The Salisbury Review (Full)

The

The quarterly magazine

of conservative thought

Exile & Return Mattiya Kambona

Moral Combat M R D Foot

Ladies Without Lamps Jane Kelly

Palace of Lies Theodore Dalrymple

A Veiled Threat Christie Davies

Sea Blindness John Parfitt

Autumn 2010

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Contents 3

Editorial

Articles 4 Exile and Return Mattiya Kambona 6 Ladies without Lamps Jane Kelly 7 Palace of Lies Theodore Dalrymple 9 A Veiled Threat Christie Davies 11 Cooking up a Storm Brian Ridley 13 Will the Germans set us Free?

Mark Griffith 15 Sea Blindness John Parfitt

18 Twelve Good Men and True?

Nigel Jarrett 20 A Curriculum of Errors Frank Ellis 22 Real Rebels on the Right Nigel Jones 24 American Funny Money Russell Lewis 26 650 Hands in the Till Richard Packer 29 Writing for Frankie Howerd Marc Blake

Columns

Arts & Books

28 BBC Watch 30 Conservative Classic — 40 When William Came, Saki 33 Roy Kerridge 34 Eternal Life Peter Mullen 35 Reputations — 29 The Queen Mother

27 Letters

38 M R D Foot on Michael Burleigh 39 Nigel Jones on Hugh Trevor-Roper 40 Patricia Lança on Generational Conflict 42 Will Robinson on Lord Denning 43 Michael St John Parker on de Tocqueville 45 Jan Maciag on Lost Cities 46 Frank Ellis on Waziristan 47 Alistair Miller on Positive Thinking 48 Anthony Daniels on Democratic Despotism 50 John Constable on an Angling Family 52 Film: Please Give Jane Kelly 53 Art: Andrew Wilton on Portraits 55 Music: Gerald Place on Shakespeare’s Songs

57 In Short

Managing Editor: Merrie Cave Consulting Editors: Roger Scruton Lord Charles Cecil, Myles Harris, Mark Baillie, Christie Davies, Literary Editor: Ian Crowther 33 Canonbury Park South, London N1 2JW Tel: 020 7226 7791 Fax: 020 7354 0383 E-mail: info@salisburyreview.co.uk Web site: http://www.salisburyreview.co.uk

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avid Cameron is a descendant of King William IV and the actress Dorothea Jordan. Like Cameron the king had a certain informality of style.

Hearing that the First Reform Bill of 1831 ridding Britain of its rotten boroughs was to be voted down in the House of Commons he insisted on being driven immediately to The Lords ‘in a hackney carriage if necessary’. There, by entering the chamber wearing his crown, he caused the automatic prorogation of Parliament. The Act was passed in the next Parliament.

William lived at a time when the American War of Independence had underlined the power of the free citizen, and while Britain fumbled her way toward democracy, most of Europe was retreating from it, but William understood its importance.

Today’s rotten boroughs are further afield than Old Sarum, the uninhabited hill in Wiltshire which sent two MPs to Parliament. The new Sarums are in Brussels, Washington, Beijing and the digital entrails of companies like Goldman Sachs, which, despite breast beating by politicians, has escaped virtually scott free from impoverishing a generation. People we have never elected increasingly rule our lives, tax us, buy up our industries, tell us who we may admit to live here, and, even worse, have acquired the right to seize our citizens and carry them off them for trial in their own countries.

Just as William IV was faced with the question ‘Who governs Britain?’ so Cameron must decide if we are to be an independent state. Is he up to the job? There is little evidence of it.

After a visit to Washington he flew to Istanbul to reaffirm US policy in the region: Turkish entry into the EU. This was despite his promise to the British electorate that he would not agree to major changes to the EU without a UK referendum. If the entry of 90 million people from a non European country to the EU is not a major change to the EU what is? Tories might shrug this off as a mere gesture. France and Germany, they chuckle knowingly, will never agree to Turkish entry, but wait ten years when, with catastrophically falling birth rates and desperate for workers, Italy, Germany, plus a Muslim dominated Holland, outvote the French on Turkish The Salisbury Review — Autumn, 2010

entry. Neither has there been any hint of reforming the scandalous EU arrest warrant, or a similar agreement with the US, which allow both powers to seize our citizens for trial purely on the flourish of a pen.

Nor has that elephant in the room, immigration, been addressed. The UN Convention on Human Rights has resulted in Britain having a revolving door immigration policy, with lawyers taking fat fees to ensure each arrival stays as long as possible and goes before courts whose decisions frequently border on the hallucinatory. To opt out of the Convention would be the political equivalent of the US Declaration of Independence. By definition the coalition has no mandate for this, and mass migration will continue. This is perhaps why The Guardian in ‘Cameron, Man of Grace’ described him as far better than either Brown or Blair to promote the type of ‘consensus’ politics in which the left so fervently believes.

What else one of the rotten boroughs, the EU, has in mind for us is described in this issue by Theodore Dalrymple in ‘The Palace of Lies’. He writes: ‘the Secretary-General of the European Union, Juan Manuel Barroso, was once asked by a journalist what the European project actually was. The former leftist said that it was the creation of an empire. Subsequently every effort was made to expunge this remark from the historical record.’ Mark Griffith in a more hopeful mood tells how intelligent Germans have woken up to the threat posed by the modern, electronically tentacled state in ‘Will Germany set us Free?’ but John Parfitt in ‘Sea Blindness’ sorrows over the laying up of our great mercantile fleet and how vulnerable it will make us to countries like China. There are more personal ways to lose your freedom. Jane Kelly in ‘Ladies Without Lamps’ describes the loss of dignity that attends being nursed in an NHS hospital, while Christie Davies in ‘A Veiled Threat’ peeps behind the burka. Finally in ‘Coming Home’, Mattiya Kambona describes his midnight arrest and ten years in a Tanzanian prison without trial and his subsequent return to his homeland after 30 years of exile.

Only those who have lost their freedom can know its sweet taste. We in Britain are tossing it away.

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Exile and Return Mattiya Kambona Editorial note: The Salisbury Review has had a long connection with the Kambona family and three brothers have now written for it. Oscar Kambona was a prominent Government Minister in the sixties but resigned in 1967 in protest at the introduction of the one party state and the brutal collectivization of the countryside. He left Tanzania for a 25 year exile in Britain and terrible reprisals were taken against his family and friends. (v SR vol 3 No 4, Vol 9 No 4, Vol 12 No 2, Vol 23 No 2, Vol 26 No 4)

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hen President Julius Nyerere’s dictatorship of Tanzania finally came to an end in 1998, my close relatives gradually became more at ease when they spoke to me on the telephone. I had been living in exile in Britain for more than thirty years, and during that time conversations with people ‘back home’ had necessarily been very guarded. Then one day I was somewhat surprised when someone asked me, ‘When are you coming home?’

During the dictatorship I had spent more than ten years in prison (without ever having been accused of any crime) so I could not understand why my people seemed so keen for me to return to a place which could be so dangerous. Had my relatives become Government agents? Cautiously I contacted some friends who assured me that it would be safe for me to return. ‘Come back’, said one, ‘the dark days are gone.

So I decided to visit my country to ‘test the waters’.

In 1968 my brother Otini and I had had to consider escaping from Tanzania, as we had realised that our situations were precarious. Our elder brother Oscar, who had been Vice-President, had already had to flee with his wife and family because he had had a disagreement with Nyerere over establishing Tanzania as a one party state and collectivising the peasants soviet style. (see The Time I met Mao, SR Summer 1990) Oscar was bitterly opposed to any such move.

One day he had a warning from a friend who was a high ranking official in the police that he would be arrested very soon for opposing the President’s wishes.

Nevertheless Otini and I had hoped for the best and put our trust in the International community who we hoped would protect us, or at least would speak out for us, if we were arrested, and make the world aware of our situation as they did in Nelson Mandela’s case.

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The British government which had so painstakingly drawn up our constitution, which provided for a multiparty state, should be concerned. Otini was working as a journalist and I was employed in the Ministry of Industry and Power. I am a Cambridge graduate so we thought perhaps we were safe.

However late at night when I was working at home, I become aware of a tremendous commotion in the street outside. There seemed to be police cars everywhere.

Then came the dreaded knock on the door. The police searched my home for several hours, then told me to accompany them to Ukanga prison. I thought that, perhaps, was some mistake as I was not being accused of any crime, but it was to be more than ten years before I saw the outside world again. On that dreadful night, I realized that my brother Otini had also been arrested, although I was not able to talk to him; indeed during the following years when Tanzania was developing into a completely inefficient state where nothing worked, my brother and I, while being shunted around various prisons from time to time, were very efficiently kept apart for the whole of our incarceration.

Otini was married to a girl from Martinique and had two small children, my wife was from the Gambia and I had a three-month-old daughter. Both families were immediately expelled and our properties were expropriated. It was to be ten years before we saw anything of them again.

In 1978, we were just as suddenly and inexplicably released — probably through the intervention of Prime Minister Muldoon of New Zealand, who by a fortunate chance had heard of our plight and had made it known to Nyerere that aid from New Zealand would cease unless we were released. This happened almost immediately.

We were still not safe, however, as it was common practice that when people were released from prison the President would order their re-arrest. We knew that we would never be given official permission to leave the country; we would have to escape. One day we went north to Moshi, a town near the border with Kenya. We were not sure where we would go from there, but by another lucky chance, I met a man whom I had known in Moshi prison. He agreed to take us to a path in the forest from where we could cross to Kenya. Under no circumstances, however, could he be seen with us, because as soon as the authorities realised that we were The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

no longer in Tanzania, he would be arrested and put into prison again, as it would be assumed that he had helped us escape. We could only make our way after dark and he would have to return before dawn. And so we managed to reach Kenya.

Here we had friends. President Kenyatta, who knew Oscar, was no admirer of Julius Nyerere. We were able to travel with the help of these friends to London and safety, or so we thought. We applied to the Callaghan government for asylum, which was refused. Then one morning I received a letter from the Home Office signed personally by Dr David Owen, who was Home Secretary, to go to Heathrow Airport, for deportation back to Tanzania. I was in a complete panic: some day I should like to confront Dr Owen and ask him why he was so keen to send us back to certain death.

Fortunately, thanks to the delay pending an appeal there was a change of government at the 1979 election and Margaret Thatcher’s government granted me asylum.

I was safe and free at last.

And now thirty years later after working for the Sickle Cell organization and later with Alliance Security and having retired, I decided to return to Tanzania to ‘test the waters’. On the plane from Heathrow to Nairobi I was very happy — I was back in Africa but afterwards my heart began to sink. Had I made a terrible mistake? Had my desire to see my country blinded me to the dangers that I could be facing? As the plane approached Dar-es-Salaam I began to feel that I could be experiencing my last moments of freedom. Would there be government agents waiting at the airport?

After all, I had not had permission to leave the country.

Perhaps I was stupid to have returned. As the plane flew over the city I saw Ukanga prison where I had spent so many months and I felt on the point of collapse.

‘Dear God, help me’, I prayed almost aloud. I tried to take comfort from a favourite saying of my brother Otini — ‘God is greater than human beings’ but all I could think about was those government agents who would undoubtedly be waiting to take me to Ukanga probably after taking me first to an interrogation room within the airport building.

As I put my foot on Tanzanian soil for the first time in thirty years I was extremely nervous and shaking almost uncontrollably. I felt that I was jumping from a comfortable warm bath into a boiling cauldron. As we entered the airport building I felt that my years of freedom were coming to an end.

I looked around me, but did not recognise any of the officials. I chose to give my documents to a young man who looked about thirty years old — he could have been born when I left the country. In spite of his youth I was expecting that he would call someone to search my belongings after which I would be told to The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

accompany someone to the Land Rover, which I felt just had to be waiting outside to take me to Ukanga. I was so preoccupied with these thoughts that I scarcely heard the Immigration official tell me to go on my way.

I thought that I had misheard. Was he really waving me away?

‘You mean I can go? I heard myself asking ‘Yes of course’, came the rather startled reply, ‘What else do you want?’

I could keep my freedom. I surveyed the area again.

I could not see a single member of Nyerere’s agents around. It was amazing. My legs became light and the heavy lump sitting in my chest began to disappear.

When I left the building I thought for a moment that I must be back in London. I was surrounded by smiling faces! (In the Tanzania that I had left, all those years ago, one scarcely saw anyone smiling: there was little to smile about in those days) As we drove away I kept looking behind. Nobody was following us. Was this really my country? Yet I still could not help feeling that this was some kind of calm before a storm.

Next morning I gingerly looked outside into the street. Apparently there was no informer watching the house. I began to feel that the disappearance of the all-pervasive fear, which I remembered so vividly, had infused my country with sweet fresh air. But as the saying goes ‘old habits die hard’. I was not yet totally convinced and I was still worrying at every unfamiliar face.

I went into the city centre and bought every available newspaper expecting to see the names of people who had been dismissed from their jobs, which groups had been rounded up and thrown (without trial) into prison, which Trade Union officials were being harassed, which government critic or politician had been arrested or had mysteriously disappeared and had his property confiscated, but as I searched I found nothing. I looked at the faces of the people around me, and gradually realised that of Dar-es-Salaam’s four million people, only one — me — was worried about Presidential tyranny. I bought a cold drink and sat in the garden opposite the Cathedral and imagined that I could see the smiling faces of Angels. Eventually a mood of thanksgiving came over me and I thanked God for the wonderful changes that He had brought about in the wonderful country of Tanzania.

When Julius Nyerere was in power, anyone who criticised him or his government could look forward to perhaps a week of liberty. In the new Tanzania people are free to say what they like and can live and die a natural death. It was wonderful to be home!

Mattiya Kambona worked for the Sickle Cell Association and Alliance Security.

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Ladies Without Lamps Jane Kelly

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hey were going to gut me like a fish, everything had to go, including the tumour on the ovary and an enlarged lymph gland.

I arrived at the Victor Bonney Ward, Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, at 11am on May 4th, 2010, as instructed. They were not expecting me — in fact they had never heard of me. The nurse in charge looked annoyed, making a noise through her front teeth she skimmed some papers.

‘Your operation is tomorrow,’ she said. ‘There is no bed for you.’

I had obviously spoiled her day. After twenty long minutes I went to find out what was happening. ‘We are making a bed up now,’ she said, without looking up.

Why didn’t she come and tell me? Not her job to be polite or give me peace of mind. This was my first in-house taste of today’s NHS nurse.

At 12 noon a nurse, calling me, ‘Kelly Jane,’ led me to my bed in VB. Although termed a ‘ward’, it looked like an adjunct of an operating theatre, functional, not at all cosy. There was no one in there but a very old, toothless lady who seemed almost dead. She told me in a whisper that she’d been waiting to go for her op since the early morning, but no one had come for her.

Watery macaroni cheese and treacle sponge arrived.

I am a lover of traditional canteen food, but I would have liked at least a slight savour of cheese, and a sauce made with milk not water. All the food looked pale as death which was not encouraging.

The old lady was not collected until 4pm.

A Middle Eastern woman was put into the bed right next to me, although the rest of the ward was empty.

She was having an ectopic pregnancy, aged thirty one, with two other children at home. I couldn’t help hearing it all, and there was no radio to plug into to avoid it.

Night came but you hardly knew it. A large anglepoise lamp was switched on next to the woman, so they could check her in blinding light all night. It seemed there were no small night lights. Too late I realised that I had forgotten my flight mask.

By the day of my op I felt tired out. In the TV room I met a woman lawyer called Jan. She’d had a hysterectomy by key-whole surgery and seemed a bit traumatised.

‘They forced me to walk all the way to the operating theatre,’ she said. ‘Down several corridors and up to Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk

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another floor, even though I was sobbing hard all the way. People kept looking at me and turning away. It was like going to the guillotine.’

In the afternoon I too walked to the guillotine, but I don’t remember a thing about it.

I woke to see a line of doctors at the foot of my bed, in the middle of them a nurse in a rather traditional Royal Blue uniform, glaring at me as if I had just committed some heinous crime.

I only ever saw her like that, apparently furious with me. I could have imagined her of course, hallucinating the ghost of Hattie Jacques.

I was attached to several tubes, with little buttons in the back of my hand that look like candle holders on a birthday cake. One line was attached to a morphine pump which came with a kind of black handbag.

I could only walk leaning forwards, as if I was clutching a smashed water-melon in front of me.

When I tried to brush my teeth I realised that there was no cold water on the ward. Our communal sink only gave warm to hot. I also wanted to wash some blood out of my new nightdress, not possible without cold water.

Nurses appeared to give us pills, laxatives and injections. Mostly we were left alone. I trundled off to the shower but I couldn’t get my nightdress off as the morphine bag wouldn’t go down the sleeve. I felt tearful, struggling like a toddler to undress, and pulled the orange cord to get a nurse. A Philippino who looked about twelve appeared and began to untwist me, struggling with the sleeve. She stared at me, looking really scared, as if she’d never seen anyone even mildly distressed before.

Untwisted and naked at last, she left and I put on the shower. The water was scalding hot. Another nurse reluctantly appeared and said that if we wanted to wash we would have to go to another part of the ward. She led me up the corridor, near the desk where I’d come in, to a small bath room, then vanished. Balancing my black bag as best I could I sat in the bath and put on the hot water. It came gushing out, but unfortunately I could not turn on the cold tap at all.

‘I just can’t do it,’ I wept. I could hear laughter from the desk. They were obviously having a good time on the nursing station, but no one was interested in patients in the bathrooms wrestling with hot water.

I gave up on washing.

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

offended by hierarchy, so no one gets any tea.

Two days after our ops the nurses had one message — no one could go home until they had moved their bowels. This Victorian pre-occupation became our main aim in life.

But the following morning we were told we were better and fit to go home. Bowel action was suddenly forgotten.

We were issued with a ruck-sack size pack of pills, hastily shown how to inject ourselves and shown the door. I wondered about the fate of the old lady. No matter what your age or circumstances, you were booted out.

I went home to a cold empty flat and morphine dreams. I quickly discovered that GP home visits have gone the way of leeches and there was not a district nurse in sight.

Come back Hattie Jacques, come back Florence Nightingale — before it’s too late!

How times have changed. I remember going to hospital when I was eleven and getting a bed bath after an operation. I was very shy, but it was done with such kindness that I didn’t mind. In 1981 after having a cyst removed, again there was the wash, carried out by two nurses. Five years ago, when I was working at the Daily Mail, I had a bunion removed at the private Princess Grace hospital. The next day, two sprightly nurses offered to help me to a bath. I told them I could manage as only one foot was in plaster. Now I was desperate for some help and there was none on offer.

Florence Nightingale once wrote that before her time nurses were there to simply give out medicine. It seems that history has repeated itself. NHS Nurses are like automatic dolls wound up to perform single tasks, any kind of multi-tasking is beyond them. I asked a nurse for some water but she said she didn’t have time to get it, even though she was standing by the sink. Most requests were met with a sullen stare.

One thing was certain, you would never ask one of them to make you a cup of tea, any more than you would ask your consultant to do it. No one can be

Jane Kelly was a staffwriter on the Daily Mail

Palace of Lies Theodore Dalrymple

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Ministry of Overseas Development, and it was while working for it that I first had an intimation of what a terrible fraud foreign aid, at least in its British variant, was. It was primarily a subsidy to British companies, that gave them contracts that they could not possibly have won any other way, for example by fair or genuine competition.

The company had negotiated a new kind of contract with the grotesquely negligent Thatcher government.

It was called ‘cost plus’. This guaranteed the company a margin of profit on whatever it spent on building the road. You wouldn’t have to be an expert in human nature to know that this was hardly an encouragement to parsimony or efficiency on the part of the company.

Indeed, its profligacy was staggering ­— I had never seen anything like it. An habitually drunken worker wrecked a machine costing £250,000, and another such machine was flown out, thereby increasing the profit of the company at the expense of the British tax-payer. The all-too predictable result of the project was a beautiful swimming pool and excellent living conditions for the British workers, but a barely serviceable road whose surface was sure to break up after a short time — thus creating the need for another contract that the company

henever I hear the word ‘project’ used in a political connection I reach for my… well, at any rate, I feel an irritation bordering

on rage.

The two great political projects of recent times have been those of New Labour and the European Union.

That of New Labour may now be dead and discredited, but its effects will be with us for a long time; indeed, there are good reasons to think that the damage that it inflicted on Britain was irreparable. As for the European ‘project’, it is still very much alive. The recent crisis in Greece only strengthened the European political class’s belief in it: for members of that class the crisis revealed only that the ‘project’ had not yet been carried far enough, and there was a need for more ‘solidarity’, that is to say, power for itself.

I have no objection to the word ‘project’ as such. For example, I once worked on a road-building ‘project’ in Africa, as doctor for the workers employed upon it.

There was a ‘project manager’, and the title did not seem to me to be absurd or evasive. It was obvious that he was in charge of the construction work.

There were, of course, many objections to the project other than its name. It was funded by the British The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

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hoped to win. Of the supposed justification for the road in the first place, funded by the British taxpayer, I will not speak. Indeed, the whole project could have served, except in one vital respect, as a model for the New Labour ‘project’.

This vital respect was that the project had a definable end point: when two places on the map of the African country were joined by two lanes of tarmac. It was badly done, perhaps, and very expensively, but it was done. It was possible to say at every moment in the project approximately what percentage of it had been carried out, and how long (more or less) it would take to complete. When the end was reached, the project was over.

Political projects like that of New Labour and the European Union, by contrast, have no defined end. There is no point at which the political bulldozers and graders, and those who operate them, can go home, their work accomplished. And yet, at the same time, the use of the very word ‘project’ suggests some definite end, some specific goal in view.

Once again we see the terrible disease of modern political language: the obfuscatory resort to connotation without denotation.

To understand the real aims of the political projectors, we must examine both their conduct and the words they occasionally let slip that reveal their thoughts better than their official, pre-digested pronouncements. Even the most wooden-tongued apparatchik occasionally says something that has meaning. For example, the Secretary-General of the European Union, Juan Manuel Barroso, was once asked by a journalist late at night what the European project actually was. The former leftist said that it was the creation of an empire.

Subsequently, every effort was made to expunge this remark from the historical record, for two reasons: first, it was discomfitingly truthful, and truth is the enemy of those who need secrecy to carry out their purposes, and second it is a general principle that he who controls the past controls the future.

The empire of which Barroso spoke is not the empire of Napoleon, of course, with all the pomp and slightly kitsch majesty that went with it. Neither will it give rise to any worthwhile style of furniture or create durable educational institutions, for all its many other drawbacks. It will not even be strong militarily.

Rather, it will be an empire of former politicians on Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk

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the one hand, tired with and bored by (for admittedly understandable reasons) the need to seek re-election, and unwilling to play the Cincinnatus, and of their apparatchik followers and dependants on the other.

What the European project is to Europe, the New Labour project was to Britain. It was permanent revolution, or at least a permanent effervescence of reform, but always under the direction of the same people or the same class of person, and tending to reinforce their control. The goal of the project was thus both definite and indefinite: there was no endpoint at which one could say the goal had been reached, and yet at the same time there was a goal, namely the permanent domination and control of the country by what was in effect a nomenklatura, for its own benefit. The ‘project’ formed an unbreakable alliance between complete mediocrity and the most ruthless ambition, of which Mr Blair was the almost Jungian archetype. The ruthless and ambitious mediocrity is, of course, the most significant product of our current tertiary educational system.

Whether the ‘project’ is really reversible remains to be seen, either in Britain or in Europe.

It is unlikely that the will to reverse it is very strong, for to do so would self-evidently take moral courage as well as intellectual clarity, neither of which has been the Conservative Party’s strong point of late; but sometimes a revenging reality imposes itself on the unwilling. Reality, after all, is that which cannot be mocked, at least not for long, not even by the most ruthless political projectors. Eppur si muove.

In a way, the use of the term ‘project’, without any specification of what the project consists, perfectly captures the deviousness of both Labour and European politicians: there is a project with an end, but it is one that cannot be avowed. It might be objected that politics always consists of definite and indefinite goals, but in the new politics of Labour and Europe there is a curious reversal in the clarity of the near and distant goals.

Look into any journal that advertises a bureaucratic post in the public sector, and you will have no idea what the post entails; you will be mystified; but you will understand perfectly that one more person is being recruited into the nomenklatura.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Spoilt Rotten, The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality, Gibson Square.

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

A Veiled Threat Christie Davies

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he prospect of a legal ban in much of Europe on Muslim women covering their faces with a veil in public places has produced the usual stupidities from British politicians anxious to prove that they are not ‘Islamophobic’. It is partly about Muslim votes and violence but even more about not appearing to be populist in a Britain where the great majority of the people want such a ban. Better a pinko than a democrat is the basic belief of the Cameronian Conservatives.

The immigration minister Damian Green seems to think that the issue of whether to ban or not to ban has nothing to do with immigration, but it obviously does. If face-veiling is banned in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Catalunya, then all the Muslim husbands in those countries who want to keep their wives in total veiled subjection will bring their massive families to Britain, as under EU rules they are entitled to do. They will not wish to remain in countries that have stigmatized the faceless face of Islam and will migrate to wishy-washy Britain. Those who are not citizens of an EU country may even have the impudence to claim refugee status. France will get to keep her progressive and productive Muslims and we will get those who are fundamentalists and an economic liability. Wanting to keep women in thraldom is a good indication not only of a willingness to countenance extremism but also of social and economic failure. Social and religious inflexibility goes with an inability to adapt to new economic circumstances. They will claim welfare on the basis of their voluntary unemployability and will not allow their wives to work. Veils are very much an immigration issue.

