drax the destroyer

I've just published a piece on The Sharpener about Drax power station; the largest emitter of CO2 in the UK, and the main target for action from the Camp For Climate Action.

Called Drax The Destroyer, it takes apart any claims that burning coal is somehow acceptable in a world that needs to avert serious climate change.

Like Barbara Freese puts it in Coal: A Human History

We've made a lot of mistakes over the centuries as we've struggled to understand the nature and impact of coal and its smoke.

Some thought coal grew underground from seeds or in mines guarded by demons or dragons. Some saw in the mines scientific proof of the biblical flood. Some credited coal with protecting people from the bubonic plague; others accused it of promoting baldness, tooth decay, sordid murders, caustic speech and fuzzy thinking.

More recently, many of us believed we could burn vast amounts of coal indefinitely without disrupting the natural balance of the planet.

No doubt we still have much ot learn about coal, but at least we've been able to dispel many of the old myths.

UPDATE: In order to prevent crossover and keep the debate in one place, any Comments for my posts on The Sharpener should be left there rather than here.

freedom of information

In May last year the West feigned surprise at the vicious behaviour of the government in Uzbekistan.

I wrote at the time about how it's another aspect of the oil story, and how we've long overlooked the torture meted out by the government because they're politically cosy with our interests.

I also mentioned the way that the British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, had called attention to human rights abuses, and for his troubles was smeared and sacked by the Foreign Office.

The British government have been trying to silence Craig since then. His book, Murder in Samarkand, has just been published.

This has happened despite the best efforts of the British Government to suppress it. In support of the points he makes in his book, Craig published a number of documents online that the British Government does not want you to see.

http://dahrjamailiraq.com/murray/
http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/documents/docs.html
http://www.blairwatch.co.uk/murray/docs.html

He then received a letter from lawyers acting on behalf of the Foreign Office demanding that he remove the documents from his website or he will be issued with a high court injunction. The government is claiming copyright on anything they ever publish, simply as a device to gag someone who exposes their collusion with torture.

This is where bloggers come in. We need to put these documents up - or at the very least links to the sites - in as many places as possible, make it impossible and in fact counterproductive for them to try and censor him. The implications of them getting away with it are, as Craig details below, absolutely enormous.

We've done this before, such as the time the government tried to remove The Guardian's piece on The Ricin Ring That Never Was.

If you have a blog or any webspace, please spread these around.

I've put a Torrent file of all Craig's documents up here.

Craig said:

I am sorry to trouble you, but believe that we now face a threat both to the Web and to Freedom of Information in the UK which must be challenged. The British government is arguing that government documents, even if released under the Freedom of Information Act or Data Protection Act, cannot be published, on the web or elsewhere, as they remain Crown Copyright. They have required me to remove documents from my website on that basis, under threat of legal action.

If you think about it for a moment, the government could thus cancel out almost the whole purpose of the Freedom of Information Act; information released would be just for the private use of an individual. Newspapers - or bloggers - could not publish it in any detail.

If accepted, this extraordinary use of copyright could keep literally everything - everything - produced by government a secret.

The documents in question are the supporting evidence for my book, Murder in Samarkand, which has just been released. The government continues to claim my story is untrue. There is one important advance in all this. Up until now the government refused to acknowledge the documents were authentic. Now Buttrill's letter specifically acknowledges all of the documents and claims copyright over them.

Some of these documents have already been published widely on the web (not least due to the efforts of many of you on this list), particularly the "Tashkent telegrams" on CIA and MI6 use of intelligence obtained under torture in Uzbekistan. Those are now admitted as authentic.

Some are new to the web. Perhaps the most important is the chart of the changes the British Government insisted be made to the book. These are extremey revealing for what they admit to be true - for example, only minor changes are requested in the key meeting between senior officials on the legality of using intelligence from torture, at which it was confirmed that this is US and UK policy.

Perhaps still more revealing is the insistence on removal of the assertion that "Colin Powell knowingly lied" when he claimed that bombs in Tashkent were the work of al-Qaida. The British government insisted on removal not because it was untrue - as detailed in the book, they know full well it is true - but because it would "Damage UK-US relations".

The changes requested were made in the book, because my publisher would not publish without. That is why the truth needs to be out there on the web.

