WHEN GREAT SOCIETIES DECLINE

 

In life all things change, usually quite gradually. The cataclysmic upheavals seen in America in 1775 or in France in 1789 were exceptional, though they were matched by the Bolshevik coup in Russia in 1917 and the election of Hitler’s Nazis in Germany in 1933. The inevitability of eventual substantial, evolutionary change cannot be avoided, yet sometimes it goes in an unfavourable direction. After all, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Spain and the Ottomans famously declined and fell. I would like to draw contemporary parallels from modern Russia and from my native Scotland.

                                Yasmine Naghdi as Odette/Odile in Swan Lake

A few days ago, I had the delight of attending with friends a cinema relay from Covent Garden of Tchaikovsky’s celebrated ballet Swan Lake. The supremely elegant dancing, the ravishing music and the magical ambiance were entirely Russian. How civilised and moving it all was! The 19^th century and early 20^th century saw a glittering Russian culture embracing giants like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin and Chekhov; music was graced by Borodin and Mussorgsky. This culture flourished in exile, with Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky in music and Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes enchanting the dance. Even under Communism, the cultural flame did not die with Prokofiev and Shostakovich in music, Eisenstein revolutionizing film, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn producing novels of global significance. In all, a wonderful legacy.

                                                               

        

Leo Tolstoy

                                                                 Boris Pasternak

But look at Russia now, the least regarded nation in the world, abhorred, isolated and despised! Her leaders and their heartless ideology carry a heavy burden of guilt. Under Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin the Russian aristocracy and liberal elements were persecuted and exiled. Prosperous peasants were dispossessed and starved, notably in Ukraine (4m dead in the man-made Holodomor famine of 1933-4), political dissidents were ruthlessly suppressed and executed. WW2 Victory by 1945 made the regime impregnable, even though Stalin died in 1953, and most of his henchmen removed, to be followed in time by the vulgarly ruthless Khrushchev and the imperialistic Brezhnev, who successfully entered the space race and brought a modicum of prosperity to the Russian masses.

                                  Joseph Stalin

 

                                  

                                                                            Nikita Khrushchev           

Vladimir Putin

                                 

Relations with the West were uneasy, despite a brief glimmer of tolerance with Gorbachov, the USSR finally disintegrated, riven by its own contradictions, ushering in a period of anarchy under Yeltsin. A strongman and ex-secret policeman, Vladimir Putin, initially steadied the society and economy from 1999. Tragically he has made bad even worse. A fantasist and a killer, he mounted an entirely unprovoked attack on the newly independent Ukraine. The descent to the gutter has been unrelenting, suppression of all creative art, crude nationalism demanding a recreation of Tsarist Russia, the worst popular instincts mobilized, opponents murdered, often in the guise of “accidents, untimely illnesses, and unexplained suicides or defenestrations”. Many thousand young Russian and Ukrainian soldiers have perished in this wholly unjustifiable conflict. Currently the tide of war is moving in favour of the Russians with their huge weight in numbers and their air superiority; but their entire enterprise is morally bankrupt and will never be forgiven. Russia, with no doubt millions of her quite innocent citizens, has lost the respect of the civilised world and will not be re-admitted to the top table in the West, her dreams of Empire forever shattered.

………………….

 

The stirring annual Edinburgh military Tattoo

But what could all this possibly have to do with Scotland? Well, think about some parallels. Scotland too has a proud cultural legacy. Edinburgh, dubbed “The Athens of the North” was the centre of the 18^th Century Scottish Enlightenment, a brilliant circle including David Hume, the empirical philosopher par excellence, Adam Smith, father of modern economics and Thomas Reid, founder of the Scottish philosophic school of Common-sense. Do not forget the great biographer James Boswell nor the matchless poet Robert Burns, painter Allan Ramsay, nor the peerless architect Robert Adam. The 19^th century saw the flourishing of Walter Scott, poet and inventor of the historical novel, painter Raeburn, florid historian Thomas Carlyle, novelists R L Stevenson and Conan Doyle, not to mention dramatist J. M. Barrie and idiosyncratic modern poet Hugh MacDiarmid.. Quite a gathering of talent!

