What If The Crusader States Had Survived?

My views on this topic can be found in my e-book ‘On Other Fields: Alternate Outcomes of the Middle Ages’ by Alexander Rooksmoor.  It is available for purchase on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/On-Other-Fields-Alternate-ebook/dp/B008LMT9WO/ref=sr_1_8?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1342436531&sr=1-8

UK readers might prefer to access it through: http://www.amazon.co.uk/On-Other-Fields-Alternate-ebook/dp/B008LMT9WO/ref=sr_1_9?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1342436579&sr=1-9

Canadian readers might prefer to access it through: http://www.amazon.ca/Other-Fields-Alternate-Outcomes-ebook/dp/B008LMT9WO/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1375772395&sr=8-4&keywords=Rooksmoor

1977 Anarchy in the UK; 2007 Bankruptcy in the UK

Today's news broadcasts are highlighting statistics from the Citizens' Advice Bureau that they are now getting 6,600 enquiries every day in the UK about problems with debt. Personal bankruptcy has reached an all time high. Whilst we have not returned to the thousands of repossessions of houses as experienced between 1990-3, the number is rising steadily. The house we are renting will be repossessed from the landlord when we leave, for non-payment of the mortgage. This time round this is not meaning cheaper houses coming on to the markets, instead banks sit on the reposessions until they reach a certain level and then sell them so that they do not reduce the ever rising price of houses. Back in the early 1990s at least those who could not afford a house had some chance getting a repossessed one at reduced rate and even that channel has now gone.

So what is to blame for such vast debt in the UK? Are we all simply spendthrift? Well, about a quarter of the problems stem from credit and store cards. The UK, seemingly in sharp contrast to its European neighbours, does seem to have got obsessed with constantly buying. Electrical goods, furniture and DVDs/music seem to be in high demand with people upgrading and upgrading. In France, almost all shops are closed on a Sunday, in Germany many still close at lunchtime on most Saturdays and do not reopen until Monday. In the UK shops are filled every Sunday with people shopping as a hobby. They are not out walking or playing football or sitting reading or even slumped in front of the television, they are walking around looking for things to buy. In Europe the UK is consumer society at its most extreme. Credit is easy to come by, you can get a string of credit cards and advertisements for loans fill the television, newspapers, the radio constantly.

In the UK you are defined by what you own. If you do not own a house you are treated as a second class citizen by letting agents and other people. There is immense pressure, going back to the 1980s on becoming an owner of property and then to start 'buying-to-let' as if it is right that everyone should strive to be a landlord. Of course both these trends keep pushing up house prices which have now not fallen in 15 years; the news media gets jumpy when there is a slow down in the increase, not a fall, as if the constant inflation of house prices is vital for the UK economy. This obsession with owning property and your status in society being defined by it is another unhealthy situation in the UK that adds to debt. It goes into things like cars. You can travel from the UK to France in 35 minutes these days and you see a sharp contrast. British roads are dominated by very large 4x4 cars (SUVs) in France there are very few. In Britain if you do not drive one you are made to feel you are letting down your children and on the road you are hassled by the people who own these vehicles as some kind of annoyance. They are expensive and terribly uneconomical to run and yet not owning one seems to mean you yield up any claim on respect whether actually in it or not.

All business people want to maximise profit, but in the UK it is greed, greed, greed, hence rents being pushed higher and higher. Utility bills make up a third of the sources of problems with debt. I have already commented on how water, sewage, gas, electricity and phone companies keep pressing prices up. Not only that but they lock you in to fixed contracts now (as do landlords) which means you cannot get out of them, are often paying for services in advance and you lose money each time you move house. A small rise in any utility price hits people hard especially when combined with the other rises they face. As I have often commented, I earn 50% higher than the national average salary for the UK, however, in my house we now cannot afford to flush the toilet because the water bills are so high. If any of us urinates we do not flush it as each flush uses 2 gallons (9 litres) and like most people we now have a water meter and we are charged once for that water by the water company and then 95% of the price again by the sewage company (in our town the water and sewage companies are separate, until this year the sewage company charged 108% of the water bill price). If we as a well-off household with two incomes cannot afford to flush our toilet, heaven help anyone poorer.

