BLACK, WHITE AND GRAY

Jacinda Arderrn, New Zealand
Prime Minister, a country on the
point of banning cigarette buying

New Zealand has gone too far.  That is not I thought I would ever write, thinking of the land of the Kiwis as being a sensible, even slightly dull, country.  Yet the country's government is now proposing a ban on people buying cigarettes.  The law has not been passed yet - and I hope it never is - but it proposes to stop people buying tobacco products if they were born after 2008. 

But not everywhere.  For simplicity I divide substances we consume into black, white and grey:

 

Why am I opposed to this move when I only ever smoke an occasional cigar and have not done so for months?  If all the tobacco in the world disappeared tomorrow (which is what happened in the film Yesterday, along with the Beatles’ songs) I would not be that worried and, although I was sceptical at first of its value, I accept and agree with banning smoking in pubs, restaurants, etc.

1.     Black ones are obviously and immediately toxic, sometimes poisonous, things like cyanide and sulphuric acid, and access to them needs to be strictly controlled for the sake of safety.

2.     White substances are harmless and usually nutritious, food and drink essential for the continuance of life – things like water, basic foodstuffs and oxygen.

3.     Grey substances come last, things we do not absolutely need to survive and which will not kill us immediately but often provide pleasure, yet can also be dangerous and addictive.  

You can classify everything into one of these categories.  Sugar, for example, is grey.  Human beings can – and have – managed without it but many people (myself included) have a sweet tooth and, as the song goes, a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.  Yet too much sugar can make you obese, cause your teeth to rot and can possibly cause cancers.

 

No-one is suggesting that we ban putting sugar in tea or coffee, yet most of us accept that it is a good idea to discourage people from consuming too much of it.  Hence government advertising to that effect.  Likewise alcohol.  People ruin their lives by drinking too much but that is not considered a good reason to stop me enjoying a pint of beer, a glass of whisk(e)y* or wine..

 

The one attempt by a country to ban alcohol completely - Prohibition in the USA, which lasted from 1920 to 1933 - is usually accepted as a failure now and actually contributed to the problems caused by drink by encouraging people to consume badly made and unpurified booze because there was no legal control over the production and sale of it.  If it is illegal in the first place there is no way that you can stop the bad stuff being produced and sold.

 

A similar process is happening with soft drugs now, which are gradually being decriminalised in many countries.  The UK lags behind in this process, so scared are the politicians of alienating those newspapers, such as The Daily Mail and The Times, which are dead set against legalising it. The British government is denying itself tax revenue and encouraging crime as a result.

 

Politicians regularly use drugs – residues of cocaine have been detected all over the Palace of Westminster (see here if you doubt this) and a senior figure like Michael Gove has admitted using it – yet they do not allow others to consume it legally and propose ever more draconian punishments for recreational drug users.  The blatant hypocrisy is almost breath-taking.  Don’t do as I do, but do as I say instead in the usual formula.

 

I believe that all drugs should be in classed in the ‘grey’ area.  Whether you take sugar in your tea, enjoy a drink and/or a smoke or inject yourself with mind-altering substances is up to you as an individual and not up to the state.  What you do when you drink, smoke or take drugs, however, needs to be controlled by legislation.  So you cannot drink and drive, smoke near others or operate machinery if you are high, or your concentration is lessened, in any way

 

The other side of the coin of allowing people to decide whether or not they consume these ‘grey’ substances is that they then have to take responsibility if the harmful side-effects come through at a later stage.  If you develop lung cancer or sclerosis of the liver because you have smoked or drunk too much, that is not the fault of the person or company that sells you the stuff but your fault for buying and consuming it in the first place.

 

Buyer beware.  We have all heard the phrase and warnings are plastered on the side of cigarette and cigar packets these days, so no-one can be unaware of the dangers of smoking.  Likewise drinkers are encouraged to ‘Please Drink Responsibly’, that ‘please’ presumably being put there as the drinks industry attempts to keep the code of restraint voluntary, rather than prohibitive, as it has long been for tobacco.

In the USA it is fashionable to sue tobacco companies for selling a product that is addictive.  This results in the absurd situation of executives denying the obvious - that tobacco is addictive - in order not to admit to peddling something potentially dangerous.  Yet all grey substances can be addictive for the simple reason that they provide pleasure.  If an individual decides to go ahead and smoke/drink/take drugs that is their decision and suing a company for enabling them to do so is merely passing the buck.

