a similar creative and his expressive needs than with the sitter. relationship.) This is a problem that always confronts the portrait- It is a picture to arouse emotions, and I was interested painter in our post-Freudian age: is the artist or the that the emotions it aroused in me were precisely sitter the true subject? Sigmund Freud’s grandson, those I have felt on viewing the corpse of a deceased Lucian, is famous for his searching portrayals of relative: a mixture of revulsion and compassion, a people as emphatically physical human beings, sense of the fragility and vulnerability of life, of the often unflinchingly descriptive yet never simply complete absence of the real person to whom the photographic: the tension between paint and what is body once belonged. And yet Todd by the directness painted remains a vital element in the work. and precision of her brushwork manages to convey Another modern master who has reinvented the the individuality of this corpse, and her own strong portrait as expression of himself is Francis Bacon, and attachment to its owner. Bacon’s influence is evident in David Nightingale’s The fact that this work was singled out by the From my Soul I cannot Hide, a small picture composed judges was understandable, but it was not quite as of superimposed self-portraits. Whether it succeeds exceptional as might appear. The exhibition is full in conveying the intense self-examination the artist of images of bodily frailty and disintegration. In his intends is debatable; in its (Baconian?) freedom of large canvas of a paraplegic, Paul Getty III, Paul handling it perhaps succeeds better than another Benney says he wished to present his sitter vividly as multiple self-portrait, Carlos Muro’s The True Self- a human being capable of communication despite his Portrait, a group of heads presented like black-and multiple handicaps. Anna Dougherty, who was born white photographs of the artist seen from different with no left forearm, says that her Self-portrait (with angles, and suffering from just that lack of real insight Ribera’s Club-footed Boy) — a nude half-length — that, as I’ve noted, is an almost inevitable consequence was ‘painful’ to paint, and it confronts us too with the of the pseudo-photographic style. pain of her condition. Hanging beside her, opposite But self-portraiture is surely a separate subject the Ribera, is her prosthetic arm. This is the kind of altogether, and I question whether it should be included autobiographical self-portrait, constructing an identity in an exhibition such as this. The opportunities for from illness and disfigurement, which Sam Taylor- psychological penetration are many and as a genre it Wood famously executes in large-scale photographs has given rise to some of the greatest of all portraits; (there is one hanging just outside the exhibition in the but the social interaction that is the battleground of NPG’s permanent collection). But so much depends on the professional ‘RSPP’ portrait, with all its special the quality of the execution: Todd’s rapidly handled but challenges and pitfalls, is missing. It has an unfair precisely observed and tender depiction of her mother advantage, and the palm should go, I think, to someone is effective largely because it is beautifully embodied who has measured up to those challenges. in paint. Like the large photographs, Dougherty’s little This year the palm (a prize of £25,000) went to a picture doesn’t enjoy the same technical flexibility and picture that claimed considerable media attention: felicity, and is correspondingly less impressive. Last Portrait of Mother by Daphne Todd. The artist Likewise the most insistent of these depictions of is a former President of the RSPP and a formidable bodily hurt, Henry Ward’s large Rembrandt-inspired practitioner of the official portrait: she has work in the group of The ‘Finger-Assisted’ Nephrectomy of NPG and has painted many of the great and the good in Professor Nadey Hakim… (alluding to the famous Britain. This is a picture exemplifying her usual down- Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp) presents us with to-earth manner, but, most unusually, represents her the detail of a rather unpleasant surgical operation, but hundred-year-old mother just after her death. Death- in such coarse terms that we are repelled not so much

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 54 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 by the surgery as by the hard, machine-like portraits painter. It is in the wise brush-stroke that the artist of the men surrounding the operating table. The naked communicates compassion. body of the patient is stylised, removed from us not by the anaesthetic that renders it insensible but by a hard Andrew Wilton was the first Curator of the Clore mannerism in the artist’s method of showing it. The old Gallery for the Turner Collection at Tate Britain lesson forces itself on us yet again: there is no substitute for fine painting; all the tricks and distractions of * Shown at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 24 photo-realism, expressionism and symbolism will not June — 19 September 2009, then at the Usher Gallery, compensate for the inspired touch of the really good Lincoln 1 October —14 November, and Aberdeen Art Gallery 27 November — 22 January 2011. Looking for Shakespeare’s Songs