So consumption is a key problem whether it is voluntarily on luxuries or almost compulsory on rent/mortgage and utilities. (I have not even mentioned again very high train fares which contribute to some people's costs). The situation is exarcebated by the fixed contracts and payment in advance that so many companies insist on. However, all of this is compounded by government policy. The UK government only has one tool with which to manipulate the economy - changing the bank base rate. From this all interest rates are set. The government handed this control over to the independent Bank of England in 1997. No-one in the past forty years has ever bothered trying to alter terms of credit, for example, the minimum you have to pay back each month or to vary tax on items, nor really put effective pressure on utility companies to moderate prices and certainly not on landlords to keep raising rent. The government has not contested the attitude promoted in the Thatcher years (1979-91) that it is your civic obligation to own property and consume as much as you can. The government needs to start sending out very difficult signals about what is important and worthwhile in our society. You may say that is not the role of government but it is them who complains about crime and social problems and has to pick up the pieces. No-one in UK government or in its think-tanks or the civil service has any ideas of how to alter the UK economy and society in a more sustainable direction.

All of these factors mean that consequently the UK economy is constantly overheated with so many baseline costs for the bulk of the population rising all the time. This means that there is always a heavy inflationary pressure no matter what anyone does. Any minor fall in sales is seen as a recession and steps are taken to keep us consuming. The constant inflationary pressure means, as this year, the Bank of England (whose only concern is inflation, nothing about social issues) increases interest rates; in 2007 this has happened five times. This tool cannot reduce that inflationary pressure, only dent it a little, and in fact the heavy rain of this Summer has done a better job at doing that than the Bank of England. Interest rises means everyone pays more and it all comes at once, your rent, your utility bills, your food, all tends to go up together. No wonder so many people are sliding into bankruptcy. All statistics hide human misery and it is those at the bottom who suffer most. Why do people wonder why the drugs trade and armed crime are so high when we are pushing so many families and individuals into a situation where crime is the only way to survive and seems fine as you have no vested interest in a society which defines you simply by your possessions. I was shocked to see a map of the UK showing the highest concentrations of the so-called 'Exclusive Wealthy' apparently these are 'People with so much wealth that they can exclude themselves from the norms of society'. No-one should be permitted to be able to exclude themselves in that way.

Other countries in Europe have problems but they have not created a society that is rushing to burn itself out, that is so obsessed with possessions that no economic approach can succeed without also addressing people's outlook. The UK as a sick society is beginning to outstrip even the USA. The number of murders committed in the UK by children under the age of 10 exceeds even Iraq which is basically a warzone still. 2,840 crimes were committed by children under the age of 10 in 2006 (which is the age of criminal responsibility in the UK these days compared to 16 years old in Anglo-Saxon times) of these half were arson or criminal damage, 66 were sexual crimes committed by the child not to them.

We need to move to a society which values other things beside possessions. I was all for Sunday opening for shops but now I think they just fuel unhealthy consumption. Of course in the age of the internet you can shop all day and all night every day of the year. We need to encourage more hobbies than shopping which is the sole leisure activity of the bulk of the UK population. We need a government which does not adhere to the 'greed is good' rhetoric or at least actually condemns it rather than accepting it passively. We need to restrict utility and transport bill rises to tolerable levels and try to stop the constant pressure on rent and mortgage prices. The government needs some different economic tools and to not be afraid to get in there and interfere with the granting of so much credit. As many countries have demonstrated, you do not need a command economy to get the economy and so society (which is so driven by economic pressures) to move in a healthier direction. If we do not do this the UK will be the first to enter the Cyberpunk dystopia for real with people either beggars on the streets or behind fortified walls being driven from place to place in blacked out, armoured vehicles, with an attitude of 'must have' everything and status only defined by your latest purpose not any actual human attributes. However, I envisage as always the British public will simply keep consuming and fighting to consume freely so digging itself deeper into debt and segregating so much of society into the 'have nots' (always a majority), the 'haves' (who struggle to keep up with the next category) and the 'have-the-latests'.

