The Lion Magazine, Winter 2016

the

L I O N

The Lion An Interview with Peter Hitchens

Henry Edwards-Xu Nintendo Switch

Will Surridge Your Donkey Club Pub Update

Emeka Forbes Kittens and the Arab Spring

wo r d s f r o m th e e di t or I

t approaches tautology to assert Orwell’s relevance to the present day. But relevant he is, and if it were possible to glean a singular principle from his work, it might be this: always look to the language. This year’s first edition of The Lion magazine implores likewise: look to the language. ‘Let the meaning choose the words, and not the other way about.’

Legitimate opinion is commonly a phobia. Interlocutors are censored or pathologised. War is peace, and religions of war are religions of peace. Freedom is slavery, and freedom is the Snoopers’ Charter. Ignorance is strength, and democracy is ignorance.

Anyone acquainted with Orwell’s 1984 will recall this tripartite formula. The Government’s new Prevent Strategy appears to have

accrued a few more tenets from the totalitarian handbook, in actually encouraging students to inform on their peers for extremist opinions. Pavlik Morozov, the thirteen-year-old boy who informed on his father and was praised as a Soviet martyr, would be proud.

Politics at all levels has become a word-game, destroying the finer distinctions and pushing for left or right or centre or fascist or phobic. Everyone is something— some word or camp—and assorted thus. I believe it is now incumbent on anyone who would call themselves a freethinker to shed themselves of the snare of identity politics. Let others define you.

Destroy bad ideas wherever, whenever, from whomever, and in whatever numbers you find them. Befriend the pen. Champion truth and justice—say just as much.

To get involved with the next issue of this magazine, email queries, articles and comments to oscaryuill@icloud.com or visit facebook.com/theheythroplion

Oscar Yuill Editor-in-Chief

Ben Mercer Managing Editor

Katt Johnson Format Editor

Dan Fair Editor-at-Large

CONTENTS

5 4 Black Lives Matter?

8 Peter Hitchens: the Interview 16 Ben Mercer’s Diary 18 Donkey Club Pub Guide 21 Tally-Ho, Tallow 22 Nintendo Switch 26 Kittens and the Arab Spring 30 Class Wars 34 Poetry

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black lives matter: why do us police kill so many (black) people?

Dan Fair

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n early July 2016, international news was made after eight people were killed in a series of related events over the course of three days. The first two were Alton Sterling and Philando Castile; their stories differ, but both were African-American men shot at close range by police officers in the US. The next five were police officers shot in Dallas, Texas at a demonstration protesting the killings of Sterling and Castile; they were shot

by Micah Xavier Johnson, who said that he “wanted to kill white people”; he was later killed by a remote controlled robot armed with explosives, completing the set of eight.

Violence against black denizens of the US has a long history that stretches back to the first arrival of West African slaves to Jamestown in 1619; since then, almost all forms of slavery have been abolished and the right to vote is guaranteed (voter ID laws notwithstanding) to all US citizens regardless of their race; despite this, hostility remains between African-Americans and the various ethnic groups

that make up the white majority, and racism (insofar as it is a social or psychological phenomenon) continues to exist. Various groups argue that this manifests itself in the killing of African-Americans by police, chief among them Black Lives Matter; while other factors are said to exist, the main causes according to these groups are the racism of white officers and the lack of accountability or repercussions in the policing system.

Indeed, in 2015, African-Americans accounted for 26.7% of those killed by police, despite representing only 12.2% of the US population according to the 2010 census.

0.0003% of white Americans were killed by the police last year, where-

as for blacks, that figure rises to 0.0008%; three in every million to eight in every million. (source: the Guardian’s The Counted database) It is certainly true, we can gather from these statistics, that African-Americans are more likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts, for whatever reason.

It seems intuitive, based on the general atmosphere of racial tension that has divided the US ever since the introduction of blacks to North America, to say that the apparent racial disparity in police killings is motivated, as mentioned previously, by racist cops; but to what extent is this true? It is conventional wisdom in 2016 that the police in the US are, categorical-

ly, racist; but there are reasons to doubt that conclusion. Herein, I will present an open and honest discussion on what causes can be attributed to the disproportionate killing of black people in the US, and what can be done to help solve the issues surrounding it.

The first problem we run into is in the department of establishing that there is a disparity between the races. So far we have seen that, certainly, the number of African-Americans killed by police is disproportionate to the population of blacks in the US, but this is a naive approach to the issue: as it stands, not all races commit criminal acts equally. By this, I mean that among the African-American

demographic, a larger amount of crime takes place as a proportion of the whole. For example, in 2015, black people in the US were arrested in connection to: 51.1% of murders and nonnegligent manslaughters; 28.2% of rapes; 53.5% of robberies; 32.1% of aggravated assaults; 29.5% of burglaries; 27.4% of thefts; and the list goes on, with only DUIs, liquor law violations, and drunkenness being proportionate to the 12.2% figure from earlier. As a proportion of all arrests (which is where the killings happen, either at the time of arrest or while in custody), black people account for 26.6% — right in line with the proportion of those killed by police who

are black. (source: FBI, Crime in the United States 2015, Table 43A) If 26.6% of the time, it is black people who are linked to criminal activity; and if 26.7% of the time, it is black people who are killed by police at the scene of an arrest; then, how does extrajudicial killing disproportionately affect African-Americans? The answer is that it doesn’t: insofar as we are talking only about extrajudicial killing by the police, race seems not to be a factor in who they choose to kill — criminal activity seems to be the factor, and race a factor in determining criminal activity; in other words, there is a reason why the black percentage of people killed by police is disproportionate to the percentage of the US population that is black, but it has no immediate cause in race — racism is not a factor as far as the statistics indicate.

Now, there is of course a problem with what I’m saying: correlation does not imply causation. In other words, 26.6% and 26.7% are very conveniently close numbers, but just because they trend together doesn’t mean that one causes the other: it could be that both statistics are true, but 26.7% of US police officers hold anti-black views, and that is why 26.7% of people shot by police are black; in this hypothetical, there is a third factor at play that might better explain the reason for the 26.7% statistic.

In reality, however, no such third factor can be found to exist, and until it does, Ockham’s Razor stipulates that we should go with the theory that explains the most using the least: in that case, it is unnecessary to posit the existence of a causative link between a racist police force and the killing of black people when the rate at which blacks are linked to crime already answer the question sufficiently; if a causative link ever is found between racism in the US police force and the killing of blacks, then it will, of course, become necessary to accept such a link as existent.

The correlation/causation problem 5

is, in actuality, merely epistemic; provided that we have open minds and we are allowing ourselves to be proved wrong, we can state

Five people is a statistically insignificant number: we can imagine that in 2015, there just happened to be five more black people whose killing was justified at the time of their arrest than there would have been had the proportion to white killings been retained; in other words, we can probably just chalk this up to chance. So far there is no reason to be concerned that racism may be causing police to unfairly target African-Americans in killings, whether generally or specifically in the cases of unarmed black people; it seems not to be a racial issue.

But the number of people killed by police in the US is still astronomically high: while 1146 people per annum doesn’t seem like a lot in a country of nearly 320 million, consider that in the last century, UK police killed only 52 people in total. Even without any racial disparities with which to contend, it is still worthwhile trying to reduce the number of people who

“Even without any racial disparities with which to contend, it is still worthwhile trying to reduce the number of people killed by the police.”

with hesitant pragmatic confidence that the statistic for arrests related to race explains the statistic for police killings related to race.

