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STEPHEN HUGH-JONES | ON LANGUAGE AND LIFE

January 25th 2008 | A Davos storm in a China Teacup

World Economic Forum

Thirty years ago the Davos symposium was a place for business affairs, extramarital affairs, and the occasional diplomatic incident. Stephen Hugh-Jones shocked a Chinese delegation into near-departure ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

It was a Chinese diplomat who taught me the meaning of face: preserving it, on his side; on mine, keeping it straight. This was in 1978, if my memory serves, when last I attended the Davos Symposium. These gatherings of what is now the World Economic Forum were more fun in those days, I suspect. And maybe more useful.

Klaus Schwab's brainchild in the 1970s called itself modestly the European Management Forum. Those networking in the Swiss ski resort included a few business leaders, but mostly their underlings. Politicians were few, and, at highest, likelier to include a former British prime minister—Edward Heath was there, wooden as ever, one year that I was—than ex-presidents of the United States, like Bill Clinton in 2005.

The networking too was down-to-earth, unpublicised, and, I'd guess, productive, unlike today's photo-ops for world statesmen to agree on some grand initiative (remember those pledges to Africa three years ago?) which they will then forget. The symposium-goers shared one simple, achievable aim, to increase their profits. And, whether in plenary sessions or, more likely, smoke-filled rooms afterwards, I guess they achieved it, or quite soon "Davos" would have fallen apart.

But not everything can have changed. Then as now, most of those at Davos were men: well-off, well-tailored, well-kempt and well into or past middle age. With them came a small caravan of wives of a certain age, trophy wives rather younger, and sundry "research executives", "personal assistants" and the like, of the same sex but younger still. And we journalists, some eager for stories—there weren't many—some, as I was, for ideas, of which I found plenty: it's one thing to read what preoccupies the captains of industry, another to hear it from the horses' mouths.

The mixture could be piquant. Among the journos in 1978 was a young woman who had worked with me on Vision, the Paris-based multilingual monthly that I had quit in 1974 for The Economist. As old colleagues will, we were reminiscing one day until I realised to my alarm that the afternoon "workshop" whose rapporteur I was due to aid had already begun. By chance, she also planned to attend it. We went, late, into the full meeting-room together.

She was a comely young woman, exceptionally so. I still recall the sight of fifty middle-aged jaws dropping simultaneously. The looks of envy darted at me, when anyone could take his eyes off her, were, alas, unjustified. But it was a happy reminder that money is not the first interest of even the busiest businessmen.

The skiing too was fun (I recommend langlauf: the cold white stuff seldom slopes at more than one in a hundred; no one but Nordics will expect you to travel faster than five miles an hour; and when you do fall even so, console yourself that the man in front who also just did so may earn more in a week than you in a year but still looks just as absurd on his side in a snowdrift).

There was leisure too: at a five-day gathering, even the grandees had time to let down their hair. And there were no cell-phones. Nor, which also must have changed greatly for the worse, any intense security, albeit the anti-capitalist Red Brigades and the Baader Meinhof gang were active at the time. Even the plenary sessions, ever less crowded as the symposium wore on, had their light moments. I recollect Lord Whatsisname (yes, memory really has failed me there), Britain's official promoter of exports, speaking of Finland as behind the Iron Curtain. The Finns present were not amused.

More than this, there were genuine business ideas, though some must sound quaint today: what on earth was the "worker participation" that worried the Davosards of the mid-1970s? And so back to my Chinese diplomat. This was the first year a Chinese delegation had turned up, after plenty of Schwabian diplomacy, I imagine. With Mao Tsetung not long in his grave, they were after a very big idea indeed: what on earth was "the market"?

I spent an evening with them, conversing, more or less, in my and their still more dubious French. Sheer naughtiness, I confess, provoked me to suggest to them that in 50 years' time their heirs would recognise Mao's Kuomintang opponent, Chiang Kai-shek, whatever his faults, as a true patriot. A shocked pause developed into a long bilateral discussion on the equality of women with a charming technologist—of just what I never learned—who assured me firmly that most European men were like most Chinese ones on that topic.

Then I goofed. I remarked to the head of the delegation, from their Paris embassy, I guessed, that the more spying the better: if Britain had lots of spies in China, and it had plenty in Britain, we'd both know what the other was up to, and so lessen the risk of an accidental incident that might escalate beyond control.

Suddenly, imperial China, the China that once told George III's envoy that it needed none of Europe's useless inventions, was reborn. Icily, the diplomat told me it was inconceivable, nay, gravely insulting, to suppose that China could even think of posting spies in Britain. In vain did I suggest to him that Britain certainly spied on his country, was it not just imaginable that China's intelligence services—no kin to diplomats, naturally—did so in ours? But that, of course, I intended no offence to the glorious People's Republic.

In vain indeed. Say what I might, the higher he got on his Tang horse, making it plain that uncouth Britons might indeed behave so grubbily but that civilised Chinese did not. I could almost hear him racially repaying, in kind, the Westerners who sneered at Johnny Chinaman 80 years before. Next morning Schwab's team told me the Chinese were threatening to pull out unless they got an apology in writing.

Since I thought it indeed desirable that post-Mao China rediscover the market, and since, more potently, I was the symposium's guest, I readily complied. In my floweriest French, I wrote assuring Monsieur le whatever his post was that of course it was inconceivable that etc etc, that I entirely withdrew any such absurd idea, and if I had unwittingly implied even the faintest stain etc etc I deeply regretted it, etc etc etc. And did my best not to fall about laughing.

We both knew I was lying: the man was playing the fool, but he surely wasn't one. But my face was straight, his was duly saved, the Chinese stayed on, I wrote an epigram on the inequality of men in my most flattering French for Mme la charming technologue, and returned later to London deeply grateful that it lay 5,000 miles from Beijing and that I lived in that brief window of history where the obvious natural superiority of the Chinese might, just conceivably, not be true.

January 18th 2008 | Sticks, stones, and cricketers' moans

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Faced with the proposition that Australian cricketers might be shocked and distressed to encounter bad language on the field, Stephen Hugh-Jones struggles respectfully to control his hoots of laughter ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Oh dear, the cricketing world is in uproar, over a single word. Did one member of the Indian team in Sydney really call one black—well, blackish—member of the Australian side a "monkey"?

One side angrily said he did, the other as indignantly denied it and the affair swelled almost into a diplomatic incident, with India's cricketing authorities threatening, for a time, to call off the tour. Meanwhile, column-miles of sports pages across much of the English-speaking world were spent on the alleged insult, mostly with third-hand knowledge of whether it actually happened, but many with first-hand, or at least patriotic, certainty of what the answer was and ready to denounce all who thought otherwise.

My reaction was calmer; shamefully calmer, you may think. My own sporting prejudices, and I'll admit that that's what in part they are, are against Australia. And the notion of Australian cricketers complaining—officially!—that some other team has used less-than-gentlemanly words on-field (sledging is the Australo-cricketing term of art) has me in hoots. But the match referee called on to sort things out reckoned the insult really was delivered, so I guessed it probably was. But did it horrify me? No.

For a start, sledging is indeed the norm in Oz cricket; most Australian players simply shut their ears to it. For a second thing, monkey, though indeed offensive, is hardly the worst missile that can be and is directed at dark-skinned Australians. It's not two centuries since white Tasmanians set out to shoot black ones as if they literally were wild beasts. That ought, I know, to make today's white Australians more than usually sensitive about racist insults, but it hasn't. It's quite untrue what we were taught as children, that

Sticks and stones may break your bones,
But words will never hurt you.

But I'll bet the Aussie cricketer concerned, let alone countless truly black Australians, has met worse than verbal rudery in his time.

That doesn't make any insult trivial. But, in sum, language has to be seen in its context. Its force depends not just on the words, but on who says them, to whom, where and when, how and why. Sure, public-bar joshing can end in a race riot; the (mostly) mild anti-semitism of a century ago led one country to Auschwitz. But plenty of things can decently be said, and not just on ethnic topics, in private, that one would rightly condemn if they were bawled through a microphone to incite some mob to turn insult into injury.

Be honest: have you never thought viciously, nay, among friends so spoken, of some class of people—taxmen, bankers, politicians, journalists, your fellow motorists? And if you have, should you hang your head publicly in the pillory? Did you really want them all run into jail or off the road?

In this case, the supposedly offending Indian was not at some Nuremberg rally. He was not—as happens at some European football grounds—in a mob waving giant plastic bananas ("just off the trees," geddit?) and mouthing obscenities when black players get the ball. He was in the middle of a wide sports ground, one of two Indian batsmen there, among eleven unfriendly Australians, and he mouthed angrily at one of these; not so angrily, even, that everyone heard what he said. The two umpires didn't, for a start.

And what bones, even metaphorically, were broken, or could have been? That matters. When I worked in then-Bombay on an Indian newspaper, the headlines of a local weekly once vilified me as a WHITE CUB. I was furious. Today, I ask myself why. The Britons who once ran India were racist often enough; and they were top of the heap. White-faces are no longer on top there, but we're certainly not at the bottom, let alone were we so in the 1960s. Racist insults, however stupid, could do me no harm.

Granted, no dark-skinned Australian is in quite that happy position. But this particular one was at no risk. Any national cricketer is one of Australia's elite. No way would other members of the team, or anyone else, turn on him sneering at the "abo" to go off again to the outback. Far from it, they rallied round.

