ALL TIED UP

Redford in The Old Man and the Gun - with tie loosened

This year we have been worrying about Brexit, climate change and Donald Trump  So what am I writing about at the end of 2018?  The importance of a necktie, of course.

I am one of those men who never quite feel they have finished getting dressed until they have put their tie on.  In practice, however, I rarely wear one, however, unless I have a specific reason to do so such as going to work (increasingly unnecessary) or attending some formal event (increasingly rare).  I have quite a good collection of ties in my wardrobe, two dozen I chose myself plus a few ones leftover work ones and others given as presents which I never actually wear, but which I could not throw away because they remind me of the person who gave them “hideous ties, so kindly meant” as John Betjeman put it in his lovely poem about Christmas, which you can see and hear him reading  on YouTube (link) – wearing a tie.

While they are still considered de rigeur for male politicians, newsreaders and James Bond, the health risks of ties are increasingly making them redundant and even dangerous.  They are said to increase the risks of strokes and to carry germs so are effectively banned in hospitals: you never see a doctor wearing one there nowadays and rarely in a surgery, whereas previous generations regarded it as an essential sign of professionalism and, I suppose, seriousness.  You were just not considered a fully paid up professional unless you wore that stretch of silk or wool, often with the badge of your professional organisation. 

Gradually the old school tie gave way to the fashionable accessory; tie shops began to appear and a sign of seriousness became an excuse for frivolity.  This undermined the point of a tie, which might have been completely plain in its heyday.  A stripe or two would be the nearest it came to raffishness, even these carrying a hint of the old school or professional association which you (or your parents) had to earn the right to wear.  As often as not a tie would signify membership of a club or organisation and would set the wearer apart as a man of distinction, a real big spender as Shirley Bassey would say with a hint that she wanted a piece of the action – in both senses.  A tie equalled money equalled success equalled sex.  The act of undoing it could slow down the process of love-making but maybe that was no bad thing.

Mark Zuckerberg likes to pretend that he is a rebel and makes a virtue of tielessness so he always wears a tee shirt, unless he is taking to politicians and is obviously in trouble. Sir Alex Ferguson, on the other hand, was always seen with a club tie when he was representing Manchester United and managing the team to glory. He was a big spender, although it was not his own money he was parting with when singing players.  Yet, when he was interviewed for a profile in The Times newspaper, he was photographed at home with an open-necked shirt.  Somehow you could not imagine Sir Matt Busby doing the same.  Jose Mourinho used to wear the Chelsea tie but did not at United and stood on the touchline with an open-necked shirt.  Likewise, Prince Charles, who comes from an older more formal generation, is rarely seen tieless in public while his sons usually are, William wearing an open-necked shirt when he takes his children to school.

That seems to be the fashion today, a smart suit and shirt but no tie.  Let us stick to the basics and do away with all unnecessary items if we want to be taken seriously seems to be the message.  If you have to wear a tie, the way you do so sends out a signal.  Leaving it loose around your neck shows that you are in but not of the establishment. In films actors adopt this style to show they are portraying someone working inside the system who is nevertheless naturally rebellious.  Although they have to hold down a job and wear the uniform, they have not fully given in to the tyranny of conformity.  Billy Crudup tried this in the film Jackie when he portrayed the journalist but it seemed wrong to me.  The real Jackie Kennedy was impeccably stylish and would never have tolerated a man wearing his tie so sloppily.  Similarly Robert Redford does this in his film The Old Man and the Gun in which he portrays a compulsive but kindly bank-robber who uses an unthreatening method to grab the loot, with the tie done up properly when he is robbing but left loose when he is off duty.  This does not quite work for me, the character he is portraying being an exploiter of the system rather than a rebel within it - but we get the point.  The suit and tie are a uniform not an expression of who he really is.

One of my sisters-in-law says that, if you are going to wear a tie, you should at least do it up properly.  I agree with her.  However, I do have to leave the top button undone when wearing one.  I have a rather thick neck and, in order to wear a ready-made shirt of the correct size for the rest of my torso, I find the collar uncomfortably tight if it is done up.  To compensate for this, I tie a Windsor knot which is wider and hides the undone button. Ian Fleming wrote that his hero James Bond thought that the Windsor knot was the mark of a ‘cad’ (the last time I can remember that word being used without irony) but I disagree.  I think it is the one useful and worthwhile thing that frivolous and self-important man did for the world, giving us the thick-necked men a way of wearing what is really a totally unnecessary item of male clothing.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

SHOULD WE WEAR THE POPPY?

Samuel Johnson – a hero of mine – said that every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier.  There is something about wearing a uniform and putting your life on the line that appeals to men – and women – on a very fundamental level, even if we are intellectually and morally peace-loving types. So many of us, myself included, wear a poppy to honour those who have risked or given their lives, even if we disapprove of some of the wars they have fought in.

Is it right to do this?  I know it is a little late to ask the question, as poppy month is passing, but I was thinking about this when I wore mine and stood for two minutes in memory of those who gave their lives in the First World War and subsequent conflicts. Prior to 1914, soldiers were a romantic but not a respectable lot and you might have admired them from afar but did not want them anywhere near your daughters (or wives).  As is often pointed out, wearing a military uniform involves long periods of boredom followed by short periods of terror. When the fighting was over and the old soldiers were not much use they were often ignored and became destitute. Even today the homeless are disproportionately made up for former servicemen who could not cope once they took off the uniform and lost the routine of a life wearing it.