Despite this, there is a further worry: explaining away the supposed racial cause for police killings does not explain the disproportionate number of unarmed African-Americans who are killed by police. As a proportion of those killed by police in their respective racial categories, unarmed white people account for 17.9%, while unarmed black people account for 25.8%. That 7% disparity between the two racial categories is equal to about five lives.

are killed by the police. Of course, many killings are legitimate and lawful; and all that needs be established is that it was reasonable for an officer to believe that they or the public were in immediate danger, so even the killing of unarmed suspects can be justified in many cases if there was reason to believe that they were armed and dangerous. But there are still two things that US officials could do.

The first is to do something about the guns: there are more firearms (owned privately, not by law enforcement or military groups) in the US than there are denizens of the US — 112.6 guns per 100 people. It is, therefore, not unreasonable to believe that literally anyone could have not only the potential to do harm to you (anyone could do harm to you, after all), but that they do in fact possess the immediately actionable capacity to fire projectiles into your body; as a result, any quick movements during a roadside stop could reasonably be interpreted as a move to grab a handgun. I’m not saying that this completely exonerates all killings carried out by the police; but that it

is not entirely unreasonable to assume in a country with the culture and per capita gun ownership of the US that handguns are omnipresent, especially as a police officer.

Reducing the number of handguns in the US would reduce the risk that serving as a police officer entails, and thereby remove at least some of the perceived need for officers to be on high alert constantly; but it would not remove all of the perceived need for such a disposition, which brings us to number two.

The second thing that could be done by US officials is mandating that there be no officers carrying firearms that are not specifically trained in its use and, more importantly, deescalation. One of the primary properties of UK police is its insistence on not equipping your average PC with a handgun: outside London and other metropolitan areas, and even within residential sectors of our metropolitan areas, police do not carry firearms; you will be very hard-pressed to see a firearms officer in the UK if you do not live in London or watch the news regularly. In addition to this, our officers are trained to ex-

plore every alternative first before resorting to firearms: if a suspect is not placing the public or officers in immediate danger, other methods of subduing him or her can be used until such a time as lethal force b e co me s necessary; this is no doubt st rengt hened by the lack of guns, particularly in metropolitan areas. If US police were better trained in deescalation and fewer were equipped with firearms in the first place, the number of shootings would be reduced.

But both of these initiatives have their issues: besides deescalation training, the plans are unworkable.

Where is it safe in the US to have police officers unarmed?; and is it even possible for the US to transition to a UK-style firearms ban considering its culture, its legisla-

tion, and the present proliferation of firearms within its borders? Furthermore, people would probably not be willing to give up their firearms until the police’s firearms use was restricted, but the police would not be safe without firearms until the public had given a significant proportion of their firearms up.

It’s a classic Catch-22. Admittedly, a lot can still be done to stop the ongoing militarisation of police forces in the US, but that does nothing to change the underlying problems detailed in this paragraph.

In conclusion, the statistics do present a disparity between the Afric a n - A me r i can population and the p ro p o r tio n of blacks of those killed by law enfo r c e m e n t , but the disparity disappears when compared with the proportion of blacks arrested in connection to criminal activity. Other measures could be taken to reduce the number of people killed by law enforcement, but the US seems to have backed itself into a corner regarding solutions to the present problem. I can’t solve everything.

“our officers are trained to explore every alternative first before resorting to firearms”

7

=

An Interview with Peter Hitchens

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Ben Mercer & Oscar Yuill This is an abridged interview. For the full version visit facebook.com/theheythroplion

“My main purpose in life is to write the obituary of my country.”

America LION: I suppose the ubiquity of American culture means there’s really only one place to start. Am I right in thinking you were in America in 1992?

PH: I was there briefly in ‘92. I’d come out of the Soviet Union across the Bering Straight and in to Alaska to do the last few days of the Clinton-George Bush senior election. I had the rather boring job of following George Bush around Louisiana. I lived in the US from 1993 to 1995, the ‘middle-Clinton’ era, as it were.

LION: I find the parallels between these elections quite interesting. Back then, you had a sort of dishonest creep in Clinton, a bovine Pensioner in Bush and a brief challenge from Ross Perot, businessman–– PH: I’d be careful about either of those things. Clinton was a star, and remains a clever person with an enormous gift of making himself agreeable to people.

I once got my way in to the White House. I shouldn’t have been there—I think there was an inquiry after-

wards about how I’d got in—and I asked Bill Clinton an awkward question about Northern Ireland.

His response wasn’t hostility or panic or rage, but he reached out and bathed me in this extraordinary charm, and I could feel it working on me. He’s a remarkable person, not badly educated either. So don’t speak too contemptuously of these people. Sometimes actions people commit are deserving of contempt, but (I regret the times I’ve done this in the past) it lowers the general tone of life if we speak of people like that.

George Bush senior had flown aircraft off carriers in war-time, which none of us in this room would be capable of doing. It’s a considerable act of courage just to get in and fly them, let alone take them into combat.

So again, let’s not be too disparaging of these people.

LION: So what’s the point of demarcation? Ross Perot was anti-immigration, anti-NAFTA, warned about global free trade as well as the national debt when it was at a comparatively low level. He fell out of the race, partly because people discovered he had some peculiar views about black people, Jews and the CIA. However, we now have a President-elect who’s beaten a Clinton on a very similar platform.

“had I been in the US I would have advocated organised mass abstention because neither candidate seemed fitted for the task” Nigel Luckhurst

PH: Ross Perot never had the cunning of Donald Trump, which is considerable. People think intelligence and education are valuable in politics, and up to a point they are. But when power is at issue, what you really have to have is the courage, for instance, of Princess Diana—an immense, vixen-like cunning in her case. She rang rings round the politicians she had anything to do with. They were often much cleverer than she was, but she had this instinct—which I think Donald Trump has as well—of cunning. It’s not a bad quality—we all wish we had it—but curiously it tends not to go with high levels of education.

LION: Where do you see this going?

PH: Who knows? It’s Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s old question, always relevant in politics: Who-whom?

Who will be telling you what to do? Will he be advising his advisers or will his advisers be advising him? It wouldn’t at all surprise me if he turned out to be the dominant one in the relationship, in which case they won’t be that important, and also he won’t hire people who are capable of goading him to a different path.

LION: You spent some time in Russia, as you describe in The Rage Against God. What do think the implications of Trump’s victory are for relations with Russia?

PH: I didn’t like either of the two main candidates, and had I been in the US I would have advocated organised mass abstention because neither candidate seemed

fitted for the task. But what put me off Hillary most of all is her almost passionate desire to wage war, particularly in the middle-East. The middle-East war nowadays brings you into conflict with Russia since the US—I think in concert with Saudi Arabia— sought to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Russia had decided it will oppose this, and this has been the core of nearly all the disagreements between the West and Russia. The Ukraine episode was engineered by the West as punishment for Russia having intervened in Syria. Syria is the core of it. I believe had Hillary been elected, even if Assad, with Russian help, had retaken Eastern Aleppo between now and Christmas—which was possible—and even if it was clear from that that Assad was [stable], she would have continued the war until the whole of Syria was dust and everyone in Syria was a refugee.

What Trump’s level of understanding of foreign policy is, and how much he cares ... I don’t know. As with so many of his positions, you don’t know if he means it or he thought it would be useful to him. I discount all this rubbish about him being an ally of Putin or the Kremlin having helped him win the election. It’s fantasy. If such a thing has happened, it needs to be established with proof before people treat it as fact. With so many things to do with Russia these days, people treat things as fact which are not. You can say almost anything about Russia now. It’s attained least-favoured nation status.

