FRIDAY MUSIC: Dead Can Dance, by JD

Dead Can Dance is an Australian music duo from Melbourne. Currently composed of Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry, the group formed in 1981 and relocated to London the following year. 

Australian music historian Ian McFarlane described Dead Can Dance's style as "constructed soundscapes of mesmerising grandeur and solemn beauty; African polyrhythms, Gaelic folk, Gregorian chant, Middle Eastern music, mantras, and art rock."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Can_Dance

They work for us... oh, yeah?

Last Friday, a number of areas in England saw new anti-virus restrictions https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-57232728 . The guidance was published online, without a public announcement; the slide into ‘Simon says’ whimsicality is bound to happen when you only have to report to the House of Commons every six months. Parliament is failing to safeguard our liberty, and this shines a spotlight on MPs’ responsiveness to constituents.

A month has passed since I wrote to my MP asking her to put a question in the Debating Chamber, urging more frequent reviews of pandemic rules. Conscious that newspapers and politicians scorn those who write to them as being generally ill-educated and semi-lunatic, I added a touch of humour, scribbling on the back of the envelope, ‘This communication is also available in green felt tip.’ Even so, no reply; and we know that the law does not insist that there should be one http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8025255.stm .

It’s bad enough when your MP ignores you, but sometimes it’s worse when they don’t. Like Peter Hitchens, who worried about it in this week’s MoS https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2021/05/peter-hitchens-i-remember-inflation-wrecking-lives-and-i-can-see-it-coming-back.html , I have been concerned for a long time about the destruction of our savings by inflation.

The Con-LibDem coalition took over on 11 May 2010; Cameron’s PPS wrote to Cabinet Ministers that ‘The Prime Minister wants to ensure that the Government as a whole is giving the highest priority to addressing the cost of living’ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2157018/Cameron-summits-quads-secrets-save-EU.html ;  yet on 19 July 2010 NS&I stopped issuing Index-Linked Savings Certificates (ILSC) for the first time since 1975. The latter were briefly made available again in May 2011 and the window re-closed in September.

So I emailed my then MP, asking him to raise the matter in Parliament. Instead, he promised to write to the Treasury and got a response from its Commercial Secretary Lord Sassoon that was a two-page tissue of irrelevancies. My question was about the duty to protect savers who shouldn’t have to gamble on the stock market to keep pace with price rises (note that today the FTSE is still bumping around the 7,000 mark it reached in 2000, and that it approximately halved twice in the intervening period – 2003 and 2009.) The noble Lord wittered on about inflation coming down, fuel duty increases being deferred, incentives to save via ISAs and pensions, the Money Advice Service etc. Apparently NS&I had to withdraw ILSC because there was so much demand (er, a message from the public there?) and in any case the scheme was to help government finance (not ours, it seems.)

I emailed my MP in March 2013 to register my dissatisfaction with that reply and to ask for an oral question at PMQs or Questions to Ministers, noting:

·         the British Government creditworthiness has been downgraded by Moody's,and

·         the pound has dropped, and

·         inflation looks set to rise further, especially for imports…

 

May I also draw your attention to two passages in Hansard from 1975 (esp. Michael Neubert MP http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1975/jul/10/savings-index-linked-schemes and Lords Lee and Jacques http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1975/nov/04/national-savings-schemes ) that make it perfectly clear that Government recognises the moral obligation to protect the value of savers' money?

The MP replied:

‘I tend not to do Oral questions. They don't have any real effect on government policy and it is a lottery as to whether you have the opportunity to ask one.’

So much for PMQs in general, then. Or is it relevant that the MP’s party (LibDem) was then sharing power with the Tories, and so a pointed question had the potential to embarrass one’s friends?

Still, he invited me to work with his researcher to frame a question. Having given the latter more information and background to explain why the issue mattered, I received a massive waffly draft question of 157 words offering maximal wriggle-room for the Minister. I can’t think an MP’s researcher is stupid, so I suppose he thought I was.