It is on the face of it very strange that the British Government is going after me over the Copyright Act and not the Official Secrets Act. The answer is simple - under the Copyright Act there is no jury. A jury would never convict for campaigning against torture, and be most unlikely to accept that documents released cannot be published. The table of changes requested by the government is not even a classified document in the first place. But a single judge may be more malleable - John Reid had put a huge effort lately into browbeating judges over anything connected to the so-called War on Terror. As the government know very well I have no money to pay a small, or even large fine, they can get the book and documents banned and me in jail without having to convince any jury of pesky citizens.

How to fight back?

Well, we must not let the documents disappear from the web. There is as yet no legal ruling on these matters, Mr Buttrill's claims are only highly controversial legal contentions. So if you post the documents pending a court ruling, there is a danger you may be contravening the - civil, not criminal - law, but then again you may not. You would quite likely receive a threatening letter from Mr Buttrill. Now you have this email from me, NSA and GCHQ are almost certainly tracking you, (they can, incidentally, reciprocally spy in the other country for each other and then swap the info, because neither needs a warrant to spy abroad), but then they probably were already.

The publisher had firm and very expensive legal advice that it was not contravening any civil or criminal law to publish in the book links to web pages containing the documents. So you are almost certainly on safe legal ground in publishing this link to the Dahr Jamail site if you do not wish to mirror the docs yourself.
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/murray/

Feel free to publish this email and the letter from Mr Buttrill.

It might also be helpful if we urged people to contact him, by phone, email or letter, and ask him complex questions about the fascinating and difficult legal and ethical questions thrown up by the government's position. As a government servant he's obliged to reply.

Finally, the government made plain to parliament that it would act against the book itself if it was published. As it only came out on Friday, no injunction yet but it could happen any time. So if you are interested in getting it, buy now and beat the injunctions! It is available from most online booksellers, though bookshops seem very reluctant to stock it.

Many Thanks,

Craig Murray

leeds: live it, lease it

There's a real eye-opener in the current Corporate Watch newsletter. Depite living in Leeds, I had no idea about the extent to which we're being fucked over by privatisation of our services. The piece is called 'Leeds: Live It Lease It', a play on the city's slogan of 'Live It, Love It', which cost us £150,000 despite the fact that it's the slogan used by Hong Kong.

All the sell-offs are flabbergasting, but the thing that dropped my jaw to the floor was this

The supposedly state-of-the-art schools constructed by Mowlem as part of the £35 million Leeds 7 Schools Project were built without kitchens. 'Nutritious', pre-cooked, frozen food is therefore shipped in each day from Mowlem's catering facilities at a hospital near Middlesbrough.

On so many levels: FUCK!

It means that the food will have to be processed stuff, diminishing the nutritional value.

It means a round trip of over a hundred miles every day just to bring the food in, with all the extra resource consumption that entails.

It means that the provision of meals will always have to be contracted out, as the school has nowhere to cook.

It means that it can never serve locally produced, fresh food, prepared and served by local people with a relationship to the school.

As ever, PFI is benefiting the wealthy at the expense of the local people who are meant to be grateful.

take the high road

May the few crumbs of this post sustain you through the long days to come.

Once again I trundle offline and offshore into the sunset, cycling and walking on a small array of Scottish islands.

Last year the plan was Arran, Islay and Jura. The first two were so involving that there wasn't time to do all three.

This year Jura takes centre stage. A place where deer outnumber humans thirty to one. Where, if they drank the whisky they make, they'd get through just under a bottle an hour, every hour, every man woman and child. The place where there's the oldest stone structure in Scotland, the place where the KLF burned a million quid, where George Orwell wrote 1984.

For more, see last year's hiatus announcement.

Back in ten days or so.

the fat lady sings

It's with some sadness that I note the demise of Top of The Pops. It was always mostly crap, but that was part of what gave it its value.

When The Jesus and Mary Chain's April Skies was released and went Top 10, they were given a TOTP appearance. Janice Long asked Jim Reid if it was a sellout and he emphatically said not.

He explained that he'd grown up watching it and there would be all this disposable commercial fluff, then there'd be some wild card, someone who looked like they shouldn't have been allowed on in the first place. Reid cited Bolan and the Buzzocks, naming them as key stages in the development of his will to make music.

The first important musical choice of my life was made whilst watching Top Of The Pops. It was the week of my tenth birthday and I'd got a little bit of money from relatives. The Jam did Strange Town, I went out and bought it and nothing was ever the same again.

It is classic Jam, muscular, tense, urban, volatile, political and restless. It was nothing like life in the dull middle class dormitory suburb I was growing up in, and that was its magic.