9

LION: Analogous to Brexit, do you think Trump’s popularity is due to genuine grievances people might have, or do you think it’s purely a symptom of ignorance, bigotry, hatred? A mixture of the two?

PH: There are genuine grievances. It doesn’t mean the people who hold them may not be bigots. There are bigots in UKIP, bigots in the Labour Party, the Conservative Party. It doesn’t invalidate their policies as such. My view for a long time has been that the American establishment, like ours, has been ignoring the concerns of the mass of the people—has been regarding sensible and civilised conservatives as if they were knuckle-brushing fascists, treating them as such and excluding them from the debate. And now they’ve got this. I can point to things I’ve said and written over the last thirty years warning against it. If you’d listened to people like me you wouldn’t have Trump.

One of the most dispiriting things that’s happened to me in the last few weeks is a civilised old gentleman in Louisiana—he’s extremely well-read and educated, we have lots of chats—wrote to me saying he was voting for Trump. I thought, If this kind of person is voting for this yahoo, then something very important has snapped. If you poke a stick through the bars and into the beast for long enough, it will eventually turn on you, and that’s what’s happened. One of my few pleasures in life is saying ‘I told you so.’ Well, I told you so.

The EU LION: Is there any future now for what’s been called ‘third-way’ politics, so entrenched in the European Union?

PH: It was an invention to make something radical look modest and un-threatening. The program of the Blair-led Labour Party in 1997 was fundamentally a Euro-Communist, Gramschian program of extreme radicalism which Blair’s former aid, Peter Hyman, said last year in an Observer article was much more radical than anything Jeremy Corbyn is up to. It was radical in a way most people who were never Marxists (and therefore don’t understand how revolutionaries think) never understood. They said that if you leave certain things alone, and if your party’s headed by a well-spoken public schoolboy, then everything will be alright. ‘Education, education, education’, ‘tough on crime’––it was manipulative populism: claim to support things the people want—people for whom you have total contempt—while getting on with your real program, a radical transformation of society, economically, culturally and politically. They reformed the constitution out of almost all recognition, they destroyed the old housing laws, they wrecked what was left of civil service neutrality.

LION: You said you used to subscribe to the Thatcher-Reagan ideas of the share-owning economy–– PH: I was much more interested in her attitude towards the Cold War. I swallowed, with some misgivings, the share-owning economy stuff, but then found it to be completely without foundation. My main reason for being sympathetic with Thatcher and Reagan was that they took the right side to the cold war. But as it happens they never really understood what they were up against—Communism—and it was partly as a result of that that we made such a mess of post-immigration Russia. Instead of trying to re-moralise the place with the rule of law, we sent lots of businessmen and economists, with the result that democracy in Russia is now a swear word. There are actually people who’ll say, not ‘demoktratiya’, but ‘dermokratiya’, which means, politely translated, the ‘rule of excrement’. That’s what an awful lot of Russians think of the Yeltsin period.

LION: How should Thatcher and Reagan have seen the conflict?

PH: They should have understood these places had been the victim of an immoral, atheistic dictatorship which had destroyed trust and law and done terrible damage to people’s hearts and minds and economies.

They should have been much gentler than they were.

They certainly shouldn’t have unleashed free-market economists. It’s not just Russia. The Czech Republic is more or less OK because Germany has flooded it with migrants, but Poland is going through similar difficulties. There’s a lot of resentment about those early years of freedom. Poland is tending very much towards a sort of Trumpian politics, a reaction against the early over-liberalisation—of ceasing to be communist and returning to conservative Catholicism—and then it was doused and soused in political correctness, catastrophic for a country which until then been one of the most Christian countries in the world. In Hungary there is something comparable, but Poland could have gone very differently.

LION: You mentioned the recent High Court decision regarding Brexit as presenting a constitutional crisis.

PH: I don’t use the term ‘Brexit’.

LION: A silly portmanteau?

PH : An unpleasant laxative breakfast cereal. That’s a joke, which I invented, which has subsequently been copied. I don’t use the term.

LION: In which case, ‘our decision to leave the EU’:

You’ve said the most likely scenario is a half-in, halfout result. Access to the Single Market, but nothing much is going to change as regards immigration, and the other practical effects of membership. Is there an alternative which ends the relationship between Single Market access and free movement of people?

PH: Why should there be? What did it say on the ballot paper? It said we leave the European Union.

We leave the European Union and then we negotiate a new relationship with it, which is probably very similar to the one you had before. As long as you’ve left the European Union, the ballot has been satisfied. What more do you want? If you want to proceed by referendum then you’re just going to have to get used to the fact that that’s what will happen to you.

The Death Penalty LION: This college is a few doors down from John Stuart Mill’s old house. Mill, of course, offered one of the best defences of the death penalty. Have you ever encountered a good argument against it?

PH: Indeed he did. I quote it in my A Brief History of Crime. No, and it’s a paradox. Despite what people believe, most of the arguments against the death penalty are emotive and irrational whereas the arguments in favour of it are rational. That said, I wouldn’t want the death penalty to be restored given the current state of our justice system. The jury system has been shot to pieces and I don’t think that the presumption of innocence survives, realistically. So I argue for the death penalty simply from the basis that it’s necessary, sometimes, to argue for things because the arguments in favour of them are good and true, and for that reason only. That’s mainly why I engage in the discussion. And I’m sick and tired of people putting forward useless, pathetic, fact-free, emotive arguments and getting away with it.

WW2, and Israel LION: What’s the premise of your upcoming book on WW2?

PH: That it’s become a sort of religion of Churchill-worship, and a belief which has become something of a substitute for Christianity; that this country is fundamentally good, and that it’s goodness largely consists of having saved the Jews from the Nazis. This involves, in some way, things like Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, and then moves on to VE Day without any other meaningful consideration. And it just bears almost

no relation to the facts at all. We didn’t save the Jews.

We didn’t fight the war for that reason, either.

LION: It’s true, isn’t it, that we were ourselves rather contemptuous of the Jews?

PH: That’s not really the point. Poland, the country for which we went to war, was deeply anti-Semitic at the time. We make ourselves out to have been something great, when in fact it was at a conference in Bermuda, during the war, and after incontrovertible word of the mass-murder of European Jews had got out, that Britain and America together decided to do nothing about it. So it wasn’t all to save the Jews; that any Jews were saved was an accidental by-product rather than the result of any intention. Of course Churchill was right not to negotiate with Hitler in 1940, but why was the second biggest military power in the world prostrate at the feet of Hitler in 1940 in the first place?

The answer has to be: through considerable diplomatic incompetence. Why else did we allow Poland to dictate the date and conditions of the outbreak of war? How was it that we relied on France, which we knew pretty well to be weak and demoralized, as our principal ally? Why did we start a war, and actually declare a war, against quite a well-armed central European power when we did not have a European army? We did not have a continental army; at the time of the outbreak of the war the British army was exercising on Salisbury Plain with broomsticks and it was tiny.

So how did we do that? And then, once we got into the war, we very rapidly became bankrupt.

Almost everything everyone thinks about the second world war is fundamentally untrue. For instance, between June 1940 and 1944 the British Army was never in direct contact with the main body of the enemy. So in a six year war we spent four years not in contact with the main force of the enemy. It’s remarkable if we were what we imagine ourselves to have been. And the problem with this is, and the reason why I’ve turned my ire on it, is because we have, so many times, had the supposed goodness of the second world war advanced as a reason to go to war in Iraq or Libya, or wherever it is.

