Toting the barge, lifting the bale

Is it really two years since Francesca Zambello's production of Show Boat was at the Royal Albert Hall?

It was a spectacular by any standards: a brilliant and dynamic set by Peter J. Davidson, thrills and frills of costumes by Sue Wilmington, the RPO beyond the bow of the riverboat Cotton Blossom. Even the Mississippi River itself made a token appearance (courtesy of Thames Water, in that summer of drought). Not all the critics were impressed: this was the first staged musical at the RAH; and they felt it went over the top (which, perhaps, is the whole point of a musical):

Francesca Zambello's in-the-round staging of the story of the life and loves of a group of travelling actors on a Mississippi boat at the end of the 19th century is not so much Show Boat as a very slow boat. I'm astonished that opera works in this space, because a musical doesn't stand a chance. Zambello makes the mistake of simply trying to fill up the space: there are 70 in the cast and some big unwieldy bits of scenery. This Mississippi is actually wet. But the more she piles on the spectacle the more sketchy the production becomes, and I found myself uncharacteristically longing for a traditional proscenium arch.

One does not necessarily expect musical theatre to be also great drama (though Malcolm persists in annoying the purists and academics with his claims that Kiss Me Kate is a better play than Taming of the Shrew). Show Boat, however, deserves respect as the first and still one of the greatest musicals.
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This memory was prompted when Malcolm was being driven up Branch Lane, Hampstead.

Being driven allows opportunity to rubber-neck. What caught Malcolm's eye was the Blue Plaque on 1-2 Branch Lane. Like the books Ted Heath didn't autograph, the houses in Hampstead without plates are the rare ones ...

This plaque is a factual statement:

Paul ROBESON,
(1898-1976)
Singer and Actor lived here 1929-1930

That means it was where Robeson lived while performing in the 1928 London premier of Show Boat.

One thinks of Robeson as the prototype Joe, the stevedore. Ol' Man River was written for him, and is eternally his song. Yet he did not do the rôle in the original Broadway run (Florenz Ziegfeld had dithered over such a controversial production: Robeson had other catfish to fry). So London was Robeson's first production: of course he then did the 1932 Broadway revival, and the 1936 movie (where Robeson is listed fourth in the cast list, after such household names as Irene Dunne, Allan Jones and Charles Winninger). That film still features, quite properly, in the American Film Institute's list of the top musicals of all time.
________________________________________________________

So, as happens on such occasions, Malcolm went rootling.

And discovered that he does not have Robeson as "Joe" -- but was able to find it on Youtube (that's the better audio) or even as a film clip (which is the real tear-jerker):

Dere's an ol' man called de Mississippi
Dat's de ol' man dat I'd like to be!
What does he care if de world's got troubles?
What does he care if de land ain't free.

In that search, something far better showed up, however.


Look what's here: Smithsonian Folkways SF 40026 -- Don't Mourn: Organize! Track 5: Joe Hill:

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
Alive as you or me.
Said I, "But, Joe, you're ten years dead."
"I never died," said he.

Fine, fine, but it's too clinical. Robeson is too much of a gentleman to give it the full anger.

• Later, Joannie took the song to Woodstock, and fed a spoonful of sugar to the children: that, too, misses the point.
• Far better is Luke Kelly doing his near-best: Kelly has gut-felt, rock-hard principle, but his version trips over the narrow line into becoming a trifle too twangy and pub-Oirish.
• Even more effective is Phil Ochs, who does the whole thing, all stanzas, which makes it a museum's display-piece rather than a rabble-rouser (which is what we came for): so polite applause.
• Higher still up the scale is Billy Bragg, opening that same Folkways disc, again doing the full Monty. Here, the use of the banjo allows the vocal to dominate -- at least in the opening part. The whole shares some of the draw-backs of the Phil Ochs version. Strangely, Bragg never quite works up the bitter froth of his full anger here.

The song should never be reduced to a historical document: it needs to remain an active force in the cause of long-downtrodden man. The Youtube video derived from Bragg is a bit tricksy, but does the business.

The fountainhead here has to be Utah Phillips, track 13 on the We Have Fed You All for a Thousand Years album. What makes this one different stems from Phillips's spoken introduction, remembering living and working in Salt Lake City, and giving the song, when it comes, a personal and moral perspective:

... workin' in State service, as a rat in the basement. Oh, yeah: I used to come to work at eight o'clock every morning, and take the basement stairs down, and the Governor'd take the stairs up, and we'd shake hands as we passed each other in the hall. My! My! Kind of thing that drives you crazy.

He recalls walking "up 21st South and 13th East", on the site where Sugarhouse Prison had been. He had seen the plan in the archives at the Capitol building, and:

I could walk at midnight through that Park and I could stand right on the spot where that white kitchen chair was that Joe Hill was tied to when he was shot. And I would look at the stars and look at the moon and wonder what the hell it was that I was doing with my life.

________________________________________________________


This posting has travelled a long, and unnecessary way from where it started. That is the self-indulgence that so many of his critics quite rightly lay against Malcolm's maunderings.

Others of us try to forgive the poor old thing: the mind may be going; but the heart's still in the right place.

He finally drags himself back to Robeson, and cranks up one last song: No More Auction Block for Me, the final track of the On My Journey collection:

No more auction block for me
No more peck of corn for me.
No more pint of salt for me.
No more driver’s lash for me.
No more hundred lash for me

________________________________________________________

And so, Malcolm has come full circle. All the way from where de lan' ain't free to a hyphenated-something American (descended from slave-owners, not from slaves) being the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, and the next President of the United States.

Whether Robeson would be supporting a "mainstream" candidate (Obama or Clinton) is very much a different question.


Sphere: Related Content

Dress code

The New York Times on the Bush wedding:

The bride wore a beaded organza dress, with a small train, designed by Oscar de la Renta, the White House said. Her attendants wore cocktail dresses the colors of wildflowers, designed by Lela Rose. The first lady, Laura Bush, wore deep turquoise. The men wore suits and ties.

