I started making postings about housing and all the difficulties I have got into with being charged heavy charges by Newham Council for the flat I own in London and how the house I am currently renting is in line to be repossessed. Since the start of July I have been trying to sell the flat and buy a house close to where I now live. Four months have passed and still no progress. Newham Council took over a month to respond to a request from the potential buyer of my flat and the buyer (I am now on to my second as the first one's mortgage lender changed its mind about lending him money) is now trying to squeeze more money out of me, the seller. The first buyer tried this too. I will call this one Mr. A to avoid confusion. Well, after making an offer which was £5000 (€7150; US$10,500) less than the asking price but which I accepted as I was keen to be rid of the flat, Mr. A then started demanding that I totally refitted the bathroom, even though that had only been done two years before. Mr. B, the current buyer knew that the flat came with furniture and in the 3 months since he put in his offer, has not said anything about it, then suddenly this week just as the exchange of contracts seemed ready to happen, he demanded it was all removed and that I pay him £545 (€779; US$1145) to him so that he could do this. What has become apparent is that in East London (where Newham is located) not only do the council try to squeeze as much money out of home owners as they can, but anyone buying your property is going to prevaricate and demand extra bonuses as if you were trading in some Third World market.
Taking four months to sell a house makes it almost impossible to move for work. The only people who benefit are the lawyers who pick up fees on everything. Local authorities also seem eager to tap into the money swilling around in Britain's overheated property market (though for the past two months it has begum to cool, though not as much as the 40% that the International Monetary Fund claims British houses are over-priced by; the average house now costs 9 times the average salary in the UK, meaning most average people cannot afford anywhere big enough for them), that new charges are appearing. Many people in older towns are now being charged for the upkeep of medieval churches in their town no matter whether they are Christian or not. The government finally introduced the HIP (Home Information Pack) after one failed attempt because they had failed to train sufficient people to produce them. You have to buy one of these in order to sell any property with 3 or more bedrooms. They take a month to produce and cost another £3-400. However, many local authorities, are insisting that buyers (in some places sellers) also have to pay for a locally created pack on all properties (my buyer had to get one for my two-bedroomed flat) which again costs hundreds of pounds, the exact charge depending on where the property is. All of these things slow up the UK housing market even more and in fact bump up prices further to cover these costs.
You may say the UK housing market needs to slow down a bit. However, that hampers people trying to move to where work is (something the government usually encourages) and trying to get their children set up well in school (some schools now refuse to take pupils who arrive mid-year and they have to commute back to their old school, hardly beneficial for their education). Thus, soon it will be incredibly difficult to move house in less than half-a-year, something that is reinforced by the fixed 6- and 12-month contracts so many landlords/ladies are insisting on which make the rented sector as inflexible as the purchase one. The lawyers, the landlords and the local authorities all simply gain more money and the average person has to put their life on hold for months. The UK housing market needs adjustment and not simply in terms of prices. I curse the day I ever thought it was a good idea to buy a flat, I should have purchased a caravan instead.
Thursday, 8 November 2007
Tuesday, 6 November 2007
Stay away from Blackpool - the town which lives up to its name
Sorry to any international readers, but this posting is most likely to be relevant to people in the UK, though if you are coming over here on holiday, it may have some interest for you. I have just returned from a work trip to Blackpool which is on the coast of the county of Lancashire in North-West England, not far from Manchester. I must say, that in all my travels across the UK and continental Europe I have never been to a town that is so bleak and depressing. Blackpool is a holiday resort, famous for its three piers, its tower and its illuminations (these bright vignettes all along the promenade are currently showing and attracting loads of familes to watch them). Going there in November, I was prepared for it to be dreary as any resort is out of season, but Blackpool is far worse than that, and I can imagine it being just as bad in the height of Summer (given the amount of litter everywhere it probably smells even stronger). I knew that Blackpool had built its success on being a holiday resort for people from the textile mills of Lancashire and the potteries of Staffordshire and shipyards of Glasgow, Scotland, in the nineteenth century and this industry has closed down, so it was never really going to be a luxury resort. However, even taking these factors into consideration that it is a resort aimed at working class people, out of season, it is a terrible place.
The buildings are drab, even the brightest lights cannot conceal this. There are numerous shabby bed & breakfast guest houses, but even the larger hotels are shabby often with crumbling paintwork. There seems to be little of interest to do bar the Blackpool Tower and terribly trashy amusement arcades with dated attractions. There is a real lack of restaurants. You can get takeaways all over and some of the fish & chip shops are decent (fish & chip shops outnumber any other food outlet about 4 to 1) but if you want to sit down for a meal, you have to walk through streets and streets (haunted by shifty looking young men hanging around on the corners) to find anything and then just two restaurants next to each other. We paid £17 each (€24; U$35) for a small piece of steak in a heavy brown sauce with chips (rather than roast potatoes as offered and requested) and for the vegetables there was simply a dish of boiled carrots withour even any garnish. This was in the restaurant recommended by the hotel owners. What adds to the problem is that there are so many burnt out and boarded up shops and houses and roads where the tarmac surface has worn away. The town appears to be like a factory town where the main industry has closed down.