Gerald Place (return to Contents Page)

he rediscovery, or reinstatement, of the play most beautiful lyrics in the language. Cardenio, shortly to be performed by the In Shakespeare’s world music is also important as an TRSC, and James Shapiro’s excellent new idea. Characters who appreciate music are estimable: book, Contested Will (chronicling the ‘Who wrote those who do not are fit merely for ‘treasons, stratagems Shakespeare?’ controversy), remind us of the extent and spoils’. Nor is it enough just to appreciate music. to which the Bard’s output is constantly being revised. Hamlet berates the otherwise courtly Guildenstern for Odds and ends also come to light, ranging from not being able to play the recorder as this makes him a documents to evidence of the theatres themselves : gentleman lacking in the necessary accomplishments (the remains of The Rose being the most spectacular at best, and morally suspect at worst. So attitudes to example to date, and the site of The Theatre in music colour motive and character, and the balance Shoreditch the most recent). The success of Sam between harmony and discord affects all life, from Wanamaker’s Globe replica on Bankside has rekindled love to politics. As Ulysses says in Troilus & Cressida: an interest in staging these plays authentically. Take but degree away, untune that string One of the areas that remain a puzzle is the music And hark what discord follows. which might have been heard in these theatres. In 1623, In a theatre without scenery or lighting, music two of Shakespeare’s friends and colleagues, John had always been important to give a sense of time Heminges and Henry Condell, published a lavish Folio and place: trumpet calls for battles, wind-music for edition of Shakespeare’s works in his memory. As a banquets; but in Shakespeare’s hands it could also result, Shakespeare’s lyrics have survived as poetry but serve to enhance atmosphere and mood. For all these there was no place for notated music in these books. reasons it behoves us to investigate further. For anyone wanting to know what the songs sounded There are a handful of period settings, some of which like in the original productions, musical detective-work found their way into the old school songbooks, but was needed. even these familiar songs are not what they may at first Shakespeare’s plays feature the word ‘music’ at least seem. Many date from the great 18th century revivals 170 times, and further references to songs, tunes, voices of the plays, where new music was written by such and a wide variety of instruments far outstrip this illustrious composers as Henry Purcell and Pelham number. It seems that only King John has no reference Humphrey, not only for the original lyrics, but the to music at all. Songs were an important element of elaborate musical interludes that were thought essential earlier drama, though they were frequently little more at the time. The ones from Shakespeare’s lifetime than the expected divertissements, and in general the almost all have question marks by them. Thomas songs are not specified. Shakespeare only very rarely Morley’s setting of O Mistress Mine only works by leaves the choice of song to the actors themselves, and putting an instrumental piece (with the same title) on consequently has left us a collection of some of the the procrustean bed of musicology and hacking at it

