The

The quarterly magazine of conservative thought

Caliphate of Spitting on the Gender Bending in Eurabia Anzacs Chancery Lane Alistair Miller Daryl McCann Peter Smith Germany Kaput Theatre of Blood The Easter Rising Ricardo Duchesne Tim Walker Michael Simison

Spring 2015 Vol 33 No 3 £6.00 Contents

3 Editorial

Articles 13 Gender bending in Chancery Lane Peter Smith 4 The Caliphate of Eurabia 15 Theatre Criticism Alistair Miller Tim Walker 6 The Bulgarian NHS 16 Charlie Hebdo Gabriel Hershman Theodore Dalrymple 7 Magna Carta, Agincourt and Waterloo 18 The Easter Rising Christie Davies Michael Simison 10 Care in the NHS and Africa 20 Germany abolishes itself Jane Kelly Ricardo Duchesne 11 Letter from Australia - Anzac heroes 22 In Swedish Chokey Daryl McCann Neils Olberg 24 PC Girlie Playground Penelope Fawcett Hulme Columns

26 Conservative Classic - 57 Arts and Books Bagehot’s The English Constitution 28 Reputations - 46 32 John Jolliffe Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies on Roger Scruton 30 Roy Kerridge 33 C J Fox 31 Eternal Life on Charles Sisson Peter Mullen 35 Celia Haddon on Hawking 36 Anthony Daniels on Brain Surgery 37 Peter Mullen on Ezra Pound 38 Penelope Tremayne on Baghdad In future subscription payments by cheque should 39 Christie Davies be sent by post to on Capital 40 Martin Dewhirst The Salisbury Review, on Putin PO Box 6317, Milton Keynes, MK10 1AU 42 James Houston on Macmillan Changes of address or other enquiries should be 43 Merrie Cave sent to the same address or emailed to on Klop Ustinov [email protected] or by phone to 44 Penelope Fawcett Hulme 01908 281601 on Home Credit card payments by phone 45 FILM: Jane Kelly 01908 281601 on Testament of Youth 47 Ron Capshaw on Orson Welles 48 MUSIC: Boyd D Cathey on Russian Opera

50 IN SHORT Editor: Myles Harris Managing Editor: Merrie Cave Consulting Editors: Roger Scruton Lord Charles Cecil, Jane Kelly, Christie Davies

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here is only one question to be asked at the next gated exclusive retreat in Shropshire? ‘White flighters’ will election. Who is going to pay at least a fraction leave behind cities, which will become, thanks again to the Tof Britain’s £1.4 trillion pound public debt? It is computer, filled with newcomers. Technology can now, for four times larger than it was in 1998 and rising vertically. little money, airlift the equivalent of entire Pakistani villages Traditionally state debt is serviced by taxes or further to London in twelve hours, imams, village seers and country borrowing. Yet while more people are being employed the midwives included, and settling them in east London where computer revolution means they often find themselves in they can resume watching their favourite Urdu soap opera jobs earning less money and thus paying less tax. Wages on satellite TV, popping out to buy their familiar foods in a are further diluted by net immigration running at a quarter Pakistani store around the corner. of a million a year. The jobs they do, the first £10,000 of earnings tax free A good example of how the computer has, and will, steal courtesy of the taxes paid by you and me, are not in high your job is offered by the software application Uber and the technology, but in low income catering trades. The corner driverless Google car. Uber allows you to summon a taxi on tailor to brain surgeon phenomenon – that from immigrants your mobile phone within minutes. It hugely expands the an educated middle class emerges – no longer holds true. available taxi fleet thus cutting fares, and allows multiple When the new migrants have sufficient money to send passengers in a taxi. Today that taxi comes with a driver, their sons or daughters to university to obtain a degree but in five years, when you call one, a driverless car will in accountancy or medicine, they find the machines have draw up beside you at the kerb. Versions of Uber and the got there first, as any English parent with an unemployed driverless car – EasyJet on the road – will steal the jobs of graduate loafing around at home now knows. many a taxi, lorry and bus driver in the country. Labour claims, with much class bombast, to be able to Computers will do the same to many jobs, from your solve this by taxing capital. Miliband’s mansion tax is a GP, replaced in ten years by a computer mainframe and taster, but capital can decamp overnight to more congenial a TV set, driverless trains, automated shops, skyscraper climes. Taxes are for ‘little people’ not the rich who have window cleaners with ten arms and eight suction feet and many mansions everywhere. The Tory plan, built on piles behind those windows, electronic stockbrokers with a of printed money, will also fail. We know that from the vote worldwide reach dealing at speeds of thousandths of a second of no confidence in money printing made by the Swiss in independent of human control. January when their government uncoupled the franc from The people replaced by these machines will pay no tax the euro and the franc’s value rose instantly by 30 percent. but nor will they be able to afford anything the machines The Swiss were not just talking about the euro, they were produce. They will not be able to hire a taxi, invest in stocks thinking of that huge overhang of incomeless, unemployable or shop for anything but essentials. Nor will the government people who have to be fed and amused or they will riot as be able to raise the revenue to pay its bills. The old model they did in Greece. of work, pay your taxes, spend what is left, and hope the We are moving backwards to a late 19th-century world of a government bails you out in thin times, is dying. few very rich families living cut off from an undercapitalised Tax will become a matter between large companies like mob controlled by an underfinanced government. Such Google and government. As Google is often bigger than governments tend to be brutal, often replacing food subsidies many government departments, certainly more organised with doses of the water cannon. Whitehall recently bought and efficient, it may turn into an unequal struggle. a fleet. What is either party going to do about public debt, Google-Uber will also cause a demographic shift in unemployment and immigration? If you have children or population. Why live in an overcrowded immigrant city expect to live another decade, this is a question you must if you can phone a driverless car to pick up your groceries ask before you vote. from a supermarket miles away and bring them to your back to contents

The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 3 The Caliphate of Eurabia Alistair Miller

rnold J Toynbee once argued that civilisations that newcomers might be assimilated into a dominant die from suicide, not murder. Many in Britain, culture is heresy. Aas across Europe, are fearful that they are living And so to Paris where twelve people were gunned through just such a collective suicide. By encouraging down at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie mass immigration, by adopting multiculturalism as Hebdo by ‘Islamists’ claiming they were avenging an official creed and rigorously enforcing this creed the prophet Muhammad. Understandably, the terrorist through a raft of ‘hate-crime’ legislation (all in the outrages at Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish supermarket name of fostering tolerance, inclusion and diversity), two days later provoked an outpouring of solidarity. and by elevating equality and diversity to the status of President Hollande declared them to be an attack on central policy objectives, a perversely well-intentioned the values of the French Republic and world leaders liberal establishment has sealed the fate of secular joined a mass demonstration on the streets of Paris liberal Enlightenment values in the West. to declare ‘Je suis Charlie’. Yet no-one in the British Few dare express their concerns openly for fear of press dared reprint the cartoon that provoked the being branded ‘racist’ or being prosecuted for acts and massacre. And we know full well that had Charlie thoughts deemed racially or religiously ‘aggravated’ if Hebdo been published in Britain rather than in they cause offence; but the rise of UKIP and the scale France, the journalists responsible would have been of ‘white flight’ from the cities speak for themselves. roundly condemned as ‘Islamophobic’ and prosecuted In his brilliant polemic The Diversity Illusion, Ed West for inciting religious hatred. For all the talk of notes that the flight of the middle classes from the solidarity, the fundamental problem remains: Western cities and suburbs to the counties of Devon, Dorset, Enlightenment values – the values exemplified by the North Yorkshire, Worcestershire and Cumbria, and to French Republic – are antithetical to a religion that is Wales, constitutes ‘perhaps the biggest shift westwards to all intents and purposes stuck in The Middle Ages. since the Anglo-Saxon invasion’. Are these ‘little Apostasy is still punishable by death under Sharia law; Englanders’ who have eschewed the lively diversity and in many Muslim states, including Pakistan, so is of the cities for a life among their own kith and kin blasphemy. Moderate Muslims might well dissent therefore racists and bigots? Or is it, as evolutionary from these extremes. But how moderate are Muslims psychologist Jonathan Haidt reminds us in The who want to institute Sharia law (a third of British Righteous Mind, simply that human beings are by Muslims according to a 2006 poll) or prosecute those nature ‘groupish’. They are altruistic, but their altruism who insult Islam (two thirds in the same poll)? How is parochial. They have evolved ‘to live, trade and can a ‘multicultural’ society, whose cultural groups trust’, but only ‘within shared moral matrices’. Recent hold antithetical values, be prevented from fracturing research, most notably by Robert Putnam, seems to into a racially-segregated society riven by sectarian confirm this. Putnam found that in communities with conflict without resort to the repression of free speech? high levels of ethnic diversity, people turned inward, By a bizarre coincidence, on the very day of the trusted each other less, and became more selfish. Paris massacre, a work of fiction was published that Diverse multicultural communities might provide addressed precisely these issues (for which reason, the an excellent range of cuisine, but when it comes to author is now in hiding). Michel Houellebecq’s new settling down and raising children, people generally novel Soumission (Submission) explores what might prefer neighbours who share their own culture and happen when political allegiances divide on sectarian ethnicity. Proponents of an all-inclusive British identity grounds, the centre cannot hold, and extremists prepare imagine that a multicultural society might thereby for civil war. The action takes place in 2022 and is seen be ‘integrated’, but integration implies assimilation through the eyes of François, a dissolute disillusioned into a dominant culture. The English in 1940 were middle-aged professor at the University of Paris III- a remarkably homogeneous people not because they Sorbonne Nouvelle, who lectures in nineteenth-century were ‘racially pure’ but because immigrants, notably literature to groups of impassive Chinese students, has the Huguenots and the Jews, were assimilated – a passion for the decadent novelist J-K Huysmans, their descendants were brought up to be English. In lives off microwavable food and vin ordinaire rouge, modern-day multicultural Britain, the very notion and pursues evasive women who wear short skirts.

Web: www.salisburyreview.com 4 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 On the political stage, growing discontent with the luxurious residence in the fifth arrondissement. The political status quo has produced a shock result in the deal is that if François converts to Islam, the simple first round of the presidential elections. Marine le Pen’s ceremony at the mosque can quickly be arranged; he Front national has emerged as the most popular party can have a lucrative post at the university. Rediger, a with Mohammed Ben Abbes’s moderate Fraternité former member of the far-right mouvement identitaire, musulmane in second place, just ahead of the socialists. expounds the attractions of Islam: the argument for The only way to prevent the National Front from taking intelligent design, the improbability of the Christian power is for one or more of the moderate parties to idea of Incarnation, and the sublime happiness that negotiate an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood, results from man’s ‘utter submission’ to God – and and secret negotiations begin. Meanwhile there is a for women, from utter submission to men. Liberal power vacuum, rival gangs roam the streets armed with individualism was doomed to fail even on demographic automatic weapons, demonstrations degenerate into grounds; by undermining family structures, it could bloody clashes, and a news blackout is imposed. With not replicate itself. As for Christianity, a once great the situation in Paris becoming ever more dangerous, civilisation, it had degenerated into a woolly-minded François decides to head south-west. He stops for petrol humanism centred on ‘the rights of man’. Islam, by at a deserted motorway service station and finds it has contrast, proposed a hierarchy of nature, a natural been looted, bodies left lying in pools of blood. France aristocracy, a ‘moral rearmament of Europe’, a ‘new stands on the brink. age of gold’. François ends up wandering the deserted streets of a But there are other attractions, as François notices village, aptly named Martel (Charles Martel stopped when he catches a tantalising glimpse of Rediger’s the Muslim invasion of Europe at the Battle of Tours in latest wife, the 15 year-old Aïcha; and later on, when 732), where he hears the next day that catastrophe has he enjoys the culinary delicacies prepared by Rediger’s been averted. The mainstream parties have agreed to first wife, the middle-aged Malik. Later, when François form an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood, whose picks up Rediger’s short guide to Islam, he turns candidate goes on to win the second round. Such is the quickly ‘as no doubt do most men’ to the chapter general relief that the right find they are able to accept entitled ‘Why polygamy?’ Rediger argues that it is the traditional patriarchal morality of the Sharia without part of the process of natural selection that dominant too many qualms, and the left, who are inoculated by males – successful academics included – take the constitutional anti-racism, are unable to resist. A dual most wives and thereby ensure that their genes are system of education is introduced. State funding is transmitted to future generations. Life is unequal; God drastically reduced for state schools; private Islamic has ordained it so. schools and institutions are, by contrast, generously In the end, the multiple attractions of Islam prove endowed. The Sorbonne, now an Islamic university, irresistible. François declares his intellectual life dead, receives almost unlimited funding from the Saudis. and converts. On his first day back at the Sorbonne, he Family allowances are increased, but only on condition is faced with female students who are ‘pretty, veiled that women who receive them cease paid work. The and timid’, each of whom would be ‘honoured to share economy improves. The charismatic and moderate Ben his bed’. He has no regrets. Abbes seems to embody a new humanism, and inspires Is Houellebecq’s vision of the future an entertaining many with his dream of a European Union enlarged to and mischievous fantasy – or is it something much include Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey and Egypt. Europe more? Only time will tell. will become ‘Eurabia’. The transformation of the political landscape is mirrored in the personal life of François. Returning to Paris, he notices small but telling changes. Some shops have disappeared, beggars have vanished from the streets, women are all wearing trousers, and erotic television programmes are no more. François is stunned Alistair Miller’s book A New Vision of Liberal to find he has lost his university job but he receives Education: The Good of the Unexamined Life is to be an unexpected invitation to visit Robert Rediger, the published this year by Routledge. newly appointed president of the Sorbonne, at his

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The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 5 Web: www.salisburyreview.com The Bulgarian NHS Gabriel Hershman

read recently that toilet paper was being rationed given a bottle of blood because it’s the only time in my in the Communist paradise of Venezuela. Well, life I have ever fainted. My helpers were Roma, often I in Bulgarian state-run hospitals, indeed in all unfairly maligned in the media, who were queuing facilities in public areas, it’s not so much rationed as to give blood. I later heard that many people in our non-existent. You are also expected to ‘provide’ your position resort to paying Roma, the most frequent own fresh fruit and vegetables, soap and even linen. donors, to get the required quantity of blood. I always think of my father-in-law when the subject My father-in-law was unceremoniously discharged turns to healthcare. He had the appalling bad luck to from hospital at one hour’s notice. Fortunately, we fall ill with advanced cancer when he was 64. Surgeons had a family friend, a doctor, for whom the word saint decided not to operate. At no stage was he offered any would be an understatement. He paid regular visits out chemotherapy or other treatment to prolong his life. In of hours to tend my father-in-law at home and ensure Bulgaria, healthcare rationing on age grounds has long he was comfortable. The ‘saint’s’ salary barely covered been a reality. So he was merely admitted to hospital the rent of a one-bedroom flat for him, his wife and and given a series of blood transfusions. child, and food and clothing. A 60-hour week left him The doctors were reasonably accommodating but the permanently exhausted; he never complained but the phrase ‘a smooth bedside manner’ has no translation in shadows under his eyes revealed years of fitful sleep Bulgarian. Doctors earn about 300-350 euro a month. and worry. Thankfully, he and his family have now Not surprisingly, most sensible medics are desperate moved to France where he earns eight times what he to get to ‘the West’. The nurses were more aggressive, did in Sofia. screaming at my mother-in-law in full view of her My father-in-law passed away at home several weeks husband. ‘Why didn’t you bring him to us earlier? after his diagnosis. At least we ensured his sheets were There’s nothing we can do for him now.’ clean and heeded his requests for water. All this was The ward was filthy: patients lay on soiled linen, eight years ago. So has anything changed? My work the stench of urine filled the air and large cockroaches colleague had a seriously ill relative in hospital over scampered over tattered walls. My distraught mother- Christmas. Not only did she have to bring in essential in-law was told that no staff were available to take sanitary supplies, she was also dispatched outside, in care of patients overnight. So she was encouraged to temperatures of minus 10, to fetch medicines from a sleep at her husband’s bedside in case he needed help pharmacy because the hospital had run out. ‘But it’s going to the toilet. The more solitary patients were Christmas Eve,’ she protested.’ ‘That’s your problem, not so fortunate, the long nights were punctuated with not ours,’ said the nurse. So customer care remains ever screams that went unanswered. so slightly elusive in Bulgaria in 2015. Transfusions were given to my father-in-law All Bulgarians, for what it’s worth, are technically grudgingly and with a rather stern directive; we were covered by insurance contributions that are deducted ‘encouraged’ to give blood in such a way that it was from their wages. Those unemployed but not registered clear we had little choice. My wife and mother-in-law as such, in particular the Roma, are not covered. And were disqualified for being too thin. I volunteered they have to pay for any treatment they receive. No and thought nothing of it. After all, I am a sturdy chap payment means no treatment. Yet, as you will have (over 14 stone) and believed I was unlikely to feel deduced from the injunction to give blood, just because anything at all. I didn’t feel too bad when the needle you are covered by national insurance does not mean was injected. Afterwards, somebody threw some you qualify for the bare essentials. Neither does it mean chocolate and coca-cola at me, my reward for being a that you won’t be asked for a bribe. In addition, if you donor. I staggered into the courtyard, my wife holding request a special surgeon – for example on giving my arm. Next thing I knew I was being carried back birth – then there is always an unspoken agreement to the hospital on a stretcher. So much for my strong that you hand a ‘gift’ to the doctor in question. The constitution and the benefits of coke! But something entire Bulgarian state sector operates on backhanders. was strange. I had given blood many times before in Corruption is par for the course in dealings with the UK and had never felt any ill effects. I must have everybody from doctors, judges, customs officers and

Web: www.salisburyreview.com 6 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 police through to environmental agencies and even the 1983 when referring to the repercussions of another heads of some kindergartens. Conservative victory. Yet our conclusions are slightly Countries that went through communism will take different. If I or my family ever get ill, and I have the many years to recover to the point whereby they can opportunity, I will get on the first plane back to the care for their citizens. Only wealth creation can fund UK. Meanwhile, I always value toilet paper. It seems the state with the wherewithal to look after the sick. In that socialism equates to a dirty backside. In Bulgarian Bulgaria, and indeed throughout most socialist states, hospitals, you see, they never strip the bed. They just the irony is that state care is abysmal. The words of strip you of your dignity instead. a certain Welsh politician resound in my head when I think of the vulnerable in Bulgaria. ‘I warn you not to Gabriel Hershman is a British journalist and author fall ill. I warn you not to get old’, said Mr Kinnock in currently based in Bulgaria. back to contents

Magna Carta, Agincourt and Waterloo Christie Davies

015 is the year of three great English anniversaries: anniversary of Magna Carta should and will be used Magna Carta, 1215, Agincourt, 1415, and to stress our close ties with the United States where 2Waterloo, 1815. You may be sure that the Magna Carta is particularly revered as the ancestor of English, and the Welsh too, two anniversary-obsessed American independence and of the American suspicion people, will be celebrating them. Indeed they will have of strong central government. We must be stubbornly been planning these for years past. The Scots were patriotic about relishing the glorious military triumphs heroes at Waterloo but they had no part in Magna Carta of Agincourt and Waterloo in view of the political and fought on the wrong (French) side at Agincourt, class’s habitual grovelling to the European Union. so we all need to be careful. Exalting national victories over another member is seen We ought to take note of all such great moments in our as undermining European Union, unless of course they history and remember them vigorously to emphasize were won by Napoleon. The celebrations in Vitoria in that we are a people of honour and achievements. The 2013 of the liberation of Spain from French occupation

The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 7 Web: www.salisburyreview.com and oppression by the victory of Wellington’s Anglo- judges who want juries to be so closely guided by the Spanish army at the Battle of Vitoria in 1813 were trial judge as to lose all autonomy. A recent head of the toned down due to pressure from the French. Goya Crown Prosecution service wanted to ‘educate’ juries must have turned in his grave. This must not happen into producing the kinds of prejudiced verdicts in sex with Waterloo. cases that he thought fit rather than the ones that they What is striking about Magna Carta, Agincourt and habitually brought in on the basis of common sense Waterloo is that none of them adhere closely to the and the facts. This is profoundly wrongheaded. The popular image that they enjoy. They are not just the whole point of the jury is that it is one of the pillars simple heroic moments that we would like them to of democracy, a way of occasionally saying to those be. They are more valuable to us as myths, located in in authority: ‘our values and priorities are different Runnymede, Stratford-on-Avon and London’s Gare from yours and we are the sovereign people not you’. du Sud but as with Bismarck and sausages one should That is why in the eighteenth century they grossly not look at their origins too closely. undervalued stolen items to save a thief from being In 1215 Magna Carta was a twelve-week wonder, hanged and why they do not want someone punished in for three months after King John had signed it, it a sex case where it has not been properly demonstrated was struck down by Pope Innocent III to whom John that there was a lack of consent. Meanwhile the radical had appealed for help. The Holy Father declared that cuts to legal aid mean that justice is in effect delayed, since John had signed Magna Carta under duress, it denied and sold. The anniversary is a time not just for was a ‘shameful and demeaning’, ‘illegal and unjust’ congratulations all round but for thinking about how document and ‘null and void of any validity forever’. far we have fallen short. Then John died and the government of his son Henry Agincourt is the opposite of Waterloo. Agincourt was III signed a similar document to restore peace with an overwhelming English victory but the consequences the barons, urgently, because of the French invasion of that victory were disastrous for England and matters of Kent in 1216 intended to replace our Henry III by would have been far worse still, if we had gone on to Prince Louis of France. All these charters were mere win the Hundred Years War. Waterloo was only won bargaining chips in the endless confused conflicts with the help of allies and was as Wellington put it ‘the between the monarch on the one hand and rebellious nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’. The battle barons and Welsh princelings on the other, and with a was only decided in Britain’s favour in the evening by lot of meddling by foreigners. Neither in England nor the arrival of the army of Britain’s Prussian ally, just in Wales did the common people have any say in the as Wellington was saying ‘God, give me Blücher, or matter. For the next three to four hundred years Magna give me night’. Yet the victory at Waterloo ensured Carta was unimportant. It was only in the seventeenth that Britain became the world’s first superpower, with century when there was a wish to force kings to the largest empire the world had ever seen. The real concede that, divine right or no divine right, they are basis of this development was the combination that subject to the rule of law that it was resurrected. We had led to the destruction of Napoleon: Britain’s naval, have a marked preference for reform through a return commercial and industrial supremacy. When this was to an idealised past than a revolutionary step into the challenged, it was by the other victor of Waterloo, for unknown. Magna Carta was part of that imagined past. Prussia was later to unite Germany after another defeat Only two clauses of Magna Carta still have much for the French. relevance today. The important bit reads: Today the myth of Agincourt is largely a product of No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or Shakespeare’s play ‘The Chronicle History of King dispossessed or outlawed or exiled or in any way Henry the Fifth with His Battle Fought at Agincourt ruined, nor shall we go or send against him, save in France’, Henry V, reinforced in our own time by the by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law 1944 film starring Laurence Olivier, which millions of the land. of schoolchildren were made to watch over the next decade. It was a (partly) government-funded film done To no one shall we sell, to no one shall we refuse or as a morale booster at a time when the war was clearly delay right or justice. won but the people were weary. The film had a formal Today that ringing statement is under new threats. dedication to ‘the Commandos and Airborne Troops of The European Union does not like juries because Great Britain, the spirit of whose ancestors it has been few of its member states have them and they are a humbly attempted to recapture’. That dedication is fine democratic hindrance to and denial of the answerable for England and arguably for Wales, but the Scots’ to no-one, unchallengeable bureaucratic order that ancestors were fighting on the French side and that is is the essence of the EU. At home there are English where Shakespeare’s stage Scotsman, Captain Jamy,