I accept that thousands of people go to Blackpool even in November and have fun. However, they are in such an unpleasant place it suggests they must live terrible lives the rest of the year. A lot of things are dated, such as the tram system with trams themselves which date back 60 years. Throughout there is a feel that nothing has been updated since the 1970s at the latest. Even in the larger hotels, we transferred to one after spending a sleepless night in a smaller one (with a shower so small you kept hitting your arm or chest on the control and a mattress so thin you felt like you were sleeping on a board) as the hotel opposite had a 'singer' howling away until 2am, you find the worst sandwiches I have ever eaten (with white bread that breakes into sticky lumps in your mouth) and no idea that a ham sandwich needs anything except ham in it. In the smaller hotel, the 'secure parking' was a yard down a narrow, barely surfaced road. A woman in a wheelchair we met had similarly been lied to and when she arrived at her hotel she had specifically booked for wheelchair access found six steps up to the reception.
Blackpool may be cheap and provide the beer and chips people want (and I must say a very, very long, clean beach) but so much of it is derelict and dated and covered in litter and you feel so threatened when walking around, that I would advise anyone who has ever considered going to Blackpool for work or pleasure to think again. Manchester, that huge industrial city, has more to offer than Blackpool. In its defence, Blackpool does not have the gun crime of Manchester, maybe Coventry or Birmingham, those Midlands industrial towns are better substitutes. If you are driving through Blackpool, watch out, visitors to the town seem to be suicidal (maybe that is unsurprising) and constantly simply step off the pavement in front of you. You might often have a view; a set of assumptions about a town, but it is only when you go there that you can find truly how terribly wrong those assumptions were.
The buildings are drab, even the brightest lights cannot conceal this. There are numerous shabby bed & breakfast guest houses, but even the larger hotels are shabby often with crumbling paintwork. There seems to be little of interest to do bar the Blackpool Tower and terribly trashy amusement arcades with dated attractions. There is a real lack of restaurants. You can get takeaways all over and some of the fish & chip shops are decent (fish & chip shops outnumber any other food outlet about 4 to 1) but if you want to sit down for a meal, you have to walk through streets and streets (haunted by shifty looking young men hanging around on the corners) to find anything and then just two restaurants next to each other. We paid £17 each (€24; U$35) for a small piece of steak in a heavy brown sauce with chips (rather than roast potatoes as offered and requested) and for the vegetables there was simply a dish of boiled carrots withour even any garnish. This was in the restaurant recommended by the hotel owners. What adds to the problem is that there are so many burnt out and boarded up shops and houses and roads where the tarmac surface has worn away. The town appears to be like a factory town where the main industry has closed down.
I accept that thousands of people go to Blackpool even in November and have fun. However, they are in such an unpleasant place it suggests they must live terrible lives the rest of the year. A lot of things are dated, such as the tram system with trams themselves which date back 60 years. Throughout there is a feel that nothing has been updated since the 1970s at the latest. Even in the larger hotels, we transferred to one after spending a sleepless night in a smaller one (with a shower so small you kept hitting your arm or chest on the control and a mattress so thin you felt like you were sleeping on a board) as the hotel opposite had a 'singer' howling away until 2am, you find the worst sandwiches I have ever eaten (with white bread that breakes into sticky lumps in your mouth) and no idea that a ham sandwich needs anything except ham in it. In the smaller hotel, the 'secure parking' was a yard down a narrow, barely surfaced road. A woman in a wheelchair we met had similarly been lied to and when she arrived at her hotel she had specifically booked for wheelchair access found six steps up to the reception.
Blackpool may be cheap and provide the beer and chips people want (and I must say a very, very long, clean beach) but so much of it is derelict and dated and covered in litter and you feel so threatened when walking around, that I would advise anyone who has ever considered going to Blackpool for work or pleasure to think again. Manchester, that huge industrial city, has more to offer than Blackpool. In its defence, Blackpool does not have the gun crime of Manchester, maybe Coventry or Birmingham, those Midlands industrial towns are better substitutes. If you are driving through Blackpool, watch out, visitors to the town seem to be suicidal (maybe that is unsurprising) and constantly simply step off the pavement in front of you. You might often have a view; a set of assumptions about a town, but it is only when you go there that you can find truly how terribly wrong those assumptions were.
Thursday, 1 November 2007
What If? Art 5: Books That Never Existed
These four counter-factual book covers are pretty straight forward. I took an original cover of the particular play and simply changed the name of the author on the front cover. There is a lot of speculation that some of William Shakespeare's plays and sonnets were actually written by other people, even that the name 'William Shakespeare' was a title for a series of different authors. There are four main suggested playwrights and I have produced a book cover showing one of Shakespeare's plays written by them. Shakespeare's plays were written between 1590-1612 and they received premieres between 1598-1634 there was often four or five years between him writing a play and it being performed; some plays have been lost but we have the bulk of his output. He lived 1564-1616 so through the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and well into that of King James I. Some now believe he came from Stratford in East London rather than Stratford-on-Avon in Warwickshire. Information about people in the 16th century is difficult to pin down so it has led to a range of interesting speculations.
Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) was a poet and playwright in his own right as well as probably being a spy; he was probably also bisexual. He was killed in a fight in an inn in 1593. There has long been speculation that he wrote at least some of Shakespeare's plays and there is at least one reference to Marlowe's work in Shakespeare's. Some believe he faked his own death and continued writing under Shakespeare's name. Compared to Shakespeare, Marlowe appears a more glamorous figure. Here I have featured 'Richard III' which was written a year before Marlowe's assumed death.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626), 1st Viscount of St. Alban, led a less glamorous life than Marlowe, but was a leading essayist, philosopher, statesman and scientist. Since the late 19th century there are people who believe he actually wrote Shakespeare's plays. Here I show him having turned his hand to that quite early, producing 'Love's Labour's Lost' in 1594, preceding his first collection of essays in 1597.
William Stanley (1561-1642), 6th Earl of Derby is a possible candidate for writing 'Love's Labour's Lost' as it featured an incident similar to what he had experienced in 1578 in Navarre. However, he has a connection with 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' which is supposed to have been first performed at his wedding banquet. His older brother ran a troop of actors who later became the King's Men. There are letters reporting Stanley as acting as a playwright though there are no scripts currently known. Here I suggest that he wrote the play initially as a kind of gift for his bride, especially as it is a romantic, dreamy play in the Shakespeare collection.
'The Tragedy of Richard III' by Christopher Marlowe (written 1592)
Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) was a poet and playwright in his own right as well as probably being a spy; he was probably also bisexual. He was killed in a fight in an inn in 1593. There has long been speculation that he wrote at least some of Shakespeare's plays and there is at least one reference to Marlowe's work in Shakespeare's. Some believe he faked his own death and continued writing under Shakespeare's name. Compared to Shakespeare, Marlowe appears a more glamorous figure. Here I have featured 'Richard III' which was written a year before Marlowe's assumed death.
'Love's Labour's Lost' by Francis Bacon (written 1594)
Francis Bacon (1561-1626), 1st Viscount of St. Alban, led a less glamorous life than Marlowe, but was a leading essayist, philosopher, statesman and scientist. Since the late 19th century there are people who believe he actually wrote Shakespeare's plays. Here I show him having turned his hand to that quite early, producing 'Love's Labour's Lost' in 1594, preceding his first collection of essays in 1597.
'A Midsummer Night's Dream' by William Stanley (written 1595)
William Stanley (1561-1642), 6th Earl of Derby is a possible candidate for writing 'Love's Labour's Lost' as it featured an incident similar to what he had experienced in 1578 in Navarre. However, he has a connection with 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' which is supposed to have been first performed at his wedding banquet. His older brother ran a troop of actors who later became the King's Men. There are letters reporting Stanley as acting as a playwright though there are no scripts currently known. Here I suggest that he wrote the play initially as a kind of gift for his bride, especially as it is a romantic, dreamy play in the Shakespeare collection.
'Hamlet' by Edward De Vere (written 1600)
Edward De Vere (1550-1604), 17th Earl of Oxford, was another Renaissance man seen as in line to have written at least some of Shakespeare's work. He was a playwright and poet and patron of two theatre companies. Despite being noted as a writer only a few of his poems survive and none of his plays. Fascinatingly many incidents in numerous Shakespeare plays reflect things that he had witnessed or had happened to the De Vere family. Those who support De Vere as the candidate point to the fact that the regular publication of Shakespeare plays ended in 1604, the year De Vere died and only resumed with the so-called first folio in 1623 which was after even William Shakespeare's death. Here I show him writing 'Hamlet' which even if he did not, had many parallels to his own life. Amongst a whole list of parallels there are things such as his mother's early remarriage; he accidentally murdered someone with a sword as Hamlet does Polonius; De Vere had a friend called Horace like the Horatio who is friend of Hamlet; Polus was De Vere's guardian's nickname and he was given a list of principles by his father as Polonius does for Laertes and they are very similar. So, his 'Hamlet' written four years before his death might have been his most autobiographical play.
Apologies to the authors and publishers shown here with work they may have produced in one of a number alternate realities.
Saturday, 27 October 2007
What If Catherine Of Aragon's Sons Survived?
My views on this topic can be found in my e-book ‘Other Exits: REVISED. 'What If?' Outcomes for Tudor and Stuart Monarchs’ by Alexander Rooksmoor. It is available for purchase on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Other-Exits-REVISED-Outcomes-ebook/dp/B00EBUPSL6/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1376051052&sr=1-1&keywords=rooksmoor
UK readers might prefer to access it through:
Canadian readers might like to access it through: http://www.amazon.ca/Other-Exits-REVISED-Outcomes-ebook/dp/B00EBUPSL6/ref=sr_1_21?ie=UTF8&qid=1376051289&sr=8-21&keywords=Rooksmoor+kindle
What If King Edward VI Had Lived Longer?