 

Government prohibition of tobacco is now set to become absolute in New Zealand, the reason being that people from indigenous communities (Maoris) still smoke heavily and need protection from the evils of tobacco.  Yet, by removing the voluntary element from the inevitable reduction of consumption, the country’s government is now trying to move tobacco from the grey to the black category.

I am sure this is wrong. Cigarettes do not kill everyone who smokes.  Healthy people can die from cancer, which is notoriously random in the way it strikes. Sometimes those who abuse their bodies lead long and even healthy lives until they inevitably die  Let them have some fun on the way in their consumption of the grey stuff – as long as they take responsibility for doing so.  

* Whisky is from Scotland. Whiskey comes from the USA, Canada or Ireland, where I am writing.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com 

A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL READERS WITH HOPE FOR A PANDEMIC FREE 2022

Edwin Lerner

A CATHOLIC CHRISTMAS

 

James Ussher, Bishop of Armagh
(who calculated dates in the Bible)

We will be in Ireland for Christmas this year, so it will probably be a Catholic event.  By one of those quirks of history The Church of Ireland is Protestant while the older Roman Catholic church uses more modern buildings.  Catholics were second class citizens in Ireland for centuries and were not allowed to build their own churches.  Now the boot is on the other foot and, in the South at least, Roman Catholicism is in the ascendancy.  

 

That is not to say that the Catholic church does not have its problems.  While the Anglican church seems to have plenty of applicants for the priesthood – particularly since they have started accepting women – the Catholic church has been beset by sexual scandals and is having difficulty attracting men to become priests, particularly as they are still expected to embrace celibacy in an increasingly sex-obsessed age.

 

We now know that for years Catholic priests satisfied their sexual urges by exploiting children they had power over and could enforce silence from.  Victims of exploitation, however, will not keep quiet any more.  Neither will loyal Catholics turn a blind eye to the ‘housekeepers’ who helped priests satisfy their all-too human needs.  It is no longer a case of ‘hate the sin, love the sinner’ but ‘hate the sin, expose the sinner’.  

Anglicans today are having problems getting people into their congregations while Catholics find it difficult to find men (exclusively) who are prepared to lead their services.  It might make sense to combine the two churches but common sense and religion are not comfortable bedfellows and the tendency as religion declines in importance is for the greater fracturing of churches rather than greater unity.

 

Faith, of course, is not based on reason.  The very word implies accepting something which cannot be demonstrated.  I have a friend who is trying (unsuccessfully) to turn me into a Jehovah’s Witness.  His faith leads him to believe that the Bible is literally true and that one day we will live in a world of plenty rather than the one we are stuck with, which is beset by war, famine and climate change.

 

There was not always this huge gap between science and religion.  Men like the monk Gregor Mendel and the parish priest Gilbert White used their thinking time and powers of observation to make great scientific discoveries.  Even Charles Darwin was set for a career in the church until evolution got in the way.  Together with the geologist Lyell, he showed that the world was much older than the Bible said it was.

 

Another priest, the Irish Protestant Archbishop James Ussher, calculated the age of the earth in the seventeenth century and showed that God had created the world at around six o’clock in the evening of the 24^th October 4004 BC.  I hate sneering at the past, by the way.  Ussher’s was at the cutting edge of scientific knowledge at the time and was the Charles Darwin of his day, even if his exactitude seems charming but unrealistic now.

 

However, you can still find people who believe that the world is just six thousand years old, rather than the four to five billion which the scientific evidence shows it to be.  There is little point in arguing with them.  Belief like this is not based on scientific measurement but on acceptance and no more amount of logic will shake it.  And churches built on blind faith gain more converts than those that accept science. 

 

I think it is a shame that science and religion are now considered enemies rather than allies.  Samuel Coleridge Taylor, who was himself a preacher in the newly created Unitarian Church, said that intelligence was being able to hold two different ideas in your head at the same time.  He also gave us the concept of ‘suspension of disbelief’, the knowledge that something is false but also that it holds a truth inside it.  

 

We know when we go to see a play that the person on the stage is an actor who lives in Hampstead or Hackney (more likely these days) who has a mortgage to pay and possibly a family to support.  He or she is portraying the Prince of Denmark or the Empress of Egypt and we accept that fact and are transported into another world by the power of Shakespeare’s words and by the actor’s performance of them.

 

Something similar is needed for us to embrace religion.  I enjoy singing hymns, reading the Bible and taking communion at church services, not because I believe that the belief system embraced by Christianity is true but because it is good.  This is a way to lead to lead your life that is worthwhile, not an accurate version of how the world – and the universe – was created thousands, millions or billions of years ago.  