It’s always the late-summer of 1938, your opponent is always Hitler, the person who counsels against war is always Neville Chamberlain and an appeaser; this is the permanent formula of all foreign policy and 11

it’s very rarely true. In fact, the only instance in the modern world of appeasement is the ceaseless pressure on Israel––largely from the United States––to give up territory in return for pieces of paper. That is the principal example of appeasement and that’s popular.

We’re all in favour of that. Except me.

LION: Then what would you summarise as your view on Israel? Anti-Semitism, particularly on university

an attempt at a solution. There is no solution. The main thing should be to increase the economic prosperity of the Arabs living in the area, and not seek for a political solution. I have an acquaintance, a rather good journalist who’s now an Israeli, and the last time I was there we were driving up to Ramallah, which is quite a complicated journey because of all the barriers which are now there. But he knew the way to get around it, and we got to Ramallah. And he said, ‘It’s so difficult these days. How I long for the good old days before we had peace!’

Before all this started, it would have been easy. When I first went to the region, people living in the West Bank would go and work in Israel, in secure jobs, and bring back good incomes. You could drink cold beers on the sea-front in Gaza.

In fact, people in Israel would go to Gaza for the night-life!

Before the intifada got going, everything was immensely more civilized for everybody.

And Arabs and Israelis got on pretty well; they aren’t that dissimilar. And then this whole business of trying to get a solution. It’s been hellon-wheels ever since. And the people who go on and on about it generally have absolutely no concern for the individual lives of the people living there, which is my principal concern.

campuses, seems rife. And you certainly see it in student unions.

PH: Of course it is. But this is largely because people in mainstream politics and journalism don’t understand the issue, and they don’t stand up for what needs to be stood up for, and––because there is still an awful lot of Judo-phobia abroad––people find an easy way of expressing it in nastiness toward Israel. People simply don’t know anything about the issue. Most of them think that there was a country called Palestine, which Israel seized and stole from the Arabs. They have no idea of the origins of the dispute, or of how it came about. And so they’re clueless about what could be done.

My fundamental argument is that there shouldn’t be

The United Arab Emirates has spent a lot of money in the Gaza strip building good, new apartment blocks. And if everybody did that––the whole Arab world, which is very rich–– Gaza could be like Hong Kong. I’ve had very good beef stroganoff in Gaza; you can’t get any alcohol but you can have very good café lattés at beach-front cafés; it’s got shopping malls; it’s not how it’s portrayed, though it undoubtedly has its difficulties and many of them stem from the fact that it’s run

by Hamas. And a lot of people are living in conditions they ought not to be living in because some people believe that, politically, it’s a bad idea for them to be content. So they’re kept in discontent and in slums for no other reason than politics. The UAE, as I say, to its great credit, is trying to do something about it.

But this is an example of how people insist on having ideal, utopian, political solutions instead of looking to

the way people live and ameliorating it. Israel’s there; it’s not going away without a very, very, very hard fight, in which a lot of people would die and many more would be dispossessed and sent into refugee camps. So why not just accept that it’s there and make people’s lives as good as you possibly can? But that is not the objective of global diplomacy, nor is it the majority view of people who talk about it.

Denouement LION: I fear we must have taken up too much of your time. But one quick question: any favourite poets?

PH: Favourite poets? Different kinds of poetry suit different people at different times. Housman is very appealing because he’s so easy to remember.

LION: The first poems I ever learnt by rote were Housman’s.

PH: Housman has this wonderful, very easily parodied style, which a man called Hugh Kingsmill did parody, and so well that Housman wrote to him and said ‘Congratulations, this is really good!’ ‘Bacon’s not the only thing / That’s cured by hanging on a string,’ and so on.

And one which begins: ‘What?

Still alive at twenty-two / A fine, upstanding chap like you…’ which ends, ‘Slit your throat’ or ‘Slit your girls and swing for it.’

But they’re brilliantly parodied because he had that style. But I wish I could recite Gray’s elegy from beginning to end. And there are huge areas of poetry I’ve never really explored; Goldsmith or Cooper, and Tennyson can be fantastic but is an unexplored country for me.

Larkin is terrific because he’s such a good religious poet, without intending to be. The Trees and Arundel Tomb and Churchgoing are all profoundly religious poems precisely because he doesn’t want them to be, because he’s fighting against it. You change a couple of lines: ‘That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die…’ If you just change ‘Pretend’ to ‘Proclaim’ then you alter the whole thing.

And ‘The trees are coming into leaf / Like something almost being said…’ Well, what’s with this ‘almost’? He also puts ‘Almost’ in ‘Our almost-instinct almost true / What will survive of us is love.’ He uses ‘Almost’

when he means ‘this is actually what I think.’ But he doesn’t dare say it. But favourites? I don’t know.

There have been moments when I’ve been reduced to jelly by Keats, but I’m probably too old for that now.

LION: He does seem to be the young romantic’s poet.

Kingsley Amis described growing out of him.

PH: Very much, yeah. But he also said that there was something wrong with someone who’d never thought that Keats’s poetry was any good. And then Byron can be quite appealing because he’s so rude.

LION: Having given up politics, or at least an active engagement with it, what now are your principle drives, goals, ambitions, interests?

PH: Why on earth should I have drives, goals or ambitions? My main purpose in life is to write the obituary of my country.

LION: An update to your book The Abolition of Britain?

PH: I did propose, to my publishers, that they combine all of my books into one great, whopping, Dominic Sandbrook-style breezeblock called The Obituary of Britain. But they were profoundly uninterested so I don’t think that’s going to happen. So I’ve got another book planned which will examine, caustically, the myth of the second world war. And after that, who knows? I could apply for a bus pass now, for goodness’ sake.

13

DIARY Ben Mercer

R

ight, Right and Right again.

Might I be afforded a few words of self-congratulation?

What we are witnessing now is a lot of faffing about by the people who are handsomely paid to tell us what to think. We voted leave? Trump won? UKIP’s a shambles? Theresa May is Prime Minister? How on earth did all this happen? Nobody saw this coming.

Well, let’s leave the talking heads to speak for themselves. For one or two people did see this coming. And not in any vague pseudo-prophetic way, either; some of us predicted each and every one of the events listed above.

Your not-so-humble servant – who has never yet been paid a penny for his opinion - is one of the few who has earned the right to say “I told you so.”

Glass-bottomed Boats.

I have this week taken possession of a narrowboat.

After much hassle and preparation, I moved aboard on Monday night, as the boat lay at rest in Watford, and cast off for London on Tuesday.

The canals and inland waterways of Britain are, for the most part, utterly beautiful. Narrowboat life operates by different laws than the rest of the world, not least that of time, which moves at a mere fraction of the speed of modernity. And so, I had plenty of time to admire the scenery, and more time than usual to collect my thoughts. The four day journey down winding waters was part soporific, part melancholy, part enlivening and enriching.

On the second day, I sailed past a huge skeletal wreck of an old factory or warehouse. There was a time, shortly before the railways caused time to gain speed and velocity, when canals were seen as the best means of moving cargo and supplies for trade and industry.

To this day, our few functioning factories tend to lie close to or alongside the waterways for precisely this

reason. But many, many more, like the ruins I passed, which were so old that they had grown into nature, lie empty, silent, ruined and abandoned.

There is a peculiar pathos to sights like that. Our industrial past, hidden amongst the trees and by seldom travelled paths, lingers on, protruding in places like the ancient scaffolding of England.

I can quite understand this apparent desire, now making itself known and felt around the world, to return to bygone days that time has painted rosy. Weren’t things better, back then? People had stable, secure jobs; people knew when and from where the next paycheck was due. There was a sense of safety and assuredness in the national character, born of the sure and certain knowledge of our long-established ways.