What Annoys Me About ... Applying for a Job

I have always said that if moaning was an Olympic sport the UK would win gold every time. British people love sitting or standing around waiting and complaining about the service/the weather/foreigners/the cost of living/youth today, etc., etc. A very popular television series was 'Grumpy Old Men' which featured middle aged male celebrities facing a TV camera and complaining about things. This spawned the even more successful 'Grumpy Old Women' which amazingly has now also become a stage show. Yes, British people will pay to watch three middle-aged women sitting on a stage complaining about things. For the British it is not an issue of Schadenfreude it is the reverse more about proving we are actually worse off than other people, you could term it Schadenzorn. Perversely I think it gives British sense of being more moral, it is like flagellation in Christianity and Islam, the perception that those who suffer most are the more holy and this in turn allows them the power to judge those who are less holy.

Probably the best summing up of this attitude in the Monty Python sketch titled 'The Four Yorkshiremen', (northern English are probably the most accomplished complainers in the British Isles). In the sketch, four well-off middle-aged men seek to outdo each other in describing how bleak their youth was ending up with the following lines:

Right! I had to get up in the morning, at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill and pay millowner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our dad would kill us and dance about on our graves, singing Hallelujah!

Aah, you trying to tell the young people of today that, and they won't believe you!

Maybe Schadenzorn is wrong, it is not an anger about the suffering it is actually a pride in it: Schadenstolz. Sorry, I am getting well off track, this was not meant to be an analysis of the British psyche, rather I sought to contextualise this series of postings I am initiating today. I soon turn 40 which is the official start of middle age and as my life expectancy is shorter than average I see nothing wrong with starting my middle age a little sooner and indulging in the right to moan, that that status gives me.

Today I am going to look at things that annoy me, at times infuriate me, about applying for jobs. Since 1998 I have had ten jobs, so am averaging just over one per year at the moment. In the UK it is common these days to get short-term contracts and it is rare to be employed on any job for more than two years. I had three jobs for the same company over a two-and-a-half year period and was always on weekly contracts, they could lay me off at the end of each week if they chose; naturally this made it difficult to plan ahead and myself and the 100 other staff on such terms never dared take a holiday or fall sick. On average I get 1 interview for every 25 job applications I make and I get a job for every 120 applications I make, so I average around 4-5 interviews each time I am out of work. Only once in my life have I managed to get a job somewhere near where I wanted to live and that was with this current job and even then my house is 30 miles (48Km) from where the company is located, but that is a common problem in the UK as the rent is often highest where there are jobs. On all other occasions I have been buffeted from town to town as work has turned up which is why I ended up in Milton Keynes a town I otherwise would have stayed clear of. Obviously I recognise that I have very little control over my career or where I live, but in all this experience I have encountered a range of incompetent and unpleasant behaviour that just makes all of that worse, I will list a few of the incidents that I can remember.

