RosieBell

Spring and Snow

Yesterday actually resembled a day in spring.  The soild in my garden is no longer frozen and is ready for digging over.  I went out for my first proper cycle of the year, north west from Edinburgh to Linlithgow.   We went on a hilly route and climbed from where crocuses were showing, to snow drops on the side of the road, then patches of snow and the hills all around still half white.  It was about twenty miles until we got to Linlithgow where we had lunch.  Then we returned on a steeper route up the north side of Cairnpapple Hill.  The banks and braes were covered with snow and the pine woods gave out a sense of silence from the heaps of snow among the dark trees.  The roads were running with thaw as the sun had come out, but first thing in the morning they would have been icy.  It was most beautiful, with grand views of the Pentland.  They’re a range of hills running south-west of Edinburgh and not very high, but with the snow on them and rising above mist they looked Alpine. 

Scholar and Gentleman

Michael Foot’s death was announced today. He was utterly unlike that other Labour Party leader, Tony Blair in three points:-

1. dress sense, PR and presentation generally;
2. intellectual interests – Michael Foot was a scholar, and the world of his mind included a huge landmass called “the past”. Tony Blair’s world has two islets, the Beatles and Winston Churchill. Michael Foot loved Hazlitt and Swift. Tony Blair I always imagine reading self-help books; and
3. ability to win elections.

Among his other achievements, Michael Foot was the founding president of the Hazlitt Society.

The former Labour leader Michael Foot unveiled a restored, 216-word inscription, one of the longest in church history, on the restored grave in St Anne's churchyard in Soho, central London. It honoured a dissenter who is acknowledged as one the greatest masters of English prose. The grave, with its jubilant tribute to "a despiser of the merely rich and great, a lover of the people, poor or oppressed, a hater of the pride and power of the few" had been allowed to fall into near -illegible neglect.

Mr Foot likes to quote Hazlitt's essay "Mind and Motive": "Happy are they who live in the dream of their own existence, and see all things in the light of their own minds; who walk by faith and hope; to whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar, and into whom the spirit of the world has not entered! They have not been 'hurt by the archers', not has the iron entered their souls. The world has no hand on them."

I one saw Michael Foot addressing an election rally in Edinburgh’s Playhouse Theatre.  He inspired real warmth and affection in his audience, and was almost knocked off his stick by the women jumping up to hug him as he limped away.

Tributes here:-

Men of power have not time to read; yet the men who do not read are unfit for power," said the great man, and it was truer than he knew. Foot's introduction to the Penguin edition of Gulliver's Travels is, for me, one of the finest essays ever written about Swift, and will be remembered long after Foot's political career is forgotten. Yet he was ill-suited to the politician's trade. Cerebral, incorruptible and curiously innocent, he represented a noble and exalted tradition on the British Left. How small his successors appear by comparison.

Neo Puritans

Last night I watched Dispatches: Britain’s Islamic Republic, on Channel 4.  It was about the Islamic Federation Europe’s entryism into the Labour party, and their domination of the Tower Hamlets council, which gives them access to large sums of money that they can divert from generally cultural projects to the more purely religious.  The IFE members came across as intolerant puritans, reminding me of the Christian evangelicals who in Victorian times dominated the country, with their Mrs Grundy censorship, their suspicion of pleasure, their miserable joyless dreary Sundays, which continentals used to regard with horror.  Along with the puritanism is a desire to control the morals of others. These guys were leaning heavily on a young woman who was starting a dating site, or taking away the funding from groups that were celebrating song and dance in bright costumes.  They were like Mrs Proudie the bishop's wife in Trollope’s Barchester series, who locked her servants’ doors and whose petty tyranny was justified because it was for the souls of the people.  Save us from those who would save our souls!

Frozen March

Freezing still, though the days are sunny. Other people’s gardens have snowdrops and crocuses poking through. Mine, facing north, is tundra, with soil frozen hard. However, some sweet-peas I planted inside are sprouting.

The Lovely Lenny Henry

The Saturday afternoon play on Radio 4 was Othello with Lenny Henry in the title role. I’ve got a big crush on Lenny Henry, and I did think he was excellent, bringing a sweeping delivery to the lines. Lenny Henry isn’t a trained Shakespearean actor but evidently being a good mimic, learning timing as a comedian and also being a respectable soul singer – I saw him once fronting a band doing Ride Sally Ride – along with his big African voice and control of a range of emotion can substitute for years at RADA and the RSC. He got Othello’s charm, so we can see why Desdemona would love him, and his bewildered passion.