David Hume

                                                                 Sir Walter Scott

Politically Scotland was pre--1914 a Liberal stronghold with prime ministers Lord Rosebery and Henry Campbell-Bannerman but it soon revolved towards Labour with worthies like Kier Hardie, Ramsay Macdonald and Arthur Henderson. The Tories held on to their support holding a majority of Scottish seats in Westminster in Eden’s 1955 administration. Then Tony Blair’s ministry 1997-2007 had many prominent Scots – Gordon Brown, Derry Irvine, Robin Cook, Alistair Darling and Donald Dewar, who became the first First Minister when her devolved Parliament was reconvened (adjourned since 1707!) in 1999. So far, so conventional. Scottishness was not boasted about, rather it was quietly accepted, and many Scots prospered within the UK.

All this changed with the explosion of the cult of Nationalism in the early 2000s and the rise of the SNP. Like class war in Russia, Scottish Independence became an ideology not a mere policy. Previously Scottish nationalism was a rather forlorn gentlemanly cause, espoused by figures like Sir Compton Mackenzie and by romantic intellectuals winning the odd by-election but basically a protest vote. Suddenly it displaced Labour as the creed of “Weegies and their Wains” (Glaswegians and their Kids) and other working-class constituencies. The race to the bottom was begun when in 2007 the SNP became the largest party in the Scottish Assembly and in 2011 it achieved an overall majority, (69 seats) all under Alex Salmond. The SNP lost the crucial independence referendum in 2014 and Salmond resigned, to be succeeded by Nicola Sturgeon who was a well-established First Minister from 2014 to 2023. Her style was fanatically fixated on Independence, secretive and Anglophobic and she wowed the chip-on-the-shoulder nationalist mob. She suddenly resigned under a cloud, as police investigation into the SNP ‘s finances gathered pace. Her successor was Humza Yousaf, Scottish born and bred, of Pakistani Moslem origins, who was politically less adept, and who blundered over his alliance with the Leftie Greens. Humza resigned today facing votes of confidence and persistent ridicule.

It has to be said that the SNP leadership carries a rather mixed reputation for honesty and good sense. Alex Salmond was tried and acquitted for sexual misconduct including rape.in 2018. Also, his regular programme later, on the Russia Today TV Channel, was heavily criticised – it ceased with the Ukraine invasion. He left the SNP to found the ultra-Nationalist fantasy party Alba. Nicola Sturgeon dabbled in gender politics, maybe unwisely, and her reputation was damaged when her husband was charged with embezzlement of SNP funds. Humza Yousaf has been naïve in some of his dealings, but is presumably straight, though there is a recent cloud over his brother-in-law in Dundee about alleged extortion and a fatal defenestration / suicide. Plummeting moral standards and a ghastly drug-culture are the bane of beautiful Scotland, the worst in Europe. What a shameful political inheritance!

Alex Salmond

 

Nicola Sturgeon

Hamza Yousaf

 

SMD

29.04.24

Text copyright © Sidney Donald 2024

DESPERATELY SEEKING CELEBRITY

 

As one reaches certainly the Sixth and quite possibly the Seventh Age of Man, I find myself scratching around in a desperate search for something to add distinction to the name Sidney D - my ancestors, my native town or my achievements. Alas, I have drawn a blank – no Sidney D charged heroically at Waterloo, nor made the serene streets of stolid Aberdeen tremble with excitement and my modest achievements do not echo and resound through the years. I stretched a point and researched what momentous events coincided with my Birthday -31 July – and even there the pickings are pretty thin. But I will have to make the best with what history records!

1.       31 July 1689. The relief of besieged Londonderry by the forces of William of Orange against those of James II.

2.       31 July 1956. Jim Laker spins out Australia 10 for 53 in the second innings of the Test match. His deceptive bowling completely bamboozled the visiting Aussies.

3.       31 July 1959. Cliff Richard’s song Living Doll gives him his first UK Top of the Pops.

4.       31 July 1970. Black Tot Day. The Royal Navy ends the daily rum ration for sailors, a custom operating since 1740.

The Relief of Derry 1689 

1.       The Relief of Derry, as described in a memorable passage by Macaulay, with the Apprentice Boys and so on, is a seminal event for Protestant Ireland and the subsequent Ascendancy. Modern Ireland, both North and South, have since taken some astonishing turns. The South can hardly be proud of de Valera, Haughey or Leo Varadkar, irrelevant grandstanders of world events while the stiff-backed Leaders of the old Northern Ireland, Carson, Craigavon and Brookeborough, have given way to more dubious figures like Faulkner, Ian Paisley and the newly disgraced Sir Jeffrey Donaldson. The much-vaunted Good Friday Agreement and the devolved Stormont are not working well with Sinn Fein and its often-revered gunmen steadily gaining ground.