• Having to make 8 copies of the application form and pay for the postage to send them all in. I thought I was lucky when a company asked for only 4 copies. Do companies not have photocopiers of their own?
• Companies, and this is very common, never telling you if you have got the job or not and being very vague about when the deadline has passed; conversely companies who wait 3-4 weeks before telling you that you actually have the job.
• Companies who send out the wrong time on their letters for interviews so when you turn up they have all gone to lunch and you look stupid even when you have the written proof that they got it wrong; of course then they have no time to fit you in.
• Companies who admit at the end of the interview that actually you never stood a chance of getting the job that you were simply there 'to make up the numbers' that their company rules require. [I was astounded that they were so callous as to admit this, I would have been happier to have been deluded that I was an actual contender.]
• Companies who will not accept you because you do not use Powerpoint in your presentation even when it is not appropriate for what you are presenting.
• Companies that tell you that you are over-qualified for a job. Who defines this? Anyway, maybe you are looking to downsize or have particular reason to want to work for the company (most people working in television and radio are over-qualified but want to be in the media) or in a particular town and surely, is it not a good thing for them to get a well qualified person at the standard rate. [Behind this is the widespread English (not Scottish) resentment of learning which is another topic for complaint].
• Companies that tell you they are not certain if you will ever be a 'proper' lawyer/accountant/official/sweeper no matter how hard you try, as if there is an Elect that you are either born into or otherwise stand no chance of entering. [This was made clear to me at the company I had worked for on short-term contracts for 2.5 years after I had applied for 6 longer-term vacancies at the company. Though I had been doing the job it was felt I was told my answers were clever but I would not get the post as I was not a 'proper' worker for the company and should give up applying; with such attitudes I did. I heard them discussing another colleague in similar terms. They were uncertain if she was a 'proper' official and never discussed her skills or capability of doing the job.]
• They tell you your CV was bad but never indicate in which way it is bad. If you ask them what was wrong with it they can never say. The weirdest incident of this was at a company which had employed me 2 years earlier on a 2-year contract and at the time said I was the outright choice. I applied for a job within the same company for another 2 years using the same CV as I had originally except with the addition of 2 years' experience working for them. They said this CV was terrible and when I asked why it was so much worse than it had been 2 years before when it had won me the job they did not know what to say and blamed it on 'fashions' in CV writing that I was oblivious to. Companies are supposed to give feedback on interviews and most promise it, but such feedback is frustrating and useless.
• Your tie was not done up tightly enough in the interview (this at an internal job interview) so you did not get the job. Following this comment which was the only criticism and sexist as the women candidates did not wear ties, I actually had official training on how to tie a tie the British civil service way (and this was in the 21st century, not the 19th!).
• Poor interviewing: people sitting so you have to twist around to see them; reading questions in a monotone from a list; paying no attention to what you have said; getting confused in themselves about their own roles in the company. People are supposed to be trained to interview. The interviewee has put a lot of work into performing at their best in an interview at least you can do is match it. Employers forget that the best interviewees are testing out the company too and may turn the company down even if it wants to appoint them.
• Once you are in a post and ask if you will receive training now that new systems are being introduced being told that there is no need for you to be trained, they will simply employ someone in your place with the relevant skills. Again a very British attitude that training is always the responsibility of other people not the company and that staff are to be picked up and discarded with no concern for the human cost or the benefits of developing staff the company already employs.

Recruitment in the UK is handled very poorly and so wastes time and money for companies. There is a sense lingering from the 1980s that the companies that do best are those which can pick up and drop workers month by month, neglecting that countries like Japan which continues to prosper and upcoming economies like China and India, keep their employees and develop them, it is not only beneficial for your company but for your country's economy as a whole. As I age, it is going to get even harder to get and hold work and I envisage sitting here in 2016 having had at least another ten jobs and have seen a score more incidences of poor company behaviour when it comes to job applicants.

What If Oliver Cromwell Had Been Able To Create A Working Constitution?

 
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:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Other-Exits-REVISED-Outcomes-ebook/dp/B00EBUPSL6/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1376051222&sr=8-5&keywords=Rooksmoor+kindle

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 Charles I Had Won The English Civil War/War Of The Three Kingdoms?

 
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:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Other-Exits-REVISED-Outcomes-ebook/dp/B00EBUPSL6/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1376051222&sr=8-5&keywords=Rooksmoor+kindle

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

The Murder of Dr. David Kelly, 17th July 2003

I recognise this blog awkwardly straddles the three blog genres: anger management, journal and scrapbook but its intention was always to get things out of my head and into cyberspace as somewhere to hold what I am thinking, a kind of 'brain dump' and because I felt (maybe arrogantly, you tell me) that other people might be interested in thoughts and opinions I have on various things. Early on I promised to say something about the murder of Dr. David Kelly in 2003. Now, for non-UK readers I apologise for what must seem a rather parochial British story, though there does seem to have been quite a lot of interest about it at the time in the USA. One reason for this, is that his murder can be seen as part of the real take-off of the steps to make the UK (and USA) less democratic and more authoritarian in nature. These steps, pushed on vigorously by President Bush and Tony Blair (and now by Gordon Brown) have all been linked to the war in Iraq (which was actually about controlling oil supplies rather than terrorism) and their sense that they needed to be in much stronger control of their countries so they could promote the conservative Christian attitudes that they subscribed to.