Web: www.salisburyreview.com 8 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 would have been found. The Scottish army was turned After Agincourt Henry V’s son by his wife Catherine, into pincushions by the English and Welsh archers. daughter of Charles VI of France, became Henry II After Agincourt an even larger Scots army fighting of France as well as Henry VI of England. He was for the French as an independent unit, the ‘Army of crowned king of France in 1422 and reigned until 1453, Scotland’, including its ‘generals’, was wiped out at but by 1453 the English armies had been driven out the Battle of Verneuil in 1424, known as ‘the second of the whole of France except for Calais. The defeats Agincourt’ because it was such an overwhelming and debts incurred led to the Wars of the Roses. Yet English victory. When Agincourt is celebrated this it is just as well that we lost. France was at that time year, you may be sure that the rancorous SNP will a richer, more populous country than England and point this out and use it to widen the sad divisions of Wales and, had we won, the centre of power of the the present time. joint monarchy would soon have moved to Paris. As There may also be a problem with the Welsh, who many already feared at the time, we would have been are convinced that the battle was won by Welsh swallowed up by France, our language extinguished archers, notably those recruited in Llantrisant, now and our glorious future annulled, eventually leaving known as ‘the Hole with the Mint in it’ because it is England as one more satrapy of Napoleon. where Britain’s coins are made. The Welsh probably Waterloo by contrast led to the unstoppable rise of were pioneers in the use of the longbow, a people’s France’s two great rivals, Britain and Prussia. It is weapon originally used to ambush at short range the something that must be stressed in the celebrations. heavy cavalry of the feudal aristocracy. The longbow Fortunately the Scots and the Welsh were also well is the equivalent of the Swiss pike or the Hussites’ represented at Waterloo. When Waterloo is celebrated, flails and linked farm carts, all weapons of liberty a Prussian orchestra should be invited to London to against the heavily and expensively armoured knights play Beethoven’s Wellingtons Sieg oder die Schlacht on horseback. Unfortunately, the happy image of the bei Vittoria, Wellington’s Victory in the Battle of Vitoria Welsh archers going forth to fight at Agincourt for (Opus 91), a battle symphony dedicated to the Prince Henry of Monmouth with leeks in their caps may Regent that uses the tunes of Rule Britannia and well be a myth. One of England’s leading medieval God Save the Queen. The Germans should be asked historians, and the expert on the archers of Agincourt, to perform it out of doors in its most exciting mode, Professor Anne Curry, has analysed the service records including real muskets and artillery as sound effects. of a quarter of a million soldiers who fought in the Perhaps too we can persuade the Russian Vozhd, Hundred Years’ War and has not found many Welsh Vladimir Putin, to provide a matching performance of archers at Agincourt. Her research findings have caused Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, complete with cannon much indignation in Wales and she is rumoured to have and the rocket’s red glare. received some not entirely agreeable letters from the Anniversaries are not about history but about the people of the Principality. It may well turn out that the reinterpretation of myth, using history to show where most important Welsh archer of the time may have been the potholes are. The purpose of the three celebrations said to have shot Prince Henry, later Henry V, in the will be to unite Great Britain by flattering the Welsh and face at the Battle of Shrewsbury and nearly killed him. avoiding reminding the Scots of quarrels past. Magna Had he died, there would have been no Agincourt. The Carta should be made the great buttress of our special Welsh Nationalists have long attacked the character of relationship with the Americans, that nation of lawyers, Dafydd Gam, the Welsh military leader who did fight and Waterloo a reminder of the happy days when all at Agincourt and was the original for Shakespeare’s Europe came together to defeat Napoleon. Centre stage Fluellen. Dafydd had earlier been a key military agent for the Prussians and Spaniards, good supporting roles for King Henry IV in the crushing of Owain Glyndŵr’s for the Russians and the Austrians and walk on parts (Shakespeare’s Glendower) Welsh revolt. The word for the Haitians and the Turks – and Wellington was gam in Welsh meant crooked. Usually it meant lame born in Ireland. (as in gammy leg), but as in English crooked has a But 2015 must above all be a year for promoting the second meaning, in this case ‘in the wrong’. Captain unity and independence of the UK. Fluellen has become Dai the Crook. Agincourt far from being a glorious day uniting Britain under Laurence Olivier is a horrid reminder Christie Davies was Amicus curiae in the case of of the divided state of the realm: ‘Alas, poor country, District of Columbia v Heller in the US Supreme almost afraid to know itself’. Britain stands not where Court 554 U.S. 570 (2008). He has also written about it did in 1944. Shakespeare’s Welsh characters and about the role of Agincourt was not even a triumph in its own time. Jeanne d’Arc in saving our independence. back to contents

The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 9 Web: www.salisburyreview.com The NHS: Better a grass Hut in Africa Jane Kelly

n early April 2014, former cabinet minister Peter an executive for Guinness, but when I visited she was Hain, speaking on BBC Question Time, said an sitting quietly by her bed, looking frail and sad after Ielderly relative had left hospital after a serious months of misery and life-changing injuries, which operation. It had taken her a month to see her GP, and began as simple leg ulcers. District nurses used to visit he added with shocked dismay: ‘There is supposed the elderly and change the dressings on ulcers every to be care in the community, but it just doesn’t exist.’ day; that doesn’t happen now and hers got completely He’s a bit behind with the news about the NHS. As out of control. a volunteer hospital visitor I often notice a distinct ‘They gushed like waterfalls,’ she told me. When she lack of nurses on the wards. A lot of basic nursing was admitted to hospital her shin bones were exposed. is now done by largely untrained assistants. But While this happened, over three months, ‘carers’ were in the community, district nurses are becoming an coming in to her home several times a week. increasingly rare species too. ‘They’d charge up their Despite a massive growth mobiles, do a small amount in population and more of cleaning and leave,’ she old people needing care told me. Once she was at home, there has been a unable to walk and cook forty-two percent decline for herself, they fed her on in the number of district cold baked beans. She was nurses in the last ten years. visited by a district nurse. You will wait a long time to ‘She handed me a large get one and if you are lucky pack of dressings,’ said they are likely to have the Gladys, ‘and told me to get wrong equipment and know on with it.’ nothing about you, as no one Which she did, alone, for at their privatised nursing three months. Eventually a agency will have forwarded neighbour called the doctor, the correct information. another nurse arrived, whom When an old, sick or frail Gladys calls ‘a wonderful person leaves hospital, person’. She took one look, particularly if they live alone, supplied morphine and community nursing and social services are supposed called an ambulance. She now takes up an expensive to kick in, but this is increasingly unlikely. Some local bed and much nursing time. She wants to leave London GPs will try to fill in the gap, but resent having to do and move to a care-home near her son in Hastings, this as so much of their time is already spent on non- but her legs have to heal before she can go anywhere, medical matters. ‘All our medical education meetings and it seems unlikely that she will be leaving hospital are now about budgets,’ my doctor told me recently. soon, if at all. ‘I trained to be a doctor, not an accountant.’ He might During the same visit I met an elderly Indian lady also have added, ‘or a community worker.’ waiting for surgery. She showed me a wound on her Gladys, aged ninety, apologises to me for the odour inner thigh, which looked like something you might from her legs. I can’t smell anything but I can see that see on a battlefield. Surgeons were going to take away her legs are lavishly bandaged. It takes two nurses an the infected and necrotic flesh as best they could, and hour every day to do this. She’s apologetic for that too. repair a gaping wound. Weeks before she had left During the war she was an air mechanic with the the hospital after a small procedure, with no visible WRAF, and flew training planes herself. After, she was problems at all. At home an infection had developed.

Web: www.salisburyreview.com 10 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 She had received one visit from a district nurse, who seemed honest and kind, and this would be a chance for had not treated the wound, or reported it. Eventually, him, someone who had never seen a made-up road or after her son had insisted, she had seen a GP and been a flushing loo, to see a different country. It took much referred back to hospital. Instead of basic nursing care effort but after a year of negotiation with the Home at home, she was now in for costly surgery and lengthy Office, he arrived. hospital care. He stayed with my friend for six months. Later Neither of these women was willing to complain I realised what a trying, demanding time he had about the poor care they had received, for cultural and experienced, hardly getting any sleep as she wandered generational reasons. No one will be punished for the about at night in confusion. He got one trip to London, negligence, which has caused them so much suffering, a sail up the Thames and a tour round the Palace of and the public so much extra expense. It’s unlikely Westminster out of it. He was particularly pleased with that any of the many agencies involved will be held a photograph of us together on the London Eye. accountable. It seems that no one wants to address this When his visa finished she went back to Africa with issue, or face the fact that we all get old and will need him. Until her death she was looked after by him and more care either in hospitals or our own homes. Our his family, in a grass hut at the end of the path leading culture seems to have become increasingly negligent from their hut with a tin roof. She is now buried in a towards the old and vulnerable. cemetery in Lubumbashi, near a previous President’s I first met this problem about ten years ago when a Grandmother, sixth on the left after a large tree, under friend returned to the UK after spending her working a thick slab of concrete to keep off grave robbers and life as an aid worker in Africa. Not long after, she was wild dogs. struck by dementia and needed home care. Over the It is extraordinary but she was better off there, dying next few years she was robbed of all her valuables: in one of the poorest countries on earth, somewhere OBE, wartime nursing badge, valuable rings, silver generally regarded as a failed state, rather than here, spoons, furniture and porcelain; all disappeared. Once where people don’t wait until the old are dead before she was in the hands of ‘carers’ and social workers I they pillage them, and no one was willing or able to saw her life disintegrate. provide her with proper care. In periods of lucidity she agreed to a radical solution, but it’s not one I can recommend to everyone. We Jane Kelly was a celebrity interviewer for the Daily decided to bring her former driver from the Congo Mail. to look after her. He had always been a good worker, back to contents Letter from Australia – Spitting on the Anzacs Daryl McCann

he start of the Gallipoli campaign on April 25 signifies the improbable first chapter of a coming-of- 1915 might not have been a pivotal moment age tale for our nation. Tin the Great War but most, though not all, In Australia the Anzac legend somehow encapsulates Australians and New Zealanders are emotionally our national character. The young men who went off invested in this year’s hundredth anniversary of that to fight for the British Empire in Gallipoli and later first landing at Anzac Cove. Some of us have personal the Western Front found themselves entangled in a reasons to reflect on an operation that ended in brutal conflict but also discovered a profound sense December of that year with none of the objectives of the of camaraderie and national pride. The Anzacs might Allied Powers achieved. My own maternal grandfather, not have defeated the Turks on the beaches of Gallipoli James Robertson (1894-1955), turned twenty-one but they learned all about esprit de corps: Simpson and on April 25 when he came ashore at Gallipoli. That his donkey, the jam-tin bomb, the trench periscope, the makes the event part of our family legend but for many wry wit, courage, innovation, mateship and a wicked Australians this ultimately futile military operation sense of humour all rolled into one. All the to-do about

The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 11 Web: www.salisburyreview.com the Gallipoli centenary is not without its critics. Over Gallipoli on April 26, 1915. The reality is that the first 8,000 young Australians lost their lives during those officially designated Anzac Day took place in 1916 grim eight months and yet there was precious little in and this, in a sense, set the birth date of the Anzac strict military terms to show for all the sacrifice. The legend in stone. Moreover, John Monash’s electrifying best moment in the whole business was the brilliant bestseller The Australian Victories in France in 1918 stealthy evacuation on December 10, 1915, which was published as early as 1920, and made it abundantly resulted in not a single casualty. clear that Villers-Bretonneux, Hamel, Amiens, Mont There are, of course, those who are critical of the St Quentin, the Hindenburg Line et al were the places emphasis placed on Gallipoli. British historian Peter where the Australians made their real contributions Hart’s Gallipoli (2011) makes the case that the ultimate to the defeat of the Kaiserreich rather than Gallipoli. purpose of the Gallipoli campaign, taking control of In any case, it is not certain that John Monash had the Dardanelles Strait, conquering Constantinople and any problems with April 25 being the commemorative removing the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) from the war, day for the Anzac legend. The Gallipoli campaign did was doomed from the start because of poor planning not achieve its objective to knock the Ottoman Empire and a complete underestimation of the enemy’s fighting out of the war and keep Russia in, and yet the goal was capacity. The real military heroics, according to Hart’s no less respectable for that. Imagine the murder and 1918: A Very British Victory (2008), occurred on the mayhem that would have been avoided if the Allied Western Front in the immediate aftermath of the spring supply lines to Russia had been unlocked at Gallipoli 1918 Ludendorff Offensive. During the hundred days and Lenin’s October 1917 putsch (aided and abetted that led up to the Armistice on November 11, 1918, the by the Kaiserreich) never occurred. If we are to define Allied forces utilised ‘integrated warfare’ to hammer the Anzac legend, at least from an Australian point of the Germans in a remorseless drive to the Hindenburg view, as the contribution of a free and modern nation Line and beyond. Systemised strategy, tanks, advanced to the cause of freedom-modernity in the world, then communication systems, accurate artillery strikes, air even the Gallipoli campaign, however futile, takes on reconnaissance, the tenacity of battle-hardened soldiers an affirmative meaning. and the infusion of fresh American troops all combined The Communist Party of Australia (CPA), founded in to create a mobile warfare that proved unstoppable. 1920, attempted to commandeer the Anzac legend for The Germans did not lose the First World War on the its own nefarious purposes. Over 400,000 Australian home front; they were vanquished on the battlefield. men, out of a population of less than 5 million people, The hero of 1918, in the opinion of Peter Hart, was enlisted for the Great War, and more than 340,000 of the ‘British Tommy’, and yet the Australian Army them returned home. Surely these worldly and military- Corps, under the command of General John Monash, trained proles who helped whip the Kaiserreich could played a useful part in the proceedings. Whatever the be co-opted into a movement to create a dictatorship brilliance of Monash, he was but one of 17 generals of the proletariat. Well – no. My paternal grandfather, along the front in those last one hundred victorious Howard McCann, who served on the Western Front days of the war. Hart is positive about the role played from 1916-18, preferred, much like James Robertson, by Australians at Villers-Bretonneux (April 24-25, the vagaries (and self-reliance) of small business to the 1918), Hamel (July 4), Amiens (August 8), and Mont millennialist joys of Bolshevism. The Anzacs endured St Quentin (September 1), not to mention the ensuing death and every kind of hardship in the pursuit of assault on the Hindenburg Line. If Australian school victory against the Prussian ideology, but they were books and politicians have paid too much attention rarely crazy enough to sign up for the psychic suicide to the Gallipoli misadventure and overlooked our of Communism. The CPA folded in 1991. subsequent (and more productive) contributions to Over the past fifty years a new kind of leftism in winning the First World War, that was hardly the fault Australia has replaced the Marxism or Fabianism of of John Monash. old. We might call it, as per Christopher Hitchens, the Sir John Monash, knighted by George V on the ‘soft left’ or, more accurately perhaps, anti-bourgeois battlefield after the dazzling success of Amiens – is bohemianism. It borrows from Lenin the notion of often acclaimed as the founder of Anzac Day, a public the Great War as an ‘imperialist war’ but has less to holiday every April 25 in Australia and New Zealand. do with Marxism-Leninism than radical pacifism. As a consequence, some might want to blame Monash Joan Beaumont’s Broken Nation: Australia in the for giving excessive importance to Gallipoli in our Great War (2013) is an exemplar par excellence of collective memory; but that would be to overlook a anti-Anzac legend polemicism. Beaumont, at almost number of things, including the fact that Monash was every public appearance, insists that there is no ‘theme’ a mere brigade commander when he came ashore at to her tome, only a scrupulously honest attempt to

Web: www.salisburyreview.com 12 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 chronicle the heartbreak and divisiveness in Australia bohemian professoriate of today is another matter that accompanied the defeat of the Kaiserreich. The altogether. They absolutely abhor the fact that Anzac tragedy, as the luminous historian-commentator Day crowds grow larger every year. My father died Mervyn F Bendle has argued, is that latter-day in November 2011 and I still recall the emotion I leftist ideologues such as Beaumont, an employee felt accompanying him on his last Anzac Day march of the Australian National University, occupy the through the main street of Adelaide in April of that year. commanding heights of academia in Australia. They What my father understood (he fought with the Royal are in a position, thanks to the beneficence of the Australian Navy against the Japanese), not to mention Australian taxpayer, to indoctrinate a new generation Ralph Edwards, our childhood neighbour and a sniper into believing that Australia’s role in the defence of at Tobruk, is that the freedom vital to Australian society civilisation throughout the twentieth century was a is dependent upon the defeat of the global enemies of crime against civilisation. The folly of these ideologues freedom. The Australian Defence Forces, as I write (they call themselves honesthistory.net.au) is to pour this, are playing their part in the struggle against the scorn on every Australian military undertaking. Thus, Islamic State. Australia’s routing of the Japanese in the Battle of The Anzac legend comes down to this: we did not Kokoda in New Guinea, one of the first setbacks of defeat the Kaiserreich on our own, did not crush the Imperial Japan during the Second World War, was Nazis on our own, did not beat Imperial Japan on our no victory at all because Tokyo never intended to own, and will not overcome the Islamic State on our occupy Australia as such, merely incorporate it as own, but we will always do our share in freedom’s a subjugated associate of the Greater East Asia Co- fight against submission. Prosperity Sphere. Marxist intellectuals of old at least pretended to be Daryl McCann is an Australian journalist. He has a fond of ordinary Australians, but the anti-bourgeois blog at http://daylmccann.bigspot.com.au. back to contents Gender bending in Chancery Lane Peter Smith

round Oxford Circus there is a man who stands charge of harassment when he told a passer-by he was with a microphone and amplifier and calls ‘going to hell’ when asked to turn down the volume. Aon listeners to repent of their sins, usually Others of course have been much less fortunate. sexual ones like fornication and homosexual acts, An American called Tony Miano was arrested in and accept Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Wimbledon in 2013 during the Championships when Saviour. Shifting uncomfortably more at the volume his public sermons were reported by a woman who of the speaker than the content of his message, the heard his comments on homosexuality and reported crowd parts around him like Moses passing through him to the police for an alleged ‘hate crime’. He was the Red Sea, although his cries of ‘Don’t be a sinner, re-arrested and released in Dundee a year later for be a winner!’ and ‘Don’t be a shopaholic robot’ have reading from St Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, made him a minor internet celebrity. in which the Apostle admonishes proto-Christians for The Left, is, very reluctantly, prepared to be their sexual immorality. mollified, but only slightly, if you do this in the privacy Another, John Craven, recently won £13,000 of a church but woe betide anyone who proselytises in compensation after he was arrested by Greater in the public square. The Oxford Circus preacher, a Manchester Police for reciting quotes from the Book ‘Scouser’ called Philip Howard, has been quite lucky. of Revelation in response to a challenge from two gay Despite making enemies of Westminster City Council, teenagers. he escaped their attempt at restraining him with an The police, those instruments of the persecuting state, Anti-Social Behaviour Order, and was cleared on a are caught between gay people who feel offended by

The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 13 Web: www.salisburyreview.com the Christian message and who report street pastors between prohibitions on discrimination on the grounds for inciting hatred against homosexuals, and the of religion, which protect Christians, and prohibitions letter of the law. Section 5 of the Public Order Act on discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. 1986 was enacted to target sectarian chanting on Judicial reasoning varies from case to case and the football terraces and, in a spectacularly poor piece of applicable legal regimes are themselves a complicated drafting, it created a criminal offence if a person used mess constituting English common law principles, ‘threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour… statutes like the Equalities Act (which give effect within hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused to European Union directives that were intended to harassment, alarm or distress’. promote the free movement of people and have been A widely-drawn rule plus nervous police and angry warped beyond belief), and human rights drawn from gay rights activists equals arrested Christians. the European Convention and domesticated by the Things have improved, slightly. After a co-ordinated Human Rights Act. campaign by comedians, Christians, the National In essence, the judges agree that people don’t choose Secular Society and Peter Tatchell, the word ‘insult’ their sexuality but do choose their faith, and thus the was removed by Theresa May from Section 5 a year former is to be preferred to the latter. But this is to ago and the police are getting the message. (The run roughshod over the actual choices being made by campaign’s strapline was ‘Feel free to insult me!’; many gay people, who may choose to book a room at one doubts whether jihadis in France would gather an explicitly Christian B&B (which is effectively a under a similar campaign for free speech in the face private house that lets out a few rooms) when there was of increasing laïcité). still 99.99 per cent of the local B&B market available. Before you celebrate, however, note what happened This tension runs deep in the workplace, too. to the Christians who wanted to hire the Queen Following the law, many employers have hid behind Elizabeth II Conference Centre, opposite Parliament, the same shield as the QEII centre and Law Society: for a one-day conference in May 2012. It was called diversity policies which ostensibly protect both ‘One Man, One Woman – Making the case for marriage religious beliefs and protect sexual identities (although for the good of society’ and delegates were due to hear they are usually limited to homosexuality and not speakers attack the Government’s plans for same-sex the full range of LGBTQIA (Lesbian, gay, bisexual, marriage. The QEII cancelled the booking the night transgender, questioning, intersex, and asexual) range. before it was due to take place, citing concerns over To give an example, Lillian Ladele was a Christian compatibility with the centre’s ‘diversity policy’. The marriage registrar for Islington borough council who Law Society had previously refused permission on was happy to conduct opposite-sex civil wedding similar grounds to host the conference in their splendid registrations but not same-sex civil partnerships. When offices on Chancery Lane. civil partnerships became law, each council had to Neither the QEII nor the Law Society bothered to provide appropriate registrars. Islington went further explain what harm homosexuals would come to if a and told all its registrars they would have to conduct free and open debate on a controversial legislation same-sex ceremonies or be in breach of its diversity took place in central London. Both venues have policy. Ladele refused, pointing out that plenty of subsequently come to secret settlements with the event other registrars were happy to perform them, and organisers, a recognition that they placed ridiculous she was asking to do a full workload of opposite-sex fetters on the exercise of free speech. ceremonies instead. The council refused and she was But who can blame them, when they pleaded fired. the Nuremberg defence and said they were merely The insurmountable problem was that Islington following the law? When asked to adjudicate between, could prefer rights relating to sexual orientation over say, Christian hoteliers and bed-and-breakfast owners any manifestations of Christian belief. Under the letter who have blanket bans on the unmarried (including of the law, Islington could legitimately argue there gay couples) sharing double rooms but are happy to was no scope to reasonably accommodate her request let twin rooms to anyone, and gay couples who turn up because doing so would imply official acquiescence in expecting a queen-size but are told that is not possible, an employee’s disapproval of homosexual acts, even the courts have preferred the rights of gay people over though there was no tangible discrimination against the rights of Christians every time. any gay couple who sought access to the provided To my mind, the root of the problem lies in the clash service. between Christians who think that homosexual activity This warfare – or ‘law-fare’ – over the clash in the is morally wrong, and gay rights’ campaigners who hierarchy of rights has muddled thinking in other ways. disagree. In legal terms this is reflected by the tension Take those Christians whose employers have objected