Phew!

That's a relief. It would be bad form to have a semi-nudist wedding. Especially in Texas. Especially when the bride has a track-record of wardrobe malfunctions.

However, Malcolm wonders if this isn't another bit of political correctness.

In days of yore, nobody bothered to comment on the attire of the males. Even when it was by de la Rental. Now we have to make the gesture.

On the other hand, if Grayson "Claire" Perry had been invited ... Sphere: Related Content

There's not much the BBC website has to learn about building traffic.

Take for example the headline up today:

Great tits cope well with warming *

Inevitably, when one clicks through to the page, the story does not qualify for as much as a parental advisory sticker:

At least one of Britain's birds appears to be coping well as climate change alters the availability of a key food.

Researchers found that great tits are laying eggs earlier in the spring than they used to, keeping step with the earlier emergence of caterpillars.
Writing in the journal Science, they point out that the same birds in the Netherlands have not managed to adjust. Understanding why some species in some places are affected more than others by climatic shifts is vital, they say.

At this juncture, Malcolm wisely decides to avoid any comment about Dutch Birds, except to recall it is a fairly unremarkable pub, with a music room, up the Oldham Road in Failsworth, Manchester.

One can never be too careful with certain words in such a context, as for example:

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has banned the use of the word "cock" when applied to the male of the species, in case it causes offence.

An RSPB spokesman confirmed that it did not use the word 'cock' on its website
In a move condemned for "taking political correctness too far", a correspondent on an RSPB online forum was surprised to find that his use of the word "cock", when referring to a male blackbird, was replaced with four asterisks.

To which Malcolm can only add: "****!"

Long years ago, Malcolm worked alongside a lovely, if slightly too-innocent-for-her-own-good teacher. She insisted on using Ian Serraillier's 1956 great story, The Silver Sword, as a class reader. (It may subsequently have been edited or re-written: it certainly seems to have gained a new title, Escape from Warsaw). The problem was that one of the characters has a pet chicken, and this (as Malcolm painfully remembers) provokes the immortal line:

Jan placed his cock on the table.

As soon as the set of books was removed from the stock-cupboard,Malcolm, would take great care monitoring the class's progress in reading the story. He fully appreciated that he would be summoned to suppress the minor riot when the psychological moment arrived.

As for Malcolm stooping so far
as to employ a provocative head-line
with a cheap word-play on "tits",
in the hope of attracting cheap trade,

perish the thought.

______________________________________________

* Curiously, after a while, the headline changed to:

Great tits in Britain seem to be adapting to global warming

Now, what happened there?

Sphere: Related Content

Malcolm's hatchet-jobs (at Malcolm Redfellow's Home Service and here) are puny compared to the axe-work of a master-craftsman.

So, today, he looked with envy at the Economist's obituary of Alfonzo López Trujillo, the "Vatican enforcer":

IN 1995, as head of the Pontifical Council for the Family, Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo published a “Lexicon of Ambiguous and Debatable Terms”. They included “safe sex” (no such thing, unless confined to the nuptial bed); “gender” (a construct of strident feminists) and “family planning” (code for abortion). He could also throw back a few phrases of his own: “contraceptive colonialism”, “pan-sexualism”, “new paganism” and, with a special lowering of those beetling black brows, “the culture of death”.

And that's only the taster. Want more? --

The enemy was all around him. Legislators and governments across the first world who passed laws to ease divorce or ensure “gay rights” (though of course, to quote Aquinas, lex injusta non obligat). Fervently Catholic countries, like the Philippines, which adopted two-child policies to curb their surging populations. Scientists in white coats who committed murder in test tubes in the name of medical research.

But the big foe was Latex Johnnie:

Condoms were the first enemy. In their sly, shiny packets, they invaded the poor world as insidiously as the disease they were meant to prevent. To the cardinal, there was nothing safe about them. They merely encouraged promiscuity. To hope to stop AIDS by wearing one was like “playing Russian roulette”. They were as full of tiny holes as a sieve, through which the HIV virus, “roughly 450 times smaller than the spermatozoon”, as he told the BBC, would slither with no difficulty. The World Health Organisation might claim condoms were 90% effective; he had read it in the Guardian; but “they are wrong about that”. And he was right.

He was always right, staunchly on the side of order, stability, hierarchy and God's law.

There's no mealy-mouthed nil nisi bonum here. The Economist knows how to pile on the ordure:

Latin America's crop of military dictators received no condemnation at the archbishop's hands. Where there was chaos, he reminded his bishops, people needed firm government.

This trick reminds Malcolm of Governor Teddy Roosevelt's axiom:

I have often been fond of the West African proverb: "speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.

Before moving on, let's note that on the facing page the Economist reviews a couple of books under the headline Sex and sensibilty, which concludes:

In Uganda people were warned of the risks of HIV and encouraged to use condoms and be sexually faithful. That helped reduce the impact of AIDS ... Political, religious and local leaders have done little elsewhere in Africa. Some, such as South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, preferred disseminating untruths about the disease and how it should be treated. Where strong leadership could have had the greatest impact its absence is most keenly felt.

Yes, the Economist also does irony with great effect.

The Economist is uncompromisingly and honourably liberal (in the economic, political, and social definition of that much-overused word). One does not have to take it in entirety as a modern Code of Hammurabi. It argues its case; and Malcolm invariably finds it stimulating both in its content, and its challenges to his own prejudices.

The Vatican, by comparison, needs to justify or publicly regret its long-time deplorable record, especially in South America.

It stood up for the dictator August Pinochet in his struggle to avoid deportation from Britain to Spain, when Spain wanted to investigate his role in the disappearance of Spanish nationals during his reign of terror from 1973 to 1990. The Argentine Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo criticised the Vatican's intervention on Pinochet's behalf, only for President Carlos Menem to apologise cravenly on their behalf for their presumptuous lèse majesté.