Whilst the Jam and punk in general were welcomed by some for speaking about things you recognise (an understandable craving in the decade that brought you albums called Tales Of Topographic Oceans and Zinc Alloy And The Hidden Riders Of Tomorrow Or A Creamed Cage In August), for me it was something different. It spoke of a vibrant, exciting life out there, where things were alive and real, where you could live by your passions and make your own choices.

When the American Religious Right had their big push to censor music in the late 80s, it led to the invention of those 'Parental Advisory Explicit Lyrics' stickers being volunteered by the record industry as a way to head off any regulation.

But whilst it made some albums seem cool to the youth they were supposed to protect by virtue of having the stickers on, there was a genuine censorship effect. Big chains like Woolworths and Wal-Mart refused to stock anything that bore a sticker. For many people growing up in small towns, that was their only record store. So it was away with Public Enemy and Prince and on to a strict diet of Michael Bolton and Debbie Gibson.

Similarly, as an adolescent hating the conformity of my surroundings, knowing that music could provide the outlet, I was constrained. Not by censorship, but by what was put in front of me blocking the view of where I wanted to go. I didn't know where to start. Top Of The Pops had its one or two freaks per show. They were my first steps.

The Jam were it for me, and to this day still command a powerful respect. I recently made a compilation for someone and it still absolutely zings out of the speakers, full of intent and fire. Beat Surrender just throws you round the room, fucking amazing.

In the days before dedicated music channels, there was so little music on TV. Yet pop music was the dominant cultural expression, it was to the late 20th century what the novel was to the 19th. In the same way that generals are always competant for fighting the last war, so pre-Sky TV commissioning editors were good for making programmes for the previous generation. They only let us have TOTP, Whistle Test (a bit grown up for a 13 year old), and Saturday morning programmes (too stupid and full of Keith Chegwin and cuddly toys). So TOTP was the one.

Pretty much anyone born between 1960 and 1980 will remember certain TOTP performances; things they saw once, on TV, for the length of a commercial break, twenty years ago!

I remember seeing Bauhaus doing Ziggy Stardust in the days when TOTP gave you stage space in proportion to your comercial standing (Bauhaus got a postage stamp, whereas Jagger got three stages linked by catwalk bridges). It sounded so fucking alien to my ears, barely like music at all. It let me know that there was a lot more lot music than the Thompson Twins and Leee John.

Then every Smiths appearance felt like a victory. There was The Bard, chief giver of not a fuck, his very presence mocking all that chart froth. Ripping open his shirt during William It Was Really Nothing to reveal MARRY ME in eyeliner on his chest. The presenter's sneery acidic tone after saying 'at just over two minutes, that's the shortest record on the chart this week', as if length was quality. I remember the smug glow inside, the one-over extra edge in knowing that the B-side, Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want, was even shorter.

Then holy moly, Shoplifters of The World Unite, such a rolling thundercloud of anti-chart pop. Like all their songs, the music set them apart from everything around them, but the fact that The Bard could be on national TV holding a placard with the title on was fucking revolutionary.

John Peel managed to keep on being allowed to present TOTP despite huge sarcyness. After I Knew You Were Waiting for Me, Aretha Franklin's duet with George Michael, he said, 'it's long been said that Aretha Franklin could sing any old rubbish and make it sound good, and I think she just has'.

As well as remembering specific performances, whether they'll admit it to you now or not, most people of the TOTP generation will have fantasised about being on it. I just about managed it! In February 1996 Julian Cope got to present a show. Mercifully, he broke with his past habit of doing it peaking on acid.

He was knee deep in the Newbury Bypass campaign at the time, so he took a couple of us from the protest along with him.

It was hilarious. Newbury had dominated the news for weeks. Julian brought hard hats and fluoro tunics so we'd look like the familiar Newbury security guards. He'd had a bunch of T-shirts made up, and swapped them between songs.

A BYPASS IS NOT THE SOLUTION
END OF THE ROAD
One aimed at Newbury's pro-road MP, David Rendel: RENDEL: U-TURN NOW!

He'd ad-lib nods to it all, 'we're sailing high over the Mother Earth tonight, we're clearly out of our trees'. We got the singer from Terrorvision to wear a hard hat. It was a fabulous prankster mix of topical politics and cultural collage.

It got more complaints than any other edition, even the one where Larry out of Cameo wore that massive red codpiece. One of them came in from David Rendel himself, the LibDem corporate scumpig.

I've still have a souvenir, a packet of king size Rizlas with roaches ripped out of the flap that we retrieved afterwards from East 17's dressing room.