In contrast, in the mid-1990s I was for months systematically smeared as an anti-semite by adherents of an American hyper-Likudnik organisation, because some articles in the section of The Economist that I was running implied that, at times, the Palestinians had a point. The smear was a total and shameless lie, one often aimed at journalists, and intended to damage, if possible silence, them. Sometimes it works. Such insults will never do the harm that anti-semitic ones have. But it made me very angry then, and it still does.

Back at the monkey puzzle, it'll probably fizzle out. But it's already had one truly ugly by-product: a retired Indian cricket captain's suggestion, albeit attributed to other Indians, that the (white) South Arican match referee judging the word had indeed been spoken had so decided on "emotion", not facts; a white man accepting the word of white players and rejecting that of brown ones. This was written, days later, in a big-circulation newspaper, not muttered, mid-field, in the heat of a hard-fought match. It came from a man whose distinguished career must often have seen white umpires rule in his favour against the appeals of his white opponents. Of two Indian cricketers, I wonder which really has more endangered race relations in the game.

January 11th 2008 | Sex and sensibility

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A pleasure to see so much Jane Austen on television and film, says Stephen Hugh-Jones, and it would be even more of a pleasure if modern adaptors could get the social nuances right, and the sexual ones in proportion ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

I'm married to a ghost. Well, the simulacrum of one. Jane Austen's, to be exact. My wife once lived in the house in Winchester where the novelist spent her last weeks. The two women hardly look alike, but whenever the modern one appeared at her front window, the tour-guided Japanese and Americans dutifully raised their cameras. Perhaps she should have stuck to the place: at even a modest fee of a few pennies per tourist/shot, she'd be making a good living these days. Whatever may be happening to the rest of British manufacturing, the Jane Austen audiovisuals industry is in fine fettle and pouring out new products.

ITV, Britain's main private-sector television chain, better known for its sitcoms and unreality TV, launched three Austen adaptations last year: "Mansfield Park", "Persuasion" and "Northanger Abbey". The BBC on January 12th completes transmission of its three-part version of "Sense and Sensibility". On the big screen, 2005 brought a lush version of "Pride and Prejudice", and British cinemas last year followed with "Becoming Jane", which purported to describe Austen's personal life.

There's been plenty more. And enjoyable viewing most of what I've seen has been. But "products" and "purported" are indeed the words. Austen, an acute observer, would not have expected the sensibility, or the prejudices, of the early 19th century to be those of the early 21st. But she might have hoped those of her time at least to be understood, and where appropriate respected. If so, her spirit will have been disappointed.

The costumes and the furnishing, I'm told, are duly in period. Handsome young men in knee-breeches, young bosoms barely restrained by Empire dresses, no doubt look very much as they did then. The endless dances are presumably choreographed as their originals were, and quite possibly better performed. Horses are horses. But the adaptors go cheerfully astray in their sense of class, a key element of Ms Austen's books. And woefully so in their sense of sexual practice, a very small element indeed.

Don't blame the script-writers if their miracles of compression at times produce phrases that Jane Austen not just didn't use—fair enough—but couldn't have, since they hadn't been invented. Nor yet the casting directors if British drama schools have taught too many young actresses to pronounce the word you as yeeuh, like receptionists at some Essex dental practice. These are trifles, and it was ever thus. No one blames Shakespeare if Richard III, indeed star-cross'd Italian lovers, use the language of an Elizabethan playwright; and any director is provably mistaken who thinks that Britain's classes and masses sound today as they did when Shaw wrote "Pygmalion", let alone a century before that.

But oh dear, the locations. Jane Austen herself was the daughter of a country clergyman; his parish at Steventon is some 25 miles from my home, the house at Chawton (shown above) where she wrote about a dozen. Both are modest places. So are her women. Their young men tend to be grander. But she did not stray far above the class to which she belonged: her characters are of the gentry and squirearchy, plus the odd baronet, but not grandees. And except for Bath, and London (which she never visited), her settings, however she may name them, mostly reflect her gentle native Hampshire or areas nearby.

If only today's directors and cameramen were so modest. But no. The young men's houses are not those of country squires, more like ducal palaces. Mr Darcy, who wins Elizabeth's Bennet's heart in "Pride and Prejudice" was indeed richer than most, but untitled. Yet for his northern seat, Pemberley, the 2005 film used Chatsworth (shown, right), which is literally the home of dukes, those of Devonshire. In last year's "Northanger Abbey", one shot of that house suggested to me nearby Arundel Castle, it too owned by dukes, those of Norfolk. I was wrong, but not wildly so: it was in fact Lismore Castle, the huge and spectacular Irish seat of, again, the dukes of Devonshire. Interiors too are often shot in grand houses, with decor, furnishings and family pictures far beyond any squire's means.

In the new "Sense and Sensibility", the family home that our heroines have to quit when their mean brother inherits, is in fact magnificent Wrotham Park, near London: built, it is true, by untitled Admiral Byng (the one executed in the 1750s pour encourager les autres) but splendid enough for any earl, rather than the equally untitled squires who in fiction owned it. Conversely the Devon cottage to which our heroines retreat—in the book, a fairly new one, half a mile of fertile, plainly docile fields and woods from the mansion of the family friend it belongs to—has been downgraded into a crude, ancient, maybe smuggler's cottage on the wildest part of the Devon coast.

The issue isn't one of infidelity to Jane Austen. It is the disconcerting clash between the characters and their properties: they are of one class, their homes of another.

The issue of sex goes deeper. Andrew Davies, the successful script-writer—and, yes, he mostly deserves to be—of more than one such adaptation, thinks it his business to put back the sex that Jane Austen left out. Charlotte Bronte, inaccurately, accused her of knowing little of the female heart. Davies's concern is femininity well below the belt. Jane Austen indeed knew little of this, and female sexuality is indeed not an invention of the late 20th century. But it was ludicrous to start the Beeb's new "S-and-S" with a scene better suited to some soft-porn movie, even if it did not morph into the routine gasping-'n'-writhing footage that today's film-makers presumably can hire by the orgasmful.

The issue again is not fidelity to Austen. It's the importation of 21st-century sensibility into a society that did not share it. Sure, her age had its sex, its seductions and its licentious side, what age doesn't? But that wasn't the side that she was writing about. The result again is discord. I've nothing against gasping or writhing, nor against ducal magnificence—in their proper place. But are they really needed, even in 2008, to sell Jane Austen?

(Picture of Chawton by bods/Flickr; Chatsworth by AndrewNZ/Flickr)

January 4th 2008 | William bloody Shakespeare

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William Shakespeare was "a decent jobbing wordsmith", ventures the London Times. Whether you like him or not, he was a great deal more than that, thunders Stephen Hugh-Jones ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

So "William bloody Shakespeare" was no more than "a decent jobbing wordsmith", "churning out" (or paying someone to churn out) "endless neo-Tudor histrionics". Incomprehensible histrionics too. Well, indeed. That was the gist of a piece by Giles Whittell in the London Times in December. Last week, while praising the same newspaper's Matthew Parris for the best article in my 12 months' reading, I promised some light New Year relief from the silliest. So here it is.

Anyone has a right to be switched off by Shakespeare. Whittell is, and how. His philippic was amusingly written, but without a hint of tongue-in-cheek. You might suspect his real purpose was just to get a rise out of the boring old Bard-farts, but I think not: his own histrionics suggest he truly believes what he says. Which would be a pity, for a serious journo, since most of his arguments were garbage.

Fair enough if he'd stuck to condemning, as he did, the obscurity of Shakespeare's plots—a few do have that quality—or the "sheer opacity" of his language. Opaque it can be when first you meet it, let alone as delivered at Stratford speed, or indeed later. He might have added, as he didn't, that Shakespeare's humour is often leaden to modern ears. Or said of more than one of the historical plays, as Samuel Johnson did of "Paradise Lost", that "no one ever wished it longer." Or even, however questionably, that it was all the work of Bacon/the Earl of Oxford/nay, Queen Victoria (as Monsignor Ronald Knox could no doubt have proved) anyway. Alas, Whittell went much further.

He damned

the orgiastic group-think dripping from every one of [the plays]; the industrialised, irresistible consensus; the greatness thrust upon them by brainwashed English teachers ... mindlessly reaffirmed by every A-level English examiner, and worshipped with world-class awestruck claptrap by academics and directors from Stanford to Irkutsk.

Nicely put, but easily shortened: what Whittell thinks, an awful lot of people don't.

What an army of robotic teachers and encephalitic examiners! What fools all these theatre directors: no understanding of drama, nor even of commerce—they must want to see their companies playing to empty houses. Except, bizarrely, that the houses aren't empty, they're full. So it's the audiences who are fools? Clever people, dim people, rich ones, poorer ones, students, salesmen, people speaking fifty languages from Tierra del Fuego via Jakarta to Spitsbergen; people like me, who had barely thought about Shakespeare, or been invited to, until first I met "King Lear" and was thunderstruck: what a bunch of led-by-the-nose ninnies we are.

But Whittell knows why Shakespeare "has acquired immunity from the big, loud puncturing he deserves." First, he's out of copyright—

perfect for schools and am-dram, but also professional theatre companies and movie studios ... without paying anyone or tangling with the strike-prone Writers' Guild of America.