The plot of Othello is a total clunker, with Agatha Christie-style set ups of misinterpreted conversations and misplaced handkerchiefs. But the poetry is great, and the main characters besides Othello – Iago, Cassio and Desdemona – are towering. Cassio the smooth, educated man with his romantic admiration for Desdesmona, his contempt for his devoted tart of a girlfriend, Bianca, and his loyalty to Othello is a picture of the averagely decent officer, the kind you get in Tolstoy. He also has one of the finest drunk scenes ever. Iago’s shrugging cynicism, his hatred of his superiors, both social and moral, and the desire to bring them down in the dirt, along with his malicious awareness of how he is regarded carelessly as the honest fellow is one of the best pieces of malevolence in drama. Those two were both played well by the actors, but Desdemona was dreadful. She had this shrill nagging voice which made you wonder why Othello hadn’t strangled her before the play begun. Desdemona is of course the most tactless woman who ever lived and died, since she always chooses when her husband is in a filthy mood to ask him a favour, and asks him in the worst possible way. However, she is asking out of a sense of justice rather than whim and it is part of her attraction and worth that she doesn’t calculate. But she is meant to be highly refined and this Desdemona only appeared naïve in contrast to her bawdy maid Emilia rather than fastidious and innocent.

It was a pleasure hearing this and I wish I had been able to see the lovely Lenny giving it all on stage dressed in a military uniform.

Photo Poster

I liked this photo of a poster for a reading by my brother-in-law, John Lyall:-

Now for some good news

On this morning’s Today programme I actually heard some positive results arising from a government initiative:-

A government initiative to boost cycling in towns appears to have increased the number of trips made on a bicycle by more than a quarter.  More adults took up cycling and there was a fall in the number doing no exercise at all.  The programme has since been extended to seventeen towns and one city.

In late 2005 six towns in England were chosen to be cycling demonstration towns including Derby, Exeter, and Brighton and Hove.   Each town was given £5 a head which it then matched.  One demonstration town, Aylesbury, used the funding to publicise existing cycle routes with colour coding and signs whilst another Darlington doubled the length of its cycling routes. Cycling England which runs the scheme said the first three years saw the number of trips taken by cyclists in the towns rise by as much as 27%.  Schools targeted by initiative saw the proportion of pupils who cycled regularly more than doubled to just over 25%.

Cycling England’s website is here.  Among other things it says:-

The standard amount of funding for cycling initiatives in English local authorities is around £1 per citizen, per year. In contrast, Dutch towns such as Amsterdam are currently spending around £10-20 per year.

Amsterdam – where cyclists rule and cars lumber about like beaten churls.

That gave me a warm glow, which I needed, as the cycle to work was freezing and my fingers felt frost-bitten by the time I arrived.

Night Music

It’s the 200th anniversary of Chopin’s birth.  I learned enough classical piano when I was young, so as to be able to stumble through Nocturne Op 9 Nr. 1.  The left hand plays a regular run of twelve notes following the same pattern throughout the piece while the right ripples away and will occasionally play odd numbers of notes eg 11 in the right hand to 6 in the left, or 7 to 6.  So the left hand fixes the rhythm, like the bass in a band, while the right has an improvised feeling.  The piece is full of yearning.

Learning to play an instrument badly does increase your appreciation for those who can play it well.

 

Gita Sahgal

From Pickled Politics

When I started writing first about the Amnesty / Gita Sahgal / Moazzam Begg controversy I said that many of those taking up Gita Sahgal’s cause were people who actually had an agenda against Amnesty International. As yet she hasn’t even distanced herself from these fruitloops.

To which I can reply, when I started reading about the Amnesty / Gita Sahgal / Moazzam Begg controversy I felt extremely pissed off that those of us who are members of Amnesty International and disturbed by what Sahgal had said about Amnesty’s activities with Begg and Cageprisoners, were told that we were either neocon dupes or really wanted the likes of Begg to be disappeared and tortured.

As a Catholic pays nuns to say masses for a soul in purgatory so do liberals pay a subscription to Amnesty International to get bodies out of hellish prisons.  If you haven’t got the energy or will or stomach to read up about torture victims and do something about them through publicity and/or petitioning the offending governments, Amnesty International will do it for you. As well as aiding prisoners of conscience they succour your conscience, and good for them.  However, as the devout Catholic would be uneasy at hearing of scandal in the convent, so do Amnesty International supporters want their organisation not to compromise itself in its dealings with the followers of ideologies that are as anti human rights as you can get.

I hadn’t heard of Gita Saghal before this controversy but I have been prejudiced on her side since she is a secular feminist, a long term activist and people who know about that kind of thing speak very highly of her. Also she is clear and eloquent about her objections to Begg (no, she doesn’t want to shove him back into Guantanamo) while Amnesty’s statements on the affair have been shifty and have not met the points she has raised:-

Interestingly, the US and other governments that have violated human rights standards in the name of countering terrorism justify those violations by saying that our security can only be protected by violating the rights of others. Mr Begg is one of the people that the US government defined as “other.”