My views on this topic can be found in my e-book ‘Other Exits: REVISED. 'What If?' Outcomes for Tudor and Stuart Monarchs’ by Alexander Rooksmoor. It is available for purchase on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Other-Exits-REVISED-Outcomes-ebook/dp/B00EBUPSL6/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1376051052&sr=1-1&keywords=rooksmoor
UK readers might prefer to access it through:
Canadian readers might like to access it through: http://www.amazon.ca/Other-Exits-REVISED-Outcomes-ebook/dp/B00EBUPSL6/ref=sr_1_21?ie=UTF8&qid=1376051289&sr=8-21&keywords=Rooksmoor+kindle
Friday, 26 October 2007
Blogging the Blog 3: Chinese blogs and Freedom of Media
Sometimes you wish you had the ability to read certain languages and if I could I would be able to reinforce this post. However, I lack the ability to read Chinese script so will have to rely on the evidence of a woman called Prof. Susan Shirk who is Director of the University of California systemwide Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation, quite a mouthful, but she seems to know her stuff. She comments quite a great deal on current developments in China and it seems that she knows Chinese very well. Anyway, recently I came across some stuff she was outlining on changes in the media in China and how blogging is playing a role in that.
As you know, China is currently under a kind of dictatorship which is Communist in name but is thoroughly engaging with capitalist economics. Since the 1980s there has been a huge economic boom with millions of people moving to the cities and being able to travel far more freely, buy consumer goods and so on. It has been noticeable in the UK where many universities now seem to each recruit hundreds of students from mainland China whereas in the past they would have come from Hong Kong or Taiwan. Despite the move to economic freedoms (itself causing major environmental and also social problems as China's welfare state seems to have disappeared) political freedom has been far more restricted. Most obvious was the suppression of the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tianamen Square in 1989 which were broken up by troops and tanks. This ended speculation (at least for a while) that China would follow the path of the USSR at the time, i.e. economic hardship leading to economic liberalisation and openness and then in turn to freer press and TV and to democracy (of course since then Russia has started going back to a more authoritarian system under Vladimir Putin.
As an aside, I was talking to a Chinese man who said that China currently has democracy at least to the level of democracy that there is in the USA and the UK. His view of Anglo-Saxon democracy is that it is dominated by multi-national companies and established families, along the lines of the Bushs, Kennedys, etc. in the USA and noble families in the UK. The people superficially have the ability to choose their government, but in fact it is these powerful families and their companies which run everything. Thus, he sees China with all its nepotism and Communist party leaders running large companies, as already having attained the level of democracy that the USA and UK have. Given that half of the British parliament (the House of Lords) is unelected, I would accept he has some points here, though I would not agree with his overall conclusion; neither Tony Blair or George Bush will be in power when they are 92. More importantly, though, it says something about the level of expectations of people in China, given that this man was in his 20s, spoke fluent English and had had the money to come to the UK for education.
A free media is vital for democracy. In China steps in that direction have almost come about by accident. Up until the early 1980s all publications, television, etc. belonged to the government and simply reported what the government wanted to say. The upper elite had access to information about the wider world, but they kept this to themselves. Journalists were civil servants and not only reported news to the public, but also reported on the feelings of the public to the elite. The cost of running such a system became impossible to sustain and so since then there has been a mushrooming of independent newspapers and magazines, particularly appealing to the urban middle class which has done well out of the economic changes. In fact most of them have a government newspaper at their core as these were the only people able to finance and get passed the bureaucracy to set them up. However, the news they report is much more extensive than in the old days. In addition, freer media from Hong Kong such as Phoenix television brings in a different view on things. Of course a free media may help democracy grow but it does not necessarily mean it is pro-democracy and a lot of the media in China is very nationalistic especially towards the USA and Taiwan.
So, where do the blogs come in. Well, the Chinese government still has a lot of power over the media and can push out editors they do not like. They still control the 11 television stations and 40 provinicial television stations and they still produce numerous official newspapers. Even on the internet they patronise news digest websites and ensure that the news they include on them is not out of step with what the government wants to cover. However, the internet cannot be a closed loop in the way that even television media can be. The Chinese government has heavy filtering of internet material accessible from China and some western companies have been criticised for collaborating on such filtering. In addition now, if you visit sites that are felt to include material that is inappropriate to what a person in China should be looking at, automated images of Chinese police appear on screen to tell you off. However, blocking and monitoring the internet is costly. Singapore which has an authoritarian government had to stop trying to control the internet coming into its country in the way it does with newspapers and television because it began to cost too much. The Chinese government continues to foot the bill for such control within its borders.
The Chinese government's filtering, despite the numerous monitoring staff its Department of Propaganda employs, is not perfect and things sometimes slip through, sometimes only for a few hours before they are eliminated. Now, apparently, however, there are bloggers waiting to snatch up such nuggets of news from the outside world. They email them around very quickly and put them up on their blogs so that Chinese people can read what is otherwise being denied to them. Obviously the Chinese government can go around eliminating blog by blog, but speed of communication and the number of bloggers will always mean some escape to post news of that kind in the weeks and months to come. Sometimes I worry that much blogging is little more than navel-gazing, so I guess my faith in its value was partly restored by realising that some bloggers out there are actually helping to spread knowledge and indirectly (hopefully) move the world's most populated country closer to (true) democracy.