The money you spend on your poppy - around £50 million pounds a year in Britain - goes to service charities to help people cope with life after they can no longer fight.  There are emotional scars as well as wounds and few people can begrudge a pound or two to help those who have fought even if they did so in wars that were unnecessary and even immoral.  The first rule of the armed services is that you obey orders and war would be impossible if every soldier was allowed to debate the ethics of the conflicts they were involved in and the actions they were told to take.

In the First World War, after which the whole idea of poppy wearing started, millions of men did just what they were told and went over the top into the face of machine gun fire which cut them down to die in agony in the mud, many without having got near to or fired a shot at the faceless enemy.  German machine gunners, incidentally, had a virtually zero chance of survival if their positions were breached – even if they put up their hands in surrender. 

Field Marshall Douglas Haig is often cast as the villain of the piece, sending thousands of men to their deaths in a battlefield where obedience, class distinction and the fear of disgrace combined with an industrialised form of killing (those machine guns) combined to leave the bodies of around a million British men behind in the killing fields.  Yet it is unlikely that, had Haig been replaced by AN Other general, the casualties would have been significantly different.  He was simply a product of his time and regarded casualties as a necessary cost of victory.  He expected his generals to produce long lists of fatalities as a sign of their commitment to achieving this victory.  

Certainly Haig had little tolerance for those who might now be identified as suffering from shell shock, a concept he would not have recognised or distinguished from cowardice. Those who refused to fight or turned around in the face of almost certain death could expect little mercy from either their officers or fellow soldiers and only recently have they too been acknowledged in the war commemorations. There is still a feeling that a soft attitude to those who failed to do their duty would have made victory impossible and, what in the end is the difference between shellshock and cowardice?  Fo those who overcame their fears and doubts they were essentially the same.

These are all discussions worth having but not ones you can indulge in with a poppy seller.  They just want your pound (or more) in exchange for the symbol of sacrifice.  Virtually everyone who has worn a uniform buys and wears a poppy in honour of their comrades and many of those, like myself, who have never come near to fighting in a war (thank God) will do so out of respect for those who have done so, partly out of a lingering Johnsonian guilt at not having been called up.  

For public figures poppy wearing is virtually compulsory, so all politicians, television presenters and even footballers have them pinned to their clothing for weeks in advance of Remembrance Sunday.  In order to show that I am not going to be browbeaten into wearing one, I usually leave it late and put mine on the day before Remembrance Sunday. For public figures failure - or outright refusal - to wear one risks the sort of pressure to conform which is right next door to bullying and which is itself next door to the kind of totalitarianism which we were supposed to be fighting against in the World Wars. This seems to be getting stronger the farther we are away from the actual fighting. It is a century since the First World War ended and none of the fighters are around to remember what is was like, but that does not make it easy for anyone to go poppyless in public. 

Or almost anyone.  The footballer Nemanja Matic, who grew up in Serbia, remembered the bombs falling near his childhood home and, knowing that it was British and American airmen who were dropping them, without putting themselves in significant danger, he chose not to have a poppy sewn into his Manchester United shirt.  He explained his decision with dignity and restraint, which was very brave in its own non-violent way.  I chose to wear the poppy and stand in silence in memory of those who had fought and fallen, even though I may have had reservations about what they were fighting for.  Matic chose not to and was perfectly free to do so.  That freedom to choose is what those soldiers were fighting and often sacrificing their lives for after all.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatourisguide.blogspot.com

HOW FAR CAN FIFTY-FIFTY GO?

Lambeth Town Hall - usually thought of as a bastion of equality

Lambeth Council is in a spot of bother.  Some of its employees have alleged – apparently with justification – that black people who work for what was always considered one of the most right-on and progressive councils are permanently stuck in low-grade jobs while the top posts go to white workers, who enjoy all the perks and privileges that go with higher-level management positions.  In the meantime an Asian-American called Michael Wang is suing some elite colleges which did not offer him a place but instead made offers to African-Americans with significantly worse grades.  To put it crudely, black-skinned Americans were benefiting from quotas while yellow-skinned ones were not.  Wang’s case may well torpedo the whole project of affirmative action, which has been challenged for some time by those who are losing out from it.  

This all raises the question of how far fifty-fifty equality can go.  This is my name for a phenomenon which particularly applies to women who complain about under-representation in art galleries and board rooms.  It highlights the difference between equality of opportunity – everyone being given a fair shot at achieving success regardless of their skin colour or gender – and equality of reward in which places at elite institutions and jobs are handed out in a way that reflects the proportions which exist in society.  Hence fifty-fifty, which reflects gender ratios, although things would obviously be different when it comes to race.

Equality of reward can only go so far.  In Silicon Valley, the great majority of top positions are held by men – many of them of Asian origin – for the simple reason that they seem to be better at thinking up schemes which people are prepared to pay good money for. Things move so fast in the world of computer technology that there is simply no time to worry about gender and racial balances.  Anyone who spends too much time worrying about them will be left behind in the race to invent the latest app.  Incidentally, the undoubtedly right wing Steve Bannon has complained about the high proportion of Asian people in computer companies, although I doubt he was thinking of the rights of African-Americans when he did so. 

Equality of reward only works in one direction. Feminists never complain that women are vastly under-represented in the bad things in life.  In prisons, for example, there are very few female inmates, simply because men commit the vast majority of murders and robberies and virtually all rapes.  The equality of reward feminist seems to be saying that they are entitled to half of the good stuff in life by right but are quite happy for men to dominate the bad stuff on merit - or demerit.  

