A PRINCESS ON PARADE

On Monday we heard the long-awaited announcement that Prince Harry was engaged to marry  Meghan Markle, the American TV actress, divorced, of mixed American-African origin and, at 36, 3 years older than highly eligible Harry. Harry and Meghan appeared at a photo-call and then were interviewed by the BBC. Both performed well, talking in a relaxed fashion, clearly in love and Meghan was articulate, pretty and unsurprisingly complimentary about the Royal Family. Having already admitted relatively plebeian Kate Middleton, mixed race Meghan adds to the inclusive reach of the modern British monarchy. Good luck to them!

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle interviewed on their engagement

Meghan has the makings of a popular princess, poised and intelligent, but being a princess is not an easy job. Much of the historic problem lies with royal princesses being under-employed and limited in their social circle. A case in point was Princess Margaret (1930-2002), an attractive, if haughty, woman in her prime. She had a very protective childhood but was bright and musical. An unsuitable love for aide-de-camp Peter Townsend, an unwise marriage to bohemian Tony Armstrong-Jones and a foolish liaison with Roddy Llewellyn put paid to her popularity and after too many cigarettes and too much drink she died a sad liability to the Windsors.

Princess Margaret in 1960

It could have been different. Princess Alexandra has lived the life of a minor royal, for many years happily married, performing public duties with dignity. Princess Anne has displayed her real equestrian skills and is a busy, if rather dull, patron of charities, honorary colonel of regiments and opener of new hospital wings. Less dull is Princess Michael of Kent, of high birth from the German-Hungarian aristocracy, who champions Catholicism but whose indiscreet statements have earned her the epithet Princess Pushy. Our princesses are certainly a mixed bunch.

Princess Michael of Kent

Of course the great icon among British Princesses was Princess Diana who died 20 years ago. Born into the leading aristocratic Spencer family, her marriage to Prince Charles seemed to be a dream come true. But the marriage fell apart with dire faults on both sides, despite two fine sons. Diana was pretty enough to become a popular super-star, warmly outgoing to the sick and the under-privileged. She was erratic in many ways but her sudden death sparked off a tsunami of grief, which underlined the sentimentality bubbling in many British hearts.

Princess Di

A minority of the British are indifferent to, if not positively inimical to the Monarchy. Certainly the popularity of the Monarchy ebbs and flows as controversies arise, but at least at present its stock stands high. The cynical ones talk of the “royal soap-opera” and they moan and groan unconvincingly about the alleged high cost. The anti-monarchists are egged on by the Murdoch Press including the Times, the Guardian and the Independent, stalwarts too of the anti-Brexit clique.

There is of course an element of fantasy-fulfilment about our monarchy. It is truly extraordinary that a middle class student like Kate Middleton (aka Princess William of Cambridge) can capture the next-but-one heir to the throne – and make a good job of it. She will be joined by equally extraordinary Meghan Markle (soon aka Princess Harry of Sussex) who has captured a very senior royal and will radiate Californian sunshine. May the royals peacefully continue their symbolic duties and always surprise and delight us!

Princess Kate

Soon-to-be Princess Harry (Meghan)

SMD

29.11.17

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2017

OTHER TIMES, OTHER MANNERS

                                                        

It is a source of wonder to me how much the world has changed, how our habits have changed and how our attitudes have changed in my 75-year life time. The 1940s and 1950s seem an aeon away, the more mature 1960s to the 1990s are fondly remembered in an antiquarian spirit, while contemporary society is to me a jungle full of unexpected pitfalls, sharp disappointments and often total incomprehension, much enlivened by frequent hilarity. British historians will probably ignore the decades but instead define the post-war years by their landmarks; the Welfare State, the end of Empire, the Suez humiliation, the Beatles and Swinging Britain, the Thatcher Renaissance, the Financial Crisis and the Brexit referendum. But I will not sink into highfalutin’ analysis; how did we actually live?

3 types of Aberdeen tram in the 1940s

As a primary school-boy I paid a “ha’penny half” (viz. half an old penny at a child’s price) on an Aberdeen tram (I usually sat upstairs in the front of a No.4) to go to school. In the playground we would eat liquorice or chew on cinnamon sticks – sugar and sweets were tightly rationed. Entertainment emanated from the wireless – Dick Barton, special agent was unmissable, as was Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh and Have a Go with Wilfred Pickles. We would borrow our parents’ Bakelite 78rpm records and play them with scratchy needles on the gramophone, often Gracie Fields, Noel Coward or Edmundo Ros. Cinema-going was ingrained and we never tired of Abbott and Costello, Roy Rogers (with Trigger) or Johnny (Tarzan) Weissmuller. We were able to raid our own and our friends’ gardens and gorge ourselves on rhubarb, goose-berries or peas from the pod.

Sunday lunch was, and remained for years, a family ritual – no sloppy dressing and intelligent conversation was expected, although respectful silence was tolerated from me, the most junior member – requiring a juicy roast joint of beef or lamb with all the trimmings. Often Sunday afternoons involved a run in the car up Deeside or maybe just to the beach – anywhere as long as ice cream cones or my father’s “sliders” featured. The car was often a roomy but lumbering Humber though my mother would run a nippy Hillman, latterly two-toned to keep in fashion. My early memories include “trafficators”, rigid direction indicators pointing left or right before the advent of flashing lights. Trams, Sunday lunches, radio shows, stands of rhubarb and radiogram needles were all to be swept away.