The obvious response on Britain’s part is to introduce a similar ban on face veiling to that being imposed by the French. France must be an inspiration to us all.

Then the veiled ones and more importantly their male veilers will be forced to go somewhere where they will be more welcome like Bulgaria or Cyprus.

Damian Green and his green ministerial colleague Caroline Spelman have falsely argued that women in Britain, and indeed men, have the legal right to dress in public exactly as they choose. This is not true. Except on secluded beaches it is not possible for women to walk around bare breasted because it would cause public offence and possibly even a breach of the peace.

A similar view is taken of men who take to the streets The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

in women’s clothing, though if they wore veils it might be difficult to know. There is no intrinsic reason for these restrictions and they did not exist among the indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands and of Tierra del Fuego, who lived in happy near-nakedness before the time of European imperialism. The reason for forcing the people of Britain to cover up is purely social. The liberty to dress as you choose is constrained because the majority want it that way.

The same argument applies to veiling the face. To non-Muslims, such a practice is offensive, indecent and to borrow a phrase from Damian Green ‘un-British’.

We are far more tolerant than Muslim societies in relation to what women may or may not wear, and far more diverse, from the strict decorum of a female Anglican priest to the brashness of an Essex Girl but like all forms of freedom and tolerance it has its limits.

You cannot wear too little and you cannot wear too much. No nudity, no veils.

Likewise, we are extremely tolerant in matters of religious belief and practice but this cannot be used as an excuse for transgressing the central moral precepts of our society. In the United States, where there is a strict separation of church and state, the criminal law was used to prosecute Mormon polygamists to the point where most of them abandoned the practice. In Britain polygamy is only permitted to Muslims who already had more than one wife before they came to live here. Is this ban on polygamy condemned by the Muslims as a form of Christian and liberal contempt for Muslim tradition? In practice, full British toleration is only extended to acceptable ‘religions’, in the case of Christians those labelled churches. If your group is not numerous and its members’ behaviour is seen as aberrant, it is labelled a sect and policed by the law and if it is very small and seen as very deviant, it gets called a cult and is persecuted. Can it really be said that full acceptance has been extended to the Unification Church (the Moonies), Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Exclusive Brethren or the Scientologists. By this standard Muslims are in fact privileged and allowed far greater latitude to flout the shared values of our society and to be un-British.

There are strong practical arguments against permitting the wearing of veils that are in fact masks.

Unless they are used as part of the comic world of play, masks are rightly seen as a threat, a deception and an 9

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underminer of trust and bona fide communication. But the main objection to the veil is that it is a symbol of the morally unacceptable.

Perhaps the most foolish, indeed ludicrous comment on the burkha problem was made by Caroline Spelman after her brief trip to Afghanistan. She called the burkha ‘empowering’ and as conferring ‘dignity’. Her very choice of these words indicates that she is living in the world of rhetoric and not that of reality. I too have been to Afghanistan in the days before the Russian invasion. In the south of the country and indeed across the border in Peshawar in Pakistan the women wore heavy burkhas in which even their eyes were hidden behind a cloth grille; a perfect metaphor for their social prison. Three of the British Christians in our party were invited into their house by curious local women. When there, they asked if they might try on their hostess’s burkhas. They felt hot and uncomfortable and could not see properly. Where is the dignity in that? In what way were the local women empowered? They had far less autonomy than the three adventurous but sensibly and by no means immodestly dressed English women.

In Kabul at that time, where the women were more likely to be enlightened and freer of suffocating social pressure, the burkha had been largely discarded. It was these emancipated women of Kabul and they alone who had dignity and a degree of autonomy.

The idea that a veil can confer dignity and be empowering is merely a piece of deceitful Muslim propaganda that makes use of the absurd jargon of feminism, much as they have mendaciously appropriated the language of rights and democracy.

The problem rather lies with Muslim men who regard women as mere property. An assault on a woman is merely theft and an insult to her kinsmen’s ‘honour’ that should be avenged and not as an affront to her personal freedom. Jack Straw has told us that there are a disproportionately high number of Muslims in British prisons (the number of Hindus is negligible). Is it unreasonable to ask whether they have been even more disproportionately jailed for crimes against women?

What gives this point relevance are comments made by Sydney-born Sheik Feiz Mohammed of the Australian global Islamic Youth centre and Sheik Taj Aldin al-Hilali, Mufti of Australia, around the time when there had been a series of brutal gang rapes by Lebanese Muslims in Sydney. Sheik Hilali said in a religious address: ‘If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park or in the back-yard without a cover and the cats come and eat it…whose fault is that, the cats or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem’.

He added ‘If she (the victim) was in her room, in her home, in her hijab (Muslim scarfy head-covering), no Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk

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problem would have occurred’.

We can now see that Muslim veils and headscarves, attitudes to rape and indeed forced marriages are part of a single outlook that all decent people of any religion and none should condemn and which it is the duty of the state to combat vigorously through the use of the law. Banning veils is merely one part of this moral imperative. Not banning veils is far more un-British than banning them.

I am sure that Muslims will object that this is not the ‘real Islam’. I can see no way of deciding what the ‘real’ version is. But if this is the case, then it is the duty of true Muslim believers to stamp it out. Others will say that most Muslims in Britain are not like that. I have never said they were. It is enough that a very significant minority are. The sin of the Muslim leadership is merely their unwillingness to use very severe social sanctions against these evil miscreants, which is in marked contrast to their attitude towards those seen as too lax in their allegiance. The real villains, though, are as usual the indigenous British leftists who have rushed in to denounce any possible banning of the veil, despite the presence among them of many fruitcake feminists who are happy to propose all manner of far more draconian attacks on personal behaviour.

In the past leftists were prepared to denounce the veil even to the point of supporting the murder by the Soviet authorities of those Muslims who upheld the veiling of women. Hewlett Johnson, the communist Dean of Canterbury, wrote with passion of the ‘unbelievable degradation’ of women in the Muslim areas of the Soviet Union.

The eastern woman was a chattel, a piece of property, a domestic-slave and an economic slave….The Mohammaden religion in practice had increased the degradation, women became mere objects of lust and were in consequence regarded as morally inferior to be isolated in the dwelling and hidden behind the veil…. Highly typical of the past is the woman’s veil…. Strife ranged fiercely around it.

Its abolition in Uzbekistan cost fourteen murders...

On March 8th 1928 these symbols of degradation ‘were piled in rapidly growing heaps, drenched with paraffin and soon the dark clouds of smoke from the burning common abjuration of a thousand-year old convention, now become unbearable, flared up into the bright sky of the spring day…. As the course of knowledge grew and women learned of their new rights they would act suddenly and resolutely.

Gul Bibi refused a forced marriage at the wedding ceremony itself and the paranya (veil) was torn off and all the women cried ‘Long live free women’ .

The only consistent threat that runs through leftist thought and behaviour from the 1920s until today is that they hate Britain, its history, customs and The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

traditions, its democratic capitalism and its freedom of speech. They automatically support any political movement that is opposed to what Britain stands for and might conceivably undermine British society.

In the 1930s it was the Soviet Union and today it is Islamic obduracy.

It is distressing to find sensible Conservative politicians even hinting that the veil is acceptable in Britain.

Christie Davies is the author of The Strange Death of Moral Britain.

Cooking up a Storm B K Ridley

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he concept of consensus in science seems innocuous, but it conjures up dangerous possibilities. On the one hand, there are whole swathes of our understanding of Nature that are uncontroversial and accepted by the vast majority of scientists as pretty good accounts of reality. One thinks here of the classical physics of Newton and Maxwell, the basic ideas of Darwin regarding evolution, and the genetic process of inheritance. To speak of consensus with regard to these matters is to use ordinary nontechnical language in an unexceptional way. It is, nevertheless, dangerous. The meaning of consensus carries with it the implication of counting heads as assessing opinion, and science is most definitely nothing to do with that. A Law of Nature is not decided by a referendum, nor even by a committee of the Great and Good. Scientific knowledge is gained by the insight and talent of the individual scientist and discussions with his peers. In this sense, the idea of consensus in the scientific sense is an oxymoron. And here is where the danger lies: in politics, consensus is anything but an oxymoron, it confers authority. To claim the existence of a scientific consensus is for politics to sanction all kinds of action based upon scientific authority.

Nowhere, and indeed no when, has this been more evident than in the recent furore on global warming.

Though now massively political, it was initiated by the religious beliefs of the environmentalists (Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, World Wildlife Fund). Fuelled, it seemed, by the concept of original sin from an older religion, the claim was that dangerous global warming was taking place, that human activity was responsible and that the science that underpinned the claim was settled and beyond question. Their icon became the now famous ‘hockey-stick’ graph that depicted the time-dependence of temperature from AD 1000 as deduced from tree-ring data, supplemented by computer predictions based on the observed rise of the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), in the

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

atmosphere. Grave concerns were raised over the inevitability of the melting of the polar ice caps and the consequent huge rise in sea-level. Even worse, there was the possibility of a runaway effect in which, beyond a tipping point, global temperatures would rise uncontrollably, and Earth would become like Venus, uninhabitable. It was a brilliant campaign that convinced all but a few of the world’s politicians that something had to be done to limit the emission of CO2. Politics was thus amalgamated with religion, the politicians believing that the scientific consensus gave them authority to order wide-reaching change in the fundamental operations of our technico-industrial civilization. The New Political Science had been born.

To persuade the masses, Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth spread the gospel, and David Miliband (then UK Education Minister) directed that no school should be without a copy. In 1990 the United Nations had already set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which reported regularly on evidence that global warming was happening according to the alarming predictions of computer simulations. Such was ‘the scientific consensus’, that reports began to be heard of journals rejecting papers critical of the science that was propagated, and ‘deniers’ being hysterically defined, by some parts of the media, as criminals.

Inevitably, given the impossibility of a scientific consensus in such a controversy, a few ripples of protest eventually became a tsunami of criticism. An objective statistical analysis of the data that went into the hockey-stick graph showed that the science that produced it was flawed and, some thought, fraudulent.

Much of the science publicised in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was shown incontrovertibly to be simply wrong. And then, in 2009, emails associated with the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia revealed unequivocal evidence of data manipulation to support the official global-warming message. After this revelation, dubbed by the media 11

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Climategate, the game was up. That this was so was underlined by the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change to agree any global consensus, thanks to the scepticism of China, India and Brazil. The fact of these being developing economies served to focus the mind wonderfully, something that still has to happen in the West, in spite of the efforts of the Czech President Vaclav Klaus and the English former Chancellor, Nigel Lawson.

It has been a scandalous episode for science. The authoritative consensus that global warming existed, and that it was man-made, never existed. Scientific academies everywhere, including the Royal Society, should have been at the forefront to refute the idea of a consensus, but they weren’t; and they should have unambiguously broadcast the actual controversial nature of the science, but they didn’t. On the one hand there were meteorologists, such as members of the UK Meteorological Office, whose predictions of alarming global warming were based on computer simulations of climate. They were naturally sincere in what they predicted, but their faith in their computer programs to handle the vastly complicated, non-linear, chaos-prone equations that describe the physics and chemistry of the oceans and atmosphere seems to some of us naïve in the extreme. (Perhaps some of us have too much experience of the garbage in, garbage out, type of computing.) On the other hand, there were climatologists who had made a deep study of climate in the past, who wrote books attempting to put global warming into its historical context. (Heaven and Earth

by Ian Plimer; Climate: the Counter Consensus by Robert Carter; both Australians.) They accept that a modest global warming does exist as a result of the globe’s recovery from the Little Ice Age (AD 15001900), but they argued that it is highly unlikely that it has anything to do with man’s activities. More alarmingly, they remark that presently we live in an Interglacial Warm Period and that these periods last typically for around 10,000 years. They also remark that the last Ice Age was about 10,000 years ago.

(Do I hear you say come back global warming, all is forgiven?)

After 20 years of politicised scientific hype, it is now possible for a rational debate on climate change to happen, and the first thing to note is that the climate is always changing. Unfortunately, to be realistic, change cannot be forecast reliably. The Met Office found this out recently when they predicted a ‘barbecue summer’ last year followed by a warm winter. Last summer was anything but a ‘barbecue summer’ and this winter has been unusually cold, so red faces at the Met. As a result, they have given up seasonal forecasts for the UK. It has been gently cooling Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk

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since1998, as opposed to the computer prediction of warming. The complexity of climatic processes — the role of that most powerful greenhouse gas, water vapour, its associated clouds, atmospheric and oceanic circulations, sunspot activity, volcanic eruptions, planetary and galactic variations — is overwhelming.

Given this complexity, it is arguably the case that a computer, no matter how powerful, cannot hope to make reliable predictions of climate change a decade or so into the future. An alternative is to look at the statistical behaviour of the climate during the recent Interglacial Warm Period, which reveals oscillations in temperature with multi-decadal regularity (nothing to do with CO2 emissions), and to use this to predict the future. This carries the assumption that there is zero man-made global warming. This, perhaps, is as good as anything, provided we don’t plunge into an unforecastable Ice Age. There are now hopeful signs that, far from there being a consensus, a good red-blooded scientific debate is under way. Warmists now readily admit the real difficulties in computer modelling the climate, but they, nevertheless, point to the back-of-the-envelope physics that clearly shows that more CO 2 means higher temperatures. Critics note that it is not linear but logarithmic, meaning that the relation is one of diminishing returns — a smaller rise in temperature per unit increase in CO2 concentration. And, in any case, a modest warming and more CO2 is a good thing for plant growth. Possibly, but not for marine life, which needs a gently alkaline ocean and dissolved CO2 pushes the balance towards acidity. These issues and a myriad others including measurement techniques, past and future, will continue to be argued over by the scientists involved. It is to be hoped that the age of caveatless statements about global warming, those tailored for politicians and the media, is past. But I wouldn’t count on it. Maybe, once the media and our politicians realise that the famously-claimed scientific consensus on global warming doesn’t exist and never has existed, we can look forward to the demise of the New Political Science. Maybe then our governments, released from being besotted by global carbon footprints, might begin focussing on real science issues bearing on local climate change. But, again, I wouldn’t count on it, riddled with environmentalists as the members of government are. One thing is scientifically sure about the climate — it changes. The record shows that a serious change of climate needs no help from mankind, and, what’s alarming, is that it is largely unpredictable.

Brian Ridley is a Fellow of the Royal Society The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

Will the Germans set us free?

Mark Griffith

A

t the start of Walter Abish’s sardonic 1980 novel, How German is it? the narrator crossly asks what is it a visitor to Germany first hears at the border: Good morning? Welcome to Germany?

No, mutters Abish, it is ‘Ihr Pass, bitte /Your passport, please’. His is the officious Deutschland we Brits chuckle at, the country where people get sued for using a washing machine at the wrong time of day.

North of Dover we still see the Teutons as an obsessively sterile nation of bossy types who adore red tape. Yet not only is this cliché out of date — it’s the other way round now. Even with the new coalition government, Britain’s woefully shrunken civil liberties should still worry us deeply. The New Labour surveillance state has already put down many roots and tendrils. Worse, there is an authoritarian wing in the Conservative party too. Parties in opposition are quick to condemn spying on citizens and use of the law to harass critics. Parties in government, however, are soon seduced by the delights of power and the siren song of those who say they need more of it.

We cannot hope that a better party wins an election to roll back bureaucracy and control of our lives.

NuLab very nearly retained power in May: this alone is a sobering thought. Britain’s most authoritarian and Orwellian government for several centuries almost won. More disturbing still was that it was able to pass these laws at all: the end to double jeopardy, innocent witnesses unable to have their DNA destroyed, the spread of administrative punishments where the suspect is intimidated into relinquishing his right to even assert his innocence. Suppose some civil liberties are restored and then Labour returns to power. How will we stop them, or another government, passing laws like these again?

We need allies who know how insidiously like knotweed the modern state can grow round us. The Germans understand this very well. A change of government at Westminster is only part of the solution, because the control freaks have won the battle for most British voters’ minds. To rip out the ‘snoopocracy’ root and branch we must study lessons that German liberals learned in the last thirty years. They swung public opinion in the EU’s largest country the other way. Intelligent Germans today value freedom and see Britain as an authoritarian land of street cameras, petty commissars, and prying databases.

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

The Krauts have been worried for some time about our transition into a police state, and they want to help us stop the slide. In recent months a new German party, the Piraten Partie, has been sending groups of people into airports to strip off to their underwear, protesting that if new US-mandated full-body scanners see everyone naked, why bother wearing clothes?

Modelled on Sweden’s Pirates Party, the Piraten Partie is growing fast. Meanwhile in Britain we know today’s ‘terrorist threat’ is small-scale and bogus compared to 30 years of the IRA, but we just grumble and shrug at each new imposition.

Recent pointed remarks from T-Mobile, the mobilephone arm of Deutsche Telekom, that Britain’s state demands more details on its phone subscribers than communist East Germany required, also show how far the UK has drifted. Of course, comparing 1980s fixed-line phones to 20-noughties mobile phones isn’t entirely fair. In the digital era detailed logs of customer calls are easy to collect. There is a lot more data to snoop on these days — but Britain’s state is still leading the pack in greedily gorging itself on our information.

To see how much ahead of us Deutschland’s critics of arbitrary power are, recall the no2id.org stunt of November 2008. Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith was at a public meeting — anti-ID-card activists whisked her drinking glass away to copy her fingerprints and DNA. The point was to show how dangerously pro-crime New Labour’s push for biometric identity was. As one security analyst phrased it to me, basing identity on the cells of your body is like forcing us all to tattoo our cash-machine PIN number on our foreheads.

What’s interesting is that this confiscation of the Jacqui Smith biometrics exactly followed a similar stunt seven months earlier, in Germany. At the end of March 2008, freedom activists there also purloined a drinking glass used at a meeting by Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble. Schauble, like Jacqui Smith, loudly supports biometric identity, a topic neither Schauble nor Smith even faintly understand. The German activists went one better though — they not only published one of Schauble’s fingerprints in the magazine Die Datenschleuder, they also included in 4,000 issues of the magazine a rubber strip bearing his print that interested readers could wear so as to leave Herr Schauble’s supposedly unique index-finger mark 13

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wherever they went.

A century of uncritical belief in the clinching certainty of fingerprint evidence has begun to crumble in the face of research by American criminologists.

The point here is that not only should fingerprints be taken with a pinch of salt at crime scenes, but they are (like iris patterns in eyes, or DNA, or face scans, or voice prints, or any other biometric) dangerous and stupid choices of markers for identity. A few seconds of thought show this. First visualise some thugs withdrawing money from a cash machine with one of your fingers, one of your eyeballs, or just you at knifepoint. Next visualise how your DNA now kept on file (we know how carefully our government guards our private information, don’t we?) can be used in an increasingly cheap lab process to grow a few drops of blood bearing your DNA, grow a few hairs in a culture dish with your DNA, grow some skin cells whose DNA shows — irrefutably given the scientific ignorance of most jurors and MPs — that you were at a crime scene though you were not.

Behind both Die Datenschleuder and the Schauble fingerprint stunt is a decades-old Hamburg forum of around 2,500 hackers, the Chaos Computer Club.

Constanze Kurz of the CCC told me, ‘The UK is now used as an example all across Europe of how not to do security.’ She explained what the Chaos Computer Club believes in.

It’s simple. We believe that public information should be public, and private information should be private.

It’s our right to keep an eye on the state, not the other way round.’

Britain’s 13-year NuLab government certainly wanted it the other way round. Tony Blair, Alistair Campbell and Gordon Brown all reacted with rage to press coverage of their family lives or any intrusions into their privacy, while crafting laws to give officials deep access to our private lives. Our bank accounts are no longer private, state officials no longer need court orders to force entry to our homes, our phone calls, e-mails and letters are no longer private — and under an act from 2000, Britons now commit a criminal offence by even trying to keep them private, like not giving decryption keys to the police. Cambridge University security specialist Ross Anderson drily remarks that the countries that give their police this power, requiring no court order, ‘include Russia, Zimbabwe, and the UK.’ In stark contrast, Germany’s constitutional court in February 2008 ruled that the hard drive of a citizen’s computer is now considered private space, like his home.

Of course as anywhere, police there sometimes need to raid someone’s home, or their hard drive, but in both

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cases they need to follow strict rules, and obtain court permission, the way they once had to in Britain. Kurz proudly explained that the Chaos Computer Club were formerly seen as criminals, but are now grudgingly respected pro-freedom lobbyists. Courts and Berlin committees call them as expert witnesses. The CCC helped sponsor this new principle that hard drives in Germany are private.

The Chaos Computer Club also pushed for last autumn’s constitutional court decision, unique in the world, to ban electronic voting. Almost unnoticed in Britain, this German decision caused great interest in the US, where allegations of cracked voting machines rigging elections have been rumbling for years, even before the curious ‘hanging chads’ case in Florida that made the younger Bush president in 2000.

More precisely, the German court decision only says that the voting process must be comprehensible to someone with absolutely no technical knowledge — by implication barring everything except bits of paper counted on long tables in church halls. Town councils across the Federal Republic are now gloomily junking their voting machines. For the nation we often mock as a land of technology-obsessed engineers, this court decision is daringly conservative. It asserts that here the traditional way of doing things is the safest and hardest to corrupt.

British press coverage of these activists usually misleads. ‘Anarchist’ is a word used very precisely across the Rhine, and it doesn’t mean being a Sex Pistol. It means organising as much as you can locally.

In this sense, many shire Tories are anarchists. ‘Hacker’ is another badge of honour among Germany’s freedom campaigners. Unlike ‘crackers’ or data thieves, Chaos Club hackers are thoughtful liberals who know information is power. They know that’s why states always want to know more about us, and want us to know less about them. Why loudly control steel or rail, when a government can quietly control information or, better still, monopolise our very identities?

A retired City of London police officer described to me an official visit to the UK by some German coppers several years ago. He showed them the Kent police database, and the visiting detectives were horrified at its scope and lack of safeguards. They warned him darkly, ‘We Germans know from experience what happens in countries where the police have powers like these’.

Mark Griffith is editor of the book Collateral Damage: Global Crash Phase Two, a collection of articles about the deepening financial crisis, which went on sale in August 2010.

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

Sea Blindness John Parfitt

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

Two-thirds of the world’s population lives within We have let too much British manufacturing be 200 miles of the sea so that is where most naval tasks, run down or fall into foreign hands, with things including transporting and supporting the army, will The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

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be. And the sea is now not just about trade and fish but undersea fuel and minerals as well, so the old threemile territorial limit has acquired various ‘add-ons’ up to 350 miles out to sea, which bring new problems.

Poor countries like Somalia ‘own’ far more sea than they can police alone, rogue states like Iran would like to interfere with shipping far from their coasts, while the laws of the sea behind all this really depend on the willingness of the old maritime powers to survey, police and enforce them: that includes us.

Government approaches to budgets often look like ‘here’s s o m e m o n e y, d o what you can with it’ followed by shockhorror when things go awry. Looking at costs should include all overseas policies like defence, intelligence, diplomacy and aid together. For instance diplomats need fighting men for credibility even if they are many miles away, while aid may need protection for its deliverers as we can see in Afghanistan, so we need a joined-up approach. Some serious heavyweights from the forces, business, academia and politics recently called for a Privy Council committee to get the relevant departments working together, but their report disappeared into a ‘too-difficult’ file somewhere. The services might get together too: admirals, generals and even ambassadors publicly arguing about budgets just get seen as grandees arguing about ‘toys’ which gives politicians an excuse to squeeze them all to fill the begging bowls regularly paraded in Downing Street.

Ships, aircraft and guns are not toys, but tools of the fighting services and even if, as for much of Victoria’s reign, they never get used in anger they will have done their job.

In 1995 the navy did its own sums and published its official handbook, British Maritime Doctrine. Its taskWeb: www.salisburyreview.co.uk

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list would not have surprised our forebears and was supported by a just sufficiently large fleet including 40 escorts and 16 submarines, funded from a defence budget of 3.8 per cent of GDP, in today’s money about £50 billion, about half its Cold War size.

Percentages are not sacred but nations who take defence seriously usually spend about 3½ per cent of GDP, more in the US. But unlike other departments, diplomacy and defence have had their real budgets slashed year after year with defence now £42 billion, 3 per cent of GDP, a realterms cut of over 10 per cent despite having more work to do than in 1995. The navy’s 40 escorts are down to 23, its submarines to eight, its skills and supplies support eroded by arbitrary cuts and its overdue aircraft carrier and logistic fleet renewal programmes savaged beyond credibility. The criminal folly is ‘capability gapping’ which pays off ships before their replacements are ready, delays new programmes (which only increases their final costs) and hopes that nobody will declare war for ten years — just like the ’thirties.

Sea power is not about occupying the sea as armies occupy territory, but about being able to use it whenever and wherever needed. That might be to protect home waters, overseas territories, trade and resources or support our national interests by projecting power: anything from flag-showing to armed force.

That is what the navy is for and it still needs that 1995 fleet as well as new aircraft carriers which are essential for operating outside home waters, because command of the sea depends on command of the air above it.