Ah, so that's why schools and amateur companies line up to put on "Henry IV, Part 2" rather than "The Mousetrap" (or, back in the real world, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" instead of "Mourning Becomes Electra"). That's why every tenth Hollywood film credits the screenplay to one W. Shakespeare.

Second, "the academic compulsion to fill the literary-historical void between Chaucer and the truly protean genius of Dickens." And, third, "the post-industrial bourgeoisie needed a canon of secular scripture whose base obsessions they shared."

This is seriously weird. It reads as if Shakespeare floruit about 1950, and one G. Whittell was born 40 years after that. The boring old reality is that Shakespeare's reputation was already high some 400 years ago: 250 or so years before any academic laid quill pen upon it—and had none of them heard of Donne, Milton, Pope, Sheridan, Jane Austen, Shelley, Byron ... flourishing in the meantime? Yes, and around 380 years before there was a post-industrial bourgeoisie.

Still, Shakespeare's "defenders say he repays study". As does Britain's Highway Code, Whittell adds mockingly. Really? "What d'you think of Marx, Comrade Lenin?" "Oh, he repays study". "And the New Testament, you born-again Christian?" "Well, it's worth reading." What admirer of Shakepeare ever defended him with such faint praise?

"They also say that Shakespeare, not Dickens, was the true genius." Do they? Which defenders, exactly? Of many thousands, name us five who have ever sought to praise Shakespeare by decrying Dickens.

Anyway, "he filched most of his stories from the ancients and English history." Untrue. Neither source inspired "Hamlet", "Lear", "Othello"—need I go on?—or most of the comedies. But let that pass, let's agree that Shakespeare borrowed from all over the place. The real absurdity follows: "That took care of content." Did it indeed? Has Whittell never written a book? (He has.) Countless novels, plays, even poems are inspired by the ideas or experience of others. Does that take care of their content? Historians indeed are not just inspired by historical fact but dependent on it. Does that take care of content, even for them?

On top, there's Shakespeare's "soporific" (and "borrowed") "dum-de-dum-de-dum." Like the same iambics, except six to the line instead of five, with which those other notorious mogadonkeys (and plot-filchers) from the Writers' Guild of Athens, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, sent their audiences to sleep? Phaedra to that.

Still, even Whittell admits one small silver lining. Very small. "With so many of a writer's decisions made for him, it would have been bizarre if he hadn't turned a florid phrase or two." A phrase or two? Like Bill Gates has made a dollar or two? Florid, if you choose to think so, though most of us, most often, wouldn't. But are all those umpteen pages in any book of quotations just a mistake?

In sum, Shakespeare "was a decent jobbing wordsmith." So now we know. For four centuries, Britain's and later the world's finest actors and directors, its subtlest critics, its other playwrights, its audiences have all been wrong. Everyone is out of step but our Giles.

At which point, Mr Whittell, enough. You and I are decent jobbing wordsmiths. Shakespeare —OK, or "Shakespeare"—was, like Dickens, a genius.

December 28th 2007 | In defence of the unthinkable

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Today's British public is as panicky about paedophiles as its ancestors were about witches, says Stephen Hugh-Jones. With more reason, maybe, but not with more thought ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Around this time of year it's my custom to sift through the articles I've clipped during the preceding 12 months (yes, clipped: I have these old-fashioned reading habits), to see which has best kept its value, and so is still worth filing, and which least. That tends to mean, respectively, what seem to me the wisest or most informative, and the silliest. Both this year came from the London Times, and a curious pair they make.

The place of honour goes to a piece by Matthew Parris, a regular columnist in that paper. It is about thought-crime. Parris was a Conservative MP from 1979 to 1986, that party's first openly gay one—not an easy thing to become in those days, or even now. That perhaps has given him a sympathy with the kind of people who are too easily damned by the public prejudice of the day, and two such people had aroused it.

One was a British actor jailed for ten months for downloading child pornography. I find paedophilia the weirdest of sexual tastes. A true perversion, I'd call it, though I imagine that, at least in part, it has genetic origins. The weirdest and the nastiest; and you can't justify its practice with the argument that what consenting adults do is their own business. Consenting or not, children aren't adults.

But that's the practice of it we're on about, not the the inclination, the imagination or even the downloading of vile images. The standard argument for punishing it anyway is that the downloaders are encouraging, and often rewarding, the child-abuse perpetrated by those who make these repugnant images. So they are; but as Parris said "you don't imprison people who knowingly consume goods produced by brutal child labour".

I'm not sure, and I doubt that he was, that that quite proves his point: forcing six-year-olds, even whipping them, to make carpets really isn't as evil as gang-raping them in front of a video camera. Yet I'm sure he is right in his general point: what people do is or may be a fit cause for punishment by criminal law, as may aiding or inciting others to do it, but what they fantasise about or indeed might like to do is not.

A court in a city near my home recently sentenced a retired judge for what awful offence? He'd downloaded pictures, thousands of them, of naked young boys. Yuk. But had he then gone out and raped their like, seduced them, touched them "inappropriately", groomed them or even offered them chocolates with those aims in mind? Nobody claimed as much. Essentially, he was convicted—and, whatever the sentence, permanently ruined in public opinion—for being what he was, feeling and thinking what he did, and failing to conceal it.

A.E. Housman, a closet homosexual, as homosexuals had to be in his day, wrote (but did not dare to publish) an angry poem in defence of the man imprisoned for "the nameless and abominable colour of his hair". For sure, homosexual and paedophile practice are not on a par. But let's not forget that in his time and earlier the homosexual variety was thought much worse: English courts sentenced nearly 70 men to hang for sodomy in the two decades 1814-34, and 39 of them actually swung. Today's British public is as panicky about paedophiles as its ancestors were about witches. With more reason, maybe, but not with more thought.

The other thought-criminal who attracted Matthew Parris's attention was of a class no more popular in today's Britain: a 23-year-old Muslim woman who had downloaded stuff which the court judged was, as Britain's new anti-terrorism law puts it, "of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism." She had also—and I suspect this was the real offence that got her convicted—written a thoroughly nasty and gory poem praising the beheading of "infidels". She hadn't emailed or printed out bomb-making advice for some would-be "martyrs". She hadn't preached her brand of violence at Speaker's Corner, nor even, so far as the court was told anyway, at her local mosque; she'd written a viciously ugly little poem

I've no sympathy whatever with those who feel such bloodthirsty ethnic hate: I share the public-bar view that if this young woman detests most of her fellow-citizens so much she's welcome to leave for some civilised country, say Saudi Arabia, where she need meet few barbarians like us and will be treated as (in that country's view, and presumably hers) Islam reckons Muslim women ought to be. But I agree strongly with Parris that she was really found guilty of was not even potentially aiding terrorism but "her state of mind".

That seems to me profoundly wrong, and almost as profoundly dangerous. Britain is at risk of reverting, in some ways, to a modern version of the days when heresy could get you burned at the stake. So far, we've taken only a few steps down that road. But it could be a long one, and it's certainly a slippery one. I salute a braver columnist than myself for choosing two of the most unpopular thought-crimes to denounce the fact that thought crime is criminal at all, and urging that we halt, step backward and close the road, now.

And, in contrast, my booby prize? My silliest piece of the year (no, I don't mean written by me, though I don't doubt others can point one out)? By contrast with Parris's piece, its subject, a matter of language and literature, was trivial, though it too challenged conventional thinking, and its arguments for doing so were mostly and manifestly absurd. But more of that, for light New Year relief, next week.

December 21st 2007 | The staying power of the monarchy

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The British monarchy owes its survival to the forces of habit and inertia, and, lately, to a special admiration for Queen Elizabeth. Stephen Hugh-Jones lets a little daylight in on the magic ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

"Monarchy," The Economist once declared, with the regal certainty dear to readers of our sister-publication, is "an idea whose time has gone." Well, one could wish it, and commonsense says it should be so. But a five-part series that the BBC will finish broadcasting on December 23rd suggests otherwise, in Britain at least. More widely than that, I fear we at The Economist were mistaken.

It was crowned fools who jointly ruined Europe in 1914-18, deservedly destroying the imperial thrones of Austria, Germany and Russia in the process. Yet hereditary monarchs still reign in Britain, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, plus a couple of princes (Monaco and Liechtenstein) and a grand-duke (Luxembourg). In Europe's past 50 years only the throne of Greece has gone under, in 1973-74; and, in a sort of compensation, elections brought Bulgaria's prime ministership from 2001 until 2005 to its former King Simeon II.

Elsewhere, Iraq and Iran lost their monarchies, both pretty bogus, in 1958 and 1979, as did Afghanistan in 1973. Nepal's is under grave threat. But Cambodia, having got rid of monarchy has restored a version of it. China's imperial throne is almost a century gone, but Japan's survives. Thailand still has a monarch; so does Jordan; so do Canada, New Zealand and even Australia, albeit she is better known as queen of the United Kingdom and, in Australia, may soon be dumped.

The dynastic principle rules even in some republics. Both North Korea and Syria are run by sons of their late dictators; Iraq might well have gone that way had Saddam Hussein been left in power. That's maybe no surprise, given the habits of dictators. Yet elections have made three generations of the Nehru family prime ministers of India, and there could one day be a fourth. Singapore's third prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, is the son of its first, Lee Kuan Yew. And wives or widows have won the top jobs their husbands used to hold in Argentina, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, with Hillary Clinton maybe yet to join them.