Mind you, devolution is not working well anywhere. In Scotland, the sinisterly secretive SNP regime imploded with the 2023 departure under a financial cloud of Nicola Sturgeon only to be succeeded by clueless Humza Yousaf, keen to donate Scottish taxpayers’ treasure to help his ancestors in Gaza. Humza’s brother-in-law has recently been charged with extortion, and his alleged victim died in a defenestration in Dundee, normally a Czech or Russian speciality to my dystopian mind. The poor Scots are stuck with SNP rule until new Assembly elections in May 2026. Send an aid convoy pronto!

                         Scotland’s heavy Handicap: Hamza Yousaf

2.       Turning now to Jim Laker, he was a low-profile cricketer of the old school. His off-spinning achievements in that remarkable test series in 1956 ensure his place in sporting history. In those days, with players like Denis Compton, Godfrey Evans or later Ted Dexter, flamboyance was tolerated but not encouraged, but consistent performances were cherished. Sportsmen have moved on since then – they are now “celebrities” and we are told more than we need to know about their wealth, lifestyle, dark pasts, wives, girlfriends and political views. We are in the world of sport as showbiz, maniacally following the lives of Harry Kane, Wayne Rooney, Tiger Woods, David Beckham or Novak Djokovic although sadly some fall off the high-wire like Oscar Pretorius, Boris Becker and O J Simpson. I do wish we could revert to the earlier order and simply give warm thanks if England won the Ashes, Arsenal won the League and Scotland won the 6 Nations!

                                                      Remember Jim Laker spinning his magic

3.       Cliff Richard is still going strong at age 83. His Living Doll was a catchy ditty but no more and generally his output is rather bland and middle-ranking. His long career has been remarkably successful. He is moreover a personable fellow, a born-again Christian, respectable and conservative in his attitudes, atypical of most in the pop world. Some record companies and DJs have shunned him and ridiculed him openly as being too old-fashioned.

Cliff has competed in Eurovision (he came 3rd) and the contrast is stark with 2024’s UK representative Olly Alexander, a tattooed militant LGBT+ campaigner and noisy critic of Israel. Alexander is a recognised actor and pop singer. I predict the dreaded “nul points” for him

           

Conforming Cliff Richard

 

                                                   Olly Alexander – “Woke” personified

4.       Black Tot Day was indeed a black day for the Royal Navy. What, no rum ration? Is nothing sacred? Alas, since 1970 quite a few traditional customs and institutions have changed. Oxbridge is now run by left-wingers, determined to pin opprobrium upon the great universities as supporters of Slavery; violent louts roam our streets untouched by the feeble Metropolitan Police paid to defend our citizens; our schools and hospitals are wracked by strikes, when once they were led by dedicated professional staff; our armed forces are cut back, no longer dependably capable of deterring our many enemies; Parliament itself is wracked by scandal after scandal as members on all sides loot their constituents and betray all trust.

Yet all is not lost. Our people have an abundance of talent supported by a glorious history. Our economy is on the mend. There are leaders of goodwill in all parties. Total Consensus is not possible, but a vigorous programme pursued by determined leaders can harness the national spirit in unity and shake off mediocrity and sloth. “Once more unto the breach, dear Friends!”

 

SMD

12.4.24

Text copyright © Sidney Donald 2024

WRONG WAY ROUND

It has long been obvious to me that I am wildly out of sympathy with the contemporary world and that I harbour many dated attitudes and expectations. I ascribed much of this to old age and general geriatric irritability but I now realise that the world I once knew, the liberal-democratic West, is indeed breaking up rapidly, if it is not already broken. A last-minute jailbreak, as in a Hollywood action movie, is required before the process is irreversible! OMG!

             Wanton Russian destruction in Ukraine

What are we to make of the following list of recent peculiar absurdities?

(1)    Harry Potter author J K Rowling is in apparent danger of being prosecuted for denying transsexual broadcaster India Willoughby’s assertion that “he” is a woman.