I don't mourn the show's passing too much. The fondness is all nostalgic, really. It dies because there are so many outlets for music today. If you want to get your hands on relevant music in these cybertimes, you can easily find your kind of people and get their recommendations and be listening to things quickly, and without blowing money on a record that could turn out to be shite.

In these days of plenty, I am grateful to those who sustained us through the famine.

not so green peace

A while ago I wrote an article on the massive dams planned for new smelters in Iceland, the largest assault on wild nature in all of Europe.

In researching that, I came across evidence of astonishing complicity in the matter by Greenpeace, and wrote an article about that.

In researching that piece, I found out a lot about Greenpeace that didn't tally with the image I - and it seems most others - have of them.

Whilst Greenpeace trade on an image of daring direct action to confront governments and corporations that despoil the environment, much of what they do has the opposite effect. I readily admit and indeed admire the vast amount of great work they have done and continue to do, but there is also a seriously counterproductive corporate side to them.

Run by directors whose career paths move from Greenpeace to senior positions as PR consultants for the very industries they opposed, Greenpeace strikes deals agreeing not to obstruct oil companies' property, and instead to strengthen the hand of Europe’s largest industrial CO2 emitter.

That stuff has been spliced with some writing from a recent blog post and turned into a great big newly published article called Not So Green Peace.

and so this is christmas

The bard said, 'it's July but it's cold as Christmas in the middle of the year'.

However, in a magnificent cakey-eaty arrangement, for me it's July, it's hot and it's Christmas.

Living in the Leeds inner city area of Hyde Park, 1st July is one of the most important dates in the calendar. It's the time of many tenancy agreements ending, especially those of our large student population.

(That's a large population of students, not a population of large students).

Having lived in a house for a year before going back to the smaller accommodation at their parents', they leave a lot of stuff behind that gets stuck in a skip by their newly ex-landlord. The effect is exaggerated for the many overseas students who have to take all their belongings back in a suitcase.

This makes rich pickings for those of us who live here permanently. It's not just pizza boxes and burst armchairs. It's perfectly working electrical appliances, furniture, clothes, books, CDs, posters, all kinds of useful household stuff that would otherwise go to landfill sites. It's known amongst friends as Hyde Park Christmas.

There's a positive flipside too. If I've any tat I need rid of, it can be disposed of for free by dropping it into one of the skips paid for by the overwealthy landlords.

It is perhaps the only system of exchange that might genuinely merit the term 'free market'. Even dumping stuff in the skips doesn't cost the landlords anything as I'm removing as much as I add.

Not that it would bother me too much anyway. I'm in wholehearted agreement with George Orwell's opinion of landlords.

These people are just about as useful as so many tapeworms. It is desirable that people should own their own dwelling houses, and it is probably desirable that a farmer should own as much land as he can actually farm. But the ground-landlord in a town area has no function and no excuse for existence. He is merely a person who has found out a way of milking the public while giving nothing in return. He causes rents to be higher, he makes town planning more difficult, and he excludes children from green spaces: that is literally all that he does, except to draw his income.

what do they know of england

Further to that post I did on The Sharpener, some more musings on the confusion the English have between England and Britain.

I remember watching some of Simon Schama’s acclaimed History of Britain a few years ago and finding much of it was a History of the English Monarchy. It didn’t do much on things that didn’t affect English interests, and even less on how any of it affected ordinary people.

I mean, if I were living in a small Yorkshire village farming my own plot, did it make that much odds when Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church?

The programme’s website encouraged viewers to take an interest in national history. It linked to English Heritage’s website. But not to Cadw, Historic Scotland, Manx National Heritage or the Northern Ireland Heritage Service.

This Anglocentrism is the main problem of popular understanding of British history and constitution.

Frustrated by being part of academic institutions that taught with such outrageous bias, Norman Davies' wrote his mighty work The Isles as a deliberate attempt to cover the history of these islands from a more balanced perspective.

He explains in the introduction:

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

The true extent of this morass of mix-ups is marvellous to behold. One of the most extraordinary aspects of the current scene lies in the number of citizens of the United Kingdom who do not appear to be familiar with the basic parameters of the stair in which they live.

They often do not know what it is called; they do not distinguish between the whole and the constituent parts; and they have never grasped thc most elementary facts of its development. Confusion reigns on every hand. Nor is it confined to the old bad habit of using ‘England’ as a shorthand for the United Kingdom as a whole, and hence of travellers who imagine that they carry an ‘English’ as opposed to a British passport.