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 55 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk till it fits. The result is very convincing, but may not Young. Here for the first time are several songs with the have been what Shakespeare expected at all original harmonies, or in the case of the ballad tunes, The first serious attempts to winkle out the original appropriate accompaniments — notably Ophelia’s music for Shakespeare’s plays date back to the middle snatches of songs from Hamlet. Here, the folk tune of the 19th century, notably those of William Chappell Walsingham is a clear choice for ‘How should I your whose Popular Music of Olden Times began to address true love know?’ as Shakespeare has written a parody the issue, and at least gather together much of the of the old song to reflect Ophelia’s unfortunate state folk material that Shakespeare mentions. Chappell of mind. He does this elsewhere, and the audience made it clear exactly which tunes were being alluded would have been expected to pick up on even the tiniest to when characters refer to songs in passing, and this reference to a song, often if only a few words. These does give us a flavour of the music which would have tunes had very specific associations and quoting one been familiar to audiences of the time. He managed would invoke a whole new layer of meaning. to match words with music as well, though ironically Since then the corpus of available settings has been only where snatches of song are needed in a play, but added to, often ingeniously, by Frederick Sternfeld, not to Shakespeare’s own words. For example, ‘When Ross Duffin (in his monumental Shakespeare’s Griping Griefs’ from Romeo & Juliet (in a pre-existing Songbook of 2004) and many others. Duffin does song and poem by Richard Edwardes) provide a tune for every Shakespeare and the beautiful ‘O Death Rock me lyric, but not all fit equally well. Asleep’ alluded to in Henry VIII. Writing in 1966, Dr John Stevens The first popular song anthology, made the clear distinction between compiled by Frederick Bridge, was ‘popular’ songs for which ballad published by Novello as late as the tunes are appropriate, and ‘art’ 1920’s and included a handful of songs that need more sophisticated familiar pieces, though with rather musical settings. Some of the ballad questionable accompaniments. tunes suggest themselves: in A Courtesy of Bridge we now have a Midsummer Night’s Dream Puck’s period setting of the ‘Willow Song’ other name is Robin Goodfellow, from Othello. Surely this must be the and as Duffin shows, the folk tune correct music, and a lute part survives of that name fits perfectly to ‘You as well. But another 16th century spotted snakes’. Many other songs setting has turned up since: which have hints in their subject matter do we go with? Bridge also included which suggest a connection. The art Robert Johnson’s settings of two songs songs are less easy to deal with, but from The Tempest. However, scholars a hunt through the body of lutenist maintain that Johnson’s music is too songs of the day has yielded music late for the very first performances, and may have been that fits the orphan words well both in metre and written for an early revival. But Johnson was truly a music mood. Some just seem to fall into one’s lap: Dowland’s man of the theatre (he wrote court masques as well as ‘Now, O now I needs must Part’ seems tailor-made songs and dances for plays) so at least with him we feel for Oberon’s final ‘Now until the break of day’. Oh, really in touch. and Dowland was also Shakespeare’s neighbour for a Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock) also studied the time and they both have memorials, side by side, in problem. He pointed out that the most famous old setting the church of St Andrew’s by the Wardrobe. of all, ‘It was a lover and his lass’, is in Thomas Morley’s Perhaps the best excuse for all this hunting over First Book of Ayres, but, alas, such is the nature of the hill and over dale is to provide directors, who wish to Shakespeare music detective story that Heseltine never attempt a period production, with music that at least saw a complete copy. The only surviving one was in a does not sound out of place, and at best may be the private collection in America. And if we are being picky music Shakespeare himself would have heard. it’s a duet in the play anyway, not a solo song. On the plus side, Morley’s case is strong as he was a very close neighbour of Shakespeare for a time. Next on the scene was T Maskell Hardy who Gerald Place’s CD with lutenist Dorothy Linell, published a two-volume collection in about 1920 citing Music from Shakespeare’s Theatre, is available on the earliest available settings, several of which had the Naxos label 8.570708. Further details on www. appeared charmingly in Lamb’s Shakespeare for the englandshelicon.com

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 56 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 IN SHORT (return to Contents Page)