On the subject of incarceration, one of the most well-known and demining statistics of our time says that an African-American man is more likely to go to prison than to university.  This is not, I hasten to add, because they are inherently worse people than whites, but because they have been dealt a worse hand in life.  If you have two pairs you will never – or very rarely – beat someone who is holding a full house.  Equality of reward in the form of affirmative action was an attempt to redress this imbalance but, when it comes to handing out a prison sentence, the severity of the crime should always decide the type of punishment.  (Again this does not deny that many justice systems are inherently racist in the way they charge and condemn black people.)

My preference is instinctively for equality of opportunity and I often use the example of black footballers to support it.  I can remember the days when they were routinely booed by the crowds.  I should have walked out and complained but, to my shame, I never did. These players had to endure far worse and more blatant discrimination than female artists or aspiring intellectuals of any colour and yet, within a generation, they have shown that they can play as well as or better than their white counterparts and now make up a healthy minority and often a majority, of most successful teams. Booing black footballers today would be absurd - as well as offensive.  Sports teams are the ultimate meritocracies and people of colour have shown that they can compete as equals in them without having to rely on quotas to achieve parity with whites.

I say sports teams are meritocracies but the same cannot be said of sports clubs where black faces are still rare in the boardrooms and on the coaching benches.  In these places, more subtle pressures are brought to bear and old-fashioned racism still triumphs over meritocracy in what are laughably called the ‘upper’ levels of the game. There might be an argument for at least exposing a lack of equality of reward in these cases.

I think you have to accept that some people will tend do better at certain things in life.  Men tend to be more successful entrepreneurs and inventors probably because they like to fiddle with things (and not only parts of their anatomy).  Women tend to be better at looking after young children because men often do not have the patience to do so.  It is important to distinguish between a generalisation and an assumption here.  There are plenty of successful women entrepreneurs and some men who are perfectly competent at looking after little children.  You should never assume that a gender or a skin colour absolutely determines your role in life but it will inevitably have some effect on it. Quotas can only go so far to counteract this. 

Edwin Lerner

____________

For more on the Lambeth case go to: theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/01/staff-accuse-lambeth-council-of-institutional-racism

An article on Asian Americans and affirmative action can be found at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/15/the-rise-and-fall-of-affirmative-action

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING?

The window display in a referendum shop, Scotland 

Referendums – referenda? – seem to be all the rage at the moment.  I am writing this in Scotland where the nationalists, far from accepting the 2014 choice by Scots to stay in the UK, are pressing for another vote. Presumably, if they get and lose that one, they will press for another – and another – until they get the result they want, when they will suddenly lose enthusiasm for the concept of asking people their opinion. 

A similar problem exists with the European Union which we voted on a couple of years ago.  Several people are now suggesting a second referendum on the subject with the hope of reversing the first vote.  The trouble with that idea would be that you would have to offer people not two choices but three – stay in, leave with a negotiated settlement the like of which the government has proposed, or crash out without paying a penny and saving some £40 billion pounds in the process.  Plenty of people favour the last option and would not accept the result of a vote which did not offer it.  The nightmare scenario would then be, say, 45% for staying in, 30% for leaving with a settlement and 25% for crashing out.  This is quite possible and would leave a majority wanting to leave - but not agreeing how – with the biggest single vote for staying in.  No politician would ever allow that scenario to arise and leaving one of the three options out would effectively disenfranchise a large part of the electorate so a second referendum is, I would have thought, very unlikely to happen.

In fact, to be precise, it would be a third referendum on Europe, not a second.  I am old enough to have voted in both the first and second ones, choosing to stay on both occasions, being on the winning side (comfortably) in the first and the losing side (narrowly) in the second. The original referendum was in 1975, the very first time the British people had encountered the phenomenon of voting on a single issue.  It seemed quite jolly at the time and, even if the second vote was marred by immigration scares and outright racism, it did at least get people to exercise their franchise in larger numbers than they had ever done before.

But you can have too much of a good thing.  Voting is about decision making not about detail: him or her for office; this party or that; in or out of Europe, proportional representation or first past the post. Then you leave the detail to the politicians, which is what they are paid for after all. Maybe we can have another either/or vote when the dust has settled and we can see if breaking with the EU has worked and we remain prosperous and comfortable. If it leads to huge queues of lorries on the M2, vegetables rotting in the fields and the NHS in even greater trouble because of a lack of workers, we might want to go cap in hand to ask if we can come back, please. Otherwise, we need to accept the first vote and get on with the process.

The elephant in the voting booth when it comes to allowing the people to decide, of course, is capital punishment.  The accepted wisdom is that, if you allowed the people to decide, they would vote for its restoration and bring back hanging.  Yet there is not the slightest possibility of that actually happening.

Why not? Not only have we managed to create a relatively safe society without resorting to executing criminals but we have lost the means and the will to use the death penalty.  The USA still has it and still executes people in certain states. Yet it is one of the most violent countries in the world with a far higher murder rate than that of any state which does not execute people.  The Second Amendment, which allows the carrying of weapons, leads to their use when minor confrontations turn deadly and to hideous unstoppable massacres of the innocent by nutcases whose lives have gone wrong. 

In contrast the UK, in or out of Europe, is a relatively peaceful place.  There are acid attacks and knife crimes but we trust the police to get on top of these problems and maintain some sort of law and order.  There is no evidence that restoring the death penalty would effectively deter crimes of this sort.