Such lapses are commonplace. But they form the tip of a far larger iceberg. The scale of the problem only begins to emerge when one observes the inability of prominent authorities to present the history of our Isles in accurate and unambiguous terms.

For a preliminary sounding, one only needs to enter a bookshop and examine the opening passages of the most popular volumes on British history.

My own experiment was conducted in a bookshop where, to my query about the best books in circulation, the assistant pointed out three titles: Roy Strong, The Story Of Britain (1992), The Oxford History of Britain (1999), and Antonia Fraser, The Lives of the Kings arid Queens of England (revised edition, 1997).

All three books undoubtedly possess manifold virtues in those aspects of the subject which most concern them. I was not making a general assessment. The point of the experiment was simply to test how they define and introduce the overall subject.

Roy Strong’s volume, for instance, was inspired by an admirable and passionate belief in the present generation’s need for a straightforward narrative history. Yet it opens with the baffling sentence, ‘Britain is an island’. One is tempted to mutter, ‘Well, yes and no.’

On the facing page, Strong offers a physical map showing an unnamed archipelago consisting of two large islands and several smaller ones. Uninitiated readers, say from Mars or Japan, would be forgiven for asking which of the islands was called ‘Britain’. And they would not helped by the answer, ‘It all depends on what you mean.’

Initiated readers, of course, would quickly recognise the familiar outline of the ‘British Isles’. For their part, they would be justified in wondering whether the book dealt with the history not of one island but of all of them. Judging by the contents, it would seem that Strong is using ‘Britain’ as the accepted shorthand for the United Kingdom.

The trouble there lies in the fact that, in its present form, the United Kingdom consists of two parts - Great Britain and Northern Ireland. So it is not ‘an island’ (singular) in the present tense. Indeed, it has not been one island since 31 December 1800.

Roy Strong’s misconception follows in the steps of numerous predecessors. One of these was A.L. Rowse, who published a survey with the same title as Strong’s. Rowse’s Story of Britain (1979, 1993) opens in almost exactly the same way:

The story of Britain is that of the island which has influenced the outside world more than any other island in history.

There it goes again - the one island fixation, embellished with an imperial flourish. And it is still there in the final sentence of Rowse’s epilogue:

It remains to be seen how the people work out their fate; and whether in this lucky island it will be worthy of so remarkable a history.

At this point, many readers may want to reach for their dictionary. The latest edition of the ultimate authority, The Oxford English Dictionary, defines ‘Britain’ as follows;

The proper name of the whole island containing England, Wales, and Scotland, with their dependencies; more fully called Great Britain; now also used for the British state or empire as a whole.

For the adjective British, the OED supplies five basic meanings;

1. 0f or pertaining to the ancient Bntoris
2. Of or pertaining to Great Britain or its inhabitants
3. Of or belonging to, Brittany. Breton. Obs(olete)
4. ellipt. as sb. pl. British people, soldiers, etc. [i.e. ‘The British’]
5. comb., British-born, -built, -owned adjs., British-man

From this, one learns that ‘Britain’ can refer to any one of three different entities - to the geographical unit of Great Britain’, to the British state, and/or to the British Empire.

Incongruously, however, British has somewhat different geographical connotations. It can only refer apparently to Ancient Britain, to Great Britain, and to Brittany. It does not pertain to the United Kingdom, therefore, except in that short period of history when the Kingdom was coterminous with ‘Great Britain’, i.e. from 1707-1800. Surely that cannot be right for a dictionary published in 1994.

If one turns for elucidation to The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the plot thickens. The meanings of’ ‘British’ are essentially the same as in the OED, although point 5 is omitted.

The main definition of Britain is also essentially the same, except for one curious amendment. Where the OED reads ‘now also used for the British state or empire as a whole’, the SOED has ‘now used for the British empire as a whole’. For some reason, among its definitions of ‘Britain’, the SOED has chosen to to drop the ‘British state’.

If this is correct, then Roy Strong’s Story of Britain could be a history either of the island of Great Britain or of the British Empire, but not of the United Kingdom.

The inconsistencies are legion. They centre on the thorny question of what constituted the United Kingdom at any particular time. In their further explanantions to their definitions of Britain, both the OED and SOED use a similar formula.