It was curious, witnesses noticed, how the Catholic authorities throughout the Chilean and Argentinian pogroms never openly criticised, yet were too frequently able to report to the bereaved family what had befallen one of the "disappeared".

Malcolm reverts to Roosevelt's letter. It was an honourable stand, by a strong leader, against pressure from within his own Republican Party to re-appoint a corrupt official. He says of his opponents, what could be said of the Vatican, and the likes of Trujillo:

They have often shown themselves the enemies of good government, but in this case I do not think they are even to be credited with good intentions. They were no more anxious to see dishonesty rebuked than a professional prohibitionist is to see the liquor law decently administered.

In a murky world,
for the likes of the Economist
we should be grateful.

Sphere: Related Content

The eternal truths


Day after day, the financial pages of the heavier end of the the British press drum out the message:

Reduce corporation tax!

Another firm moves its HQ to Ireland to benefit from the lower corporation tax!

A typical story is that of Shire:

The FTSE-100 company said it was applying to a court to create a new holding company incorporated in tax-haven Jersey and would become tax resident in Ireland, where corporate tax rates are less than half those in the UK.

The 22-year-old biopharmaceutical firm whose key products include a treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), said its headquarters would remain in Basingstoke and it did not plan to cut or relocate any UK jobs.

But its board of directors will hold meetings in its Dublin office once the tax residence move gets court approval.

Most importantly, the move means it will be subject to an official corporate tax rate of 12.5%, compared with 28% in the UK.

This weekend the Sunday Times was at it again, with a new twist (taxes and not paying them are a Big Thing for the Murdoch Media):

Bosses' tax threat at No 10 summit
SOME of the biggest names in British business have told Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling that Britain risks a corporate exodus if Treasury tax proposals on foreign earnings go ahead.

The warning was delivered at Downing Street 10 days ago by a delegation from the Multinational Chairmen’s Group, a secretive body that brings together leaders of some of the most powerful companies in the world ...

Those involved in the discussion say the foreign-dividend proposals have given a hard edge to general discontent over UK corporate taxation.

In recent weeks two leading companies, Shire Pharmaceuticals, a FTSE 100 drugs group, and United Business Media, a media and conventions group, have decided to shift their tax domiciles from the UK to Ireland. There were rumours last week that another FTSE 100 group was on the verge of leaving.

The not-so-subtle hint about "another FTSE 100 group" was merely a taster for a Times story on Tuesday:

One of the most prominent players in the Lloyd’s insurance market is considering shifting its corporate headquarters outside the UK, the latest in a string of City businesses angered by unpopular tax proposals from the Treasury. Brit Insurance, the reinsurance broker valued at £800 million in London, is investigating whether jurisdictions such as Dublin or Geneva are more tax-efficient than the UK, which is increasingly seen as operating a business-unfriendly regime.

Several other companies, including Sir Martin Sorrell’s WPP Group, have said they are considering such a move ...

Naughty Malcolm.
Naughty, naughty Malcolm:
you forget that the great and the good
have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders,
to avoid paying tax.

As in the Shire case:

"Shire has concluded that its business and its shareholders would be better served by having an international holding company with a group structure that is designed to help protect the group's taxation position, and better facilitate the group's financial management."

A Shire spokeswoman stressed it was not stopping UK tax payments outright.

"We will not pay corporation tax in the UK but will continue to pay tax in the UK on our UK business," she said.

Don't we "little people" yearn for that choice "not to pay"?

In any case, too many "British" companies have already decided that they should enjoy the benefits, but shirk any commitment to Britain:

a National Audit Office study has revealed that almost one third of the UK's 700 biggest businesses pay no corporation tax whatsoever - not one penny. A further third of these businesses pay less than £10m a year in corporation tax, the main levy on UK company profits.

Intriguingly, almost 70 per cent of all UK corporation tax in the 2005/6 financial year was paid by just 50 companies, the report showed. While Britain's banks stumped up £7.5bn in corporation taxes, the alcohol and tobacco industries coughed up next to nothing. While oil and gas companies shelled out close to £7bn, the mega-bucks property sector paid just a few hundred million.

There are armies of accountants in the City of London trained in the dark arts of tax minimisation. But it's not all about offshore accounts in the British Virgin Islands or Bermuda. For the modern multinational, it is remarkably easy to make a large tax bill simply disappear - through entirely legitimate means.

Malcolm would insert a small aide-memoire here, from last August, for that reference others may be trying to recall:

Leona Helmsley, the cutthroat hotel magnate whose title as the “queen of mean” was sealed during a tax evasion case in which she was quoted as snarling “only little people pay taxes,” died Monday at age 87.

Helmsley (right) embezzled $1.2M of tax money by claiming personal expenses on the firm: everything from renovating her Connecticut estate to paying for her knickers. She, eventually, went to jail for 21 months of a four-year term. Even then she cheated: much of her "community service" was done by her employees.

When she died, she charmingly left her little dog, "Trouble", $12M.

There was nothing for two grand-children, though.

She died lonely; she died alone: but she died rich.
And that's what really matters, yes?

Compared to machinations like these,
decent whoring looks a respectable business.

In all the Gaderene rush to set up shop in Dublin, never, not once, does the accompanying article comment on the other side of the equation:

VAT in Ireland is 21%.

But only the "little people" pay VAT. Sphere: Related Content

A little local difficulty

As the previous postings imply, Malcolm's Sunday mood was irritated and irritating. Blame it on a torn ligament and some genuine pain.

Even scrutinising X-rays (nowadays called up on a computer screen) of the foot and ankle did not lighten the tone. It left Malcolm entranced by the intricacy of countless bones, if chastened by the shadowy revelation of only old injuries, either rugby and motorcycle, but surely self-inflicted.