And what if we did bring it back?  We would need lawyers, judges and doctors to argue for and implement it and there is no sign that they have any enthusiasm for bringing back state killing.  How would it be done anyway? There are no trained hangmen around; lethal injection would almost certainly be challenged successfully in the courts as cruel and unusual punishment; the electric chair is obsolete. Firing squads? The heart sinks at the thought of getting enthusiastic amateur volunteer killers to shoot the condemned. 

The great majority of lawyers would refuse to argue in favour of the death penalty, judges would flinch at the thought of donning that black cap and not many doctors would want to become involved in the process. Any professionals who facilitated capital punishment would become known as death-mongers and find that invitations to fashionable cocktail and dinner parties rapidly dried up.  While they lost hope of professional advancement and acceptance, there would be armies of volunteers who would oppose efforts to use capital punishment and make life a misery for those who tried to enforce it.  Never underestimate the power of peer pressure.  The chattering classes will not support the death penalty so it is not coming back – ever.

Get over it, death penalty restorers.  It is a hopeless cause and, while there may be enthusiasm amongst the general public for its return, the people who would have to put it into practice are simply not there. Restoring the death penalty is one option that will never be put to the people in a referendum.  Thank God.

Edwin Lerner.  (My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com)

WOULD I WORK FOR WOODY?

Woody Allen (picture from Wikipedia)

You do not see it very often nowadays but there is a British road sign which occasionally raises some knowing sniggers.  It shows an adult holding the hand of a child as they walk along the road.  It is meant to act as a warning to look out for pedestrians but it reminds some people of an older man grooming a younger girl – inevitably with a sexual overtone.  Having sex with children is one of the crimes that horrify us most of all and anyone locked up for it can expect little mercy from his fellow inmates who show far more respect for a man responsible for crimes of murder or robbery than for a ‘nonce’. Prisons can be Old Testament places when it comes to passing judgement.

This is the source of Woody Allen’s problems.  He has been accused by his stepdaughter Dylan of molesting her when she was young and this has led to a boycott of him by actors who were previously falling over themselves to appear in one of his films but now refuse the honour. The accusation was first made by Dylan years ago but has now been reiterated by her as an adult.  There is nowhere near enough evidence to convict Allen in a court and he has never been charged with a crime.  That does not stop people passing judgement in the court of public opinion.

A single accusation is one thing, multiple accusations another.  If a group of women or,  in the case of Kevin Spacey, men accuse Harvey Weinstein or a Bill Cosby of predatory behaviour (ie rape), then you feel there has to be some truth in the allegations.  One or two of them may have acted out of spite but a whole group of people who did not know each other?  Not bloody likely.

Only one person has accused Allen of molesting her but that someone was in his care.  Was she being manipulated by a vengeful mother who felt herself to have been wronged in the person of Mia Farrow, whose own brother has been imprisoned for the same crime she accuses Allen of?  Or was she bravely exposing the crimes of her famous stepfather who exploited his position and had demonstrated in films like Manhattan a fascination with younger women?  The short answer is that we will almost certainly never know in the absence of a confession by either person that they had either committed an offence or fabricated an accusation of the crime we fear and hate most.

But what if they were both telling the truth in different ways?.  Sexual crimes are notoriously hard to prosecute because they usually involve two people giving different versions of the same event, both sides convinced that they are telling it like it was.  This leads to many women having an absolute conviction that they have been raped without gaining the satisfaction of a conviction in court against the man they feel certain has raped them.  That same man breathes a huge sigh of relief and then walks away Scot fee, hopefully having at least learned not to repeat his mistake.

It is possible that Woody, in showing natural affection for a child who has been brought into his family but with whom he had no biological relationship, overstepped the mark and did things which did not amount to sexual molestation but which were significantly uncomfortable for Dylan. Don’t laugh.  Many fathers, encouraged to show affection towards their children, find themselves wandering into this grey area.  Blake Morrison wrote about this in When Did You Last See Your Father? and I have to admit that I have been there myself.  Yet I have a perfectly healthy relationship with my now grown-up daughter.  I can understand how a child, caught up in a vicious break-up of the type Woody Allen and Mia farrow had, and feeling the need to take the side of the parent she lives with, manages to turn behaviour which probably would have become an embarrassing private memory for both of them into a highly public crime for one of them.

The film industry is notorious for stories of aspiring actresses who are given parts if they submit to the advances of ruthless producers. They were once expected to accept these advances with a shrug or even the appearance of gratitude but are no longer prepared to become human fodder for sex predators.  There is a difference between actresses, who were usually thought to be sexually mature women, and sexually immature seven year old girls.  So Allen, who was untouched by allegations from the many actresses he worked with, has found his life torpedoed by an accusation he can never rebut by someone who was part of his now fractured family.

Whatever you think of his private life, he was and still could be a great director.  He has gone off the boil in recent years and I no longer make a point of going to see any film he makes, but I still have a soft spot for comedies like Café Society and Magic in the. Moonlight and I think Crimes and Misdemeanours and Annie Hall two of the greatest films ever made and Blue Jasmine worthy of an actress Oscar for Cate Blanchett, who has been asked but declined to boycott him.

I have never been tempted by acting as a career and do not have the skills needed to work in the technical side of the film industry so it is unthinkable that I will ever receive a call from Woody Allen to help him in what is left of his career as a director.  Moreover, where I come from you generally wait for the invitation before you send back the RSVP.  However, in the vanishingly unlikely event of being asked to work for Woody Allen, I would be inclined to accept the offer. 