The OED states:

After the O(ld) E(nglish) period, Britain was only used as a historical term, until about the. time of Henry VIII and Edward VI, when it came again into practical politics in connexion with the efforts made to unite England and Scotland; in 1604 James I was proclaimed ‘King of Great Britain’; and this name was adopted by the United Kingdom, at the union in 1707…

The SOED uses a condensed version of this information, while the OED adds some further details:

After that event [the union of 1707], South Britain and North Britain are frequently in acts of Parl. For England and Scotland respectively; the latter is in occasional (chiefly postal) use. (So West Britain, humourously or polemically for ‘Ireland’.) Greater Britain is a modern rhetorical device for ‘Great Britain and the colonies’, ‘the British Empire’, brought into vogue in 1868.

These comment are instructive, of course, as far as they go. But one cannot help feeling that the Oxford editors have been stranded in a rather distant period of history. Indeed, they appear to have progressed very little beyond 1707. They do not let on that the name and territory of the United Kingdom have changed twice in the last two centuries.

West Britain, for example, could only have applied when Ireland formed part of the United Kingdom between 1801 and 1922. Britain as shorthand for both ‘Great Britain’ and the ‘United Kingdom’ only remained unambiguous during the lifetime of the united ‘Kingdom of Great Britain’ between 1707 and 1800. Ever since 1800, as the dictionary definitions indicate, Britain has had to assume alternative meanings.

Nor is the matter much clarified by turning to the dictionary for an explanation of the term England. The SOED seems to offer three definitions:

1. The territory of the Angles. Only in OIld] E[nglish]
2. The southern part of the island of Great Britain… Often: the English (or British) nation or state
3. Short for The King of England, also for the English or a portion of them…

Looked at closely, this entry reveals that the SOED is actually offering seven definitions of England. Point 2 alone contains five. These five are:

- The southern part of the island of Great Britain - i.e., a geographical or territorial unit.
- The English nation, i.e., a community of people.
- The English state, i.e., a political entity
- The British nation.
- The British state

It is unfortunate that the editors elide all five definitions into a single point. One possibility is that they considered both ‘English’ and ‘British’, like ‘nation’ and ‘state’, to be synonyms and that all four terms are coterminous with ‘the southern part… of Great Britain’. If so, they have laid themselves open to some serious queries.

In this light, or twilight, one can turn to The Oxford History of Britain (1999). The editor’s foreword opens as follows:

The distinctiveness, even uniqueness, of the British as a people has long been taken for granted… Visitors from overseas, from those ubiquitos Venetian ambassadors in the late fifteenth century, through intellectuals like Voltaire or Tocqueville, to American journalists in the twentieth century, have all been convinced of the special quality of British Society.

The key phrases here are ‘the British as a people’ and ‘British society’. They immediately arouse suspicions of anachronism There can be no doubt that Voltaire in the eighteenth century, de Tocqueville in the nineteenth, and the American journalists in the twentieth were all reporting on a people and a society that could properly be called ‘British’. But there has to be a question mark over what exactly was visited by those Venetian ambassadors in the late fifteenth century.

More than two hundred years before the formation of the British state, one has to suspect that the Venetian ambassadors had only visited England and that their comments were confined to the special qualities of the English people and of English society.

It is surely out of place to suggest that the ‘English society’ of the fifteenth century was simply an earlier version of the ‘British society’ of the eighteenth century and later.

Reading on, one’s hopes for clarification are dashed when one meets a statement containing a still more convoluted muddle:

A basic premise of this book is that it deals with the history of Great Britain, two partitioned, poly-cultural islands, and not merely with England.

The book does not deal ‘merely with England’. That is fair enough. It supposedly deals with the ‘history of Great Britain’. Yet Great Britain cannot possibly be equated with ‘two partitioned, poly-cultural islands’. As the OED confirms, Great Britain is the full name of ‘the whole island containing England, Wales, and Scotland, with their dependencies’. It does not include Ireland. Unlike ‘Britain’, it can’t be made in refer to ‘two islands’, whether ‘partitioned’, poly-cultural’ or otherwise.

So one is faced here not just with an anachronism or with an ambiguity but with a fundamental error. It is rather disturbing. It would appear that the mix-ups are being disseminated by the very works that should be disentangling them.

Investigation of the constituent chapters of The Oxford History of Britain provides little reassurance. Despite the editor’s declaration, the ‘basic premise’ is largely ignored. The chapter on the sixteenth century, for example, is entitled ‘The Tudor Age’. It begins with a section on ‘Population Changes’, which contains no information on the population of anywhere other than England and opens with a statement that:

The age of the Tudors has left its impact on the Anglo-American mind as a watershed in British history.

Surely, the age of the Tudors, who reigned in England, Wales, and Ireland but not in Scotland, is an important period in the history of England. But it hardly represents a watershed in British history.