Peter Bauer and the Economics of Prosperity, ed Theory at the University of Buckingham. In this James A Dorn & Barun S Mitra, Academic Foundation, illuminating reader, edited by his friend Michael James, New Delhi (distributed in UK by the IEA) a number of Barry’s colleagues celebrate his memory. Barry was an outstanding scholar of Hayek in One of the most depressing aspects of the Coalition this country, and his cause, appropriately, was the Government’s economic plans has been the containment of government. He did not reject the State, Conservative Party’s proud boast that whatever other but like many classical liberals and all libertarians, saw expenditure they might have to cut, international aid it as too large, and often counterproductive. He wanted will remain ring-fenced. If I had thought it would do it restricted to minimal required functions. The market any good I would have sent a copy of this book to David economy has in a couple of centuries freed many of the Cameron and anyone else who might have contributed world’s inhabitants from primary poverty but the urge to that fatuous policy. Please, I would have written in to extend government remains so strong that endless the accompanying note, read what Peter Bauer had reasons are adduced for intervention. These essays take had to say for many decades and what his colleagues up his favourite themes. and pupils have had to say and then consider whether Do the complexities of modernity require the state to your policy is not only “taking money from the poor modify spontaneous patterns of output significantly? of the rich countries and giving it to the rich of the Or are its interventions harmful? A chapter, revisiting poor countries” but is, actually, preventing those poor Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, insists that the state is best countries from ever becoming rich. contained by internationally competing legal jurisdictions It is extraordinary that we have known for a long — precisely what the EU seeks to eliminate. time that aid not only does not help but actually harms The old chestnut that the 1930s depression was development in poor countries; that Peter Bauer has essentially a capitalist failure, rescued by FDR and explained it over and over again in a clear and pithy his New Deal, is explored. Fiscal mismanagement fashion; that there are growing numbers of economists is reemphasized as the central culprit, with in those developing countries who are saying that aid government deficits crowding out private investment. should be cut and trade should be opened up within Environmentalism has come to radiate a surrogate the developing world and between developed and religious fervour. Colin Robinson says that if global developing countries; and yet, our politicians, backed warming is real, markets will deal best with it. If global by the usual suspects, most of whom have a vested warming is discredited, markets will resume their interest in keeping the poor in poverty ­— NGOs, default position. Other ‘environmental’ pieces look transnational organizations, lobbyists, rock-stars — at ‘externalities’, and at the value of competitive free continue with this ruinous and evil policy. association in citizen protection. For anyone who really does want to understand Terence Kealey argues that privately financed how poor countries have become rich in the past and science causes underproduction because innovators how they can do so in the future, there is no better cannot privatise outcomes, a view traced back to introduction than this slim collection of Bauer’s own Francis Bacon, but rejected by Adam Smith, who saw essays and others’ discussion of the man’s work and successful innovation as overwhelmingly driven by achievement. On top of which there is a delightfully private business. Science questions can be seen as witty short biography of Peter Bauer by Ralph Harris only a subset of educational ones. Modern educational who was sorry that his friend and colleague was not socialism squanders vast resources in free societies. clubbable enough to generate more of a following. In his posthumously published paper Barry applauds Ronald Dworkin’s emphasis on the autonomy of law, Helen Szamuely law itself being constituted by ethico-legal principles of adjudication. Dworkin, Hayek and Barry all uphold Classical Liberalism In The Twentieth Century: the autonomy of law. They unite in denying positivist Essays in Honour of Norman P Barry, ed by Michael claims that law can exclude all social and political James, Institute of Economic Affairs, 2010, £20.00 pressure, though they also unite in resisting weak submission to such intrusion. Barry rejects, however, Norman Barry was Professor of Social and Political Dworkin’s overemphasis on legal equality, that is civil