As I say, I see the appeal. But take that creaking carcass I passed, on a stretch of canal so free from human activity that the birdsong was clear, and the surround bore all the colours of autumn; reds and golds and rich bronzes, the green waters and the iron sky. Bring that factory back to life, and the air becomes thick with smoke, the trees wither and die or else are cut away, the birds are driven out, the waters become dull, thick and lifeless.

No, the past is the past and that is that. A.E. Housman was write all along: “That is the land of lost content / I see it shining plain / Those happy highways where I went / And cannot come again.

Can I Borja with Talk of Italy?

I have been to Italy twice, travelling once eastward across the plains of Lombardy, toward Vicenza and Venice, and once northward, rounding the eternally blue Lake Como before heading on toward Chiavenna, driving carefully up the alpine trails before the commune of Prata Camportaccio to the small and ancient hamlets still nestled in or perched upon the mountains. On this latter occasion I stayed in one of the few re-made houses in the otherwise abandoned and relic-like Lottano.

What strikes me now is how very different each place was from the other. Milan is large, spacious, hot and dry and flat. Much of the facade and the interior design of Milan Centrale railway station was intended by Mussolini to represent Italy’s resurgence and the power his fascist party would restore to the venerable old country. Its large stone eagles and high steel canopies certainly have an effect, but, much like the rest of the city, it resonates to the presence of history – the old kingdom of gold – now lost to iron and rust.

By contrast, Lottano, and the many hamlets and villages like it, is a world removed both in time and by geography. Even the language is different; and it varies between the villages, for these remote outposts maintained their very local dialects in spite of Mussolini’s attempts to wipe them out. Milan was a reminder that, for a time, many people did genuinely believe that Il Duce ha Sempre Ragione. The people of the Alps, closer to Switzerland than to any Italian city, never quite bought into the myth.

Chiavenna is the local town, and is one of those places no painting or postcard could do justice. And, unlike Milan, it is an example of living history, not tired by the pursuit of former glories but content to live in and amongst them. It is in many respects the epitome of a conservative ethos which seeks to preserve and celebrate rather than to grow and renew.

These vast and fundamental differences will be on display on December 4th, as the increasingly desperate Matteo Renzi puts his proposed constitutional reforms to the people in a national referendum. And the referendum question is quite remarkably opaque, which strikes me as a deliberate and stupid attempt to engineer the result.

and the power of the Senate, and return powers from regional to central government control. This would make it easier for a national party to win a working parliamentary majority at the national level, allowing for the kind of coherent government currently prohibited by a system which all but ensures non-rule by self-contradicting and inefficient coalitions.

The problem, though, is that the impact of constitutional reforms is seldom limited in its scope to the stated intent, and confusion reigns because few people understand exactly what powers will be moved and into whose hands. Guiseppe Grillo, erstwhile comedian and founder of the absurd and absurdly popular Five Star movement, is partly right when he describes the referendum question as ‘incomprehensible.’

One cannot help but think of Machiavelli’s The Prince when considering this issue. Machiavelli, unfairly vilified by those who claim to know him despite not having read or being unable to read his works, was almost certainly a free republican, whose advice to Cesare Borgia on matters of state and of ruling states would, if followed, have had the effect of divesting the central authority of much of its power and influence. Whilst uniting Italy was his ostensible motive, Machiavelli understood all too well that this was a nation of nations, and a central authority with long arms and powerful hands, bent on ruling all as if they were of equal unimportance, was alien to the character of the Italian

The question, that will head every ballot in every district and region of Italy, is: “Do you approve the text of the Constitutional Law concerning ‘dispositions for the overcoming of equal bicameralism, the reduction of the number of parliamentarians, the containment of the running costs of the institutions, the suppression of the National Economic and Labour Council and the review of Title V of Part II of the constitution’ as approved by Parliament and published in Gazzetta ufficiale n.88 on 15 April 2016?”

Who but an unelected technocrat – and it is worth remembering that Prime Minister Renzi is both unelected and a technocrat – would consider this a sensible question to put?

The ostensible desire is quite easy to comprehend: the proposed reforms would reduce both the size

states.

17

The Prince Under the King The Prince of Wales, Kensington All Heythrop students know, I hope, the Prince of Wales on Church Street.

A beacon of a pub, owned by the reliably okay Taylor Walker chain, but somehow above the rest. It was dimly lit, the toilets were smallish and fairly dirty, the bar was plentiful and reasonably priced (for Kensington), and staffed in a friendly manner. It was a singularly excellent drink hole.

And then Taylor Walker was bought out by Greene King; a company which aspires to own clubs with badly spelled names, serving only off IPA. I never saw so much 1730 before Taylor Walker was bought out.

I had the misfortune to sit in the Prince the week following its refurbishment by Greene King. It was agony. It started gently; I was served by a member of staff I didn’t know. Unnerving, but also unthreatening. Anyway, she seemed friendly enough. Chatting away, then I’d paid, and wanted to ask why my favourite pub had changed. She blanked me, moving on to the only other punter at the bar. I sat down at what had been my second favourite table, now a hard wooden bench with a glorified drink holder. The leather armchairs and the bookshelf-like wallpaper were gone.

Not all the armchairs though; my favourite table was intact, or nearly.

It was occupied by trendy Australians.

They were moaning about the “bloody English barmen” not knowing their odd little two-ingredient cocktails by name. “So it’s not all bad” I thought to myself; I know I’d never heard of it.

Then I went to the loo and was proved wrong. It had never been big, but now there wasn’t enough room for me to stand between the urinal and the opposite wall. It was spotless; no it was sterile, and utterly soulless. The gods agree with me, the next time I was in the Prince its ceiling had collapsed on half the room.

The Donkey’s Guide to Boozers Will Surridge

The Victoria (Fuller’s) Paddington 9/10 Bad quiz, beautiful building, excellent beer keeping, stately toilets.

The Hammersmith Ram 8/10 Trendy, good beer but repeated their own and three taps were off. Very smart interior.

The Betsy Trotwood Farringdon 6/10 Weird. Showing indie films upstairs. The beers were largely off, but the ones they had were well worth drinking. Small and intimate but the punters were good natured. Somewhat bizarrely, they had a large indoor shrubbery.

Ye Olde Cheddar Cheese, Fleet Street 10/10 I cannot emphasise enough how necessary it is to visit this pub.

Go to Fleet Street. Sam Smiths is only £3 a pint, and it’s delicious. Let alone the wonderful, wonderful pub!

Tally-ho, Tallow Oscar Yuill

Tallow—animal fat—has been found in Britain’s newly-circulating £5 notes. Among the many articles succeeding this discovery is the statistic that only half a cow is needed to produce enough tallow for the 369 million notes in total circulation.

Brutes. If her reasoning is valid, he argued, then the same logic should be extended to include animals.

Professor Taylor might inadvertently have done us vegetarians a favour. Before the publication of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation in 1975, there was barely a campus or journal in the world concerning itself with the issue.

Now barely a single syllabus excludes it. Even philosopher of mind Colin McGinn, with whom some of you are familiar, has said in a review of Singer’s book that:

to a concern for the suffering of animals, for ‘in suffering,’ said Bentham, ‘the animals are our equals.’ Half a cow per 369 million notes is half a cow too many.