For a dying idea, and one with umpteen histories of misrule, misjudgment, misbehaviour, misalliance and sometimes missing wits, that's not bad going. How come? The BBC's series on the work of Britain's current royals offers a clue. Looking above stairs and below, it has been factual enough, funny at times, silly at others, never critical and often over-polite. Yet like or dislike the principle, one thing it made clear: Elizabeth II, now in her 56th year on the throne, works hard at her job, and does it well. And a second thing: the profound force, in this issue, of habit and of inertia.

No sane man would invent a monarchy today. Yet you can deride the idea and still, quite sanely, see no point in overturning an applecart which, however creaking, runs as well as more modern forms of head-of-stately transport. Britain's royals, especially its Prince Charles, have had a pretty rough ride from the media these past 15 years; and its public might well be happy to see him tire of waiting and step aside in favour of his elder son. Yet I can imagine Charles succeeding—if his mother's remarkable health ever gives him the chance—and quite soon changing the public's mind for it.

The same forces must surely dash the hopes, if commonsense does not do it anyway, of the sundry "heirs" to Europe's former thrones. Only one such has managed the trick since the 1930s: today's Juan Carlos of Spain, who owed his reinstated throne to Francisco Franco, yet was barely on it after the dictator's death in 1975 than he proved a firm defender of democracy, turning up in person in the parliament to frustrate the bunglers of a would-be military coup there. He's not as popular today as that made him then, though his recent tart rebuke to Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, "Why don't you shut up?", at an Ibero-Latin American summit, did him no harm at home; but he sits secure, whatever one may wonder about his son.

Other could-be claimants have mostly had more sense than to try. The grandest of them, Otto von Habsburg, renounced any claim to Austria's ex-empire, and became a valued member of the European Parliament (and, when The Economist set up a lecture in memory of its well-loved ex-Austrian librarian, Charles Stransky, delivered the first Stransky lecture; not every Viennese Jew has had such a kaddish). Germany has a few princes, not least a Hohenzollern, who use that title without claiming its powers. Only in France do monarchists—two rival clans of them—pretend ostentatiously to its non-existent throne. The late Count of Paris once, it is said, believed that General de Gaulle might reinvent it for him; a delusion, if true, that surely showed him unfit for it anyway.

My own acquaintance with royalty has been strictly at second hand, bar one wild—but in itself perfectly sensible—political indiscretion from the Duke of Edinburgh. My London office used to overlook the Mall, but I never felt the need to watch the Queen being driven to or fro. Yet, quaint as I think it, I wouldn't go to the barricades against Britain's monarchy, though I'd readily do so against the sort of people most keen, for their sort of motives, to overthrow it. In place, it doesn't matter enough. It's part of our silly class system, but not the source; influential, but not powerful, let alone powerful enough, as Mohammed al Fayed seems, ludicrously, to think, to have the secret services—servants of the government, not the palace—murder an inconvenient princess.

But I do think it should join the modern world in one respect: at least informally, term limits. There really are good reasons why no one should be 56 years in any top job. Too late now, but what a pity Queen Elizabeth didn't, as a Dutch queen might have done, hand over to her heir 20 years ago; and take up a new trade in which her experience, enthusiasm and hard work (and money) would surely have made her no less successful: as a racehorse trainer.

December 14th 2007 | Get lost, Greenpeace

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The green lobby is right about a lot of things. But it would be much more admirable, says Stephen Hugh-Jones, if it could learn to wear its virtue more modestly, and leave a touch more room for self-doubt ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

A few weeks ago I wrote of some overweening bumblecrats—no, forgive me, it was Britain's Olympic Delivery Authority, quite a different thing, surely—who had "taken it upon themselves to nanny the British nation out of its cars". I was mistaken. I withdraw the word unreservedly. For nanny read chivvy, push, shove, force, police or, why not, while we're at it, thumbscrew us toward that desirable end.

Not that I really think our Olympiarchs would go to that extreme. But their plans certainly go as far as policing: how else are they to enforce their insolent schemes for London's roads? And there are plenty of others who would readily go further still. Being, or at least talking, green, and compelling other people to be so, is the name of the game in Britain these days.

Let us agree that the end is indeed desirable. Cars clog Britain's cities and pollute its air. They add to man-made global warming, a nasty phenomenon whose reality I, like many sensible people, once doubted, and, like most sensible ones by now, today accept as a fact. What isn't desirable at all is the self-righteousness with which the green lobby preaches such things as truths that one cannot morally question, or even qualify; and damn as sinners all who do not take the counter-measures that they demand. Savonarola, the self-appointed scourge of Florence, and Carlyle's "sea-green incorruptible" Robespierre—snot-green corrupt, in fact, up to his eyeballs, where the rights of men other than himself were concerned—were like this.

Listen to Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. Listen indeed—you can hardly avoid it, so readily do journalists hang on their words. And why not, after all? They know the issues and the answers, don't they? Don't they just, and don't they just know it. Does it ever even cross their minds that they may be fallible, like other humans?

It certainly doesn't cross their lips. Not an iota of self-doubt infects the pronunciamentos of their spokesmen. Do they ever say should when they can say must? Shoppers must (plastic bags and food-miles), drivers must (gas-guzzlers, nay cars of almost any sort), airline passengers must (stay on the ground), electricity-users must (switch off), and, of course and endlessly, governments must.

Let's agree again that they may be very largely right about climate change, and the urgency of action to halt it; countless scientists are on their side, so too the United Nations, not to add Al Gore. And their strident certainty might be excusable if they confined it to this one huge issue. But they don't. They are just as certain, just as strident, but at least arguably mistaken, about another of their obsessive hates, nuclear energy—the only real-world alternative, in the short term, to fossil fuels. And much of what they preach, with equal self-certainty, about yet another pet hate, genetically modified crops, is emotive claptrap. Humankind, in ever-rising numbers, has been eating these alleged "Frankenfoods" for more than ten years now. So far, not one of us has been shown to suffer as much as a stomach-ache from them.

These greens are worthy folk, granted. Devoted ones too: it takes that to get half-drowned and frozen to challenge Japanese whalers, or, as happened in 1985, to have your ship sabotaged, and one person drowned, by a French government happy—not alone—to use the far side of the globe as its nuclear test site. They ask real questions. They may have the right answers. Yet it is possible not to share their (and on some issues my) views without being a moral cretin. Or even wrong.

Even were they always and entirely right, it is also possible to preach virtue without quite such a show of one's own gleaming halo. Or such an assumption of authority. Who appointed these and other such lobby groups to boss the planet and the lives of the six billion rest of us? Isn't that what we elect governments for, with all their many and manifest faults?

The section of The Economist that I was then running once carried a story from our Vancouver stringer on public opinion in those parts about logging. The public of British Columbia wasn't vastly bothered, he reported. In thundered a letter from Thilo Bode, the chief panjandrum of Greenpeace at its global headquarters in Amsterdam. Before printing such stuff, why, it asked indignantly, and very much de haut en bas, hadn't we consulted them? Greenpeace could have given us reams of information about the sundry flora and fauna at risk from the loggers.

No doubt it could have, and maybe at risk they were. But, as I replied to him, though our stringer had indeed talked to Greenpeace's supporters on the spot, our story wasn't about wildlife, it was about public opinion there. And on that topic we thought a professional reporter in British Columbia likelier to know the facts than a professional pressure-group in Amsterdam.

Alas, the courtesy due from a dignified, measured magazine to its readers constrained my pen. What I wanted to tell this one, and I wish now that I had, was to get lost.

That is a sinfully unmeasured, undignified way of reacting to people whose concern for our planet, and knowledge of it, must be ten times greater than mine. But by the time you have been hectored silly by a host of self-canonised saints, sin has its excuses, does it not?

December 7th 2007 | Enjoy democracy while it lasts

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The price of liberty can be paid in many currencies, from studied casualness in Scandinavia to guns and goons in Bogota and Baghdad. If you live in a well-functioning country, be grateful, says Stephen Hugh-Jones ...

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What do we mean by democracy? I'm increasingly convinced that those of us who enjoy the best of it have little idea. We think it means free and fair elections. And we so blithely take our good luck for granted that we may cheerfully ignore these: when Americans next year elect someone to the most powerful office on the planet, around half of them probably won't bother to vote at all.

In contrast, there are great areas of the world where the will of the people calls for something much cruder than freedom to vote: freedom from fear. Yet, given the chance, these people are as ready to go to the polling station as we are.

I'm inspired to these thoughts by a grainy, grim picture from Colombia. The first time and, I add happily, the last that I was in Bogota, in 1998, it was the capital of a country under siege from drug-financed thugs: the plain drug barons apart, two guerrilla forces on the so-called left, one from the so-called right. True, within the city, the main risk to ordinary folk was sudden disappearance from the face of the earth down a hole in the road, because someone had stolen the manhole cover. Not so elsewhere, and nowhere so for politicians.

Though neither won, that year's presidential election had been shaken up by two women candidates. One, she told the Economist's stringer and myself, had received threats to her children and had evacuated them to New Zealand—instantly. As we left her house, she drove us downtown. I noticed a scruffy jeep-like vehicle and its scruffy, armed occupants, seemingly tailing us. They were. But "that's all right," she said, "they're my bodyguards".