You may say that why am I blogging about a 'current affairs' event of four years ago? There is a lot of excellent material about the event on the internet and a number of good programmes about it have followed in the UK and elsewhere in the intervening years and continue to be made. My attention to it comes now because I feel that people need to be reminded about it. It certainly marks a milestone Britain turning its back on democracy, a process which continues now even though Blair has been replaced by Brown: legitimate protests are increasingly being suppressed by anti-terrorist legislation which followed the 11th September 2001 attacks in the USA and then the invasion of Iraq which UK and US politicians tried to link.


You might say that the world is full of conspiracy theories, no-one in the public eye is killed or dies naturally without people speculating about the cause. In the case of David Kelly though, evidence that he was murdered seems overwhelming. Accepting that he was murdered then demonstrates that the British state continues to use extra-legal execution (it has long done this against people like IRA operatives) but now not only against people who are clearly committed to violence, but also against its own employees (Kelly was a leading civil servant) who have done nothing violent. Kelly ironically supported the war against Iraq, he was just unwilling that that war be started on the basis of a lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, notably in the area of Kelly's specialism, biological weapons. (No-one disputes Hussein was tyrant who had and used chemical weapons; ironically the British were the first to use aerial bombardment of poison gas in Iraq in the 1920s, so-called 'punative missions').


How do we know Kelly was murdered? The Hutton Report of May 2004 made no attempt to even question the explanation put around that Kelly had killed himself. The Inquiry into the death only looked at 75 of the 300 statements taken from people about the incident. As it is, anyway, the evidence simply does not add up. It was clear to pathologists that the body had been moved between him dying and it being found; he had died lying flat on his back but was found propped against a tree. Local police set up the incident tent usually put over where the body was found, not around the tree but in a nearby field.

Kelly was supposed to have died through slitting a vein in his left wrist. Not only is this difficult to do, but the injury was not severe enough not to have clotted quickly (this is why most people who try to commit suicide this way do it in a warm bath to keep the wound open; trying to kill yourself this way is rarely successful anyway). Someone who has bled to death leaves a lot of blood around, there were very few traces around the body. He was also supposed to have over-dosed on 29 tablets of Co-Praxamol, but only half a tablet was found inside him; there was no evidence of vomiting and even taking 29 would not have guaranteed his death. Remember Dr. Kelly was one of the UK's leading microbiologist he was not an ignorant teenager. Co-Praxamol is only available on prescription in the UK (though freely available in the USA) and there was no record of Kelly being prescribed it. Numerous doctors have written to newspapers outlining while they remain unconvinced with the diagnosis of suicide.


So, if he was murdered why is this a problem and how does it relate to the government? Well there were three men found with his body led by a Detective Constable Graham Peter Coe, though it is believed that he actually works for MI5 (the UK's secret internal security force). The existence of the third person keeps on being denied though he was seen by many witnesses. He immediately went to Kelly's house and took away numerous documents that have never been returned. Interestingly in all that evidence no-one found a suicide note. Nine out of ten people committing or trying to commit suicides leave notes that can be found. Ironically when I asked a journalist I had seen in the company of (now Sir) Stephen Lander, (Director-General of MI5, 1996-2002; Eliza Manningham-Buller was the director-general 2002-April 2007), about whether it had been done by them, the journalist said if it had been then they 'would have done a better job of it'. We know that there are often rogue agents and units working inside all intelligence services, but if that had been the case, why did the government go to such efforts to quell speculation?