Later, the memory came to Malcolm of visiting Dinosaur Valley, dragged across the endless, arid monotony of the State of Utah by an enthusiastic daughter, to spend an hour or so with fossils from prehistory. The grey-scale of the screen images seemed curiously of a kind with those skeletal vestiges. Darwin vindicated, again.

It didn't make the foot more comfortable, though.

By late evening Malcolm lost it.

Now Iain Dale has many faults -- many, many faults -- but Malcolm did go a trifle over the top, and on libdemvoice, too. The combination of what and where and how makes him a trifle shame-faced today; but the final uh-oh was to realise he was in harmony with the suphurous Tim Ireland.

The issue in question was the posturing over the candidates for the Crewe and Nantwich by-election: specifically how "local" was the Tory, and whether Tamsin Dunwoody was an in-comer. In short, all the usual gesture-politics. Malcolm suggests that, with two parents in the House (together some four decades), grand-daughter of the formidable Morgan Phillips and the hardly-less-determined Baroness Norah, as well as her own time in the Welsh Assembly, Tamsin might know the score.

The irony is that Iain Dale (born in Essex, resident in Kent) continues to claim he "lived" in North Norfolk when he was the highly-unsuccessful Tory candidate there in 2005 (he increased Norman Lamb's 483 margin in 2001 to a thumping 10,606).

This all prompted Malcolm to make a further claim: that at least he had birth-ties to the North Norfolk constituency.

Norfolk-born, Norfolk-bred ..

Malcolm's alter ego originated in Wells-next-the-Sea, which in those distant days enjoyed the privilege of a Labour MP.
In 1945 Eddie Gooch, of the National Union of Agricultural Workers, displaced the squirarchical Tommy Cook, though the radical tradition had been there even before Noel Buxton took the seat for Labour back in 1929.

The North Norfolk seat later, in 1964, was inherited by Bert Hazell, then President of the NUAW. To Malcolm's delighted surprise, Bertie survives into his 102nd year, and is now the oldest surviving Parliamentarian.

It was always, sneeringly, implied that Eddie Gooch's and Bert Hazell's tenures of the constituency were helped by the local farmers who voted to keep them at Westminster, rather than causing them problems through the NUAW. That canard ignores the local tradition of radicalism, which will now become Malcolm's main theme for Labour Day.

The years the locust ate

Après Bertie, le déluge.

The complexion of the constituency changed. Employment on the land fell rapidly. That also drained much of the bitterness that had persisted since the agricultural depression of inter-war years, and the farm-workers' strikes of 1923 and 1926. Moreover, the second-homers started to arrive.

All conspired so that for the next two decades the North Norfolk constituency was the fiefdom of Ralph Howell.

Howell, like Mandelson, was one to whom taking an instant dislike saved a deal of time.

He was xenophobic, rabid, a Thatcherite before the Lady, an apologist for white racist régimes in Africa, and a supporter of the Turks in Cyprus.

He was instigator of the "Right to Work", which sounds well but (in his terms) amounted to a curious, even Stalinist notion that the unemployed should be conscripted, either into national service or be otherwise deployed by the state. Howell had come close to defining "Workfare".

Yet, he had saving graces: a good war-record, served his constituents conscientiously, was afraid of nobody (even his own Whips): a self-made (and proudly so) agri-businessman.

Then, latterly, North Norfolk got Norman Lamb. And, so far, seems quite taken with him.

George Edwards

Malcolm would like to revert to the peculiar radicalism of the area, if only because it gives him the chance to acknowledge the greatness of the Norfolk working man.

George Edwards was born in Marsham in 1850, into the grinding poverty of farm workers. At the age of six, a child of the Workhouse, he was already in employment, as a human scarecrow. Later, he fell out with his employer, and went to work in the brickfields.

He married, and became a strict Primitive Methodist: two events that together liberated him. His wife, Charlotte Corke, gave him literacy. His faith gave him political and social belief: he was yet another proof of Harold Wilson's maxim that British socialism owes more to Methodism than Marxism.

He was one of a remarkable group of men: "Comrade Joe" Sage of Kenninghall, Will Codling of Briston, George Hewitt at St Faiths, Jimmy Coe at Castle Acre, Bert Harvey at Trunch: each and every one of them black-listed and unemployable among the Norfolk farmers.

Individually and collectively these were the strong shoulders on which the farm-workers' union would be rebuilt, after the 1896 collapse of Joseph Arch's National Agricultural Workers' Union. But Edwards was the main man, on his bicycle across North Norfolk, in fair weather and foul. At first hope was vested in the Liberal Party: the Liberals took every seat in Norfolk in 1906, and Edwards was a County Councillor. Other members of the Union began to be elected to local councils, first as Liberals, then as Labour men.

During the War, the Union won the Wages Board.

In 1920, at the age of 70, George Edwards was in Parliament, as MP for South Norfolk. Conservative pressure had the Wages Board abolished; but George was back in Westminster with the 1923 minority Labour Government to have it restored.

Sam Peel


Wells had its own local champion: Sam Peel, an Methodist evangelist turned Quaker.

The Quakers have been in Wells for over three hundred years: they have a neat little brick-and-flint meeting house on Church Street (see left), doubtless regarded as eminently-convertible among all the nouveau-richery and 4x4s down for the weekend.

Peel, for most Wells folk of Malcolm's childhood, was the personification of Quakery.

What is about printers that they turn radical?

Peel started with a Men's Adult School for the Workers' Educational Association, teaching grown men to read and write. Then Sam was:

• onto the town Council, attacking slum housing, which meant taking on a whole range of vested interests, including the Holkham Estate of Lord Leicester;
• on the Executive of the NUAW, and then onto the Wages Council;
• onto the Board of Guardians, arguing for improved support for widows;
• onto the local Bench of Magistrates;
• running the local War Pensions committee.

In 1920 he was elected to the County Council, effectively on a platform of housing and health, but soon switched to education: he was Chairman of Education for the County for 23 years.