Those of you who dismiss our indignation over the banknote should therefore understand the industry This is apparently evidence that you are dismissing with it. It is vegans, Hindus and anyone else an industry responsible for more with a concern for animals are Co2 emissions than every plane, spoiled, fanatical idealists. Why, train and car combined; untold it is asked, are we making a fuss poverty in third-world countries, over rendered banknotes when as precious grain is used to fatten the last hospital in Aleppo was livestock for the disease-inducing just destroyed, thousands of ‘Standard Western Diet’; children are starving to death and, most importantly, becoming a vegetarian is only the most minaround the world and Donald more suffering, torture, imal ethical response to the magnitude of the J. Trump is President-elect? pain and misery than you evil. What is needed is a complete revolution in can possibly imagine. the way we deal with other species. Do not exThis is to miss the point with pect, then, to find me in any way ‘balanced’ on exquisite fatuity. It is another If it is insufferable to take the question: this is not really an issue on which way of saying a concern for a moral stance on issues there are two sides. It’s a won argument, as far animals rules out a concern of this magnitude, so be as I’m concerned––in principle if not in practice. for one’s fellow humans. I it. Henceforth, however, have yet to encounter this rule defenders of tallow should of logic. When Mary Wollstone- This moral consistency is what admit they are logically committed craft published her Vindication of separates vegans with those who to a defense of the industry prothe Rights of Women in 1792, the hate them. Vegans accept what ducing it. I consider that a much Cambridge philosopher Thomas many of us likely repress. Name- more undesirable stance than the Taylor titled his satirical rebut- ly that a concern for the suffer- vegan proposition of minimizing tal a Vindication of the Rights of ing of humans must translate the suffering of sentient beings.

“

”

21

Switch: the Telos of Nintendo Design Henry Edwards-Xu

T

he newest console offering from Nintendo was unveiled for the first time on the 20th of October 2016 at 3pm. Following months of speculation on the various patents and leaks about the mysterious “Nintendo NX”, it was revealed that they were in actuality suspiciously accurate. The Nintendo Switch is, as foretold in numerous leaks, a hybrid console with both handheld and home characteristics. And the decision to design such a console is one that not only plays perfectly to the strengths of the Japanese video game company, but also one that serves as the idealised product of what Nintendo have been attempting to design ever since the unveiling of the 3DS, in 2011.

Firstly, what exactly is the Nintendo Switch? In its default state, it appears more or less like any other console. A small rectangular black box that sits next to the TV, and outputs video to the TV. But the controller for the system can split apart and attach to the console itself, revealing it to actually be a tablet-like screen that can be taken outside and playing the full console experience. It’s a somewhat diffi-

cult concept to explain in words, hence why I recommend you check out Nintendo’s own reveal video (which has jumped up to 11 million views at the time of writing, making it the most viewed video on Nintendo’s channel.)

The reveal itself already demonstrates that Nintendo is learning from the shortcomings of the Wii U. An immersive gaming session with the new Legend of Zelda game is interrupted by the demands of a barking dog. Suddenly, the screen cuts to a red and white logo accompanied by a “click” noise, and right there, plain for all to see, is “Nintendo Switch”. The music literally “switches” immediately from the Ghibli inspired mellow soundtrack of the video game to a funky guitar rift egged on by a persistent percussion. The click and logo is repeated several times throughout the video, no doubt marking where the TV ad will be cut but also, with such an impressionable first glance at the name of this anticipated console, the name and logo is burned into the memory. Then, the main function of the console is shown off, namely how the main unit is detachable into a tablet with physical buttons.

Compare this with the confusing name that is the ‘Wii U’. Going back to the first Wii U trailer, the first clear shot we get of the console is actually the GamePad alongside the older Wiimote. Their first mistake was carrying on with the ‘Wii name’. Given the Wii’s track record with ridiculous peripherals such as the Mario K a r t ste ering whe el and the W i i Sports tennis racket and the multitude of different controllers for it (the Wiimote, the GameCube controller, the Classic Controller, the Classic Controller Pro, the Nunchuck, etc. etc.), Nintendo’s direct

successor to the Wii appeared to be nothing more than yet another gimmick. The Wii U forever stood inside the shadow of the Wii, selling only 13 million units in its lifetime compared to the runaway success of the Wii which sold 67 million units in the same time frame. Although the constant “Switch” of the newest reveal video may seem forceful and overt, it’s still le a g ue s more effe c t ive than the Wii U reveal video’s vague reference to the “new controller” which adds further adding to the ambiguity about whether the Wii U is a new console or simply an alternative controller.

But more than merely making up

“what the Wii U should have been in the first place”

23

for the abysmal marketing push behind the Wii U, the Nintendo Switch has also been described by many as what the Wii U should have been in the first place. Certainly there are similarities. Both feature a tablet capable of displaying graphics that would typically be greater than expected of such a device. But the Switch’s advantages lies in its enhanced portability.

The video shows the tablet controller being taken on walks outside and even on airplanes, without any other console needed to be nearby.

The Wii U’s gamepad couldn’t even be taken to the next room that the main console was stationed in.

Consider the landscape of the mobile gaming market after the Nintendo Wii. Amongst the rise of gaming on actual smartphones, the iPad also came out, Steve Jobs’ final family of products to be released, inspiring more serious attempts to create tablets worthy of gaming on. Razer gave us their offering of the Razer Edge in 2013, Microsoft released the Surface Pro in the same year, and Nvidia created the Nvidia Shield two years later. But before any of those, it was clear to Nintendo that the casual gaming crowd that had made the Nintendo Wii and DS a success were moving over to the App store. This prompted Nintendo to immediately come up with a response to the product, something that imitates the tablet in one sense but also subverts it into something original. (Indeed, Apple and Nintendo share an interesting history in how they borrow features in products, but that’s a discussion for another time.) Contesting the smartphone gaming market at that point in 2012 was impossible, since the Nintendo 3DS was already in stores at that point, forcing Nintendo into a premature decision. The result was a half-hearted allusion to the tablet market, advertised as a solution to problems that never really existed and didn’t solve particularly well: that of housemates or parents wanting to use the TV

while the player was mid-session, of asymmetric multiplayer opportunities, of being able to “view” the game space from unusual perspectives through use of the gyroscope. Star Fox Zero, rather than demonstrate the exciting gameplay options made available by the gamepad, only served to highlight its redundancies.

This is all a given, of course.

What’s most notable is how the design of the Switch also throws back to an under looked feature of the 3DS: the charging dock. One

of the earliest public concept videos for the 3DS featured the charging dock as a space where the 3DS can continually stay connected with the internet, updating software, checking for notifications, downloading demos and even free DLC for games. The 3DS was meant to become more like a phone in that way, in that it would become indispensable to leave off. A 3DS user would leave their system on in their bag as they went about their day collecting data from other players (Street Pass) and then leave it

charging on dock when they went to sleep (Spot Pass). Although we don’t know as of yet whether these communication features exist on the Switch, it’s still interesting to see how that particular design decision of the dock has carried through into the heart of Switch’s design.

Another design feature lifted from other Nintendo consoles is that of local multiplayer for the maximum amount of people on the least amount of hardware, making multiplayer accessible to the maximum

amount of people as much as possible. The Nintendo DS introduced “DS Download Play” that was continued in the next console with the imaginatively named “3DS Download Play”. This let players who didn’t own a particular game that had multiplayer download a limited version of the game from someone who did own the game and wanted to play with them. Mario Kart DS is arguably the greatest user of the feature, allowing people who didn’t own the game or left it at home to play with those that were carrying it.

Spot Pass kept the player connected with the rest of the world, even while the console wasn’t in use.

Street Pass kept the player interacting with strangers, turning them into friends. DS Download Play meant the player could always have someone to play with, provided they at least had a console to play on. Nintendo has always pushed for more ways for people to interact in person through video games, and the Switch is no different.