(2)    King Charles is pressed to apologise to Prince Harry for mistreating him in his youth and undermining Meghan Markle’s position in royal circles.

(3)    Britain is expected to eat humble pie and pay huge reparations to Caribbean nations for the historic institution of Slavery in the 16^th to 18^th Centuries.

(4)    The unelected UK House of Lords seeks to frustrate all attempts by the UK government to deport illegal immigrants or fly them to Rwanda for assessment.

(5)    The discredited Metropolitan Police manage to arrest a demonstrator waving a sign saying “Hamas are Terrorists” - pro-Hamas demonstrators in their thousands are untouched.

(6)     British Jews live in fear of violence from Islamist fanatics and their Leftist supporters on the streets of London. The MP for Golders Green (Mike Freer) is standing down due to intimidation.

(7)    US Presidential candidate Donald Trump praises Putin (“genius” and “savvy”) and privately speaks well of Xi and Hitler. He leads in all the polls.

(8)    Pope Francis enrages Ukraine by advising her to wave the white flag and negotiate peace with Russia to end the war.

(9)    Chinese influences and money stifle debate about that country’s aggressive policies and repression of dissenters.

(10)                        UK media and advertisers continue to peddle the myth that Britain has very substantial black and Asian minorities. The 2021 census figures are a mere 4% and 9% respectively.

      Pro-Palestinian demos in the streets of London

All the above are examples of the distortions of thinking and erratic behaviour prevalent in the West, weakening its hard-won Liberties and dimming the warm glow of our Enlightenment.

Going back to first principles, most Britons believe in toleration, giving much latitude to a wide range of opinions. People should be able to express their views in any way, within certain limits. Those limits forbid the use of violence or intimidation or expressions of racial, sectarian or tribal hatreds. We have built a long-established system of parliamentary democracy which must change with the times, but preferably gradually and with a broad measure of electoral and public support. The judiciary must apply the law with integrity and be uninfluenced by political pressures.

    

                                         “Activist” vandalizes Balfour portrait at Cambridge University

The problem of social disintegration in the West, viewed from my admittedly geriatric ivory tower, is that our society has lost its moral compass. But I am truly talking about people who have no moral compass and to whom “morality” is a mere joke. How can we explain a cash economy to avoid VAT, practiced by every tradesman, too many politicians “on the make” in US, UK and Europe grasping at bribes, or ruthless company directors gaily committing grand larceny as if it were their “entitlement”? Where does morality sit with those civil servants and academics who “cancel” all dissenting voices with unrelenting malice, and are complicit in the distortion of historical fact?

To be sure, we in the West need to reset our priorities. It is too easy to blame governments in office. Rishi Sunak is an honourable fellow but his country has tired of his party. Joe Biden is too old, but who isn’t? Macron, Scholz and Meloni may be somewhat uninspiring, but new leaders are just outside the door, - the West has so much in its favour. It may not have the manpower of China and Russia, but the West has the brains, the technology and the resources to overcome all her foes.

The West’s priorities, not unlike those at the start of the Cold War, are rearmament and advanced technology. Her industrial work-forces need to be mobilised and energetically managed. Climate targets, high welfare payments, triple locks, unaffordable health services and immigration policies will have to take a back seat meanwhile or be drastically reformed.

Our large educated elites, need to show our people the way forward, to lead, galvanise and inspire. Step forward now!

 

 

SMD

17.03.24

Text copyright © Sidney Donald 2024

WRITERS OF CONSEQUENCE

In my old age, I think of the books that have radically influenced me. To give some context, I am a conventional fellow, bourgeois, financially privileged, with a vaguely Presbyterian background, intellectually curious up to a point, but British to the core with tastes limited to the English-speaking world with smatterings from some European power-houses. I confess I am not an innovator, lateral thinker nor original spirit. So be warned!

I list the books in chronological publication date order, though I certainly did not read them in that order;

1.       Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann (1901). Because I had a family biz background, I understood this saga of the decline and fall over 4 generations of a thriving business in Lübeck, (cf. Succession on Amazon Prime). Mann was a serious writer and sometimes I struggled with his complexity. His last work, The Confessions of Felix Krull (1954) showed that he had that famously elusive German sense of humour.