Web: www.salisburyreview.com 14 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 when their staff wore crucifixes. Nadia Eweida was a organisation that provides counselling to same-sex Coptic Christian who worked for British Airways on attracted people, whose adverts on London buses were their check-in desks at Heathrow. She wore a discreet banned by the Mayor on the grounds that they could cross over her work uniform that looked smart. give offence. Even many gay campaigners think that Muslim employees were allowed to wear headscarves looking the other way when the bus passed by, was a without a problem, but Mrs Eweida was told that suitable solution to this non-problem. her cross undermined the uniformity of BA’s dress. Christians aren’t being persecuted in a violent sense, She had to take her case all the way to the European but they are being shut up by a society that celebrates Court of Human Rights, which agreed that her cross- an illusory and false notion of diversity, one that has wearing was a defensible manifestation of her faith created rules which superficially protect a neutral and that BA’s clothing policy was a disproportionate public square but which, in fact, mask an intolerant infringement of that right. BA had backed down under view of those outside the new orthodoxy and only public and political pressure, but that this case had to serve to victimise the faithful. be litigated in the first place shows how bizarre the workplace has become. Peter Smith is a Lawyer and editor of the Bow Group Or the example of the Core Issues Trust, a Christian magazine Crossbow. back to contents Theatre of Blood Tim Walker

n March 21, I will be treading the boards of advertising goes online – the traditional critics have the Theatre Royal, Winchester. I have not, become all but extinct. I can think of only one old-style Ohowever, been reduced to spear-carrying critic – who is properly paid and properly treated by his since I made my final exit, just before Christmas, newspaper and given the time and space to compose as the Sunday Telegraph’s theatre critic. Along with his thoughts – and that is the great Michael Billington colleagues from other newspapers – past and present – I of The Guardian (an organisation that now looks more will be giving what is optimistically being billed as a and more like some sort of newspaper heritage park ‘master class’ in the art of theatre criticism. which is run purely for the benefit of tourists). We will have to explain to an audience of budding Old hands in the theatre world once used to look upon young critics what it takes to become one, how the job the critics with fear and apprehension, but now it is with has evolved, and what it actually means today to do the the sort of compassion that is normally reserved for job. I have to say that we shall not be talking from a self-harmers. One leading regional theatre impresario position of strength: it is not possible to throw a stone told me he felt lucky if anyone at all turned up for his in the capital these days without hitting a critic who first nights. In the event that someone did, he or she has lately been sacked. was likely to be some hard-pressed, spotty intern from Still, when I became one more than a decade ago, a multi-media news organisation, tagging the task of the older critics liked to consider themselves to be reviewing on to a thousand other tasks performed members of a most exclusive club: indeed, there was during the day. much tut-tutting among some of them that I was doing There are dot com critics now in abundance, but the job as a sideline to my newspaper’s Mandrake what is in short supply is authority and a sense of gossip column, and what, they wondered, would a professionalism. In that splendid Seventies shocker mere gossip columnist know about theatre criticism? Theatre of Blood, which starred Vincent Price, the Such snobbery has long since gone – along, of course, critics drove Rolls-Royces, lived in vast apartments with many of the critics who said such things. I am overlooking the Thames and employed uniformed pleased now that I declined ever to become a member maids. If that was the case even in the glory days of of the Critics’ Circle: that little talking shop looked to Agate and Tynan – which I rather doubt – the critics me even then like the Amish by any other name. With of my generation could only ever have marvelled at newspapers cutting back on their arts budgets – as the such a lifestyle. We have become a sorry sight in recent

The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 15 Web: www.salisburyreview.com years: seldom if ever in suits, all too often laden with bothered to do that. It is hard not to look back with carrier bags, and, sometimes, so Quentin Letts of the nostalgia to the days when a generation of theatre Daily Mail used to complain, smelling very bad. Worse critics got to go to the first nights of shows like Look still, the man from the FT – an amply proportioned Back in Anger, The Entertainer and, if musicals are fellow – had a nasty habit of turning up in a T-shirt your thing, My Fair Lady. We have had to contend, by bearing the words: ‘Still hate Thatcher’. contrast, with juke box musicals, a great many revivals, The premise of Theatre of Blood was that Mr Price, but precious few new straight plays. playing an actor driven over the edge by critics who Are there any ‘angry young men’ around today? I had panned his performances in Shakespearean plays, can’t see any and indeed the very phrase would no had decided to bump them off, one by one. These doubt be regarded as sexist. This seems to me to be a days I wonder if Mr Price would bother: it is not as if time of predominantly safe and unchallenging theatre. individual critics have the power to close shows and The business might therefore be said to get the critics certainly I doubt, for that matter, if any actor could it deserves: scrappy, half-hearted, here-today-gone- get to appear in so many commercial productions of tomorrow productions get to be reviewed by scrappy, the Bard’s plays. half-hearted and here-today-gone-tomorrow critics. I had a sense from the day I first took my seat What I shall say therefore to the young men and among the critics that the days of this little band were women who are thinking of becoming theatre critics numbered. It wasn’t just that the internet was eroding is DON’T. My advice to them at my master class shall the foundations of the newspapers. All too often, the be to get proper, well-remunerated jobs in which they theatre critics looked out of place: solitary, angry old are respected by their employers and the world at men in dusty jackets who would sit, looking just a little large. Become bankers, lawyers, dentists, plumbers – creepy, among screaming teenagers getting all hot and whatever you like, boys and girls. And that way – if bothered about some soap or pop star who was about you find that your enthusiasm for the theatre persists to make his debut in a musical or ‘tribute act’ show. – you will actually be able to afford your own tickets. Comically, in retrospect, I used to read long, learned books about the craft of acting, but I wonder how Tim Walker is a theatre critic many of the actors now acting on the stage have even back to contents Charlie Hebdo: Lambs to the Slaughter Theodore Dalrymple

hat goes without saying should generally go and light them in concert with hundreds or thousands unsaid, at least if we do not want to spend of others. Wour lives uttering and listening to platitudes. What can these candles signify to people who Do we really need to be told or to say that the killing have none of the beliefs in the transcendent religion of journalists, policemen and supermarket shoppers by or religions with which the lighting of candles was drug-dealing, rap-music-loving louts turned gun-toting formerly associated? Is it some kind of pagan fire- Moslem fanatics is wrong and that we are all, or very worship? No doubt many of those in the crowd of nearly all, against it? candle-lighters would claim to be (O Heaven help us!) The demonstrations that followed the attack on the spiritual but not religious, that is to say believers in offices ofCharlie Hebdo and the Jewish supermarket wind chimes and the healing chakras of the earth, but in Paris were impressive in size but not in all other they do not believe in anything that requires actual respects. And the previous public manifestations of discipline or the personal sacrifice of participating in disgust or fear or grief at the events in Paris struck me organised religion. as distinctly odd. When something terrible happens in The slogan that quickly became the badge of grieving the public sphere nowadays, it seems that the massed virtue after the attack – Je suis Charlie – required as ranks of unbelievers reach straight for their candles little personal sacrifice as the spirituality of those who

Web: www.salisburyreview.com 16 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 lit candles. What exactly did it mean, Je suis Charlie? the nation could hardly discourage the aspiring martyr. The staff of that magazine were indeed exceedingly It is just what the narcissist-cum-fanatic is looking for. brave, knowing as they had done for years that they The demonstrations did not promote national unity, worked under real threat. Their courage, moral and rather the reverse. Marine Le Pen was not invited, physical, perhaps the greatest in the Western world, at least not as head of a party that, according to put that of our political class, and indeed that of most polls, is now the most popular in the country and of the rest of us, to shame. is the first choice of almost a third of adults. The The slogan therefore seemed to me not merely kitsch decision not to invite her, whether right or not, was emotionally but dubious morally. Sentimentality, said likely to have increased her popularity; so far from Oscar Wilde, not my normal authority, is the desire to being demonstrations of national unity, therefore, experience the luxury of an emotion without having to they were demonstrations of national disarray. By a pay for it. Whether or not that is right of sentimentality curious coincidence, which some have doubted was a in general, it seems to me right about this slogan: the coincidence, the novel by Michel Houellebecq called people who made use of it wanted to appear to share Soumission, which envisages a Moslem President the admirable courage of the staff of Charlie Hebdo of France in the elections after next, in 2022, was without putting themselves at the slightest risk. Indeed, published on the very day of the attack on Charlie in the circumstances, it would have taken more courage Hebdo. In this novel, the Moslem President is elected publicly to deny that one was Charlie than to assert it. precisely because of a refusal, preferring anything When, therefore, I saw hundreds of people claiming else to co-operation with the Front National. The to be Charlie, I felt something like nausea. They were demonstrations were therefore perfectly consonant not lying, exactly, but pretending to a virtue that they with Houellebecq’s dystopian political vision. Clever did not have. Islamists would be well advised to study Houellebecq’s Perhaps I am temperamentally wary of mass book with careful attention. expressions of opinion, especially when allied to strong It would have been far better if the demonstrations, emotion, and especially when what is expressed is so perfectly understandable as they were in the wholly banal that no one other than an ideological circumstances, had not taken place, at least not under the madman or psychopath would oppose it. Of course weak and self-indulgent slogan Je suis Charlie. They gunning down journalists is an appalling attack on would not have gratified the fevered, self-important freedom of expression, for anyone who does not imagination of future terrorists, assuming there to be already know it is not going to be persuaded otherwise some, as seems highly and lamentably likely; they by merely being told so. would not have exposed the fractured nature of French Such banal expressions open those who indulge political life, excluding the chief representative of the in them to the charge of inconsistency and therefore opinion of nearly a third of the population; and they of hypocrisy, a charge which is likely and no doubt would not have given the rest the illusion that, merely intended to obscure the main point. Is not France the by going into the street, lighting candles and holding country in which it is illegal to deny that the massacres up so feeble a slogan, they had done something to of the Armenians by Ottoman Turkey in 1915 were combat terrorism. And, from the British point of view, genocide? This is surely a question for historians they would not have allowed David Cameron so easily to decide and not for the law to pre-empt, however and falsely to appear resolute against terrorism, when much the evidence may be on one side of the question. in fact his clichéd utterances about Islam were of the By passing a law making it illegal to question the most cowardly nature, especially when compared to Armenian genocide, France laid itself open to the President al-Sisi’s courageous admission at al-Azhar charge of hypocrisy. that, thanks to extremism, Moslems are justifiably the In any case, demonstrations such as those that object of suspicion and even hatred throughout the occurred in the wake of the murderous attacks were world, so that religious reform in the Moslem world intended not to express a truth or even an attachment to is absolutely essential. There can be little expectancy a principle, but to express a national determination not of that; by contrast, Mr Cameron is reluctant to run the to be intimidated by thuggish fanatics. Unfortunately, risk of a stern reproof in the Guardian. the demonstrations express not strength but weakness, It would have taken moral courage for demonstrators unlikely to deter the terroristically-inclined but rather to have demanded that Moslems examine their to encourage them. One of the characteristics of the religious doctrine and unequivocally accept freedom terrorists is wounded narcissism, and since they are not of expression and freedom of apostasy, without which afraid to die (if only they really were cowards, as they any religion in effect makes use of the Mafia principle are sometimes mistakenly called) so large an effect on of omertà. On the day following the killing, Anjem

The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 17 Web: www.salisburyreview.com Choudry wrote in USA Today: cartoons or The Satanic Verses to that in response to the Contrary to popular misconception, Islam does not Paris killings to know that Choudry is not expressing mean peace but rather means submission to the merely a personal opinion. commands of Allah alone. Therefore, Muslims do The courage, though not necessarily the taste in not believe in the concept of freedom of expression, humour, of the staff of Charlie Hebdo is above praise; as their speech and actions are determined by divine the slogan Je suis Charlie is beneath contempt. The revelation and not based on people’s desires. former is a sign of iron determination, the latter of And one has only to compare the emotional tissue paper weakness. temperature of the popular Moslem response to a few Theodore Dalrymple is a retired psychiatrist. back to contents The Easter Rising: Everything True except the Facts Michael Simison

owards the end of last year the Irish government of their legendary nationalist heroes, James Connolly released a video in preparation for next year’s and Pádraig Pearse, was being exploited in order to Tcommemoration of the 1916 Easter Rising. tempt dollars from American tourists. Naturally, Yeats The Rising was the turning point for the nationalist and Beckett are pictured fleetingly but what rubbed campaign. The courts-martial and executions of the salt even further into the wound was that some of the rebellion’s leaders caused most extensive personal outrage and turned many coverage was granted to to pursue violent means HM The Queen, David against British rule. By Cameron and Ian Paisley. 1918 the Anglo-Irish War Commentators concluded had begun and only ended on this evidence that three years later with the history was being ‘re- treaty which cut away written’. In many ways Southern Ireland from the these complaints are United Kingdom. justified. When honouring The commemorative a major historical event in video, worthy of the a nation’s history it would most saccharine of Walt be only logical to devote Disney’s productions, that commemoration to was widely mocked upon the event itself rather than its publication. Over the shy away from its reality. predictably dire soundtrack of a specially written To fail to do this would be one thing but to dominate song, its lyrics being half in Irish, half in English, proceedings with the very people on the opposing side pictures of Ireland flitted momentarily across the is a far graver offence. Even so, to say that the history screen. Superimposed over them were some of those of 1916 is being re-written is wrong; it was re-written horrific buzz-words such as: ‘imagine’, ‘possibility’, long before this video was produced. and ‘hope’. Apart from a solitary image at the very The Easter Rising is frequently portrayed as the beginning of the ruined General Post Office, the Easter pinnacle of the nationalist struggle, the moment when, Rising is not mentioned once. It is essentially a cheaply after centuries of hesitation, the voice of all Irishmen made tourism video. was proclaimed and the oppressive British yoke thrown The Irish papers were full of complaint, so much off. It is, however, a far more complex story in reality. so it was withdrawn after a few weeks. The memory Soon after armed men of the Irish Volunteers had

Web: www.salisburyreview.com 18 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 stormed the GPO and other prominent landmarks catastrophic for the nation but the greatest catalyst Sinn around Dublin the British army appeared in the streets Féin could hope for. The party thrives on returning to in force. These were not rabid unionists from Belfast, the grievances of the past and the populism of today London and Glasgow but the 3rd Royal Irish Rifles and to spread its support across the country. It is a party the 10th Royal Dublin Fusiliers. The majority of them rooted in the nationalist jingoism of past decades as were from the streets of Dublin, many were Catholics. that is essentially its guiding light: ‘we, ourselves’. It It was neighbour fighting neighbour; Irishman against has just issued its own video of The Rising. Irishman. This adds to the tragedy of the situation but As nearly 20 years have now passed since the Good thoroughly dilutes the claim that the Irish were only Friday Agreement brought peace to Ulster it is easy fighting the British. to forget that the UK still has an ‘Irish Question’. Yet, Furthermore when the army had restored order, the the crisis budget talks in December very nearly failed. surviving Irish Volunteers were jeered in the street by Despite the Northern Irish Executive being offered £1 the people of Dublin as they billion, Sinn Féin claimed were led away in chains. Nevertheless, the Green myth of Easter that it was far too small In their eyes it was the 1916 has become so implanted that an amount and they could rebels not the British who to criticise it, even in the slightest, is to not support it. To do so were responsible for the renounce one’s right to an Irish passport. would have meant having to destruction of an historic support cuts in some area of city, the looting which was widespread and the 250 the North’s expenditure, which would severely damage civilians who were killed during the fighting. Only their populist credentials. when the leaders were summarily executed by the What is more intriguing still is that the Irish British as traitors in a time of war was widespread premier himself, Enda Kenny, suggested that Martin nationalist anger aroused. McGuinness, the Deputy First Minister, had been Nevertheless, the Green myth of Easter 1916 has willing to sign up to the package before Gerry Adams become so implanted that to criticise it, even in the instructed him otherwise. It could well be that with slightest, is to renounce one’s right to an Irish passport. a general election in the Republic in 2016 and a The former prime minister of Ireland, John Bruton, presidential election the year after that Adams is made the considered claim in a speech a few months ago determined not to do anything which might damage that the Easter Rising may have been an unnecessary his party’s chances and his own in the ballot for the loss of life as Ireland was guaranteed Home Rule when presidency. the First World War ended anyway; the 3rd Home Rule Once again it was only through extensive talks during Bill having been passed in 1914. For merely criticising which the rabidly anti-EU Sinn Féin could showcase the path by which the Republic came into existence their nationalism and populism, that disaster was Bruton was derided as an Anglophile ‘West-Brit’. averted. The budget crisis had only minimal coverage Of course, all nations have a tendency to over- on the British mainland and as a result it is easy to play their military victories as they take the victor’s forget the fragility of the North and even more so the privilege of writing their own history. Whilst on the cost of failure in any part of its political sphere. Had whole this only constitutes harmless national pride and these talks collapsed they could well have brought making benign jokes about vanquishing the French at Stormont down with them, plunging Ulster back into Agincourt and Waterloo, there is danger in the Irish the chaos from which it is only beginning to move attempt to do so. Rather than merely adding to frivolous on, and dominating the UK’s future domestic politics. national celebration it can instead be vitriolic against The 1916 commemorative video should be mocked. any who criticise even a small part of their nationalist By any measure it is pathetic. However, the historic struggle. More importantly history is a vital part of distortion of a virulent nationalism, which shows no the politics across the island, which are currently far sign of abating, is a greater threat to Ireland than a from stable. poorly produced, weasel-worded tourism advert. The party with the most support in the Republic is now Sinn Féin; the two dominant parties of the past, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, are desperately struggling for even half the support they once had. And, in the North, Sinn Féin appears to be doing its utmost to bring down the Stormont Parliament. It is almost as if Michael Simison is a musician. it is trying to leave the British government no choice back to contents but to again implement direct rule. This would be

The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 19 Web: www.salisburyreview.com Germany abolishes itself Ricardo Duchesne

ince the 1960s Jürgen Habermas has been one new homeland, without having to give up the cultural of the most celebrated thinkers in the world; form of life of their origins by doing so. Slisted in 2007 as the seventh most-cited author But what if mass immigration threatens to overwhelm in the humanities and ranked joint seventh in the ‘Top the host’s culture? According to Habermas, just as a 100 Global Thinkers’ list in 2005/2008 by Prospect liberal state has no mandate to preserve traditional magazine and Foreign Policy. Yet nobody has had a immigrant cultures, it has no obligation to preserve close look at Habermas’s Enlightenment Project, in its own culture. A key characteristic of the modern which he quite clearly infers there is no such thing as liberal life is that citizens are free to choose how they a German, a Frenchman or an Englishman or the nation live. To guarantee the survival of the majority culture states in which they live, only multicultural societies would be to deprive new generations of ‘the option of competing individuals. of learning from other traditions or converting and Habermas believes that the Enlightenment Project setting out for other shores’. Germans need to realize can only be ‘completed’ after the elimination of ethnic that in the face of immigrants arriving with different identity through immigration, a Marxist idea nurtured lifestyles a democratic state cannot be in the business by the Frankfurt School. But can there be democracy of preserving either the cultures of immigrants or the if people cannot vote according to nationality culture of Germans. and homeland? Its alternative, the imposition of Herein lies the central flaw in Habermas’s thinking: multiculturalism and immigration is, and has been, in reasoning correctly about the need to protect the an undemocratic violation of the collective culture individual rights of minorities, he pushes the idea that and individual rights of the established ethnic peoples Germany, if it is to live up to the theory of individual of Europe. rights, must accept becoming ‘an immigrant nation’. All Habermas has to say about immigration and He does not consider the possibility that a liberal nation diversity in Europe is contained in a small collection can recognize the rights of minorities, as European of essays published under the fitting titleThe Inclusion nations started doing in the nineteenth century, without of the Other (1999). Only one of these deals explicitly thereby being obligated to mass immigration. with immigration, namely, Struggles for Recognition Rather deceptively, he brings into a discussion about in the Democratic Constitutional State. the rights of long established minorities the idea that In Habermas’s view there is no difference between European nations must become ‘immigrant cultures’ an immigrant and a ‘native’ European. The theory of if they are to sustain their cultural vitality and live up individual rights, in his estimation, has been already to their liberal ideals. constructed to deal adequately with the cultural identities of minorities. Just as, in a modern society Even a majority culture that does not consider itself threatened preserves its vitality only through lesbians, gays and women do not need a separate an unrestrained revisionism, by sketching out culture but are to be treated legally like anybody else, alternatives to the status quo or by integrating alien so immigrants can be like anybody else as long as the impulses – even to the point of breaking with its government does not impose assimilation but ensures own traditions. This is especially true of immigrant equal opportunities for success. cultures. Habermas is however clear that while nobody One can agree that an open and dynamic culture expects democratic societies to adopt those practices should welcome alternative ways of thinking; but this of the newcomers they find illiberal, such as sharia law, is not the same as mandating the integration of alien neither should immigrants be coerced into adopting cultures. the day-to-day habits, customs, folkways and food of Habermas adds: the majority. The accelerated pace of change in modern societies All that needs to be expected of immigrants is the explodes all stationary forms of life. Cultures survive willingness to enter into the political culture of their only if they draw the strength to transform themselves