Why did Kelly have to die? Throughout his career Kelly had been involved in investigating biological weapons across the world from Russia to South Africa. He was a weapons inspector in Iraq after the 1990-1 Gulf War and visited the country 37 times. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize as a result. He went there again in 2003 and spoke to journalists that he was not finding evidence of weapons of mass destruction. In contrast, prime minister, Tony Blair was telling Parliament that there was evidence that the Iraqis not only had such weapons but they were in a position to put them into use within 45 minutes of attack. Much of the evidence came from distorting an essay they found on the internet rather than the solid evidence Kelly was bringing back to the contrary. Of course, no such weapons have ever been found in Iraq, but the British and Americans concerned about control of oil resources across the world, especially with the change in the Venezuelan government to being unsympathetic to the USA and vigorous Chinese efforts to secure oil resources across the world had to take control of Iraq. They knew they could not simply say this. They could not use a moral justification, i.e. that Hussein was a tyrant as that would oblige them to invade many other countries which are friends to the UK and USA, so they had to fall back on the approach they have been using since 2001, that there was a serious threat that needed to be staunched.


Kelly, apparently angered by the government distorting his evidence spoke to the journalist Andrew Gilligan. Kelly thought that he was not the only source of Gilligan's information and this may have in fact been the case as he had not been alone on his inspections which were UN run. The government released Kelly's name to the media as a way to dismiss Gilligan's story (and that of another journalist, Susan Watts) and in fact it had the opposite effect, bringing it more into the public view. However, Kelly had already been interviewed twice by his employers at the Ministry of Defence and then by the Intelligence & Security Committee, this is one of the so-called 'select committees' of the British Parliament made up of politicians from all parties which investigates events on particular topics.


Kelly was a member of the Baha'i faith. There are apparently 6000 believers of the faith in the UK, with a large percentage among civil servants, because it is quite an intellectual religion. It condemns suicide. It also emphasises truthfulness and for a man like Kelly, it must have been terrible to realise that despite his assurances to the Iraqi people he had met on many occasions, that if they complied with inspections there would be no war, that the country was still going to be attacked and tens of thousands of ordinary Iraqis would die as a result. However, Kelly never discussed suicide with his wife or friends he was in contact with on the day of his death. He did speak of 'many dark actors playing games'.


The involvement of the British government has been confirmed by former intelligence agents. It was known in the civil service that Kelly was in line to be killed and a security barrister (lawyer), Michael Shrimpton had been told this days before the killing. He believes that the murder was carried out by French external intelligence agency, DGSE, who are renowned for direct action, for example against Greenpeace protestors; seemingly President Jacques Chirac's government did not want Blair's sympathetic government in trouble. I am not convinced by the French involvement and think it was more domestic. It does seem clear that whoever carried out the killing, MI5 tidied up afterwards, though elements within the organisation were unhappy that it had been done. Lieutenant-Colonel Crispin Black, on the Defence Intelligence Staff until 2002, portrayed the Hutton Report account of things, as ridiculous.


We know Tony Blair was incredibly arrogant, he also felt himself to be on a mission from God. He may have had no qualms about ordering the murder of a non-Christian. He may not have ordered it directly, as Hitler is supposed never to have ordered the Holocaust. Instead he might have simply let it be known that Kelly was a pain to him. This is very similar to King Henry II and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas a Becket. He was killed by knights who felt they were acting on the king's orders though no direct command had been given. Throughout his time in office, Blair felt those that disagreed him were foolish and simply lacked the intelligence to understand what he intended. Someone with clear intelligence and evidence to back up his case, combined with a clear moral stance and a wish to treat the Iraqi people fairly might have been too difficult a concept for Blair to stomach. Above all, Kelly made Blair look a fool, I think the greatest offence Blair felt was against his vanity. In addition the killing of one British scientist, hundreds of British troops and thousands of Iraqis was nothing compared to a secure oil supply. Another fear, might have been, that Kelly not only knew about Iraq but many other countries' secrets that now that he had been thrown into the spotlight by his employers he may have chosen to bring into the open.