 

2.       Strait is the Gate by André Gide (1909). A very tender love-story of the doomed devotion of cousins Jerome and Alissa, whose impossibly high, puritanical standards cannot be achieved.  Mainly told through exchange of letters, this is a marvellous piece. Gide was a dominant and astringent French intellectual for 40 years.

 

3.       Journey to the End of the Night (1932) by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. This racy saga of poverty in Paris, the experiences of a doctor, work in the American motor industry, was highly original and brilliant in 1932. Céline in 1940 became notorious as a collaborationist and antisemite, a decidedly bad egg all round. He died in 1961, returning to France unprosecuted, after voluntary exile in Denmark.

 

Andre Gide

Kingsley Ami

 

4.       The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck. This is a very moving family chronicle of the Joads, driven from dust bowl Oklahoma to ruthless exploitation and starvation as labourers in California. A bible for Lefties, it stirred the conscience of and fired indignation into a generation of Americans. Steinbeck wrote widely but never equalled this masterpiece.

 

 

5.       The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene (1940). This tale of a lone whiskey-priest’s persecution in rural Mexico, is typical of Greene’s ardent Catholicism and foresight, championing traditional beliefs against the cruelties of ideological atheism. The priest accepts his martyrdom with shaky dignity. Striking but somewhat depressing.

 

6.       L’Etranger (The Outsider) by Albert Camus (1942). This short novel is arresting from its first lines. “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I can’t be sure”. Camus’ protagonist in Algeria, proclaims his liberation from life’s norms, is condemned for accidently shooting an Arab man. He awaits execution with Olympian contempt for his persecutors. What a book!

 

 

7.       The Master of Santiago by Henri de Montherlant (1947). This taut drama was an A Level French set book giving a taste of masochistic Spanish Catholic devotion. Montherlant was an influential writer of the Right, a tortured soul, who, knowing his declining powers, in 1972 entertained his friends for lunch and then shot himself. Andre Malraux, Gaullist minister of Culture praised Montherlant’s irrepressible independence of spirit.

 

8.       Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945). This evocation of eccentric 1920’s Oxford and the friendship of Charles Ryder with aristocratic Sebastian Flyte is highly civilized as is its treatment of the declining Marchmain family and its crumbling values. This is Waugh in his maturity, his earlier novels being an acquired taste, not helped by his abrasive personality.

 

9.       1984 by George Orwell (1949). This is a great dystopian, if satirical, novel where the protagonist Winston Smith, a low-level official at the Ministry for Truth, rewrites the historical record to the orders of Big Brother. We encounter familiar contemporary bogey-men like the Thought Police, brainwashing and all-powerful governments. A highly relevant cautionary tale for 2024!

 

Gore Vidal

 

Evelyn Waugh

10.   The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger (1951). At last, wartime gloom and post-war nightmares were dissipated by life-affirming Holden Caulfield and his hilarious adventures and misadventures in love and adolescence in dynamic America. It was the tonic we desperately needed - I read it aged 14 and never looked back with any Angst. Thank you, Salinger.

 

11.   Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1954). This furious comic assault on the pettiness of academic life in a red-brick UK university, on the class system generally, and an eloquently misanthropic punch at a variety of human types is side-splittingly funny. Kingsley Amis later became excessively conservative – many preferred his son Martin Amis’ novels – but I stick with Kingsley.

 

12.   Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1956). This book explores the gay infatuation of an American in Paris for a barman. It is extremely well-written with honesty and candour, about 10 years before its time. Baldwin went on to write his searing collection of essays, The Fire next Time, (1963), which discussed the race issue in America with urgent passion.

 

13.   Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? By Edward Albee (1962) was an explosive stage play and later a memorable film. I saw the play in London in 1964 and was astounded by its depiction of the dysfunctional marriage of George and Martha. The bitter but often deeply comic exchanges electrified the audience. I remember being taken to task for expressing my admiration at an interview. “Isn’t it very destructive? I was asked. Well, I suppose it was, but it was incomparable theatre.

 

14.   Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal (1968). This brilliant satire, defying all convention, has Myra as dominatrix of uncle Buck Loner, various scabrous sub-plots and after a car accident, Myra has a sex-change to become Myron. Not family reading, I admit, but I laughed like a drain at Vidal’s wit and invention.