As you know, China is currently under a kind of dictatorship which is Communist in name but is thoroughly engaging with capitalist economics. Since the 1980s there has been a huge economic boom with millions of people moving to the cities and being able to travel far more freely, buy consumer goods and so on. It has been noticeable in the UK where many universities now seem to each recruit hundreds of students from mainland China whereas in the past they would have come from Hong Kong or Taiwan. Despite the move to economic freedoms (itself causing major environmental and also social problems as China's welfare state seems to have disappeared) political freedom has been far more restricted. Most obvious was the suppression of the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tianamen Square in 1989 which were broken up by troops and tanks. This ended speculation (at least for a while) that China would follow the path of the USSR at the time, i.e. economic hardship leading to economic liberalisation and openness and then in turn to freer press and TV and to democracy (of course since then Russia has started going back to a more authoritarian system under Vladimir Putin.
As an aside, I was talking to a Chinese man who said that China currently has democracy at least to the level of democracy that there is in the USA and the UK. His view of Anglo-Saxon democracy is that it is dominated by multi-national companies and established families, along the lines of the Bushs, Kennedys, etc. in the USA and noble families in the UK. The people superficially have the ability to choose their government, but in fact it is these powerful families and their companies which run everything. Thus, he sees China with all its nepotism and Communist party leaders running large companies, as already having attained the level of democracy that the USA and UK have. Given that half of the British parliament (the House of Lords) is unelected, I would accept he has some points here, though I would not agree with his overall conclusion; neither Tony Blair or George Bush will be in power when they are 92. More importantly, though, it says something about the level of expectations of people in China, given that this man was in his 20s, spoke fluent English and had had the money to come to the UK for education.
A free media is vital for democracy. In China steps in that direction have almost come about by accident. Up until the early 1980s all publications, television, etc. belonged to the government and simply reported what the government wanted to say. The upper elite had access to information about the wider world, but they kept this to themselves. Journalists were civil servants and not only reported news to the public, but also reported on the feelings of the public to the elite. The cost of running such a system became impossible to sustain and so since then there has been a mushrooming of independent newspapers and magazines, particularly appealing to the urban middle class which has done well out of the economic changes. In fact most of them have a government newspaper at their core as these were the only people able to finance and get passed the bureaucracy to set them up. However, the news they report is much more extensive than in the old days. In addition, freer media from Hong Kong such as Phoenix television brings in a different view on things. Of course a free media may help democracy grow but it does not necessarily mean it is pro-democracy and a lot of the media in China is very nationalistic especially towards the USA and Taiwan.
So, where do the blogs come in. Well, the Chinese government still has a lot of power over the media and can push out editors they do not like. They still control the 11 television stations and 40 provinicial television stations and they still produce numerous official newspapers. Even on the internet they patronise news digest websites and ensure that the news they include on them is not out of step with what the government wants to cover. However, the internet cannot be a closed loop in the way that even television media can be. The Chinese government has heavy filtering of internet material accessible from China and some western companies have been criticised for collaborating on such filtering. In addition now, if you visit sites that are felt to include material that is inappropriate to what a person in China should be looking at, automated images of Chinese police appear on screen to tell you off. However, blocking and monitoring the internet is costly. Singapore which has an authoritarian government had to stop trying to control the internet coming into its country in the way it does with newspapers and television because it began to cost too much. The Chinese government continues to foot the bill for such control within its borders.
The Chinese government's filtering, despite the numerous monitoring staff its Department of Propaganda employs, is not perfect and things sometimes slip through, sometimes only for a few hours before they are eliminated. Now, apparently, however, there are bloggers waiting to snatch up such nuggets of news from the outside world. They email them around very quickly and put them up on their blogs so that Chinese people can read what is otherwise being denied to them. Obviously the Chinese government can go around eliminating blog by blog, but speed of communication and the number of bloggers will always mean some escape to post news of that kind in the weeks and months to come. Sometimes I worry that much blogging is little more than navel-gazing, so I guess my faith in its value was partly restored by realising that some bloggers out there are actually helping to spread knowledge and indirectly (hopefully) move the world's most populated country closer to (true) democracy.
Why the USA Scares Me
Living in the UK people for some reason always feel we are in danger of being dominated by others. In the Cold War many believed the USSR had a desire to overrun the UK and that they would fight a guerilla war to stop this. Given the economic difficulties of the UK and the USSR throughout that era, I doubt it would have made much economic sense, but it was what people feared. Since 1973 when the UK joined what was then called the European Economic Community (EEC) and is now the European Union, many people constantly complain that our country is increasingly 'controlled from Brussels' with most of the focus on keeping EU rules for tinkering with our quirky systems of measurement and keeping the pound as the currency. The argument does not go beyond that and never addresses the broader economic and political questions, beyond complaint about Polish immigrants though they are generally lumped together with asylum seekers. There is a sense always that there is a British identity focused on the eccentricities of the UK in the 21st century, the loss of which, will mean the end of freedom in the UK. This takes no recognition of the massive changes that have gone on in British society since the late 1970s (probably more extreme than anywhere in western Europe) or the fact that freedom is more at risk from the government's erosion of civil liberties throughout the 2000s.