Quixotically, I persisted, and got a written answer from Sajid Javid MP (8 July 2013):

‘National Savings and Investments (NS&I) purpose is to provide cost-effective debt financing to the Government by issuing and selling retail savings and investment products to the public.

‘In meeting this objective NS&I follow a policy balancing the interests of their customers, the taxpayer and the stability of the wider financial services market. In line with this remit NS&I do not anticipate new sales of Index-Linked Savings Certificates this year.’

I submit to readers that the ‘balance’ here is like that between two thieves and their victim.

I asked a second question about the threat of bank bail-ins and the reply from Greg Clark MP made reference to the FSCS £85,00 insurance limit for depositors, without addressing the point that in the Cyprus bank crisis of 2012-13 the latter originally faced partial loss of even their insured deposits.

My MP was kind enough to explain it all to me:

‘What they are basically saying is that they don't want to issue any more index linked debt at the moment. They are also saying the 85K is safe.’

And I was kind enough to respond:

‘I understand that. Please don't think that you're the only grammar-school-educated boy in South Birmingham. I also have a degree in English from Oxford.’

With pushing, a further reply from him, with a request to give him the 1975 Hansard references (again):

‘I accept that there are issues about access from time to time. I will write to the minister about this. The table office are very picky about how questions are put to ministers and normally edit them.’

Poor, sensitive table office! On receipt of the links, he then said:

‘I will ask [my researcher] to put these points to the minister with the suggestion that a small number of index linked bonds should be made available with a limit as to how much any one person can hold.’

Why he took it upon himself to qualify with ‘small’ and ‘limit’, I don’t know. So grudging! Not that even this got an official response; if it was sent at all. So, after more than a year, I got… nowhere. *crickets singing*…

They work for us, do they? 

Vote for war

Outside St Mary’s Church in Totnes stands a rough stone war memorial. At the foot of the cross are named over 100 men killed in the Great War, including three men from one family and two from another, in a town of fewer than 6,000 souls.

Who voted for the slaughter to begin? Nobody. The electorate comprised 5.2 million men (some 60% of all adult males, and no women at all), but they were not consulted. Instead, the order was given by King George V at a Privy Council meeting in Buckingham Palace attended by only two court officials and Lord Beauchamp. As historian AJP Taylor explained  https://global.oup.com/academic/product/english-history-1914-1945-9780192801401?cc=gb&lang=en& , this reflected ‘a general view that war was an act of state, if not of prerogative, with which ordinary citizens had little to do.’

By 1918, after nearly a million British servicemen had died (with another c. two million permanently disabled) https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/disability-history/1914-1945/war/ , it was thought that the people might be entitled to more of a voice. The Home Secretary introduced the Representation of the People Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representation_of_the_People_Act_1918#Background saying that the war

‘has made it, I think, impossible that ever again, at all events in the lifetime of the present generation, there should be a revival of the old class feeling which was responsible for so much, and, among other things, for the exclusion for a period, of so many of our population from the class of electors.’

Nevertheless, while the Act extended the vote to all men only some women qualified - about 40% of them. The rest had to wait until 1928 to be included. Universal adult suffrage in Britain has yet to celebrate its centenary.

Even modernised democracy didn’t stop the repeat use of the royal war-making prerogative in 1939; and it remains to this day the constitutional position for the United Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_parliamentary_approval_for_military_action . While we complain about minor infringements of our personal freedom, the government reserves the right to kill us (and the people of other nations) wholesale, so long as some pretext can be found that circumvents Nuremberg principles. ‘Gandalf’ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9569815/You-looked-like-Gandalf-Tony-Blair-admits-lockdown-mullet-mistake.html bounced us into war with Iraq, and ‘Dodgy Dave’ https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/on-this-day-dennis-skinner-thrown-out-of-the-commons-after-calling-cameron-dodgy-dave-263883/ only desisted from bombing Syria because he chose to ‘respect’ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-23892783 a Commons majority opposing it.