The Switch’s controllers separates into two much smaller controllers, allowing two people to share the same tablet screen and play locally. Local multiplayer is the console market’s greatest strength over the rise of PC gaming, and it’s also something that has been neglected by the other console titans of the PS4 and the Xbox One in recent years. The opportunity for local multiplayer, for being able to play games with your friends in person, is built into the very design of the Nintendo Switch, further differentiating it from the competition, and it also brings the console deep into familiar Nintendo territory. This is Nintendo bringing their core ideologies (i.e. with friends) of what a console should be and how it should be played to the home console.

To a certain extent, I do agree that the Switch is what the Wii U should have been in the first place.

But as of 2012, the technology wasn’t quite there, and the Wii U was forced to be tethered to its con-

sole to produce its desired result.

The Switch, however, isn’t just a second chance just for Nintendo.

It also serves to be the spiritual sequel to the Nvidia Shield, with Nvidia creating the custom graphics chip for the Switch console. The Shield was similarly tethered to the internet to play the latest games, streaming them to the display rather than rendering them with its own hardware. The two company’s co-operation here finally gives them the opportunity to impact the tablet gaming market with full on console tier graphics on a portable device, albeit 3-4 years later.

In the title I described the Switch as the ‘telos’, or the end of Nintendo’s design philosophies of 20112016. Other words I was thinking of using were ‘culmination’ or ‘apex’. The more I look at it, the more I feel that this is the console that Nintendo would have ideally released in 2011 (although I suppose you could say that about any present hardware in the past) and that everything since then has been leading up to it in one way or another. The strict and extreme distinction between handheld and portable following the Wii and DS was one that became strained for Nintendo, as it struggled (at least initially in the case of the 3DS) to properly compete in either market. The 3DS eventually found the support it needed through what I would attribute to the sheer might of the Pokemon franchise, but the Wii U was not granted such a grace. Although the official line is that the Switch is a home console successor, with a true 3DS successor to arrive much later, the Switch still reflects strides in combining the best of both worlds of Nintendo’s product line, and finally securing a desirable niche within the console market. Whether the release is in time or not from the “ideal” 2011 projection remains to be seen, but falling share prices certainly show a lack of faith from shareholders.

25

Mint Tea, Kittens, and the Arab Spring Emeka Forbes

The room I’m in is small with a narrow construction that gives it the feel of being wedged into the only space left over in the rest of the building. At the far end is a fireplace and a rising chimney breast of exposed brick. Instead of a raging fire, the small dark space contains a tangled bundle of fairy lights, which, while not providing any heat, offered the minor illusion of adding a few extra degrees of warmth to an otherwise cold space.

A few months ago, a heavily-pregnant cat found its way into the house and decided to move in. Close to the fairy lights was a small basket containing a litter of tiny kittens who lay nestled amongst their mother.

On either side of the room were two firm single beds that doubled in use as sofas. I sat on one of them with my back pressed against the wall behind me.

In the far corner sat a tall Moroccan man, with curly hair and a slim build. Perched on a cushion next to the fireplace, his eyes were glued to the screen of a laptop beside him. Opposite me sat another man with short hair and deep lines around his eyes, revealing that he had several years on his friend.

One of the kittens had ventured out of the basket and taken an interest in me. It spent a while tugging at the laces of my shoe before becoming much more adventurous and clambering up onto my lap.

I poured a glass of mint tea from the ornate brass teapot in front of me, spilling a little in the process as the kitten squirmed to get involved in the process.

The second man instantly disappeared returning a few moments later with a cloth. He retired back to the sofa and the first man skipped between tracks on the YouTube playlist he was carefully curating.

“So were you both here in Marrakesh during the protests?” I enquired.

“Protests?” The second man shot back a slightly confused look.

“During the Arab Spring,” I offered, as casually as I could, but I could tell I’d stuck a nerve with the prescience of my question.

“I think we don’t want to talk about politics now,” said the second man, with a slight laugh.

“Of course.” I laughed uncomfortably and took a long sip of my mint tea. I tried to steer the conversation onto lighter ground and asked about the kittens but the second man seemed, despite his protestation, to be interested in my question.

“We were all here,” he said, with a little hesitation.

“Here in Maroc, there were 3 million people in the streets.” I wondered how true that figure was — in truth, I didn’t know how many people had actually been directly involved in the protests here — but I nodded in understanding. “Maroc is a very rich country,” he went on, “but the money is not here for everyone. We have the King, and then the ministers, but the ministers take from us the money.”

“They steal it?” I asked “Yes. They have this corruption, fraud, these kinds of things.”

“And that’s why you protested?”

“For this and other things. Here in Maroc, it is different, you understand.” I nodded. “We do not have the power”.

“You mean because you can’t vote?”

“Exactly.” He paused to take a sip of tea. The first man had turned up the volume slightly on the YouTube playlist. He hadn’t said anything so far about the protests, and I got the impression that he was much less comfortable talking about this than his friend. I tried not to ask too many questions of my own, instead opting to do little more than listen to whatever conversation was volunteered.

There is a culture of us and them.

“I heard though that the King has made some changes, you know? Are things better now?” I leaned slightly forwards on the bed-cum-sofa. The good conversation had me holding my breath.

“Everyone is asking me if the King is good — I don’t 27

know him personally.”

We both laugh, but I read between the lines to a broader sense of disconnect between the monarch and his subjects. This sense of being so far removed was surely one of the causes of the protests in the first place, and regardless of what other changes have been made, this will remain the case for the foreseeable future. There is an unmistakeable us-and-them culture.

“Is difficult for people to talk. In the protests, I was beaten by the police and the military.” I feel bad for extracting this detail , but it was an important re-

themselves, but it was undeniably gave the impression of hope.

Morocco is a country where wounds have still not healed and scars are still fresh.

Bored of my company, the kitten who had made himself quite at home in the folds of my woollen jumper scurried back across the room and made a leap into the basket. For a moment or two, there was some meowing as he fought for his place back amongst the litter. As Morocco stretches itself and desperately seeks

“Despite the concessions made by the King in an effort to put unrest to bed, the problems here have never truly been solved”

minder of the humanity at play in the abstract world of geopolitics.

“Do you think there will ever be more protests?”

He shrugs in response, stopping short of a vocal indication either way. Contained in that single shrug was an exhaustion which manifested itself as physically as it did metaphorically. Beyond that though, was a glint in the eyes that stared back at me. I don’t know if it came from the reflection of the lamp which dimly lit the room, or emanated deep from within his retinas

the approval of the West — most clearly visible in the show it put on during the recent Climate Change Conference in Marrakesh, it is undoubtedly being careful not to tear itself apart at the seams. Despite the concessions made by the King in an effort to put unrest to bed, the problems here have never truly been solved, and anyone who assumes they can draw a line and relegate the protest movement in Morocco should find a quiet corner, a pot of mint tea, and work on their understanding of the real mood hidden deep behind the bustling souqs of the city.

Class Wars

Richard Pullin

L

ife sounded much more exciting and entertaining in the Middle Ages, back in the days when my Dad was a boy, growing up in the North Downs countryside. His numerous entertaining anecdotes of his schooldays put my own to shame. Of course, in his day schools were corrupt places, run by ruffians and scoundrels. It was commonplace for the teachers (or ‘masters’ as they were known) to beat and intimidate the pupils.

Parents’ complaints to the head

master were always ignored, and nothing ever improved behind the gates of Caterham School.