Web: www.salisburyreview.com 20 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 from criticism and secession...through exchanges The next point Habermas makes is the most bizarre: with strangers and things alien. ‘by 1990 West Germany had integrated 15 million These clichés, devoid of historical and economic refugees, immigrants, and foreigners who were either veracity, are the sort that academics and TV stars love German or of German descent’ (145). Apparently, to repeat. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China and we are supposed to believe that Germany is a multi- numerous nations today are very dynamic and yet racial immigrant nation because it took up millions of they are not advocating minority rights for immigrants ethnic Germans expelled from eastern territories that despite countless exchanges with the world. They don’t Germany lost after WWI and II. allow aliens to become citizens. The Enlightenment ‘In the face of this evidence,’ says Habermas, the Habermas so cherishes was actually engendered within claim that Germany is not a land of immigrants should ethnically homogeneous cultures. no longer be ‘put forth in the political public sphere’. Habermas claims that Germany has always been a To keep insisting otherwise can only be interpreted as land of immigrants. The arguments he adduces here an irrational fear of immigrants, a mentality educators are quite revealing in exposing the intellectual depths must bring an end to, however ‘painful’ this may be. to which someone designated a ‘great thinker’ will But Habermas is the one who has fears about the descend to defend mass immigration. He says the preservation of the ethnic identity of Germans. population of Frankfurt (as of the early 1990s) consists The self-understanding of Germans as members of of 26 per cent foreigners, which somehow contradicts a nation must ‘no longer be based on ethnicity but the image that Germany is not an immigrant nation. founded on citizenship’, Habermas concludes. History How can one rely on recent immigration numbers teaches us, however, that those states possessing a in a city to claim that a nation has been historically high degree of ethnic homogeneity, where ancestors immigrant? Pro-immigration élites are now regularly had lived for generations – England, France, Italy, using this type of argument, as the cities of Europe are Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and filled with immigrants, but it only amounts to the claim Denmark – were the ones with the strongest liberal that their devious policies to impose racial diversity traits, constitutions and institutions. By contrast, the are working. Austro-Hungarian Empire, composed of multiple Habermas tries to create an image of diverse groups ethnic groups, was enraptured by illiberal forms of migrating in and out of nations, observing that since ethnic nationalism and intense rivalries over identities the early nineteenth century almost 8 million Germans and political boundaries. migrated to the United States, while 1.2 million The influential British journalist, David Goodhart, workers entered Germany by 1914, and 12 million once a supporter of open borders in England, has now were displaced by the end of WWII, deported from admitted that welfare programs require high levels Poland and the Soviet Union. In reality, after the of social and ethnic solidarity – the very cohesion Second War, Europe experienced the opposite: as a he has seen seriously eroded in Britain with the result of mass expulsions and movements of ethnic frenzied promotion of diversity and immigration (The groups back to their original homelands, Europe saw British Dream: Successes and Failures of Postwar a ‘massive process of ethnic unmixing’, resulting in Immigration (Atlantic, 2013). He was pilloried for this the creation of strongly homogeneous ethno-nations by his fellow liberals. throughout Europe. As Jerry Muller argues in Us and Meanwhile, Habermas, for all his talk about open Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism rational discourse, categorized Thilo Sarrazin’s book, (Foreign Affairs, March/April 2008), within a few Germany Abolishes Itself (2010) with terms like years after WWII, ‘for the most part, each nation in ‘poison’ and ‘odious’ (‘Leadership and Leitkultur,’ Europe had its own state, and each state was made up New York Times, October 28, 2010) without engaging almost exclusively of a single ethnic nationality’. In its factual contents, suppressing its ideas within the the case of Germany, public sphere. He appeals to extra-liberal arguments best designated as cultural Marxist in calling for a Between 1944 and 1945, five million ethnic Germans fundamental alteration in the cultural life worlds of from the eastern parts of the German Reich fled Europeans by instilling fears about their age-old ethnic westward to escape the conquering Red Army, which was energetically raping and massacring its way attachments. to Berlin. Then, between 1945 and 1947, the new post-liberation regimes in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Ricardo Duchesne is a professor in the department Poland, and Yugoslavia expelled another seven of social science at the University of New Brunswick million Germans in response to their collaboration Saint John. with the Nazis. back to contents

The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 21 Web: www.salisburyreview.com In Swedish Chokey Neils Olberg

Sweden’s prisons are the envy of Europe. Falling supportive environment. Positive and reinforcing numbers of inmates have allowed it to close jails, interaction with the inmates is vital. They talk, they while reoffending rates stand well below the average listen, they reason and they guide. They are in many in fellow EU members. Admissions figures to the ways the role models our inmates have never had in prison and probation service are down this year their lives. [2014] by approximately 6 per cent, and have been However no one can like everyone all the time. There so on a yearly basis since 2011. And all without crime figures going up. The UK rate, for return to prison are daily situations where staff need to intervene firmly within 2 years, is around 50 percent for all prisoners, and receive no appreciation in return. Of course there and as high as 75 per cent for young offenders are conflicts, anger and exchanges of harsh words. They will, during their careers, also be exposed to In this (edited) extract from his recent Longford endless trauma, sadness, human disaster and personal Lecture, Nils Oberg, director of the Swedish Prison disappointments. and Probation Service, explains his approach. About one third of our offenders, 30 per cent, come back to serve another penalty in our prison and recently overheard one of my prison managers probation service within three years…the frustrating addressing a group of new prison officer recruits. part is that those figures have remained more or less S h e b e g a n h e r I unchanged for a long presentation by saying: period. ‘If you want to work on A strong faith in my team, you must like people’s capacity to all kinds of people’. That change therefore has to captures in a nutshell be deeply imbedded in many of our core values our professional value in the Swedish Prison system. In this respect and Probation Service. I am very proud of If you don’t like people my organisation. The of some particular kind, relations between our you cannot be part of staff and our clients are our team. healthy and remarkably If you are afraid of respectful. inmates, indifferent to Approximately 80 per them as individuals and cent of our inmates are human beings, or in any sentenced to penalties of less than a year’s duration. way disrespect or look down on them because of Given that they have several problems in their lives, the situation they are in, then you are by default and have had them for a long time, that time is short. disqualified from being part our service. We run an Therefore every day in prison must count, and this is operation where unconditional respect for inmates and particularly important for our young offenders. clients is fundamental to everything that we do. It is not Juveniles get particularly short sentences which is subject to compromise. It must be imprinted throughout why we have two very good reasons to start working the entire organisation and it is non-negotiable. with them from the first day (in pre-trial detention Easy to say but difficult to achieve – in particular centres): we need to reduce the damaging effects of since the role of prison officers in Sweden is a dual isolation; and we have to make an early assessment one and therefore complex. On the one hand, they are of risk, need and responsivity. representatives of the criminal justice system, charged We try to use the time before trial as much as we with carrying out criminal sanctions, sometimes with can both to motivate the detainees to treatment, to the use of force. study them, and to establish a good relationship with At the same time they are also part of our fundamental

Web: www.salisburyreview.com 22 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 them. Without healthy personal relations we cannot what these factors are. Let me give you an example. hope to help anyone to the kinds of changes we are About three years ago, the staff in one of our high looking for. Our experience is that there are often good security prisons became fed up with a group of opportunities for this during the first weeks or months. prisoners they had been working with for many years. Once juveniles reach prison, it is much harder to get The majority of them were local offenders with a long through to them. history of substance abuse. They had been enrolled in Young inmates who appear in our service normally every conceivable treatment programme available. We have many problems and even more needs. In our had detoxified them, educated them, offered vocational experience, you can’t work with one factor in isolation training, and tried a number of different motivational from others. Different professions within the prison strategies and advanced therapy. Still, year after year, service have to work with different needs – well they kept coming back. Our personnel were convinced coordinated and at the same time. that it was not their drug addiction that was the issue. However we do not choose when we come into an They were certain that these prisoners had Attention inmate’s life. Most young offenders are with us for a Deficit Syndrome (ADHD). short period of time and we do not control when they They asked for special units to allow them to offer leave us. Our odds of success are therefore not very medical treatment for that diagnosis in conjunction good. For that reason we need to have an exceptionally with all the other therapeutic interventions they were good plan, if we are to stand any chance at all. already giving. To test this we designed a randomised To do this we keep them completely separate from controlled study to find out if there really was a other prisoners in small units of 6-10 inmates. Each connection between the ADHD diagnosis and risk of unit is staffed with a variety of professional resources reoffending. – teachers, psychologists, prison and probation officers The results were dramatic. The group of prisoners that and treatment staff. We have a staff ratio of almost was offered active medical treatment, in combination 1:1 – we are the fourth largest state run service in the with a range of other specifically targeted social country. If we did not have programmes and therapy, this ratio I am convinced We try to use the time before trial as much responded so remarkably that the alternative would be as we can both to motivate the detainees to well that we initially had a even more costly to society. treatment, to study them, and to establish a hard time believing it. So T h e y w o r k i n a good relationship with them. Without healthy much so we are about to coordinated way, preparing personal relations we cannot hope to help launch a nationwide study for an inmate’s release from anyone to the kinds of changes we are looking to further establish the the first day to the last. for. Our experience is that there are often connection between ADHD There is very little time left good opportunities for this during the first and the risk of reoffending for our juvenile offenders weeks or months. Once juveniles reach prison, amongst all our clients. to sit around doing nothing it is much harder to get through to them. The point of all this is that during their time with us. part of our challenge is to The last phase of a prison term is very important. identify and deal with the underlying factors behind The time during conditional release cannot be just crime and relapse into crime. It is but one illustration supervision. We continue with evidence-based of the dynamic character of most of the problems that cognitive programmes to fight the risk of reoffending. our inmates are struggling with. It means that most, if We also cooperate intensively with other state or not all of them, can in one way or another be assessed communal authorities like our national employment and addressed. The only static problem that we cannot agency and social services. change is the criminal history of our inmates and Someone once told me that the only strategy that clients. works with young offenders is to let them grow older and wiser. I would very much like to prove him wrong. Lord Charles Cecil has invited us to publish this This brings me to the third and perhaps most edited version of Nils Oberg’s speech in response to important component of our plan. When we look at an article in our Autumn 2014 edition ‘The Crank and the survey data on our inmates and see what problems the Treadmill’ by Don Beech. they have, we need to look at the whole picture. We To read Nils Oberg’s full text and find out more about must deal with all their problems, not just the ones that the Longford Trust, go to www.longfordtrust.org. got them into prison. If you ignore key factors that can We hope to publish a further article on prisons by cause reoffending, you jeopardize the whole effort. Theodore Dalrymple in our Summer issue. That is why it is so vitally important that you know back to contents

The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 23 Web: www.salisburyreview.com Political Correctness: Living in a Girlie Playground Penelope Fawcett Hulme

t school we were told, ‘Sticks and stones can break absolutely forbidden word in human vocabulary coming my bones but names can never hurt me.’ Sadly that up first on screen. Aold saw no longer applies. These days the wrong In the early 1990s the word ‘niggardly’ was banned word to the wrong person can send your illustrious career by several American newspapers after a complaint to the shooting down the pan, unless you immediately do the Dallas Times. Not realising his danger, in 1999, David right thing and apologise. Even better, put on sack cloth Howard, an aide to the mayor of Washington, DC, used and abase yourself through the streets. ‘niggardly’ about a budget. This upset a black colleague In these days of policed liberalism, the curse of saying who lodged a complaint. As a result, ten days later Howard the wrong thing can hit even the most blessed. Oscar- tendered his resignation, and the mayor accepted it. Only nominated Benedict Cumberbatch, famous on both after pressure from the gay community, to which Howard sides of the Atlantic as the BBC’s Sherlock, recently belonged, was this questioned and he was offered his job seen on screen as the new gay icon Alan Turing, has back. Howard refused but accepted another position with fallen from grace. the mayor instead, insisting that he did not feel victimized On January 26th the news hit the international headlines: by the incident. On the contrary, he said he had learned ‘British actor Benedict Cumberbatch has apologised after from the situation. describing black people as ‘colored’ on US television.’ He is I used to think it would be great if we could all reported to have ‘used the racial term’ during a debate on the be colorblind; that’s naïve, especially for a white lack of diversity on British TV. After the interview hundreds person. They don’t have to think about race every took to social media to condemn the actor for his choice of day. An African American does. terminology, branding it ‘racist’ and ‘inappropriate’. ‘Coloured’ is now as heinous as ‘redskin’, and ‘Eskimo’, As long as it lasted he took his punishment as his due although there is The National Association for the and didn’t feel he deserved better. Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) a US civil rights Later that year, Amelia Rideau, vice chairwoman of organization, formed in 1909 and apparently quite happy the Black Student Union at the University of Wisconsin, with the name which has never changed. So far they have reported a professor teaching Chaucer after he used the not spoken up for poor doomed Ben. More puzzlingly the word ‘niggardly’. She said he continued to use it even after term ‘people of colour,’ is highly acceptable, much used she told him that she was offended. by Labour’s Chuka Amunna. ‘I was in tears, shaking’, she told the faculty. ‘It’s not up to He didn’t know he was doing wrong but as in written law, the rest of the class to decide whether my feelings are valid.’ ignorance is no excuse and he stands condemned. Naturally Like the Mayor’s aide, young Ben readily accepted his he immediately issued an apology for his ‘incorrect’ and fate. As he says, ‘the damage is done.’ In one unforgiveable ‘offensive’ use of the word. moment of madness he fell into the special level of hell ‘I’m devastated to have caused offence by using this reserved for the users of non pc language. He obviously outmoded terminology,’ he said. ‘I offer my sincere has no wish to be there among them. apologies. I make no excuse for my being an idiot and ‘I can only hope this incident will highlight the need know the damage is done.’ for correct usage of terminology that is accurate and Even harmless conversation or giving an interview to inoffensive’, he opined desperately. ‘The most shaming your adoring fans on TV is dangerous these days, and akin aspect of this for me is that I was talking about racial to using a foreign phrase book over five years old. It’s hard inequality in the performing arts in the UK and the need for to keep up with the changes and words can now be lethal rapid improvements in our industry when I used the term.’ to your health and wealth even if they are innocent in In case anyone doubted him, he went on: ‘I feel themselves. Use of the word ‘Niggardly’ has caused outrage the complete fool I am and while I am sorry to have in the US several times. Watch out for people looking over offended people and to learn from my mistakes in such your shoulder if you type it into Google as you get the most a public manner please be assured I have. I apologize

Web: www.salisburyreview.com 24 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 again to anyone who I offended for this thoughtless use In November 2013 the Attorney General, Dominic of inappropriate language about an issue which affects Grieve, MP was reported as saying politicians need to ‘wake friends.’ up’ to the issue of corruption in some minority communities. John Lennon shocked the world in 1966 and lost record ‘Corruption in parts of the Pakistani community is sales in the US by declaring that the Beatles were more endemic,’ he said. Two days later he apologised and said popular than Christ. That seems like a very distant age. he had not meant to suggest there was a ‘particular problem These days the great religious certainties concern race and in the Pakistani community.’ gender. The biggest risk of heresy lies with them. The following July he left office and was replaced by At the time of writing pop singer James Blunt has just Jeremy Wright. In October, 2014 Michael Fallon, then been accused of homophobia after joking about ‘picking defence secretary, claimed British towns are being swamped up the soap’ in the showers with fellow public schoolboys by immigrants and their residents are ‘under siege’. Hours including David Cameron and Boris Johnson. A spokesman later Number 10 sources claimed he had intended to say, said: ‘Although James might have been joking, it’s this sort ‘under pressure’. A day later he told BBC Radio 5 that he of language that perpetuates negative stereotypes around said he, ‘misspoke’ and ‘used words I wouldn’t normally gay men and gets deemed as acceptable as it becomes have used’. Only under the bedclothes if he has got any ingrained in society.’ sense. Chief gay inquisitor Peter Tatchell said: ‘It would be In May 2011 the old war-horse Kenneth Clarke MP helpful if James could explain what he meant by those almost broke the mould, but not quite. At first he declined to words and make it clear he apologise after he appeared is not homophobic.’ In May 2011 the old war-horse Kenneth Clarke to suggest that some rapes He will, he will. Offending MP almost broke the mould, but not quite. At were worse than others. Later women these days brings first he declined to apologise after he appeared he returned to TV studios immediate sanction, no to suggest that some rapes were worse than to stress that ‘all rape is matter how esoteric the others. Later he returned to TV studios to a serious crime’ and said circumstances. In December stress that ‘all rape is a serious crime’ and said that he had used ‘the wrong Dr Matt Taylor, a professor of that he had used ‘the wrong choice of words’. choice of words’. astrophysics, was brought to He also wrote to a victim book for wearing an incorrect of attempted rape, who also t-shirt. He was busy leading the brilliant team which featured on the show, saying: ‘I have always believed that managed to land a probe on a comet travelling 41,000 all rape is extremely serious, and must be treated as such. miles per hour, some 311 million miles from earth. It I am sorry if my comments gave you any other impression was a historic triumph of calculation and technology, but or upset you.’ quickly overshadowed by an angry outcry on Twitter and Thespian Ben and many of the other errant boys will elsewhere, sparked by Rose Eveleth, a feminist journalist, no doubt live to fight another day, having been severely who objected to his shirt. Dr Taylor looks eccentric in the frightened and chastised. And that is surely the point of it tradition of great minds, but that is very tricky these days. all. This new form of reproof, worthy of the Puritans and He made the mistake of wearing a garish Hawaiian-style the Victorians at their worst, is not about what they said, number festooned with cartoon-like drawings of scantily only that they slipped out of line and crossed the invisible clad, gun-toting women. Feminists gathered on Twitter boundary now set out for us all by the great controlling and a trembling public apology from Dr Taylor followed. forces of liberalism here and in the USA. What exactly happens to people between uttering the What would happen if anyone accused of using a wrong fateful words and making their abject apology is a mystery. word or phrase refused to apologise to their accusers, we Something must be done to them. They all seem to visit cannot know, as no one has yet risked it. There are some Room 101 and come out grovelling. The British were incorrigible, unrepentant souls who jib at this modern once famous for apologising for everything of course. If sanction. They have set up a ‘Sorry Watch,’ online. But they someone stepped on an Englishman’s foot, he would say are not in the public eye, with nothing to lose. Perhaps it sorry. In some ways the liberal classes have kept this up, may happen one day that someone well known will refuse tacitly apologising to Muslims for Islamist terrorism. The to apologise for what they said by accident or because they desire to be seen as a well-mannered person has somehow genuinely believed it. What kind of fate awaits that person escalated into a need to be seen as doing and thinking can only be imagined. the correct thing. A quaint custom of good manners has turned into a gigantic political cringe. But it’s one thing to apologise to ignorant people for using a word they have never heard; it’s surely quite another to apologise for Penelope Fawcett Hulme is a social commentator. expressing a genuinely held truth. back to contents

The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 25 Web: www.salisburyreview.com Conservative Classic — 57 The English Constitution Paul Gottfried

n his magnum opus Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) that the monarch’s veto power had fallen into such appears to be a political dinosaur. Richard Crossman disuse that if the House of Commons condemned Iobserved that Bagehot’s emphasis on cabinet Queen Victoria to death, the sovereign would have government as the essential feature of the English been required to sign her own death warrant. polity was already out of date by the time he advanced No one would find these comments objectionable his thesis on ‘how Cabinet government worked before in our egalitarian political culture, yet a hundred and the extension of the suffrage, the creation of the party fifty years ago, when royal sovereigns and the still machines, and the emergence of an independent Civil unreconstructed House of Lords were viewed as more Service administering a vast, welfare state.’ Bagehot than mere ornaments, one would hardly have expected was not a man of the Right, and Crossman stresses to hear such views, and least of all from the English the overlaps between Bagehot’s Right. Bagehot was not speaking views of government and those of as a champion of tradition, but as the more explicitly democratic J an advocate of whatever habits of S Mill. Both authors considered thinking or fondness for pageantry themselves progressives, and neither kept the government functioning. cared for the ‘dignified’ aspects He championed the ‘efficient of the traditional constitution, the executive’ and ‘secret republic’ that monarchy and House of Lords, he thought animated the English except as an emotional prop for the government and identified this force masses. of energy with the cabinet and the Bagehot feared that the rural and prime minister who distributed village life he experienced in his ministerial responsibilities. They native Somerset would soon vanish. provided the English with ‘a single He never upheld a Tory ‘Party of sovereign authority’, which gave order’ for he was a staunch Liberal, them an advantage over the citizens a friend of William Gladstone, and of the American Republic who were a banker who wrote a widely read doomed to ‘having many sovereign book about finance and banking, Lombard Street authorities’ and who had to hope ‘that their multitude (1873). Although Bagehot did not want to abolish may atone for their inferiority’. Bagehot thought the the ornamental sides of the English constitution, he American constitutional system was inferior to the would have resisted more power being granted to the way English Parliamentary government had evolved. ‘useful but no longer decisively acting parts of the Unlike the Americans, the English had fused the government.’ legislative and executive branches, and no matter how The monarchy was useful for its pageantry and the medieval their political institutions appeared, effective example of middle-class decency set by the royal power resided in the House of Commons. ‘The ultimate family, but he was not complimentary about it: ‘An authority in the English Constitution is a newly elected hereditary king is but an ordinary person, upon an House of Commons’; no matter how the regime may average at best; he is nearly sure to be badly educated look from the outside, a ‘new House of Commons can for business…He probably passed the whole of his despotically and finally resolve’ all questions of state, youth in the vicious situation of the heir apparent…’ including the ‘question of making or continuing a war’. Although Bagehot values having an ‘external authority’ But Bagehot did believe in strong sovereign power. that could deal with the impasses that arise periodically He greatly admired Abraham Lincoln for having in parliamentary governments, he would not trust made the most of a wartime executive in dealing with someone ‘who is nearly sure not to be clever and Southern secession. Crossman tells us how grieved he industrious’ to assume this role. He seemed delighted was by Lincoln’s assassination because of his reverence

Web: www.salisburyreview.com 26 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 for this powerful leader. If he saw the unification of ‘A deferential community in which the bulk of the Germany in 1871 as a problem (so did the Marquess people are ignorant is therefore in a state of what of Salisbury) it was not because he disapproved of the is called in mechanics unstable equilibrium. If the decisiveness of the Iron Chancellor, but because he equilibrium is once disturbed, there is no tendency to foresaw the dangers to England of a mighty continental return to it, but rather to depart from it.’ Unlike Mill competitor. he had no faith in mass education but believed the He did not oppose executive authority any more than respect for venerable institutions was what kept the Thomas Hobbes, but believed that the ‘choice of the ‘best constitution’ in place. Any educational process chief executive should remain in the ‘People’s House’. that drove a wedge between the populace and their The obstacle to the executive will would presumably objects of awe would weaken what was best in the come from the House of Lords, which retained a power English government. of veto. But this ‘resistance’ could be effectively met, if The second edition of The English Constitution, the party in power appointed additional members to the which came after Disraeli’s extension of the franchise, House of Lords, until that body did what the Commons warned grimly against the possible effects of the new wanted. Such a measure was threatened by the Liberal legislation. Although Bagehot believed that there was government in 1911, when it tried to emasculate the an ‘unrepresented class of skilled artisans’, to whom veto power of the Lords. one could extend the vote without destabilizing the He was confident that England would continue to regime, he lamented that ‘the Reform Act of 1867 did have a fused executive-legislative government lodged not stop at skilled labour; it enfranchised unskilled in the House of Commons that would be checked labour too. And no one will contend that the ordinary by built-in controls. The Prime Minister ‘being working man who has no special skill, and who is the nominee of the majority party is likely to share only rated because he has a house, can judge much its feelings’ and would depend on continued party of intellectual matters.’ Bagehot blames reckless Tory support for his administration. Moreover, the House of leaders, who passed this Act over the heads of their Commons could dissolve any government if a majority constituents. ‘On the other side most of the intelligent of its members withheld their confidence. The broad Liberals were in consternation at the bill’; yet they middle class elects Parliament, and this social base remained silent when it passed because ‘they would was more useful than the House of Commons and the have offended a large section of their constituencies cabinet. if they had resisted a Tory Bill because it was too Fortunately, England’s middle class belonged to a democratic.’ ‘deferential community’, which recognized political The preface to the second edition might be the most excellence when it showed up. Bagehot was concerned conservative commentary that Bagehot wrote. He that the ‘highest class’ would no longer be able to rule insisted that there was nothing just or moral about if England became more democratic: ‘In communities extending the vote, if that change would weaken where the masses are ignorant but respectful, if you constitutional liberty and the quality of national once permit the ignorant class to begin to rule, you may leadership. Englishmen should not have congratulated bid farewell to deference forever. Their demagogues themselves on having a ‘newly enfranchised class’: will inculcate, their newspapers will recount, that the ‘We have not enfranchised a class less needing to be rule of the existing dynasty (the people) is better than guided by their betters than the old class [of small the rule of the fallen dynasty (the aristocracy).’ property owners]; on the contrary, the new class need Bagehot often changed his opinions; sometimes it more than the old. The real question is, will they he vented contempt on monarchs and lords, but submit to it, will they defer in the same way to wealth elsewhere he rushed to their defence as the bulwarks of and rank, and to the higher qualities of which these are constitutional order and popular morals. Like Macaulay, the rough symbols and the common accompaniments?’ Bagehot represented a triumphant bourgeoisie. He Bagehot regarded the Reform Act of 1867 as almost derided the relics of the political past when he spoke unstoppable, but irresistibility did not confer a holy for his ascending class, but defended what he called aura on what was passed. Nor did Bagehot equate the ‘theatrical show’ of monarch and aristocracy ‘justice’ with extensions of the franchise, particularly when in horror he contemplated the effects of a more if the effect of the widened suffrage would be a leap in democratic government. Unlike Mill, Bagehot did the dark. The Reform Act was impossible to stop, but not wish to extend the suffrage to the lower orders. as an advocate of ‘rule by the best,’ or at least of the In the last pages of The English Constitution, he went moderate, Bagehot felt obliged to oppose it. into his worst-case scenario if the lower class became empowered but lost its deference. back to contents