Carriers need no access to foreign waters or bases, can travel 5000 miles a week, command a million square miles of sea from a self-contained mobile air base and provide air support for anything from humanitarian The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

assistance to all-out war. We also need a makeover of no organic political unity will seldom be able to find the navy’s infrastructure. It is too easy when money common positions on major issues: accession, climate is tight to cut non-lethal bits, like design, building, change, Israel-Arab relations, Turkey and Kosovo, and training, auxiliaries and stores back-up: but disastrous its long-awaited 60,000-strong Rapid Reaction Force when the guns begin to shoot. still only exists on paper. Worse, as Chalfont foresaw, Magic bullets are tempting, and the biggest is EU posturing is undermining NATO’s defensive ability ‘Interdependence’. In his 1985 Diplomacy at Sea and alienating the US, while NATO Secretary-General Sir James Cable dubbed it a ‘drug of addiction’ and Rasmussen has publicly accused Europeans of being a pointed out that it usually means dependence. But paper tiger: undiplomatic but true. Cable had remarked too many politicians have been willing to accept it, that ’60s France lost nothing by keeping her political staggering like drunks along a foggy political street and military independence, and we should follow: our where clutching any lamp-post, however dim, seems military and diplomatic expertise are scarce resources better than sobering up not to be distracted into and getting home unaided. agencies of pan-European Too many well-fed wiseacres who would Cable was writing of the irrelevance when they are b e s e a s i c k o n w e t g ra s s t h i n k t h a t US, but the EU is now also needed for our national and Britain’s terminal decline since 1945 does a problem.

NATO interests. not matter, yet think that our glorious The first lamp-post is We did not build an past entitles them to living standards America. We need good economy half as big as most of the world can only dream about US relations and the ability China’s with 5 per cent to work with its forces but of China’s population by dependence is risky. There is a history from scrapping doing everything wrong, so it is time to stop beating our our wartime nuclear-sharing deal, Suez and unequal breasts, ignore academic declinists muttering into their treaties to dealings with British arms firms. Today’s high-table port about ‘diminished roles’ and set about problem is our jump-jet project, begun here but now a correcting the mistakes of the recent past. Rebuilding joint venture with the US in the driving seat: our new our position as a major maritime trading power means carrier programme depends on it for its completion and ensuring that our defence, diplomatic, commercial and in-service support, but will it be forthcoming? The US industrial policies combine to maintain British seats and blatantly uses such deals to dictate policy to its allies, credibility at the international conference tables where as in post-war years when navies with US-built ships many future battles will be won. We have been here knew that if they used them in ways disapproved of in before in our long history, something the old American Washington spares and support would be cut off. And sea-dog Mahan knew when he identified ‘Character the business of America being business and the politics of the People’ and ‘Character of the Government’ as of America being pork-barrel, foreign companies had essential ‘Elements’ for a prosperous seagoing nation. better get used to sloping playing fields, while we Our opportunities are world-wide and not confined to need to think seriously about ‘plan Bs’ for things like Europe and the USA (back to those ‘three circles’ of those jump-jets. post-war new-Elizabethan thinking) No one else will The other lamp-post, the EU, has problems enough do it for us, we must not let others stand in our way and with its democratic deficit, bureaucracy and high it will not be done overnight. Realistically it will take costs and needs major reform, but here we will stick five years for others to understand that we really mean to trade and defence. On trade, we can all cook figures it and ten before we start to reap the big benefits, but to claim that our EU trade today is anywhere between it is worth the effort and the sooner we start the better.

45-55 per cent of our total, depending on the answer we want, but by 2015 it will probably be under 40 per John Parfitt is a former naval officer who is writing a cent and falling as other economies outpace Europe’s. book Sea Power and Trade in the 21st Century, New Prosperity will not come from taking in European Britannia. washing.

The EU has wanted a common security and defence policy and military role to back its foreign policy aspirations for years, but it has been dogged by problems: in 2001 a former foreign minister, Lord Chalfont, published a critique of them (The European Army) in the Salisbury Review, but after nine years the problems he identified remain. A 27-state group with The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

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Twelve Men Good and True?

Nigel Jarrett

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ritain’s jury system is often held up as the may not be able to serve, but trying to wriggle out of a mainstay of a fair and unprejudiced legal jury summons is almost impossible and, if successful, organisation, ensuring that the conviction of simply results in a postponement of duty. There may defendants in tried cases is ultimately taken away also be friction between juror and employer (human from the judiciary. The ‘twelve good men and true’, a nature will often irrationally apportion blame for description long out of date on gender grounds at least, disruption), transport difficulties and feelings of are expected after listening to sometimes complex inadequacy, of not being up to the job; all of which arguments and evidence to marshal their thoughts and may prevent the jurors from paying close attention to bring in a disinterested verdict. Where the jury might what they are being told. Above all, they know that make a complete ass of itself — for example, in finding their verdicts might result in fellow citizens being guilt where it cannot possibly have been proved and deprived of their liberty. To be told that one’s task is probably forcing the prosecution to appeal against a onerous does not make performing it easier; for some, wayward conviction — the judge and legal teams step it’s quite the opposite. in and save both the defendant from an unjust fate and The costs of the jury system must be astronomical. the jurors from confounding embarrassment.

Crown courts, having taken the place of assizes and Despite having probably never been inside a court quarter sessions, are almost continuously active, of any sort before, and increasingly swayed by the new jurors turn up every week and a separate absurdities of courtroom staff is employed to meet Before the case starts, then, our ‘unprejudiced’ ‘dramas’ on television, their needs, organise their citizens are faced with what already resembles jurors turn up on Monday deployment and pay a scene of impartially differentiated morning in crown courts their expenses for daily elements, to join the ‘no smoke without throughout the land subsistence, travelling to fire’ thought that arises when they see (200,000 of them serve each and from court (sometimes someone arraigned before them, especially year in the UK) and receive also to a court farther away) if they are tattooed and/or bare-skulled. an induction that ranks the and, where applicable, loss bureaucratic procedures for of earnings. The cost to the claiming expenses as almost equal in importance to the country of taking employees out of the economy for essential protocols of the court and the legal processes. up to two weeks could be calculated if anyone wanted Within the hour they may be tossed into the cauldron to work it out: it is done for absence from work due to face not only a scene of intimidating seriousness, to sickness and for reasons that point to the need for despite the attempts of judges and barristers to put them improvement and revision. Perhaps the results for the at their ease, but also the dock and its defendants, now law would be equally startling. as likely as not behind protective glass and flanked by And is there any guarantee that, with all these court officials to stop them absconding — or so the reservations considered, the verdicts juries bring in are jurors have been told on their crash course. But, surely, the best available in terms of intelligently reckoning only the guilty would attempt to escape; the innocent the evidence? To say that a verdict must be based would want to stay to clear their names. Before the case on the weight of evidence for and against guilt (or starts our ‘unprejudiced’ citizens are faced with what innocence) is to assume that juries are fit for the job. already resembles a scene of impartially differentiated What is ‘fitness’? Is it not possible for jurors to steel elements, to join the ‘no smoke without fire’ thought themselves against the importuning of their instincts that arises when they see someone arraigned before or the need to remember and understand labyrinthine them, especially if they are tattooed and/or bare- evidence, particularly over a long period? To suggest skulled. that it is human nature to assess reasonable doubt (what Jurors, selected randomly from those aged between is ‘unreasonable doubt’?) and bring in a ‘not guilty’ 18 and 69 on the electoral register, may have much verdict is as flawed as the idea that jurors, individual or on their minds, not least a feeling of unwarranted collective, will set aside their fears and prejudices and imposition. If you have a criminal conviction you find innocense in a defendant who looks nefarious as he

Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk

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The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

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

Even when all these reservations are considered, we are still left with the random method of calling jurors to court. One may be lucky (or unlucky) to have served on a jury twice in 12 years yet know of no-one in one’s immediate circle of friends and family who has served at all. The objection might not be against The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

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Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk

A Curriculum of Errors Frank Ellis Since our inception in 1997, we have broadened our intellectual framework and built on our existing specialisms within gender relations. We now incorporate ‘race’, masculinities, sexualities, queer and trans-theories into our research work which has a core focus on the body. (Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, Leeds University).

Please mark for content only — Do not penalise for errors of spelling, grammar or punctuation (written instructions given to Dr Frank Ellis at the University of Leeds before marking a 2nd year grammar exam, 2004-2005).

The University of Leeds has aspirations to worldclass status (University and College Union, Leeds University).

T

he financial crisis which now confronts Leeds University (and other universities) has its origins in the egalitarianism of both New Labour and, it must be said, the Conservative Party. A Tory government abandoned the distinction between polytechnics and universities, so imposing unitary status and allowing the influx of large numbers of poorly qualified students into tertiary education.

Further inflaming this expansionist fever was an assumption, encouraged by politicians and academics, that all who wanted to go to university should be able to do so; since going to university was akin to a human right. Potential students should be able to go to a university, if they can meet the academic requirements and get funding. If they cannot, they must seek other avenues of personal advancement.

The huge increase in the numbers of students that overwhelmed universities from the mid 1990s onwards resulted in course requirements being watered down to accommodate students who would have been rejected earlier. Even worse, they soon discover in the world of mortgages and council tax that the much-vaunted degree in gender studies or film studies does not impress a hard-headed employer. Over the last fourteen years the governing bodies of British universities have behaved in a way which resembles those other wouldbe masters of the universe, the banks, now rightly castigated for their incompetence. In pursuit of a subprime clientele, the universities encouraged a reckless increase in student numbers regardless of academic ability. They thus cruelly deceived many applicants Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk

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about the benefits and costs of higher education, lied to the British taxpayer and will almost certainly have inflicted severe long-term damage on higher education itself. I wonder whether Michael Arthur, the vice chancellor of Leeds University and chairman of the Russell Group of universities, who presided over this porcine rush after fool’s gold, is competent to deal with his own local crisis and the national one that he and his fellow vice chancellors have done so much to create.

Between 1992 and 2006 I taught in the Department of Russian Studies, part of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures (SMLC), at Leeds University.

In addition to my specialist Russian media course, I used to teach two general courses on nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Russian literature. I also prepared a special subject course on Russian war literature. Over this period, I was able to see the consequences of the expansion referred to in educational bureaucratese as ‘widening participation initiatives’ on academic standards and to gain some insights into its impact on financial planning in the SMLC. Russian literature in British universities is no longer read and studied in Russian. Very few first-year students come to university with a Russian A level, and even when they do, such has been the decline in the A level over the last 15 years, that the top grades do not indicate much about a student’s abilities. Teachers in secondary education have presided over a deliberate and systematic inflation of A Level grades which has undermined confidence in the examination. Teachers generally, and teachers’ unions specifically, detest the sorting effects of examinations. Indeed, many teachers hate examinations and would, if they could, abolish them completely and rely on course work. I frequently met students at Leeds with A and B grades at A Level Russian whose knowledge of basic Russian grammar was pitifully weak. These students, supposedly good linguists, are unable in their first year to cope with reading even short Russian novels in Russian let alone something substantial. This is an appalling indictment of modern language teaching in our secondary system.

The situation may never improve while universities collude with politicians to accept students who cannot meet the demands of higher education. Most students who study Russian at university these days study the subject ab ovo. Most of their effort will go to gaining sufficient mastery of the language and they will have The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

little time for, or interest in reading a major Russian novel in Russian. In 1993, Leeds University, like other universities, went over to a modular system. This allocates a certain number of credits to a module and the student must amass a minimum number of credits to qualify for his degree. The modular system also provided for students to do a course outside his main subject. One direct consequence was to reduce the amount of time available in the curriculum to cover material in any depth.

The twentieth century Russian novel course highlights the problems of the modular system.

Students taking this course must read and study four novels, like Vasilii Grossman’s Life and Fate (1988) or Boris Pasternak’s Doktor Zhivago (1957). Most students make decisions about their work at the start of the academic year and leave themselves very little time to complete the reading before the relevant class begins. When the twentieth century Russian novel course begins with, say, Life and Fate few students will have started to read this major novel, let alone have completed it and made notes. Seminars based on the novel are predictably one-sided affairs. A small group of students who have read it and the lecturer end up doing all the talking. Students who have not read the novel or in some cases not even bothered to buy a copy are not able to make any useful contribution in class. The twentieth-century Russian novel course is assessed on the basis of two essays, which must be written on two of the set texts. Many students, having decided on which set texts they will write their essays, do not bother to read the other two and often do not bother to attend the class in which they are taught.

This is common practice and something I found deeply dispiriting.

The modular system is designed to be open to students from other departments in the university. A student in the Department of English taking a course in the nineteenth-century English novel might like to study the Russian novel or a student majoring in Russian history might want to study Solzhenitsyn.

Students from these departments were generally of a much higher intellectual calibre than those majoring in Russian studies. As there was great financial pressure to attract such high quality students, this was another factor that favoured studying literature in English translation.

A Russian department in which Russian literature is primarily read in English translation and not in the Russian original is an academic Potemkin village.

Lecturers in the English Department could argue that since the Russian department does not offer Russian literature in Russian but in translation, there is no point in having a dedicated Russian department. A The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

Russian department’s status in the university and the wider academic world depends on its expertise in analysing and interpreting the primary texts in the Russian language. If the transmission of that expertise is neglected out of non-academic considerations — administrative, timetabling convenience and financial pressures — then that status is undermined and the justification for retaining a Russian department is further weakened. The trend towards teaching literature in translation makes a strong case for teaching all literature in translation within a large department, maybe a new entity, the Department for the Study of World Literature in Translation. Russian literature would then enjoy no unique status but would be one of a number of foreign literatures to be studied. If a student had no interest in literature — and many do not — and his sole aim was to learn Russian then there is no need to retain a Russian department. He would be sent to the University’s Foreign Language Centre where much of his pursuit of Russian could be self-directed (or he could pay for private tuition). Experts in the Russian economy, history, media and philosophy would be allocated to the various departments specialising in economy, history and so on.

Modern-language students in most British universities spend part or all of their third year abroad. It is taken for granted that the time they spend there is excellent value for money: there are, it is claimed, dramatic improvements in the language being studied; institutional links are established and fostered and students experience different cultures first hand. It is argued that the benefits are indisputable: I disagree. The arrangements are expensive, represent an unacceptably large drain on staff time, unnecessarily lengthen the degree course; and perhaps worst of all do not deliver the academic benefits cited to justify the time and trouble. There are undoubtedly benefits from time spent in a foreign-language environment, but these benefits can be delivered in Britain much more cheaply.

Modern-language teachers have an almost mystical faith in the power of the time spent abroad to improve the language skills of even the least able students. There is no guarantee that the command of a student’s German will improve in Germany. Discipline and application are necessary. A student with poor attendance and weak language work in Britain is unlikely to suddenly improve when abroad, especially when the temptations and excitement may well overcome his limited selfdiscipline. There is a strong case for using time abroad as a way of rewarding those students who meet certain academic standards before being awarded a place.

Competition would be fierce and would raise standards.

Time spent abroad would be an indicator of academic quality control, conferring superior status on selected 21

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students. The pursuit and enjoyment of some of the cultural and less rigorous educational benefits can come after the degree course and at the former student’s own expense. Most of the languages offered by SMLC at Leeds and other similar departments are those of EU states. Travel to and from these states has never been easier so that a mandated year for language learning is not required within the degree course. Physical access to the Middle East (Arabic), Russia, China and Japan is not as easy but not insuperable. However, the Internet and satellite television properly used — al-jaziira is outstanding — are excellent and cost-effective substitutes. The opportunities provided by the Internet, satellite television and other electronic media should be fully exploited. As the SMLC will now have to abandon its ambitions to remain ‘the UK’s largest institutional provider of modern languages’, Russian, Chinese, Arabic and Japanese departments should be considered for closure or downsizing.

The key to the mastery of any language to degree standard is regular and serious reading. Unfortunately, students no longer read. They read as little as possible in English and only a fanatically dedicated handful will attempt something like Gogol’s Dead Souls in Russian, let alone The Brothers Karamazov. Students who graduated before the introduction of the modular regime had no excuse for not reading major works of literature, like Ivan Denisovich in the original Russian.

In the days of the modular supermarket, any tutor who is foolhardy enough to demand that students read the set texts in Russian would soon be addressing rows of empty chairs; but some of those chairs should not be occupied in the first place. Students who do not wish to immerse themselves in the great canonical Russian texts are denying themselves an opportunity to experience Russian culture.

The most efficient and cost-effective way to linguistic mastery and cultural understanding is through reading, which does not require that the student be located in Moscow despite the claims of modern language departments’ promotional literature. When student numbers were much smaller, the leisurely passage through a modern language degree course with a year abroad was feasible. In straitened financial circumstances, the year abroad can either be retained for a few elite students or abolished. It cannot continue in its present form.

Not all student applicants are equally endowed with sufficient self-discipline and intellectual ability to be able to pursue a worthwhile course in tertiary education. These arguments against mass higher education are not new. They were made during the expansion of higher education during the 1960s and those who advanced them were soon vindicated. The latest round of expansion which accelerated in the mid 1990s has threatened the university ethos. Higher education is now expected to be inclusive so that it must host a miscellany of pseudo-intellectual misfits — gender studies and black studies are two obvious examples — which are hostile to notions of intellectual rigour, above all, to free speech and academic freedom.

Gender studies and black studies have no place in a university: they are little more than grievance factories and should be closed. Vice-chancellors, university secretaries, the heads of departments and schools, who do not defend the essentials of a university for reasons of ideological and financial expediency, or who fail from cowardice to confront the charlatans, cease to preside over a university.

Frank Ellis was a lecturer at Leeds University.

The Real Rebels should be on The Right Nigel Jones

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ne of the major attractions of the Left — especially to the young — has always been their identification with romantic rebellion and revolt against the stuffy, conventional established order. In England, this goes right back to the legend of Robin Hood and his Merry Men — cocking repeated snooks at authority in the shape of the Sheriff of Nottingham; living free under forest skies; and above Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk

all subverting the social order by robbing the rich and giving the proceeds of their muggings to the poor.

Even though Robin himself may be a myth, his outlaw image expresses a timeless ideal of the discontented and the restless.

It was no accident that the left-wing Hollywood screenwriters Ring Lardner Jr and Ian McLellan Hunter, blacklisted in the US by anti-Communist 22

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McCarthyism, found a refuge in Britain where they anonymously wrote the teatime children’s TV series The Adventures of Robin Hood which slithered a seductively attractive message of social equality and anti-establishment revolt into millions of homes and impressionable young minds in the grey 1950s.

The arrival of rock and roll in the same decade fed into the same stirring zeitgeist of revolt. The prevailing heroes of the hour were James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause; Marlon Brando in The Wild Bunch and Elvis Presley, whose curled lip and gyrating hips seemed a permanent sneer and thrust against the old and the conventional. The music spawned a succession of youth movements — the Beats, the Teds, the Mods, Rockers and finally the Hippies, all dedicated in their different ways to beating a path away from the routes taken by their parents’ generation.

Inevitably, the global youthquake of revolt found political causes to hitch their wagons to. Nuclear disarmament in a world threatened by atomic obliteration was an obvious one; and soon TV pictures beamed out from the atrocious war in Vietnam offered another. The political establishment on both sides of the Iron Curtain in the 1960s was dominated by old men; (emphasis on the ‘old’ and the ‘men’) — from the geriatric tyrants of Communism — Brezhnev, Mao and Ho Chi Minh — to the World War One generation: Adenauer, de Gaulle and Macmillan — who still held sway in the West. When a young charismatic leader — President J F Kennedy — appeared to break the mould, it seemed only inevitable that ‘they’ — unidentified dark forces — should kill him and resume business as usual.

To the post-war baby boomers who marched to Aldermarston nuclear weapons research establishment every Easter, or gathered outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square to protest about Vietnam, their elderly rulers represented reaction, repression and finally death. While they — at least in their own eyes — with their music, their mind-expanding drugs, their flower power and free love, were on the side of life and the future.

Somehow — it may have been the strength of the dope they were imbibing — it quite escaped the Love Generation that the heroes whose posters plastered their bedsit walls: the bearded Fidel Castro, and above all his murderous failure of an acolyte, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara — were brutal dictators far more repressive and grim than the tolerant old democrats against whom they were marching and chanting. The Trade Unionists who made pilgrimages to Cuba and East Germany did not pause to reflect that strikes were unknown in these socialist paradises — not because they were not needed, but because they were banned.

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In the end it was not the Sixties and Seventies ‘fun’ toy revolutionaries — the Tariq Alis, the Danny Cohn-Bendits, the Weathermen, the Baaders and the Meinhofs — who triumphed, but those who — in the main peacefully — overthrew Communism in Russia and across Eastern Europe twenty years later. After half a century of unfettered power, the original revolutionary impulse of Communism had ossified into a grey bureaucratic dictatorship, no longer capable of inspiring loyalty even among its own salaried apparatchiks.

Two decades after those great upheavals, the ‘long march through the institutions’ advocated by the more thoughtful and dedicated of the 60s revolutionaries — though grown grey and pot-bellied now, is nearing their desired destination. An entrenched new class, holding to the neo-Marxism of ‘political correctness’ as if to a new religion, has its sweaty hands clammily clasped round the levers of power. A new Establishment — in politics; the civil service; the judiciary; the media; local government; academia — even the police — the hated ‘pigs’ of yesteryear — sits in air-conditioned offices in London and Brussels spinning a fine mesh of rules, laws and codes to bind, control and slowly enslave us all.

Faced with this reborn Establishment, is it not time for Tories to take on the unaccustomed role of the rebel? For, in a curious reversal of history, any resistance to the stifling blanket of conformity that has been flung over our liberties must come from the Right. Even though Labour were ousted from office in the election, their nanny statist mindset will continue to dominate our culture until it is challenged by a Conservative revolution. It is their placemen and women who sit on the quangoes and the judges’ bench, teach in the classrooms, pontificate in the studios, and write the editorials in the Guardian and Independent (the Pravda and Izvestya of our time).

How long will the young, the traditional foot soldiers of revolution, continue to tolerate the lazy-minded, dispiriting, disempowering and frankly tedious nostrums of the Left?

How long before they yearn to snip through Nanny’s apron strings and run free? In 1979, at the fag end of the Sixties and Seventies revolutionary wave, a brave woman modestly proposed that startling paradox: a conservative revolution.

No wonder that a popular poster shows Che Guevara’s iconic beret and curling locks framing the face of Margaret Thatcher. With the Left once more occupying the commanding heights of our culture, it is time for Tories to storm those heights once again.

Nigel Jones is a historian, biographer and journalist.

He is currently writing a history of the Tower of London for Random House/Hutchinson.

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American Funny Money Russell Lewis

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ast February, the US Congress passed the • $264 billion on direct welfare payments, which American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. rewarded states with federal handouts based on the Obama’s officials predicted that the near 800 number of people they put on their welfare rolls. billion dollar stimulus package it involved would • $53.6 million for a ‘state stabilisation fund’ to help jumpstart the economy and create 3.6 million jobs. states and local governments which had got into This confident forecast was based on the simple olddebt to avoid budget cuts — more money for the fashioned Keynesian idea that government spending feckless. would send consumers scurrying into the shops and • $300 million to buy cars for federal bureaucrats. cause money to pulsate round the economy in ever • $2 billion for ‘neighbourhood stabilisation’ to radical widening circles. Through this so-called ‘multiplier groups like ACORN (for whom Obama used to work effect’ the GNP would then increase by a larger amount in his earlier career). than the stimulus money spent, boosting the demand • $529 million to ex-Vice President Al Gore to finance for labour and propelling the unemployed millions the development of a new hybrid car. How weird back into work. However, three and a half million when there is huge overcapacity in automobile jobs were actually lost since the stimulus began. The manufacturing worldwide. unemployment level has stuck just under the 10 per There was the ‘Cash for Clunkers’ scheme under cent level. So as the leading Harvard expert on the which car buyers were given a $4500 incentive to trade subject, Robert J Barro, pronounced after the first six in their jalopies for brand new cars. This produced an months, there was no net stimulus effect on job creation immediate jump in sales in August, which was offset whatsoever. by a plunge after the subsidy ended in September.

This stimulus exercise, though it has coincided These grants look less like stimuli for job creation and with the US Federal Bank’s more like the ingredients of Keynes’s idea, ... claimed that if there rescue of the credit system, a slush fund. are idle human and physical resources, is not to be confused with Obama’s plan was based why not finance their return to productive it. The Fed’s reduction of on Keynes’s idea, which work by boosting demand for them... interest rates and monetary originated in the midst of If you feel that this prescription has echoes of easing has been quite the 1930s depression. Its the South Sea Bubble, your instinct is sound. rightly aimed at preventing theory was plausible and the money supply, bank optimistic and it claimed deposits and interbank credit nose-diving. Without that if there are idle human and physical resources, this action there could have been widespread financial why not finance their return to productive work by breakdown, spiralling deflation and a slump similar to boosting demand for them — throwing bank notes that of the 1930s. I am not criticising that very necessary out of helicopters, as some of Keynes’s recent apostles intervention, though this salvaging of the credit system have suggested — or giving cash to firms that would by monetary expansion should not be overdone or it otherwise go bust ? Indeed, if there is a multiplier, these will undermine the international value of the dollar. exercises might pay for themselves.