The thing is, to begin to operate in this way, killing a man who was simply telling the truth, is opening a door that it is difficult to close. Now the British regime has a taste for this, what is to stop them doing it again? It fits neatly with the rapid erosion of civil liberties. Now if you are too high profile to be locked up without charge they will murder you. It is clear that they need to practice more though, so at least they can do a convincing job of it next time. Though, given that they have effectively got away with it and the world will have soon forgotten Dr. David Kelly and what he stood for, maybe they will not bother. The 17th August 2003 is not the day democracy died in the UK, but it is the day a worthy man was murdered and so the day that liberty in the UK contracted a terminal illness.

P.P. 18/08/2010: There are very, very few things that the coalition government has done right, but one of these rare activities is to announce a re-investigation of the murder of Dr. David Kelly.  I imagine this is largely motivated more by a desire on David Cameron's behalf to embarrass the 'golden boy' Tony Blair as it is by any desire for justice.  According to tabloid headlines last week, only 1 in 5 of the population now actually believe Kelly committed suicide.  While I doubt any enquiry will actually get to the truth of what happened, I hope, at least, it may make those working for the government a little less confident about carrying out assassinations, at least of British citizens.

An Atlas of Imaginary Worlds 7: Lands of Gulliver

I think I must be getting well into my middle-aged crisis, thinking of the saying 'After his child, the person a man most disappoints is himself'. I know that one day all fathers realise their children despise them, but before that time, they probably have come to hate themselves. So, to escape such sentiments I am busily burying myself away in my collecting maps of places that people have imagined. I thought that after all the stuff that some people on the internet believe is real, I would turn to some places which people all accept do not exist. I was also thinking about what I had written about Plato using Atlantis as a place he knew did not really exist but could act as a model for the kind of society he wanted and this brought me to Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) and his most famous work, 'Gulliver's Travels' [published as 'Vol. IV of the Author's Works Including Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships'] (1726) which features a number of contrasting imaginary lands to make satirical points on contemporary society especially of Britain (at the time rulers of Ireland where Swift was from) and Europe more broadly as well as the long-titled explorers' accounts of the time. In turn, his character, Lemuel Gulliver travels to Lilliput where he is a giant (12 times larger than the people there), to Brobdingnag where is tiny (12 times smaller than the people there). There is satire on the reasons why people go to war (over which way to eat an egg) and about treatment of strangers: he gets better treated as a pet in Brobingnag than as a giant in Lilliput.

This map shows Sumatra in the North East and Van Diemen's Land (i.e. Tasmania) in the South, and as you can see, Australia which had only been partially mapped at the time is missing. Belfuscu was the rival to Lilliput which Gulliver seized the fleet of.

Brobdingnag is shown as being an peninsula of the West coast of North America. New Albion was a region of what is now northern California claimed for England in 1579 by Sir Francis Drake, putting Brobdingnag on the coast somewhere probably just into Oregon or the very northern part of California.

In the next book he goes to Laputa, a flying city where all the theoretical work, predominantly in linking music and geometry is not put to much good use, though they do bomb cities from the air. He is then lowered to Balnibarbi where people after having visited Laputa decided to reverse direction in science and the arts, especially agriculture and building, and have left the country a wasteland. On Glubbdubdrib Gulliver meets a man who can bring the dead back to life and he learns that many of the assumptions he made about history are wrong. In Luggnagg he meets a tyrranous king and immortal people called Struldbrugs who still age and so lose all their faculties though they cannot die.

This map is rather confused, but not too bad given the catography of the early 18th century. It puts Japan South rather than East and North East of Korea (here shown as 'Lesso') and the Japanese northern island of Hokkaido has been merged into mainland, unless the large island of Sakhalin which is North of Japan has been mixed up with the Korean peninsula.