The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 27 Web: www.salisburyreview.com Reputations — 46 Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies Scott Grønmark

he Open Society and Its Enemies, written in government power rather than enabling a dictatorship New Zealand during the early years of the of the majority) was Popper’s preferred system because TSecond World War by the émigré Austrian ‘only democracy provides an institutional framework philosopher Karl Popper and first published in the that permits reform without violence’. Only by UK in 1945, was one of the most influential works of entrenching and shoring up democratic institutions political philosophy of the last century. Nowadays, can open societies defeat those wishing to revert to a it is largely ignored or has simply been forgotten. In more primitive, tribal, collectivist arrangement offering some ways, that’s understandable, given that some protection from the ‘strain of civilisation’ which version of the political system results from the threat of rapid Popper was advocating is what social change and the burden of most of those living in Western- personal choice. style liberal democracies have The idea Popper identified experienced – undoubtedly as underpinning all forms of to their benefit – during the totalitarianism was historicism, last 70 years. What struck which he defined as a belief in readers as bold at the time ‘inexorable laws of historical can now seem unexcitingly destiny’ – for instance, the old hat (or as one libertarian ‘inevitable’ establishment of an commentator recently put it, international Caliphate, or the ‘namby-pamby’). victory of the Proletariat or the But, rereading the book after Aryan race, or the nirvana of nearly 40 years, I was surprised Universal Equality. He saw such at how compelling it remains, teleological beliefs as resulting and how relevant to present partly from utopianism – ‘a threats. In particular, Popper’s deep-felt dissatisfaction with analysis of the persistent a world which does not, and menace of totalitarian ideology cannot, live up to our moral can effectively be applied to ideals and to our dreams of a variety of current ‘revolts perfection’ – and partly from against civilisation’ – most notably Islamo-fascism, sheer funk in the face of uncertainty. With the attempt but including the liberal fascism of the EU, the Green to return to ‘a state of implicit submission to tribal movement’s advocacy of global impoverishment, and magic’ we inevitably arrive at ‘the Inquisition, at the the distinctly adolescent strain of anarchy espoused by Secret Police, and at a romanticised gangsterism… the anti-globalisation mob. with the most brutal and violent destruction of all that The task Popper set himself on the day in March is human’. 1938 when he learned that the German army had Not everything Popper proposed resonates today. marched into his homeland was to explain why ‘open’ One of his less appealing ideas was that politicians societies – self-critical democracies whose members should behave like scientists. Their job, he felt, was are responsible for decisions affecting their own lives to find the best solutions to problems by conducting – are doomed to suffer successive attacks by those small-scale experiments which could be reversed wishing to establish ‘closed’, undemocratic societies or modified if found not to work. He described this where all decisions are made for their members by as ‘piecemeal social engineering’, in contrast to the an irremovable elite. In doing so, Popper hoped to large-scale utopian variety favoured by closed society identify the means by which open societies could enthusiasts. This scientific approach seems unattractive inoculate themselves against the poison of tyranny. to those of us who don’t necessarily view life as a series Democracy (which he saw as a mechanism for limiting of soluble problems, distrust the very concept of social

Web: www.salisburyreview.com 28 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 engineering, and feel that our politicians’ endless, tendency to curtail personal freedom during times of hyperactive tinkering with every aspect of our lives war (impressively restrained of him, given that this suggests an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. was written as European democracy was fighting for Popper’s main field was the philosophy of science, its very life) but, in a section that is possibly even and there’s one area where his desire to import more relevant in our slavishly multicultural era than scientific methodology is welcome: he felt the best when it was written, Popper insists that for a truly open form of society was one operating under the principle society to survive there must be limits to tolerance. of open criticism. Tyrannies, he felt, were doomed After conceding that the expression of intolerant partly because fearful henchmen are justifiably beliefs needn’t always be suppressed, especially if reluctant to tell their deluded, strutting leaders that their influence can be countered by rational argument their policies are failing. A similar point was made and public opinion, he gives us this distinctly un- by Popper’s friend and champion, Friedrich Hayek namby-pamby key passage: ‘But we should claim (who was instrumental in Popper’s being awarded the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; a key post at the LSE after the war), in The Road to for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to Serfdom, published in 1944. As Popper was essentially meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin a man of the social democratic left, one suspects that by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their some of the classical liberal ideas he propounded: followers to listen to rational argument, because it is free markets, light-touch government (he specifically deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the warned against interfering government officials), and use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, a firm rejection of the concept of a centrally planned in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the economy are as much a result of Hayek’s influence intolerant.’ Sound familiar? as of genuine conviction. But if some of these views It’s not just the strength of most of Popper’s were indeed grafted onto Popper’s essentially soft-left arguments which impresses. There is something core beliefs, he is to be commended for practising the heroic about the lack of moral preening or ideological critical openness he preached. rigidity, the absence of hysteria or extremism, the Popper’s political ambiguity has contributed to his all-pervasive tough-minded common sense. It was unpopularity with academics: there’s something in written by an overworked man, often exhausted and ill, The Open Society to infuriate everybody. His lack of living in near penury, exiled thousands of miles from support among left-wing academics (the vast majority home, expressing himself in what was in effect a third of the breed, obviously) probably stems from his language, labouring under an unsympathetic boss, in contempt for Marx’s followers; his lack of belief circumstances which made it well-nigh impossible in a powerful, beneficent state; his support for the to discuss his ideas with his intellectual peers, of individual over the collective; and his contempt for whom there were, admittedly, only a handful. That the ostentatious do-goodery of supposedly enlightened he managed to produce such a powerful, influential élites: ‘…our greatest troubles spring from something document bears testament to his brilliance and the that is as admirable and sound as it is dangerous – from sheer force of his will – by all accounts, Popper was a our impatience to better the lot of our fellows.’ pugnacious character. Popper was insufficiently critical of Marx himself Perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Open for right-wing tastes, and rather too suspicious of Society is that it owed its success to the general reader. unfettered capitalism, which he viewed as a ravening After all, it’s 800 pages long; most of it is taken up with beast in need of taming. As for conservatives, Popper detailed attacks on Plato, Hegel and Marx; it barely dismissed them as fear-filled reactionaries (although refers to the war; it was published in two volumes; he modified this view in later life). Conservatives, in and there is no concession whatsoever to sentimental turn, were no doubt alarmed by his rather technocratic populism – hardly a recipe for bestsellerdom. What attitude to social and political traditions, which he felt it had in its favour was Popper’s ability to get his could safely be jettisoned or modified when they had point across and to make ideas exciting, even those in outlived their usefulness, his rejection of systems based support of moderation. Unlike most works of political on the need to accommodate human nature, and by his philosophy, it is remarkably readable. endless and rather wearying emphasis on the need for Liberal democracy once more finds itself menaced constant reinvention. by totalitarian thugs and their fellow-travellers: a But what really stands out on rereading The Open propitious moment, one would have thought, to revive Society is how extraordinarily often Popper is simply the reputation of such a staunch defender of liberty, right. For instance, he warns against politicians’ and of this key work. back to contents

The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 29 Web: www.salisburyreview.com Roy Kerridge

know of a police station, now closed, which married a Boswell’. ‘He was one of the Woods of held noisy parties in the back room once a week. Wales’). Waters have been further muddied by English- I Sitting next door, in a public building, trying to born Irish tinkers who now describes themselves as write books, I could hear the unmistakeable sound of ‘gypsies’. Irish tinkers, a fascinating people in their black British revelry reggae music booming. At library own right, are Irishmen and women whose ancestors closing time the next-door club would also close and became itinerants. Romany gypsies are, or used to be, over excited young men with tiny eye-pupils would a proud and unique race. push and shove one another in their eagerness to get My feelings are much the same as those of Jewish out to the phone box and order more drugs from their people who regret it when one of their race ‘marries suppliers. out’. Later I solved this mystery when I found that the *** police station in question hired informers. Every week Talking of immigration, as everyone seems to be they held a party for their informers, their only window doing, I have narrowed down the causes of this scourge to the black criminal community. Surely the police or boon (cross out that which does not apply). There didn’t sweeten their guests with drugs confiscated are two main causes, and one is that nature abhors from others? a vacuum. When war work with its high prestige A friend of mine complained to the police at this and pay ended along with the Second World War, station about a criminal Irish family in his street women refused to go back into service and so created who were making his life a misery. Eagerly the desk Continental au-pairs. Former mill workers refused to sergeant enrolled him as an unpaid informer, giving go back to the mills and so created Asian Lancashire him a phone number and telling him to report on and Yorkshire. the family once a week. He dutifully noted down No one talks of au-pairs any more, as when they the numbers of white vans delivering or collecting became Filipino all pretence of teaching them English computer parts, but felt that the outwardly grateful and making them one of the family disappeared. police were secretly laughing at him. One day when Likewise, no one talks of Asian mill workers any he visited the police station he was shooed away by a more, as the second generation of ‘Asian Northerners’, panic stricken officer. He realized that the Irish family brought up in England, refused to work in mills and all were giving information to the same policemen about the mills closed. (Some have resurfaced in Asia itself, him as a suspected paedophile. All this coming and but that’s another story.) going amused the police enormously. The second cause of immigration, which brought us Although this rogue police station is no more, the West Indians in the nineteen fifties, is patriotism and police of England now seem to be relying on informers love of Empire. As I dimly remember it, West Indians as never before. This may be why crack houses are came here not to take jobs that English people didn’t flourishing, as convenient nests of criminals to be want, but to live and work in England where the Queen culled in occasional raids but otherwise encouraged lives. To their sorrow and disappointment, they at first as long as the patrons inform on one another to the found neither work nor dole very often. After many police. In this hidden world of feuds and lies, how vicissitudes, the men found work in public transport can information be trusted or presumed to be correct? and the women in hospital cleaning. The result was *** that these jobs became known to white people as ‘black Is it racist to regret the disintegration of a race? If jobs’ and only then did white people cease wanting to so, you can all shout at me ‘racist out’! as I cannot do them. help feeling sad to see Romany gypsies intermarrying The more people curse immigrants the more I feel I and consorting with Irish tinkers. This would not long am an immigrant myself, an immigrant from nowhere. ago have been inconceivable, given the once-proud How does the old song go? ‘I can’t feel at home in this snobbery of English Romanies, so similar to archaic world any more.’ upper class snobbery. (‘She was a Stanley, but she back to contents

Web: www.salisburyreview.com 30 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 ETERNAL LIFE

he gospels began to be written down not long are not memorable. There is nothing of the beauty of after the first Easter – when certainly the holiness in them. They are really vapid and useless. Tdisciples were still alive. Now here’s what I find When we hear the words of a traditional service or read truly impressive: the gospels do not flinch from telling the English Bible, we are drawn into the vast intimacy us that the disciples were cowards. They let Jesus of the presence of God. The new services are banal. down – Peter particularly denied him with curses and They are the theological equivalent of junk food. they ran away. Yet in the end, they are changed by Our It needs to be said also that the new services have Lord’s resurrection and they came back and preached, destroyed the splendour of the Anglican tradition of taught and worked miracles just as he predicted they worship and spirituality in another way. The failed would. They gave their lives as the first Christian new words don’t fit the marvellous old tunes. So they martyrs. But they did not spin the gospel narrative to have to provide us with some failed new tunes as well. show themselves up in a good light. Just think of that: Once I had to attend a Chrism Mass in Bloomsbury and it’s another good reason for trusting the reliability of the tune for the revamped Gloria in Excelsis was bad the gospels, if you still think such reasons are required. enough to win the Eurovision Song Contest. There is no Compare and contrast the old and the new. Some such thing as noble truth in ignoble words. And there is modern disciples of Christ, prominent leaders of the no such thing either as spiritual uplift in dumbed down church, have denied him and traduced the gospel for musical doggerel, the twang of the liturgical guitar, the forty years. But, unlike the first disciples, they have choir replaced by the song group who only know three not come back to make good. Certainly none has been musical chords. martyred. One only thinks the pity is that, having done Lex orandi lex credendi. How we pray reveals what such damage to the church, they did not imitate the we believe. The new liturgists accuse people like me first disciples on Maundy Thursday and run away and of merely liking what is beautiful. It says something stay away. Instead they have hung around, clinging about them doesn’t it that they should think a taste for to their mitres, their palaces and their vast and effete beauty is a defect? But when you change the words synodical bureaucracy. And the result of all their doings you inevitably change the meaning of what is being has undermined the gospel and the church. said. And the new services have emasculated and I want to spell out exactly how the leaders of our undermined Christian truth. This is because they don’t church have failed us for two generations and what we face the facts of life. Anything not nice, like sin and must do to repair the damage. First they have failed by judgement, has been fairly thoroughly expunged. This sidelining to the point of destruction our sacred texts is to offer a lying vision of human nature. in English, principally The King James Bible and The We need to know that we are sinners under Book of Common Prayer. The Catholics have ditched judgement, for only then can we kneel down and the Latin Mass. They have done this partly because of receive the glorious gospel of God’s forgiveness. One their slavish attachment to modernity, as if it were an wants to ask these failed leadership charlatans and item of their faith that today always knows more and incompetents, these euphemising bourgeois, why they better than yesterday. They have also invented new jump up and down and throw their arms in the air so and ugly forms of services, rather as many modern much. What is there to be joyful about? If we were not architects design ugly buildings because they despise mired in sin, why should Christ bother to come and the past and are envious of their elders and betters. save us? The modern theologians fail to understand Unable to produce anything themselves which is other human psychology. They underplay human wickedness than ugly and already crumbling with obsolescence with the result that they are bound also to underplay before the foundations are finished, they wish only to redemption. They may pipe but I will not dance to their pull down and destroy the good that has gone before. tune. No evil, no death, no worms, no vile bodies – The modern services don’t do what they were so all their talk of salvation is worthless, for all their meant to do. The period of liturgical revision, really banana-split smiles and hideous backslapping. vandalism, has seen the biggest desertion of the pews in So what is to be done? We are a generation in chaos, all church history. And why? Because the new services a decadent civilisation under judgement. There are four

The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 31 Web: www.salisburyreview.com things we must do if we want to avoid destruction. We And most importantly of all, we must ask God to make must recover intellectual rigour. We must understand us desire him. St Augustine said that the best way to what manner of people we are: not rather nice people understand how much God loves us is to think of erotic actually who have no need of the Saviour; but sinners love between a man and his wife. We must ask God under judgement. We must recover moral seriousness to kindle in us an intensity of affection and desire for and return to the laws which God set down under him that will transform our lives. We don’t adore God Moses. That is, we must stop regarding men and naturally. We must beg him to make us desire him. women as mere consumers of sensations and thrills All this is not for the hierarchy to do. They have – any thrill will do. This is the pig philosophy which failed. They are apostate. They can’t do it. We must destroys the dignity of mankind made in the image do it, the traditional laity. We who used to be called of God. the holy common folk of God. We must turn again to the beauty of holiness. Words and music that reveal the world charged with the Peter Mullen is a retired Church of England Priest grandeur of God. We must stop trivialising holy things. and a writer. back to contents ARTS AND BOOKS

principle unfortunately abandoned as early as the A Message from the Founding eighth century. Since it has not adapted, nobody really knows how much it means. Are we still to Editor stone adulterers? Is investing money at interest still categorically forbidden? To know where we are, we John Jolliffe need to be told. Then there is the European Union. It arose ‘to unite people around their shared interest in peaceful How to be a Conservative, Roger Scruton, Bloomsbury, coexistence’. Sadly, however, this simply is not the 2014, £20. way in which free people behave, except in response to a deadly crisis, when it is often too late, as it so As most readers know, Roger Scruton was the nearly was in 1940. Although it is not strictly the founder-editor of the Salisbury Review, and we are result of nationalism, Scruton detects a ‘culture of all in his debt. He has written a number of influential repudiation’ which has grown up in universities here books (unfortunately not listed here) on more or less and in Europe and which seeks to demean and destroy philosophical subjects, and has now tried to lay down just about everything that was previously held sacred. how the crumbling of cultural, religious and political It is destructive rather than constructive, and certainly standards in the past half-century can be resisted and has no clear or convincing idea of what it wants to put even to some extent reversed. His new book is based in the place of what it is destroying. on a profound political philosophy, or what political Conservatism, on the other hand, should start with philosophy ought to be, and is much more than a a much more positive position, of seeking to preserve response to the dismal plight of this country today. and defend what we value. This sometimes bursts out He first examines various forms of truth, arising from in the most unexpected places. Even the French, often such sources as nationalism, socialism, capitalism, great lovers of disruption, have shown in the recent liberalism, and environmentalism. Following Adam nationwide rally in Paris their determination to defend, Smith, he reminds us that without a sense of justice, as a nation, the concept of free speech, however much a love of beauty, and a habit of unselfish generosity, it may be abused. Of course ‘free to say what?’ is a society will disintegrate, and in some respects has question they do not answer. already begun to do so. Nationalism is believed by Scruton next tackles the weaknesses of socialism, some to be the great cause of the main disasters in under which ‘the products of human labour are nineteenth and twentieth century Europe. Crucially, essentially unowned until the state redistributes them’, Scuton is merciless on the inadequacies of Sharia, and where ‘every success is someone else’s failure’, which was originally supposed to ‘adapt the revealed and every failure must be compensated by the state in law to the changing needs of society’, a benevolent the name of ‘a fairer society’. The trouble here is that

Web: www.salisburyreview.com 32 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 the ups and downs of human life simply cannot be is far from being entirely materialistic. It believes in evened up in a way that is ‘fair’ to all concerned. Far friendship and cooperation, and the existence of free better as a general principle was Winston Churchill’s associations for religious, cultural, recreational and idea, early in his political career, that the state should sporting activities, unhindered by any idea that the provide a safety net beneath which nobody could state knows best. fall. This may have been more or less practicable The thought behind all these conclusions is always under the great reforming Liberal government before lucid and well developed. But the words in which it is 1914, but what happened subsequently, with the expressed are often opaque, sometimes even obscure. increasing complications of modern life, was that If it is not heresy to say so, the prose is sometimes the more help was provided, the more was claimed pretty leaden. However, the content is so important, as a (previously undreamed of) ‘right’. As Margaret and often of such crucial relevance today that any Thatcher concluded, ‘the trouble with Socialism is that reader who perseveres will be well rewarded. But the sooner or later (since money does not grow on trees) the questions considered are so varied and so wide that it money runs out: as one of Brown’s Treasury ministers is impossible to draw attention to them all in a review. admitted on losing office, there is ‘no money left’. Many people will benefit from the book, not least Scruton goes on to analyse the ‘truth’ in capitalism David Cameron. If you are on the side of the angels, and liberalism. On the former, he justly observes that dear reader, why not send him a copy for Easter? His material values, aided by unlimited and unscrupulous address (at present) is 10 Downing Street, London advertising, erode our awareness that ‘such things as SW1. The more copies he receives, the harder he will love, beauty and sex cannot be put on sale for to do find it not to do something to correct the many evils so is to destroy their ultimate attractions’. They can to which it draws attention. back to contents only be preserved, if at all, by education, true culture and agreed standards, all of which are constantly Servant to the Devil endangered by capitalism when red in tooth and claw (see Rupert Murdoch and others, passim). C J Fox When it comes to liberalism, he is particularly good on the UN Declaration on Human Rights, in its demands for a right to work, to leisure, to a standard A C H Sisson Reader, ed Charlie Louth and Patrick of living sufficient to guarantee health (which of McGuinness, Carcanet, 2014, £19.95. course it can never do). These are claims against the state, instead of demands for freedom from the state’s Alistair Miller’s call, in the Winter 2014 Salisbury encroachment on people’s lives. This has led to an Review, for the English to reassert their identity and ‘inflation of rights’, probably of an unlimited nature. speak their nation’s name at a time of social and ethnic For example, when the right to a family life entitles flux coincides with the launch of a new anthology a criminal who is also an illegal immigrant to escape showcasing a poet-critic forthright in his affirmation deportation; when the right to the traditional lifestyle of England. of one’s ethnic community is used to install a park I first came on the work of Charles Hubert Sisson of mobile homes in defiance of planning law (to the (1914-2003) in 1962 at a bookshop in New York City. perpetual annoyance of those around it); when bankers There I found a stark-looking literary magazine from successfully claim outrageous bonuses as a ‘human London, branded X, which enthused over the diverse right’; when the courts are burdened with similar cases output of C H Sisson and printed 10 of his tigerish at the rate of seven a day in Britain, at a cost of £2bn a or often darkly-ruminative poems to document its year to the taxpayer, we may ask whether there is any praise. X revealed that this master of ‘creative gloom’ solid argument that would enable us to distinguish the was also a senior English civil servant, of all sedate- true from the false among the many applicants. The sounding things. I was permanently taken. But since chief beneficiaries of all this are of course the multitude this strange functionary had defined a civil servant in of lawyers employed in such cases. a poem as ‘civil to everyone, and servant to the devil’, Scruton finally covers ‘the truth in Conservatism’. I felt a trepidation when I first met the Bristol-born Mr It includes ‘the view of human beings as accountable Sisson in London. to each other, bound in associations of mutual However, he turned out to be more civil than satanic responsibility and finding fulfilment in the family and took me from our rendezvous, at his fine Ministry and the life of civil society’, and certainly not just in of Labour office overlooking St James’s Square, to striving relentlessly to satisfy private desires, by means a pub near Piccadilly Circus. At Ward’s Irish House fair or foul. Though it encourages private enterprise it we lunched with some of Sisson’s authorial friends,