One such ruffian was a chap called, I think, Mr Putin (or, possibly, Mr Pickup). He was a geography teacher, and in one of his lessons there was a boy who got an answer wrong, or was being a bit cheeky, or something like that. Mr Putin got angry, and literally dived towards the boy. But in the process of doing so, his foot got caught in the string for the roll-up world map on the wall behind him. The class roared with laughter as he untangled himself, and then he dived

onto the floor with the boy, growling through clenched teeth: ‘I’ll wriggle the life out of you Stringer!’ (The boy’s name was actually Skinner, or something, so perhaps ‘Stringer’ was a traumatic memory from Mr Putin’s past.) The boy shouted ‘You’re a bloody disgrace!’ and managed to escape the clutches of the teacher, running out in to the grounds. The class watched as the boy shot past the window in front of them like a deer, followed a few seconds later by the teacher.

After many minutes of waiting, the teacher finally appeared back in the classroom and huffily told them that ‘you’d better all do an essay.’

‘yes’, where ‘no’ would have been far more advisable. The teacher caned him in front of the class for being insolent. In another lesson, my Dad yawned loudly, although completely unaware that he had done so. The teacher spun round and demanded who had yawned.

My Dad, suddenly realising that it was him, innocently replied: ‘I think it might have been I who yawned,’ prompting the teacher to give an outburst about how rude it was to make ‘bovine noises.’

All completely true, that. If that had happened nowadays, Mr Putin would have lost his job. Then there was the teacher who would confiscate the kids’ pornography, and disappear into the adjoining store room for long periods during the lesson. In an English lesson the class had to write a fictional story, and my Dad’s was quite inventive, incorporating strange alien words, and such like. The teacher, however, was not impressed and read it out to the class, who proceeded to roar with laughter and taunts. The teacher asked ‘do you think this is acceptable?’ and my Dad, being rather flustered now, answered

Now and then the pupils would get their own back. In the assemblies, the teachers would sit on a row of chairs on the stage, facing the pupils on the floor. There was a particularly nasty teacher who was much hated by the kids, so one day my Dad and his friends turned up early before the assembly started, and oh so slightly moved the teacher’s chair so that the back legs were above a slight gap in the floor. The intended effect was that the chair would sink into the ground when the teacher sat down. However, the results were far more spectacular than anticipated. As the teacher sat down, the chair lurched backwards and the teacher was catapulted back through the stage curtains, out of sight. The entire hall exploded into unrestrained laughter and glee, and the other teachers fought hard to keep straight faces.

During another assembly, my Dad and his friends rigged up a jug to come down on a piece of string and levitate next to the head master as he was addressing the school.

Forty years later, and it was still a mystery to the head master as to how this jug had appeared out of nowhere and hovered next to him.

The beauty of these schemes was that there was no way the teachers could work out who was responsible.

Inevitably, in modern times, my own Pitmaston school memories are far less colourful. In Year 2 we were about to have a PE lesson, but – through no fault of my own

– the shorts had disappeared from my PE bag. I was terrified that Mrs Holland, who was a poisonous old hag, would make me prance around the school hall in my underpants. And that is why I proceeded to hide between two tables, squatting on the floor of our classroom, for the entire lesson. Our classroom was next to the hall, so I could hear the lesson going on.

Old Holland never even noticed my absence (good thing there wasn’t a fire drill/real fire). Later on I explained to my Mum that, through no fault of my own, my shorts had disappeared (thinking that it was, in fact, probably her fault). She got very cross, and when another mum asked what the matter was, she angrily replied: ‘Richard’s lost his kit.’

My older brother was also unlucky enough to be taught my Mrs Holland. He had a Captain Scarlet pencil case with Retro Metabolism written on it. As Mrs Holland walked past he said in a loud, clear voice ‘Retro Metabolism!’ She took the pencil case off him and put it on her desk. Pathetic isn’t it. At break time he simply took the pencil case back and she forgot all about it.

In Year 1 we were all sitting on the floor listening to a story, or something. I saw a large, grey stone on the floor. With a spark of inspiration, I shoved the artefact up my nose and picked it out again, pretending that I was picking a really large, nice bogey out of my nostril. It was a tremendously fun thing to do, I can tell you. To pretend that this thing was a great big bogey, just waiting to be plucked out – fantastic! After a few goes of this, panic set in when the thing got stuck in there and I couldn’t get it out! Luckily I managed to remove it after a bit, but it was still a very frightening experience.

I didn’t put it up my nose again.

31

Fear ripples the waves of lust, Crawl to me and dissolve in the lies you beseech, Exposure of justice, die in the mercy You attempt to repent.

Resurrect the body that you have lashed and scared Tethered to a pit in the ground.

Ivy sweeps over her breasts, Moss taking shape between the hollow of her thighs, Pockets of youth lost forever in her brazen, sunken cheeks anew.

Oh power cast a fire over me!

Rise up and rip clean the revenge that sticks to the heart.

Claw and scratch away this repeating memory the skin conceals.

Blind the dream of false hopes and desires, Make deaf the malice for reasons unexplained and unknown, Castrate the arrogance protruding from his innards, Unlock the guilt forever and always, The hurt that he has inflicted.

Now I am awake.

I rise.

Stand as my opposite.

Look me in the eye; you are my fading projection.

Speechless //Anon Speechless //Anon

35

Sent through the winter has it never rained since, to wither the paint of a painter, all such whisper hints and touches upon these stars to wish a good sleep behind its pars, in the nocturnal deep.

Speechless Moonlight//BARCOL //Anon

Something Heard: white Light was streaming Down, obtuse, blocked At the source by a fraying Silhouette composing panicked Corn on a foot-worn polished tomb.

Not a bird after all but a moth up there On high, for the second time enwombed, Uncomprehending, flapping like a velvet Dog by God’s commandments never-ending.

For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, Forever. ‘Do you believe in God?’ Vaulted words afloat, Dust-motes, faint voices from the vestry, sunbathed oak.

A Moth//Oscar Yuill Speechless //Anon

37

g HOROSCOPES

never

gonna

give

you

Mar 21 - Apr 19

Apr 20 - May 20

May 21 - Jun 20

Jun 21 - Jul 22

Imagine waking up one day to find the stars have abandoned you, they cannot tell your fortunes and affairs of the heart.

That is your future.

Remember: you can bring a horse to water but it’s not your horse so you could face an average of nine months in prison for nicking it.

Fidel is dead. America will, this month, announce an end to its embargo.

You will be met with good fortune if you take the opportunity to buy a cigar on the open market, and smoke it in memory of the murderous old twunt.

Did you know the moon is currently ‘sextile’-ing Saturn? I don’t know what that means but if I were Saturn, I would break orbit and run for GN-Z11.

But if anyone’s ever sextiling you, mace them.

up

never

gonna

Jul 23 - Aug 22

Aug 23 - Sep 22

Sep 23 - Oct 22

You will meet a tall dark stranger.

He will mug you because you live in Woolwich.

Nothing special for you this month. Your life will be just as empty, dull, loveless and morose as it has always been.

It’s a full moon. You need to get Tim Farron to a forest, pronto.

you

Nov 22 - Dec 21 You do believe in fairies, you do, you do.

down

Dec 22 - Jan 19 Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. As the CEO of Shell, you burn it down.

never

Jan 20 - Feb 18 The dead of night isn’t only aesthetically preferable for all blood sacrifices but tends to bear fewer witnesses.

let

Oct 23 - Nov 21 ‘Panacea’ is a nice word (say the stars). Try shoehorning it into your next piece of academic work (say the stars).

Also, you should sue your barber (say the stars).

gonna

Feb 19 - Mar 20 Trump, Syria, Castro, global warming - you will have a cup of tea, and let it all blow over.

g crosswords puzzles etc

Art by Alfred Russo