The ruling principle of the Obama administration If you feel that this prescription has echoes of the that government can combat unemployment by, as South Sea Bubble, your instinct is sound. If you want the phrase has it, ‘spending its way out of depression’ recent evidence of what happens when the theory is put will fail. Here are some examples of where American into practice, then look at Japan, which has been deficit taxpayers’ money has gone: financing for two decades without any effect other than • $288 million in short term tax cuts. Critics, looking increasing government debt. There are many reasons back at similar temporary tax cuts by George Bush in for believing that government action to boost industry 2008, which were ineffective, claimed that, precisely directly won’t work mainly because politicians and because they were transient, they would be largely bureaucrats haven’t a clue about picking winners. saved by households fearing future wage cuts or loss Public choice theory should also make us wary of of employment. deliverance through government largesse. For, when Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk

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it comes to choosing who gets the prizes, the power elite will always favour their friends. In Obama’s case this means, among others, Al Gore, and party stalwarts in Democrat state governments. There are also the unions who contributed so handsomely to the Obama campaign — the Autoworkers gave 400 million dollars and got their payback in the form of a chunk (or clunk) of General Motors’ equity It may seem rather curious that Obama should attach himself to such an outmoded economic model, with its emphasis on effective demand, the multiplier effect and steering the economy through tax and spend. As one Chicago economist remarked, the multiplier effect is now only taught as an illustration of a popular economic fallacy. Certainly, in post-war Britain and America, the policy of fiscal fine-tuning of the economy has been tested to destruction after World War II, and culminated in ‘stagflation’, which we had in the seventies, when the attempt to promote employment by fiscal measures resulted in simultaneous inflation and recession. In Britain the Keynesian prescription was dramatically discredited when 364 Keynesian economists signed a letter to The Times, which condemned the fierce fiscal squeeze in the budget of Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Geoffrey Howe, and claimed that it would result in prolonged economic decline. In the event, the economy turned into an expansionary phase for at least five years.

Recent extensive research on the effect of government spending on employment in America from Roosevelt to the present day indicates that the multiplier generally has been a flop. Barro concludes that the multiplier reaches one — that is the point when GDP grows at the same rate as government spending — only when unemployment reaches 12 per cent. On the other hand, based on data since 1950, he reckons that an average permanent marginal tax rate cut of one per cent raises the following year’s GDP growth rate by around 0.6 per cent per year. History is replete with examples of the striking success of permanent tax-cutting stimuli, notably during the presidencies of John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and the Margaret Thatcher premiership in Britain.

So, given the discouraging evidence of government outlays as a cure for unemployment, what was the drive behind the Obama team’s love affair with Keynes’s legacy? Certainly the now dominant intellectual left in the Democrat party has become obsessed with the inequality of American society, summed up in the claim that the top 1 per cent of American earners have 22 per cent of the nation’s total income. Obama is eager to tax these aristos, not just to support the public services, but to make them pay for their wealth. That approach is apparent in his health care programme which is The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

supposed to be paid for by an additional income tax of 5.4 per cent on those with incomes of half a million dollars a year. It is a means, in his own phrase, of ‘spreading the wealth around’.

It would clearly be a waste of time trying to convince Obama that fierce taxing of the rich is counterproductive, because the anticipated revenue invariably contracts. He must also be deaf to pleas that the best way to stimulate employment is to make permanent cuts in marginal tax rates on productive activities. Even the super-cautious Mrs Merkel and her German government have grasped that. For Obama’s overriding aim, whatever the revenue loss, is to ‘close the gap’. So expect US deficit spending to continue, provided Congress plays ball, and, with a rising defence commitment and the new burden of the taxheavy Health Act and Cap and Trade bill to come, don’t be surprised if annual US budgetary deficits linger in the trillions, however much the top one per cent are squeezed. With the economy thus burdened, America’s dole queues are not likely to shrink through the rest of Obama’s term. Nor will the Obama stimulus packages speed up growth but hinder it — like Roosevelt’s New Deal, which delayed American economic recovery by a decade.

President Obama has returned from a G20 meeting in which he failed to sway his European partners in favour of more government spending to foster economic revival. At home he faces a popular revolt against excessive government — his stimulus programme mainly stimulated the tea party movement. With the stock market falling there is now talk of a double dip American depression which could rock the rest of the world. We shall see.

Russell Lewis was a leader-writer on both the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail and was Acting Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs. He wrote the first biography of Margaret Thatcher, a best seller.

Email: lewisrussell@btopenworld.com

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650 Hands in the Till Richard Packer

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very so often events show that all one’s cynicism about the nature of political debate in our country, about which attitude one occasionally feels almost guilty, only underrates the folly of politicians and the gullibility of the public. The expenses ‘scandal’ about expenses incurred on ‘second’ homes is an excellent example. Most comment has been vacuous and the remedy apparently to be adopted expensive and ill-judged.

Backbench MPs receive modest salaries, currently £65,000 per annum; this is more than twice the average wage, but it is very much less than the pay of almost everyone an MP will meet professionally. Even in the public sector it is below the pay of middle-ranking, let alone senior, civil servants. Most MPs need homes in at least two places, one near Parliament and one in their constituency. Only a minority of MPs have a constituency near Parliament. All parties have proved reluctant to take Parliamentary action to increase MPs’ salaries.

The remedy adopted to deal with this awkward conjunction of facts, sanctioned explicitly and implicitly by all Governments, has been to adopt a relatively liberal regime about expenses on ‘second’ homes. One bad mistake which has been widely commented upon was to have a system that was effectively secret and screened from public view.

This was a direct encouragement to abuse. There was, however, another fatal mistake, unnoticed in all the many tons of newsprint devoted to the issue, which was to adopt a system which reimburses actual expenditure.

The worst aspect of a system which reimburses actual expenditure is that all the incentive for economy is lost. Indeed incentives operate in the opposite direction. There is every incentive to obtain the very best of everything provided only that the cost will in fact be reimbursed. Thus under such a system many individuals will buy more expensive goods than they would have done if they were using their own money even had they been richer than they are or were. This unfortunate tendency is reinforced by another factor which is probably only noticed by those who have submitted expenses claims over a very long period — like MPs. However widely an expenses regime is drawn there will always be some types of necessary expenditure ­­— or at least expenditure regarded as Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk

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necessary by those making it — which fall outside the definition of eligibility. This is pernicious because the result is that those affected will tend to submit inflated claims for other items in order to ‘make up’ the deficiency.

A careful examination of the claims submitted by a large majority of MPs will show all these tendencies in operation. Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Alistair Darling, for example, are no exceptions. All have distorted behaviour to increase claims, Brown by his peculiar cleaning arrangements, Cameron by taking out a mortgage the costs of which are claimable when he is unlikely to have needed one and Darling by buying and selling property in effect making capital gains at taxpayers’ expense. This serves merely to reinforce the obvious. If a system provides incentives for a certain type of behaviour then such behaviour will increase in frequency.

Unfortunately the remedies proposed by the Kelly report will not put the situation right, because they merely propose continuing the present system but making it tougher. A significant increase in MPs’ salaries is already being mooted as a consequence.

Further, it is also envisaged that a substantial bureaucracy should be established to police the new regime. Why taxpayers should feel happier to pay for a needless bureaucracy is not explained.

What is needed is something quite different which reflects the realities of economics and human nature.

Most MPs need two bases the cost of which should be recognised. All those who qualify under this simple test should receive a flat rate allowance which could be at a rate below that in fact claimed by most MPs until recently, that is below £20,000 per annum. They should spend this as they please without any check. The whole system could be operated by less than one person. Such a system would have none of the unnecessary checking and arguing which on current form we seem destined to have and to pay for in perpetuity. MPs would have the same economic incentives as everybody else, namely to maximise utility and minimise expenditure. Thus giving MPs more freedom to choose what to buy for second homes would, contrary to most assumptions, reduce the cost of MPs’ second homes to the public purse and eliminate the scope for abuse.

The whole saga demonstrates yet again that quick The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

fixes, in this case the decision to pay generous expenses secretly administered as a covert means of increasing MPs’ pay, rarely work in the long-run. When a problem emerges about which the public is believed to feel strongly, time is better spent reflecting on the fundamental causes and whether there might be a

simple solution rather than taking public attitudes — which in this case might be said to comprise ‘screw the bastards’ — as the main determinant of a solution.

Sir Richard Packer is a company director

LETTERS Sir I much appreciated the article in your Summer issue on Nesta Webster, a very good writer who deserves to be better known. H E Taylor hits the nail on the head when he writes of one of her books that it is ‘a comprehensive directory of past and present revolutionary organisations.’ She knew a formidable amount about the subject, even by present day standards, and wrote about it both reasonably and rationally.

I lived for some months with her and her disabled daughter in London in 1945. This had been organised by my grandfather, who for many years had conducted a very nineteenth-century friendship with her (she was a beautiful woman, and she would perhaps have called him her cher ami). She had a large flat, but couldn’t cook; I could cook but had nowhere to sleep. I was 23-4, she in her late sixties.

We got on very well so long as I was careful never to say anything on the dangerous subject of the Jews, or anything that might lead to it. Otherwise she was a charming companion and had a rare gift for treating one always as if one were her intellectual equal. Unfortunately she did not extend this to her daughter, a sweet natured and selfeffacing 45 year old. It took me a few weeks with Nesta to realize that what was still a first class mind was beginning to give way. Once after one of her anti-Jewish statements I dared to ask why she felt so strongly about them? ‘They killed my husband!’ she cried, and snatching off her shoe hurled it at me ­— unfortunately, missing me but smashing a Meissen figurine on the mantelpiece. Later when the air had cooled I asked what had happened to her husband. He had been in charge of some kind of police operation in the Northwest Frontier Province, now Taliban-ridden in today’s Pakistan. An ‘incident’ had arisen, he had gone to sort it out, and had not been shot but had died of a heart attack on the mountainside. How the Jews were responsible for this she did not explain, and I had not the heart to ask. Apart from this she had a delightful sense of humour, great courage and a total absence of stuffiness or self-importance.

incarnation as women were massively employed during WWII in the manufacturing sector, whereas the current incarnation has witnessed women dominating the service sector while also moving up the management ladder. Both situations are similar in that the national debt ballooned, albeit for different reasons.

Whereas the post-war nation inherited a strong industrial base to pay off its wartime debt, it’s difficult to conceive of the current welfare state as a good business case, although it doesn’t take much imagination to visualize the welfare state being repurposed to serve the rapidly growing needs of the greying boomer generation.

The real issue of the feminization of the economy is whether it has created a successful economy. The answer thus far is not encouraging given the massive debt-to-GDP ratios in all modern economies combined with the largely unfunded contingent liabilities for public pensions and medical services to be paid for by a shrinking labour force because of low fertility rates.

The prospects are further dimmed by the rising economic overhead to deal with social and economic dysfunction stemming from pandemic family breakdown.

It would be wrong to place all blame on feminism, especially as the gender equality aspects have been liberating to mankind. However, radical feminism is a corrosive Marxist force using women’s rights as a façade to impose the same system of elitist socialism that drove the former USSR bankrupt.

We are now in a post-feminist era where gender equality is not only the accepted norm, but is guaranteed by the economic realities of a shrinking labour force. I agree with Baskerville’s thesis, but framing the discussion in gender terms detracts from the real discussion, namely the need to deal with radical feminism as a political ideology rather than as an equality issue.

Hoff-Sommers correctly characterized feminism in terms of the beneficial equality feminism and the destructive gender feminism camps. The latter has morphed into a pure political Marxist ideology. The starting point for any meaningful discussion is to frame radical feminism as a political threat to national security, no different than offshore terrorist ideologies save for one distinguishing characteristic — we fund radical feminism. Once we recognize the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the discussion can proceed.

Penelope Tremayne, Wadebridge, Cornwall Sir ‘Women on Top’ (SR Summer 2010) was an excellent piece inviting us to consider the consequences of the modern incarnation of the feminization of the economy. I term it The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

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The Salisbury Review listens to the BBC The Sunday Programme. 13/06/2010 In a feature about a ‘woman friendly mosque’, in Manchester. Ed Stourton interviews Sabina Hammed, who says she has ‘the very rare privilege of being able to come and go as she pleases’ at the Mosque. She notes the separate entrances and boys as young as eleven being banned from the women’s room inside.

Stourton never challenges her about sexual segregation in Islam or the attitude of other Mosques which are breaking English law by keeping women out. At one point she trots out the ‘It’s cultural, nothing to do with Islam,’ argument.

Later there is a report about a discount coat store being turned into an Islamic community centre/ mosque only two blocks away from Ground Zero in New York.

Stourton tells us: ‘There are strident voices attacking the proposal and using it as a vehical to strike at Islam.’

A BBC reporter goes on: ‘Islam is once more under fire

from a noisy minority who see the Koran as suspect.’

‘There are US flags here and speakers denouncing the mosque.’ (He mentions that one of them lost three relatives in the 9/11 attack.)

‘Most people here adhere to the fundamentalist view that American values and the phrase Judeo-Christian are indivisible.’

He asks a Muslim in charge of the project: ‘Aren’t there extremists in all religions?’

Back to the harmless sounding ‘discount coat store,’ the reporter says ‘It is the focus for much fear and suspicion.’ Congregations are ‘struggling to understand the condemnation that has come their way.’ He mentions ‘A hail of propaganda.’ He then refers to ‘the extreme and very emotive criticism of the mosque.’ Right at the end he mentions the recent car bomb in Times Square.

But we are quickly reminded by an Imam that ‘it has happened in all faiths.’

Sunday 4/07/2010 Invited to look over the Sunday papers are left-wing poet Michael Rosen, Baroness Billingham, Labour peer, formerly from the Institute of Education and black Jazz composer Julian Joseph. Billingham declares that ‘the Tories hate all public services,’ and insist that the economic cuts are a conspiracy to destroy the public sector.

Paddy O’Connell puts it to her that perhaps Labour would have made cuts too, but this is not followed up.

Michael Rosen then explains that our failure in the recent World Cup was because there is no England so there can’t be an English team. The UK team were ‘forced to play for an entity which no longer exists and who would want to do that?’ No one disagrees with him although Julian Joseph slightly demur and Paddy O’Connell who presents the programme immediately accuses him of being ‘very old fashioned’.

Thursday July 8th, Radio 4 Andrea Levy started by gleefully telling us that one in three Londoners was born abroad, then quoted the number of languages spoken in the city now. This is the usual preamble to asserting that London is no longer an English city and that it never in fact was. Sure enough she continued, ‘London has always taken people in, after all it was founded by the Romans.’ Not true of course; it was inhabited for centuries before they arrived and founded by the Trinovates in the Iron Age. After their conquest the Romans took years to actually settle here. The BBC loves the lies of multiculturalism.

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Writing for Frankie Howerd Marc Blake

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rankie Howerd was a clown and a buffoon, which was why the British public took him to their ample bosom. His act was pure camp; an arch knowingness drizzled with double entendres that placed him as moral arbiter and simultaneously engineer of all that seemed improper. On stage, TV and film he teased us with a wink and a come-hither gesture, before turning on a sixpence, huffing and puffing in complete umbrage at whatever naughtiness we had dared to imagine.

So how was I going to write that?

As a fledgling stand-up and comedy writer, I had donated lines to BBC Radio’s satirical Weekending and the rather better News Huddlines plus the odd piece for Punch. Considering these shows were going down the tubes I was starting to see myself as the Mary Celeste of Comedy until, in the summer of 1991, I received a call from my shiny new agent, who was known as Tooting Broadway Jerry Rose.

star faded once more. In the late Eighties, Channel 4 made a series SuperFrank and a fresh student audience latched on to his inimitable style of humour.

When I arrived at Central TV offices I was told that they were planning a six part series, Frankie’s On... in which he would appear live at a University, on board a ship and in various other locations. There were five other writers in the boardroom. It transpired soon that not only had I got the job but the great Frankie Howerd was actually coming in.

I began to wish I had not worn T-shirt and shorts.

We sat nervously as a TV was wheeled in on a trolley. I glimpsed Mr Howerd arriving through the glass office wall. He was taller than I had imagined, slightly stooped, wearing a mis-matching jacket and trousers with a black silk shirt and a terrible wig that resembled a sparrow’s nest. I decided not to mention this, or the obvious pun on Wigmore St. He was polite and respectful to all as he shook our hands and stared at my legs.

He sat next to me and whispered sotto voce — ‘Are you married?’

Luckily I was. I showed him my ring.

I later heard that the script editor was frequently chased around his living room. Frankie was known for his peccadilloes. The TV was fired up and we were shown a videotape of his recent sell-out show.

‘Do you know the Garrick?’ asked Frankie.

Time for my first faux pas.

‘Isn’t that the little theatre?’ I asked.

‘A two thousand-seater.’ He said, graciously.

I went red. It was brilliant. At seventy-five he was in his prime. They stopped the tape after the first 25 minutes.

‘Do you know how many jokes I told?’ he enquired of us.

We all had a stab. Thirty, seventy. Not even close.

‘Five.’

Five actual jokes.

Every nuance, double take, sideways glance, pained moue and outraged exhalation had been staged and rehearsed. He knew exactly what he was doing, how to work the audience, how long to hold off, how far he could take a word or a moment until he wrung laughter from it. What was needed now was fresh material. He had used the best and now it was our turn. He rose and with another glance at my foolishly bare legs, he went

Are you free on Thursday?

When am I not free?

There’s a meeting. Central TV, in Wigmore Street.

What’s it about?

They’re looking for new writers for Frankie Howerd.

He has writers?

Oh ye of innocence and stupidity. They all have writers.

But I’m an alternative comedian.

So was he. Are you trying to talk yourself out of this?

I’m just overawed. Won’t it all be Oh, no, missus?

If it is, then it’s easy money for both of us.

Born in Yorkshire in 1917, Francis A Howard first came to prominence in BBC radio’s Variety Bandbox.

His writers included Eric Sykes, Johnny Speight and Galton and Simpson — so no pressure there. He achieved fame in his first film role The Runaway Bus opposite Petula Clark, going on to star in two Carry On films, The Ladykillers and the Great St Trinian’s Train Robbery. By the 1960’s he had fallen out of fashion — only to have his career resuscitated by appearances at Peter Cook’s Establishment Club and on BBC TV’s That Was the Week That Was. Between 1963 and 1965 he appeared in the Broadway musical A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Forum, which sowed the idea for the sitcom Up Pompeii for which he became best known. This was also the progenitor of Black Adder as later series had him placed in further historical periods. Two seasons and three films were made but his The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

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off to be lunched.

I was commissioned to write twenty minutes over the six part series, so I went home to toil, producing several surreal tales and reams of innuendo-laden oneliners — anything I felt he could use. We never met again. The Script Editor delivered the work to Frankie’s Kensington Home and started wearing running shoes.

There were problems though. Technically brilliant, Frankie was resistant to leaving his comfort zone. The routines were too complex and had to be cut to fit. A lot of whittling was done. I didn’t mind and nor did my agent, because he liked getting paid.

Sadly, Frankie fell ill after contracting a virus on a

trip to the Amazon and died in April 1992. Only two shows were ever broadcast. On the morning of his demise he was still speaking to the producer, making suggestions, trying to improve the show. He had become, rightly, a comedy legend. It was a pleasure and a privilege to have met and worked with him, however briefly. I learned so much: how to tailor the material, how to use comic punctuation, the value of the beat and the pause and most of all, how to dress more appropriately for meetings.

Marc Blake is a stand-up comedian.

Conservative Classic — 40 When William Came Timothy Kidd

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he Edwardian writer Saki, or Hector Hugh Munro, is best known for his short stories and sketches — witty or macabre pieces, with a sharp-eyed, sardonic view of the contemporary British and European world. He was also the author of several plays, a history of the Russian empire and two novels, the second of which was published in 1913 with the ominous title of When William Came.

There had been a number of ‘invasion scare’ novels and plays in the previous decade, warning of the German threat. Liberals and progressives scoffed at the whole notion that war was coming and that Britain would do well to prepare for it. In his Preface to Misalliance, Bernard Shaw jeered: The grown-up Englishman is to the end of his days a badly brought-up child: afraid that the Germans will come and enslave him ... unless his nurse, his parents, his schoolmaster or his army and his navy will do something to frighten these bad things away.

The publication of this effusion was early in 1914.

It is not hard to see who had a better grasp of what was about to happen.

Subtitled A Story of London under the Hohenzollerns, Saki’s novel is in a sense a history that never occurred.

Yet it is not just a superbly written, if somewhat dated, Edwardian classic. The book contains much of valuable relevance for us nowadays; and it may in particular engage those who are concerned with what has happened, or is happening, to our shared national identity a century later.

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The story begins in an elegant Mayfair drawingroom in high summer. Cicely Yeovil is entertaining a young male admirer to luncheon. They are awaiting the return of her husband, who has been away for months in Siberia, cut off by distance and then by illness from the events of the outside world. It becomes clear that he will be returning to a very different homeland: He’ll come back feeling sore and savage with everything that he sees around him, and he won’t realise just at once that we’ve been through all that ourselves, and have reached the stage of sullen acquiescence in what can’t be helped.

Murrey Yeovil is the half-hero of the book, described as ‘a grey-faced young man, with restless eyes and a rather wistful mouth.’ He represents Saki’s own perspective on what has happened. Arriving at Victoria Station he takes a taxi, with a German cabbie, who drives past Buckingham Palace on the route home. The alien uniforms at the gate, and the eagle standard flying at the flagstaff, indicate what has occurred. Kaiser William has come and conquered, and the British Isles are now a province of the German empire.

How this came about is described later that evening by a doctor friend. A weak Liberal government, beset by internal quarrels, had neglected or undermined Britain’s defences. Germany engineered a minor frontier dispute in East Africa, which then escalated into open war: It burst on us with calculated suddenness, and we

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but the setting of the ancient home where the old lady resides is unmistakeably a portrait of Hatfield House, and the family traditions evoked are those of the Cecils:

were just not enough, everywhere the pressure came.

Our ships were good against their ships, but were not able to cope with their ships plus their superiority in aircraft. The enemy were a nation apprenticed in arms, we were not even the idle apprentice: we had not deemed apprenticeship worth our while.

The collapse was so complete that I fancy even the enemy were hardly prepared for the consequences of their victory. No one had quite realised what one disastrous campaign would mean for an island nation with a closely packed population.

Torywood was not a stately, reposeful-looking house; it lay amid the sleepy landscape like a crouched watchdog with pricked ears and wakeful eyes ... To and fro the squires and lords of Torywood had gone in their respective generations, men with the passion for statecraft and political combat strong in their veins.

And now one tired old woman walked there, with names on her lips that she never uttered.

Britain having lost command of the sea, the Broken in health if not in spirit, the old lady Germans are able to dictate terms. Any further attempt at resistance or insurrection would simply lead to disconcertingly advises Murrey to become a blockade, starvation and surrender. As a shrewd commercial traveller. She urges him to travel up and German politician remarks: ‘Every wave that breaks down the country, in contact with all types and classes of people, to remind them of the great things of the on her shore rattles the keys of her prison.’

Not all has been lost. The Empire has stayed past, and instil a determination to win them back. In loyal; the King and court have moved to Delhi, and the course of time, she warns him, the Government many families have sold up and moved overseas, would find out what he was doing, and he would be their places being filled by German immigrants. As ‘sent out of the country’, but others would be left to the story progresses, Murrey wanders disconsolate carry on the work.

The latter suggestion through a changed London, reveals perhaps that the A century on, we may regard Saki’s last observing the bright author underestimates novel as a fictional prophecy which has not military uniforms of the what a German military come about in quite the way anticipated, conquerors, the continental occupation would mean as is often the case with prophecies cafes and Bavarian bands, in practice, since such a the proliferation of bicounter-agent would have lingual signs and petty regulations, with numerous been summarily shot.

But Saki takes pains not to petty officials — some of them British — eager to make his account melodramatic or sensational. All enforce them.

The question the book expounds is: under such the German characters in the book are sympathetically circumstances, what can be done? Cicely Yeovil and portrayed. Having delivered the first paralysing blow, her sophisticated friends have settled for acquiescence; their subsequent methods are those of absorption, her husband Murrey, angry and frustrated, searches for dissimulation, even an unequal form of partnership. some form of resistance. As he says: ‘It is one thing to Indeed, the author shows a respect for the enemy’s willpower and self-belief, qualities that are slipping face the music, it is another thing to dance to it.’

A musical evening at the theatre, in the presence of away from his central character, and those of his kind.

Murrey returns to London, where a chance meeting at His Majesty himself, indicates how far submission to his club leads to the purchase of a horse and the lease the new regime has gone, at least among the artistic and metropolitan crowd. The programme of songs includes of a house in the West Country for the autumn huntingsuch popular numbers as ‘They Quaff the Gay Bubbly season. The scene then shifts to the countryside where in Eccleston Square’, and concludes with the daughter Saki spent much of his childhood, and where (for all of a once-powerful aristocratic family performing her his later urban polish) he acquired an abiding love of ‘Suggestion Dances’, illustrative of such topics as country pursuits: The dry warm scent of the stable, the nip of the The Life of a Fern. As one of the audience remarks morning air, the moist earthy fragrance of the autumn afterwards: ‘At any rate we know now that a fern takes woods and wet fallows, the whimper of hounds life very seriously.’ and hot restless pushing of the pack through ditch Disgusted with the spectacle, Murrey leaves London and hedgerow and undergrowth, the birds that flew for the provinces, where much of the traditional British up and clucked and chattered as you passed, the way of life is still carried on. He goes to visit an old hearty greeting and pleasant gossip in farmhouse acquaintance, the Dowager Lady Greymarten, now kitchens and market-day parlours — all these wellwidowed. The character is based on Lady St Helier, a remembered. political hostess whom the author knew and admired, But the quiet comfort of country life turns out to be an The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

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enervating force, sapping what is left of Murrey’s will.

An encounter with a courteous young German officer, who shares his love of field sports, both entertains and repels him. His settling down to a life of rustic littleness is marred by self-accusation, ‘ignoring the struggle-cry that went up, low and bitter and wistful, from a dethroned dispossessed race, in whose struggle he lent no hand.’