The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 33 Web: www.salisburyreview.com several of them actual Irishmen yet tolerant of his credentials. It was not that I was sanctimonious about aversion to the later W B Yeats and profound feeling her rightness. Certainly I felt England to be in the for England. right…’ The antagonism towards Yeats was set out in a Sisson ascribed special importance to the feeling 1971 essay now reprinted in a 500-page selection of for ‘native country’. In an anthologized poem called disarming verse and prose called A C H Sisson Reader. ‘Place’, he wrote with didactic earnestness: Sisson-on-Yeats strikes me as a monumental instance We cannot afford to scoff at the pays natal, of a typical Englishman’s exasperated reaction to a Unless our minds are to be born without content; Celt ‘cutting a figure’. But it is just as destructive as Nor at the acres in which we spend our childhood, Sisson-the-critic’s more sombre deflation of the later Unless the things we see are of no account, T S Eliot. There he mounts an acute analysis of why Do not fill our minds, are nothing but generalities. he finds the much-beloved Four Quartets and other What do we see? Faces on a television screen… post-Waste Land poetry by that ‘artificial Englishman’ So we live no-where … a falling-off from his spectacular beginnings. Sisson moved back to his native West Country Sisson’s article on Eliot forms another segment when he retired around 1973. (This followed by two of the Reader. The book honours the centenary of years his startling, three-part protest in the Spectator Sisson’s birth and is edited by two Oxford academics, magazine – defying tight-lipped Whitehall tradition his grandson Charlie Louth and Patrick McGuinness. – against proposed service ‘reforms’.) His new home The editors had a wealth of brilliant outpourings at in Langport overlooked the serene Somerset Levels their disposal, starting in the 1930s and including near the centuries-old All Saints’ Church of which he much in addition to poetry and literary criticism. The became an outspoken champion in the emerging age concern for England that marks Sisson’s writing, and of church closures. now echoes Alistair Miller’s patriotic rallying cry, From Moorfield Cottage there poured cascades of commonly takes the form of a passion for the nation’s multifarious poetry and prose during the next 30 years. land. ‘When shall I see England again?’ cries the poet On occasional visits, I accompanied him in regulation in ‘Aller Church’, out on his travels but pining after wellies, half-wading across sodden fields where – as the quirky domestic landscape. And in another of the he put it in a Reader poem called ‘The Hare’ – he and many newly-anthologized poems, ‘In Flood’, he asks another denizen named Gordon ‘walked/ Talking of about the homeland: apples, prices and bog-oak’. There he himself avowedly belonged, ‘where the pasture squelched underfoot/ And Do you know it? It is Arthur’s territory England stirs, forever to hold my bones’. The poem Agravaine, Mordred, Guinevere and Igraine – Do you hear them? Or see them in the distant ends by conceding that the city life was favoured by sparkle? some as an alternative to all this. Perhaps so, ‘But at Likely not, but they are there all the same. the Last Judgment it will stand/Abject before the power of the land.’ Moreover, in full poetic maturity Sisson Among the anthology’s deep-delving literary seems to have shed his Anglican belief in an Afterlife commentaries is an essay on the poet Edward Thomas, and espoused the prospective absorption of his remains eloquent devotee of the English countryside who was by Somerset’s soil as his posthumous destiny. As the killed in the First World War. Asked after his enlistment Reader poem called ‘In Flood’ imposingly put it: ‘… why, at age 37, he joined the fight, Thomas famously among the named dead I shall be gathered/ Speaking brandished a handful of crumbled English soil and to no man, not spoken to, but in place.’ replied, ‘Literally for this.’ Sisson, who served in World Ironically, one of Sisson’s most scathing critiques War II, would have said the same. involved another writer-resident of little Langport. His emotional account of the intellectual atmosphere th th This was the revered 19 century sage of constitutional before the second great 20 century war points and economic matters, Walter Bagehot. As noted in that same direction. It appears in a 1954 essay by the incisive Louth-McGuinness introduction called ‘Autobiographical Reflections on Politics’. to the Reader, Sisson’s dispute with the author This Reader entry tells of Sisson’s time as a visiting of Lombard Street focused on Bagehot’s alleged student in mid-1930s Germany, during the turbulence obsession with financial profit for its own sake. ‘The of freshly empowered Nazi rule. Candidly recounting central object of Bagehot’s writing…was to give after the War his first-hand experiences, he says that exclusive respectability to the pursuit of lucre’. Sisson he didn’t share the ideological hesitations of some thought that this and relentlessly high productivity of his compatriots about the looming international demands threatened to leave humanity mindless as struggle: ‘For me there was no doubt about England’s well as without the solace of ‘place’, a process later

Web: www.salisburyreview.com 34 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 compounded by the revolutionary technologies of his T H White’s goshawk was ripped from its nest and he own time. Appropriately a salient part of the polemic trained it with a ruthless incompetence. If Macdonald’s he called The Case of Walter Bagehot is included in account is accurate, I cannot be the only reader who the centennial collection. felt unsettled and angry at the novelist’s cruelty. Also enriching the weighty paperback are Sisson’s White described the breaking in of his hawk, Gos, as explanations of how he escaped absorption into a battlefield. His struggles with the terrified bird had the orthodox leftism of the 1930s or into moneyed ‘the logic of a sadist who half-hates his hawk because Whiggery, emerging instead as his own sort of stoutly he hates himself,’ she writes. In the end Gos escaped independent Tory. His traditionalism was saved from from him, flying away with the jesses still on its legs, mustiness by his proximity to literary modernism and jesses that would probably have caught in a tree branch his immersion in the raw practicalities of 20th century where it may have starved to death. administration. Macdonald is much kinder about the novelist’s As an anthology, A C H Sisson Reader is a success, sadistic attitude to his hawk than I would have been. though the subject’s fiction is omitted from the She is also much kinder to her hawk Mabel than T H numerous selections and a biographical chronology White was to Gos. Oddly enough it doesn’t seem to of the busy Companion of Honour would have been have occurred to her to consult the body of modern helpful. But the book benefits from the provocative training theory that now exists, perhaps because she edge produced by such entries as the essay in which is in love with traditional hawking methods. Sisson attaches an enduring importance to the role From Harting’s Hints on Hawks to T H White’s The of the Monarch in present-day English governance. Goshawk, she read all the books as a child and at the Overall, it is possible to predict with Alistair Miller that age of eight condemned the novelist for his attitude England may yet rise again if provided with stimulants towards his bird. Seduced by her adult reverence like this inspirational book. for his skill as a writer, she now finds this childish back to contents compassion embarrassing. Hawking lore has her in its grasp, a grasp as relentless as the gripping talons of a A Fine Raptor goshawk like Mabel. It is probably her English Literature degree from Celia Haddon Cambridge that makes her love affair with hawking as much about literature as about any natural history of the real birds. ‘I am her friend, and she my playfellow,’ H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald, Jonathan Cape, wrote Bert in his Treatise of Hawks and Hawking in £14.99. l619, an experience unknown to T H White’s poor goshawk but enjoyed by Mabel. Hawking is a weird pastime, a sort of killing by proxy. Her hawking obsession means it is not enough for A bird of prey is trained to fly off and hunt, then return Macdonald to visit the wild goshawks in Lakenheath, to the human hand. It’s difficult enough to train a dog she must possess one of her own. In the book-lined to come back after chasing a rabbit. Yet dogs have been room of her house, again and again she takes the hood domesticated for tens of thousands of years. Hawks are of her newly purchased and terrified bird. It cannot fly wild and taming any wild animal is a seriously time- off because of being tied with jesses and she has the consuming activity. grace to admit this is a hateful procedure, but hawks Strange, then, that this is the preoccupation, indeed have to be wearied into compliance by a patient human. obsession, of Helen Macdonald, a Cambridge academic Mabel’s education also requires walking the streets and writer. Stranger still, her book is also a study of the and the parks of Cambridge. The goshawk, perched novelist T H White, better known for writing The Once on Madcdonald’s wrist, must learn about the reality and Future King rather than for training a hawk, and of humans. This is called carriage among falconers, a reflection on the death of her father. It is a curious for hawk enthusiasts share a special language, just as trinity of a book. fox hunters share Norman and strange English words Helen Macdonald’s own goshawk, Mabel, arrived such as the mort, bitch pack or whippers-in. on the ferry from Belfast in a large cardboard box. The shared language binds falconers into a close and She had been bred in an aviary and fed as a chick by a secret sect, a world she reveals to the reader. Hawks human. Wild animals can get used to, and be socialised are manned not tamed. They bate when they try to fly to, the proximity of humans if they meet them early away from the falconer’s fist. They wear hoods to calm in life. But hawks like Mabel are nevertheless tamed them down and are thus hoodwinked into believing rather than tame. that it is night time.

The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 35 Web: www.salisburyreview.com Like cats, goshawks live to hunt. ‘If you want a well- awaits with impatience. One does not know which to behaved goshawk, you just have to do one thing… admire more, his courage or his honesty. Give ’em the opportunity to kill things. Kill as much All surgeons, it seems to me, must be brave. It takes as possible. Murder sorts them out,’ advises a falconer. the ‘eye of an eagle, the heart of a lion and the hand Breeding goshawks in the restrictions of captivity is a of a lady’ to cut into the living body of others with tricky business, as the much larger female will kill the the intention of healing them: but such bravery ought male if she is not absolutely ready to mate. never to become mere bravado or foolhardiness. There Into this mix of obsession with hawking, T H White is a temptation to do something merely because it can and Mabel, Macdonald pours the memory of her father, be done, losing sight of the object of the endeavour, a Fleet Street photographer who like all journalists of namely to improve the life of a patient. If that is not his generation always wore a suit, ready at any time for achieved, then no degree of technical brio can justify any kind of job, from door-stepping on the pavement the surgeon’s intervention. to attending a posh do at the Savoy Hotel. Her father, There are slight qualifications to this principle, she believes, taught her how to watch and wait, the however, as the author subtly indicates. Surgeons essential skills for a taming a goshawk. improve with practice, and they can only do so at the This threefold mix of subjects is held in solution expense of their earlier patients, on whom their results by the power of her descriptive writing. It shouldn’t, will not be as good as those on their later patients. And, but does, work as a coherent whole. It aroused in me of course, new procedures, whose outcomes cannot be both a fascinated enjoyment of the world of hawking known in advance, and whose results may be anything and a horror at the cruelty of T H White. His bird Gos from miraculous to disastrous, cannot be assessed in probably died a lingering death hanging upside down advance. Great surgeons, of whom the author does not from a tree branch by its jesses. Macdonald’s Mabel claim to be one, who go down in the history of surgery, died of aspergillosis in an aviary. may therefore have an element of psychopathy about Hawks have come down in the world from the them, or at least an ability to blot out the memory of days when they were the possessions of the rich their failures from their minds. and powerful. They are now vermin in the shooting Marsh is not such a one: his failures haunt him, community. They are repeatedly illegally poisoned and I have rarely read, or even heard in conversation, or shot by gamekeepers to preserve the pheasants and such honest accounts of medical failure, some of it the grouse killed in large numbers by businessmen paying result of hubris. In one case, he failed to diagnose a to blaze away in the countryside. post-operative infection when he clearly should have H is for Hawk has more to say about humans than done, with catastrophic results for the patient that led about goshawks. It is a meditation on hawking, not to a £6 million out of court settlement. His only excuse hawks. But then we humans, whether falconers or was that he was distracted by fatuous managerial gamekeepers, seem unable to leave birds of prey to tasks at the time, but no doctor will read Marsh’s live out their lives alone. This remarkably well-written story without the hackneyed thought, there but for book immerses us into a secret world where hawks the Grace of God go I, coming into his mind, even if are leashed like dogs with leather and loaded with his branch of medicine is a good deal less hazardous symbolism. than neurosurgery. A moment’s inattention, a lapse in back to contents concentration, a single error of judgment, can undo a lifetime’s work and ruin a reputation. Fortunately for The Brain Surgeon’s Tale doctors, most of their mistakes are without catastrophic consequence and British patients are, or were, nobly Anthony Daniels forgiving, though they are now being bred up to the glories of compensation, or compo in popular parlance, some of it undeserved. Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain If it is his failures that stick in the mind, this is Surgery, Henry Marsh, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, because Marsh emphasises them more than his £16.99. successes: to have done otherwise would have seemed boastful. But the extensive good he must have done This is one of the best books about medical practice that is obvious from some of the cases he describes: relief I have ever read. The author, a neurosurgeon nearing from trigeminal neuralgia, for example, a terrible the end of his career, recounts stories of his successes intermittent lancinating pain in the face that can and failures with such literary skill that the chapters drive patients to suicide. And he grew wiser with age, are like little adventure stories whose denouement one recognising that a short prolongation of life if it only

Web: www.salisburyreview.com 36 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 prolongs agony in a hopeless case is not a worthy aim of medicine. The doctor must always treat the patient The Great Craftsman and not his own guilt or distress at his impotence. The author is no unqualified admirer of the National Peter Mullen Health Service, whose status as a national idol or totem he finds inexplicable. He describes very well the Ezra Pound, Poet: A Portrait of the Man and his humiliations often, not always, visited upon patients, Work (vol II) A David Moody, OUP, 2013, £25. and also on doctors, by the sheer callousness of the system and the heartless idiocy of the spreading fungus Was he mad, an insane demagogue? An outright of management. When he himself required surgical Fascist, a womaniser and a bumptious poseur? A treatment he resorted to the private sector precisely shameless elitist? The most insightful critic since to avoid the loss of personal dignity that the NHS so Coleridge? A genius? Pound was all of these things. often inflicts. He does not say so, butI suspect that the Above all he was, as the title of Moody’s book insists, infliction of indignity, so long as it is on all patients a poet. So much of what passes for poetry is pretty alike, is what attaches the British to their system: poor stuff: neither ornament nor discourse. And not it is the Dunkirk spirit of the ill. I do not entirely everything that appears on a page, the words not quite mock this, and hope, when my time comes, I shall be extending to the margins, is a poem. A real poem cannot uncomplaining, a good patient like the others. be explained and it is always a mistake to ask what a There is a hilarious scene when Marsh goes to the poem means. It means what it says. It is the words on casualty department of his own hospital after having the page and nothing else. As Pound said, ‘Poetry is broken his leg (he soon transfers to the private sector). language charged with meaning to the greatest possible Faced by a receptionist behind what appears to be, and extent.’ And the purpose of the poet is to incarnate the probably needs to be, bullet-proof glass, the following world of things, to reveal the world directly. conversation takes place: Some years ago, I was asked to preach at the ‘Name’ she asked. annual service of the Honourable Company of Master ‘Henry Marsh.’ Mariners. The congregation consisted of old sea dogs. ‘Date of birth?’ What could I, a mere land-lubber, say to them? I began ‘Five three fifty. Actually, I’m the senior consultant by reading them the opening of Pound’s first Canto: neurosurgeon in this hospital.’ And then went down to the ship, ‘Religion?’ Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly seas, and This wonderful exchange demonstrates in a handful We set up mast And then went down to the ship, of simple words, the impersonality of the whole Set keel and sail on that swart ship, system. Incidentally, Marsh is a master of explaining Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also complex clinical problems in words of one syllable, Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward and at the same time Man’s underlying existential Bore us out onward with bellying canvas… equality. No self-importance, no belief that one is The old sea dogs’ heads slowly looked up in made of completely different cloth from one’s fellow wonderment at these words of the supposed beings, could long survive the receptionist’s pro forma impenetrable elitist. These men knew about the sea. interrogation. Patient thou art, and to waiting list thou It was in their blood. And they recognised the sea and shalt return. the sailor indubitably in Pound’s verse. The poem is Mr Marsh is also very funny, though not without words made flesh. an element of lugubrious exasperation, on the new Moody’s remarkable book covers the years 1921- managerialism in the NHS. He is forced to attend 1939, perhaps Pound’s most creative and industrious courses on communication with customers, taught period during which he twice went over the indecisive, by a catering officer promoted to the bureaucracy, in neurotic Eliot’s messy, sprawling drafts of The Waste which the emptiest of platitudes are earnestly taught Land and ‘…turned them from a jumble of good and as if they were the thoughts of Pascal. One doesn’t bad passages into a poem’ – the most original and know whether to laugh or throw a brick through a influential long poem of the 20th century. Eliot was bureaucrat’s window today; the more the NHS pretends grateful for Pound’s help, without which that poem to be market-driven, the more Soviet it becomes. might never have been finished and he dedicated it I finished this humane and wonderful book to him with the words Il miglior fabbro – ‘the greater exclaiming, ‘Henry Marsh for Prime Minister!’ craftsman.’ In 1933, Pound procured an audience with Mussolini who asked him about his purpose in back to contents

The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 37 Web: www.salisburyreview.com writing poetry. Pound replied, ‘To put my ideas in Cythera, here are lynxes. order.’ Precisely. For the real poet does not pour out This is both sparse and exquisite. The reluctant his thoughts on to paper or, in that ludicrous phrase deposit of images on the mind’s floor. beloved of our educationists and the creative writing The best compliment one can pay Moody is to course, express himself. The true poet writes in order say that his writing in this book is suffused with and to find out what he thinks, to discover what’s in that haunted by Ezra Pound himself. residue on the floor of the mind. He said that the poet must not turn aside for beauty Canto XLV and distinguished between the Romantic who idealises an enchanted landscape and the Classic who is here Ezra Pound to do a job of work. And he mocked the verse of Romantics such as Housman: With usura With usura hath no man a house of good stone Come tum-tum Greek Ulysses come, each block cut smooth and well fitting Caress these shores with me; that desing might covr their face, The windblown tide has wet my bum with usura And here the beer is free. hjath no man a painted paradise on his church wall Pound spent all his life trying to discover himself harpes et luz and European civilization – which are the same thing, or where virgin receiveth message because the individual person is what he has imbibed. and halo projects from incision, Like Henry James and T S Eliot, Pound was an with usura American who knew his reality belonged to European seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines history and tradition. He sought out and encouraged all no picture is made to endure nor to live with those other writers, painters and musicians who came but it is made to sell and sell quickly to be known as Modernists. In London, Wyndham with usura, sin against nature, Lewis, in Paris, Joyce, whose Ulysses was published in is they bread ever more of stale rags 1922, the same year as The Waste Land. The sculptor is they bread dry as paper, Gaudier Brzeska, Stravinsky, Yeats and all those with no mountain wheat, no strong flour who understood that to be original one needs to look with usura the line growns thick backwards and to understand the tradition which has with usura is no clear demarkation shaped civilization and culture, for only by so doing and no man can find sight for his dwelling. can the writer or the artist, in Pound’s words, ‘… Stone cutter is kept from his stone make it new.’ Pound, being Pound, went even further weaver is kept from his loom and learnt Chinese ideograms, studied Confucius and back to contents commended Confucianism as a system more robust and reliable than Judeo-Christianity which, he said, had become ‘flabby’. The Halls of Nebuchadnezzar This American turned himself, as completely as he could, into a European and an ancient Chinese and Penelope Tremayne declared that all great writers are contemporaries: one could (and Pound did) talk about Sophocles and T E Hulme in the same sentence. This was quite an Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood, Justin achievement for a man born in 1885 in Hailey, Idaho Marozzi, Allen Lane, 2014, £25. – a single street with forty-seven saloons, a newspaper and one hotel, without locks on the doors. On his The dust jacket of this book tells us that the author grandmother’s side, Pound was descended from horse has ‘spent much of the last ten years living in Iraq thieves. and other places from Afghanistan to Somalia’, so he Pound insisted that, ‘The reader has the right, from has a much wider view of modern life in the Middle time to time, to be refreshed with shards of ecstasy.’ East than most of us get and not wasted his time. The And he practised what he preached: immense amount of material in the book might easily Here are lynxes have become stodgy but Marozzi has made it very Here are lynxes readable. Now and then he slips over into journalism, Is there a sound in the forest which is a pity because it trivialises what he is writing Of pard or of bassarid about and distracts the reader, but fortunately it gets Or crotale or of leaves moving?