The other woman was Ingrid Betancourt. Since 2002 she's been a prisoner of the 'left' guerrillas, held in the jungle for no one quite knows what purpose. It was her gaunt face that figured in a video captured by the security forces—OK, "security", if you insist—and released to the media a week ago. She's a brave woman, not for being captured and surviving so long, but entering politics at all.

How different things can be in Europe. Six years back, I had an appointment with the about-to-be prime minister of Denmark. He had just won an election and was to be formally appointed next morning. "Come at 9.00," he said, since my plane would leave around midday. I arrived a bit early at his house in the woods of a suburb outside Copenhagen.

Security troops? Machineguns? Barbed wire? Policemen? Guard dogs? There wasn't even a spokesman. The gate was open. Trailing my carry-on trolley of freshish clothes—but it could just as well have held a bomb—I walked up the drive, and onto the verandah. Through a window I saw the future prime minister from the back, shaving. In common courtesy rather than anything special due to prime ministers, I tiptoed back and sat peacefully in a chair on the verandah; at 8.59 rang at the door, which he opened; had a long, indeed prolonged, talk and coffee made by his wife; and off to the airport. Anders Fogh Rasmussen is still alive, still unkidnapped, indeed he last month won a third election.

I had a like, but almost less likely, experience in Finland a year later. I was due to meet the prime minister, Paavo Lipponen, at the parliament. I suppose I was frisked as I walked into the building, but nothing that I recall. When I got to his office, I was given a message: he was delayed in the chamber, would I please wait in the office till he was free. I did so. Alone. What secrets the prime minister of Finland may keep in his desk I don't know. But only, maybe, because I didn't look.

Of course, this isn't typical of all Europe: Denmark and Finland are not large countries (and let's not forget, as indeed I remarked to Mr Lipponen, that Sweden had lost an informal prime minister, Olof Palme, to murder a few years before). I doubt that such ease of access has been known in Downing Street since the 1930s, if then. But that it could happen at all, anywhere, ever... Let us be grateful.

In fact, we aren't grateful at all. We take personal security so much for granted that we only notice it when, as these days in Britain, it has to be—or at least is—rigorously enforced. And by and large we, or at least I, dislike or indeed resent, its enforcement. Not that we are liberty-lovers; we just don't see that liberty and security—yes, and order—go hand-in-hand.

As, in Britain, they very largely still do. Not so in much of the world, much of Africa notably, where unlaw goes with order, and security means a a squad of uniformed bully-boys demanding, at least, a bribe or else. I once wrote in The Economist an editorial on the mythical central African country of Ordinia. It was run by Swiss from the canton of Ordnungszell, policed by Maoris and its soldiers were Gurkhas. It offered no votes, no free press, no state welfare, no guaranteed jobs; just an open door to anyone who wanted to settle there. And order and security.

A kindly editor printed the piece, knowing full well that it was he, not I, who would carry the can for what would predictably be denounced as shameless colonialism. I still wonder, as its closing lines did, how many inhabitants Ordinia would have, and how many would be left in the rest of Africa.

And yet Africans queue for hours to vote, so do Iraqis. In that presidential election over 60 percent of Columbia's voters went to the polls; proportionally, more than will vote to determine the next occupant of the Oval office.

November 30th 2007 | Free speech and fascism at Oxford

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Shocked by demonstrations at an Oxford Union debate this week, Stephen Hugh-Jones argues that free speech is too precious to be trampled down, however repugnant the speakers ...

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If they wanted to see fascism in embryo, Britons didn't have to go far this week: not to Caracas, say, or Moscow, just Oxford.

It is home to the Oxford Union, a student debating society, much fancied—and with some reason—by 21-year-old would-be politicians, and much ignored, with equal reason, by most other people, Oxford undergraduates included. The Union had had a bright idea: a debate on free speech, whose main guest speakers would be David Irving, a not-quite neo-Nazi British historian, and Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party.

Both are controversial figures, Irving a well-known one. Generally labelled a Holocaust-denier, he is not in fact entirely so: he by now accepts that very many Jews were indeed murdered by the Nazis, though with sundry ifs, buts and quibbles about the methods and numbers. He used to argue that Hitler personally did not order the massacre. Even that view, I believe, he has since modified. But his writings and sympathies are on record, and for years he has been active in extreme-right gatherings. Only last December did he emerge from prison in Austria, where expressing views such as his is a criminal offence.

I doubt it was his historical studies of Hitler's Germany that first shaped those views. The other way about, I suspect, recalling an incident from 50 years ago. At the time, I was editor of The Isis, a student weekly at Oxford. Into our office, and no doubt others like it, came a curious letter. Claiming support from various then-familiar bits of the loony right such as the League of Empire Loyalists, it informed us floridly that a new wave was about to sweep through British universities, flushing them clean of communism and kindred ills. The letter was signed D.J.Irving.

I fear we first binned it, then retrieved it, trimmed its crumpled edges a bit, and published a half-tone of it, in mockery. Not till decades later did I recall the letter and guess who its signatory—not yet 20 the time—must surely have been.

Griffin, by comparison, is small fry. His party dislikes immigrants in general, and non-whites, whether immigrant or British-born. Its brand of national-populism certainly has appeal beyond its small membership, and it wins a few local-council seats, mainly where racial tensions are high. Incitement to race hate is a crime in British law, and Griffin in 1998 got a nine-month jail sentence for that.

Here, then, were two men who might have something to say about free and unfree speech, and notorious enough to ensure that the event drew a crowd.

It did, but not the one the Oxford Union was hoping for: a parade of baying demonstrators waving placards supplied by Unite Against Fascism, a Troskyite front, declaring Stop the fascist BNP. Most seemed as intent on stopping the two men being able to speak at all. Some, denouncing "Nazi scum", blocked people hoping to attend the debate. Others burst into the hall and caused uproar inside. Eventually, the event went belatedly ahead, in farcical form, with the two principals speaking in separate rooms.

The far left, of course, was at the demo in abundance. I detest what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it has never figured in Trotskyite ideology except as a length of bourgeois-liberal rope to hang the bourgeoisie with. Not that anyone knew what Irving or Griffin did plan to say: why bother, when it's the man you object to?

There too was the student Islamic society; understandably, given Griffin's racist views and the tenuous link between Islam and free speech. Also there was the student Jewish society, it too understandably but even less creditably: had they forgotten the very solid link between the silencing of unwelcome views and the rise of howling anti-semitic mobs in Hitler's Germany and Austria? One co-president of this society was reported as rebutting "the accusation that we want to deny people free speech" with "we just don't want to give them any more platforms to air their views"—like those in the 1930s who "had nothing against Jews, I just dislike their yarmulkes, synagogues, bar-mitzvahs and kosher kitchens. And money". One may suppose that his studies include neither democratic politics nor logic.

Whether fascism is the word for either Griffin or Irving, I don't know; maybe, if you accept its extension by the far left to mean no more than far right. That either man proposed to display its principles in the debate I doubt, let alone to call for the gassing of Jews or expulsion of Muslims. But one face of fascism was certainly on display that evening—in the street.

If speech were free as air, this wouldn't much matter. It isn't. Our ancestors spent centuries, till very recently, and even now in not many countries, establishing the principle. Nothing, not even the American Constitution, guarantees that it will endure. It has limits; rightly, but there are plenty of people eager to tighten them.

The protestors' placards bore another slogan, a familiar one, albeit not in their politically corrected wording: For evil to triumph, all that is necessary is that good people do nothing. There's a still easier way: do the evil yourself.

November 23rd 2007 | Roasting the Pope

Never discount the strength of other people's gut feelings, especially in matters of religion, says Stephen Hugh-Jones—who admits to a touch of old-fashioned English anti-papism himself ...

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So the 950-year-old rift between the Roman Catholic church and the Orthodox may be patched up: the Pope and his cardinals are meeting on November 23rd to discuss a document to that end. If I were Satan, I'd be laughing all the way to the stokehole: artificial unity is a splendid way of creating its opposite. But what gets my adrenalin flowing is the words Roman Catholic.

My childhood home was in a Scottish village. My "uncle" was an elder of the kirk. His English wife, my godmother, was an Anglican. So most Sundays the household went to the Presbyterian village church, but occasionally to an Episcopal one in the town nearby. The differences caused not a tremor in its harmony.

Just what divided the two sects I never grasped. Bishops, of course, different forms of service, and a few peculiarities of behaviour thereat. Anglicans crossed themselves, Presbyterians didn't. Anglicans knelt to say their prayers, Presbyterians merely leant forward in their seats. Hence the Presbyterian gibe;

The Pisky prays upon his knees,
His back he winna bend,
Because he darena meditate
Upon his latter end.

But all was good-humoured.

Not so the local view of Roman Catholicism. For us English, hostility sprang from ancient politics. The little history I learned at school taught me of Mary Tudor, the bigot whose five-year reign saw some 300 Protestants put to death; of papal efforts to unthrone the queen of England, her successor Elizabeth I; of Catholic Spain and its Armada; of Catholic Guy Fawkes plotting to blow up Parliament; of James II trying to reinstate his Catholicism in a country that had rejected it. Why all this should matter 300 or 400 years later I did not ask.