So where does the USA appear in this equation? Many people see it as a defender of democracy and certainly of the capitalist form of economics, though I would argue the EU certainly has an equal role in the latter. Due to the long historical connection between the USA and UK we probably get more US culture and hence attitudes flowing into our country than any of our neighbours and at various times France and (West) Germany have sought to shake off such influence. In the UK no politician can be seen to be hostile to the USA and so damage the 'special relationship' even when we have no need for US military bases on our soil (if we ever had a genuine need for them in the first place). The UK presents itself as retaining a key role in policing the World, but actually when you look at it, it cannot do this independently of the USA. This has been the case probably since 1941 though it was not put to the test until 1956 when the Americans opposed British intervention in Egypt.
Now for much of the 20th century the USA has managed to go off and have ill-advised wars without involving the British. There were British troops involved in the Korean War 1950-3 but fortunately that was comparatively short. The influence of Prime Minister Clement Attlee dissuaded the Americans from using atomic weapons which many millions of people in the world should be grateful for. The UK (bar a few individuals working with the Australians or later directly for the Americans) managed to stay out of the Vietnam War. What it was unable to do was to avoid the overall Cold War paranoia. This brings me to the first period when the USA scared me. It was during the terms of office of President Ronald Reagan. Like the current President Bush, Reagan was a man so lacking in talent that he should have been barred from holding high office. People portray him as the man who ended the Cold War and I have even seen a website arguing that if he had not been elected president in 1981 we would still be in the Cold War, that is utter rubbish; if he had died following the assassination attempt in March 1981 actually the Cold War may have ended a lot sooner. Especially in his first term of office (1981-1984) he brought the world closer to nuclear war than it had been at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. He diverged from the steps to detente that had occurred in the 1970s (not helped by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979) but started adopting the jargon of the 'empire of evil' rather than seeing the Soviets as humans too and with no appreciation that by the mid-1970s their economy was in melt-down.
What was so alarming about Reagan and this has been an aspect which contributes to making the USA so frightening how, is his high degree of self-righteousness, and his belief that in the case of nuclear war the 'elect' (including himself) would be lifted clear of Earth by God and then brought back down to a new Eden that would rather be like the world following the end of the Deluge at the time of Noah. You cannot have the most powerful man in the world so detached from reality and with so little concern for billions of people living on this planet and not be afraid. Consequently through the 1980s I would awake to a loud bang fearing Reagan had triggered a nuclear war to bring about the new Eden. I was just grateful that living near a NATO computer base that we would be hit by one of the early missiles (in the UK we only had a 4-minute delay between war starting and missiles hitting the country, being only the size of Rhode Island there was nowhere to run to) rather than face a lingering death in the irradiated wreckage of what had once been the UK. Reagan also brought fear to Latin America by backing dictatorships in El Salvador and Honduras that were involved with the murder and horrific torture of their citizens and by sponsoring and arming rebels in Nicaragua too.
Right, you may say, well Reagan has long been out of office and is now dead, surely you cannot be worried about the Americans. Well, we have a US President who seems even more incompetent than Reagan. Since the 1980s fundamentalism has been growing across the world (in part because people feel they have so little to direct their own fates) and in the USA as in Iran, it has taken control of the political system. George W. Bush's attitudes are shaped by it. This means that the self-righteousness is back in full force, the sense that the Americans are so special that the policies they carry out are holy and cannot be wrong. Of course these policies are not applied, say to eliminate dictatorship across the world, but bar in Afghanistan (which I increasingly believe was invaded simply to have a war) has more to do with securing raw materials, notably oil (there may be raw materials in Afghanistan, something like uranium that the general public are currently not aware of) and to provide big contracts for US companies which have made billions out of rebuilding Iraq. At the moment it looks like Bush is gearing up for a war with Iran without even having tidied up in Iraq; the same language is being used as in 2002-3.
Thus, it is unsurprising that the world feels dangerous with a country that seeks to start a war every 3-4 years. The last person to get away with that was Benito Mussolini in the 1920s-40s in Greece (twice) and Ethiopia and ultimately he was executed. What is infuriating is not only is US policy so geared to these policies but somehow we (especially in the UK) are constantly being told we should support it and see that it is right. What enabled that forced sympathy was the attacks on the USA on 11th September 2001. Now I am not going to go into any conspiracy theories on this, though it is clear that the Bush family and Osama bin Laden's extended family were in friendly contact. What infuriates people in the UK is that after 2001 the Americans keep suggesting that they have suffered more than anyone else and so this gives them a special right to behave how they wish in the world. Now, even for Israel, home to the Jews who lost over 6 million people in the space of five years, this argument is wearing thin. For the USA such an argument has no strength (or it should have none). Growing up in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s we were regularly exposed to terrorist atrocities by the IRA. I witnessed one in 1999 in East London and had a friend who was standing very close to two bombings in London and Manchester. Other parts of Europe, notably Spain, witnessed similarly regular attacks and other countries such as France, West Germany and Italy were not spared.
