Windmills and Motorways

Last weekend my wife, daughter and I drove back to Glasgow from Manchester. Unusually we travelled through Cumbria and the Borders not just in daylight, but in sunshine, I can't remember when we previously travelled that road in daylight. I had expected to enjoy the rugged beauty of the hills, but what my memory had not prepared me for was the wind farms. There is something inspiring in the sight of those giant air-screws gently turning in the wind, I love to see them whether in a Rajasthani desert or on a mountain crest in Cumbria.

I know that there are many people who hate wind farms, who want to preserve the countryside unchanged; however there has never been a time when the countryside has not been changing, primarily through the action of human beings. Progress has its own beauty, but it is predicated upon the acceptance that the urge to progress, to learn, to discover, to improve is essential to the existence of humanity. If we kept – as some would have us – our wild places untouched we would have no agriculture and no settlements. Some claim that wind farms spoil the countryside, that is merely one opinion with which some of us would disagree. Some oppose road building, but would we want to spend a week travelling from London to Glasgow in a horse drawn carriage along rutted cart tracks, which in themselves represented humanity's urge to impose progress and improvement on the land. Who can say that today's resisted project won't become tomorrow's tourist attraction? Were it not for General Wade's hated roads there would never have developed the Scottish tourist industry. The monuments of our commercial infrastructure attract visitors, all the way from the Thames Barrier, across the Forth bridges up to the Skye road bridge, visitors carried on the motorways some consider scars on the landscape and upon the remnants of the magnificent rail network left to us by our Victorian forbears.

Change is inevitable and improvement is essential as long as we want to heat and light our houses, and power industry, and move food and manufactures around the world. It is easy to bemoan the pace of contemporary life, but would we willingly return to horse drawn mail coaches instead of email or candles instead of the electric light? A few perhaps, but all the time? I think not.

You may not like change, you may oppose it, but change is inevitable and life might be easier if instead of resisting you instead learnt to appreciate the beauty of progress because it is not going to be reversed any time soon.

David Cameron suckered by Salmond!

The SNP went into the election with a clear commitment to hold the Independence referendum in the second half of the parliament. The Unionist parties tried to goad the Scottish Government into moving earlier, but uniquely among British political parties the SNP showed a determination to deliver on its manifesto promises although it has yet to do so on several. The unionist frustration at Salmond's determination to move in his own time as promised has goaded David Cameron into precipitate action.

A referendum in the second half of the parliament may well deliver independence so David Cameron has decided that the Westminster Tory Government will force an earlier vote, he may have played right into Salmond's hands. Like Thatcher, Cameron has demonstrated a contempt for the will of the Scottish people and this latest move shows how little regard he has for us. However the referendum will have a legal status that Salmond's one would not have had, it only takes a stirring up of Scottish resentment of English arrogance and meddling for Cameron to have painted himself into a corner. Salmond could not have split the Union, but he has tricked Cameron into doing it for him.

Remembering Action Bangladesh

In 1971, in my late teens I had one of the defining experiences of my life. I was allowed to go by myself to London to stay with my cousin Barry, my first big adventure I suppose. In the middle of the two weeks at the beginning of August I attended my first ever protest march and rally. Action Bangladesh had organised a protest in support of the struggle to gain independence for Bangladesh (East Pakistan), I suppose there may have been some Bengalis working that day, but it looked to me as if the whole Bangladeshi population of Britain had converged on Trafalgar Square. We marched through the streets chanting, “Joi Bangla” and “Long live, long live, Sheikh Mujib, Sheikh Mujib”, we sang a song which went – if I remember correctly – “Bade penge dow, bade penge dow bango” and translated as, “break down the barriers and let the spirit free” (of course, it was forty years ago so I may not be accurate). In Trafalgar Square we listened to speakers calling for the bloodshed in East Pakistan to cease and for it to be given independence as Bangladesh and heard the first public playing of George Harrison’s “Bangladesh”. I had never been so excited and the next day I went –  as I remember –  to Streatham and volunteered.