Sam was universally and properly admired and honoured, a rumpled and cherubic rustic Clem Attlee. He was not necessarily equally liked.

He remained a staunch supporter of temperance, but presided at the Magistrates' bench at Walsingham for the brewster sessions. He regularly set up his soapbox on the Quay at Wells, to denounce the demon drink. Wells, which still boasted over a dozen pubs in the post-WW2 period, was -- as the old street maps of lanes and ginnels show -- a Viking town. Local tendencies ran more to rapine and pillage, washed down with quantities of Bullards, Steward and Patteson, or (in cases of desperation, Morgans from Ted Stenning at the Vine in High Street): and that was only the distaff side.

Still, he was one of an Olympian kind that long since went out of production: decently, they named the local secondary school for him.

All in all, Bank Holiday Monday has been
a less painful, more reflective day
for our resident philospher ...

... though any posting that involves
both dinosaurs and Tories
severely tempts fate.

Sphere: Related Content

In a spirit of general biliousness and dyspepsia, Malcolm offers ...

Ten suggestions for a decade or so of dutiful neglect:

10. Sharma doing another series, with coffee-table book as optional extra.

• Actually, this could usefully be extended to include most "popular" history, especially if it is a "co-production" with the History Channel. Just think how many electrons will be released for useful service, even for real education.

9. Lady violinists with cleavages more obvious than their musical talents.

• This, fortunately, should also keep Classic FM magazine permanently off the shelves at W.H.Smith.
• A similar restriction might be placed on sopranos, especially with Welsh ancestry.
  

8. Any permutation on Michael Palin and pointless journeys to forgettable places, with funny food and bearded bods en route.

• Air travel is an unfortunate necessity. Railways are civilised and decent means of transport. Dhows and cargo ships, camels and donkeys are mocking the afflicted, those obliged to employ them, and anyone fool enough to watch them.
  

7. Anything that involves a list of "The Hundred Best ..."

• Particularly if it originates on Channel 4.
• Replay The Old Grey Whistle Test instead.
  

6. Attenborough.

5. Any television series of "classic" English movies.

• There are only three: Brief Encounter; The Third Man and A Matter of Life and Death. We've seen then repeatedly. We know every frame.
• They don't work on the small screen anyway.
• For the purposes of public hygiene, Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo might be similarly excised from the schedules...
• Works involving Michael Caine may occasionally be excused, but only to prove they are far better than subsequent American re-makes.
  

4. Any belief that football ("soccer" to the ex-colonials) involves art, grace or subtlety.

• References to "the beautiful game" deserve extended penal servitude.
• The mantra is and should be: soccer is a game for gentlemen played by guttersnipes; Rugby is a game for guttersnipes played by gentlemen; Gaelic football is a game for guttersnipes played by guttersnipes.

3. The collected works of Jane Austen.

• Under no circumstances should there be any further television or film adapatations, modernisations.
• Speculations about the author's psychology and sexuality should be forbidden, or treated as clairvoyance, and perpetrators punished under the fraud laws.

2. Anything which involves the Mona Lisa.

• Particularly if it also involves Templars.

1. Romeo and Juliet. It is not a particularly well-constructed play (only Macbeth -- which has been severely mucked about -- and Taming of the Shrew are as crude):

• The only interesting male character is written out half way through.
• The chronology goes awry with Capulet shifting the date of the wedding, as well as the Friar John thing.
• Balthasar in the falling action and Count Paris in the final scene are weak constructs, when neither has been adequately established.
• The Friar Lawrence wrap-up is nearly as deadly dull as the Archbishop in the second scene of Henry V.
• Its main educational merit (apart from a quick flash by Olivia Hussey, forty years ago) is that the powers-that-be who ordained the National Curriculum didn't get the knob jokes.
  

Sphere: Related Content

Is Malcolm alone in his wish...

Vivaldi work revived 278 years on

By Rob Cameron
BBC News, Prague

Vivaldi wrote dozens of operas.
A long-lost opera by the Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi has been performed for the first time in 278 years, in the city of Prague.
Argippo was written for the Czech capital and premiered there in 1730.
But the opera - a tale of "passion, love and trickery" in an Indian maharaja's court - later disappeared without trace.

... they'd stop finding yet more bloody Vivaldi? Sphere: Related Content

Degrees of divinity

Spot the link:
















Well, obviously one is the great redeemer and the other is the Son of God.

But which is which?

Here's the Mail on Sunday:

After weeks of biting his tongue, Boris Johnson celebrated his election as Mayor of London yesterday by finally giving vent to his feelings.
Shrugging off his minders – who had feared that one of his gaffes would derail his bid to topple Ken Livingstone – Mr Johnson relaxed with his first alcoholic drink in three months and launched a colourful attack on critics of his subdued campaigning style.
"I am just totally fed up with this artificial distinction...this sort of Arian controversy about the old Boris and the new," he said.
"There is no distinction."
His "Arian" remark apparently referred to an obscure theological dispute in the early church.

Got that, chaps, "Arian", not "Aryan".

Then Malcolm resorted to the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church to check it out:

Arianism maintained that the son of God was not eternal but created by the Father from nothing as an instrument for the creation of the world; and that therefore He was not God by nature, but a changeable creature. His dignity as Son of God having been bestowed upon Him by the Father on account of His foreseen abiding righteousness.

Now there's a load of analogies that stretch credence.

In passing, one Harry Phibbs (by name, by nature: who single-handed managed the abolition of the Federation of Conservative Students) is claiming ultimate parentage of the blond abortion ambition.

Of Phibbs it was once opined:

He is a very tall, posh boy (well probably not that young these days, late thirties). Harry Phibbs in person always gives the impression of being a cut-price/poor man's Boris Johnson. Same posh shamblingness, same surface cluelessness.

So ... that way with the rotting vegetables.

Sphere: Related Content

Larne -- twinned with Sangatte?