Scottish Presbyterians, truer heirs of Martin Luther and the Reformation, had deeper reasons. To some, the Pope was next door to Antichrist. That didn't much bother them, so long as he stayed there. Yet at one point on the road to Glasgow, a wall bore in white-painted letters five feet high the message HELL ROST THE POP. Its spelling apart, not a few Scots would have agreed.

A few years later the minister of the kirk was, in effect, forced out. Not because he used a few phrases from the Anglican prayer-book, and thus originally, in Latin, the Roman one: I doubt his congregation knew that. His offence was more obscure.

The church's worn-out organ stood at its east end, behind the communion table. A replacement was found, but too large to go there. Put it at the side, in one of the transepts, he suggested. Why, growled some who maybe had other bones to pick with him? Does Mr Potts want to shift the Lorrrd's Table backward into the east end, where the Romans have it?—(a move which, today, Rome is busily reversing). He found it expedient to seek a call elsewhere.

All this in an area not remote, not backward, not notably religious, in the mid 20th century. I doubt that educated Roman Catholics there much cared: if you know you are right, why be worried by those who think not? Nor did my uncle. Yet lower in Scottish society such sentiments, though mostly buried, even now are not dead. You'll see the ethnic divide—I won't call it religious—whenever Glasgow's top football clubs play each other: Celtic, the Catholic (and Irish) one, in their green shirts, against Rangers, the Protestants. Football today spans the globe. Yet as late as 1989 some fans, on both sides, were enraged when Rangers signed a noted Catholic, ex-Celtic player.

And here's a confession. Having no perceptible faith myself, I'm unworried by other people's. I've worked happily with colleagues of every major Christian kind—Jews, Parsis, Hindus and Muslims, for that matter. I'm glad to know an Anglican church that has a Catholic chapel inside it. I think it entirely right that Ireland's Catholic majority at last won a state of their own, wrong as I think their efforts to force it on Northern Ireland's Protestants. Yet my childhood prejudices aren't dead either. When the late Pope John Paul created saints by the busload, my only logical comment would have been, "That's his business". It was in fact, "How absurd."

Still more so when history, however long past, is involved. When I read that the current Pope may canonise yet more of the English Catholics—40 have haloes already—claimedly martyred under Protestant monarchs, why should I care? Yet my reaction is, "What about Bloody Mary's victims?" When a wave of Anglican priests switched to Rome in the early 1990s, Britain's leading Catholic, Cardinal Basil Hume, a usually wise man, permitted himself the comment that this might be the start of "the conversion of England for which we have all prayed." My hair bristled. Have you, I thought? So the leopard hasn't changed its spots.

And when the Vatican and sundry Catholic parties wanted God written into the might-be constitution of the European Union, my true objection was not to God but to his sponsors. I wholly prefer Jesus Christ's view of "the woman taken in adultery" to the Islamic one. Yet, if ever I had to choose between the Pope and the ayatollahs, though I'd opt for the Pope I'd do it with gritted teeth.

I don't think this visceral hostility is sensible, let alone in an unbeliever. No one is trying to ram Catholicism down my throat. Yet, however little it may affect my actions, my prejudice is a fact—after 60-odd years, in a man reasonably educated, still tolerably intelligent, in a largely secular society, in the 21st century.

There are warnings in this for people like me who see human reason and conscience as better guides to modern life than are ancient scriptures, however admirable. First, that we too may be leopards. Second, that if our gut feelings are that durable, we are unwise if we discount the strength of other people's.

November 15th 2007 | The Police Struggle to Lose Our Confidence

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Londoners have a pretty high regard for their policemen, says Stephen Hugh-Jones. Which makes it all the sadder to the see the city's police chief squander that trust by ducking blame for a fatal fiasco ...

Special to MORE INTELLLIGENT LIFE

The ancient cliché calls them New York's Finest. Unlike most American cliches, it hasn't made much mark east of the Atlantic. But if London's police carry on as they have been doing lately, its equivalent may become accepted there—with all the cynicism that can go with it in New York. If these are London's finest, heaven help London.

Most Britons respect, even appreciate, their policemen, as the citizens of many countries do not. Any resident of London knows that its Metropolitan Police Force can be—a nice home-grown cliché—economical with the truth. I was once a juror when an earnest defence barrister read us a five minutes of some judge in the 1890s solemnly hinting so. Why bother, we yawned: this is London and we're all grown-up. But we think of the Met as, by-and-large, honest and most often competent. It's been working hard recently to suggest that it is neither.

Its worst blunder was in July 2005, when a squad of armed police—still mercifully rare in Britain—shot dead, on his way to work, a harmless young Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes, who had been mistakenly identified as Hussein Osman, a would-be suicide bomber eager to replicate the London bombings that had killed 52 people two weeks earlier.

The ludicrous outcome, British beyond parody, was a trial not of policemen, junior or senior, for murder, manslaughter or even scaring little old ladies with loud bangs. It was a trial of the Met, as an institution—fair enough—under (believe me) "health and safety" legislation. The force was found guilty and fined £175,000. And then?

Then nothing. British policemen do not regularly pump dum-dum bullets into an innocent. If your subordinates, in an operation managed from headquarters, have, however unwittingly, done just that, you might expect shortly to be removed, or at least golden-handshaken, from your job. You might even resign first. Not Sir Ian Blair, chief of the Met. He was going back to his work, he averred after the trial. He said it again, when London's toothless elected assembly voted that he should be sacked. And again when Britain's Independent Police Complaints Commission made public its highly critical version of the shooting and accused him of blocking its enquiry for days after it.

The central government, his ultimate boss, is stoutly backing him. So too is London's elected mayor, Ken Livingstone, on the curious ground that the Met's largely mythical independence would be endangered by giving way to a "media campaign" for its chief to be fired; the elected assembly's vote to that effect merely proved, he said, how right it was that that assembly has no power over London policing.

That's rich from Our Ken, whose favourite persona is tribune of the people against overweening authority. Nor was the media solid: one London Times columnist declared, simultaneously, (a) that it is not really Britain's foreign policy or internal security measures that cause Muslim terrorism, but terrorists, and (b) that it was not really the Met who killed Menezes but Hussein Osman. One or the other, arguably—the first, I'd say. But both in one breath? Another cliché comes to mind, for Mayor Livingstone and the Times's David Aaronovitch alike: having your cake and eating it.

And there, amid much froth about the buck stops here, and current limits to that mantra, the matter, so far, rests; at least, until London's police authority, another cardboard tiger, debates it on November 22nd.

I'm with the froth-blowers. But there's something just as alarming as the refusal of London's police chief, mayor and national government to accept that responsibility really does go to the top. It is the professional sloppiness that has been shown up.

Menezes and Osman lived in the same block of flats in South London. They looked a bit alike. Both were young and brown-skinned; quite a lot of Londoners are. A surveillance team mistook one for the other. Briefing on the operation to catch "Osman" began at Scotland Yard—minus, for 25 minutes, the senior officer named to handle it there; she'd been directed to the wrong room. An armed squad was ordered into place; hours elapsed before it turned up. In South London, two of the surveillance officers doubted that Menezes was their terrorist. Was the officer in charge at Scotland Yard informed? No. And more. In short, a shambles.

Meanwhile, the supposed "terrorist" was watched boarding a bus. Then leaving and reboarding it. Then entering a Tube station. Public transport had been the target of the earlier bombings. Did the surveillance team stop him? Did they even try? (At risk of their lives, sure, but that goes with the job). Seems not. As Menezes, unhindered, boarded a train, the firearms squad were still rushing down the escalators. They hurtled onto the train and (this, paradoxically, may—just—be the one excusable bit), believing its passengers to be at imminent risk, grabbed Menezes and summarily shot him dead.

Leave aside that the Met swiftly leaked lies to the media (Menezes supposedly had vaulted a ticket barrier in his haste to join the train; he hadn't), and now shows no more shame than does a Santa caught by the kiddies putting his beard on. Look only at London's security. One minute more and "Osman" might have set off his imagined bomb. On this form, the city might as well be guarded by the Keystone Cops.

Of course this form may be untypical. Blair's supporters assure us that the Met's, mainly hidden, successes have been legion. Maybe. Pity it's not as smart with its own cash: this week's press alleges that £3 million to £6 million has gone walkabout in Met coppers' personal expense accounts—while three years of warnings from its auditors went unheeded.

November 9th 2007 | The Case for a Nicer Nationalism

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You can be a Scottish (or Irish or Tibetan) nationalist, and the world will enthuse with you; but try being an English one and the world (to say nothing of the Scots) will give you a dark look, complains Stephen Hugh-Jones ...

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What do we mean by English? Much of the world, Americans included, uses the word as if it simply meant British. In the early 1970s I explored a ruined French farmyard whose gateway still bore, just legible, a slogan painted by its occupiers 30 years earlier: Gott strafe England. Glasgow, Cardiff and Belfast should have been so lucky. But from inside the United Kingdom, this usage sounds very odd. And increasingly so.

I'm prompted to these thoughts by the extraordinary Indian summer (there's another national adjective of diverse meanings) that the English south has enjoyed this year. We cannot match New England, with its fiery maples. But the autumn woods on the Sussex-Hampshire borders have been, oaks and beeches above all, a tapestry such as I've never seen of green, yellow, copper, bronze and gold, and, here too, occasional flaming reds.