These attacks led to deaths and maimings and also altered how our society behaved. I remember being separated from my parents when we visited the Tower of London so that we could each be searched for explosive devices and inside is a plaque where people were killed by a bomb in the 1970s. Attacks even reached the Houses of Parliament where the war hero Airey Neave was blown up and the royal family as Earl Mountbatten was blown up on his yacht. British policy in Northern Ireland was harsh, but at no stage did the British assert the right as a result to go round attacking who they chose, and particularly not simply for economic gain. We could easily have said that the IRA was being funded from Libya so we needed to invade Libya and take over its oil wells. The Vietnamese could easily claim reparations from the USA for the constant bombing of the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s (there are estimated to still be more landmines in the country than there are people) and the use of chemical weapons which are still causing severe birth defects thirty years on. By being so bullish about the attack on them rather than presenting it in the context of suffering that terrorism has long caused in the world, the Americans have shown how self-centred they are and how they continue to think they are better than anyone else. It ends up with such a patronising position that is communicated to the UK that somehow we know nothing about global politics, that we know nothing about true suffering from terrorism and so we should give up any rational objection to how these things are being handled to those people who know about these things, i.e. the fundamentalist right-wing in US politics.
I accept that faith is about believing whole-heartedly that you are right in what you believe. However, I am always afraid of those who will accept no questioning of their actions and have no ability to see anyone else's perspective. I wish I could find online an image of the 1960s cartoon which shows an an American man dressed in a jumpsuit made of the US flag saying it is a wonderful outfit suitable for church, school, leisure, work and then next to him a smaller, Vietnamese man draped in the oversized outfit saying 'It doesn't fit'. That cartoon is not only as applicable today as it was 40 years ago, it is applicable to the UK as much as it is to Iraq, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Somalia, the Philippines, Cuba, etc. You may argue, well, surely my concern about fundamentalist attitudes should extend to the 'other side', and it does, I do fear an Islamist suicide bomber, London has experienced these as well as other countries. However, it is an issue of scale. Even if al-Qaeda existed, which it does not in the form people seem to assume, then it lacks a fraction of the military might that the USA has. The US military could still wipe out the whole world either via nuclear, chemical or biological weaponry if it chose or some combination of these; it might even be able to do it with the conventional weapons it has. People would live on, but like the Vietnamese during the late 1960s it would be in tunnels and bunkers. That is the enduring strength of the US and why with their current obsessions, misapprehensions and self-righteousness I find them as frightening today as I did in the early 1980s.
So where does the USA appear in this equation? Many people see it as a defender of democracy and certainly of the capitalist form of economics, though I would argue the EU certainly has an equal role in the latter. Due to the long historical connection between the USA and UK we probably get more US culture and hence attitudes flowing into our country than any of our neighbours and at various times France and (West) Germany have sought to shake off such influence. In the UK no politician can be seen to be hostile to the USA and so damage the 'special relationship' even when we have no need for US military bases on our soil (if we ever had a genuine need for them in the first place). The UK presents itself as retaining a key role in policing the World, but actually when you look at it, it cannot do this independently of the USA. This has been the case probably since 1941 though it was not put to the test until 1956 when the Americans opposed British intervention in Egypt.
Now for much of the 20th century the USA has managed to go off and have ill-advised wars without involving the British. There were British troops involved in the Korean War 1950-3 but fortunately that was comparatively short. The influence of Prime Minister Clement Attlee dissuaded the Americans from using atomic weapons which many millions of people in the world should be grateful for. The UK (bar a few individuals working with the Australians or later directly for the Americans) managed to stay out of the Vietnam War. What it was unable to do was to avoid the overall Cold War paranoia. This brings me to the first period when the USA scared me. It was during the terms of office of President Ronald Reagan. Like the current President Bush, Reagan was a man so lacking in talent that he should have been barred from holding high office. People portray him as the man who ended the Cold War and I have even seen a website arguing that if he had not been elected president in 1981 we would still be in the Cold War, that is utter rubbish; if he had died following the assassination attempt in March 1981 actually the Cold War may have ended a lot sooner. Especially in his first term of office (1981-1984) he brought the world closer to nuclear war than it had been at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. He diverged from the steps to detente that had occurred in the 1970s (not helped by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979) but started adopting the jargon of the 'empire of evil' rather than seeing the Soviets as humans too and with no appreciation that by the mid-1970s their economy was in melt-down.