The first day I was there we counted the money from the collections made along the route of the march and at the rally – several hundred pounds in coins – our hands were black. We then took the money to the bank in buckets, they were not entirely happy and suggested we might in future use money bags with which they then supplied us. I think it was the first time in my life that I felt part of something truly worthwhile, and although I was just a schoolboy I don’t remember ever feeling I was not wanted. I was a little overawed by Paul Connett and Marietta Procope who were running the organisation, they not only knew so much but they understood stuff! I was a callow schoolboy and they seemed so sophisticated but they put up with me with a good will although I am sure I had little to offer in skills and experience. I had conversations with other volunteers and, I believe, absorbed some of their passion for justice.


The person above all who made an impression upon me was Marietta Procope. She was personally committed to the cause and – as I understand it – had originally given Action Bangladesh a room from which to organise. By the time I arrived the organisation had taken over not only her life, but her house, all she had left to herself was her bed! I remember her as very slim and a prodigious consumer of cigarettes and coffee. I don’t know whether I had a crush on her, I might have done, but I do know she inspired me. That week at Action Bangladesh convinced me that ordinary people can make a difference, that there is always hope and that people are fundamentally good. I went back to school, the war ended and East Pakistan became Bangladesh. I never saw Marietta or anyone from Action Bangladesh again, but in the forty years that followed I have been involved in the Labour Party then the Communist Party, I have been a trades union official, I have campaigned against nuclear weapons, against Apartheid, against racism, I have demonstrated, canvassed, petitioned, leafleted, I have written letters and lobbied, and I continue to do so.


I was very upset when I learned of Marietta’s death after she returned from Bangladesh, having visited shortly after the war. I can’t pretend to understand how others think, but I have known the pits of depression and considered killing myself and I regret that anyone should suffer. I like to think of her death as one last protest against mans inhumanity to man. I was pleased to see that she is among the 124 foreigners being honoured by Bangladesh for their contribution to the War of Liberation; for my part I would like to think that the campaigning and political activity I have undertaken is a small, but not inappropriate, tribute to the memory of the woman who inspired me to action - Marietta Procope

Anonymous, the Shakespeare Thing!

I went to see the film “Anonymous” which I thoroughly enjoyed. As I was preparing to leave the cinema I overheard two men speculating on whether Derek Jacobi or the other stars actually believed that someone else other than William Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s works. I love it when a film provokes discussion, it doesn’t happen often. The debate over the authorship of Shakespeares plays is not a new one and over the years academics have postulated several alternative authors, this film presents an entertaining drama which should be treated as such.

Whoever wrote them the plays of Shakespeare represent the high point of English literature, written at a time when, had they not been written then, there was a wealth of writers – Marlowe, Johnson, Donne – whose names would have sprung readily to mind, but who tend to be overshadowed by Shakespeare’s incomparable brilliance. It must have been an amazing time to be alive.

I don’t much care who wrote Shakespeare’s plays, as I said to the men discussing the film. “It is not important who wrote them, what is important is that they were written!”

We Shall Remember Them.

I was watching a documentary about Pathe News which included war footage from British ships in the Mediterranean. My Father served on minesweepers, mostly in the Med, and as I watched the British ships being bombed by the Luftwaffe I realised that I knew virtually nothing about my Father’s war. He told me he hated dive-bombers, all I knew of his arctic convoy experience was, “When they issued us with woolen underwear I knew we weren’t going to the Med.” and I knew he failed to get into the Fleet Air Arm because he turned up to his flying test still tipsy from the night before. As I watched the old newsreel footage I realised that he just did not talk about the war, I don’t know why, but I suppose like many others he found it an experience of which he preferred not to be reminded.

I am of that generation born just after the war whose culture and society has largely moulded by the wars of the first half of the century and – coming from an East India trading family – the Empire they defended. Perhaps there is a glory in war, but it also leaves its scars not only in those who survived but in the society they bequeathed to their children. I was brought up in Yorkshire where whole towns lost a generation of young men in the Great War, they joined the army together, fought together and died together and their loved ones mourned together and grew old without them. In my youth I knew people who had fought in the Great War, one – my neighbour downstairs – was killed at Paschendale, not killed entirely, but his health was taken from him. Three days after a gas attack he was driving supplies to the front in a field tractor when it began to rain, the rain released the gas trapped in the soil and so he lived as an invalid for the next half century, his lungs burnt by the mustard gas. The scars of war are slow to heal.