 

So, I will continue to cling to a doubtful, sceptical kind of religious belief, not one which provides all the answers.  Science does not provide a reason to get out of bed in the morning, it merely answers factual questions.  While I do not want to ignore or reject the answers given by science, neither do I want to base my life on them.  So, I will stick with the sensible church rather than one based on faith alone.

 

May you have a joyful and - maybe just a slightly religious - Christmas this year.  

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

BOND AND THE BADDIES

Daniel Craig as James Bond 007
(If he looks waxy it is because it is
a model from Madame Tussauds)

According to a recent report, people do not go to the cinema unless there is a fair bit of killing in the film.  We do not fight large scale wars anymore so we watch our killing on screen instead.

A case in point is the latest James Bond film No Time To Die, which we went to the other day.  It is, of course, Daniel Craig's last outing as Bond.  (Inevitable if you watch to the end, but I will not say why and give away the ending.)  Craig offs more bad guys than previous Bonds and is officially the most violent incarnation of the man with a licence to kill, a nonsensical idea which is nevertheless a fundamental part of his identity as shown by that fictional 00 prefix.

Computer programmes tell people who put their money into films that, in order to recoup their investment, lots of people have to be killed on screen.  With interest payments alone at a million pounds a month because of its delayed release, it is hardly surprising that the Bond film ends up being one where an army of anonymous baddies line up to be killed by the hero, usually in a variety of ways, often with him making a pun or quip as he does so.  None of the gunmen think that a concerted rush at the lone saviour of humanity might work but come out one or two at a time, giving him the opportunity to kill them.  And none of them can shoot straight either.

At the same time, war films are increasingly realistic in showing us what it is actually like to kill someone - bloody, messy and long-winded.  I caught a little of Hacksaw Ridge a war film directed by Mel Gibson (who has done his fair share of killing on screen) and it showed just how dangerous and bloody it was to fight in a real war with actual weapons.

Relax, I hear you say, it is only a movie, a few hours entertainment that should not be taken too seriously.  Well, yes, but I often wonder how the chief baddie (who also cannot shoot straight) gets hold of his army of men who are prepared to die for him and the pay-packet he presumably offers them in the end.  There is a section in one of the Austin Powers films, which are spoofs on Bond, in which the families of Powers' victims mourn their loss while he makes terrible puns about how he killed them.  It is the most interesting part of a not always effective satire.

It all started off quite innocently with Craig-Bond learning to kill at the beginning of Casino Royale.  He becomes quite expert and enthusiastic at it by the latest film which follows the formula that, in order to make the world a better place - or simply to save it - you have to kill a bunch of people.  It is a tempting proposition but a huge oversimplification.  People act from all sorts of motives, sometimes in the belied they are doing something worthwhile, sometimes just to pay their bills and make a living.  That these sometimes come with a death penalty attached if they end up on the wrong side of the moral fence is not usually factored into their calculations.

All o this comes at a time when Alec Baldwin is in deep trouble for actually killing someone and wounding someone else on the set of a western he was making.  There is no suggestion that he knew it was loaded with live rounds rather than blank ones but he pulled the trigger in a pretend killing that turned into a real one with a real victim.  Why were a real gun and bullets used rather than fake ones?  Time and an investigation will presumably tell but a pretend killing turning into an actual one shows how reality and fantasy sometimes get mixed up - with fatal results.

Films often have in their credits a note saying that no animals were harmed in its production but that will ring a little hollow if it is appended to Rust, the film Baldwin was making, when two real human beings were injured, one fatally, when he was working on it.  People are bound to ask awkward questions when and if the film is eventually released and will expect answers.

Asking awkward questions is one of the freedoms we fight for when we try to protect freedom and it is one that assorted villains are only too eager to suppress when it comes to gaining world domination, an idea that keeps popping up in James Bond films.  Well, it is not too much of a spoiler to say that he saves the world from domination by the forces of evil in the latest movie. He also has a five year old-daughter who appears in the film.  Bond, however, is about taking life not creating it.  Where, I wonder, do they put the bodies of all the people he kills in his work?

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com 

Edwin Lerner

WAS BOMBING DRESDEN A WAR CRIME?

Guernica by Pablo Picasso (Wiki Commons)
On display at Renia Sofia Museum, Madrid

After the Second World War the Royal Air Force was given a church of its own in London.  You probably know the name of this church from the nursery rhyme:

‘Oranges and Lemons say the bells of Saint Clements.’ 