Web: www.salisburyreview.com 38 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 rarer as the story goes on. He has extracted from the outside world then was still mainly through Damascus. eighth century to the twenty-first, not just a collection Baghdad itself for all its past glories had descended of gory or fanciful incidents but a coherent account of into little more than a dusty slum. the grandeurs and miseries of war that have beset the The fatal split of Islam between Sunni and Shia, which region and provided the background to what besets is still so balefully evident, dates from immediately some parts of it today. after the Prophet’s death. It was neither religious not The Assyrians may have been the first occupiers of political but dynastic, and therefore ineradicable; there Iraq as long ago as the fourth millennium BC. Iraq is nothing modern about what we are watching now is an Arabic name, Baghdad is Persian, meaning the in Syria and elsewhere. Haroun al Rashid, the greatest Garden of God. Either name might account for the of the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad, the listener to the stories that it was the site of the original Garden of One thousand and one Arabian nights’ tales, for which Eden. Nebuchadnezzar lived there – ‘the Jew-slaying, he is the only caliph whose name is still well known, temple-smashing, gold-loving despot’ of the sixth was a Sunni with all his dynasty; the successive and century BC. Alexander the Great was there too, and appalling Mongol hordes that engulfed his empire were the Parthians and the Persians; it was an insignificant Shia. Throughout history both Mongols and Arabs have fraction of their vast empire. The Umayyad dynasty been much addicted to cutting off their victims’ heads, were the first Arabs to have seen the possibilities in alive or dead, and to the public display of human body the fertile, often flooded palm-filled plain between parts pour encourager les autres. the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They claimed direct Marozzi does not discuss these matters for his subject descent from the Prophet, conquered an enormous is Baghdad, not Islam, but he has the literary skill to area of the near east and North Africa, established give his readers some inkling of the unbelievable size themselves as caliphs of all Islam and set up a powerful of the Hordes, their procedures and their total disregard capital at Damascus. In 752 AD a successful revolt was of human life. Tens of thousands at a time would be raised against them by the Abassids, also Arabs, with deliberately wiped out and built into walls or left as their own claim of direct descent from the Prophet. The manure. 9/11 was a pinprick compared with the scale victor, whose honorific was ‘shedder of blood’, sent of their operations, always carried out in the name of back the loser’s head to his brother, but himself died God. Since the beginning of this century conditions of smallpox shortly afterwards and was succeeded by in the City of Peace have been appalling and Marozzi his own brother, Mansour. This immensely talented makes no attempt to say otherwise, but he knows leader chose a site, for sound reasons on the eastern not from personal experience what physical and mental the western bank of the Tigris, on which he personally conditions on the spot are like and what improvements oversaw the building of a great fortress and palace. are, or might be, or are not, possible. His last chapter Thus arose, under his son and grandson, the fabled city makes very grim reading. of Baghdad, which lasted for 500 years and grew into The production of this book is impeccable: typos a legend for luxury, learning and civilisation. are absent, the notes are sensibly organised so that the Baghdad suffered successive and devastating reader can get at them without losing his place, the invasions in the following centuries, of which the maps show what the text refers to, the index is reliable Hulagu’s in 1257 must have seemed most like the and the illustrations are well chosen and beautifully end of the world. Hulagu was a grandson of Genghis reproduced. All this makes the book a pleasure to use. Khan (from whom Russia’s Ivan the Terrible was also back to contents a descendant, as were several other horrific destroyers, all seeing themselves as world conquerors appointed Piketty-boo! by Heaven). Hulagu’s self-announced mission oddly included ‘riding to the rescue of the oppressed Christie Davies Christian communities of the Middle East and Caucasus’. Perhaps this can be explained because he had a Christian mother. Marozzi mentions the Moslem Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Thomas Piketty, rulers’ custom of marrying Christian princesses and Harvard University Press, 2014, £29.95. the missionary advances of the Nestorians into central Asia. He does not enlarge on these, but he makes it Thomas Piketty has written a very thorough and clear that if the Christians were treated badly so were scholarly book drawing on a wealth of economic others, and the Jews have been treated worse down and historical data from many countries. He is to be to this day. Iraq became a part of the Turkish empire congratulated, but his lengthy tome does not merit the later and remained so until 1922. Contact with the worldwide attention that it has been given, let alone

The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 39 Web: www.salisburyreview.com the hype and adulation. The book has received this eyes will glow with enthusiasm, even though few of excessive praise because it tells left-wing intellectuals them have read Marx and even fewer have understood what they want to hear, and this culturally hegemonic it. But Piketty is not in any sense a Marxist. The title is group decides how such a book will be greeted. a marketing device and the Marxists are angry because The literary portion of the left-intellectuals will not it is a book about wealth and not about capital as they have ploughed through its 681 pages and even if see it, namely the ‘forces of production’ that produce they have, they will not have understood Piketty’s goods. Wealth is different. An individual’s wealth quantitative arguments or the tables he has posted on could include, say, paintings by Manet or Hockney line as appendices. So instead they have gushed that and unless the owner charges visitors to see them, their it is ‘beautifully written’ (forgetting that the version worth is essentially speculative, the gamble that in ten in front of them is a translation from the French) and years’ time someone else will be willing to pay a lot that it draws on the novels of Jane Austin and Balzac, more for them than their present price. It was a gamble thus showing that the author is one of them and not taken out by, among others, the pension fund of the one of those boring economists who suffer from what National Union of Railwaymen. The house the reader Piketty calls an ‘infantile obsession’ with mathematical lives in or Tony (the rich man in his castle) Blair’s models. four million pound mansion are capital items that The central claim of this book, which so much appeals provide services to their owner on an everyday basis, to the left, is that capitalist societies are becoming more but they are also assets that grow in value. Capital is unequal and that the very rich are getting even richer. not a simple concept and the notion of measuring ‘the Piketty tested this by comprehensively examining the rate of return on capital’ is very problematic. Piketty relevant data, in particular tax records and wills, over is a Gaitskellite and, like Gaitskell, he believes that very long periods of time. More problematically he socialism is about equality and not about socialism sees this shift as an intrinsic feature of capitalism, since (hence the Marxists’ anger). normally the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of Most welcome of all to the egalitarians will be growth of the economy, so that property income rises Piketty’s ‘cure’ for the growing inequality of ownership faster than incomes in general. So it should in an ageing in a world where money knows no frontiers. He society. If it did not, pension funds and insurance advocates a global wealth tax which none can escape; companies would not be able to support a growing then everything will be Piketty-boo! Even he admits population of aged people. Piketty’s understanding of such a scheme would be Utopian more like dystopian. these institutions is shaky. If there are such attractive Imagine a tyrannical United Nations bureaucracy rates of return why are people saving less? getting its hands on that kind of power or even the Piketty has also looked at transfers of money between wretched and inept EU. At a national level Piketty the generations and here he sees the emergence of a thinks that European nations that are heavily in debt new class made up of those who have inherited vast should pay the debt off by means of a capital levy on wealth and are watching it grow. Between 1914 and the wealth of their citizens. He makes the very fair the end of the 1970s, a time of disaster and destruction point that governments that have chosen to borrow their followed by thirty years of rapid growth, the ‘normal’ way to dodgy levels of debt often choose inflation as rules of accumulation of wealth were suspended an alternative way out, one which would impoverish and societies became more equal. Now we are back the middle classes as happened in Germany after to Edwardian plutocracy. The punitive taxation of World War I, while leaving the very rich still very rich. income from property during war-time and the period Something similar happened in Britain at the same time of austerity after World War II are now impossible when the Government decided not to have a capital because of globalisation. The rich can move their levy but to arbitrarily lower the rate of return paid money from country to country, from haven to haven, on war loan bonds on whose interest many people of and live much of the year outside the country of their modest means depended. Naturally the value of their citizenship. They are not trapped by taxes in the way bonds was seriously undermined and so it amounted people of more modest means are. Had Scotland to a capital levy but one that selectively hit the little become independent and the taxes advocated by people. the more lunatic egalitarians among the economists What is needed is not equality but growth that gives backing the SNP been introduced, the average income middle class people higher incomes and secure savings. of Berwick-upon-Tweed and Carlisle would have risen Who cares about the rich? Remember how much worse mightily. Hearts on the left, sporrans on the right. we were squeezed by the Trade Unions. Piketty’s book has the title Le Capital and its German back to contents translation is called Das Kapital. At this word leftist

Web: www.salisburyreview.com 40 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 by the end of Putin’s first 100 days as President. The Putonia final chapter brings readers up to date on the present state of kleptocratic authoritarianism in Russia, bearing Martin Dewhirst in mind that, if the West so chooses, the 2014 attack on Ukraine will be a great game changer, probably putting an end to geopolitical, if not philosophical, Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? Karen neo-Eurasianism for ever. Dawisha, Simon & Schuster, 2014, $30.00. The volume’s thesis is stated clearly in the Introduction. ‘Instead of seeing Russian politics as When the mighty USSR collapsed in 1991, who could an inchoate democratic system being pulled down have imagined that less than ten years later the President by history, accidental autocrats, popular inertia, of ‘post-Soviet’ Russia would be a ‘former’ officer bureaucratic incompetence or poor Western advice, in the KGB? This used to be a rhetorical question, I conclude that from the beginning Putin and his answered, if at all, by limp remarks about anything circle sought to create an authoritarian regime ruled and everything being possible, especially in Russia, by a close-knit cabal with embedded interests, plans, and references to Putin as an ‘accidental’ President and capabilities, who used democracy for decoration who never really wanted the job. This may be true, but rather than direction.’ Quoting a reliable (in this the ‘hidden’ theme of Karen Dawisha’s path-breaking case) source, Dawisha claims that the ‘creation of the study is that the rise to power of someone like Putin oligarchs was a revolution engineered by the KGB, may well have been the result of planning by other but then they [temporarily] lost control’. Full control ‘former’ KGB officers ever since the failure of the anti- was re-established through the arrest of Khodorkovsky Gorbachev coup in August 1991 (Yeltsin’s bodyguard, in 2003. The strategy from the very beginning was adviser and confidant in the first half of the 1990s revisionist and revanchist. As a notorious PR specialist was the ‘former’ KGB officer Aleksandr Korzhakov, put it, ‘By revanche I mean the resurrection of the great quickly promoted to become an army general), or at state’. This involved (although the author doesn’t put it least since Putin’s move in 1996 from St Petersburg so crudely, and refrains from classifying Putin himself to Moscow, where he almost immediately obtained a as an oligarch) replacing state socialism with, in effect, series of increasingly important positions in Yeltsin’s state capitalism. That was the Big Deal. top-level administration. Furthermore – and leaving This process meant that, according to a 1992 official aside various conspiracy theories – the centuries-old report of the St. Petersburg City Council of People’s tradition of Russian messianic imperialism has made it Deputies, some of Putin’s actions in the early 1990s almost impossible for most Russians to accept the loss, had already taken place ‘flagrantly and repeatedly now a quarter of a century ago, of even part of their in violation of the law’. Of course, because Putin empire and to help their country to become a ‘normal’ had (and has) various metaphorical skeletons in his modern state based on the rule (not ‘dictatorship’) of cupboard which helped rather than hindered his career. law. The widespread view that ‘big is beautiful’ and He likes controlling others, but he can be controlled ‘the bigger the better’ explains both why the virtual (and blackmailed) himself, however much he dislikes acquisition of South Ossetia in 2008 and the illegal this. As Dawisha puts it, for the ‘older generation annexation of Crimea in 2014 are so popular with most of KGB veterans who suffered a temporary setback of the less enlightened citizens of Russia. when the August 1991 coup failed, Putin represented But the question of whether someone rather like Putin the culmination of their ideological, ethnic, and was almost certain to become the leader of Russia is institutional desire for revanche’. This led to a situation only an incidental concern of Dawisha in her latest where Putin ‘was a player, and eventually a central monograph. What she provides, using a huge number player in the drama that did indeed bring to power an of sources which have not been given due prominence elite that was non-transparent, unrepresentative, and in any of the earlier books about Putin, is a well- highly corrupt from its very inception’. documented and very detailed account of the activities What is almost unbelievable is that the long-term of Putin and his close colleagues and friends from the strategy document was leaked to a newspaper which time of his KGB posting in the German ‘Democratic’ published many details from it in May 2000, at about Republic in the 1980s until the point when the essence the time when Putin was officially inaugurated as of Putinism (a farcical but still tragic version of President. The text (without the appendixes), in due Stalinism) became only too obvious (if only to those course disappeared from the Internet but can now be few Russians and foreigners who were following read in English translation on the intrepid author’s political developments within Russia really closely) website – see pp. 252-256, perhaps the most important

The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 41 Web: www.salisburyreview.com pages in the book. This document makes it clear that But what is our ‘immediate past’? David Kynaston from then onwards it would be Putin’s Presidential has defined his period as 1945-1979, roughly from the Administration (heavily staffed by professional election the Attlee government, bringing the Welfare siloviki, personnel from the various security services), State and nationalisation in its train, to when the latter, not the government, let alone the parliament, which at least, started to be rolled back with the election of would take all the key policy decisions. Moreover, Margaret Thatcher. The book under review is the sixth it would ‘not only be able to forecast and create in a series entitled Tales of a New Jerusalem (with six “necessary” political situations in Russia, but really more to come) and covers 1959-1962. be able to manage social and political processes in the Though not a period that defines itself as exactly Russian Federation and in the countries of the near as, say, 1914-1918, Kynaston argues that it was abroad’ (italics added). The ‘task at hand is to “start seminal to future decades. Politically, it starts with and to conduct a permanently increasing ‘offensive’ the election victory of the Macmillan government against the opposition”’. From then on, for the ‘élite’, in 1959 and charts the decline in its popularity to ‘rule number one would be that the law would be mid-1962, on which the scandals of 1963 merely set applied only to someone who had broken the Kremlin’s the seal. Aided by probably the most comprehensive internal rules – the guarantee of impunity before the diaries kept by a British prime minister since law was the primary benefit of maintaining loyalty’. Gladstone, a picture emerges of Macmillan himself Thus, Russia has ‘closed around Putin’s promotion as a relentless ‘moderniser’ (notably philistine on of revanchism abroad and conservatism at home’. As preserving London’s architectural heritage, he received a leading Russian sociologist has written, ‘Putinism a delegation pleading for the Euston Arch with his eyes is a system of decentralized use of the institutional and, we must assume, his ears, shut) conscious that his instruments of coercion…hijacked by the powers own time is short, whose voice, appearance and way of that be for the fulfilment of their private, clan-group life ironically symbolised all that was dated and ‘fuddy interests’. duddy’ about the British Establishment. Society in Russia is, as usual, very weak, but how Many of the key decisions on the transformation of strong is the state? An astute Russian economist has Britain’s cities and thus the lifestyles of many of their queried whether it even exists: ‘Instead of the state as inhabitants were taken in this period, as ambitious an institution implementing the course of a developing local councillors set about the demolition of historic country, we have a huge and uncontrolled private town centres and swathes of terraced housing, structure which is successfully diverting profits for its usually replacing them with soulless, characterless own use.’ Dawisha rarely uses the term ‘mafia’ and she slabs of concrete within which deterioration both is well aware that Putin and many of his colleagues of public behaviour and building fabric soon set are innocent of any crimes until they are deemed to be in. For every cautionary voice, such as the Leeds guilty by a properly constituted court of law (preferably housing administrator S I Benson’s comment that ‘our in The Hague, I would add). This situation means that experience shows that it is far better to avoid larger Putin’s top priority and main strategy must be to do dwellings in a multi-storey environment’, many more whatever is needed for him to stay in power for as long agreed with the praise of the Guardian’s architectural as possible, so as to bring up a younger generation of critic for Sheffield’s ‘bid to replace its nineteenth Putinistas who will be skilled enough to carry out a century confusion with something planned specifically smooth transition into the post-Putin era. By and large, for today’s needs’. Still, as one tenants’ leader pointed the West seems to accept this, lest a sudden change of out in 1960: ‘very few housing managers... or even regime in Moscow leads to dangerous instability in the chairmen of housing committees are actually council world’s second largest nuclear power. tenants’. Very few architects too, he might have added. back to contents Given the nationwide scale of redevelopment and You’ve Never Had it so Good the vast sums involved, Kynaston curiously makes little mention of the corruption which influenced a James Houston number of deals between certain architects, contractors and the often poorly- or un-paid local councillors who suddenly found vast and lucrative contracts in Modernity Britain: A Shake of the Dice, 1959-1962, their gift. Another major consequence which he does David Kynaston, Bloomsbury, 2014, £25. not address (perhaps saving it for the next volume covering the 1964 general election) was the effect on A distinguished historian once said that ‘the history people electoral politics. The large scale uprooting of urban know least well is the history of their immediate past’. communities broke forever the critical mass of working

Web: www.salisburyreview.com 42 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 class Conservative voters, notably in Liverpool and Then there are the quotes which shed intriguing light Manchester at first, between 1959 and 1964, resulting on the naivety of the 1960s Left, such as Tony Benn in a raft of Conservative losses in the latter year, who was telling us in 1960 that ‘Eastern European which were never to be reversed. Labour support, advance’(!) demonstrated that ‘the idea of private often underpinned by Catholic community networks, enterprise offering any hope to a community like weathered these changes far better. ours is....gradually being realised to be out of date.’ The first stirrings of the debate which, by the mid- As Kynaston reminds us, in the same period German, 1960s, was to bring about the aptly termed ‘cultural Dutch and Swedish parties of the centre-left had revolution’ in education are also recorded. Critics of reconciled themselves to ‘mixed economies’ and were the grammar schools quoted are perhaps typified by on the way to becoming natural parties of government. two education researchers, Jackson and Marsden, who Despite Hugh Gaitskell’s brave attempt to ditch Clause acknowledged their own ‘large debt to grammar school 4 in 1960, the British Labour Party had to endure the education’ but at the same time hoped that ‘our voice twists and turns of the Wilson era and then nearly two is the voice of the last grammar school generations’. decades in the wilderness before succumbing to the As we now know, they came perilously close to getting pink candyfloss of ‘Blairism’. their wish. It might be interesting to debate whether The volume takes us almost to 1963 – one of the the proponents of tower blocks or ‘comprehensivation’ most significant post-war years both for Britain and have had the more malign influence on British society the world. It will be interesting to see how Kynaston over the last fifty years. guides us through the next stage of the journey. ‘The working class’ Kynaston reminds us, ‘seemingly back to contents inexorably in the late 1950s and early 1960s moved ever further towards the centre of the cultural frame – Peter Ustinov’s Father via sociology, literature, cinema, television and much else....’ Curiously enough, probably the most influential Merrie Cave theatrical show of the period, Beyond the Fringe, was anything but proletarian in character, being written Klop: Britain’s most Ingenious Secret Agent, Peter and performed by four Oxbridge graduates; but two Day, Biteback, 2014, £20. of these, we are assured, were working class. So that’s all right then. As a boy Peter Ustinov was regularly sent out of Retail habits, an often undervalued indicator of social the room when his father’s friends came round. Not change, offer some striking statistics: in 1961, the 6,000 because they were an unsavoury bunch but because ‘self-service stores’ only accounted for 11 per cent of they were spies discussing high politics. Peter inherited UK retail sales and the average UK high street of the his talent to amuse from his father Jona, known as Klop time would be unrecognisable today. (bedbug) whose long suffering wife turned a blind In the spirit of having ‘never had it so good’, eye to the extra-marital adventures which gave him consumerism gathered pace. 1960 alone saw the his nickname. Despite his exotic ancestry, including arrival of the stripe in Signal toothpaste, ‘ready Ethiopian princesses and Russian aristocrats, and salted’ crisps, plastic carrier bags and refuse sacks the fact that he was only 5’2” with a head too big and the first automatic dishwasher. There was a way for his body, Klop always wanted to be the perfect to go, however. While 79 per cent of 1960 households Englishman. However his magnetic personality owned a television set, only 40 per cent had a washing more than compensated for his physical defects. machine, 31 per cent a car, 22 per cent a telephone and His weakness for attractive women proved useful in 21 per cent a fridge. extracting information while he was charming his way The book is a monumental and painstaking work round the social and political salons of Europe. Sir of research, drawing on a wealth of sometimes Dick White, head of both MI5 and MI6, described him daunting sociological data, enlivened by glimpses of as ‘his most ingenious operator’, while Robert Bruce- contemporary attitudes from diarists, and what was Lockhart praised him as ‘the brightest star in a brilliant still known as ‘the press’. Often the most revealing team of German foreign correspondents in London…he insights come from direct quotes, such as that from not only had a remarkable flair but also a penetrating a man identified only as ‘a worker’ who remarked to mind illuminated with a scintillating wit.’ Although the sociologist Ferdynand Zweig that ‘TV kills the Klop left behind no memoirs, the author has succeeded conversation. Nobody talks, we just listen’, a process in fashioning a gripping narrative, which will appeal to which has perhaps culminated today with the ‘tablet’ those addicted to the backstairs of history. This book and mobile phone.

The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 43 Web: www.salisburyreview.com would make an excellent film. plan to assassinate Hitler; he had already leaked details Klop’s father, Platon, refused to take an oath to the about the weapons research station at Peenemunde Tsar, sold his family estates and moved to Germany where the V1 and 2 were developed. Philby made sure but soon after settled in Jerusalem where Klop grew that this information was not exploited for Stalin was up speaking several languages. When the First World afraid that the Allies might make a separate peace with War started, the family split up; Klop and his brother Germany and turn against Russia. In any case, by 1944 went to Germany and joined the Air Service while the Allies were committed to unconditional surrender. his father and some of the family returned to Russia. After the war Klop’s star waned. Intelligence work After the war Klop worked for the Wolff news agency had became more technical than personal, while he in Berlin and as a Russian speaker he was sent to also suffered from his association with German exiles, Russia to report on the Bolshevik regime; he took the some of whom ended up in East Germany. Nor was opportunity to trace his family amid the chaos in the he helped by his close contact with Philby who was country. In Moscow he fell in love with Nadia Benois already suspected of treachery. Klop retired without who was looking for a man to help her escape from a pension and in 1957 Peter Wright was surprised to Russia. She sensibly insisted on Klop marrying her find a supposed hero living in poverty in a dingy flat. before they fled to England. Klop told him: In London Klop was a main player at the German When you work for them you never think about Embassy as well as acting as a go-between for important the future, about old age. You do it for love. And anti-Nazi visitors from Germany. Wolfgang zu Putlitz when it comes time to die, they abandon you….the at the Embassy, later helped to escape to safety from gentlemen run the business and the gentlemen have the Nazis by MI6, was Klop’s most valuable source short memories. back to contents of information. Klop also supplied information to anti-appeasers like Vansittart who had set up a private intelligence network. When Goebbels absorbed the From Pigsty to Semi Wolff Bureau into his state controlled News Bureau, Klop was sacked having refused to declare details of his Penelope Fawcett Hulme Aryan ancestry unless Goebbels did the same. He now officially worked for British intelligence with a cover The Making of Home, Judith Flanders, Atlantic as an art dealer, keeping an eye on both the German and Books, 2014, £20. Russian exiles, many of whom he had known socially since the war. In 1939 his encyclopaedic knowledge ‘An Englishman’s Home is his Castle’, or so our of, and contacts with, the Czech Secret service meant grandparents used to say. Now that the idea of a stable he was able to supply accurate details of the German middle class home is fading from memory along with invasion of Czechoslovakia a week in advance. aspirations for a mass property-owning democracy, In spite of the evidence, the resistance in the this book about ‘home’ is very timely. German Army high command did not receive much Judith Flanders carefully and humorously reconstructs encouragement from the Foreign Office, one of whose the way in which our ancestors used their homes for officials remarked that the German Army seemed to daily life, their physical surroundings, even what she expect Britain to save them from the Nazi regime. The calls ‘invisible furniture’ such as spittoons, which are disastrous fiasco at Venlo (Holland) in November 1939 never shown in paintings. She finds this is a many- where two British SIS officers were kidnapped by the layered and complicated exploration, from the Dutch Nazis, had been sanctioned by Chamberlain in the hope masters and Samuel Pepys to the present, when glossy of a compromise peace. Klop was not directly involved photos of our ‘machines for living in’, as Le Corbusier but after the war he interrogated Walter Schellenberg, called them, are often so unrealistic. the head of the counter intelligence department, who In attempting to make ‘invisible patterns visible’, told him he thought after 1940 Germany would lose she tries to tease out what was really ‘done’ from the war and had himself been attempting a settlement contemporary accounts in northern Europe and the with the Western powers. USA, particularly from England and the Netherlands. In 1943 Klop went to Lisbon, an extraordinary This exploration was not an easy matter. She found crossroad for spies and racketeers as well as penniless that in two London houses in 1710 one had servants refugees, but he did not know that Kim Philby, who was and their masters completely segregated, even using in charge of counter espionage in Iberia, was working different staircases, while in another titled aristocrats for Russian intelligence. Otto John, one of the key shared rooms with their maidservants and footmen. figures in the German resistance, told MI6 about the Home is different things to different folk. An inquest