 

I suppose if my list is ever analysed I will be diagnosed as a misogynistic, crypto-Catholic gay, but I do not think that is accurate. Literature often shocks and we need that to stimulate and move on.  Do your own lists of whatever category and see where it leads!

SMD

2/02/24

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2024

GIMME THAT OLD TIME RELIGION!

It finally came on the eve of the Iowa caucuses.  A video emanating from the Trump camp claimed that God had sent Trump as his “caretaker” to manage the nation and the world; Trump is now a fully equipped crackpot American politician with his monstrous deal-doing ego supplemented with a solemn Messianic mission - to the evangelicals he is obviously unbeatable. Praise the Lord!

We have seen it all before. In 1925, populist 3-times presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan denounced the teaching of evolution in the famous Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee. Bryan was badly mauled under cross-examination and died shortly after the trial. H L Mencken summed it all up with characteristic verve.:

W J Bryan

One day the defence lured Bryan into his astounding argument against the notion that man is a mammal. I am glad I heard it, for otherwise I’d never believe it. There stood a man who had been thrice a candidate for the Presidency of the Republic, uttering stuff a boy of eight would laugh at….He came into life a hero, a Galahad, in bright and shining armour. He was passing out a poor mountebank.

May the same fate overwhelm Donald C Trump!

Religiosity (excessive religiousness) is one of the most off-putting facets in American life to the British and European cast of mind. We have mostly moved forward from defining our lives in religious terms, some generations ago.

Billy Graham (1918-2018) was a hugely successful US Southern Baptist evangelist who thrived mainly in the 1950s -70s. He filled stadia, ran crusades and preached cooperation. He was certainly a talented orator and he made friends with the good and the great. Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and maybe surprisingly Richard Nixon hung by his words and sought his counsel.  

Billy Graham

He was followed by a variety of black preachers, notably esteemed Martin Luther King, and Al Sharpton is still around, agitating at the first sign of trouble.

Britain has a tradition of sorts notably on the Celtic fringes, Ireland has long been a religious hotbed (some of this reflected in Joe Biden’s stubborn Anglophobia) and Ulster sported the anachronistic figure of the Rev Ian Paisley – ye shall hate idolators with an undying hate, he bellowed, although he mellowed later when he was forced to share power genially with “reformed” IRA gunman Martin MacGuinness. Scotland long had a bitter Protestant/Catholic divide but our current first minister Humza Yousaf seems most engrossed in the Palestinian cause. He is Scottish-born, raised as a Catholic but converted to Islam in 1977. His rival in the SNP, Kate Forbes, is a talented Gaelic-speaking 33-year-old, who has been finance minister. She is an adherent of the Wee Free Church, with only about 10,000 members, opposed to same-sex marriage and generally Puritanical and socially highly conservative. Karl Marx got much wrong but he was surely right in saying; Religion is the Opium of the People.

SNP's Kate Forbes

        

Moving on to terra firma from these ghostly matters, I have been puzzled by the differences between London attitudes and those of England more widely. Much of the difference derives from ethnic background. The London ethnic split according to the 2021 census is:

White British    36.8

Other White      17.0                 53.8%

Asian British    20.8

Black British     13.5

Mixed race       5.7

Other                 6.2                 46.2%

Note that White British are far from a majority even in their capital city.

Much more representative are the statistics for England and Wales from the same census.

White British    74.4

Other White      6.2                  80.6%

Asian British    9.3

Black British    4.0

Mixed race       2.9

Other               3.2                  19.4%

 

Viewed nationally, White British are in a substantial majority, as one might expect.

Last night I watched quiz night on BBC 2 (the BBC being reliably cutting edge on the betrayal of our country in my view). I enjoyed Mastermind, Only Connect and University Challenge compered skillfully by Clive Myrie, Victoria Coren Mitchell and Amol Rajan. These three are excellent and I am all for a meritocracy in broadcasting.

Yet I felt there was an elephant in the room. Let’s have Diversity but where are the Englishmen, the John Bull - Toby Jug- pub dartboard – Morris dancing Englishmen? Remember that statistic above, 74.4% no less. They may not be hugely talented in global terms but they deserve better in their own country than sink schools, useless public services, poor healthcare and crime-ridden streets. Let there be positive discrimination on their behalf, proper preparation for the world of work, a welcome to our better universities and their opportunities, the prospect of a decently paid career.