The US Constitution attempted to restrain the Executive with a specification that it should be Congress that declares a war. Despite the country being almost continuously involved in armed foreign conflicts since its foundation, that declaration has been made only eleven times, the last in 1942 https://history.house.gov/Institution/Origins-Development/War-Powers/ . The use of the notion of ‘authorisation’ has allowed this power, like so many others, to drift towards the Chief Executive, and in any case the next Big One may happen so suddenly that there will be no need for a call-up before a general incineration begins.

The US President’s nuclear football is ever at hand; Britain is now stocking up with more atomic weapons https://www.economist.com/britain/2021/03/18/britain-is-adding-nukes-for-the-first-time-since-the-cold-war ; the winds blow around the old granite cross. And we have the vote.

Dirty women (and men)

 'She's so deliciously low — so horribly dirty.'

Professor Henry Higgins, talking about the Cockney flower-seller Eliza Doolittle in Shaw's play "Pygmalion" (1913)

'What you thinking of, goin' with a bloody woman? You're gettin' soft. Don't you know that women smell and give you diseases?'

Gangster and homosexual Ronnie Kray, scolding his brother Reggie in 1957 for womanising when they had set up a successful nightclub in London's East End. Quoted in John Pearson's 'The Profession Of Violence' (1972, Collins revised edition 2015)

'Women simply are not clean - absolutely filthy, the whole lot of them. Englishwomen simply do not wash and scrub enough.'
Prolific lover Ian Fleming, interviewed for the Evening Standard in April 1960. Quoted in John Pearson's 'The life of Ian Fleming' (1966)

The real and fictional East End women will have had plenty of excuse for not attaining twenty-first century standards of hygiene. Even public baths came late to Britain - for example, the Moseley Road Baths in Birmingham were built in 1907 (the men's were divided into first and second class) and it would be a long time before most working-class people's houses had indoor lavatories, let alone baths and showers. Besides, Ronnie Kray's sexual orientation may have conditioned him into an instinctive dislike of female hormones.

What excuse Fleming's posher lovers had, I don't know. Or maybe, as with Ronnie, it was merely his perception, having spent his formative years at a boys-only public school, Eton College; it seems not to have put him off women, though he never spent the whole night with them when he was a single man. His creation James Bond is struck by the superior cleanliness in the USA (in, I think, 'Thunderball') when he sees the seat of the lavatory in his hotel room has a strip of paper across it confirming that it has been 'sanitised.'

How like the English, though, to look down their noses at their social inferiors and refer to them as 'the great unwashed,' as though it was the latter's choice to be shabby and unclean. George Orwell in 'The road to Wigan Pier' (1937) noted how hard it was for a miner to wash all over, where there were no pit-head baths:

'Probably a large majority of miners are completely black from the waist down for at least six days a week. It is almost impossible for them to wash all over in their own homes. Every drop of water has got to be heated up, and in a tiny living-room which contains, apart from the kitchen range and a quantity of furniture, a wife, some children, and probably a dog, there is simply not room to have a proper bath. Even with a basin one is bound to splash the furniture. Middle-class people are fond of saying that the miners would not wash themselves properly even if they could, but this is nonsense, as is shown by the fact that where pithead baths exist practically all the men use them.'

   - http://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/prose/RoadToWiganPier/wiganpierpart_3.html

I knew an Englishwoman who went to marry a Cypriot after WWII and on the voyage there she met a Levantine man who explained, ' I do not wash. I perfume.' Today we have much better plumbing.

Bertrand Russell exploded the way that some romanticise the working class as a compensation - a cheaper one than alleviating their conditions - for their misfortune, in his essay 'The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed' (1937):

'If it were indeed the case that bad nourishment, little education, lack of air and sunshine, unhealthy housing conditions, and overwork produce better people than are produced by good nourishment, open air, adequate education and housing, and a reasonable amount of leisure, the whole case for economic reconstruction would collapse, and we could rejoice that such a large percentage of the population enjoys the conditions that make for virtue.'