You can see St Clement Danes as you enter Fleet Street from Westminster.  At the front of the church stand statues of Hugh Dowding, head of Fighter Command and Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris whose nickname indicates clearly what role he played in the war. 

The Queen Mother, who unveiled the statue of Harris, was reportedly upset by the hostility shown to him, the statue having to be protected from vandalism and often covered in graffiti.  She had lived through the Blitz and said that she was glad when Buckingham Palace was bombed as it meant she could look east enders in the face, they having suffered the brunt of the bombing,in reality far worse than anything the royal family had to endure.

Harris was not a diplomatic man and always maintained that the bombing of German cities, which he was well aware would result in the deaths of many civilians, was a justified tactic.  It was practiced by the Germans and would be practiced on them until they finally realised that the war was unwinnable.  I have often called the bombing of Dresden the Hiroshima of Europe, a hammer blow that would convince an opponent that they were beaten, something they had previously refused to concede.

This is not entirely accurate because Dresden was bombed in February 1945 and the Nazis did not surrender until three months later.  The bombing of Hiroshima and later Nagasaki had a more immediate effect in making the Japanese quickly admit defeat.  Both they and the Germans had showed a stubborn determination in continuing to fight a war that had obviously long since been lost.  It was as though Hitler was punishing his people for losing the war, his own suicide finally allowing them to surrender.

This refusal to admit they were fighting for a lost cause meant that allied forces had to work their way slowly and bloodily towards both Berlin and Tokyo, overcoming their enemies and losing lives as they did so.  If you think that the bombing of cities like Dresden and Hiroshima was unforgivable, you would have to be prepared to say to the parents and loved ones of the men who fought that it was possible to end the war quickly but their lives would continue to be lost as it was fought slowly.

I would not be prepared to do that, so I cannot call the bombing of Dresden (or the dropping of the atom bombs) war crimes.  Killing thousands of civilians who were burned to death as bombs rained down on them from above was obviously a horrible thing to do but it effectively saved the lives of the many soldiers who would otherwise have died on the battlefield as they advanced towards the heart of enemy power.  Life is about alternatives not absolutes and this is a choice that I would have made.

It is thought that about 25,000 people were killed at Dresden, a pretty city with a population of about a million.  The Nazis claimed it was ten times that number and described the bombing as mass murder.  If anyone knew about mass murder, it was the Nazis who were shipping millions of Jews as well as gays, gypsies and disabled people off to the gas chambers.  They were the real experts in the process of the wholesale killing of defenceless people.

Although the bombing of towns and cities had begun in the First World War, with the Kaiser initially and rather quaintly forbidding the Luftwaffe from bombing London lest they hit Buckingham Place, it was in 1937 that the Nazis conducted what is still probably their most notorious air raid.  This was during the Spanish Civil War when the Condor Legion bombed a Spanish republican town called Guernica.

Again, an unofficial competition grew up between the victims, who claimed a larger loss of life, and the perpetrators, who estimated a smaller one.  The number was probably around 300, way below that of Dresden or those killed by the atom bombs, which was over 100,000.  The bombing is (in)famous mainly because of Pablo Picasso’s famous painting of it, which was returned to Spain, after democracy was re-established there.  

There is a story that a Nazi confronted Picasso, who was living in Paris during the Second World War, and saw either the painting or a sketch of it in his studio.  The Nazi said, ‘Did you do this?’ (knowing full well that he was the painter) to which the artist coolly replied, ‘No. You did it.’  The implication was that fascists had perpetrated the atrocity while the artist had merely shown the world what they had done.

When it comes to doing, we were bombers as well.  In my tourist guiding days I had an elderly American client who seemed mild-mannered but who quietly admitted to me that he must have been responsible for the death of thousands during his time in Bomber Command when he helped drop bombs on German cities and the helpless citizens down below who had no way of defending themselves.

Blanket bombing of civilians is no longer considered acceptable but it was how war was waged in the twentieth century.  Although it was probably just as dangerous for the men involved, it did not involve the kind of individual gallantry shown by fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain so it did not attract the heroic status the fighters enjoyed. Bombing was not nice but it was necessary and it should not be called a war crime.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner

M AND M

Malala Yousafzai - wearing a veil

Irish president Mary McAleese

I am writing this having just returned from Ireland.  The local people extended more goodwill towards us in just over a week than any of our British neighbours have done in years.  This comes from living in a rural location where people are more likely to greet strangers but it is also a part of the Irish character.