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

ARE FOOTBALLERS WORTH THEIR WAGES

Some of England's young football millionaires
(Picture of Marks and Spencers advertisement)

When he was captain of Manchester United, Roy Keane reportedly had it written into his contract that he was to be the best paid player at the club.  Knowing Keane, this was as much about his desire to be top dog as his financial aspirations.  David Beckham might be sexier, Ryan Giggs more exciting, Paul Scholes a better passer but Keane was captain and leader so nobody would earn more than him. Footballers are like that – driven, competitive and very aware of their status (except when it is starting to decline).

Keane earned around £50,000 a week from Manchester United – and increased that when he went to Glasgow to play for Celtic despite being past his best by then and surplus to requirements at United.  That is about a tenth of what their new star man Alexis Sanchez is reportedly being paid.  United came second in the league and the FA Cup and lost in the first knock out round in the Champions League last season so it is not as if that weekly half a million which they pay Sanchez helped them win any trophies.

What is interesting is that footballer’s incomes are still labelled ‘wages’ and quoted in weekly sums.  This comes from the fact that they were paid by the week as working class men were in the days when football became professionalised and the habit has stuck. Maybe there is an element of snobbery in it as well, however.  These are not highly qualified people just men who happen to be good at kicking a piece of inflated leather around.  What do they do with the rest of their money once they have paid for the weekly shop and the mortgage? Put it in the bank - after they have paid their parking tickets.  (Many of them apparently have a park anywhere attitude and pay the resulting fines, which are negligible for them.)   It is a short career and not one that leads anywhere much unless they succeed at coaching or go into the television studios to analyse their successors when they retire in their early thirties, later if they are lucky.

In contrast, businessmen (and, occasionally, women) do not earn wages but are paid annual salaries, which often match those of Premier League footballers.  The top earning businessman in the UK is Sir Martin Sorrell who can earn £50 million a year, well above what Sanchez or any of his colleagues make.  He runs a company called WPP, which I had never heard of, and is presumably good at what he does, even if he is in his seventies now and might think about taking a rest.  Fat chance.  Like footballers, businessmen are driven to succeed and do not relax when they have made ‘enough’ money, like the rest of us.  They probably do not have much time to enjoy their wealth as they are so busy making it. 

Businessmen do not get half the criticism that footballers do for what they make, yet arguably they are not worth the enormous incomes they command in the way that athletes are.  England had a fairly successful World Cup and reached the semi-finals, although they lost three games in the end (two to Belgium, who they usually beat and one to Croatia, which has less than half the population of London).  What was significant, however, was that the country practically ground to a halt when their games were on.  I even sacrificed some expensive theatre tickets to watch them, deciding that I cared more about our national team than about a governess who was paid twenty pounds a year (not a week) to teach the children of the King of Thailand in The King and I, which was admittedly set over a hundred years ago.

Much of the disapproval people voice about the earnings of footballers comes from the fact that they are often uneducated in comparison to other high-achievers. The England coach Gareth Southgate actually earned eight GCSEs and could probably have gone to university if he had wanted to do but the demands of mastering the skills needed to succeed in soccer override the need for academic qualifications and so the idea of the thick footballer emerges.  Why do they earn so much when they would not succeed at anything else?

But they do succeed at what people pay good money to watch, either in the flesh or on the screen.  Who else can make the country stop for a couple of hours and then celebrate/mourn when they win/lose? Certainly not some businessperson paid millions a year to run a company more efficiently, which often means being prepared to lay off workers.  Kicking people out of jobs in order to make the business more efficient may be necessary but it does not bring joy in the way that sport does.  Kicking a football around, however, can make the country stop for a couple of hours. Moreover, there is a lot of money in the game mainly from the huge sums paid for television rights.  No-one complains about these fees and it is the players who make them possible.

So, f anybody is worth a lot of money in our unequal society, it is footballers.. They bring joy to many and can stop the country in a way that no-one else can.  They have a short time to earn it and the rest of their lives to spend it.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

RICH MAN, POOR PERSON

Sir Jim Ratcliffe (picture from the BBC website)

I do not generally buy either Sunday papers or Murdoch publications but I must admit to a guilty fascination with the Sunday Times Rich List.  Every year this lists the people with the most money in the country.  This year the chart-topper was, unusually in these days when so many of the wealthy are from overseas, British. His name is Sir Jim Ratcliffe, he is sixty five (my age) and he is the head of a company called Ineos, the name meaning ‘something new and innovative’ according to Wikipedia. He is reportedly worth over £20 billion pounds, has three children from two wives and employs 17.000 people.

Ratcliffe made his money from chemicals and energy, is not. afraid of fracking and is a fairly efficient and ruthless operator who won a battle with the Unite union (of which I am a member) over the Grangemouth oil plant in Scotland/ It was losing money so he reorganised the plant after threatening to close it.  In a similar but smaller dispute my local cinema the Ritzy was in dispute with some of its workforce and their union over its refusal to guarantee paying the London living wage. It too seems to have won this battle. Employers who are not afraid to dig in often win disputes and come out on top as Ratcliffe and the Ritzy owners did. 