   - https://criticathink.wordpress.com/2018/04/11/the-superior-virtue-of-the-oppressed-bertrand-russell/

There's still work to do.

COLOUR SUPPLEMENT: Cherry Pie Tree, by JD

This is a painting I have called The Cherry Pie Tree and is just sitting there on the easel shortly after I had finished it.

 When I took it to the Frame Shop Mick, the framer, looked at it and said "That looks like Flodden. Is it Flodden?" Indeed it is and he recognised the road/path and tree because he had spent a few weekends there helping with an archeological dig.

I was prompted to paint the tree when I saw a photograph on the blog "Cherie's Place" (below):

http://www.cheriesplace.me.uk/blog/index.php/2012/02/05/cheries-place-thought-for-the-week-144/

I told her via the comments that I was going to 'steal' it and paint it and when she saw the finished and framed picture she loved it so it is now hanging on her wall somewhere at home down south.

______________________________________________________________________________

Historical note: Flodden is the site of a famous battle between the English and Scots in 1513: (Ed.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Flodden

Cherry's tree photograph above was taken in 2009; below is another shot from 2018, plus JD's closeup of his finished painting (thanks to Cherry - http://www.cheriesplace.me.uk/blog/)

WEEKENDER: Are you queer? by Wiggia

Amazingly a word that was outlawed not that many years ago by the  LGBTXXXXX brigade a few years back is back in favour. At this rate 'faggot' and 'poofta' will be acceptable soon. such is the rate of change.

In real terms I don’t give a stuff what people get up to in their own homes. Why should I be concerned after all these years when no one ever complained about selfgendering and pronouns? I doubt the majority if confronted over the pronoun issue would have a clue what was being spoken about and that is how it should have remained.

Which all makes this announcement from ARUP  and the Westminster University aka the old Regent Street Polytechnic and now sadly a woke outpost, even more ridiculous.

The Regent Street Polytechnic was a grand old Victorian philanthropic organisation set up in 1837. Its mantra was: 

 “an institution where the Public, at little expense, may acquire practical knowledge of the various arts and branches of science connected with manufacturers, mining operations and rural economy. “

It was acquired by Quintin Hogg, the father of the late Lord Hailsham, who was very hands on with the institute, and was the first Polytechnic in London.

A previous article I wrote about the Poly and its central role in ensuring the 1908 Olympics went ahead has been lost though I do have a paper copy somewhere. Back to today: this once august institution seems to spend a lot of time now as a hot bed of lefty Marxist groups rather than anything constructive such as turning out people who are useful to society, but this latest announcement comes from the top and its alliance with ARUP, the architects designer planning consultant group. 

Does anyone really know what that headline means? In this time of diversity and inclusiveness any excuse is as good as another to change things that supposedly allow minorities to enjoy the fruits of life as do the rest of us; the only problem with that analogy is there is nothing to stop them now, and hasn’t been for decades. The ‘problem’ is a purely invented one.

It is worth reading the entire article: 

https://www.westminster.ac.uk/news/queering-of-public-spaces-will-make-them-more-inclusive-for-all-report-suggests

The announcement from ARUP follows the same theme.

But what does it actually say? The bulk of it is verbal diarrhoea, it says nothing, it just fills a page with gobbledegook. This passage is a classic: 

"They also said that inclusive design should contribute to the desistance of hate crime and promote the inclusion of marginalised and disempowered groups in public space. Professor Catterall and Dr Azzouz suggest attention to the scale and mass of buildings, lighting features, colours and facades and the addition of curvilinear aspects are amongst the design techniques that can help achieve this objective."

'Marginalised, disempowered, hate crime,' it is all in there - and apparently the size of buildings can make a difference! How, is not defined.

The ARUP version incorporates a review jointly produced by themselves and the Westminster University, here:

https://www.arup.com/perspectives/publications/research/section/queering-public-space

 
                                                                                                                                                                     What I do not understand is why, after telling us they have what have become ‘gayborhoods’ or queer enclaves, is there a necessity to have them spread out into the general areas. They have the ability to do that now, no one is stopping them, these days minorities rule, so what is the problem? 