You get a good sense of this Irish character by reading Here’s the Story, the memoir of the former Irish president Mary McAleese, which I did while over there.  She was brought up in the north of the country, where I spent most of the first ten years of my life, moved to the south and said that, as president, she would represent all Irish people, Protestant and Catholic, unionist and nationalist, those who considered themselves British first and Irish second and those who thought they were Irish only.

Ireland was divided in two because of the irreconcilability of these two sides.  The British parliament had recognised Ireland’s right to independence in 1914 and said that it would have its own government – something like the Scottish parliament today – but that there was the small matter of defeating Germany in the meantime.

That was not enough for the Irish rebels who, following the old adage that England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity, tried to overthrow British rule by force in the Easter Uprising of 1916.  This was both a total failure and a huge success.  Militarily the Irish rebels were no match for the British army which sailed into Dublin harbour to regain control of the city.  The leaders of the uprising were forced to surrender at the Dublin Post Office and were taken to Kilmainham Gaol where they were executed, thus becoming heroes and martyrs of the Irish freedom movement.

The long and short of this was that Ireland was divided in two a hundred years ago and Mary McAlese, growing up Catholic in Northern Ireland, had plenty of early experience of the resulting sectarian violence.  She, however, had the sense to know that the way to respond to violence is with non-violence and made sure that the men who had terrorised her youth were made to feel part of the peace process once it began.  They were involved in the talks that led to the Anglo-Irish Agreement and she made sure that they were invited when the Queen came to the Irish Republic on a state visit.  The republican movement Sinn Fein boycotted the visit while the Ulster paramilitaries fell over themselves to sit at (or near) the same table as Her Majesty.  

No prizes for guessing who came out of that one better.  The Sinn Fein mayor of Cashel defied his own organisation to greet the Queen when she went there.  He had cancer and only two months to live so he did not care what happened to him.  Sinn Fein realised they had missed the boat and their leader Martin McGuiness later went to Windsor Castle for a state banquet with the queen and McAlese’s successor, Michael Higgins.

As we were in Ireland, Afghanistan fell to the Taliban.  The fact that they took over the country and its capital Kabul with such ease as soon as, almost before, the Americans had withdrawn their troops was both predictable and infuriating.  The promises that Afghanistan would be a safe place for emancipated women and western values seemed like so many empty vacuous promises detached from reality, just the sort of things our Prime Minister Boris Johnson would - and has - said since.

The Taliban shoot and kill teenage girls who have the temerity to try and gain an education.  That is what they did to Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan before her life was saved and she came to Britain with her family, one place where she could hope to live safely.  In Taliban eyes females should not only be covered up and confined to the home but illiterate and permanently pregnant – that or they face death by men brave enough to shoot an unarmed teenage girl.

I have no faith in the promises that the Taliban will change their ways and that they will show compassion and understanding towards the thousands of women who have started to enjoy freedom from oppression.  They can expect as much or as little mercy as the men who worked for the western powers when they held Afghanistan.  

The soldiers who were needed to prop up this version of an enlightened society are leaving now.  That is the problem with occupying a foreign country.  Eventually the men sent abroad get fed up and want to come home.  The occupied may not have the firepower to defeat the occupiers but they just have to wait until the invaders decide to leave because they feel guilty, frustrated or just plain homesick.  The British army eventually left Ireland, the Americans left Vietnam and we are both now abandoning Afghanistan.  The rebels only needed to wait, having nowhere else to go.  

Hope is not lost entirely.  As we found in our time in Ireland, the people are very friendly now that the British are visitors rather than invaders.  Likewise, Vietnam has now adopted a western style economy and shrugged off communism.  It may have been the best means to defeat America but in the end capitalism is more fun to live under than communism (or fundamentalism) and provides a better standard of living.  We can only hope that the people of Afghanistan come to the same conclusion.

Both Mary McAleese in Ireland and Malala Yousafzai have looked down the barrel of a gun held by men who fear female power and independence.  Both survived traumatic events and now represent a version of female emancipation that is not automatically anti-male but recognises the desire and needs of a woman to think for herself.   Here is to them – M and M. 

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IFFY ABOUT INSTITUTIONAL

Saka, Sancho and Rashford with Raheem Sterling -
who did not take a penalty and was an England star

As the footballers say, I hold my hand up and admit to noticing that the three players who were successful in the England-Italy penalty shoot-out three weeks ago were all white, while the three who missed their kicks were black.  More to the point Harry Kane and Harry Maguire were seasoned professionals as was the goalkeeper Jordan Pickford, who made a couple of decent saves from the Italians.  In comparison, Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka were young and inexperienced, the latter two still in their teens, born after the millennium.