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 57 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk rights at the expense of economic ones, which Barry always managed to’. Our traitors fascinated him and sees as permitting the state to constrict individual he succeeded in tracking down Burgess with whom he economic advancement. became friendly, but doubted whether spying, with few Sir Alan Peacock differed from Barry over inherited exceptions, had much value. We shall never know whether property. Barry believed that owners should have the stolen secrets were put to good use. Andrei Amalrik absolute control of their legitimate wealth, while was the most impressive of the dissidents he encountered Peacock feared that over-concentrated private wealth — His book Will the Soviet Union survive until 1984? was leads to political inequality. In the next few years only a few years wrong. He never managed to interview wealth formation itself, rather than redistribution, is Solzhenitsyn who, when he was exiled to Switzerland, likely to preoccupy politics. made the mistake of not holding a press conference and complained that the resulting mayhem was worse than the Dennis O’Keeffe KGB. The other outstanding dissident, Sakharov, unlike Solzhenitsyn, was ‘shy and unpretentious’. All them Cornfields and Ballet in the Evening, John Miller is upbeat about Russia’s future in spite of the Miller, Hodgson Press, PO Box 903A, Kingston on mafia and the terrible legacy of Communism. He is Thames KT1 9LY, enquiries@hodgson press.co.uk, convinced that eventually Russia will be a normal country. www.hodgsonpress.co.uk Merrie Cave The title of this book comes from the satirical film about trade unions I’m all right, Jack in which Peter Who Made God? Edgar Andrews, E P Books, 2009, Sellers as Fred Kite proclaims the glories of the Soviet £9.95. Union. John Miller was a Reuters and Daily Telegraph correspondent in Moscow for over thirty years but as Scientists are the shamans of our age to people who he explains this is not a conventional account of his can’t do maths. The media celebrity scientists the professional life but a very amusing and informative public knows — Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, read about his daily life in the ‘vanished world of the Stephen Hawking — are strident atheists. (This is USSR’. He had mastered the language (he was in JSSL unsurprising as, even in highly religious societies like for his National Service), read the appropriate literature America, scientists, especially the most brilliant, are like Animal Farm and Victor Kravchenko’s I Chose largely irreligious.) Thus the lumpen-intelligentsia Freedom, and decided which side he was on. His racy — journalists, lawyers, humanities academics and account is illuminated by his sharp observations and champagne socialists everywhere — have adopted insights into the reality of Soviet life. the New Atheism under the vague supposition that it You can smell the bugs (insects — getting the other is ‘scientific’. kind was like coming of age) see the KGB tails and This makes the relatively few scientists who are diplomats caught by KGB honey traps, feel the misery orthodox Christians of great value to Christian of living and working in the workers’ paradise. There apologetics. Professor Edgar Andrews, a distinguished were said to be eighteen million rats in Moscow to nine University of London physicist, has produced a rebuttal million people. Food was sometimes so short that once to Dawkins and co, ‘Who Made God?’. He gives the the keepers of the Volgograd zoo stole the elephant’s usual arguments — where do atheists derive their food to feed their hungry families. No wonder that morality? how did the first lifeform emerge from the foreigners depended on illicit gifts from visitors and primordial chemical soup? where did the universe the embassy shops. No wonder too that people would come from? He gives popularised accounts of quantum do anything to get out of their communal flat (as many mechanics, the ontological argument, genetics, as twenty people living on a floor of a single building, information theory, the scientific method, the Hubble each family having a single room and sharing a kitchen red-shift and much else. Finally, having stated his and bathroom). Drunkenness in the Soviet Union was arguments for a God-given physical and moral order of excused in socialist ideology as a capitalist hangover; the universe, Andrews jumps without further argument in reality it relieved the despair of living under a to an offer of the love of Jesus to those who will accept. regime which robbed people of their humanity. There As little in this book could be described as original, are graphic descriptions of the results. I am judging the book on its presentation. And, in Miller met most of the big names in successive this respect, ‘Who Made God?’ is deficient. Andrews Politburos and tells some good stories about Khrushchev. is ruder than Richard Dawkins to his intellectual ‘“Sometimes a man goes to see Stalin and he does not opponents. He is verbose. Whole pages could be know whether he will come home again”. Khrushchev condensed into a single line. Andrews omits nothing,