Web: www.salisburyreview.com 44 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 in 1865 into the death of a man who had starved to sees as the first age of consumerism. Suburban homes death heard that he refused to go to the workhouse represent a longing for an imaginary pre-industrial because he couldn’t bear to give up ‘the comforts of age. Underneath the twee pitched roofs and inglenook his own little home’. The worthy middle-class men fireplaces of the Arts and Crafts movement she smells investigating couldn’t see anything in the place apart a fear that English history was being swept away by from a pile of straw. A photo of a domestic interior industrial capitalism, which of course it was. taken in 1910 looks poverty-strickenn but was at the In Britain we also love our despised ‘Mock-Tudor’, time fairly prosperous, full of new consumer durables, with its resonance of ‘Merrie England,’ which she gradually filling with what H G Wells called ‘the points out with a contemporary relish was always far jackdaw dream’, of accumulated stuff. removed from reality. The Making of Home is startling and fun, as Flanders Her book shows us that ideas of domesticity may shows us how our ancestors mainly stayed at home have changed but they have largely survived. It might in cramped dark places, where there was no privacy well have been entitled ‘The Quest for Cosiness’, and the only utensils were the ones needed to work which held true until 20th-century modernism began and eat. From the 16th century on with the growing looking for clean lines and functionality, detesting economy, most homes became places of toil. The ornament for ideological reasons. But she has to admit whole family from infants to the elderly had tasks to that the recent architectural project has largely failed perform, gathering fuel, foraging, hunting, carving to get most of us to turn our homes into ‘machines’. utensils, weaving, spinning and cooking on the fire. We still like our chintz, rugs, curtains and ornate, She provides vivid statistics; ‘in New York in 1800, often ersatz fireplaces. Much of our definition of home less than five per cent of men worked outside the home. is about souvenirs and inheritances, the knick-knacks By 1820 it was twenty five per cent, by 1840, seventy. which recite back to us the story of our most intimate The writer is a real historian interested in ideas and personal lives. the reality behind precious myths. She eviscerates nostalgia which she traces back to the 18th century, and back to contents FILM

study at Oxford, yet none of them utters a complete Testament of Youth sentence. Vera was studying languages but seems to suffer from verbal poverty. BBC Films I suspect that the script for this film is half as long as the BBC TV series of 1979, written from Brittain’s Jane Kelly own words by Elaine Morgan, the Welsh writer, herself an Oxford graduate. It seems that BBC films are not about words anymore, visual effect is everything. This script was written by Juliette Towhidi, who penned the ‘I like clarity,’ declares the lead character in Testament corporation’s cumbersome Death Comes to Pemberley, of Youth, the bio-pic of Vera Brittain the pacifist writer. two years ago, and an un-memorable British rom- She certainly has it in this film as everything is flagged. com called Love, Rosie. She seems to be a favoured There are surtitles telling us dates and locations, shots specialist in the middle-class twee which now cynically of newspaper headlines giving historic context, in case rules the taste of many TV producers. This Testament we missed it. Nothing is allowed to puzzle, everything of Youth is as unimaginatively middle-market as a is kept simple – particularly the script, or lack of it. Cotswold tea-shop. The voice of Vera is entirely lacking, unless she Like a country tea-shop, it is above all very neat spoke in extremely short, rather empty phrases, and pretty. Vera, played by Alicia Vikander, looks like which is doubtful. All the youngsters in the film had the Swedish Royal Ballet star she once was and she a privileged education, on screen and off. Among the is on show all the time. She looks so gorgeous that assembly of thespian toffs is Kit Harington who plays she provides a visual feast which could work without Vera’s fiancé Roland Leighton, a direct descendant of any of the attached story. There is not a single north- Charles II. The aim of the two central characters is to country accent, although Vera grew up in Buxton,

The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 45 Web: www.salisburyreview.com Derbyshire. There are no straight, tight hobble skirts returned; Miranda Richardson, Nicholas Farrell and which women wore from 1910 until 1914, to the Nicholas le Prevost, who looks distressed but doesn’t amusement of men as they made walking and getting say anything. It wouldn’t have been surprising to see on to trains very difficult (hence the ‘hobble’). The Sir Ian McKellen turn up as a telegram boy. film’s director preferred to put his leading ladies Unlike Vera herself, the film refused to take any into free floating, Laura Ashley-style creations. The risks, quickly becoming what used to be called ‘a scenery, shot in Ravenscar and Robin Hood’s Bay in woman’s picture’, a real weepy. News of her fiancé’s the North York Moors, is equally ravishing. There are death in battle arrives on her wedding day, and even river scenes where young Edwardian bodies can disport the war scenes drag because they look so familiar. The themselves, in this case modestly clothed, and coastal camera pans over a vast field of bodies which we’ve stretches allowing Vera to stare wistfully across the seen before, most memorably in Gone With the Wind. Channel, vintage cars and shots of the Keighley and But when Vera finally gets to the front as a nurse, three Worth Valley Railway valiantly puffing along, as only quarters of the way through the film, things do start English trains can. to get a bit more interesting. She has to nurse German From the start I felt as if I was being carried along in soldiers, and at last we get to the heart of her later a ‘Girl’s Own’ adventure. It was all so pukka and Vera writing, with this early experience pushing her towards so much a teenage girl’s heroine; at least to the girls the idea of pacifism. of my generation when comics still contained stories Near the end of the film we meet Winifred Holtby, about brave women of the past and stirring school played by young Welsh actress Alexandra Roach, stories about female derring do. She was cross with her almost the only character on screen who doesn’t look plutocratic Dad, played by the unfeasibly handsome like a fashion plate. The successful novelist who Dominic West, who bought her a piano rather than became Vera’s life long friend appears, a small blonde sending her to Oxford. She was cool with boys, even with a kind face and attractively dizzy manner. The the really handsome ones, and obviously determined reality was much more interesting. When they first met to get her own way. At Oxford for her interview she Winifred was wearing a boldly-striped costume, topped overcame the resistance of a frosty female tutor by with an emerald green hat. As she was exceptionally her originality, writing an essay in German when she tall and well built the effect was astonishingly bold. couldn’t manage the Latin. How much better to have made a film about those two In the original TV version Vera was at loggerheads unusual women, living together in post-war London with her doughty but dull northern mother when without men. They were both trying to be writers, Vera they had a row about who was going to light the struggling to propound her pacifist ideals in the ‘low fire in the bedroom if Vera wanted to study. Here dishonest decade’ of the 1930s which of course ended domestic warfare, apart from the dispute about the in the most terrible war in history. piano, is muted. We don’t see much of a generational As wars rage around us in 2015, just as they did a clash and Mrs Brittain, played by Emily Watson, hundred years ago, the message of pacifism which is an inoffensive, vague woman who just couldn’t dominated her life after 1918 has obviously failed, but understand the importance of a woman’s work. the serious issues which obsessed her are never really It is sad to see Emily Watson, once a highly regarded addressed in this film but only touched on, through soft actress, sidelined into mumsy parts, and irritating to see focus, really just to show us what a feisty little heroine so many small roles in the film taken up by a panoply she was. As the film is based on such an influential of famous theatrical faces, including Anna Chancellor, book, adult viewers might have expected more. who has one line to croak after her son’s uniform was back to contents Please note our change of address

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Web: www.salisburyreview.com 46 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 Orson Welles Ron Capshaw

hat is it about Orson Welles, born 100 years Hearst forces would use a radio show Welles appeared ago this year, and who once described on as exhibit A in the case for Welles’ ‘Communism’. Whimself politically as coming from the The show was His Honor The Mayor and its theme ‘radical fringes’ of the New Deal, that makes was that civil liberties were sacred, and that no one, not conservatives today claim him? The short answer is even a homegrown fascist movement, was exempt (the that conservatives, long regarded as uncreative, want presence of conservative Republican Jimmy Stewart on the most creative film-maker in cinema history on the show is evidence that it was not communist-tinged). their team. Conservatives have been sincere in their This flew in the face of the Communist view of civil beliefs he was one of their own. In the 1980s, President liberties, who asserted there should be no free speech Reagan was genuinely shocked that Welles had not for fascists. Another supposed ‘nail in the coffin’ was supported him. Welles’ participation in a Latino gangland slaying Leftists go crazy about this ‘kidnapping’, and assert known as the Sleepy Lagoon case. The accused was a that Welles never stopped being a man of the Left. Latino, and the CPUSA along with liberals was able But Welles in the early ’70s startled an interviewer to convince him that this was racism. But, again the by recounting how, during the McCarthyite 1950s, he presence of Republicans – including Earl Warren – practically ‘begged’ for the opportunity to testify before showed that, at best, this was a bi-partisan effort rather the House of Un-American Activities Committee and than an exclusively Communist cause. assert his anticommunism. In the post-war period, Welles would disappoint leftists Liberals claim such moments are not to be taken by refusing to support Henry Wallace, who was duped seriously, as Welles wasn’t above doctoring his history by Communist members (even a KGB agent) on his in order to play to the crowd. However, within the campaign staff. Without repudiating his denouncement context of the period – the period with Vietnam raging of the blacklist (he famously said about informers that full-bore – there was a dwindling crowd to play to. In they didn’t act ‘according to principles but to save their this zeitgeist, it was fashionable among Hollywood swimming pools’), Welles nonetheless was critical of the film-makers to rehabilitate the blacklisted Old Left CPUSA’s blanket support for Joseph Stalin. from knee-jerk Stalinists to heroic liberals battling The reality of Welles’ liberalism was that he was fascism in the form of Congressional anticommunists. an old-fashioned anti-McCarthyite, and without Certainly there is a kernel of truth in liberal claims abandoning any respectable anti-communism, a that Welles was at one time one of their own. Despite civil libertarian, and an opponent of segregation and denying that he was a Communist – a charge lodged lynching. against him by allies of William Randolph Hearst who But he was not afraid to rethink positions, even at were angry about Citizen Kane being a thinly-veiled the risk of being politically incorrect. A foe of Reagan portrait of the right-wing publisher – he nevertheless (Welles attributed the President’s ‘allegiance to the shared some beliefs with the Left. During World wealthy’ as akin to a dazzled native having a gold War II, Welles, who was considering exchanging his watch swung in his face), he nonetheless was critical movie-making for a political run (encouraged in this of both the Old Left and the New Left, finding the endeavour by none other than FDR himself), lauded former stupid and the latter nihilistic. Later in life he Henry Wallace, Roosevelt’s dim-witted Wall Street- denounced JFK, the darling of liberals, for secretly bashing Vice President and already a catspaw of the emersing the country in the quagmire of Vietnam. American Communist Party (Wallace ran as a Third Instead he praised Eisenhower for maintaining ‘peace Party candidate in the 1948 election). In a series of and prosperity’. newspaper columns near the war’s end, Welles also Welles never repudiated his disdain for unchained took the Communist Party stance that Wall Street was free enterprise, but today his libertarianism and plotting to destroy the wartime partnership between willingness to dare to have second thoughts might place America and the Soviet Union. him within the conservative movement. But Welles’ kind of liberalism would make him an odd fit in the age of Obama and NSA surveillance. back to contents

The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 47 Web: www.salisburyreview.com Russia through Opera: Voices from the burning bush Boyd D Cathey

enneth Clark observed that the best way folk culture, and through his eyes much of the semi- to understand a society and its people is mythical Russian past was finally written down. Kto immerse oneself in its culture and arts. Legendary elements predominate in Russian opera Through its arts one can see where the society places more than in Western Europe so Pushkin’s role in its highest values and what it rates as important. Russian opera cannot be overestimated. Some art forms are more revealing than others. In the 19th century there were two major tendencies Film has a history of scarcely one hundred years but in Russian music: Tchaikovsky, Anton Arensky, Russian cinema reached international fame with the Rachmaninov and a few others represented a more work of Sergei Eisenstein in the 1920s. His Battleship cosmopolitan, Western European approach to Potemkin, followed by Alexander Nevsky and Ivan inspiration and composition; on the other side were the Terrible, rank as classics in world cinema. Today, five composers (Cesar Cui, Mily Balakirev, Nicolai directors such as Nikita Mikhalkov, Andrei Kravchuk, Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Borodin and Modeste and Pavel Lungin continue to produce striking films of Mussorgsky) whose work was based on Russian merit and interest which explore Russian tradition and traditions and folk literature, and who included ‘blood- offer profound critiques of the Communist episode, as and-soil’ themes in their compositions. Tchaikovsky’s in Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun. famous ballets, his 1812 Overture, the operas Eugene Russian literature and theatre can also boast a history Onegin and Queen of Spades, his later symphonies, his of fertility and talent. Many Westerners are familiar concertos, and some of his chamber music are what with Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy but fewer most Westerners know and like. During his lifetime have read Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Tchaikovsky was criticized for ‘looking West’ for Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, and many other authors inspiration, yet he also had a Slavic and ‘folk’ side. less well known. His earlier operas The Oprichnik, Cherevichki (The Russian architecture says much about Russian culture Tsarina’s Slippers – Tchaikovsky thought it his best and history. The onion-shaped domes of thousands of opera), and Mazeppa, illustrate this well. Russian Orthodox churches can be compared to the There are fine recent recordings of Oprichnik and hundreds of small pilgrimage chapels that once dotted Cherevichki (issued by Dynamic Records under Catholic Europe. They show a culture and people Mstislav Rostropovich), and Mazeppa, on several forged in an eastern Byzantine Christian religiosity labels. There is also a superb DVD video of a recent that once pervaded Russian life, which has been reborn Covent Garden production (with very colourful and since the fall of Communism. These buildings are traditional sets) of Cherevichki. What comes through valuable as cultural artefacts, but remain inanimate is a joyful appreciation of peasant life, customs, and without the impressive liturgy that inhabits them. In belief, with legends of impish, but not malevolent those domed churches, liturgical chant and choral devils, a ‘good’ witch, and an intrepid young hero who music expressed the doctrines of Russia’s Christian travels to St. Petersburg in search of the Tsarina’s red faith. As well as being the living prayer of a people, slippers for his fiancée back home. the sacred liturgy is a supreme art form, connecting Even in Onegin and Queen of Spades Tchaikovsky the faithful with past generations. would come up with a folk tune when needed. In Opera offers a better understanding of how Russians the opening of Eugene Onegin, the estate serfs sing see themselves and the world around them. Like an obviously folk-inspired song and the second act opera in other European countries, the Russian brand of Queen of Spades offers one of those marvellous draws heavily on native literary traditions, particularly Russian ceremonial scenes, set in a palace in St from Pushkin who is rightly considered the father of Petersburg, capped by the arrival of the Tsarina modern Russian literature. Much of Russian literature Catherine the Great. Although Tchaikovsky writes developed from his epic poetry and his use of Russian music for the second act ballet sequence that might

Web: www.salisburyreview.com 48 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 come from Western European, even French, tradition, The story in Mussorgsky’s second major opera, the music for the arrival of the Tsarina is purely Khovanshchina, deals roughly with the reign of Peter Russian. Orthodox chant haunts the final scene and the Great. The story is almost incomprehensible to the inevitable death of Herman, whose madness has many Westerners, as it focuses on the religious conflicts overtaken him. with the ‘Old Believers’ in the Orthodox Church. Among ‘the Mighty Five’, Rimsky-Korsakov was the The musical language and the integration of ancient most prolific. His fifteen operas are mostly unknown Orthodox chant, especially in the final Immolation in the West and most of them are based on Russian scene is highly dramatic. Mussorgsky offers contextual legends and history, and on stories collected and insights into the complexity of Russian character and published by Pushkin and others. Amongst them are not conflicts that cannot be found elsewhere. A personal just The Golden Cockerel and Sadko, which was once favourite and the lodestar of modern Russian classical played at the Metropolitan Opera, but the incredible music is Mikhail Glinka’s patriotic opera, A Life for Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and The Tsar’s the Tsar (1836). Once again, the work is set in the Bride. Kitezh has been called ‘the Russian Parsifal’ by ‘time of troubles’, but unlike the dark and introspective some musicologists, and while such a claim may be Mussorgsky operas, Glinka extols another aspect of exaggerated, the work is shot through with amazing Russian character: an exuberant loyalty to the Tsar and melodies and accents of Russian mysticism. There unswerving service to the Motherland. There is a are two commercial DVD issues available, neither very good Kultur DVD from the Bolshoi with Yevgeny one entirely satisfactory in staging, but both worth Nesterenko, made after the fall of Communism (1992) investigating for any adventurous listeners unfamiliar and with the pre-Revolution portions fully restored. with Rimsky’s best operatic works. President Putin ordered that the music of the finale be Perhaps the finest musical introduction to Russian used on state occasions, as it was in his inauguration musical culture and a perspective on how Russians back in May 2012. have viewed themselves during a long and difficult Although recordings made in Russia have always history is through the work of Mussorgsky who been available in the West, since 1991 their number has during his short life left behind few works: some increased. Thanks to Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky quite impressive songs, some well-known works for Theatre in St Petersburg, and the Bolshoi in Moscow, orchestra, but several operas that rank as among the new life has been given to many of these treasures on very best ever composed. Like Rimsky-Korsakov compact disc and on DVD. The old Russian state label, and Borodin, Mussorgsky was fascinated by Russia’s Melodiya, is also re-releasing much of its extremely past, particularly by the ‘time of troubles’, the period rich LP catalogue on silver discs. So we now have the between the demise of Tsar Boris Godunov in 1605 best recording of Eugene Onegin (1955) available (with and the accession of Michael Romanov to the throne Galina Vishnevskaya, Sergei Lemeshev, Ivan Petrov; of Muscovy in 1613. Mussorgsky’s chef-d’oeuvre was Boris Khaikin, conducting) in good sound, a superb his opera Boris Godunov, which, after the two Western- historic Sadko, and a fine 1958 Bolshoi recording of looking Tchaikovsky operas, is the most famous of Rimsky-Korsakov’s seldom performed and rarely all Russian operas. Mussorgsky takes the tragic story recorded The Tale of the Tsar Saltan. of Tsar Boris, who supposedly usurped the throne Recurring themes of foreign domination and Russian from Dmitri, the younger son of Ivan the Terrible, attempts to throw it off, a fascination with fate both and creates an impressive combination of music individual and national, the importance of the Orthodox of remarkable expressiveness with psychological faith, and the central role of the long-suffering Russian portraits of his characters. The major character in people, set Russia apart from the rest of Europe. Boris Godunov is the long-suffering Russian people; Through the eyes, the voices, and the stories presented for Mussorgsky was a genius at dissecting character, by its composers of opera we can better explore the emotions, and belief through music. You can sense the Russian enigma and how its inhabitants see themselves. historical sweep and, at times, the helplessness and the irrevocability of fate in his works. Among the many recordings of Boris Godanov perhaps the best modern issue is the Melodiya Records release featuring Ivan Petrov as the ill-starred Tsar. Additionally, there is the Boyd D Cathey writes a regular online column for spectacular, classic Russian-made film of Boris from Communities Digital News and was the State Registrar 1954, in colour, with Pirogov as Boris, an essential of the North Carolina State Archives. viewing and listening experience (available on both the VAI and Kultur DVD labels). back to contents

The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 49 Web: www.salisburyreview.com IN SHORT

Ground-Breaking, Vivian Linacre, 2013, pb £17.50, firstly retail development, but as high streets declined, Kindle e-book, £9.30. shopping moved to out-of-town sheds; secondly office development; and thirdly business parks – offices and Vivian Linacre, one of our contributors, is a campaigner light industry in ‘sheds’. It is now on the verge of a for the retention of Imperial Weights and Measures fourth phase, the commercial development of leasehold and founder of the British Weights and Measures housing (an existing example is the Olympic Athletes Association. In this book he gives a lively picture of Village, which was designed to be converted into flats). the commercial property market in which he played a This has not yet happened, though the housing deficit prominent part. He describes how the commercial is allegedly getting worse. property market and his working life both got off the ground, from 1950 to 1975. He began by studying Robin Cave estate management, but after a period getting his boots dirty on a farm he moved with his family to London With Friends Like These…Why Britain should and joined a small firm of estate agents, dealing leave the EU – and how, David Conway, 2014, with commercial property such as hotels, restaurants Civitas, £7. and small shops. He soon moved to the much larger Healey & Baker, dealing mainly with shops in David Conway has spent thirty years teaching suburban north London. After two years he moved to philosophy and religious studies, but it is a huge leap Glasgow to be responsible for H & B’s business in the to try to disentangle recent historical events. So I whole of Scotland, working on various town-centre admire Conway’s paper tracing the origins of the EU redevelopments. He had to deal with his client and and particularly the UK’s entanglement with it, but I other potential developers, and with planning, under am disquieted by the pitfalls which have tripped him relatively new laws introduced in 1947. The planning up. His heart is certainly in the right place but while authorities consisted of professional officers controlled his research is competent, the debate has not been by committees of local politicians, seldom competent advanced. to choose between competing developers. Conway is right to highlight the importance of the In 1961 he moved to Murrayfield Real Estate and USA in the UK’s involvement in the EU, but he claims then, in 1968, to City Wall Properties, his final position that the UK is America’s ‘oldest and most dependable with a major developer. His projects for City Wall in ally’. That would surprise Americans for whom France Edinburgh included the rebuilding of the New Club, a is the oldest ally, giver of the Statue of Liberty. Hence club for the elite of Edinburgh, on Princes Street, and the huge outcry recently in the States when jihadists Trinity Park, in the north of Edinburgh. This site, the murdered Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris. The Americans’ headquarters of a shipping company, with seven acres oldest ally was under threat as wall to wall TV coverage of garden, was no longer needed as their HQ, and so was endlessly repeated. was proposed as an office development. This naturally Conway describes the origins and rationale of the produced outrage among the neighbours, who thought EU but he fails to understand the scale of the threat of that what was needed were more detached mansions, subversion to a Western Europe in turmoil after years suitable for gentlefolk like themselves. Linacre, instead of war, physical destruction and human dislocation. of taking every opportunity of insulting those standing Not only could the USSR roll its tanks west, but in the way of commerce, offered to preserve the stone nearly every Western European country had substantial wall around the site, and nearly all the one hundred Moscow-leaning parties. In no country were those trees in the garden, and set up a group of the local parties in the majority, but they were far too close to amenity societies to consider and modify the proposed power for comfort. Had the US done nothing, it is plans. The planning application, supported by the local plausible that Italy, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, societies, was accepted by the Edinburgh Council. Luxembourg – in fact the original six members of the Linacre left City Wall in 1973, soon after it was taken EEC – could have been taken over from within. Not over by the Rank Organisation, and in 1977 set up on one Soviet tank need have rolled. his own in Edinburgh. This issue is huge and the lack of its mention in Commercial property has developed in phases: the book negates Conway’s limited discussion of the

Web: www.salisburyreview.com 50 The Salisbury Review — Spring 2015 origins of the EU. He could then have gone on to debate is the loss of our legal system, policing and hard-won how the Americans stopped the USSR – he has given liberties such as habeas corpus, which just become snippets only – and then ponder upon the major issue part of a balance sheet. The huge difference between of the legacy of interfering in other countries’ affairs. Napoleonic law and common law and the protection He has gathered disparate points from other writers we have from overweening state power is not given (including me) but has missed the big picture. He the pre-eminence it deserves. provides a useful review of the costs and benefits of It is always good to have more stuff in print calling UK membership of the EU, but only gives a glancing for the UK to leave the EU, so I welcome another. nod towards the key point of the business costs which Whether the UK leaves by one of the well-known burden the UK and from which Germany (in particular) negotiated routes Conway rehearses or leaves because gains from the EU’s constraints on our ability to make the EU implodes or becomes overtly threatening, which money. he does not discuss, leave we must if we are to have a He is weakest on security and defence, a flaw future as an independent sovereign state. which runs through the whole book. Most important Lindsay Jenkins

The Best Thing to Say

The best thing to say is nothing And that I do not say, But I will say it, when I lie In silence all the day.

Carcanet Press 1998

back to contents C H Sisson

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