It seemed like a rare wrong move by the England coach Gareth Southgate to give the responsibility of taking penalty kicks to these young players, particularly as they took the later kicks when the pressure was growing on them to score in front of a huge audience.  Whatever the colour of their skin, the pressure of scoring against an Italian goalie with a spotless record in shoot-outs was always going to be immense.  And they all missed.

Saka later said that he knew that his miss would lead to abuse on social media and that much of this would be racist in character.  With depressing predictability a bunch of idiots used the notorious ‘N’ word in blaming the black players for England’s eventual defeat and publicised their prejudices on Twitter.  Equally predictably, this prejudice attracted interest and condemnation.

However, let us be accurate here. The condemnation of black players by racists is not the result of 'institutional' racism but of what better be called pervasive racism.  It does not come from above but from below.  Like it or not (and I do not) people often take against those of a different skin colour – in a way they do not for people of different eye or hair colour.  This type of racism is proving much harder to eradicate than institutional racism.

I think it is worth making this distinction because it is important to accurately recognise the nature of a problem if you want to eliminate it.  Institutions in Britain today fall over themselves to appear anti-racist and justification for racist views is actually quite rare.  This is undoubtedly progress from the days when posters appeared comparing the skulls of monkeys to those of people of African origin, something I remember from my younger days.

It is also important to identify racism that is stubbornly deep-rooted but not officially sanctioned because the word ‘institutional’ is so close to ‘irredeemable’.  It is a counsel of despair to say that racism is condoned and encouraged by our institutions when it is manifestly not.  Racism may exist in these institutions but it is not supported by them.  There is a difference between what is hard to eliminate and what is inevitable.

Let’s take some examples. The Nazis were institutionally racist and eliminated Jews in order to try and create a pure Aryan race.  With their gas chambers and the machine gunning of Jews they made little secret of this attitude. The South African state and its police force were also institutionally racist in their treatment of back people, who were regarded – and treated – as second class human beings.

Whatever its faults, Britain does not tolerate those kind of attitudes.  I worked in an office when what was then known as race relations legislation was passed and we were told that it was illegal to discriminate against people on the basis of their ethnic origin (skin colour), religion or nationality.  Since then the grounds for illegal discrimination have been widened to include factors such as gender, sexuality, disability and age.

Yet, despite being a theoretically equal opportunity society, it is still harder to get an interview - let alone a job - if you have an obvious foreign sounding name (like Saka) than if you are called Smith or Jones.  That applies even if you have the same or better qualifications than Smith or Jones.  Often without realising it, people who decide who gets a chance tend to favour those from their own racial groups.

This is why people of colour can achieve success in sport while they still suffer discrimination in employment.  Basically, the man or woman who can run faster, jump higher or score more often is the one who wins the prizes, whatever the colour of their skin.  Sport is the ultimate meritocracy and allows people to succeed whatever ethnic background they come from.

It does not protect them, however, if they are perceived to have failed when they were expected to succeed. That is when the old stereotype of the black player who bottles it at the moment of greatest pressure resurfaces.  In fact, any young player, black or white, would have found the pressures very hard to handle. It just happened that the players in question were all black.

The building of a mixed race team – and their taking the knee to show their commitment to racial equality before kick-off – reflects the reality of life in Britain today where people from ethnic minorities make up about 15% of the population.  Many of these are of Asian origin and so the proportion of black footballers in the England squad actually exceeds the percentage of black people in the country.

The Italy team in contrast was exclusively white.  The one Italian black player of note, Mario Balotelli, helped to knock England out of the World Cup in Brazil but he is thirty now and probably past his best. Balotelli had been subjected to racist abuse by ‘fans’ of Italy who thought that no-one could be Italian if they were black.  Italy may have won the trophy but they are way behind in racial equality.

Gareth Southgate deserves huge credit not only for taking England farther in this and previous competitions that his more celebrated predecessors did but also in building a team that is not only multi-racial but openly anti-racist.  The team reflects the multi-cultural and racial nature of the England of today.  Sadly, the abuse received by its black players also reflects the fact that racism is still far from finished in Britain.