And what a sense of place, and gratitude for it, they give me. I was brought up in Scotland. I'd happily live again in France. I'm an urban being, having spent most of my adult life in London. Yet when I see the rare splendour of these trees, the church spire amid them (not that I go there), the lanes and small, hedged fields, the Hereford cattle (all right, or Friesian) and blackfaced sheep—yes, even the plethora of pheasants, albeit bred for a slaughter I dislike by sportsmen whom I've little in common with—I feel profoundly English. This is where I belong.

That's a spirit much mocked these days. Middle-brow writing a century ago was full of England and English feeling. Yet that has largely gone, or been transmuted into a feeling for Britain. Today you can be a Scottish (or Irish or Tibetan) nationalist, and the world will enthuse with you; but be an English one and—if it's heard of Englishness at all, or has any idea that that is not identical with Britishness, which mostly it hasn't—it will mutter words like cricket, vicar, Grantchester, fox-huntin' and cream teas, or hint darkly that what you really mean is you don't like people whose faces are brown or black. Or indeed, if you go to Scotland, may greet you with a frostiness, or worse, that could make you think Edinburgh was Dublin in 1916 (where, for the record, oddly few of the Irish thought the largely justifiable Easter rising was justified at all).

Of course this isn't true of all the world, nor all Scots. And many of those muttering will be English themselves. That truly is absurd: to many Englishmen, it's fine to belong to almost any nation on earth and be proud of it (America perhaps, in their eyes, excepted), yet to say I'm English and happy to be so is at best laughable and at worst next to bellowing the Horst Wessel song at a bar-mitzvah.

I think the world, and those of my fellow English, mistaken, both in historical fairness and, more important, about present-day fact. Patriotism has been called "the last refuge of the scoundrel". So it can be. But as a generality, that is nonsense. The feeling is deep-rooted in most of us. Very deep. You can be an American and deplore this or that aspect of your country or its policies; and yet, as I surely would, sing the "Star-Spangled Banner" with a lump in your throat.

I once on television saw Jessye Norman singing the "Marseillaise" in Paris, as France celebrated the bicentenary of the fall of the Bastille. As a performance, it was ludicrous: the unfortunate diva, swathed in a huge pennant-shaped tricolour, had to sing slower and slower as band and crowd fell behind, till the lively anthem sounded more like a funeral dirge (or "God save the Queen"). But I was moved, and if I were French, my goodness I'd have felt proud.

Regional, local or ethnic 'nationalism' seems to me as natural. And sometimes as significant. I'm disinclined either to proclaim or apologise for the right or wrong that we English have done in past centuries: that was then, this is now. And much of it anyway was done in Britain's name by Scotsmen and others. But to ignore the political potential of any loyalty is folly.

Strangely, for a nation once so proud of itself, we British—yes, I'm that sort of nationalist too--have often underestimated the patriotism of others. We did it in Ireland, India, Egypt, Cyprus (and Malvinas-seeking Argentina), to go no farther afield or longer back. Dominant majorities do it at their peril, as the English so long discounted the feelings of many Scots. Northern Ireland's Protestants made that mistake, so for decades did Anglo Canada.

But the converse also can be true. Majorities have their feelings too. As Scottish separatism has grown, English nationalism is rising. Some politicians see votes to be won in it; not least, our Conservatives' leader, David Cameron, his party beaten three times on the trot and with little to lose in Scotland anyway. The results may not be pretty.

That's true, though, of any strong sentiment. I'm happy for anyone to feel Scottish or Irish, or Ruritanian or red-headed for that matter. Just allow me to be English, even if that feeling is spurred merely by the passing colour of some leaves. I don't want to stick the red cross of St George on a pole in my front garden, still less beat some rival football hooligan round the head with it. But what I feel is what I feel, OK? One can do worse.

November 3rd | Touching the Fiscally Foreign

Why should the British taxman give a foreign sports star or tycoon a free pass on much of his wealth, but hit a British-born one for a full 40 percent? Stephen Hugh-Jones sees a new minimum tax on foreign residents as a useful start ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Britain's favourite motor-racing driver, Lewis Hamilton, is packing his bags, and not just his overnight one. He's moving home, if any international sports star has a home, from Britain to Switzerland.
Mr Hamilton has everything going for him. He's brilliant at his job: in his first season in Formula One, he has just, but only just, been pipped at the post to become its champion driver. He's young, he's personable, he's good-natured, he's modest (though one can wonder whether his "grace in defeat is the mark of a true champion", as one British newspaper rashly put it: ask Michael Schumacher). He's even what passes in Britain and America for "black"—a faint coffee tinge that won't do him much good in Switzerland, but in Britain helps the rest of us to pretend (when they're successful) that we don't notice, or even rather fancy, the colour of people's skin.

Too bad that he also has one thing going after him, most of his on-track rivals apart: the taxman. Supposedly, Mr Hamilton is going abroad because he's tired of the paparazzi. Maybe, but his accountants must be brain-dead, which I doubt, if they haven't pointed out to him the tax advantages of a move. Swiss income-tax law is very kind to resident foreigners. Britain's is pretty unkind to high-earning resident Brits.

Yet—curiously, you might think, after ten years of a Labour government—Britain's is also very kind to high-earning resident foreigners. The rest of us are taxed on our worldwide income. But persuade the taxman that you are not "domiciled" in Britain and you can live here for years, decades even, and be taxed only on the income you earn in, or choose to bring into, the country; the rest of your income is your business.

And the argument of choice in proving non-domicile is being foreign. Yes, you can say, I've been here since 1066, but when I retire I'm going back to Caen or Corfu or Vladivostok or wherever. All right by me, Sir, the taxman will say, repacking his pincers and pulling his forelock, and your worldwide income is in the clear.

The traditional image evoked by this generosity is that of Greek ship-owners, conducting their arcane business via London's ship-charter market, the Baltic Exchange, from their Hampstead mansions, but ever ready, so they claim, to return to the Aegean island where their grandfathers herded goats. But in fact today Britain has hundreds of thousands of such non-domiciled residents.

And lo, at last, after ten years of Blair government (and as many of Gordon Brown in charge of the tax-gatherers) the administration now headed by Mr Brown proposes a blow at these legalised tax-avoiders.

A blow? A tap on the shoulder, let's say: a charge of £30,000 a year as the alternative to paying up, at Britain's 40% top rate, on all their income worldwide. And that only after seven years—yes, seven—of living here.

And what a hullabaloo the City and the tax-advising trade (for all the extra custom that this would bring it) have set up. The Baltic Exchange will founder on the reefs as the Greeks flee in their private jets to Chios and Santorini. The investment bankers and hedge-fund clippers will up sticks to Dublin or Luxembourg or the Cayman Islands (or maybe simply Zurich). The normally sensible business editor of The Times declared the non-doms "an issue that, if not dealt with responsibly, could cause great damage to the health of the economy and the fabric of society."

Merciful heaven! Forgive me while I dry my eyes at the thought of the British economy supported on the Zimmer Frame of its shipping market. Or the weft of British society represented by Chelsea Football Club (proprietor: Roman Abramovich, presumably still domiciled in Putin's Russia). I've no love for high taxation, even when imposed on other people. I pay considerably more than £30,000 a year on the income generated by the savings (OK, and stock-market speculation) of a hard-working lifetime. The British tax machine will grab 40 percent of what I'm paid for this Internet-published article. And, like all who are well-off and well-taxed, I dislike it.

And I think Uncle Sam goes over the top when, exactly unlike Britain's taxmen, he claims the right to tax his fellow-citizens even when they live abroad (though how much of their earnings he actually gets to hear of is another matter).

But fair's fair. Living in France I paid French taxes on my modest earnings from The Economist; living earlier in then-Bombay, Indian taxes on my barely measurable receipts from The Guardian. Those who live any length of time in a foreign country enjoy its amenities and endure its bureaucracy just as its citizens do. Let them be taxed likewise.

Funny to think that if Fernando Alonso and Kimi Raikkonen, Lewis Hamilton's principal rivals, came to live in Britain, their earnings elsewhere would very largely escape British tax, while his, up till now, pay 40 percent.

 

October 27th | Feeding the Olympiarchs

The London Olympic games will break several world records, predicts Stephen Hugh-Jones. Including those for wasting public money, overrunning budgets, inconveniencing the public, and indulging the arrogance of the organisers ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Is there no limit to the arrogance of those who run the Olympic Games? To their gargantuan appetite for public subsidy? To the readiness of politicians to feed them? London is to host this showcase of commercial athletics in 2012. And from what we've seen so far, the answer to all these questions is no.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who dreamed up the Olympics in 1894, had a noble slogan, Not the winning but the taking part. At their Lausanne HQ, his successors still prattle of the Olympic movement. In the puff-pastry of their website, you'll discover that it even has an ethos, Olympism.

All those words are empty breath. Since the 1980s, when an ingenious Spaniard, Juan Antonio Samaranch, began to build a one-time sporting event into a giant sports conglomerate, the driving force of the Olympics has been money.

Other people's money, mostly. And its misuse.