To be good at business you need to have an eye for a gap in the market and the ability to fill it; you need to be ruthless with your competitors and, sometimes, with your employees while maintaining the respect of the former and the co-operation of the latter.  You also have to be prepared to go into debt, borrowing money to back your hunches, which need to be good ones.  Donald Trump likes to remind everybody what a good businessman he is but he relied on what he laughably called ‘a small loan’ of a million dollars from his father to get started and has gone bankrupt several times when his hunches have not paid off.  I would be a lousy businessman, the only significant debt I have ever incurred being my mortgage, and I could not bear the shame of leaving unpaid debts behind if my ideas failed – which they often do, even with supposedly successful speculators like Trump.  

At the other end of the scale are the low-paid who get a little help from the government these days through the minimum wage, now called the National Living Wage, which was a not very subtle attempt to abolish the distinction between what employers had to pay and what they ought to pay. This has recently gone up to £7.83 an hour for those above the age of twenty five, £7.05 an hour for those below, less for the even younger.  That works out at around £15,000 a year – if you work a full year with holiday pay thrown in.

You can probably survive on £15,000 a year but you cannot save.  It is impossible to build up any significant amount of capital and start a business in the way that Sir Jim has done without some help via a loan from a family member or a friendly bank manager.  For most people survival is the aim until they can relax in later life when the bills and debts have been paid off and the children grown up and there is a little money to spare and – hopefully – enough time left to spend it.

Sir Jim obviously has money to spare but may not have much time to spend it, so busy has he been earning it.  John Paul Getty was an expert at making money but does not seem to have had a particularly happy life as a result and the curse of his wealth has gone down to later generations, who did not even have the satisfaction of earning their (his) money, only of inheriting it.  I agree with whoever it was that identified the sum of money you need to live comfortably (around £35 – 40,000 a year?) and said that whatever you have beyond that adds little if anything to your happiness.  A Rolex does not tell the time better than a Timex, a Rolls Royce does not get through a traffic jam quicker than a Renault and you arrive at the same time in both first and second class. 

The problem for egalitarians is that they tend to get angrier about wealth than they do about poverty.  It is the money of the rich man (the majority on the Rich List are male) who excites their disapproval far more than the lack of it for the poor person (many of whom are female).  This has only got worse in recent years because way that capitalism is organised (which is hardly the right word) the gap between rich and poor has grown wider in recent years.  My theory is that it was the collapse of communism which was both directly and indirectly responsible for this widening gap: directly because a lot of money was hoovered up by the Roman Abramoviches of previously communist countries like Russia who saw and exploited the opportunity to cash in on new market freedoms; indirectly because the lack of a viable alternative system meant that successful capitalists felt far more uninhibited in amassing and parading their wealth.  In the 1970s the boss of a big company might earn ten to twenty times the salary of the average worker.  With the shackles off he (again usually) makes one to two hundred times the average.

What, if anything, should be done about this.  My late father suggested that the government pass a law restricting what anyone could earn to a million pounds a year. Dream on. Top footballers make that in a month and no-one wants to go down in history as being the person who destroyed the Premier League by driving the top players away to a country which will not tax them or restrict their earnings. The only way to change things is to adopt more of a socialist lifestyle within a capitalist system. So, stop making money when you don’t need to, give more away and take time to enjoy it if you have enough. Don’t hold your breath that this will happen any time soon.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com 

ABORTION – CALLOUS OR COMPASSIONATE?

Anti-abortion poster from the Irish referendum

In Ireland there has been only one issue on peoples’ minds recently – abortion.  The votes are bring counted in the referendum as I write in a short gap between jobs and it looks as though the Irish people have voted to change their constitution to allow the termination of pregnancies up to twelve weeks into a pregnancy.* This is half the time currently allowed under British law although, to complicate matters, abortions are not allowed in Northern Ireland and Theresa May’s decision to call an unnecessary election has handed power to the Democratic Unionists who oppose it, so reform there is unlikely any time soon. The strongly Catholic Southern Irish republic will, therefore, have a more liberal abortion law than British Northern Ireland ruled by Protestant Unionists.

The right to an abortion is one which those on the left normally support and those on the right usually oppose.  Yet most of the posters urging people to vote No in the referendum have pictures of a foetus which a change in the law would allow to be destroyed with the implication that it is the left-wingers who are being callous in killing a potentially healthy human being, while the right-wingers are being compassionate in trying to protect it.  I have long thought that one of the reasons pro-choice supporters get so angry with pro-life supporters is that they cannot stand the thought that someone else is outdoing them in idealism and compassion, the very qualities which they assumed they had a monopoly of.  If being left-wing means anything it is supporting the underdog and you cannot be more of an underdog than an unborn child.  Just try looking at one of those photos of foetuses which adorn almost every other lamp post in Ireland and say that it can be flushed away without any qualms at all.  I simply cannot do that.

Yet, if I had a vote, I would almost certainly have gone with those who want to allow abortion.  To use an Americanism I am conflicted on the issue.  In Britain you rarely see those pictures of a foetus which everyone in Ireland has been bombarded with recently. Although there is a vigorous pro-life movement the issue has been more or less settled and one in five pregnancies, the vast majority of healthy potential humans, are ended because the pregnant woman does not want to go through with it.  Many women feel huge relief at not being saddled with a child they do not want after an abortion and there is even some evidence that places with relatively liberal abortion laws suffer less from crime and social problems later on as the majority of children born are not unwanted and therefore less likely to go off the rails twenty years down the line.    