Just remember that it is racism which comes from below - not from above.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner

COMMUNISM AT THE CINEMA

Two recent films were set at the height of communism in Russia: Dear Comrades! and The Death of Stalin. The first has just come out, although it does a good job of looking dated, made in black and white on a small screen, as though it originated in 1962 when it was set.  Armando Iannucci’s film on Stalin came out in 2017 but, being in English and in colour, with recognisable if not major stars, is evidently contemporary.  I avoided it on release as it was advertised as a comedy and I could find nothing amusing about the bloodletting and power scrambling in it.

Stalin died as I came into the world.  No-one is absolutely sure of the exact date of his demise because they were all so scared of him that they did not call a doctor until it was too late to save him. Stalin had in any case had most of the competent doctors in Moscow killed, convinced that they were out to kill him. The date is usually given as 5^th March 1953, the day after I was born.

In Russia at the time, an accusation was as good as a conviction and the almost invariable sentence was death.  Although you do not see it happening, plenty of people are dispatched with a single shot to the head, often shouting, ‘Long live Stalin!’ just before they are killed.  You dared not show disloyalty even as you died.  

The cheapness of life also came over in Andrei Konchalovsky’s ironically titled Dear Comrades! set in the town of Novocherkassk, a small Russian town where the people have rise up against the local communist officials when they impose yet another pay cut on top of a price rise and they decide that they have had enough.  They rebel and are gunned down as punishment.

The heroine of the film is a woman who is one of these officials but whose daughter naively believes that she can side with the rebels.  The mother is both more loyal to the system and more realistic in her approach but is reduced to desperately searching for her daughter after the massacre.  She is helped in her search by an oddly sympathetic KGB man.

I will not give away the ending but you wonder if it really happened or was imagined by the mother, so at odds with the previous events in the story it is. The director seemed to be saying that, even in an era of socialist realism, the most loyal and dedicated upholders of a tyranny need an element of wish-fulfilment to survive.

While Ianucci is a British film maker (albeit with an Italian name and parentage, born in Scotland) Dear Comrades was made in Russian by Andrei Konchalovsky, who had a brief unsuccessful transfer to Hollywood, where he found the censorship imposed by commercialism harder to live with than that imposed by communism.  He was fired from Tango and Cash because he did not kowtow to the Hollywood's wish to make a light-hearted buddy cop film.  

Both films show how much the people of Russia loved Stalin, despite his homicidal enthusiasm for killing large numbers of them.  The heroine of Dear Comrades longs for the days of certainty he offered, while the people in The Death of Stalin flock to his funeral – and 1500 are gunned down as they breach the lockdown Lavently Beria had imposed on Moscow.   

Beria, who runs the secret police, comes out as the one utterly evil character amongst a bunch of generally unsympathetic ones in Iannucci’ film, everyone trying to grub their way to power while keeping in with Stalin.  He is portrayed by Simon Russell Beale, an actor I admire but one who normally portrays sympathetic, almost cuddly characters.  In real life, Beria was a rapist and exploiter of women, a man only too happy to carry out his boss’s orders to arrest and kill anyone named on the lists he hands out to his equally enthusiastic underlings.  It is hard to feel any sympathy for Beria when he gets his comeuppance as Khrushchev gets the better of him.

Why was I put off from seeing the film when it first came out, normally being only too keen to see how communism turned so quickly into murderous tyranny, with a strong dose of corruption, privileges being granted to those successful at climbing the greasy pole of the party rather than being good at making money? The film was advertised as a comedy.  While there was a certain black humour in it, none of the characters was remotely sympathetic, something you surely need to really enjoy a film. I was fascinated by The Death of Stalin but did not laugh once.

The film ends with Khrushchev in command but adds that, although he got rid of those who helped him take Beria out, he too fell from power when Leonid Brezhnev took over some years later.  By that time the death sentence had fallen into disuse in Russia and those who fell from power were merely ‘retired’ and allowed to live in their comfortably-appointed party-provided dachas until they died. Nikita Khrushchev’s granddaughter is said to have asked why her grandfather was crying all the time after his fall.  Maybe a bullet would have been preferable.

Watching films like these makes me thankful I live in a democracy in which our leaders never become too powerful simply because they have to – or are expected to – obey the law and we can get rid of them after a few years.  Donald Trump had a lot more in common with those communist leaders than he would ever have admitted but the difference is that the system proved stronger than him in the long run – even if his attempt was an close run thing in the end.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

SOCIETY'S WASHING MACHINES

Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt - victims of Usman Khan

When David Cameron was asked what would be his priority when he was re-elected as Prime Minister in 2015, he replied simply ‘prison reform’.  Well, that all went south because of Brexit and little more than a year later he was replaced by Theresa May and later by Boris Johnson.  Prison reform was forgotten after Brexit and the anti-reform attitude which went with it.