The chapter following, entitled ‘The Stuarts, 1603-1688’, offers meagre improvement. Once again, Scotland and Ireland are ignored; and the chapter opens with a remark about the Stuarts being ‘one of England’s least successful dynasties’. Such a judgement on an ancient Scottish dynasty which reigned only briefly in England is, to say the least, out of place.

In his foreword, the editor of the Oxford History makes a heartfelt appeal to the patriotism of Britain. ‘This rooted patriotism,’ he writes, ‘embracing Welsh, Scots and Ulstermen over the centuries – though, significantly, never the southern Irish - endured and remained unchangeable.’

One has to suppose that southern Irishmen like the Duke of Wellington do not come into the reckoning. But if Welsh, Scots, or Ulster readers take the trouble to seek out what is, and what isn’t, said about their countries, their presumed patriotic feelings are due for a dousing. If British historians are to continue to appeal the patriotism of the non-English, they will have to address non-English concerns with rather more accuracy and sensitivity.

If one now turns to The Lives of The Kings and Queens of England, one finds still more sources of confusion. Lady Antonia begins by saying that ‘in one sense… the volume… needs no introduction.’ A glance at the table of contents, however, reveals that on one point at least an introductory explanation is sorely needed. For the contents open with William the Conqueror and close with Elizabeth II.

For no apparent reason they exclude the ten pre-Conquest monarchs from Edward the Elder to Harold Godwinson, who were undoubtedly Kings of England, whilst including the eleven representatives of the Houses of Hanover, Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha, and Windsor who have been monarchs not of England but of the United Kingdom. All the Queen’s loyal but non-English subjects have good cause to feel aggrieved.

This Sceptred Isle was a book published to accompany the highly successful BBC Radio series in 1995-6. Liberally laced with trenchant extracts from Winston Churchill’s History of The English Speaking Peoples (1954-6), its fifty-five episodes cover the two thousand years from Julius Caesar to Queen Victoria. Both the book and the radio series revealed the public’s appetite for old-fashioned narrative history and for a comprehensive chronological framework to historical knowledge.

Yet, as the adoption of Shakespeare’s catch-phrase implies, the interpretation is Angloccntric to a fault. It accepts without a word of hesitiation that England is the only part of the Isles that counts and that British history is a mere continuation of English history.

Finally, one last book needs a mention. Paul Johnson’s Offshore Islanders (1995) bears a subtitle, A History of The English People. It opens on the frontispiece with a quotation from Milton’s Areopagitica:

Lords and Commons of England - consider what nation it is whereof you are and of which you are governor.

Amen to that.

…The ultimate devlopment in this regard was perpetrated in a recent TV advertisment which unceremoniously amended Shakespeare and came up with the ineffable line:

‘This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this Britain.’

The advertisers must not be blamed. After all, they are imitating the most distinguished academics.

One would be hard put to find another state or country which is so befuddled about the basic framework of its past. One of the few parallels that does exist can be found in the textbooks of the late and unlamented Soviet Union.

Although the Soviet Union was not created until 1923, Soviet historians customarily pretended that Soviet history stretched back to prehistoric times, just as it was destined to stretch up and away into the eternal future.

The standard textbook of the Stalinist era, A.M. Pankratova’s A History of The USSR, appeared in Moscow in three volumes in 1947-8. Only the third volume treated the formation and development of the USSR. The first volume opened with a section on ‘The Primitive Community System in Our Country’, and closed with ‘Important Dates in the History of the USSR since Ancient Times until the end of the Seventeenth Century’.

In this period of the ‘Soviet past’, space was found both for the ancient Greek cities of the Crimea and for Genghis Khan. The second volume opened with a chapter on ‘The Founding of the Russian Empire’ and closed with ‘Important Dates in the History of the USSR in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’. The first date on this last list is ‘1682-1725… Reign of Peter I’.

One may be amused. But to state that the reign of Peter The Great formed part of Soviet history is no less eccentric than stating that the reign of Henry VIII formed part of British history. Soviet historians at least could plead that they were writing to the prescription of ideological commissars. British historians have no such excuse.

a demented badger

The best three opening words of a newspaper article that I've ever seen.



I love that bit from Kevin Witts. He's so keen on badgers that he's the spokesperson for the Devon Badger Group. His zoological knowledge must be far greater than yours or mine. And how does he express his understanding?

'An elderly badger that's losing it a bit'.