Although his central character accepts defeat, the story does not end there. The final chapter depicts a festival day arranged in Hyde Park, on which the Boy Scouts of Britain are due to parade in front of the Kaiser and a host of dignitaries. The event is intended to set the seal on submission to the new regime. As the crowd — including a shame-faced Murrey — stand waiting and the minutes tick past, it becomes clear that the parade will not take place. ‘The Emperor and princes, Generals and guards, sat stiffly in their saddles, and waited.

And waited ... The younger generation had barred the door.’

The world itself did not have long to wait. Within a year the guns of August spoke, and Britain and her Empire was at war with Germany. Although he was now aged 43, as H H Munro he immediately joined the army, saying that having written When William Came he ought at least to go halfway to meet him.

He served a private soldier and then as corporal in the Royal Fusiliers, posted to the Western Front. A fellowsoldier recalled his courage and coolness in action, and his cheerful kindness to others when they were out of the line. The end came on a dark winter morning in November 1916, during one of the last battles of the Somme campaign. Munro was resting with his section in a shell-hole, waiting for the order to attack. One of the soldiers struck a match to light a cigarette, and in the brief flare of the match-flame, a German sniper took his chance.

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A century on, we may regard Saki’s last novel as a fictional prophecy which has not come about in quite the way anticipated, as is often the case with prophecies.

It was Germany who lost the war, and all her overseas possessions; the British Empire growing even greater as a result. A second war with Germany and her allies also ended in victory for Britain, but at the cost of her own Empire and her national wealth. Subsequent membership of the European Union has rendered the British Parliament and law subject to Brussels and Strasbourg rather than to Berlin, but the outcome is much the same.

The denationalised culture that Saki saw and described in London in his own day has extended, with American influence now predominant.

Although the countryside has remained much as he knew it, mass immigration has turned parts of our cities into foreign territory. The prospect of the younger generation barring any door seems remote, since state education is now given over to ‘equality, diversity, and climate change’. The armed forces have been run down and deprived of men and matériel, although still required to engage in endless wars. A bloated public sector is mainly devoted to serving itself rather than the public. Once-respected institutions such as the Church of England or the BBC are now dedicated to apologetics or appeasement. The United Kingdom itself may be moving from devolution to dissolution.

And all of this has occurred, not as a result of defeat in war, or through foreign invasion, but simply through negligence, self-distrust, or through our own volition.

If Saki had lived to see these things come about, he might have wondered whether his sacrifice, and that of his entire generation, had been worthwhile. But then, as his central character realises in a despairing moment of recognition: ‘One cannot explain things to the dead.’

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M

y grandfather prided himself on owning a Regency house in Hove, but the present owner told me that the place was built in 1875. I was shown my old bedroom, which is still a boy’s room. Instead of my self-drawn and coloured cut-outs of birds on the walls, he has banal stickers of The Incredibles, a modern cartoon family.

Nearly all the Victorian terraces of Brighton are now homes to people who once went to nearby Sussex University, and have never been able to leave the town. There are scarcely any normal shops any more — everywhere trendy gifts are on offer, like lavatory brushes that look like bow and arrows. Working class people no longer live in the terraces, paying rent, but are all on council estates.

One such estate I visited at Portslade was mildness itself, full of fat sleepyeyed women and freckled children with dogs. Little expeditions set off here and there within the estate ‘visiting Nan’.

On my last visit to Brighton and neighbourhood, a few weeks ago, I noticed a few changes. Hove Library, saved from closure by a hair’s breadth, has thrown out half its books and has a demoralised proletarian air. No wonder — the majestic old brick and flint Gas Company mansion opposite has been pulled down, replaced by a terrible gleaming airport of a Tesco’s.

Near the Volk’s Railway Station on Brighton’s pebbly beach, lorry loads of bright yellow sand have been tipped, to encourage tourists. At Vernon Terrace, near my old school, I noticed a painted-over plaque I had never seen before. Apparently Eleanor Marx, a tragic

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

and romantic figure, had once lived there. Nature writer Richard Jefferies loved Brighton, and in an essay of 1884 he noticed that people who live there (apart from fishermen) never look at the sea or go near the beach.

This still holds true today. He also described horses on the beach, going round and round to winch the fishing boats up onto the shingle. In my younger days, mechanical winches, cemented onto the beach, wound the boats up on huge chains. Now winches and chains are red with rust, seldom if ever used. How much fishing still goes on is a mystery for Sussex fishermen are a secret people now, as in Jefferies’ Day. Little Preston Street, almost an alley behind the real Preston Street, at first looks bleak and featureless but on examination proves to be a place of architectural curiosities. The drainpiped backs of tall slate-roofed houses show a strange array of alcoves, annexes and windows small and large, some neo-gothic, some imitation Regency.

When the hurricane of 1987 hit Brighton, many of the elm trees that had been spared death by Dutch Elm disease, had their branches blown away. Only the sturdier limbs survived, bereft of twigs. Where could the leaves grow? To my surprise, The leaves grew along the main boughs, making the trees look like strange twisted hands in ragged green gloves. Each bough was a mass of leaf, and more leaves grew straight from the trunks of the trees. New twigs eventually became branches. Elm lovers should go to Vernon Terrace, to the Level and to the aptly named Elm Grove.

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ETERNAL LIFE

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ast week the Synod confirmed its determination to have women bishops but the resolution does not include any proposal to provide statutory provision for those who in conscience cannot accept women’s episcopacy. So the benign genius of Dr John Habgood, when Archbishop of York, which offered the notion of two integrities at the time when women priests were originally approved by the General Synod, has now been overthrown. The latest synodical resolution will also abolish the roles of the Provincial Episcopal Visitors ­— flying bishops — created in 1993 to provide pastoral oversight for those conscientiously unable to accept the priesthood of women. As Bishop Broadhurst said on Radio Four the other day: The Synod has lied to parliament and it has lied to the church.

Dr Habgood’s agreeable compromise has been arbitrarily done away with and now, by implication, there is only one integrity in the Church and it belongs exclusively to the supporters of women priests and bishops. Synodical approval for women priests was obtained in 1992 providing that alternative pastoral arrangements were made for those opposed to it.

Many members of the Synod would have rejected the innovation if the safeguard of the flying bishops had not been forthcoming.

The integrity which opposes the ordination of women is no mere misogynist whim. It is a theological integrity and it was outlined by the great Christian apologist C S Lewis: Suppose the reformer begins to say that God is like a good woman. Suppose she says that we might just as well pray to Our Mother which art in heaven as to Our Father. Suppose that the Incarnation might just as well have taken a female form. Suppose the Second Person of the Trinity be as well called Daughter of God as Son of God. Suppose finally that the mystical marriage betwixt ‘Christ and his Church’ were reversed, that the Church became the Bridegroom and Christ the Bride. All this is involved in the claim that a woman can represent God as priest. If all those supposals were ever carried into effect, we should be embarked on a different religion.

There is a profound shift in original mystical theology, in the psychology of ritual and in our beliefs concerning the Divine ontology when a female stands at the altar and declares, This is my body. These things are not trivial: they go to the heart of Christian apprehension where they actually make the relationship between God and humankind a matter for experimentation. To claim Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk

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that women cannot be priests or bishops does not deny ministry to them. We sometimes have women to preach at St Michael’s, and not only Christian women. Last week we had a lady Rabbi to preach at the Drapers’ Installation Service.

After agonised prayer, Christ appointed twelve male apostles. The Gospel says he ordained them. (St Mark 3:14). He had warm and close relations with women, and was even accused on occasions of being too friendly with them, but he did not ordain any of them — not even Mary Magdalene, the first witness to his Resurrection.

This decision was not just a matter of cultural relativism: as if Jesus were merely primitive and reactionary and stood in need of correction by the militant feminists of our day. He did not ordain any women and we must assume that there was a reason for his decision.

Supporters of women’s ordination cite the example of the other professions: women doctors, women judges, women astronauts — why not women priests and bishops? The question misses the point by substituting secular standards of judgement for legitimate church order based on biblical and patristic authority.

As an old-fashioned liberal, I do not expect everyone to agree with me, but I believe that allowances must be made for people who beg to differ. John Stuart Mill understood that democracy is about more than counting heads; it is about ensuring that dissenting minorities have their views represented. Eighteen years ago, allowances were made for those who could not conscientiously accept women as priests. The same sort of provision should have been made for the significant minority who cannot accept women bishops. The radical feminists who pushed through the motion call themselves liberal and inclusive but their liberalism only extends as far as those who agree with them. They are the Church Militant Tendency. I have had reports of that Synod and of the savage triumphalism, which followed the announcement of the vote.

The first women bishops will not be traditionalists; they will be chosen from among those who were most strident in favour of the innovation. You won’t find one coming into St Michael’s — after my retirement — and celebrating the Parish Communion on a Sunday from The Book of Common Prayer. The female ascendancy in the church is broadly feminist, left-wing in politics and obsessed with environmental issues. On Ascension Day a couple of years ago, a sermon was preached in the City of London — and broadcast on the BBC — by a woman priest very widely tipped to be one of the first The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

of the new bishops. She said the original Apostles of Jesus thought the world was about to end. They were wrong, she said. But we today know the world is coming to an end — because of global warming. I have attended services where the worship was devised by this female ascendancy. We were asked to place little nightlights in the sanctuary, then prance around them as if we were enacting some pagan ritual in a woodland glade with sentimental choruses instead of robust hymns.

The church will become dominated by a single party — the politically-correct party. There will be demands for equality between traditional views of marriage and same sex partnerships and we are already hearing a lot more about light bulbs and carbon footprints. There

will be a corresponding dearth of doctrine and theology.

Many of the people who will assume control of the church are generally uneducated: they attended dumbeddown theological colleges where little was taught except about diversity, feminism, environmentalism, institutional racism and the evils of English history.

Perhaps even late in the day there is yet hope for those conscientiously opposed to the consecration of women bishops? It is just possible that there are enough members of the Synod who will hold in revulsion the palpable injustice of the proposals in the draft measure when it comes before them and refuse to vote for it. This would effectually scupper the whole process leading to the consecration of women — God willing.

Reputations — 29 Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother A W Purdue

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ueen Elizabeth remains a sphinx full of riddles. She combined sweetness and charm with steel and intransigence. ‘Powerful’ may seem an inapposite word to describe a Queen Consort who lived during a period when the political power of the monarchy was confined to a few rarely exercised prerogatives, but its immense social influence and its role as the expression of national identity is a diffused form of power. No one, perhaps not even her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, did more to enable the monarchy to maintain its position at the head of civil society as well as the ceremonial expression of the state.

Most biographies portray only the sweetness and charm although Penelope Mortimer’s of 1986, representing her as a female Machiavelli, is an exception. Was she the power behind the throne, and how ruthless was she?

Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon only accepted the diffident Duke of York at the third time of asking, but how much did his status influence her final decision to marry him? Had she, like many girls of her class and time, occasionally imagined that she might marry his older brother? After enjoying a happy and informal family life, she was marrying into an odd family, with a tradition of disliking its heirs. George V had some good qualities as a king, but few as a father, and Queen Mary, who stood in awe of her husband, had been cold and distant to her children. The daughter, Princess Mary, was shy and self-effacing, and of Elizabeth’s brothersin-law Henry, Duke of Gloucester, was decent but not

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cerebral, while George, Duke of Kent, was clever, good looking, bisexual and, for some time, addicted to cocaine. She appears to have shared her husband’s admiration for David, the glamorous elder brother. The brothers were united in fear of their irascible father but only the Prince of Wales openly showed defiance.

Elizabeth got on well with George V for whom she played the role of not being a ‘modern girl’ for the King disapproved of them.

Edward VIII’s abdication was not a mere hiccup in the successful history of the monarchy during the twentieth century, but a real crisis and the apparent smoothness with which it passed off was due to a carefully contrived public relations exercise in which the government and the court, utilising a compliant media, pulled out all the stops to ensure that the ‘year of the three kings’ was forgotten as quickly as possible. This was a difficult task. Edward VIII was not an admirable man but he possessed a charisma that was not the less effective for being purely physical. The media, the nation and a good part of the world had adored him as Prince of Wales and, as the exemplification of youth and modernity, his accession to the throne had been widely welcomed. He was the first royal super star and there have only been three.

Two of them, Edward and Princess Diana, nearly destroyed the monarchy, the other, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, did much to save it.

Many people thought that Edward VIII should have been allowed to marry Mrs Simpson, and remain king

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and as Duke of Windsor he continued to be a popular figure. Once the die was cast, Queen Elizabeth’s attitude towards the Windsors quickly turned from regret to outright enmity, tinged with disappointment for the Duke but which was personal for the not HRH, Duchess. When in 1940 it was decided that the safest post for the troublesome duke was to make him Governor of the Bahamas, the Queen objected: Britons were used to ‘looking up’ to the King’s representatives but the Duchess was the ‘lowest of the low’.

Queen Elizabeth loved and respected her husband and, always careful to disavow any suggestion that she provided the force and the will for his reign, objected to Sir John Wheeler Bennett’s biography of George VI, which ascribed to her a dominant role. She had a far better grasp of public relations than he did and the recovery of the monarchy, accomplished by projecting the image of a family on the throne and by successful visits to France, Canada and the United States, owed much to her grace and popular touch. She will forever be identified with her wartime persona: the Queen who would not have dreamed of deserting her people and the sympathetic visitor to the East End. The emotions were genuine but the performance was carefully calculated. She understood that the monarchy’s appeal was to combine care for a suffering population with formality and that people wanted a touch of glamour, even when they or their neighbours had had their homes destroyed. Decades later the TV satirical programme Spitting Image would portray her as a jolly ‘gorblimey’ cockney in the dress of a pearly queen, a veiled tribute to her wartime success. The King and Queen were officially living in Buckingham Palace which was, of course, bombed but they returned to Windsor for the nights and Eleanor Roosevelt’s experience of being a guest in a freezing palace with broken windows and being served an austerity cuisine was not typical, though certainly the royal family lived frugally and much less comfortably than their prime minister. All great public figures project an image of themselves which is part spontaneous and part contrived but, at the core of those who do this successfully, there has to be an empathy which enables them to understand what is wanted.

After her husband’s death, she did not welcome taking a subsidiary role and the title ‘Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’ was invented especially for her. She continued to be a formidable force as Lord Mountbatten soon discovered. If war with the Windsors had been open warfare, relations with Lord Mountbatten were a cold war. His raising of a glass after George VI’s death in salute to the beginning of the House of Mountbatten, saying ‘The House of Mountbatten now reigns’, did not go down well with either Queen Mary or the Queen Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk

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Mother. There was constitutional sense in his view for, if Queens’ reigns are not named after their husbands (Queen Victoria was the last monarch of the House of Hanover, not the first of Saxe-Coburg), Queen Elizabeth II had been married to Prince Philip before she ascended the throne. Nevertheless the two dowager consorts won and George V’s invention of the House of Windsor continued. She showed good judgement in favouring Eton as the school for Prince Charles rather than Gordonstoun, the choice of Lord Mountbatten and Prince Philip, but this was an occasion when she lost; the heir to the throne went to Gordonstoun and hated it.

The Queen Mother’s long widowhood was to be her apotheosis. Her great achievement was to do almost exactly what she liked and to be loved and admired. She lived in the style of a bygone age with little criticism from a press alert to the slightest extravagance when it came to other royals. Her opinions were reserved for her circle but it was well known that she despised socialism even if she liked some Labour politicians.

Like her daughter, she cherished the Commonwealth, but unlike her was a great supporter of Rhodesia after UDI. She valued her positions as Colonel-in-Chief of regiments, amongst them her position with the Canadian Black Watch which enabled her to combine her love of Canada and the army.

She was a complex person and, though she can be presented as representative of an older Britain and as deeply conservative, there are paradoxes. She disapproved of divorce but modified her attitudes over time. She was blamed, unfairly, for helping to persuade Princess Margaret not to marry Peter Townsend, enjoyed a friendly relationship with the upper-class bohemian, Lord Snowdon, and did not allow the Princess’s affair with Roddy Llewellyn or her subsequent divorce from Snowdon to upset her relationship with her daughter. She didn’t like rows.

The disaster of Prince Charles’s marriage and his liaison with Camilla Parker-Bowles brought new problems and old memories. Was Charles behaving like David, was Princess Diana another Wallis, or was Camilla to be cast in that role? In the end, one supposes, it was Diana whom she blamed for letting the side down and for being neurotic and selfindulgent but, as Princess Margaret subsequently ‘sorted’ her correspondence, we shall probably never know for certain. She was close to Charles and may well have considered that he should have married the countrified and supportive Camilla in the first place.

She had moved on and accepted several divorces; if she regretted them, she was probably more attuned to changing more than her daughter, the Queen.

We now have William Shawcross’s long official biography of the Queen Mother. Official biographies of The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

kings and queens are rarely exciting. The biographer is given the enormous advantage of privileged access to the source material in the Royal Archive but with the unwritten command that the work must be respectful and not controversial. Some have found the work hard going and Harold Nicolson revealed how tedious a subject he found George V when, as Duke of York, he seemed to do nothing for years but stick stamps in his album and massacre game birds. These biographies are a necessary genre but are necessarily circumscribed.

Nicolson produced a fine book but Kenneth Rose’s George V cast more light on his subject.

Shawcross is admiring but not hagiographic and locates her attitudes firmly in the context of the social mores of the period and social milieu in which she grew up. He assesses the degree to which she modified them during the immense social changes of her lifetime.

With its detail and information derived, not just from archival sources, but from the many who have confided in him, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother will be of great value to all historians. It is a perceptive book but its provenance as an official biography means that it will be far from the last word on its subject for it only hints at or elides over some of the tough questions which a less constrained biography would have been asked. Shawcross seems to stand back and let his sources tell the story. He in fact skilfully reveals a

person, if not all of the person, then particularly the private personality and tastes of his subject.

Although she had not had a good education, Queen Elizabeth appears to have been far more interested in modern art and literature than most of the royal family.

Kenneth Clark, when Director of the National Gallery, helped develop her appreciation of art and she built up a considerable collection of paintings. She sat for Augustus John, whom she found great fun, and John Bratby as well as the more traditional Pietro Annigoni; Graham Sutherland did a preliminary sketch of her but abandoned the project. Her cultural tastes were not confined to art and in her eighties she became a close friend of the poet Ted Hughes.

Here was a woman who got on well with landed families, soldiers, racing trainers and jockeys, gay retainers, artists and poets, and who was open-minded, genuine in her emotions but tough when it came to getting her own way. She was, all in all, wonderful and became in her later years a venerated national institution. The first commoner to become a queen since the sixteenth century, her personality and interests were, perhaps, more those of the aristocracy into which she was born than of the royal family she married into.

No chocolate-box figure, the monarchy and nation are indebted to her.

Feeling blue? A tip to improve your circulation.

True conservatives go about their business quietly, hoping to lead by example. There is nothing the true conservative likes less than to make a fuss. But we live in perilous times, a noisy yob culture is abroad and this is not time to keep silence. But we need voices. It costs up to £10,000 a year to place the magazine on the shelves of a bookseller chain, which although we have a growing readership, we cannot afford.

The alternative is to seek the help of readers to place the magazine in local newsagents. If you feel you can overcome your natural conservative reticence then here is an opportunity to make a quiet type of fuss. E mail us with your address and an estimate of the number of copies you think you be able to distribute and we will send them to you.

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

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

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ARTS AND BOOKS A Beastly Streak M R D Foot Moral Combat: a History of World War II, Michael Burleigh, Harper Press, 2010, £30.

Thucydides, head and shoulders above all other historians, believed when he wrote his history of the Peloponnesian war that it would help his fellow Greeks to be aware of the errors of their forebears. Not many modern historians dare as much; but Michael Burleigh has ventured on an account of the last world war from a moralist’s rather than a military commentator’s viewpoint.

He believes in Blake’s aphorism, now some two centuries old, that Nought can deform the Human Race Like to the Armour’s iron brace.

He begins with an austere review of how the predator powers behaved in the nineteen-thirties: the Italians using blister gases against a barefoot Abyssinian army, the Japanese murdering over a hundred thousand Chinese of both sexes at Nanking, raping most of the women before they butchered them. His contempt for the ineffectual righteousness of Chamberlain and Halifax is clear. He then shows how the internal regimes of the German and Russian dictatorships sapped the capacity for normal fellow-feeling of their citizens, by overturning accepted ideas of behaviour and encouraging children to betray their parents.

His record of the Polish campaign emphasises the savagery of the mopping-up that followed on the Germans’ and Russians’ military walk-over.

Everybody who had the least traces of education — dons, schoolteachers, engineers, doctors, as well as officers and priests — was herded away into camps, where most of them were shot; the Germans huddled those Jews who were not shot on sight into ghettoes, pending a ‘final solution’. The police did most of the work; the army watched, lending an occasional helping hand. When it came to the invasion of Russia, Burleigh makes it abundantly clear that the bestial behaviour of the SS Einsatzgruppen was aided and Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk

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abetted by the German army, whose apologists now like to pretend that it kept its hands clean. On the other side, the NKVD behaved no better: many prisons they abandoned to their advancing enemies contained scores of corpses, beaten to death after torture.

He does not attempt chronological cover; for instance, his reader is cast back, after a trenchant chapter on the justified use of atomic bombs in August 1945, onto an account of what became of Mussolini in September 1943. But every chapter is a closely argued account of one sort of horror or another. He has a particularly vivid account of life in France in the summer of 1944, far behind the fighting fronts — missed rendezvous, abrupt changes of allegiance, muddle and sudden death. Historians of strategy are often weak on tactics; he is strong on tactics as well as strategy, and devotes a score pf pages to explaining what a fighting soldier’s life was like in action.

Much of his work deals with what happened to the Jews of Europe who were mown down by the scythes of the Sicherheitsdienst and of its many supporters, German, Hungarian and Roumanian: ‘a history in which there was no happy ending’. He shows that many of these monstrosities were carried through by men who had become convinced, so twisted were nazi doctrines, that what they were doing was the right thing to do. Others simply showed that a beastly streak lurks in most of us, and — given an excuse — will get indulged. He knows enough law to keep abreast of the lawyers, enough philosophy to keep abreast of the philosophers; he understands human behaviour, even when it runs berserk. As for politicians, ‘the will to ignore the inconvenient can ride over any amount of evidence’.

He is always alert to the probability that a generally received doctrine may be mistaken; noticing the continuing tendency to assume that the USSR cannot have been as bad as Hitler’s Reich, and indicating that Hannah Arendt though nowadays usually taken as infallible could make grave errors of judgement.

This is not a comfortable book to read, but war is not a comfortable business, and atrocities remain atrocious. It deserves to be widely read, and will deepen understanding.

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almost authorised biography. Sisman — a former student and friend of his subject — sometimes lets him down a tad too easily, and pulls his punches when harsher criticism might be justified. The biographer — who has also written a Life of Trevor-Roper’s great rival, A J P Taylor — is never less than thorough, and tells the truth as he sees it, but as someone who knew and liked his subject, this is certainly the case for the defence — and a very convincing fist Sisman makes of it. Chummily — and significantly — Sisman calls his subject ‘Hugh’ throughout, and admits that he was chosen for the hard task of presenting him favourably to posterity. The old boy chose well.

Writing about the notorious Hitler Diaries, for example, Sisman’s considered verdict is that it was merely a ‘blemish’ on an otherwise distinguished career, citing other great men (Dr Johnson, David Hume) who were also taken in by literary con-artists, yet whose reputation has survived their gullibility. He gives an extremely detailed account of the whole affair, which I found gripping, from anxious calls from Times executives to Lord Dacre (as Trevor-Roper had by then become) and his snobbish, silly wife Xandra while they were dining with the Queen at Windsor Castle; through Dacre’s growing doubts about being bounced by his Murdoch minders into verifying the Diaries too quickly; to Rupert Murdoch’s own characteristically blunt reaction when told that the paper’s tame eminent expert (and Times director) Lord Dacre was having second thoughts; ‘Fuck Dacre!’ quoth the blunt Australian magnate: ‘Publish!’

Born the son of a doctor in Northumberland, TrevorRoper had a distant relationship with his chilly parents, and — no good at games, except riding — was a fish out of water at his grim Prep and Public Schools (Charterhouse). Chronically myopic, he retreated into his books. Recognised early as a brilliant scholar, he started reading Classics at Oxford, switching to history because he was bored with Greek and Latin. A somewhat aloof youth who seems to have enjoyed hating as a sort of hobby throughout his long life, he conceived early lifelong prejudices — notably against the Scots and Roman Catholics, but more generally against any religion.

Far from Puritanical, he regularly enjoyed Bullingdonstyle benders, though as a middle-class student he was not invited to join the notorious club itself.

Publication of his first book, a biography of Charles I’s ill-fated Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, coincided with the outbreak of World War Two. Like many brainy academics, Trevor-Roper joined the secret services, working in the RSS, a branch of MI6 which analysed enemy radio traffic and was a forerunner of GCHQ. Expertise in German helped him crack an Abwehr code, which stood him in good stead when his typically vicious comments about his less intellectually

Hugh and Cry Nigel Jones Hugh Trevor-Roper: A Biography, Adam Sisman, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2010, hb £25, pb £12.99.

Hugh Trevor-Roper was arguably the greatest British historian of the 20th century. The fact that this claim can be made despite him never having written the ‘big book’ that was expected of him as the crowning of his life’s work justifies publication of this informative and enjoyable biography. The Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and in his latter years Master of Peterhouse College, Cambridge, his outward life was appropriate to those positions: that of the prolific, snobbish and pompous academic. But — as this enormous yet always readable Life shows — appearances were deceptive.