For everyone else the constant bombardment with rainbow flags, crossings etc is wearing. Like all progressive movements there is a limit that when crossed creates a divide, which was not the original purpose.

Many from the gay community have spoken out about all this. Wokery on their behalf is not wanted, they are quite happy to continue with their lives as is. Those extroverts that seem to infest gay pride parades with their extreme agenda are a small part of the gay community. If 'queering places' means this is the next step I suggest they stay in gayborhoods.

https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/arup-calls-for-queering-of-public-space

The AJ (Architects Journal) has a broader, more practical approach to the report, yet still talks as if there is a problem. Is there really a problem? The AJ refers to safe spaces in universities for minority groups and wants to incorporate this theme in outside areas; I ask why? Putting rainbow flags everywhere doesn’t automatically give a safe space, it indicates what that place represents and could give a reverse signal to anyone so inclined to want to make trouble; but aren’t we past  the days of the Naked Civil Servant? Isn’t all this a complete overkill to suit one minority, and do they really want it?

When I grew up in the East End of London many of our haunts were gay pubs. Why? Because they provided the best entertainment, nothing more nothing less. The customers that frequented these places went there mainly for the entertainment, there was never an ulterior motive. Now, gay pubs are for gays only; is that really progress? 

Has everyone become such wimps in life that they have to demand protection from everything, hurty words, demanding to be called this and wondering why they get the wrong answer? Isn’t it all getting totally out of hand. Can’t all minorities just get on with their lives like the rest of us without having to need a crutch for every perceived slight?

Oh, and I have probably just committed a hate crime.

On top of the above Sutton council in south London have just unveiled their first trans road crossing; this they believe will lead to more inclusivity? They already have a permanent rainbow crossing; if they carry on with all the genders it will be interesting to see the first time someone is knocked down on one of these crossing because the driver had not a clue what it was. There is the usual waffle from the councillors who you would have thought had more pressing items in the borough, though of course if you appoint a “lead member for Equalities” I suppose you have to give him something to do:

https://metro.co.uk/2021/05/18/london-uks-first-ever-transgender-flag-pedestrian-crossing-unveiled-14601161/

As with nearly all articles on subjects like this, you finish reading and say ’so what’ ? It is such infantile stuff. How anyone can take this seriously is amazing. I should say that, with days for almost everything, from causes to groups and individuals being created all the time, we must eventually run out of things to celebrate. Perhaps we can declare the whole year a bank holiday, or have we just had that, and all buildings to have mandatory flags, from trans groups to 'save Palestine' month, Black History month, clapping for the NHS, anti-slavery week, LGBQT  history month (see below, and do they really need a month?) and on and on.

(This is a mental hospital, by the way.)

In closing, I have to ask how can these random crossings be legal? We have zebra crossings which are the legal black-and-white ones; how many others are in the official traffic regulations?

And if they are to be made legal, can we have some decent ones? ...

Having taken all this in we need a rest, and naturally there is a rainbow answer to ease your aching mind:                                   

FRIDAY MUSIC: Peter Frampton, by JD

 A couple of weeks ago SKY Arts showed Eric Clapton's 'Crossroads' guitar festival from 2019 in Dallas, Texas. https://www.crossroadsguitarfestival.com/

The highlight, for me, was a friendly 'duel' between Clapton and Peter Frampton playing George Harrison's song While My Guitar Gently Weeps. I had forgotten how good a guitarist Frampton was and still is. 

He is now 71 and has been diagnosed with 'inclusion body myostitis' an autimmine disease which will eventually prevent him from playing the guitar so here is a selection of his music including the aforementioned 'duel' with Clapton which they both clearly enjoyed enormously; Frampton is one of the few performers who smiles on stage as if he really enjoyed his craft!

http://www.frampton.com/home/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Frampton