We sometimes forget that there are no single casualties in war but every soldier killed or maimed or psychologically scarred shares his or her scars with a family, parents, spouse, children, all of whose lives are changed forever. I sometimes feel that politicians find war too convenient as an instrument of policy, and I have nothing but contempt for politicians like Tony Blair and George Bush senior who are happy to send other people’s children to their deaths while keeping their own sons safe at home (or possibly in the National Guard). I am saddened every time the news reports further casualties in Iraq or Afghanistan, I regret the death toll on both sides particularly collateral damage. “Collateral Damage” translates roughly as dead women and children killed by military carelessness. I am appalled that in this day and age we still so readily turn to violence to meet our foreign policy goals.

Armistice Day will soon be upon us. Although I am a pacifist I have bought a poppy, I may have contempt for the politicians who order wars, and I regret that so many young men and women have felt it necessary to take up arms and go to war. Why have I bought a poppy? Because however much I regret their going to war, I am proud that they went. I’m just ashamed that we have not yet managed to find a way to ensure they never have to go again.

A Generation of Narcissists

I have just read a Tanith Carey article “Why do people become so vile online?” in the Daily Mail of Thursday 11th August 2011. Generally it is a very good article, that is to say I largely agree with her arguement, apart from one arrogant and contemptuous comment.

“The downside of the free speech offered by blogs, Twitter and social networking is that it has created a generation of narcissists obsessed with their own opinions.”

The fact is we have always had these “narcissists” ever since newspapers began to publish the letters of their readers. There are two sorts of journalists those who report the news and those who comment on events, those who comment on events are just as much “narcissists obsessed with their own opinions” as a blogger or Twitter user; that someone is paid to express an opinion does not make them any more qualified, or less self absorbed than the unpaid letter writer or blogger. Frequently the online specialist commentator is better qualified to write than the columnist who covers a range of subjects.  Who is to say that a member of the general public has an opinion that is of less value than that of one paid to express an opinion? The papers are full of people like Littlejohn expressing opinions on a thousand and one things of which they have no experience or knowledge. Parliament is full of members who appear to believe that a public school and university education is a substitute for experience, and that a law degree somehow qualifies them to have opinions on such diverse subjects as military expenditure and fish farming. The downside of the free speech offered by blogs, Twitter and social networking to the professional pontificator ,is not that it has created a generation of narcissists, but that it has allowed ordinary people to share their narcissism.

Topiary - A Cruel and Unnatural Punishment

I suppose one should be pleased that Jake Davis aka Topiary – the hacker alleged to be a spokesman for LulzSec – has been released on bail, but I have reservations. Davis has not as yet been found guilty of any crime, but his bail conditions are tantamount to “cruel and unusual punishment”. For many people being denied access to the Internet is not a punishment, but to deny them human interaction would be considered inhuman. Some people’s normal human interaction is over the Internet because face to face interaction is unpleasant and confusing, to condemn them to only interacting face to face is the equivalent of placing a normal person in solitary confinement. Without access to the Internet one is deprived of the means to express one’s feelings and opinions to others, a denial of the Internet is like expecting a normal person to converse while wearing a gag, blindfold and earplugs. The Internet is a realm in which many autistic people can move freely and to exclude them from it is as restrictive of their freedom as incarceration in a jail cell would be to a “normal” person. I find a day without going on line difficult, the Internet has given me a freedom I never had as a child, but at least I have in the past managed without it, I am in my fifties, to deny Davis – who is only eighteen and has not grown up without the Internet –  Internet access is cruel!

I think our reaction to LulzSec and Anonymous is totally disproportionate. A politician who fraudulently claims expenses may go to jail for a few months, most did not. Journalists and editors who hack into voice messages and bribe policemen may go to jail for a few months, most get away with it. Bankers and financiers can indulge in rampant brinkmanship with other people’s money, very few are punished and many are rewarded. The activities of Lulzsec and Anonymous have not been for material gain, but they cause such ire in the establishment because they embarrass those in power who do not accept that ordinary people have a right to question their behaviour. It might be argued that if government departments, institutions and large companies like Sony behaved responsibly there would be no LulzSec or Anonymous, if they were not so desperate to conceal the truth, there would be no Wikileaks. Rather than pursuing those who are revealing incompetence and abuse, we should be calling for those they have embarrassed to correct their errors, and allow the police to focus their efforts on real criminals who are abusing the internet for dishonest gain.