Unusually for a scholar, Trevor-Roper led a life of continuous adventure and controversy, in which danger, adultery, secret service, code breaking, and continuous — almost manic — disputes with his academic ‘colleagues’ and rivals played a constant part.

Of the many storms which crackled across the calm surface of Trevor-Roper’s scholarly career, these are just a few which made him famous: • His cracking of the German military intelligence [Abwehr] codes early in the Second World War. • His wartime friendship in MI6 with the Soviet double agent and traitor Kim Philby.

• His key role in establishing for the first time the truth about the last days and death of Adolf Hitler by tracking down and interviewing survivors from the Berlin bunker.

• His adulterous affair with and subsequent marriage to the eldest daughter of Britain’s Great War Commander-in-Chief, Earl Haig.

• His lengthy and acrimonious disputes with fellow historians — especially Marxist ones — including A J P Taylor, A L Rowse, Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm.

And last, but certainly not least: his hasty and illadvised authentification of the forged Hitler Diaries in 1983, which sped their publication in Times Newspapers and blighted the rest of Trevor-Roper’s life to the delight of his many enemies.

So Trevor-Roper’s controversial career certainly justifies a big biography, and in Adam Sisman, an expublisher turned historian and ghostwriter, he has been fortunate in finding a knowledgeable and sympathetic Boswell. It must be emphasised, however, that this is an The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

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gifted superiors almost got him fired. Sisman gives a good account of these secret service turf wars in which the real venom was reserved for one’s colleagues rather than the ostensible enemy.

After the war, Trevor-Roper was given the task of putting an end to the widespread rumours of Hitler’s survival by tracking down witnesses from the Bunker and writing the first comprehensive account of The Last Days of Hitler — a book which became a lifelong bestseller, and the basis for many that followed. Sisman is frank in detailing the late-flowering affair between HT-R and Xandra — then married to her first husband — describing how they would meet for adulterous afternoons in Home Counties hotels, before Xandra got a divorce and they lapsed into Oxford respectability in large houses they could barely afford, but which the couple snobbishly considered essential to their elevated status.

Equally late-flowering was Trevor-Roper’s conversion to Conservatism. Previously apolitical, partly in reaction to the idiocies of Marxist historians, and partly because of the Cold War, he became involved in the CIA’s 1950s cultural crusade against Communism. This was mirrored by his academic battles against left-wing colleagues who saw the Civil War — one of his specialisations — as an English Revolution, whereas he correctly viewed it as a much more complex struggle, involving religion as well as economic and political factors. Sisman makes excuses for Trevor-Roper’s failure to deliver his longawaited masterpiece. He puts much of the blame on Xandra’s demands for money to sustain her pretentious lifestyle, forcing her husband to produce more hack journalism than was good for him. (Though he was, it must be said, an excellent hack journalist). As often, however, Margaret Thatcher put her finger on the nub of the matter when she asked him when his next book would appear. He assured her that he had one ‘On the stocks’. ‘On the stocks?’ she characteristically echoed, ‘On the stocks? A fat lot of good that is! In the shops, that is where we need it!’

Despite this failure to deliver, Sisman leaves us in no doubt about his subject’s importance as a historian. His wide-ranging work on such diverse subjects as Nazi Germany (he believed Hitler was primarily a racial ideologue rather than an opportunist with no serious agenda which was the view of Alan Bullock and A J P Taylor); European witchcraft; the rise of the gentry class; and even Chinese history — deservedly won him the highest honours that a historian can earn. Even if he never quite produced the ‘big book’ on the Civil War that was always expected of him, elevating him to rub shoulders in the clouds with Macaulay, Carlyle, Gibbon, Trevelyan and Elton, his many lesser books — especially his essays — earned him a higher place Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk

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in the Pantheon than some of those whose ‘big books’ clunk dead from the press.

We get a strong sense, however, that Trevor-Roper’s deepest love was not history but High Table bitchery and banter. He certainly enjoyed baiting his fellow historians and the mass of those who did not attain the rarefied summits of intellect where he walked. His fall, when it came, was therefore all the more sweet to the many who had suffered his barbs and put-downs over the years. Sisman glosses over the embarrassing post-Hitler Diaries years, but they could not have been pleasant for such a proud and sensitive man. He certainly paid dearly for his brief lapse. Curiously, for an experienced interrogator one of whose best books — The Hermit of Peking — exposed China’s historian Sir Edmund Backhouse as a liar and fantasist, Trevor-Roper did not spot the same thing when it was placed in front of him.

There is more than enough absorbing human material in this huge book to justify a purchase, even though few may readily recognise Hugh Trevor-Roper’s name today. Episodes from his life, like the time he followed a pack of foxhounds (on horseback) into the top secret grounds of Bletchley Park code-breaking centre; or the occasion when the ineffable Frank Pakenham (later Lord Longford) shopped him to the Irish Police in Dublin as an English spy, vie with the better-known episodes of his career to make this an instructive, often enthralling, sometimes hilarious, and thoroughly enjoyable read.

Breaking the Social Contract Patricia Lança The Pinch, How the baby boomers took their children’s future and how they should give it back, David Willetts, Atlantic, 2010, £18.99.

Cobbold: The National Debt represents the sums of money which the Government have over the years borrowed from the public, mainly in this country and, to some extent, abroad. That is really the amount of expenditure which they have veiled over the period to cover by revenue.

Day: Have we paid for World War II? Cobbold: No, Day: Have we paid for World War I? Cobbold: No Day: Have we paid for the Battle of Waterloo?

Cobbold: I don’t think you can exactly say that.’

From the first ever interview ever given by a Governor of the Bank of England to Robin Day, 1958, in Willetts, p168.

This strangely-titled but important book has an

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explanatory sub-title: How the baby boomers took their children’s future — and why they should give it back.’ In one short sentence the author indicates the first principle on which his book is based and which he believes has somehow been transgressed. Baby boomers are those born between 1945 and 1965 and Willetts believes they have been guilty of a monumental failure to protect the interests of future generations.

The social contract, Willetts believes as did Edmund Burke, is essentially between the generations. We who live now owe our condition to those who came before us just as we in turn have a debt to those who come after us. It is essentially this contract that makes us human. More than once he cites the tribe of North American Indians whose elders in council would take no decision without considering what its effects might be on the forthcoming seven generations. The author delves into anthropology, social history and evolutionary psychology for some of his insights.

He provides a brief outline of English family history, describing how it differs from that of most continental countries except Holland and Denmark. He shows from documents that the continental extended family, like true feudalism, never really existed in England and that the nuclear family has been the rule for 1,000 years.

This had its effect on the development of trade, finance, the judiciary and industry — and on the outlook of the people and their sturdy individualism.

The second consideration, often overlooked, is that generations are frequently unequal in size.

Demographers call such groupings ‘cohorts’ and it is the size and composition of a cohort that makes a great deal of difference. As in the economic cycle there are ‘booms’ and there are ‘busts’. The baby boom refers to that bulge in the birth rate that started in the 1940s and reached its peak in the 1960s. Because of its repercussions on the life-style and ethos of most of the boomers — more material goods and fewer babies — the next generation was considerably smaller. Not so small in Britain as in other parts of Europe but small enough to cause the concern that now inspires all responsible political thinkers. The contract between generations means essentially that parents will look after and educate their children who, in turn, will look after them in their old age. Whether or not we think of these proceedings being conducted directly by individuals and families or through some kind of a welfare system, public, private or mixed, the provision or lack of it must come from the present generation’s work and taxes.

All this is familiar enough to the serious newspaper reader and the poor showing of Gordon Brown and his Labour Party in the recent elections was due in large measure to widespread recognition that the former chancellor’s reckless spending had in fact constituted The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

part of his breaking of faith not only with his own electorate but with future generations. Proclaiming he had abolished the boom-bust cycle did not make it so and events in finance and industry over the past two or three years have shown this.

Everybody knows the dilemma that now faces us: how to pay for the pensions and health care of the cohort now reaching retirement age? How to pay for the education and welfare of the young? And if a significant number of these are not employed, where will the taxes come from? This is what Willetts means by ‘the pinch’.

Brown, Blair and their Nulabour acolytes always maintained that these questions were of little concern because future productivity would inevitably be much higher and thus compensate for any shortfall. Against all the evidence, they still continue with this mantra.

Willetts shows convincingly that apart from the global economic crisis now besetting us the problem is far more complex. He devotes the greater part of his book to examining these complexities, especially the different shapes cohorts may take and their consequences. The history books do not usually mention these matters. And yet when we look at the last two centuries we find that they were crucial. During the 1917 Soviet Revolution in Russia the median age of the largest cohort was fifteen. During the Chinese cultural revolution and the French Revolution the average age was also fifteen.

Young people aged 10 to 19 are the largest age group in the world making up close to 20 per cent of the 6.5 billion estimated in 2005 and 85 per cent of these live in developing countries. So if we list current trouble spots we should not be surprised at the median ages of those involved: Iraq — 9; Yemen — 17; Democratic Republic of Congo — 16; Somalia — 18.

Zimbabwe, Nepal and Sudan — 20.

The CIA, which keeps its eye on these matters, reckons that of the world’s 25 youngest countries, sixteen have experienced war and civil bloodshed in the past decade.

China, alone, because of its one-child policy and the wholesale abortion of female children, presents a special problem and the terrifying prospect of a generational cohort where tens of millions of young men will be unable to find wives. Willetts scarcely mentions China, neither does he talk much about immigration and its problems but what he has to tell us about Britain and its prospects, unless government policy can reverse present trends, provides no comfort.

There are political as well as economic and financial 41

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problems connected with big cohorts. They carry a great deal of electoral clout. Here are some of Willetts’s figures: ‘71 per cent of 54-64-year-olds vote and 75 per cent of over 65s as against a national figure of 61 per cent. Between them these two groups cast 40 per cent of votes in the 2005 election. A 55+ party could sweep Parliament’. He concludes that ‘we are in for big changes in the age of our voters over the next decade and more.’ This prediction is, of course, the answer to those who are sceptical about the practicality of Hayek’s recommendation that both voting and officeholding age be raised to above 45.

Willetts is not pessimistic. His book is an essentially moral work, reminding us about what conservative policy should be based on and how it may be applied.

The author’s new job as Minister for Universities will give him opportunities for putting some of his ideas into practice and test the mettle of the Coalition.

Denning’s Achievement Will Robinson The Jurisprudence of Lord Denning: A Study in Legal History, Charles Stephens, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, £99.99.

For many years it has been distinctly unfashionable for politicians or respectable journalists to go anywhere near the thorny topic of English national identity.

Indeed Lord Denning wrote an article in the Salisbury Review on the then EEC in April 1987.

The concept has become redolent of nothing short of fascism, intolerance and shirtless men waving red and white flags outside unloved Essex pubs. Yet the term still has some meaning, and those who care about England need to think very hard about how they are going to save it from being subverted either by educational experts or, at the other end of the spectrum, a dedicated clique of nationalist extremists.

Charles Stephens’s attempt to do this through a vigorous three-volume study of the life and thought of the controversial Appeal Court Judge, Lord Denning, is most timely. The central premise of his work — that Englishness is rooted in a respect for the country’s law and constitution — is well reflected in three thousand or so judgments that his subject passed between becoming Master of the Rolls in 1962 and his retirement amid controversy twenty years later.

The first volume, Fiat Justitia: Lord Denning and the Common Law, is an attempt to integrate the development of the common law, from Bracton to Coke, within the broader historical context: a task essential for anyone Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk

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hoping to understand Denning’s values. In doing so, Stephens echoes the sentiments of the great jurists of the nineteenth century by noting the main achievement of the period to have been the recognition that even the king was under the law. This was institutionalised in the seventeenth century, if not well before, by the ‘legal personality’ of the Crown.

To Denning, this represented the most important aspect of the history of English law; but he cared little whether the tyrant be Charles I or a post-modern theory of Parliamentary Sovereignty, now virtually ubiquitous.

Unlike its former manifestation, personified by Oliver Cromwell, whom Denning greatly admired, the new version holds that it is permissible for any government to re-shape the laws of the country simply by forcing legislation through parliament. Denning rightly thought that this could potentially be little different from the Roman Law maxim beloved of medieval kings: that ‘the will of the prince has the force of law’. Only by having some inviolable benchmark could the liberties of the ‘common man’ — a distinction Denning thought every Englishman should bear with pride — be defended.

In contrast to many who have shared this view, Denning rejected the idea of a written constitution or a new Bill of Rights. His defence was firmly rooted in the fact that English law has never been ‘black letter law’, as it has been in France and elsewhere, but is founded in the fairness and independence of the judiciary. This, in turn, is kept in check by members of the public, who have served as jurors since the dawn of the Middle Ages.

As is discussed in the next two volumes, The Last of England and Freedom Under the Law, these views led Denning into direct conflict with various governments during the 1970s and early ’80s, ultimately leading to his forced resignation at the distinguished age of 83. ‘Progressives’ such as J A G Griffith claimed with some truth that he preferred to pass judgments in favour of litigants whom he found attractive — policemen, individual workers and Grammar Schools — ‘and against those whom he did not — Trade Unions, squatters and adulterers. This criticism was apparently shared by the House of Lords, which quashed many of his dissenting judgments.

The crisis that ended his career, however, was brought about by comments he made on the subject of immigrants serving on juries in his last book What Next in the Law (1982). In this work, he opined that the huge increase in the numbers of immigrants living in England since 1948 threatened the principle of trial by jury, since this had always presumed the existence of an ‘homogeneous society’, underpinned by adherence to Christianity, if not exclusively the Church of England. As this could no longer be taken for granted, he feared that many jurors would bring with them prejudices that were distinctly un-English — a most serious problem for English law.

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like to meet.

Born of a noble Norman family which suffered in the French Revolution (he used to say that his father would have gone to the guillotine if Robespierre had fallen two days later), Tocqueville had a warm regard for the aristocratic physiocrates like Turgot of the preceding generation. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, however, the social, economic and fiscal questions which had preoccupied these elegant ratiocinators were subject to new modes of study. Tocqueville is known to have studied the works of Jean Baptiste Say, and he corresponded with John Stuart Mill. But he was not at the cutting edge: he seems never to have read either Comte or Marx, and while he collaborated in politics, to a certain extent, with Adolphe Blanqui (economist, and elder brother of the socialist revolutionary of 1870), he shows few signs of having been affected

by Blanqui’s ideas on free trade.

Richard Swedberg says he aimed to present Tocqueville as a thinker about economic phenomena — an aspect of Tocqueville’s work which, he maintains, has been under-studied until now. This does not mean that we are to see Tocqueville as a newly-discovered luminary of the early history of economics — nor would Tocqueville himself have countenanced any such idea.

Tocqueville’s sympathies, and, the methodology of his work, remained rooted in an earlier period.

Tocqueville was not just an early, and perceptive, commentator on the emergent politics of the USA. Swedberg demonstrates that his thinking about matters as diverse as prison reform, the French colonial enterprise in Algeria, the development of the French railway system, pauperism, and the problem of abandoned children, let alone his major work on the Ancien Regime, show a man fascinated by the variety of human social activity, and the interplay of the individual with the group dynamic.

Tocqueville’s preferred method of working was to identify a phenomenon by factual inquiry, and then to amplify understanding by examining its context.

He was the product of a disturbed inheritance, living in disturbed times and trying to understand societies in a state of rapid evolution. His work is marked by inconsistencies and uncertainties — so much so that some commentators have written of ‘the Tocqueville Problem’. It is a striking fact that he shares this methodology with the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, who had written, only a few decades previously, on much the same

Though many may find this objectionable, it is entirely consonant with reason, and throws much light on contemporary politics besides. Solutions — ranging from Rowan Williams’s suggestion that aspects of Sharia Law be incorporated into English law to Jack Straw’s plan to do away with the jury system – have so far been unacceptable to the values that Stephens characterises as innately English. One can but agree with both him and Denning that multiculturalism, at least as defined by New Labour, is inconsistent with the premises of our legal system — race has nothing to do with it.

The only surprise of Stephens’s work is that it contains relatively little on the Profumo Affair, after which Denning conducted the official inquiry in 1963. This may be because many works have already been devoted to the subject, whereas few have focused so intensely on his contributions to law and the constitution. Undoubtedly, Denning found the whole incident rather unseemly, but it is surprising how much his findings were sympathetic to the ailing government of Harold Macmillan, which was responsible for many of the cultural changes that he privately abhorred.

One finishes the trilogy knowing more about Denning that a conventional biography could ever hope to supply; but the book’s formidable length may deter some readers.

This is unfortunate because it is impossible to understand the views of Denning without also knowing a fair amount about constitutional law, a most unfashionable subject. Those who persist will be rewarded with a new understanding not only of a great judge, but also of many of the inconvenient challenges that we must face up to as a society if we are to protect the root of our common identity: freedom under the law.

A Special Way of Thinking Michael St John Parker Tocqueville’s Political Economy, Richard Swedberg, Princeton University Press, 2009, £19.95.

Alexis de Tocqueville is an attractive figure — an eighteenth-century ‘man of feeling’ born out of his time, torn between the delights of scholarship and the obligations of political action. Even the inconsistency and incompleteness which marked all his efforts — he died of consumption in 1859, aged 54 — serve to emphasise his sympathetic humanity.

Richard Swedberg remarks in the Introduction to his new study of Tocqueville that many have ‘come to regard him as a friend with whom to argue, agree and disagree’; his portrait shows a face one would

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subjects as those which attracted Tocqueville, but with conclusions as robust and decisive as his were qualified and hesitant.

Apart from frequent references to Adam Smith’s influence Swedberg makes no mention of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers. Yet their ‘Science of Man’ covered the same ground that Tocqueville was exploring throughout his career, and was founded on the same holistic propositions. The range of his work as well as the structure of his thought stands close comparison with that of the Scots.

Whereas Smith and his contemporaries wrote from within a secure and prosperous society, Tocqueville had to make his way amid the flashy uncertainties of the July Monarchy and the 1848 Revolution. Nor did he experience the benefits of a rigorous Scottish education; the French university system in the early nineteenth century held few attractions.

His writings resonate strongly with our experience in the early twenty-first century. His analysis of the dangerous potential of unfettered, greed-fuelled capitalism, as he observed it in the USA, eerily foreshadows the reality of our own banking crisis.

His summary of the materialistic tendencies of democracy seems peculiarly relevant to contemporary Britain; indeed, his own personal alternation between visionary speculation and uncertain action might be a model of our current politics.

Not that one could envisage Tocqueville, the committed ‘moralist’, finding the cynical opportunism of the Blair era anything other than repellent. His condemnation of what he called the ‘friponnerie’ of the Guizot administration of the l840s in France was quite unequivocal. On the other hand, he might have had more to say to David Cameron; his theory of the essential importance of what he called ‘associations’ as the catalysts and enablers of political morality in democratic societies has a striking resemblance to the idea of the ‘Big Society’ which is being urged on an uncomprehending electorate by the present Government.

Richard Swedberg is, of course, not concerned with the relevance of Tocqueville’s thinking for twenty-first century Britain; rather more surprisingly, though, he makes no attempt to refer to the situation of the modern America. Indeed, an academic study is under no obligation to be ‘relevant’ — but Tocqueville himself, in L’Ancien Regime, made a powerful case for exploring the past as a means to understanding the present. There is a wooden stiffness of approach, tainted by political correctness,

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which limits the interest as well as the value of this very academic production. And sometimes even the pedantry becomes imperfect, as when we are told, first that Tocqueville was ‘an avid newspaper reader’, and then that he wrote that ‘he reads practically no newspapers’. Most seriously, Swedberg might be described as showing limited understanding of the realities of late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury European history.

This limitation becomes significant when Swedberg attempts to discuss Tocqueville’s L’Ancien Regime et la Revolution, a work which has been hailed as one of the most valuable early accounts of the events that ushered in a new era of history. Tocqueville disliked historians as a species; but that may have been a reaction to the highly politicised style of history practised in France, as represented par excellence by his political opponent, Guizot. Like so much else that Tocqueville did, L’Ancien Regime was unfinished at his death, but as J S Mill put it ‘The value of his work is less in the conclusions, than in the mode of arriving at them’. His analysis of the interaction of forces in pre-Revolutionary France, like the comparable analysis of the forces that he perceived at work in the infant USA, is of lasting significance.

Perhaps Tocqueville’s most important single contribution to socio-political thought was his perception of the tendency for industrial capitalism to lead both to a growth of democracy and to a centralisation of power and the restriction of individual freedom of action. But, he was not a determinist — he rejected the gentle mechanisms of Montesquieu, and never encountered the harsh syllogisms of Marx. His observation of human behaviour, in the USA, in England, and perhaps least, in France, convinced him that individual actions, arising from what he termed the mores of a people, were the motivators of history.

I n his insistence on the primacy of mores Tocqueville may be seen as a truly conservative thinker. If Tocqueville’s thinking on the autonomy of the individual, and the power of individuals in voluntary association to mould their fortunes and their environments, can be seen as lying at the heart of a conservative political philosophy, then Richard Swedberg’s book must be welcomed as an addition to the literature of the field. It is a pity that so valuable a subject could not have been given a more accomplished treatment.

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prepare the reader for the rest of the book. And the rest is akin to a chapter by chapter lament…an obituary of individual cities — Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Canterbury to Portsmouth and Worcester…so that the reader may know why and when this terrible destruction was carried out. But the photographs of these wonderful towns, their architectural wealth and human scale, left me impressed at what had been created and incredulous that it had been lost and discarded so easily. In some places, like Coventry, the process started in the 1930’s (the wartime destruction now providing a convenient fig leaf), while in others it was the ‘lack of will’ to repair and preserve after bomb damage. In a surprising number of cases the demolitions happened in my own lifetime and this seems to strike at some recurring if contradictory myths of post war Britain; that our decline was someone else’s fault and that it was inevitable. Instead, I would suggest that by the early part of the 20th century we had become so accustomed to our Western inheritance that we had begun to believe it to be infinite and indestructible. We could afford losses and with that delusion, from 1914 to 1945, Europe conducted a civil war (with a half time break for some to switch sides) that left it bewildered. But it was the ideals of a perfect high-tech future built off a loathing of tradition that left it prostrate and suicidal. Those ideas continue to gnaw, seemingly untroubled, now that only whitened bones remain.

Stamp describes ‘Bomber’ Harris as a ‘repellent figure’ for the destruction of Lubeck and Rostock and for provoking Hitler (as though he needed provocation) into bombing our cities and towns but forgets that the duties of war are imposed whilst the misguided and desperate treatment of our own Western culture is selfflagellation. Harris’s war ended a long time ago and, to be fair, Stamp identifies the ideas and individuals such as Le Corbusier who were busy before the fighting, during the fighting and, under the inspirational leadership of men such as Harold Wilson, a long time afterwards. He identifies those like Colin Amery, Dan Cruickshank and, of course, Sir John Betjeman who did so much to awaken a late interest in what was being discarded. This, therefore, is a very sad book about defeat. But extending its content beyond what Gavin Stamp has written about architecture is additionally thought-provoking.

Could something have been done to prevent the destruction? Is looking at these pictures simply pathetic nostalgia? It is a truism that change is inevitable in all strands of human endeavour. It is a sign of life but it is no more a sign of life than the efficacy of previous solutions passed down as tradition. Comprehensive redevelopment is no more likely to succeed if it involves

Farewell to Beauty Jan Maciag Britain’s Lost Cities, Gavin Stamp, Aurum, 2010, £16.99.

In 1968 our family moved into a modest 1930’s villa in Ealing, West London. It had been built in the side garden of a grand Victorian gothic house and our lawn was especially delightful as it had once been the tennis court. My father, an engineer and a practical man of his time, at once set about the ‘modernisation’ of our house by truncating the tall brick chimneys that had given the house so much character, blocking up the fireplaces, replacing the elegant brass door handles with the latest brushed aluminium products and fixing hardboard over the turned wooden spindles on the staircase. This was followed by a brand new ‘up and over’ polyurethane sealed cedar garage door.

Some months later, the architectural degradation of the area took a momentous leap ‘forward’ with the sale and demolition of the Victorian house itself. It had been neglected and ended its days grubbily converted into flats. Naturally, we children saw this as enormous fun; the building was universally described as a ‘hideous monstrosity’ and it seemed appropriate that the gloomy beast should be clubbed to destruction. To my enduring shame, I contributed to its demise by throwing bricks through what had been the billiard room windows.

We moved out in the mid 1980’s and, in due course, our own house also met its fate at the hands of a demolition crew to be replaced by yet another banal block of flats.

Gavin Stamp’s book, Britain’s Lost Cities, culminates in those same years of despoliation that also featured in my own childhood. However, it starts before the 1939-45 war and demonstrates that our collective will to implode our civilisation’s inheritance started well before the bombs were dropped or the rockets first fired. The city planners were itching to demolish and rebuild, not in the aftermath of desolation or, indeed, due to pragmatic necessity but, like my father’s modernising efforts, because it was then fashionable, righteous and modern. All that was needed to set the ball rolling at full speed was the government’s looting of private property rights through post-war planning legislation.

This book begins with an introductory chapter that lays out Stamp’s history of this awful period. It is well described and, in today’s modern parlance ‘kicks the right ass’ with a detailed explanation that tries to

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buildings than if it involves customs, populations or education. While memory is deceptive and selective, architecture leaves behind the evidence of its physical existence even if only as drawings or (as in this case) in photographs. This book is one of several (England’s Lost Country Houses by Giles Worsley, Lost London 1870-1945 by Philip Davies) that allow us a reasonably direct appraisal of what the past looked like. And while art can be kept alive in galleries and old music can be reborn at the whim of a musician, architecture dies as people die. Old photographs don’t just show us scenes from the past. Uncomfortably, they often demonstrate that, despite poverty and disease, our towns and cities were once more delightful and humane places in which to live than they are now and that what has gone has indeed been a grave loss.