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk 58 The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 however irrelevant to the point he wants to make — did of the internet ‘where one grazes on endless ready made you know that the 117-mile M25 motorway opened meals and snacks for the mind.. resulting in mental in 1986? malnutrition’ to spend a year reading all the books Erratum: On p. 148, Noether never used the name she had in her house she had either never read or not Amalie and the quotation from Einstein is not right. opened since she was a child. As a young woman she lived in libraries just as today Nicolas Stevenson our children live with their heads in stuck in computers. Reality is much to be preferred to the electronic miasma Howard’s End is on the Landing Susan Hill, Profile that cloaks youthful minds. In “A Corner of St James” Books, 2009. £12.99 she tells how in the stacks of the London Library an elderly gent dropped a book in front of her. ‘I bent A friend of mine was so in love with books he would down, picked up the book and handed it back ...... and buy second or third copies if he thought they had been found myself looking into the watery eyes of E M so long on a bookseller’s shelves they ‘looked lonely’. Forster. How to explain the impact of that moment. If, like him, you are so addicted to books, their feel, How to stand and say nothing and smile when through typeface, binding, the smell of their pages, or you my head ran the opening lines of Howard’s End, ‘One have so many littering the house the divorce lawyers may as well begin with Helen’s letters.’ He (Forster) have been sighted, then ‘Susan Hill’s ‘Howard’s End seemed slightly stopping and wholly unmemorable and is on the Landing’ is for you. Hill describes a lifelong I have remembered everything about him for nearly passion for books, which she has read, written, edited, fifty years’. A treat. and lived among like a bee among clover. Hill relates how she managed to throw off the chains Myles Harris

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The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010 59 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk Why the election pledges must be honoured Monday, 4th October 2010 With speakers

Melanie Phillips Roger Helmer MEP Daily Mail Columnist ADMISSION FREE AND OPEN TO ALL LOCATION: The Birmingham & Midland Institute Margaret Street, Birmingham, B3 3BS

M5 Junc.1 (M6) A38 t e A41 e tr Lecture and Discussion: 2.30pm – 4pm S Co y a nstitu M6 Junc.6 L w iver t Spaghetti e ion ation l r Junction d y Hi o d Str ll p (M40/M42) i Fr r eet M ede Co d FORTHCOMING MEETINGS l e r i i s n c u k c k ueenswa ir S Q Ic 's y C tr d La ha ncaster eet C Tuesday, 19th October 2010 St m St. A Graha

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Newh e w an s 6.45pm for 7pm n ay L t S e e ll w e

an all s e s u e Hill n o r u d S e lh t tr Q p eet e S ue te t i n t

t Q S a S s o t i u S P at W m a s r With Simon Heffer r o s m ad le e r p e e a B r r S h u o m H l C a u C Newh l

m J i t w ll m o S S e a R t t r re r (Associate Editor of The Daily Telegraph) . Ro all re e

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K e E Che r n St. in t. t Bu g d Princess Alexandra Hall, Over-Seas House e S S E g r ll Albert d rid ry n St A w mb io l t a Ca t . be e rd a rt S tre 's Road y r t nt S o U p n nce re r io Y 6 Park Place, St James’s Street Vi Sheep n Centenar o S A St. Squa C t. . Ne t W w S Str S eet N c h ote ICC E EET Ne g E R w i ST The Birmingham & Midland Institute S U London SW1A 1LR t H S Margaret Street ree Q tr D t eet A O R Suf B Hyatt fo Hi l k ll S Str 6 Regency t. eet Saturday, 6th November 2010 Qu S A45 tion tr e Sta eet ensway D ig b e th 10.30am until 6.15pm P H e ig rsho h r Str allb ee r t Sm e H S The Bruges Group Annual Conference u t rs r e WHOLESALE t e S t t MARKETS ad r He eet y A M42 The Great Hall, Kings College London, Strand wa 3 llo 8 Junc 5 M5 Ho B (M40)

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10/98 P190 For further information contact: Robert Oulds, The Bruges Group, 227 Linen Hall, 162-168 Regent Street, London W1B 5TB Tel: 020 7287 4414 E-mail: [email protected]

Honorary President: The Rt Hon. the Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven LG, OM, FRS, Vice-President: The Rt Hon. the Lord Lamont of Lerwick, Chairman: Barry Legg, Director: Robert Oulds MA, Head of Research: Dr Helen Szamuely, Washington D.C. Representative: John O’Sullivan CBE,60 Founder Chairman: Lord HarrisThe of SalisburyHigh Cross, Review — Autumn 2010 Web: www.salisburyreview.co.ukFormer Chairmen: Dr Brian Hindley, Dr Martin Holmes & Professor Kenneth Minogue