One of the jobs of politicians – and the people who vote for them – is to differentiate between a sin and a crime.  That word sin is not very fashionable these days as it has biblical connotations and sending people to prison surely has little role in the issue. However, the words are useful shorthand for distinguishing issues where the individual decides based on his – or, in this case, usually her – moral outlook and where the state should intervene to decide when to take action.  In fact, abortion is one of those issues where at a certain point in the journey from sex to birth the state has to draw a line and say that the foetus/unborn child/whateveryoucallit is now a potentially viable human being and deserves protection.  In other words, destroying it before that point might be considered a sin but should not (yet) be regarded as a crime. Then it becomes a crime to kill it.

No-one advocates criminalising contraception, although some do regard it as sinful, just as no-one can argue in favour of legalising infanticide, although it has been practiced - and tolerated - in the past).  At some point the potential human in the womb gains the right to life and the protection of the state. The British line is drawn at twenty four weeks and there are arguments in favour of reducing it to twenty weeks as medical advances make the survival of a child born early possible. I am fairly agnostic about where the line should be drawn but I do know that you have to draw it somewhere around the time that life changes from potential to possible.  Moreover these rights are surely absolute and are not withdrawn if the foetus is discovered to have a hare lip or some other defect which makes the future Justin or Justine less than perfect.  We do not withdraw the right to life for living disabled people and neither should we do so for those who are not yet born.

This is a practical rather than an idealistic approach. There is no future in criminalising sin: apart from anything else we do not have room in our prisons for all the sinners in our society.  The pro-life movement probably has a better chance of eliminating abortion if it concentrates on the personal morality involved in the issue rather than the role of the state.  I have a hunch that eventually they will win the argument as people turn away from terminating pregnancies.  There is already evidence that fewer doctors are willing to work in the prestige-free zone of providing them. 

In a recent post in my other blog (http://diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.ie/2018/05/that-was-then-this-is-now.html) I wrote that if we judge people in the past by the standards of today we will be judged by people in the future by the standards of tomorrow and will almost certainly be found wanting.  Maybe the pro-life movement will gain the upper hand in the moral war while it is losing ground in the political one. In a hundred years from now, as contraception improves and conception declines, abortion may be virtually unknown and our use of it might even be regarded as a genocide of the innocent unborn.   I will not be around to see that, however, and need to live in the present.  So, regard ending a pregnancy as a sin by all means but do not make it a crime. 

* That is what the Irish decided by a margin of two to one in the referendum.

Edwin Lerner 

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

STRANGE FRUIT

Winnie Mandela - flawed heroine

One of the questions they ask in the Guardian Saturday profile is “Which person do you most despise?”  Just in case I am asked to take part (not yet) I have my answer ready: “I try not to despise individuals but there is something ugly about a mob.”  Everyone has a few redeeming features – even Donald Trump is a good father to his children – but something about a group of people whipped up into hatred is particularly ugly and frightening.  Individually they can be decent people; collectively they descend into the depths.

Lynching is probably the clearest example of this. There was a powerful piece in the same paper today about the subject and it showed the memorial to nearly 5,000 people killed by mobs in this way in the USA  (https://eji.org/national-lynching-memorial).  Almost invariably this was white on black killing, often accompanied by the most gruesome torture, including burning and skinning alive. The victims could be women or children accused of the most minor crime – basically forgetting their place in society – and never with the bother of any kind of a trial.

Sometimes a song can express these feelings better than a statement.  Listen to Billy Holliday singing Strange Fruit (youtube.com/watch?v=Web007rzSOI) to feel that shudder down your spine.

Before we start feeling superior about how we are better than the Americans, think about the people who were surrounding Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool where Alfie Evans lived out his final days.  You have to admire his parents who were determined to keep their son alive even when he is obviously nearing the end, but not the mob who surround the hospital and abuse the hard-working and often badly-paid staff who have kept him going this long.  No-one has been killed yet, but plenty have been threatened with death by people who would never abuse doctors and other health professionals if they were acting alone but whip themselves up to it when in a group.

This is one of the main downsides of the internet.  It is a place where mobs can be formed easily, where people go online and start goading each other into ever more aggressive attitudes.  Mark Twain said that lies are half way around the world before the truth has got its boots on.  Now lies are out there before the truth has booted up.  The superficial becomes the serious with the bogus respectability of the web.  We even have a word now for someone who sows misinformation on the web – he (usually) is a troll.

But it is trials not trolls which establish the truth.  I have just finished re-reading Bleak House with all its powerful satire on the law and its workings.  The book begins with a fog descending on London, the image of how lawyers line their pockets by obscuring the issues in a fog of detail and deliberation.  Nobody does this better than Dickens.  For him the law is a kind of mob with everyone involved in it putting their own professional interests above common decency until the entire Jarndyce estate is exhausted in the payment of endless legal fees.

But, for all its faults, no civilised society can live without the law.  The reason that it is surrounded by ritual is so that it is not drowned in emotion and clear decisions can be taken on the basis of verifiable facts.  I have often thought that the right to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence are the most important of the differences between a democracy and a dictatorship.  In dictatorships they just lock up troublemakers and throw away the key.  In democracies it is necessary to prove beyond reasonable doubt that someone is guilty of a crime before they are punished. This is why Amnesty International, for all its faults, is such an important organisation.  They do not advocate releasing everybody locked up for political activities but of giving them a fair, open and honest trial by an independent court, not one controlled by the government which wants the accused out of the way. 