While this book demonstrates our architectural losses, it is clearly much more difficult to show associated ‘soft’ cultural losses: those that once constituted a civil society. How do you show the loss of self esteem, the loss of good behaviour and civic purpose and the dissipation of liberty? This volume describes the effects of progressive thought on its ‘long march’ through our towns and cities leaving them uglier and disfigured. Do we think that it has not had the same effect on our spirit, on the way we live with ourselves and with others?

It all makes Burke’s suggestion that ‘To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely’ increasingly hopeless. And yet, I suppose, we must try.

Wearystan Frank Ellis Waging War in Waziristan: The British Struggle in the Land of Bin Laden, 1849-1947, Andrew M Roe, University Press of Kansas, 2010, £31.50.

A remote mountainous area of Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan, Waziristan is currently one of the main battlegrounds between Taliban insurgents, their al Qaeda allies and NATO. Indeed Waziristan may turn out to be the decisive battleground in the struggle to impose stability in Afghanistan. Inhabited by fiercely independent tribes that are resentful of outsiders, the area has a long history of lawlessness and violence.

During the nineteenth century the British colonial administration was responsible for the onerous task of maintaining law and order and employed various methods in order to find some kind of modus vivendi with the tribes, mainly the Wazirs. Tribal leaders, maliks, were bribed, co-opted and flattered in the hope Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk

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that they would in turn exert a measure of control over the more rebellious and unruly elements among them.

Eventually, the British decided that containment was the best policy with various irregular forces and the British Army being deployed if the tribes stepped out of line. In the 1920s and 1930s, air power dramatically enhanced the ability of the British colonial forces to impose their will.

To a large degree the British colonial policy in Waziristan worked and Roe maintains that the British experiences in administering and appeasing the tribes of the North-West Frontier ‘have undoubted utility in helping address present-day challenges in the same geographical area’. Roe rightly sings the praises of the British officials who administered the tribal regions.

‘They possessed’, he notes, ‘a deep sense of duty, a strong national identity, and were culturally astute’.

Moreover, many of them spoke Pashto and were able to communicate directly with the tribal leaders.

However, this degree of familiarity, linguistic skill and prolonged exposure to Waziristan was, and is, not risk free. Roe cites cases in which these brave and dedicated colonial officials became psychologically and culturally detached to such an extent that they tended to identify with the tribes they administered. Army officers were also vulnerable to the same processes of being acculturated to the ways of the tribes (or seeing things that were not there). One former soldier liked the enemy and recalls that ‘they reminisced about the fighting, almost as if talking about some hardfought cricket match’. This approach might well have been appropriate in the 1930s, though it was clearly something more than a hard-fought cricket match when British officers captured by the tribesmen ran the risk of being castrated and skinned alive. In the twenty-first century metaphors of cricket matches are irrelevant and dangerous. There was nothing Kiplingesque about the terrorist attacks of 11th September 2001.

One example of opposition to British rule in this region would seem to offer a striking parallel with Osama bin Laden. In 1936, a Muslim priest, Mirza Ali Khan, eventually known as the Fakir of Ipi, agitated for rebellion against the British. Over the next decade the British tried and failed to capture this charismatic and elusive cleric. Essential to the Fakir’s successful evasion over so many years was the code of Pashtunwali (the way of the Pashtun): renegades must be offered safety and protection; hospitality must be offered at all times; and an affront must be avenged.

Even among tribal opponents or among those who were lukewarm to his religious demagoguery he could always find shelter and sanctuary from the British.

Osama bin Laden and his cohorts will also have availed themselves of this code to avoid capture and death.

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Roe is concerned by the failure on the part of the coalition to learn the lessons of British colonial experience ‘This important oversight is in part due to a fear of a quasi-imperial occupation of the region as well as being a consequence of the dearth of contemporary analysis into the methods of British colonial control’.

These two considerations are related. The lack of analysis is because there is an assumption, often quite explicit, that anything to do with the colonial past, because it is colonial, can have nothing useful to say and so it is not studied. The colonial period does indeed provide valuable insights: those who deal with the tribes must have specialist linguists; they must know, and be sensitive to, the culture; they require great patience; and they must be allowed to take decisions.

However, this must be subject to the caveat that we study the language and culture of our opponent not in pursuit of cultural and spiritual enrichment — worthy aims in the right context — but to understand him so that we are more likely to achieve our goals, one of which may be to kill him.

There are significant differences separating the British colonial experience in Waziristan from that which now confronts NATO in the twenty-first century. These differences set limits to what can be derived from the past. First, for all his objections to the British presence and his desire to see an independent Pashtunistan, the Fakir of Ipi had not declared war on Britain, let alone the West. Nor did he engage in, or sponsor, acts of terrorism in the West. Second, media coverage of the British presence was far less intrusive in the 1930s than now (the Fakir, unlike Osama bin Laden, could not exploit the Internet to plan and carry out attacks). Third, oil was not a factor in British considerations, which is not so in the NATO mission.

Fourth, there was no Israeli state to serve as focal point for rallying jihadis. Fifth, Pakistan did not exist and there was no large Pakistani population in Britain from which jihadis could be recruited. Sixth, Iran’s nuclear ambitions and declared hatred of Israel were absent.

Seventh, the British were the sole power running Waziristan. NATO is a multinational coalition with specific national and cultural agendas that complicate, even impede, a united approach.

Roe is well aware that free markets, human rights and Western democratic standards mean nothing to the tribesmen and that ‘Protestant European logic and rules of behaviour do not apply to the tribal belt’.

Roe’s sound observations highlight a problem for the NATO forces in this part of the world. If the rules and customs of free markets, human rights, democracy and European logic are deemed not to apply, why must NATO and Western states adhere to these legal instruments and cultural artefacts in the prosecution The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

of this counter-insurgency campaign? Is this a sign of a superior civilization or political cowardice? If the Taliban in Waziristan and al Qaeda in Iraq see nothing wrong in sawing a Westerner’s head off why should the perpetrators enjoy a semblance of legal protection when caught? It was and remains demoralizing for our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan to know that they will be held to a much higher standard in their conduct than the insurgents and terrorists they are fighting.

Some of the parallels between the British experience in Waziristan before 1947 and with NATO which Roe discusses are robust and insightful; others are rendered less so by the passage of time and the change in technological and political circumstances. That said, Waging War in Waziristan brings together a great deal of valuable ethnographic, historical, political and military detail. This synthesis alone makes the book an important study and one that certainly should form part of any officer’s pre-deployment training for Afghanistan.

Compulsory Optimism Alistair Miller Smile or Die, Barbara Ehrenreich, Granta, 2010, £10.99.

In Smile or Die, Barbara Ehrenreich exposes the dark side of positive thinking, the cult that has come to grip America. With its outrageous cast of overblown motivational speakers, life coaches and prosperity preachers, Ehrenreich’s meticulously researched yet entertaining account would read as a comedy if only the consequences were not so dire.

The cult of positive thinking has its origins in nineteenth-century America. It was inevitable that the harsh, unforgiving Calvinism of the early settlers, their ‘system of socially imposed depression’, would evoke a reaction, and it eventually came in the form of what came to be known as the ‘New Thought’ movement.

New Thought replaced the punitive God of the Puritans with a boundlessly benevolent Spirit with which man was coterminous, and it encompassed figures as diverse as the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mary Baker Eddy (the founder of ‘Christian Science’), the psychologist William James and the self-educated watch-maker and ‘amateur metaphysician’ Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. It was Quimby who cured Mary Baker Eddy of her neurasthenia or ‘invalidism’ (a form of religious melancholy afflicting nineteenth-century middle-America), and a former patient of Quimby’s who cured William James. James had misgivings about the movement’s underlying philosophy but

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nevertheless praised its ‘concrete therapeutics’.

The generally benign New Thought movement declined in influence in the early years of the twentieth century with the rise of scientific medicine, but was to return later in a new and virulent form — ‘positive thinking’ — that was peculiarly well attuned to the needs of business America.

A string of classic motivational self-help texts have since paved the way to the twenty billion dollar motivation industry of today, including Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich! and Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 classic The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale ministered to the ‘lonely salesmen’ of America, who lived in constant fear of rejection and needed a positive outlook if they were to survive. But in modern corporate America the productivity of everybody can be raised through the exhortation to be more positive, more motivated, more committed and more devoted to the firm. And, handily for managers seeking to maximise short run profits, it is the victims of ‘down-sizing’ that are to blame for their own misfortune. No need for redundancy pay or re-training, no case for improved conditions or better pay: just enrol on a positive thinking course. As the Christian motivator Zig Ziglar comments, ‘It’s your own fault; don’t blame the system; don’t blame the boss — work harder and pray more’. When Wall Street crashed, it was of course obvious that there was something wrong with the system and with the new breed of charismatic executives, who, ‘pumped up by paid motivators’, felt able to forgo ‘the tedium of detailed risk analysis’. Unfortunately, there was good reason for those who were still able to think rationally to remain silent: if they voiced any ‘negativity’, they were thrown out.

Eliminating negativity is, of course, central to positive thinking. Motivational speaker Jeffrey Gitomer enjoins us to ‘GET RID OF NEGATIVE PEOPLE IN YOUR LIFE’, and J P Maroney is even more succinct: ‘Negative People SUCK!’ Other notable motivational speakers include Joe (“Mr Fire”) Vitale, the author of Zero Limits: The Secret Hawaiian System for Wealth, Health, Power, and More who ‘claims doctorates in metaphysical science and marketing’ (a useful combination), and Sue Morter, who argues that ‘infinite power’ can be achieved so long as you resonate in tune with the universe, and orders her audience to stand and engage in rhythmic clapping. The Orwellian overtones are all too obvious and Ehrenreich reminds us of the fate of the character in Milan Kundera’s The Joke who sends a postcard bearing the line ‘Optimism is the opium of the people’. It is but a small step from compulsory optimism to totalitarian repression.

Lurking behind positive thinking is the Law of Attraction, the notion that if you focus your mind strongly enough on the thing you want, it will be Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk

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attracted to you. The law is, its proponents claim, firmly grounded in science, but precisely what science — gravity, magnetism, quantum physics or simply ‘vibrations’ — has yet to be agreed on.

However the ‘good news’ of the Law of Attraction is widely promulgated, not only by ‘life coaches’ in the motivational industry, but by evangelical preachers versed in ‘positive theology’. In other words, ‘God wants you to be rich’. The new ‘prosperity gospel’ is popular, with an estimated 17 per cent of American Christians subscribing to it. In the new ‘megachurches’, humility and sacrificial love are, Ehrenreich regrets, distinctly thin on the ground.

Ehrenreich’s own interest in positive thinking arises from her experience as a breast cancer sufferer, when she encountered the sugar-coated dogma that a relentlessly upbeat, positive frame of mind helps the body fight disease — a notion that Ehrenreich, a former immunologist, knows has no empirical or scientific basis whatever. The problem is that when positive thinking fails to halt the spread of the disease, as it inevitably must, the patient can only blame herself.

Perhaps it was even her negative attitude that brought on the disease in the first place. In one particularly disturbing case, a patient worries that ‘I know that if I get scared or upset, I am making my tumour grow faster and I will have shortened my life’.

The cult of positive thinking claims academic respectability in the guise of ‘positive psychology’, now Harvard’s most popular course. But though positive psychology distances itself from its wackier cousin, the empirical research on which it founds its claims (for example a study that purports to show that happier nuns live longer) is, as even some of its proponents admit, distinctly shaky — mainly because the results are ‘correlative’ rather than ‘causative’. In any case, the message is the same.

Is there an alternative to the reckless optimism and self-delusion of positive thinking? Yes, concludes Ehrenreich. It is to have the courage to face things as they really are.

Democratic Dangers Anthony Daniels Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect, Paul A Rahe, Yale, 2009 hb £27.50, pb £16.99.

Although we live longer lives, suffer less pain and have more choices than any previous human inhabitants of this planet, we feel uneasy, as if we were holding The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

a drunken party on the brink of a precipice. Are we right to feel uneasy, or is this merely an instance of the law of conservation of anxiety, according to which mankind’s worry will attach to one thing if not to another, irrespective of the objective justification for it?

Many readers of this review, I suspect, will have experienced a curious psychological paradox: while their own lives are about as satisfactory as it is possible for any lives to be, given the limitations of sublunary existence, the general state of the world alarms them so deeply that it casts a gloomy pall over them. The gross financial irresponsibility of governments, banks and general population alike, the rampant criminality, the surveillance state that spies but does not protect, the militant vulgarity of inescapable popular culture, are indeed sufficient to reduce even the best-off among us to despair. It sometimes seems as if the cultivated and refined person in our society is doomed, like the decent person in Hitler’s Germany, to inner emigration.

This philippic is preceded by a long, scholarly and somewhat dry analysis of the relations between the thought of the three political theorists on the one hand, and our current discontents on the other; and, truth to tell, the philippic could easily have stood on its own without the preceding disquisition. Plenty of intelligent people have come to very similar conclusions about the modern state without having read, or even heard of, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Tocqueville.

In a sense, then, the reader gets two books for the price of one, the pair of which are unlikely to suit a single type of reader. But neither of the two books encourages the facile optimism about the end of history that in some quarters greeted the west’s victory in the Cold War, and gave rise to a dangerous hubris. Only if history is teleological can it have an end; and history is not teleological, therefore it cannot come to an end (except with the extinction of the human race). And there is absolutely no guarantee that liberal democracy cannot transform itself into something much nastier.

The relationship between the character of a people and the political regime that rules it was of interest to all three of Rahe’s political philosophers, and is a question that is not susceptible of a definitive answer, except perhaps the rather mealy-mouthed one that it is dialectical. It would be a terrible thing to say, for example, that the British people deserved the leader they got in Anthony Blair; on the other hand, it would be vain to suppose that his characteristics — lack of real character apart from ambition, sanctimonious ruthlessness, sentimentality in the service of absence of scruple, self-interest masquerading as compassion, and moral cowardice posing as principle — did not correspond to or harmonise with the character of an important and significant sector of the British population.

It was Tocqueville’s insight that, in a democracy, The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

something must stand between the power of the government chosen by the majority and the rest of the population, if tyranny were not to result. This tyranny would be different, softer than previously known tyrannies, but perhaps all the more efficacious for being less easily discernible.

Tocqueville thought that the United States was far better placed to avoid the soft despotism of democracy than European countries. This was for a variety of reasons, among them the religious mores of the people, the devolution of power down to township level, a history free of kingly or aristocratic privilege, and a pronounced tendency in the part of the population to form associations to pursue cultural, social or moral ends, independent of any public authority. All these things had either never existed in France or, if they had existed, had been destroyed or suppressed by the Revolution; and France, as a French newspaper recently put is, is not merely European, it is Europe.

The author is less sanguine about his country than was Tocqueville. American religion is a weak reed to sustain anything; not only is there very little in it by way of transcendental belief, but the reaction against it is strengthening, freedom of religion now being often interpreted as freedom from religion. The mores of the people is libertine rather than biblical; its sacred text is a few famous lines from Mill’s On Liberty, not the Pentateuch or even the Gospels. Power has been increasingly drained from the periphery to the centre, such that local choice often consists of little more than that between methods of carrying out directives formulated and imposed by unelected officials in Washington. Judges twist the Constitution in any way agreeable to the moral preoccupations of the day; and private associations are increasingly forced to comply with laws or regulations with which they disagree, and may even have been set up specifically to oppose.

As it happens, there is an excellent linguistic example in this book of the reach of soft despotism. The author animadverts (with what justice I cannot claim to assess) on the conformism of American universities which, though private institutions, proscribe certain opinions and impose ideologically-inspired codes of conduct on teachers and students alike. On page 258, however, we read the following sentence: We are now ruled by women and men who make a profession of politics, and re-election is all too often their overriding idea.

It seems to me that the normal way of putting it would have been ‘We are now ruled by men and women etc…,’ not because men are still more important in politics than women (though no doubt they are) and therefore ought to be mentioned first, but because the

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rhythm of the language demands it, just as it demands that we begin a speech ‘Ladies and gentlemen’ rather than ‘Gentlemen and ladies,’ which would sound very awkward.

There are two possibilities here. First, the author wrote the sentence in its natural form, and it was the press’s sub-editors who changed it in accordance with an ideological prescription; or second, the author had internalised the requirements of political correctness, against his obvious inclinations. If it was the former, he probably felt that the effort required to restore the sentence to how he wrote it was too great. But whatever is the case, the sentence is a tribute to a soft and sinister power.

I wish I could wholeheartedly recommend this book to others than those professionally interested in the three philosophers mentioned in the title, for the author is a learned man with (at least for my taste) his heart in the right place. But as I grow older, I value — as a general reader — concision and pithiness more than an accretion of detail that ultimately leads to precisely the same conclusion. Burke put the essential argument of this book in fewer words than it has pages: Man is qualified for liberty in exact proportion as he is prepared to place a limit on his own appetites.

The current crisis might, of course, place a limit on the satisfaction of our appetites, if not on our appetites themselves.

A Family of Anglers John Constable Blood Knots, Luke Jennings, Atlantic Books, 2010, £16.99 The dust cover of Blood Knots tells us that the subject of the book is ‘Of Fathers, Friendship & Fishing’, and though this is accurate the net is in practice cast wider. While the heart of the book is concerned with his father, who was a distinguished King’s Royal Hussars tank commander in the 1939-45 war, and with Captain Robert Nairac, GC, the Grenadier Guards officer tortured and killed by the IRA in 1977, the circumstantial text is made up of a series of interlocking memoirs, in which many other incidental but never irrelevant figures appear, for instance René Berg, the minor glam-rock guitarist and obsessional fisherman, and the communist publisher Ernest Wishart and his scandalous wife Lorna Garman. The author’s own life is sketched with indicative episodes of narrative,

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these mostly being concerned with his schooldays, or composed of glancing asides sketching his day-to-day life in contemporary North London.

Most of these elements are connected by longer or shorter filaments to fishing, and several with angling for pike. Indeed, these fish both open and close the book, and break surface frequently throughout, though eels, perch, roach, rudd, carp, and trout also appear.

Fortunately, there is no technical advice offered and all the tackle described is antique or obsolete, so the bad odour of product placement does not sully the pure ceremonies of homage that are the larger purpose of the book. Indeed, far from being an advertisement of any kind it seems unlikely that Blood Knots will make anyone want to venture, rod in hand, to the waterside.

The author’s father did not fish, but Robert Nairac, we learn, was an angler of a very high standard and some considerable subtlety. There are further distinctions, and these two dominant figures are presented as partial opposites, one being the undemonstrative yet deeply affectionate parent, making silent sacrifices for his children, while the other passes over the book’s stage as an hypnotically compelling personality whose example is never quite free of self-satisfaction; both are admirable soldiers, though with styles of courage so different they appear to emerge from entirely different psychological foundations. This father-friend axis is the measure of all others for Jennings, Berg being revealed in comparison as a sadly wrecked and incompetent personality whose sole redeeming feature seems to be his interest in and understanding of England’s largest predatory fish. Nevertheless, desert and reward are barely lashed together here, for though Nairac still holds the record for the largest pike from one of Ampleforth’s lakes, a modest mid-double, it is the drugged rocker in mascara and latex trousers who draws leviathan out, a Thamesmead forty pounder, in which, however, as fitting reproof for his transgression of the rightful order, few believe.

Indeed, virtue seems often punished in these pages, or only ambiguously acknowledged. The astounding cast to an almost inaccessible rising fish yields not the great trout it merits, but a dace; medals are posthumous. Throughout the text we see an agonised religious conscience toying with evidence of universal malice or indifference, and while Sartre is mentioned and dismissed as the juvenile enthusiasm of over-sophisticated schoolboys, the néant is never far away in Jennings’s own geography lesson, the Catholic church having abandoned the field altogether, singing ‘Domine vobiscum’ as their recessional but to the tune of ‘Bobby’s Girl’.

This frustrated will to faith finds its outlet in a mysticism derived in large part from J W Dunne’s speculations on the philosophy and parapsychology of The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

time. That Dunne was also a fly-fisherman is a gift to Jennings, who can thus attempt to tie his scattered and perhaps disconnected memories into a pattern implying the existence of a coherent stream of thought, each element not only individually profound but coming together to offer a synthesis suggesting something altogether deeper.

The result is entirely satisfactory as a literary artefact, the mechanics of the text being neatly engineered, while the juxtapositions and transitions rarely, if ever, result in redundancy and the component elements are fascinating and often moving in themselves. Yet the resolution towards which Jennings marshals his material is idiosyncratic and specious. Forgetting Keats’s observation that we hate all art that has too obvious a design upon us, the book closes with an interpretation of angling which is also offered as a summa of everything else that has been discussed: ‘Deep down, something is moving, and I know that this is the moment, this is why we do it. For that heartslamming infinity. For the knowledge that, this time, it might not be a fish at all.’

This is clever and striking, thought-provoking even, but unfortunately it isn’t even remotely true to the experience of most other fishermen. The nervous anticipation of what precisely has been hooked in the viewless water, eel, pike or perch, minnow or monster, is real, but it goes no further. Our uncertainties are about the practical and the physical, not whether the tight line leads to the Great Fish Jesus Christ himself.

Ask the common angler for an explanation, and they will say that they fish to ‘get away’, that fishing is both

relaxing and exciting, and leave it there. Such remarks may seem incurious, anaesthetic and superficial, but perhaps the average man-on-the-bank is right; fishing is simply trying to catch fish, an activity through which you escape to some degree, not only from the family, from work and colleagues, but also from any sense of wider or greater significance and the oppressive existential responsibilities that are bound up with such thoughts. Perhaps it is perverse to wish it any other way.

In one of the passages on the author’s school-life we learn that he was an enthusiastic actor in a production of Marlowe’s Edward II, and over-reaching is a recurring theme throughout the text, and even embodied in it. In small things, angling and even the literature of angling, as well as in grand adventure, it is possible to go too far; one ends in tragedy, of course, but the other only in a slight touch of bathos. No one who reads Blood Knots will be disappointed, but it does confirm the view that philosophy and field sports should not be braced together in the hope that one will teach the other.

Metaphysics aside, this is a splendid book in its elements and in so far as they are focused by the author’s own experience. No god or para-deity is needed to redeem the accounts of fishing or falconry; they stand up for themselves. No one else could write about Michael Jennings or Robert Nairac in this way; the observations and the feelings are peculiar to son and friend, and their expression is not only elegant but entirely convincing and sincere. These are unique and compelling tributes decently made, and they may stand as honourable memorials to both men.

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FILM Please Give Directed by Nicole Holofcener Jane Kelly On the way to the cinema in the tube a man shaped like Wibbly Pig sat opposite wearing a base-ball cap and red vest bearing the slogan: ‘Some people are fat. Get over it.’ He could have been an extra in Please Give, the film I was going to see.

Something has happened to Americans since the economic crash, or perhaps it is the influence of Obama, but if this film is true, they are more concerned than ever about being good and doing the right thing when poverty and homelessness are right there in front of you.

At least intellectual urban folk are worried about it.

Please Give is a comedy of manners, worthy of Woody Allen at his best. Kate, played by Catherine Keener and her fat, boorish husband Alex (Oliver Platt) live in a New York apartment with their unhappy fifteen year old daughter Abby, played by Sarah Steele, who in real life is a student at Columbia University. They own a furniture store selling tasteful retro furniture bought from dead and dying people. They also buy an apartment next to theirs, belonging to Andra, a very nasty nonagenarian, who will stay until she dies.

Andra has two granddaughters, the dutiful and generous Rebecca, played by Rebecca Hall, (daughter of Sir Peter) who works as a breast cancer radiologist, and Mary (Amanda Peet) a bitterly angry beautician who shares her grandmother’s vicious tongue. Kate and Alex circle Andra like vultures, but Kate worries about the profits they make from people who do not know the value of what they are selling. She assuages her unease by giving $20 bills to people living on the street and attempts some charity work which is not a success. A friendly group of kids with Down’s Syndrome playing basketball reduce her to a pathetic flood of tears.

She is frustrated by her own and other people’s lack of principle, and increasingly at odds with young Abby who seems to her nothing more than a grabby little princess. Meanwhile Alex strays into a sordid affair with Mary.

The film is written and directed by Nicole Holofcener, who worked on four episodes of Sex In The City. This Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk

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film is mainly about women, by women, but it’s far removed from any kind of ‘chic lit.’ Kate’s character is used to skewer middle class self-obsession and selfpity. She is trapped in the dilemma of the rich: how to get even richer while remaining morally sound.

She aims to help people who are less fortunate, but is baffled by how little effect she has.

Please Give is not high minded or preachy; based on close observation of human foibles it has a gentle laugh at the niggling imperfections and pressures that upset us all at different times in our lives. In the land of the teen-queen Abby is fat, with some luridly realistic looking spots. A skin like that is not often seen outside horror films. Everyone in the film, apart from Kate and Mary, looks odd. Even youthful Rebecca Hall, who sometimes plays romantic leads, looks toothy rather than toothsome. In a touching and funny scene we see her on a date with one of the grim nutters you typically meet on dating web sites.

When she gets a decent boyfriend Andra tells her, ‘he’s only going with you because he’s so short. He couldn’t get anyone else.’

Andra is played by Ann Guilbert, once a regular on the Dick Van Dyke Show. Cruel and harsh in old age, at her funeral we are told she was once a charitable, giving woman. Somewhere along the line life poisoned her.