What was so alarming about Reagan and this has been an aspect which contributes to making the USA so frightening how, is his high degree of self-righteousness, and his belief that in the case of nuclear war the 'elect' (including himself) would be lifted clear of Earth by God and then brought back down to a new Eden that would rather be like the world following the end of the Deluge at the time of Noah. You cannot have the most powerful man in the world so detached from reality and with so little concern for billions of people living on this planet and not be afraid. Consequently through the 1980s I would awake to a loud bang fearing Reagan had triggered a nuclear war to bring about the new Eden. I was just grateful that living near a NATO computer base that we would be hit by one of the early missiles (in the UK we only had a 4-minute delay between war starting and missiles hitting the country, being only the size of Rhode Island there was nowhere to run to) rather than face a lingering death in the irradiated wreckage of what had once been the UK. Reagan also brought fear to Latin America by backing dictatorships in El Salvador and Honduras that were involved with the murder and horrific torture of their citizens and by sponsoring and arming rebels in Nicaragua too.
Right, you may say, well Reagan has long been out of office and is now dead, surely you cannot be worried about the Americans. Well, we have a US President who seems even more incompetent than Reagan. Since the 1980s fundamentalism has been growing across the world (in part because people feel they have so little to direct their own fates) and in the USA as in Iran, it has taken control of the political system. George W. Bush's attitudes are shaped by it. This means that the self-righteousness is back in full force, the sense that the Americans are so special that the policies they carry out are holy and cannot be wrong. Of course these policies are not applied, say to eliminate dictatorship across the world, but bar in Afghanistan (which I increasingly believe was invaded simply to have a war) has more to do with securing raw materials, notably oil (there may be raw materials in Afghanistan, something like uranium that the general public are currently not aware of) and to provide big contracts for US companies which have made billions out of rebuilding Iraq. At the moment it looks like Bush is gearing up for a war with Iran without even having tidied up in Iraq; the same language is being used as in 2002-3.
Thus, it is unsurprising that the world feels dangerous with a country that seeks to start a war every 3-4 years. The last person to get away with that was Benito Mussolini in the 1920s-40s in Greece (twice) and Ethiopia and ultimately he was executed. What is infuriating is not only is US policy so geared to these policies but somehow we (especially in the UK) are constantly being told we should support it and see that it is right. What enabled that forced sympathy was the attacks on the USA on 11th September 2001. Now I am not going to go into any conspiracy theories on this, though it is clear that the Bush family and Osama bin Laden's extended family were in friendly contact. What infuriates people in the UK is that after 2001 the Americans keep suggesting that they have suffered more than anyone else and so this gives them a special right to behave how they wish in the world. Now, even for Israel, home to the Jews who lost over 6 million people in the space of five years, this argument is wearing thin. For the USA such an argument has no strength (or it should have none). Growing up in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s we were regularly exposed to terrorist atrocities by the IRA. I witnessed one in 1999 in East London and had a friend who was standing very close to two bombings in London and Manchester. Other parts of Europe, notably Spain, witnessed similarly regular attacks and other countries such as France, West Germany and Italy were not spared.
These attacks led to deaths and maimings and also altered how our society behaved. I remember being separated from my parents when we visited the Tower of London so that we could each be searched for explosive devices and inside is a plaque where people were killed by a bomb in the 1970s. Attacks even reached the Houses of Parliament where the war hero Airey Neave was blown up and the royal family as Earl Mountbatten was blown up on his yacht. British policy in Northern Ireland was harsh, but at no stage did the British assert the right as a result to go round attacking who they chose, and particularly not simply for economic gain. We could easily have said that the IRA was being funded from Libya so we needed to invade Libya and take over its oil wells. The Vietnamese could easily claim reparations from the USA for the constant bombing of the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s (there are estimated to still be more landmines in the country than there are people) and the use of chemical weapons which are still causing severe birth defects thirty years on. By being so bullish about the attack on them rather than presenting it in the context of suffering that terrorism has long caused in the world, the Americans have shown how self-centred they are and how they continue to think they are better than anyone else. It ends up with such a patronising position that is communicated to the UK that somehow we know nothing about global politics, that we know nothing about true suffering from terrorism and so we should give up any rational objection to how these things are being handled to those people who know about these things, i.e. the fundamentalist right-wing in US politics.
I accept that faith is about believing whole-heartedly that you are right in what you believe. However, I am always afraid of those who will accept no questioning of their actions and have no ability to see anyone else's perspective. I wish I could find online an image of the 1960s cartoon which shows an an American man dressed in a jumpsuit made of the US flag saying it is a wonderful outfit suitable for church, school, leisure, work and then next to him a smaller, Vietnamese man draped in the oversized outfit saying 'It doesn't fit'. That cartoon is not only as applicable today as it was 40 years ago, it is applicable to the UK as much as it is to Iraq, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Somalia, the Philippines, Cuba, etc. You may argue, well, surely my concern about fundamentalist attitudes should extend to the 'other side', and it does, I do fear an Islamist suicide bomber, London has experienced these as well as other countries. However, it is an issue of scale. Even if al-Qaeda existed, which it does not in the form people seem to assume, then it lacks a fraction of the military might that the USA has. The US military could still wipe out the whole world either via nuclear, chemical or biological weaponry if it chose or some combination of these; it might even be able to do it with the conventional weapons it has. People would live on, but like the Vietnamese during the late 1960s it would be in tunnels and bunkers. That is the enduring strength of the US and why with their current obsessions, misapprehensions and self-righteousness I find them as frightening today as I did in the early 1980s.
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