But there is no place for the “other” in human rights because to argue that some people are more ‘deserving’ than others of having their rights protected is to argue that some beings are less than human.

Widney Brown, Senior Director for International Law and Policy, Amnesty International – International Secretariat.

Gita Saghal had not argued nor had anyone except the foamy-mouthed bigots that you get in any comments thread argued that Begg should not have his human rights protected.  And that "other" card is of low value these days.

Anyway, here’s an interview with Gita Saghal, though of course her answers may have been dictated by Dick Cheney:-

Moazzem Begg was released from Guantanamo Bay, without being charged with any terrorist-related offence. So what’s wrong with Amnesty involving him in its campaign against human rights violations in prison?

Amnesty International could have involved him in meetings to describe his experiences at Guantanamo, without whitewashing his views. For instance, it is clear that he was an admirer of the Taliban, had attended jihadi training camps and had sold books and videos promoting global jihad and terrorist attacks, such as Abdullah Azzam’s book. [Azzam, who preached jihad, was a mentor of Osama bin Laden and persuaded him to come to Afghanistan.] These things could have been stated in his introduction to make it clear that he held abhorrent views, but nevertheless his rights should be defended. Instead, he appears as someone simply doing charitable work in Taliban Afghanistan.

….

Amnesty has said that Moazzem Begg never used a platform he shared with Amnesty to speak against the rights of others. What’s wrong if they get him to share his experiences as a detainee in a campaign against torture?

It seems that no one in Amnesty International has any idea what Begg’s views are, so they would have no idea whether he was using an Amnesty platform to promote his views or not. Secondly, this is a disingenuous statement for two reasons:

One, either Begg has views that should not be promoted from an Amnesty platform, so Amnesty is acknowledging he keeps his detainee experiences separate from his ‘views’. However, Claudio Cordone [senior director of Amnesty International] has also said there is nothing wrong with his views. So which does Amnesty believe?

Two, Amnesty International is a highly reputable organisation. Anyone receiving such extensive coverage is legitimised as a human rights advocate. This is undoubtedly true of Begg. It is not honest for Amnesty International to pretend that giving someone such huge coverage globally was not exceptionally important for Begg. It also helped to legitimise Cageprisoners as an organisation. . .

There’s a view that sometimes the people whose rights you defend may not share your views — but that does not mean you don’t defend their rights or involve them in the fight for rights. How would you see this in the context of Moazzem Begg?

If Begg were a white fascist, Amnesty International would understand the distinction between protecting his right to be free from torture and arbitrary detention, and treating him as a hero and an advocate to close Guantanamo when he came back.

How can organisations like Amnesty ensure that while they continue to champion the rights of terrorism suspects to be free from torture, they are not seen to be implicitly endorsing the views of these suspects?

Many of the most reputable lawyers and activists who work with those arrested in relation to terrorism cases, are appalled by the status given to Cageprisoners. I have received a lot of support from anti-racists and former Islamists who know just how dangerous the ideology of Cageprisoners is. They can see the distinction between supporting people’s human rights and giving them a platform. However, the leadership of Amnesty International cannot see this and appears to have wilfully ignored all evidence to the contrary. They are supported by a large number of largely white, liberal lawyers who apparently have no capacity to analyse Begg or Cageprisoners.

Beat her!

This is depressing stuff:-

A study of schoolchildren has found that most of those questioned thought violence towards women was acceptable if there was a reason behind it.

The majority of the pupils said it was justified if the woman had an affair, or if she was late in making the tea.

This reminds me of going to see School of Rock.  In the initial scenes the Jack Black character is mooching off his friend, sleeping on the floor and not paying any rent.  The friend’s girlfriend is getting very pissed off, naturally, and mouthing off.  The kids in the audience, boys of about ten, were indicating that the girlfriend should be put in her place, physically if necessary.

The old saying of 'If he pulls your pigtails it means he likes you', translates into violence in adulthood which girls accept as normal.

Which reminds me of a satirical group who used to busk at the Festival – the Merry Mac Fun Trio? – and their song:-

Ah’m a lovely woman,
Feminine, defenceless,
I knaw that ma man loves me
‘Cos he beats me senseless.

I grew up among conservative farming folk with very little education.  There were clear lines between the women’s sphere and the man’s sphere but it was thought shocking if a man hit a woman.   There was some tussling in the primary school playground, but the boys were brought up with the dictum “you don’t hit girls”.  What happened to this?