It is not too much to ask if we put our minds to it!

 

SMD

16.1.24

Text Copyright Sidney Donald 2024

LADIES FIRST

 

I tip-toe around this subject, as I have no wish to revive the battle of the sexes, and anyhow, half the world’s population is female and we all know how wonderful and talented most of them are.

From Cleopatra to the Hapsburg Empress Elizabeth (“Sissi”) and to Queen Victoria, ladies have enchanted and inspired us men, but it is only relatively recently that they have actually been in charge of affairs. We remember our past admiration for Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto and above all our revered idol Maggie Thatcher, who saved the UK

                         Romy Schneider as Sissi (1955)

But there has been a noticeable decline in wholly positive vibes in more recent years. Starting at the top in the UK, the esteemed Elizabeth II’s female successors include Charles’ Queen Camilla, Princess Kate and Andrew’s Duchess Fergie. All of them carry past baggage of varying weight and I cannot see the population warming to them easily.

 Some recent figures have been much more controversial. I am thinking of Angela Merkel (too tolerant of Russia), Liz Truss (a 30-day disaster), Hilary Clinton (losing even to Trump), Nicola Sturgeon (resigning as first Minister of Scotland in murky circumstances) and Jacinda Arden (New Zealand’s Queen of Woke). It is perhaps too early to take a dogmatic line - History will judge.

There are plenty aspiring ladies in the UK – Penny Mordaunt, Kemi Badenoch for the Tories, Angela Raynor and Rachel Reeves for Labour, not to mention US Presidential hopeful Nikki Hayley. But these people have not really been tested in very high office and only then can we judge their mettle.

The fact is that several high-flying ladies in the UK and US have come down with a bump recently:

1.       Alison Rose, Chief Executive of NatWest Bank. She broke her bank’s first requirement for client confidentiality by babbling to a reporter about the “de-banking” of right-wing politician Nigel Farage. Maybe her actions were animated by a compound of arrogance and political bias but Farage raised a stink and Rose lost her job.

 

2.       Paula Vennells, once head of the UK Post Office who presided over a grave miscarriage of justice affecting more than 700 employed as sub postmaster/postmistresses often in small town or village locations. The Post Office introduced in the late 1990s a new computer system bought from Fujitsu called Horizon. The cash would not balance in some cases, but the PO insisted there was nothing wrong and prosecuted many sub-postmasters with theft. Some suffered imprisonment, all lost their jobs and reputations. By 2010, it was discovered that Horizon had a computer glitch causing the imbalance. Quite when the PO management knew this, what they did about it, and how and when they advised ministers is not clear. Vennells has returned her CBE and apologised but that will hardly be enough. The luckless taxpayer will have to bear very high costs and the present Tory government has proposed a £600,000 compensation payment each to those affected. Senior PO officials and Fujitsu are being implicated, and in a delicious twist, LibDem leader, holier-than-thou Sir Ed Davey, is facing calls to resign. He was the Minister for Posts for 2 years and predictably did precisely nothing. Watch this space!

 

3.       Sharon White. Ended her term as chief executive of John Lewis, of department store and supermarket (Waitrose) fame. She is blamed for poor performance in an admittedly difficult sector, but critics say she drove a cherished brand into the ground with her misjudged policies.

 

4.       Claudine Gay. Appointed President of Harvard 5 months ago, she has been accused of several cases of academic plagiarism. Then she gave evasive evidence, along with the presidents of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, to a congressional committee about campus antisemitism. They refused to condemn calls for the genocide of the Jews, to public outrage. All 3 presidents have now had to resign. In her resignation statement, Gay airily stated she would return to her old academic duties at Harvard. The US has some peculiar rules about academic tenure and entitlement, but Gay has done serious damage to Harvard’s reputation.  I expect the new President of Harvard to throw her out on her ear.

 

What do these 4 cases prove? We may feel some unworthy Schadenfreude (pleasure at the misfortune of others) but that is inappropriate. 

Alison Rose

    

                                                       Claudine Gay

These cases simply prove that Women are as prone to error and misjudgment as Men. To that extent we are all truly equal (at least in the West), which is the conclusion we want to proclaim.

Don’t worry, Ladies, we love you more than ever!

 

SMD

10.01.24