This is also why I could not regard Winnie Mandela, who died recently, as an unalloyed heroine.  It is funny how you can change your mind just by watching someone in action.  I had regarded her as a pretty good egg, a bit strident but understandably so in the light of what she had to put up with from the upholders of apartheid.  Then I saw a video of her saying to a crowd how they would achieve freedom through the use of 'necklaces'.  These are burning tyres put around the necks of victims which suffocate and burn them alive simultaneously - a particularly nasty way to go and one reserved for those who are deemed to be collaborators or traitors - without, obviously, the benefit of any kind of fair trial.  Say what you like, but all the perfumes of Araby cannot wash that particular stain off Winnie Mandela's memory.

The worst thing about necklaces is that they were used on black victims.  In most cases to be accused was to be convicted.  To be convicted was to be condemned.  And to be condemned was to be executed often in the most brutal and horrible fashion. And don't talk to me about revolutionary justice.  Lynching is lynching whether it is done by a racists or by revolutionaries.

This is not the way to achieve a fairer world in which everyone can expect to be treated fairly. Lynching does not suddenly become ok when it is practiced on people who would otherwise be regarded as victims. In fact, it is in a way worse because you expect better of people who want to create a fairer world.  So, let’s stick to trials with all their absurdities and ignore - if not silence - the trolls.  As for the lynch mobs, let us remember their victims and condemn the perpetrators - racists or revolutionaries.

Edwin Lerner My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

WHAT'S WRONG WITH WOMEN PRIESTS?

The new female Bishop of London Sarah Mulally - it is just a matter
of time before a woman is ordained as an Archbishop of Canterbury

I asked this question of the priest as I was leaving church recently.  I am an occasional church goer and find spending an hour a week there worthwhile even if I am not a strong believer and find the idea of an afterlife pretty unconvincing - pretty dull even. Others were waiting to say their goodbyes so there was not much time to deal with the issue properly  but his one sentence response was: “Because it mucks up our relationship with other churches.”  This is fair enough as far as it goes but it does make it seem that it is more important to be popular than to be right. It also makes the pace of change very slow.

Churches were excluded from the legislation which the UK enacted to outlaw discrimination on the grounds of gender - and presumably sexuality.  The CofE (Church of England) has adapted very slowly to the idea of having women priests and, although plenty of its vicars are known to be gay, they are not officially allowed to live in a homosexual relationship with another man, only a platonic one.  I wonder if many of them actually obey the rule not to have sex with their live-in partners for the sake of obeying the letter of the law.  If so, they have more self-control than most of us.  It is probably more a case of ‘Don’t ask, Don’t tell’.

There is certainly nothing in the Bible which definitively prohibits women from becoming priests, although there are texts which, as usual, can be interpreted differently.  (For more on women in the bible go to http://www.philosopherkings.co.uk/Womeninthebible.html)  Your interpretation usually reflects rather than decides your view.  In sport video technology is now used increasingly to decide issues which the on-field referee may not have seen clearly.  Has this stopped the arguments and led to peace breaking out?  Of course not.

One of the attractions of church, of course, is its unchanging nature. It is reassuring to go to a familiar building and join in the same type of service every week wherever you are in the world.  Indeed, in the relentless competition between churches, it is often the ones that change the least which attract the most loyal devotees, while the ones which always try to be up to the minute and relevant soon lose their appeal. 

So, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.  The trouble is that the Catholic church is increasingly broken.  It is all very well Saint Paul telling the followers of Christ to refrain from sex, but the kind of dedication needed to achieve that has worn off in two thousand years.  The pressures on men to find some form of sexual gratification led to so many Catholic priests being accused of sexual abuse and a whole lot of trouble for their church.

While the Catholics cling to an increasingly untenable insistence on an undeliverable level of abstinence, the good old CofE wins gold medals at fudging the issue.  When we stand up to say the creed together after the sermon we refer to ‘the holy catholic and apostolic church” with a small ‘c’.  This makes it seem that the English church is an offshoot of the Roman one which conducts the same service but allows the priests to marry.  Once you let the wives in to become ordained as well as the husbands, you have torpedoed any hope of the two churches coming together in one body.  For many traditionalists, it is better to do without women priests than to make that final break with their capital ‘c’ Catholic cousins.

So, we have effectively two Anglican churches, one which allows women to offer the bread and blood of Christ, the other which will only allow them to read the lessons from the Bible.  I am not being cynical here.  No Archbishop of Canterbury wants to lose half his flock over the issue of female ordination (or gay priests) so both sides are accommodated within one large tent, even if they live on opposite sides of it and only occasionally nod to each other. I cannot blame him (not her yet) for keeping a lid on this particular pressure cooker.

After we have said our prayers, sung the hymns, listened to the sermon and recited the creed (which I do with a large pinch of salt nearby) we extend to each other the sign of peace, which is just a handshake with strangers.  It may not seem much but it is a way of saying that we are all equal in the eyes of God, that the size of your bank balance (or your ego) means nothing when you stand before the Almighty.  I may not believe in Him (or Her) very much but I have always felt this was worth doing on at least one day of the week, which I still set aside for thinking about things besides my personal ambitions and desires.

Then we go to the altar and kneel for communion.  I was slow on the uptake and did not realise for a long time that it was always a man who handed over the wafer and tipped the communion cup towards the communicants at this particular church because they had decided to stay out of the women priests' club.  Most of them are elderly white men: pale, male and stale is the less flattering way to put it. In time I suppose, they will die off and be replaced by younger priests who do not share the view that you have to be male to bring people to God. I would have no problem if this were to happen tomorrow but I will not boycott the church just because it has a purely male priesthood.  Sometimes it is better to agree to differ than to pick a fight.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is: diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com