Now, here's a curious thing, for some hours featured as the main item of Scottish news on the BBC national news portal:

Police have caught more than 1,000 people later identified as illegal immigrants at ports in south west Scotland over the past four years.
Numbers of foreign nationals detained at Stranraer and Cairnryan have more than doubled between 2004 and 2007.
Crimes including people trafficking for the sex trade have also been detected.

The numbers cited are:

2004 - 117
2005 - 304
2006 - 327
2007 - 259
Total - 1,007

This would seem to be prompted by a press-release from the Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary.

The last occasion this was kicked around, to Malcolm's casual notice, was back in June 2003. Peter Duncan (then the only Tory MP in Scotland) put up a parliamentary question about immigration officers attending at Stranraer/Cairnryan.

The formulaic answer was:

1 January 2000–31 December 2000 Immigration Officers attended the Port of Stranraer on 56 occasions during this period (two Officers each time).
1 January 2001–31 December 2001 Immigration Officers attended the Port of Stranraer on 131 occasions during this period (two Officers each time).
1 January 2002–31 December 2002 Immigration Officers attended the Port of Stranraer on 215 occasions during this period (two Officers each time).

Peter Duncan lost his seat, in large part through redistribution, at the last General Election. One might speculate whether his question was one of constituency interest alone, or was a foreshadowing of Michael Howard's "dog-whistle" campaign on immigration. Malcolm would point, in passing, to an incisive post-mortem on Howard's strategy and leadership, courtesy of conservativehome. The present incumbent in that neck of the woods, Russell Brown, seems a down-the-line Labour loyalist, and a bag-carrier for Des Browne.

So, while there may be a historical trend for the SW Scotland short-sea-route becoming a port-of-entry for illegals, there is no major up-tick in recent years. In other words, as a news-item it can be "spun" either way.

The other questions remain:

• why are the Poliss putting up a statement now?

More to the point,

• why are the Beeb picking it up, and featuring it on the national news-portal as the single Scottish story of interest -- above the Grangemouth refinery kerfuffle -- on the "Around the UK now" listing?

And, above all,

• why did the Beeb switch to a more sensational headline? —

Port immigration offences surge

— particularly as the increase from 215 in 2002 to 259 in 2007 (assuming some degree of comparability) hardly qualifies as a "surge". Indeed, if one changes the base-dateline for the comparison, the story falls flat on its face.

As far as Malcolm can see, the native Scottish press have not yet reported on this as a significant topic.

One final thought.

Something has changed.

From 4 April this year, we have the new UK Border Agency:

Border, immigration, customs and visa checks will be united from today in the country's new UK Border Agency, the Home Office has announced.

The new UK Border Agency, established as a shadow agency of the Home Office, will protect our borders, control migration for the benefit of the country, prevent border tax fraud, smuggling and immigration crime and implement quick and fair decisions.

That raises questions about the UK's land border, that with the Irish Republic.

Back last 12th November, the Irish Times did a major piece (and editorial) on the implications of how the higher UK standards of passport control would impact on the common travel area between Ireland and the UK. Since the border with Northern Ireland always has been unenforceable, that suggests UK citizens in Northern Ireland might be subjected to passport control at a point-of-entry into Great Britain.

Ummm ... Sphere: Related Content

What is it about YouGov?

It claims to be one of the leading polling organisations, and has made huge profits for its founders. Perhaps that is because of canny knack of "discovering" just what its clients expect.

So we come to its polling for the Evening Standard on the London mayoral election. Over recent weeks, YouGov has been able to play to the Standard's Kenophobia by showing vast leads for the Tory candidate. A month ago, after calculating second preferences, the gap was an astounding 14 percentage points: 57-43. Then, a fortnight ago, it was still 12: 56-44. Suddenly, a week back, it was down to eight: 54-46. Now, it has eroded to just six points: 53-47. Recently, that lead has been eroding, until, now, with just a week to go, the gap is more credible:

Johnson (Con) 44% (Down 1)
Livingstone (Lab) 37% (Down 2)
Brian Paddick (LibDem) 12% (Up 2)
Sian Berry (Green Party) 2% (Unchanged)
Others 3%

What is missing here (and, moreover, it is a telephone poll) is a confidence indicator. The Standard article does not give one, and -- more surprisingly -- nor does the YouGov source document seem to. Let us assume, however, that it is a 3% margin of error -- and in view of the sudden shifts in this poll's recent history, that has to be a valid assumption (either that, or the poll respondents are playing funny buggers). So that means the Tory candidate may lead by a stupendous 13% (which would suggest the earlier polls were correct), or by as little as 1% (which is in line with what the Guardian-ICM poll said earlier this month). That is also the finding of this week's Mruk Cello poll for the Sunday Times.

More pertinently, perhaps, Andrew Rawnsley does a piece on Politicshome. This derives from a weekly tracker poll, PH100, using a panel of 100 political insiders. So watch this:
Rawnsley's comment:

If the gap between the contenders continues to narrow along this trend, the Boris and Ken lines will roughly meet each other on May 1st. That, of course, just happens to be election day in London. This could be a nail-biter.

And Malcolm's view?

It says a lot about the "sophisticated" London political scene that we are stuck with two "chancers" as the only credible candidates. Two of the also-rans, Brian Paddick and Siân Berry, seem at least house-trained. Both are refuges for a conscience-vote, knowing that it will all come down to second-preferences.

At the last, though, it is not a hard decision. Malcolm is repelled by the serial adulterer, the man who was sacked from his Party's Front Bench, not because of his affairs, but because he blatantly lied about them. How can we take seriously a paltroon, who regards emotion that a 62-year-old man (Ken Bigley) is beheaded by an Iraqi death-squad, as "mawkish sentimentality"? What do you call a man who repeatedly betrays his wife, impregnates his girl-friend after lying to her about marriage, then talks her into an abortion? And is exposed for it by the girl-friend's society-lady mother in the London scandal-sheets and even the Daily Telegraph? How is referring to "piccaninnies" with "water-melon smiles" not racist? It's certainly racist enough to win the fascist BNP vote.