With its crumblies and gargoyles this film takes a delightful swipe at celebrity culture. In an interview with BBC Radio 4 Rebecca Hall said that she aimed to make her character as self-effacing as possible, make her almost disappear from the screen. Keener is no show-off either. She relishes being a supporting actress.

‘The interesting characters are very few if you want to be the lead, and they depend on you being beautiful,’ she says. ‘Since I’m not interested in those parts, the pressure’s off, in a way. I’m not cast for my physicality.’

This is real ensemble playing; no posing or staring into the camera allowed. But you have to wonder, where do these actors normally work? There can’t be much of it about in these glamour obsessed times.

The film accurately reflects real life. Keener, who is beautiful and a close friend of Hollywood A-listers such as Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, has had trouble measuring up.

‘One director said I just wasn’t sexy,’ she says. ‘It was really hard. I left town for two months with my tail between my legs. But you have to kind of go, okay, maybe I’m not their idea of sexy but what the hell.’

In Please Give, the destructive emphasis on samey The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

our only hope is to live in a way which makes kindness and love possible, so that we can die well, among loved ones — or perhaps we should say, tolerated ones. Its old fashioned message, one espoused by Dickens, emphasizes the importance of fellowship, generosity and faith in others.

In its only nod towards Hollywood tradition, the film’s ending is slightly sentimental, when Kate finally buys Abby the pair of jeans she craves, costing over $200. In a move towards real compassion and closeness with her daughter, she puts aside her narrow disapproval of frivolous materialism in favour of making someone really happy.

good looks is ridiculed. It also has a profound message about mutability and human frailty. Death haunts the picture. It begins with some startling photography set in a clinic testing women for breast cancer. Andra dies in her chair having successfully made everyone unhappy, while a good granny, played by Lois Smith (once a stalwart of Dr Kildare) gets breast cancer. We are made to look, and smile at the unfairness of fate.

Even in America no one lives for ever and the wrong people get a raw deal. As Roger Scruton likes to point out, there is always death, aging, failure and darkness out there. Now it seems that the American cinema, once the last bastion of mindless optimism, has noticed.

It is a black comedy, not a sad film, but it tells us that

A Popular Art Form: Portrait Painting Today Andrew Wilton

T

he National Portrait Gallery’s annual BP Portrait Award exhibition* is, as usual, packed with visitors. People love portraits: paintings in which there is a three-way relationship between artist, sitter and viewer; that engage our interest on several levels. There is the direct appeal to our humanity; and if sometimes humanity seems in short supply, there is the interest of the sitter’s position, role in an organisation — government, university, school, business — where the individual stands for a body corporate, academic or political, transcending his or her private personality yet doing so only, and precisely, in terms of their individual qualities.

The Royal Society of Portrait Painters (RSPP) has acted as an academy of professionals supplying such images to such organizations, as well as providing the more private and personal sort of portraiture. It’s the latter type, though, that has always dominated the BP Portrait Awards, and at times in the past it seems to have been almost too loose in its definitions. Is a picture of the artist’s girl-friend, seen in a dim light from behind, peeling potatoes, really a portrait, or a study, using the girl-friend as model? In such a case the work is surely a picture pure and simple; whereas a portrait must combine several aims: not only the artist’s desire to produce a ‘good picture’, but the sitters’ desire to be well — perhaps flatteringly — represented, and The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

often the social requirement that the sitter’s status is demonstrated. All these qualities in addition to the hope that the likeness will be vivid, and will reveal something of his or her internal character: it’s a tall order, and yet it has been fashionable to suggest that, thanks to photography and the inexorable ‘progress’ of art, portraiture is dead.

Photography has indeed struck a blow against good portraiture, but not by making it redundant: as the NPG exhibition shows only too clearly, it has become an aspiration of some painters to produce portraits that mimic photography to an almost ludicrous extent.

Examples of this tendency commonly use photographs as their starting-point, and simply replicate them — often on a very large scale — with the result that we see many freckles, wrinkles, individual hairs and capillary veins, in a plethora of undifferentiated detail through which the personality of the sitter emerges with difficulty. There’s nothing shameful about the use of photography in painting, but a painting that does nothing more than imitate a photograph is labour wasted. Michal Ozibko’s iDeath, the head of a young girl wearing earphones, which measures 87 x 67 inches, is typical of this tendency.

There is a greater chance of success in portraits that present their sitters ‘warts and all’ but nevertheless give the viewer the experience of looking at a painting, 53

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of enjoying the interplay between technique and representation that is one of the great delights of art.

Anthony Williams is well known for his remorseless scrutiny of faces and limbs, but a portrait like his small head of Eli maintains this balance. There are times when that balance tips too far the opposite way: the surface of Giampaolo Russo’s Portrait of Giuseppe is so thick with impasto that we barely discern the head and shoulders that loom through it. This is a style made familiar by the portraits of Frank Auerbach, and with Auerbach too the technique is so obtrusive that the picture seems more concerned with the artist himself and his expressive needs than with the sitter.

This is a problem that always confronts the portraitpainter in our post-Freudian age: is the artist or the sitter the true subject? Sigmund Freud’s grandson, Lucian, is famous for his searching portrayals of people as emphatically physical human beings, often unflinchingly descriptive yet never simply photographic: the tension between paint and what is painted remains a vital element in the work.

Another modern master who has reinvented the portrait as expression of himself is Francis Bacon, and Bacon’s influence is evident in David Nightingale’s From my Soul I cannot Hide, a small picture composed of superimposed self-portraits. Whether it succeeds in conveying the intense self-examination the artist intends is debatable; in its (Baconian?) freedom of handling it perhaps succeeds better than another multiple self-portrait, Carlos Muro’s The True SelfPortrait, a group of heads presented like black-and white photographs of the artist seen from different angles, and suffering from just that lack of real insight that, as I’ve noted, is an almost inevitable consequence of the pseudo-photographic style.

But self-portraiture is surely a separate subject altogether, and I question whether it should be included in an exhibition such as this. The opportunities for psychological penetration are many and as a genre it has given rise to some of the greatest of all portraits; but the social interaction that is the battleground of the professional ‘RSPP’ portrait, with all its special challenges and pitfalls, is missing. It has an unfair advantage, and the palm should go, I think, to someone who has measured up to those challenges.

This year the palm (a prize of £25,000) went to a picture that claimed considerable media attention: Last Portrait of Mother by Daphne Todd. The artist is a former President of the RSPP and a formidable practitioner of the official portrait: she has work in the NPG and has painted many of the great and the good in Britain. This is a picture exemplifying her usual downto-earth manner, but, most unusually, represents her hundred-year-old mother just after her death. DeathWeb: www.salisburyreview.co.uk

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bed portraits generally show the deceased arranged beatifically as if asleep, or as the undertaker displays them to their relations in the chapel of rest. Here, no such cosmetic attentions have been afforded: rigor mortis has set in, the gases in the stomach have begun to ferment and swell the old woman’s papery flesh. It is certainly an ‘unflinching’ picture; I wonder whether the ever-truthful Lucian Freud has painted a corpse in this condition? Todd has said that she is in a sense ‘in love’ with her sitters while she is painting them.

(Freud too, in the act of transcribing so painstakingly what he sees, can be said to express a similar creative relationship.)

It is a picture to arouse emotions, and I was interested that the emotions it aroused in me were precisely those I have felt on viewing the corpse of a deceased relative: a mixture of revulsion and compassion, a sense of the fragility and vulnerability of life, of the complete absence of the real person to whom the body once belonged. And yet Todd by the directness and precision of her brushwork manages to convey the individuality of this corpse, and her own strong attachment to its owner.

The fact that this work was singled out by the judges was understandable, but it was not quite as exceptional as might appear. The exhibition is full of images of bodily frailty and disintegration. In his large canvas of a paraplegic, Paul Getty III, Paul Benney says he wished to present his sitter vividly as a human being capable of communication despite his multiple handicaps. Anna Dougherty, who was born with no left forearm, says that her Self-portrait (with Ribera’s Club-footed Boy) — a nude half-length — was ‘painful’ to paint, and it confronts us too with the pain of her condition. Hanging beside her, opposite the Ribera, is her prosthetic arm. This is the kind of autobiographical self-portrait, constructing an identity from illness and disfigurement, which Sam TaylorWood famously executes in large-scale photographs (there is one hanging just outside the exhibition in the NPG’s permanent collection). But so much depends on the quality of the execution: Todd’s rapidly handled but precisely observed and tender depiction of her mother is effective largely because it is beautifully embodied in paint. Like the large photographs, Dougherty’s little picture doesn’t enjoy the same technical flexibility and felicity, and is correspondingly less impressive.

Likewise the most insistent of these depictions of bodily hurt, Henry Ward’s large Rembrandt-inspired group of The ‘Finger-Assisted’ Nephrectomy of Professor Nadey Hakim… (alluding to the famous Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp) presents us with the detail of a rather unpleasant surgical operation, but in such coarse terms that we are repelled not so much The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

by the surgery as by the hard, machine-like portraits of the men surrounding the operating table. The naked body of the patient is stylised, removed from us not by the anaesthetic that renders it insensible but by a hard mannerism in the artist’s method of showing it. The old lesson forces itself on us yet again: there is no substitute for fine painting; all the tricks and distractions of photo-realism, expressionism and symbolism will not compensate for the inspired touch of the really good

painter. It is in the wise brush-stroke that the artist communicates compassion.

Andrew Wilton was the first Curator of the Clore Gallery for the Turner Collection at Tate Britain * Shown at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 24 June — 19 September 2009, then at the Usher Gallery, Lincoln 1 October —14 November, and Aberdeen Art Gallery 27 November — 22 January 2011.

Looking for Shakespeare’s Songs Gerald Place

T

he rediscovery, or reinstatement, of the play Cardenio, shortly to be performed by the RSC, and James Shapiro’s excellent new book, Contested Will (chronicling the ‘Who wrote Shakespeare?’ controversy), remind us of the extent to which the Bard’s output is constantly being revised.

Odds and ends also come to light, ranging from documents to evidence of the theatres themselves : (the remains of The Rose being the most spectacular example to date, and the site of The Theatre in Shoreditch the most recent). The success of Sam Wanamaker’s Globe replica on Bankside has rekindled an interest in staging these plays authentically.

One of the areas that remain a puzzle is the music which might have been heard in these theatres. In 1623, two of Shakespeare’s friends and colleagues, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published a lavish Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works in his memory. As a result, Shakespeare’s lyrics have survived as poetry but there was no place for notated music in these books.

For anyone wanting to know what the songs sounded like in the original productions, musical detective-work was needed.

Shakespeare’s plays feature the word ‘music’ at least 170 times, and further references to songs, tunes, voices and a wide variety of instruments far outstrip this number. It seems that only King John has no reference to music at all. Songs were an important element of earlier drama, though they were frequently little more than the expected divertissements, and in general the songs are not specified. Shakespeare only very rarely leaves the choice of song to the actors themselves, and consequently has left us a collection of some of the

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

most beautiful lyrics in the language.

In Shakespeare’s world music is also important as an idea. Characters who appreciate music are estimable: those who do not are fit merely for ‘treasons, stratagems and spoils’. Nor is it enough just to appreciate music.

Hamlet berates the otherwise courtly Guildenstern for not being able to play the recorder as this makes him a gentleman lacking in the necessary accomplishments at best, and morally suspect at worst. So attitudes to music colour motive and character, and the balance between harmony and discord affects all life, from love to politics. As Ulysses says in Troilus & Cressida: Take but degree away, untune that string And hark what discord follows.

In a theatre without scenery or lighting, music had always been important to give a sense of time and place: trumpet calls for battles, wind-music for banquets; but in Shakespeare’s hands it could also serve to enhance atmosphere and mood. For all these reasons it behoves us to investigate further.

There are a handful of period settings, some of which found their way into the old school songbooks, but even these familiar songs are not what they may at first seem. Many date from the great 18th century revivals of the plays, where new music was written by such illustrious composers as Henry Purcell and Pelham Humphrey, not only for the original lyrics, but the elaborate musical interludes that were thought essential at the time. The ones from Shakespeare’s lifetime almost all have question marks by them. Thomas Morley’s setting of O Mistress Mine only works by putting an instrumental piece (with the same title) on the procrustean bed of musicology and hacking at it

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till it fits. The result is very convincing, but may not have been what Shakespeare expected at all The first serious attempts to winkle out the original music for Shakespeare’s plays date back to the middle of the 19th century, notably those of William Chappell whose Popular Music of Olden Times began to address the issue, and at least gather together much of the folk material that Shakespeare mentions. Chappell made it clear exactly which tunes were being alluded to when characters refer to songs in passing, and this does give us a flavour of the music which would have been familiar to audiences of the time. He managed to match words with music as well, though ironically only where snatches of song are needed in a play, but not to Shakespeare’s own words. For example, ‘When Griping Griefs’ from Romeo & Juliet (in a pre-existing song and poem by Richard Edwardes) and the beautiful ‘O Death Rock me Asleep’ alluded to in Henry VIII. The first popular song anthology, compiled by Frederick Bridge, was published by Novello as late as the 1920’s and included a handful of familiar pieces, though with rather questionable accompaniments.

Courtesy of Bridge we now have a period setting of the ‘Willow Song’ from Othello. Surely this must be the correct music, and a lute part survives as well. But another 16th century setting has turned up since: which do we go with? Bridge also included Robert Johnson’s settings of two songs from The Tempest. However, scholars maintain that Johnson’s music is too late for the very first performances, and may have been written for an early revival. But Johnson was truly a music man of the theatre (he wrote court masques as well as songs and dances for plays) so at least with him we feel really in touch.

Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock) also studied the problem. He pointed out that the most famous old setting of all, ‘It was a lover and his lass’, is in Thomas Morley’s First Book of Ayres, but, alas, such is the nature of the Shakespeare music detective story that Heseltine never saw a complete copy. The only surviving one was in a private collection in America. And if we are being picky it’s a duet in the play anyway, not a solo song. On the plus side, Morley’s case is strong as he was a very close neighbour of Shakespeare for a time.

Next on the scene was T Maskell Hardy who published a two-volume collection in about 1920 citing the earliest available settings, several of which had appeared charmingly in Lamb’s Shakespeare for the Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk

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Young. Here for the first time are several songs with the original harmonies, or in the case of the ballad tunes, appropriate accompaniments — notably Ophelia’s snatches of songs from Hamlet. Here, the folk tune Walsingham is a clear choice for ‘How should I your true love know?’ as Shakespeare has written a parody of the old song to reflect Ophelia’s unfortunate state of mind. He does this elsewhere, and the audience would have been expected to pick up on even the tiniest reference to a song, often if only a few words. These tunes had very specific associations and quoting one would invoke a whole new layer of meaning.

Since then the corpus of available settings has been added to, often ingeniously, by Frederick Sternfeld, Ross Duffin (in his monumental Shakespeare’s Songbook of 2004) and many others. Duffin does provide a tune for every Shakespeare lyric, but not all fit equally well.

Writing in 1966, Dr John Stevens made the clear distinction between ‘popular’ songs for which ballad tunes are appropriate, and ‘art’ songs that need more sophisticated musical settings. Some of the ballad tunes suggest themselves: in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Puck’s other name is Robin Goodfellow, and as Duffin shows, the folk tune of that name fits perfectly to ‘You spotted snakes’. Many other songs have hints in their subject matter which suggest a connection. The art songs are less easy to deal with, but a hunt through the body of lutenist songs of the day has yielded music that fits the orphan words well both in metre and mood. Some just seem to fall into one’s lap: Dowland’s ‘Now, O now I needs must Part’ seems tailor-made for Oberon’s final ‘Now until the break of day’. Oh, and Dowland was also Shakespeare’s neighbour for a time and they both have memorials, side by side, in the church of St Andrew’s by the Wardrobe.

Perhaps the best excuse for all this hunting over hill and over dale is to provide directors, who wish to attempt a period production, with music that at least does not sound out of place, and at best may be the music Shakespeare himself would have heard.

Gerald Place’s CD with lutenist Dorothy Linell, Music from Shakespeare’s Theatre, is available on the Naxos label 8.570708. Further details on www. englandshelicon.com The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

IN SHORT Peter Bauer and the Economics of Prosperity, ed James A Dorn & Barun S Mitra, Academic Foundation, New Delhi (distributed in UK by the IEA)

Theory at the University of Buckingham. In this illuminating reader, edited by his friend Michael James, a number of Barry’s colleagues celebrate his memory.

Barry was an outstanding scholar of Hayek in this country, and his cause, appropriately, was the containment of government. He did not reject the State, but like many classical liberals and all libertarians, saw it as too large, and often counterproductive. He wanted it restricted to minimal required functions. The market economy has in a couple of centuries freed many of the world’s inhabitants from primary poverty but the urge to extend government remains so strong that endless reasons are adduced for intervention. These essays take up his favourite themes.

Do the complexities of modernity require the state to modify spontaneous patterns of output significantly?

Or are its interventions harmful? A chapter, revisiting Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, insists that the state is best contained by internationally competing legal jurisdictions — precisely what the EU seeks to eliminate.

The old chestnut that the 1930s depression was essentially a capitalist failure, rescued by FDR and his New Deal, is explored. Fiscal mismanagement is reemphasized as the central culprit, with government deficits crowding out private investment.

Environmentalism has come to radiate a surrogate religious fervour. Colin Robinson says that if global warming is real, markets will deal best with it. If global warming is discredited, markets will resume their default position. Other ‘environmental’ pieces look at ‘externalities’, and at the value of competitive free association in citizen protection.

Terence Kealey argues that privately financed science causes underproduction because innovators cannot privatise outcomes, a view traced back to Francis Bacon, but rejected by Adam Smith, who saw successful innovation as overwhelmingly driven by private business. Science questions can be seen as only a subset of educational ones. Modern educational socialism squanders vast resources in free societies.

In his posthumously published paper Barry applauds Ronald Dworkin’s emphasis on the autonomy of law, law itself being constituted by ethico-legal principles of adjudication. Dworkin, Hayek and Barry all uphold the autonomy of law. They unite in denying positivist claims that law can exclude all social and political pressure, though they also unite in resisting weak submission to such intrusion. Barry rejects, however, Dworkin’s overemphasis on legal equality, that is civil

One of the most depressing aspects of the Coalition Government’s economic plans has been the Conservative Party’s proud boast that whatever other expenditure they might have to cut, international aid will remain ring-fenced. If I had thought it would do any good I would have sent a copy of this book to David Cameron and anyone else who might have contributed to that fatuous policy. Please, I would have written in the accompanying note, read what Peter Bauer had had to say for many decades and what his colleagues and pupils have had to say and then consider whether your policy is not only “taking money from the poor of the rich countries and giving it to the rich of the poor countries” but is, actually, preventing those poor countries from ever becoming rich.

It is extraordinary that we have known for a long time that aid not only does not help but actually harms development in poor countries; that Peter Bauer has explained it over and over again in a clear and pithy fashion; that there are growing numbers of economists in those developing countries who are saying that aid should be cut and trade should be opened up within the developing world and between developed and developing countries; and yet, our politicians, backed by the usual suspects, most of whom have a vested interest in keeping the poor in poverty ­— NGOs, transnational organizations, lobbyists, rock-stars — continue with this ruinous and evil policy.

For anyone who really does want to understand how poor countries have become rich in the past and how they can do so in the future, there is no better introduction than this slim collection of Bauer’s own essays and others’ discussion of the man’s work and achievement. On top of which there is a delightfully witty short biography of Peter Bauer by Ralph Harris who was sorry that his friend and colleague was not clubbable enough to generate more of a following.

Helen Szamuely Classical Liberalism In The Twentieth Century: Essays in Honour of Norman P Barry, ed by Michael James, Institute of Economic Affairs, 2010, £20.00 Norman Barry was Professor of Social and Political The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

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rights at the expense of economic ones, which Barry sees as permitting the state to constrict individual economic advancement.

Sir Alan Peacock differed from Barry over inherited property. Barry believed that owners should have absolute control of their legitimate wealth, while Peacock feared that over-concentrated private wealth leads to political inequality. In the next few years wealth formation itself, rather than redistribution, is likely to preoccupy politics.

Dennis O’Keeffe All them Cornfields and Ballet in the Evening, John Miller, Hodgson Press, PO Box 903A, Kingston on Thames KT1 9LY, enquiries@hodgson press.co.uk, www.hodgsonpress.co.uk The title of this book comes from the satirical film about trade unions I’m all right, Jack in which Peter Sellers as Fred Kite proclaims the glories of the Soviet Union. John Miller was a Reuters and Daily Telegraph correspondent in Moscow for over thirty years but as he explains this is not a conventional account of his professional life but a very amusing and informative read about his daily life in the ‘vanished world of the USSR’. He had mastered the language (he was in JSSL for his National Service), read the appropriate literature like Animal Farm and Victor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom, and decided which side he was on. His racy account is illuminated by his sharp observations and insights into the reality of Soviet life.

You can smell the bugs (insects — getting the other kind was like coming of age) see the KGB tails and diplomats caught by KGB honey traps, feel the misery of living and working in the workers’ paradise. There were said to be eighteen million rats in Moscow to nine million people. Food was sometimes so short that once the keepers of the Volgograd zoo stole the elephant’s food to feed their hungry families. No wonder that foreigners depended on illicit gifts from visitors and the embassy shops. No wonder too that people would do anything to get out of their communal flat (as many as twenty people living on a floor of a single building, each family having a single room and sharing a kitchen and bathroom). Drunkenness in the Soviet Union was excused in socialist ideology as a capitalist hangover; in reality it relieved the despair of living under a regime which robbed people of their humanity. There are graphic descriptions of the results.

Miller met most of the big names in successive Politburos and tells some good stories about Khrushchev. ‘“Sometimes a man goes to see Stalin and he does not know whether he will come home again”. Khrushchev Web: www.salisburyreview.co.uk

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always managed to’. Our traitors fascinated him and he succeeded in tracking down Burgess with whom he became friendly, but doubted whether spying, with few exceptions, had much value. We shall never know whether the stolen secrets were put to good use. Andrei Amalrik was the most impressive of the dissidents he encountered — His book Will the Soviet Union survive until 1984? was only a few years wrong. He never managed to interview Solzhenitsyn who, when he was exiled to Switzerland, made the mistake of not holding a press conference and complained that the resulting mayhem was worse than the KGB. The other outstanding dissident, Sakharov, unlike Solzhenitsyn, was ‘shy and unpretentious’.

Miller is upbeat about Russia’s future in spite of the mafia and the terrible legacy of Communism. He is convinced that eventually Russia will be a normal country.

Merrie Cave Who Made God? Edgar Andrews, E P Books, 2009, £9.95.

Scientists are the shamans of our age to people who can’t do maths. The media celebrity scientists the public knows — Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking — are strident atheists. (This is unsurprising as, even in highly religious societies like America, scientists, especially the most brilliant, are largely irreligious.) Thus the lumpen-intelligentsia — journalists, lawyers, humanities academics and champagne socialists everywhere — have adopted the New Atheism under the vague supposition that it is ‘scientific’.

This makes the relatively few scientists who are orthodox Christians of great value to Christian apologetics. Professor Edgar Andrews, a distinguished University of London physicist, has produced a rebuttal to Dawkins and co, ‘Who Made God?’. He gives the usual arguments — where do atheists derive their morality? how did the first lifeform emerge from the primordial chemical soup? where did the universe come from? He gives popularised accounts of quantum mechanics, the ontological argument, genetics, information theory, the scientific method, the Hubble red-shift and much else. Finally, having stated his arguments for a God-given physical and moral order of the universe, Andrews jumps without further argument to an offer of the love of Jesus to those who will accept.

As little in this book could be described as original, I am judging the book on its presentation. And, in this respect, ‘Who Made God?’ is deficient. Andrews is ruder than Richard Dawkins to his intellectual opponents. He is verbose. Whole pages could be condensed into a single line. Andrews omits nothing, The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

of the internet ‘where one grazes on endless ready made meals and snacks for the mind.. resulting in mental malnutrition’ to spend a year reading all the books she had in her house she had either never read or not opened since she was a child.

As a young woman she lived in libraries just as today our children live with their heads in stuck in computers.

Reality is much to be preferred to the electronic miasma that cloaks youthful minds. In “A Corner of St James” she tells how in the stacks of the London Library an elderly gent dropped a book in front of her. ‘I bent down, picked up the book and handed it back ...... and found myself looking into the watery eyes of E M Forster. How to explain the impact of that moment.

How to stand and say nothing and smile when through my head ran the opening lines of Howard’s End, ‘One may as well begin with Helen’s letters.’ He (Forster) seemed slightly stopping and wholly unmemorable and I have remembered everything about him for nearly fifty years’. A treat.

however irrelevant to the point he wants to make — did you know that the 117-mile M25 motorway opened in 1986?

Erratum: On p. 148, Noether never used the name Amalie and the quotation from Einstein is not right.

Nicolas Stevenson Howard’s End is on the Landing Susan Hill, Profile Books, 2009. £12.99 A friend of mine was so in love with books he would buy second or third copies if he thought they had been so long on a bookseller’s shelves they ‘looked lonely’.

If, like him, you are so addicted to books, their feel, typeface, binding, the smell of their pages, or you have so many littering the house the divorce lawyers have been sighted, then ‘Susan Hill’s ‘Howard’s End is on the Landing’ is for you. Hill describes a lifelong passion for books, which she has read, written, edited, and lived among like a bee among clover.

Hill relates how she managed to throw off the chains

Myles Harris

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