Another nail in its coffin was the recent inquest into those who were killed on London Bridge in 2019.  Briefly, what happened was that two young idealistic people (photos above) were killed by the supposedly reformed terrorist Usman Khan after attending a rehabilitation meeting at nearby Fishmonger’s Hall.  Khan had been given a clean bill of health and promoted as the ‘poster boy’ for prison reform and the deradicalization of extremists. 

The key word here is ‘extremists’.  There is a world of difference between making criminals feel worthwhile members of society who can make a contribution by giving up crime and persuading those who want to destroy western style democracy and replace it with a version of Islamic fundamentalism to see the error of their ways.  Persuading a crook to go straight is one thing, deradicalizing an extremist is another.

Despite the terrible failure of the idea of reforming a radical like Khan after he has been locked up, it is still worth making the effort.  But it is a tough sell.  There are very few votes in prison reform and nominally radical politicians tend to run scared from issues which they feel will lose them votes and make them look weak.

As is often the case, it is the conservative who effects change because he is mindful of his legacy, as Nixon did when he went to China.  Wouldn’t be cool to go down in history as the man who opened up the communist east to the capitalist west, thought Nixon?  Likewise Cameron may well have thought his administration would look good to posterity if prisons were genuinely reformed during his watch.

I have written before about the need for us to have prisons to make society work, my argument being basically that, once you lock the door of your house you are effectively voting for a criminal justice system.  (Go here for that post.)  However, they should not be, as they so often are, universities of crime, rather the washing machines of our society.

When I buy and use a washing machine I expect it to work.  I put in dirty clothes and take them out clean.  If it does not work, I want my money back or at least the machine repaired.  Similarly, if I support sending people to prison, I expect those convicted and sentenced to come out better citizens than when they went in. 

Some hope.  According to the Howard League for Penal Reform there are nearly 80,000 people in prison in Britain at present and there is little sign of that number going down, especially as the government thinks it can win votes by promising longer sentences - such as ten years for defacing a statue.  The League compares the prison system to a river which sweeps away people stuck in the middle of the flow.

In a sensible system, locking up people convicted of a crime and then working hard to help them turn their lives around would be a cause for celebration.  Look, John or Jane has been inside for five years and came out determined to go straight, find a job, reconnect with their families and leave their criminality behind them. They would become contributors to society rather than a drain on resources.

Prisons can be quite a drain.  We spend about £4.4 billion pounds a year in Britain on prisons (not on the justice system) and each prisoner we lock up costs nearly £45,000 annually.  (You could send them to a decent hotel for that.)  Yet the reoffending rates are shockingly high. Nearly 50% of prisoners who have been released are reconvicted within a year and these rates are higher for young and petty offenders.  The washing machine is not working.

Success stories like the (entirely imaginary) ones of John and Jane are not only rare but are widely mistrusted by those who never go to prison.  Talking to prisoners, as I do occasionally when working as a Samaritan, makes you realise what hopeless places they are, yet the appetite for punishment is increasing all the time and our prison population has almost doubled in thirty years from 45,000 to 83,000.

Many ordinary people are sceptical of concepts like prison reform and rehabilitation.  It is widely assumed that all prisoners have fancy flat screen televisions in their cells and can watch anything they want.  In fact, flat screen tvs are the only kind that are made now and access to a limited number of channels depends on good behaviour.  Yet just say ‘flat screen televisions in prison cells’ and people immediately assume that going to prison is like staying in a holiday camp.

In reality, it is often very difficult to get a job if you have time in prison on your cv.  Timpsons, ironically a company that specialises in locks for people's houses, has instituted a successful programme of employing former prisoners and says on its website that:

'The vast majority of ex-offenders we recruit are extremely loyal, productive, hardworking and make excellent colleagues. Many have been promoted and fully grasped the second chance they have been given. To put it simply, recruiting ex-offenders has been great for our business.'

Rather than regarding them as society’s washing machines in which those who have gone wrong can be cleaned up, we are all too happy to see prisons as the rubbish dumps of society, where people are tossed and left to rot.  Yet, as the Timpson story shows, this not need be the case.  Washing machines or rubbish dumps?  We have a long way to go to convince people that prisons can be the former rather than the latter but it is a step well worth taking. 

Edwin Lerner

Go to: https://www.timpson-group.co.uk/timpson-foundation/ex-offenders/ for more on Timpsons.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com.