Pass the sick bag, Alice.

So Malcolm's vote will tally for Ken Livingstone next week. Sphere: Related Content

Three things collide
in the curious demi-monde that is Malcolm's mind.

Here's one, from the New York Times Editorial Board blog today:

The nonprofit History News Network is reporting that in an informal survey of 109 historians, 98.2 percent considered President George W. Bush’s presidency to be a failure, while 1.8 percent called it a success.

On the question of whether he is the worst president in history, there was greater difference of opinion: 61 percent said he was, while others disagreed or are withholding their opinions. (The survey also made clear that James Buchanan has some work to do rehabilitating his whole catapulted-the-nation-into-Civil-War reputation.)

The corollary from that is:

We’d be interested in knowing more about the 1.8 percent of historians who regard this presidency as a success.

Of course there's more than a degree of nonsense in any of these self-serving academic polls. Yet that provokes the second thought.

Not too long ago Malcolm had, for reasons of putting bread on the table as well as financing a serious wine habit, to toil daily at the chalk-face. He was once given (by an "expert") an explanation of classroom misbehaviour. It is that, at any given time, about one person in twenty could be diagnosed as clinically-insane.

So just 1.8% beats that generalisation.

Curiously, and this is the third thought, that's about the same percentage as the Britons who, even in the depths of the Second World War, could not name their Prime Minister.


So, let's hear it for James Buchanan, finally released from his wooden-spoon ranking as the the "worst" President. At least he could have told Dubya one Pennsylvanian home-truth:



What is right
and what is practicable
are two different things. Sphere: Related Content

Why is this Malcolm's comment on today in Northern Ireland?

All is revealed at
Malcolm Redfellow's Home Service.

Sphere: Related Content

It's a Boffo! It's Biffo!*

Thursday's Irish Times (pages 1, 7, 8 , 16 and the lead of the letters column on page 17) did more than full homage to the enstoolment of Brian Cowan as the leader of Fianna Fáil.

Malcolm sensed in it something odd, even unpleasant: a deep-felt wish to be past the Ahern years and into something cleaner, more decent, more honourable. Less of the "cute, wee hoor" and more of (as Mark Hennessy's Analysis column started):

a new public face: softly-spoken, gentle, statesmanlike, but quietly tough.

That piece continues with another fair evaluation:

Though he has been left a united party by Ahern, Cowan faces major troubles on the economy, unemployment, the Lisbon Treaty and, crucially, the sclerotic public services.

In passing, Malcolm wryly wonders whether a Dublin-based journalist would recognise a "disunited" Fianna Fáil. It is, after all, — and consciously so — more of a successor to its revolutionary origins than a political party on the British or American patterns. There is a strong, even bone-headed loyalty to the Leader of the Army of Destiny, through thick and thin.

As usual, Martyn Turner (Malcolm's favourite political cartoonist) said it all neatly and succinctly (see above).

Cowan's fate is not entirely in his and his Party's hands. The glory years of celtic tigerdom may have passed for good.

As a context, “Charlemagne”, the regular comment column on Europe, in today’s issue of the Economist should be essential reading. It runs (with its apposite graphic) under the heading:

Danger ahead for the mighty euro

Typical points (all cut-and-pasted plagiarisms):

• the outlook for the euro area seems to be deteriorating a lot faster than the optimists had expected.
  
• inflation has picked up to 3.5%—the highest in the euro’s nine-year existence. Troubles in the region’s two biggest export markets—recession in America and slowdown in Britain—are starting to bite.
  
• A weaker dollar is driving an American export boom; a stronger euro is likely to have the opposite effect in Europe. Mr Almunia ["the engaging European economics commissioner"] says the euro is “overvalued” and adds that, although the impact has been moderate so far, “we are at the limits, if not beyond them.” It is a delusion to suppose that euro-area exports can continue to barrel on regardless of their cost.
  
• Europe may have avoided the American subprime mess, but in several countries house prices have been even bubblier than in America. They are already falling in Spain and Ireland, and, beyond the euro zone, are starting to do so in Britain. A property bust may not produce an American-style mortgage meltdown, but it will surely topple economies heavily dependent on construction (which accounts for 15% or more of Spanish and Irish GDP, for example).

Hidden in that article are two further comments that are particularly relevant to Ireland:

• some countries have adapted a lot better to the discipline of the euro than others. Germany and the Netherlands have cut labour costs and introduced enough reforms to make their economies more competitive. France, Spain and especially Italy have done less—and are suffering more, from both the euro's rise and the global slowdown.
• To qualify for the euro in the late 1990s, countries such as Italy and Spain had to make swingeing fiscal and structural adjustments. Yet by shielding weaker countries from a currency crisis, the euro now relieves much of the pressure on them to keep up reforms. In fact, these are more essential than ever now that countries have lost the option of devaluing their currencies to regain competitiveness and offset relatively slow productivity growth.

"Charlemagne" has a conclusion to this well-argued and finely-written piece:

the euro is about to show the world that it is not yet an optimal currency area — and the demonstration may not be a pretty one.

To which, in the context of Ireland, must be added:

• Yesterday’s Irish Times front page news about unemployment: now 200,000, up 12,000 in the last month alone (that's the cost of a booming economy based on construction for the residential market).
• Nor should we lightly pass over today’s front page side-bar item about Unions getting restless about 5% inflation.

Yes: Euro-area inflation at 3.5%, but in the RoI at 5%. Growth down to 1.8% — and that's with all fingers crossed. No control over interest ECB rates: only two clubs left in the golf-bag: taxation and public expenditure (those "sclerotic public services").

Welcome to the dog-house, Mr Cowan: it’ll be you they blame.

*Pity if the "Biffo" tag sticks. It is, as is well-known, an acronym for "big ignorant fucker from Offaly".