For my part, I suspect it's just a bit more outgoing. Any crossing of paths with a badger is likely to see you coming off second best. The assiduous scientific research at Kerosene Oyster Hell shows that badgers are even harder than swans.

Be careful out there.

fight not to win, but because we should

Been thinking some more about one of those astonishing quotes from Greenpeace staff in the Iceland article.

Greenpeace's Frode Pleym said, ‘the reason for not getting involved in the dam issue was that we felt that the decision making process had gone too far.’ And now there’s a direct action campaign, Greenpeace is still staying out.

Ignoring the fact that the planning process is only decided on for one of the dozen dams, let’s deal with the point of principle. Supporting those who resist ecological devastation used to be part of Greenpeace’s work, irrespective of the immediate chances of winning.

Greenpeace gave some help to the anti-roads campaigns in the mid-90s, in terms of public statements of support and direct practical assistance on the ground with media training and materials. There was never any real chance that the individual roads being targeted would be stopped, but that was not the point. The benefit came in raising the issues, giving space to different ideas and priorities that did win the day, and the government’s roads budget was slashed to a tiny fraction of what was planned.

We did not fight at Newbury to win there, but because of that inevitably defeated campaign we didn’t have to fight at Salisbury or any of the dozens of other places threatened by schemes that were swiftly abandoned.

When Greenpeace sent ships to French nuclear tests in the Pacific, there was no real prospect that they would stop the tests. The decision making process was too far gone. When they blocked the Sellafield outflow pipe in the Irish Sea, Sellafield was already up and running, it was not going to be stopped.

By Frode Pleym’s explanation of Greenpeace’s rationale, none of these actions should have happened. They were contradictory to the idea that it’s not worth raising your voice if a planning process is too far gone. Either Greenpeace should not have been supporting those campaigns, or else it should be supporting the Icelandic dam campaign. There is no other consistent position.

So either Pleym is a liar, or Greenpeace has retreated from its radical tradition (or both).

Greenpeace was founded – and is funded by subscribers who want to see it continue – on the premise that somebody gives resistance. They get in the way and attempt to stop things not just when there’s a good chance of winning, but because these things should be challenged on principle.

But we don’t just oppose on principle, though that in itself is reason enough. We oppose because we often can’t tell how possible or realistic our aspirations are. Many of us who remember the 1980s never really believed apartheid or the Soviet Bloc would be gone in our lifetimes. Political change doesn’t happen in steady, visible increments. It often seems like there are only a few fringe nutters who are bothered and then - bam! - out of apparently impossible situations huge victories are won. And even when we fail, we have left seeds of inspiration behind in the hands of those who will come after us and succeed.

The activists who started the suffragettes, the anti-apartheid campaign and innumerable anti-colonial independence movements began struggles decades long that many of them never lived to see the end of. How thankful we should be they never entered into deal-making with their opponents, accepting their power and merely looking for ways of mitigating some of the wrong. The people committing unconscionable acts should not be allowed to do so unopposed, and a public who would agree with us should be made aware.

These actions make people ask why we are objecting, and in giving powerful, informed answers we make it more likely that future projects will be stopped. It is quite frequently not about winning on the ground where we are fighting, but about preventing the battles in future, sowing the seeds for a lasting victory later on.

Two centuries ago anti-slavery campaigners could have sought compromise with the slave traders and owners. There could have been improved conditions for slaves offered, and any anti-slaver would have felt bad turning it down out of some pig-headed adherence to moral absolutes. How easy for the well-fed white idealists to refuse the compromises offered of longer chains and less whipping. It would have been unreasonable and unrealistic to expect such a huge industry on which so much of the economy relied to be eradicated. Even if that were a long term goal, surely some short term gains in the conditions of slaves would be welcome.

But no. The core activities of the slave trade were unacceptable. To lend support to some slavers or some of what they did implies they have a good moral disposition in general. To see them as someone with whom we do deals means we accept their position and power. It lends their existence a legitimacy it does not deserve, it would actually reinforce them and makes it less likely that they’d be abolished.

Doing deals to curb certain areas of an opponents activity has the effect of not challenging the rest of their activity, it affirms the legitimacy of what is not being challenged. With an oil company, with an aluminium smelter, with an airline or a nuclear installation there is no compromise to be had, no core activity to be endorsed.

As the world’s ecological crisis worsens many of the organisations we’ve trusted to fight the destruction are effectively reinforcing the power of the destructive corporations. As our need for change becomes ever more urgent and so the solutions needed are ever more drastic, some of the larger NGOs find themselves actually asking for less and less change.