I don't mean the idiot sums—that's their choice—poured in by sponsors and broadcasters: over 2001-04, $1.4 billion and $2.2 billion respectively for the International Olympic Committee alone, the top level of the Olympic ziggurat. Nor yet back-stage corruption, claimedly sorted out since Samaranch's time, when some IOC members readily sold their support as rival cities vied to host the games.

No: the issues are public money and its open mis-spending. All at the cost of taxpayers in cities, and thus countries, daft enough to want the Olympics, and unlucky enough, in the characteristically Olympian wording of Lausanne, to be "granted" them. Montreal only recently paid off the last of the bonds it issued to finance its games in 1976. God knows—the Greeks certainly don't—when the final costs of the 2004 Athens Olympics will be met.

Leave aside the Chinese puzzle of Beijing 2008, London 2012 will surely go the same way. In 2005, its public budget was, supposedly, £3.4 billion: £2.4 billion for the games themselves, a further £1 billion for "regenerating" their main site in dumpsville east London. Last March the government confessed to £9.3 billion: regeneration apart, £5.5 billion for Britain's new 'Olympic Delivery Authority', plus a fat £2.8 billion for "contingencies". Few but believers in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy doubt that that £2.8 billion will be called on. And very probably exceeded.

For what? Notably, a shiny new 80,000-seat stadium, whose estimate is so far 75% up to £500 million, and whose later use, even when seating is cut to 25,000 after the games, no one knows; an architecturally cutting-edge (ie, budget-busting) aquatics centre; a stadium for track cycling, a sport for which few Britons give a damn. Oh, and £600 million of security.

Plus, noisily puffed to justify the rest, sundry public improvements, mainly in transport. Fair enough—except that most reflect not London's long-term needs but the two-week demands of a Swiss-based athletics multinational.

It is cheerily admitted today that the 2005 figures were a support-catching sham. Even the new ones draw such airy comments, this one on the cost of the aquatics centre, as "I'm not sure where we are going to finish up ... the important thing is that it does the job that is required." So much for cost-control.

You might find arrogance enough in all that. You would be wrong. This week we learned some travel plans. Spectators' cars, let alone parking, will simply be banned from anywhere near the eight main competition sites, to make these "the greenest games in modern times ... We want to accelerate the shift to public transport seen in London in recent years." And who, pray, are the "we" that have taken it upon themselves thus to nanny the British nation out of its cars? The voice of God? The Queen? The government? No. The Olympic (sic) Delivery Authority.

Happily for some, it has a further transport scheme: one lane in several key roads across London will be reserved for the 80,000 (re-sic) true Olympians; competitors, media folk and, top of the heap, officials and IOCocrats. Who, while we hoi polloi pollute the air with redoubled fumes from our gridlocked cars, will no doubt be proceeding greenly on foot, by bicycle or in rickshaws.

No doubt. Funny that Nanny Green also plans to order a private fleet of 3,500 new cars.

 

October 19th 2007 | Do you speak sport (or are you American)?

As English rugby hopes for a miracle in Paris, Stephen Hugh-Jones takes pleasure in the worldwide spread of British sports, and puzzles over American exceptionalism in this pursuit, as in so much else ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

The invasion of Paris has begun. As I write, tens of thousands of English fans are streaming across the Channel to the French capital, hoping to see their side defeat South Africa and win rugby football's World Cup.

That'll take a miracle—it has taken two already to get England that far—but on Saturday evening tens of millions of Englishmen will be settling before their television sets praying for one. Five million Scots (that's the whole nation, from babes-in-arms up) will no doubt be rooting for South Africa; disconsolate Australians and New Zealanders, both of whom expected to see their teams at least in the final, will be waking to a springtime Sunday; and as the first kick is taken, at three o'clock East Coast time, midday in California, hundreds of millions of North Americans will no more know or care, indeed rather less, than they do about the hamburger-eating championships in Palookaville.

Much of which is very odd. World rugby in Paris? The game is typically one of English-speakers. Its very name comes from the "public school" of a city in the English Midlands. Yet south-west France especially has taken to it with an enthusiasm that for years made the French side the most exciting to watch of all, if seldom the most successful. Both Italy and Argentina are up-and-coming forces in the game. British-based sports have conquered the world.

They've taken their language with them. Across South Asia, just as across the English-speaking southern hemisphere, a batsman (that's cricket, dear Americans) is in or out, whether his native tongue be Urdu or Bengali, Hindi, Tamil or Sinhala. And "the world" isn't only the ex-colonial world. Football (that's soccer) is a truly global game, best played by the national teams of mainland Europe and of Latin America. South America, thanks to 19th-century British railway-builders and ranch-owners, has teams called Corinthians, Wanderers, The Strongest and Newell's Old Boys. The diminuendo shriek of a commentator crying G-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-l is heard across that continent. True, the French, winners of this game's latest World Cup, insist on calling a goal un but, yet even they call a penalty kick un penalty.

Yet English-speaking North America says no. True, the United States soccer side notoriously beat England in 1950 and 1993, and its women players are among the best in the world. Ironically, the inflow of Mexicans may yet give the game a future there. But to most Americans and Canadians football is that (to Europeans) mysterious battle conducted by armoured hulks and reported in statistics, and a bat is swung only in baseball. With basketball and ice hockey these are North America's sports. Baseball has spread a little; basketball is popular in eastern Europe; the NFL has tried to export its game to the Old World, but with little success.

The one truly worldwide exception, if mostly in the rich world, is tennis—lawn tennis, or indeed earlier still, sphairistike, as its English inventors used to call it. And, for the still-better-off, golf: I've watched a Japanese service-station attendant endlessly practise his swing on the forecourt tarmac; he was no likelier ever to afford access to a real course than I am to drive a Ferrari.

And this too is very odd. Frenchmen, Italians, Brazilians, Argentinians have readily adopted English sports; our North American cousins very largely look the other way. I've no idea why. Can anyone tell me?

October 12th 2007 | A periodical fit of morality

Paul-in-London/Flickr

The long, sad affair of Princess Di feeds on the mawkish sentimentality which has come to afflict the British character, says Stephen Hugh-Jones, in the first of his new weekend columns. The only defence against it is age, and cynicism ...

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"We know no spectacle so ridiculous," wrote Macaulay some 175 years ago, "as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality." The great historian was not often so terse in his use of language. Admirably terse, I'd say: English has moved on from the days of three-decker novels and 3,000-word book reviews. But he was often acerbic, sometimes witty, even humorous—his demolition of the poems of the Rev Robert Montgomery can make me laugh out loud. And he was often right.

He was then, in his view of us Britons and our morality, and he would be today. And, he might well now add, in one of our fits of mawkish sentimentality. As we have been busy proving since 1997, indeed before, in the sad affair of Princess Di.

To start with morals, it is, let us agree, unseemly that a married man, even a Prince of Wales, heir to the British throne, should have a mistress, as Prince Charles did before he and the late princess divorced. But it is hardly unknown: his great-great-grandfather, the future Edward VII, had several, and continued to do so even while he was both married and king. But there was in those days a simple remedy, at least for common folk: in the Victorian phrase, the man made an honest woman of her. He married her.

So what happened when Charles, long after Di's death, proposed to do just that? Great swathes of the British public, which presumably has never committed adultery and wouldn't know a mistress if she got up and hit it in the face, said no. To marry Camilla would be not just unseemly, but wrong, wicked, evil—English has a vast vocabulary for censuring other people—a crime against man, God and the Daily Express.

The prince, happily, is a man of better sense. After undue delay, the pair were married. So now British morality has turned its idiot eye on the dreadful prospect that one day Camilla might become queen. The swathes are smaller, but there are still plenty of my countrymen, and especially countrywomen, it seems, who again say no.

All this springs from the new British disease—by now I'd call it chronic rather than periodic—of mawkish sentimentality. This reached a high point in the miles of flowers left to wilt outside Buckingham Palace and elsewhere after Di's death. But she, peace be upon her, is not alone. Visit the spot where some child was murdered or even died accidentally and you will find at least yards of flowers from good people who never met the victim. Let some tearaway ride his 1,000-cc bike into a tree and the local vicar will talk of a bubbly young man with all his future before him. Television news is spattered with such shots, as the reporter puts on his special tragic voice and the pronoun they (as in They buried little Johnny/Janice...) in this close-knit community torn apart....

It takes a vaccine of age and cynicism—and perhaps plain nastiness—like mine to avoid this disease. Yet I see hope in the recently opened inquest into Princess Diana's death. It's an absurd affair. Was she engaged to marry Dodi al Fayed? What exactly was that ring? Was she pregnant? Just where was their driver, doing just what, in the hours before all three were killed in the crash? Was he in the pay of British intelligence (and presumably ready to die for them as well)? Were the couple, as Dodi's father flatly asserts, "murdered by the royal family"? And much, much more, which will take a coroner, umpteen witnesses and an 11-person jury countless months, at unknown public expense, to sort out. All this ten years after the event.

Why? Almost solely to put at rest the potty conspiracy theories dug up by (among others) al Fayed, his PR team and the said Daily Express. How much does any of it have to do with the real world? Does the state of the Di/Dodi relationship matter? Two amiable, well-off young people lamentably died in a car crash, already endlessly investigated, in a foreign country, in 1997. That, in a one-day formal inquest, should have been the end of it.

So what hope can I find? One unexpected thing: so far, the great British public seems strangely uninterested.