Sphere: Related Content

How the Brown Bear has the last laugh

In the High and Far-Off Times, O Best Beloved, when the world was young, the Great She Elephant ran our bit of the jungle. There was a blond giant called Hez-el-Tine, (though others called him Tar-Zan because of his hair and the way he swung sticks around).

The Great She Elephant and her friends like Hez-el-Tine wanted to be nice to the Sow-dees because they had great heaps of gold and lots and lots of oil ...


You can read the rest of this enthralling tale at:

Malcolm Redfellow's Home Service

Sphere: Related Content

Over at
Malcolm Redfellow's Home Service
Malcolm waxes loud and lyrical about

• the Daily Mail,
• 1930s fascism, and
• the continuing moral blindness of the British press.

Among other targets.

Sphere: Related Content

3 a.m. fantasy

I've seen the lights go out on Broadway
I saw the Empire State laid low.
And life went on beyond the Palisades, ...

We held a concert out in Brooklyn
To watch the Island bridges blow...

The worst way to celebrate a birthday is to finish the bottle, with music and Brie.

In the early hours, the mind is wide awake, and speculative...

_________________________________________________________

The time came when the capitalist world was fully wired. We all had instant messaging, super-Blackberries, iPhones Mk 3. We no longer needed to go into the office.

We no longer needed an office.

What we were not prepared for was the suddenness of it all. There was this "tipping point"; and that was it.

Rents in the central business zones collapsed. A brief flurry of converting the buildings to hôtels and "loft"-apartments was too late: the life and purposes had gone out of the city-centres, and with it the need for accommodating the drones of capitalism. Very soon, the tourists tired of the tattiness and tackyness that was left behind. The notion of visiting "attractions" seemed very passé, and -- the ultimate dismissal -- very "Twentieth Century".

The city authorities were no longer afford to maintain the infra-structures. Power was cut off. For a while, litter blew along the concrete canyons. Then the weeds took hold. Soon after that, bits began to fall off: the streets and avenues were no longer safe. A final patrol prowled the neighbourhood, left, and locked the gates behind them. Behind the barricades, silence took over, broken by the rumble of a building surrendering to neglect and decay.

Outside, life went on, happier and more compact. Suburbs became interlocking villages. Villages and small towns flourished.

We became content with our lot, and stayed put upon it. Joyce had claimed that, if Dublin were destroyed, it could be recreated from his books. Virtual reality drama did just that: at the touch of a remote-control, it could be June 16, 1904 any day, anywhere. If we wanted to see Venice, we could be guided aboard a Vaparetto by Francesco da Mosto, or walk the sestieri with fictional Guido Brunetti. No smells, no mosquitos, no hordes of tourists, from the comfort of one's own sofa.

In consequence, something else, something quite astonishing happened. Energy consumption dropped. We no longer needed the huge electricity plants that had lit, warmed and driven the megalopolis. The robotic factories, which replaced manual labour, provided for our needs, more efficiently, more accurately, more humanely even, than before.

Nor was there mass unemployment. Two main industries took up the spare capacity: health-and-welfare, education-and-leisure.

In another way, time went into reverse.

There was a second agricultural, or rather horticultural revolution. Small-holding and gardening became something more than a hobby. The village market-day returned, selling (or, more frequently, bartering) surplus to ready buyers. People had time for society and a social circle. Others opted to retreat further into the depths of a quieter, boskier countryside. With e-communication the norm, that was not isolation, except by choice, however.

Conservation gave way to frugality, as a philosophy of make-do-and-mend became something of an art-form. The scent of wood-smoke became universal, as copses were systematically harvested as part of the new order. Domestic appliances and cars achieved new longevities, into their second or third decade, cosseted by the local Jane-and-Jim repair shops (another of those many craft industries that sprang up). If all else failed, another Jane-and-Jim ran Rent-a-Wreck to keep you going while heavy repairs and rebuilds happened.

Cars were frequently cannibalised, or were repaired from the scrap-yard. It became a badge of honour not to repaint, so multi-coloured bodywork became the norm, rust-brown the favoured tone. Other forms of transport proliferated: the bicycle, even the pony-and-trap. After all, when horizons shrank to the local townland, what more was necessary? The one constant was the Jack Russell or the lolloping Labrador in the back seat.

It would take longer for the "global-warming" effect to reverse, but the indicators were positive. Populations gently aged and declined.

The western world had passed into a fourth phase. From basic survival to the age of exploration and discovery. Then to hectic industrialisation and the urban lifestyle. And now to a new phase of individualism and self-awareness. Development became something internal and personal. Mental health improved dramatically, alongside a whirl of local involvement, spiritual and intellectual life. Children were cherished.

So, was it all better? More comfortable, less fraught, certainly. More balanced. Even more human and humane. Sphere: Related Content

A not-too-difficult question

The estimable Carolyn Kay at the equally worthy MakeThemAccountable continues to plough a lonely furrow, pointing out the anti-Clinton bias in the US media.

This side of the Atlantic we do not have such ready access to more balanced versions, so we tend to take at face value much of the poison served up. For example, the almost-recent Pew Poll, showing Obama with a commanding lead among Democrats, was taken as a profound, indisputable and even final word.

However, thanks to Caroline, Malcolm was able to make comparisons. This came, ultimately, from D. Cupples at Buck Naked Politics under the promising title Presidential Primary Polls Conflict: Pick the One You Like?

Gallup Rasmussen NBC/WSJ Pew Fox
Mar 24-26 Mar 23-26 Mar 24-25 Mar 19-22 Mar 18-19
Clinton 44% 46% 45% 39% 40%
Obama 48% 44% 45% 49% 38%
Other/Undecided 8% 10% 10% 12% 22%

In other words, only one poll, and that the earliest, is seriously out of line. And all the others put the two candidates well within any margin of error.

However, guess which one fitted the political line being pursued by the right-wing UK Press? And therefore got the publicity?
........... Sphere: Related Content