Gulliver then goes to Japan with a Dutch ship and this bit of the book, though not actually based on any experience by Swift actually reflects on Japan of the time. The Dutch are shown as being compelled to stamp on a crucifix to demonstrate they are not trying to introduce Christianity to Japan. The Jesuits had been closely linked to the Spanish and Portuguese who had come to the Japan in the 16th century and had contributed to the instability of the country, partly through supplying guns and because as Catholic powers had sought the expulsion of the Protestant Dutch from Japan and the Jesuits also wanted the removal of their Catholic rivals, the Franciscans. Christianity was banned in Japan in 1587 and all Jesuits expelled. In 1614 all foreign priests were expelled, all churches in Japan destroyed and all Japanese converts had to renounce their faith. To prove they had done this they had to stamp on a crucifix. This was repeated in 1616 with military action against those who resisted. Foreign books and travel abroad were banned in 1633 and from 1635 onwards on the Dutch were allowed to stay with one small base on the island of Deshima, and to be allowed this they had to give up all show of Christianity. It is a Dutchman who tries to get Gulliver to stamp on the crucifix when he has been exempted from this by the Japanese authorities. Thus, this bit is far less satiricial and more reflective of East Asian geo-politics of the time. It may also reflect Anglo-Dutch relations as England had had a Dutch King William of Orange 1688-1702; he was renowned for his fighting in Ireland (notably the Battle of the Boyne) and a love-hate relationship with the Dutch who had been both economic and military rivals in preceding decades. Before turning to writing full-time, Swift had been a clergyman.

Gulliver's last voyage is to the Country of the Houyhnhnms who are intelligent, talking horses who walk on two legs (similar to the pigs at the end of 'Animal Farm') while humans in the land are reduced to barbaric Yahoos.

Throughout the journeys Gulliver becomes increasingly bitter and rather depressed about the state of humanity. This may reflect the increasingly bad treatment he receives from the different crews who ship him around in each of the books, though in each location he meets at least one decent human. He is thought to have become mad by the end (something Swift was suspected of himself at times). In 'Gulliver's Travels' you see lots of discussion of the time, such as the use and application of science in an era of discovery, and its comparison with religion. In addition there is the whole 'nurture vs. nature' debate about human behaviour and whether the world is likely to become more civilised or more barbaric in what was a very turbulent time, often termed the Age of Enlightenment. Cook's voyages around the Pacific only occurred 1768-1779 and whilst there had been people crossing the region since the age of Magellan and Drake, it was still pretty much uncharted as was the West coast of North America and so ideal for locating the imaginary countries Swift puts in the books. Note that he travels on Portuguese and Dutch ships, these two countries and to a lesser extent Spain, being dominant Western imperial powers in Asia at the time.

These maps are produced by the contemporary illustrator Kim Coles, see the imwithsully blog on this site: http://www.blogger.com/profile/30768636

This map shows the Country of the Houyhnhnms as due South of South Africa.

A partial contemporary of Swift's was the German satirist Johann Andreas Schnebelin. No-one seems to know when he was born but he died in 1706. He published a book in 1694 called (which if I translate correctly) 'Maps explaining the Miracle Lands of the Utopias'. From this comes a continent around the land of Schlaraffenland. It is an idyllic world with good food and other luxuries easily available; there is a land of alcohol, an island of tobacco, a Great Empire of the Stomach, lands of games, the miserly, sluggardly, spendthrifty, the young, the old, the fools and of swearing amongst others. Schlaffen means 'to weaken' and given that there are the 'Unknown Countries of the Pious' on the edge of the map, the suggestion is that this an allegorical one and that these lands are what lead you away from piety. The best known map of these lands was produced by Johann Baptist Homann in 1716:

This probably shows more imagination than you find in the bulk of fantasy maps produced these days. Note the presence of not one but two inland seas! What also struck me was the style of this map which reminded me greatly of John Speed (1551/2-1629) a leading English cartographer responsible for maps of all sorts of places but probably best known are his map of England and Wales and of individual English and Welsh counties which you will find on the walls of middle class households across the UK. I include some examples below. They easily fit the style of fantasy maps, though they were accurate in their day. The ones shown are England & Wales as a whole, Buckinghamshire, Brecon (which is now part of the county of Powys), Anglesey (now Ynys Mon county) and the Isle of Man. The Isle of Man looks rather distended in this map. It is quite a bizarre place even now. It is a tax haven, it claims to have the oldest continuous parliament in the world, it has an annual motorcycle race on public roads which habitually kills people (riders and spectators), homosexuality is illegal on the island but corporal punishment is not and cats from the island naturally have no tails.