My teenage years saw me at boarding school and university. The music blared from a tinny record-player with 33 1/3 and 45 rpm vinyl discs – an improvement but you still needed to change the stylus. We had discovered Elvis and many others but we were still deferential to elders and betters; indeed we dressed like schoolmasters with cavalry twill trousers and tweed jackets with elbow pads, usually sporting a tie. The more popular TV programmes were American, Sergeant Bilko, Burns and Allen or I Love Lucy, though Swinging Britain soon edged in. Fullers’ cakes were a treat, but institutional diets were biased towards brown Windsor soup, thin beef stews, steamed puddings and fried fish. Brought up on lemon sole and haddock, I could never understand the English enthusiasm for watery hake or far-from-fresh cod.

Spotted Dick and custard kept us going in the 1950s

I became familiar with the world of work in 1965, not before time. In those days workmen wore overalls, management wore suits. I came to the City in 1968 where management’s bowler hats were making their last stand but top hats were still ostentatiously sported by bill brokers as they trotted round the banks. The Bank of England itself was protected (1783-1973) by the nightly “picquet” of Guardsmen, a hoary relic of the Gordon Riots of 1780. The first company I visited as a banker was a heat treatment facility in Park Royal where men roasted in front of a furnace annealing heavy bars of metal. I later came to know well shirt makers for the Prince of Wales, manufacturers of typewriter carbon ribbon cassettes, letterpress printers, pub chains, warship builders, chemical and dyestuff manufacturers, chicken processors and auto-component engineers, among many others. Those businesses that still exist will have changed out of all recognition, just as Big Bang radically changed the atmosphere and practices of the City, mainly for the better.

The most radical change is probably the Digital Revolution which took off in the 1990s. When you recall the hassle of even making a long-distance call in the 1950s via the GPO system, the 2010s are a paradise. Easier communications, quick execution of transactions, roomfuls of records retained in a simple device and knowledge at one’s fingertips. Clerical and secretarial work has shrunk enormously (and with it many jobs) but new industries have been created and global opportunities opened up.

We have little option but to embrace change but we realise that there is a price. The supportive family network has been weakened with all members in their private worlds huddled over their laptop or smartphone, barely communicating with their parents or siblings. Family outings or shared enjoyments are much more difficult to organise – so many people now live alone and put a premium on their privacy. Longevity is a mixed blessing as good health cannot be maintained indefinitely. We need to take a conscious decision to socialise and participate in local activities – our social circles should always be expanding.

A whole digital world at our fingertips  

Yet we are living in a golden age. Our life has many comforts. Healthier, better fed and better paid than our ancestors, we have not experienced the horrors of world war nor the desolation of youthful bereavement. We can speak easily to friends in remote corners of the globe, we can travel to our imagined Shangri-La, we can meet and empathise with other races. Our nation is wealthy enough to care for all its citizens whatever their problems or handicaps and we can even aid faraway communities.

As the song goes Don’t Worry, Be Happy!

SMD

22.11.17

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2017

FOLLOW THE MONEY

“Nothing is certain except Death and Taxes” observed Benjamin Franklin and our seriously rich are much concerned with avoiding both. The Bill Gates Foundation, among others, finances cryogenics, research into the human algorithm and other challenges to mortality. A quest is under way to ensure that at least US billionaires can live forever (perish the thought!), while poor Joe Public accepts his limit these days of 4 score years and ten before he shuffles off his mortal coil.

Simultaneously an enormous industry is dedicated to tax avoidance in all its guises, harnessing the ingenuity of an army of smart lawyers and clever accountants. It will take some very slick genetic engineering to eliminate the defiant gene rebelling against paying any tax whatsoever, but taxes have to be raised somehow (but not from the super-rich, they seem to say). HMRC has smart people too and increasingly the ethical basis of tax avoidance is being questioned. To what extent is avoidance legitimate?

Bermuda, Paradise for tax avoidance

The problem has swollen greatly in the last 30 years as businesses becomes more global and electronic systems move billions at the blink of an eye. Maggie Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe dismantled Exchange Control in 1979, the deadweight preventing the development of the UK’s global economic ambitions. The 2007 Crisis and its dismal aftermath demonstrated how financial businesses could wildly misuse their freedoms but the intervening 28 years had allowed corporate and individuals’ incomes and their portfolios to be managed in a free-booting “tax-efficient” manner.

The time-honoured reaction to criticism of tax-dodging is to make the distinction between illegal tax evasion and legal tax avoidance. Evasion is usually a criminal offence but taxpayers clearly have the right to minimise their tax liabilities within the law and avoid unnecessary expense. And yet…….while avoidance may be allowable in a legal sense, there are legitimate issues over its present scale, the damage it does and its fairness within our society.

The scale of tax avoidance is truly eye-watering. American academics estimate that the equivalent of 10% of global GDP is held offshore by rich individuals via faceless corporate entities. The precise figures are hard to quantify accurately but the UK’s tax authority, HMRC, puts their country’s tax loss from legal avoidance at £35bn plus £6bn if illegal evasion is included.

HMRC fights bravely against this tsunami of shady dealing but it is outgunned by opponents with huge resources. Domestically there are some successes with loopholes being closed at every budget, but new ones are soon prised open. Legal judgements have been delivered helping the tax collectors notably the Ramsay principle (1982) when the House of Lords ruled that where a succession of preordained steps artificially delivers a tax advantage, the scheme will not be allowed, even if each step is legally admissible, if the overall effect is simply to avoid tax.  Bank confidentiality was once absolute but EU pressure and financial diplomacy has allowed the UK to share tax information with the EU, Switzerland and even Liechtenstein.

The UK is far from guiltless in this tax avoidance round-about as she tolerates special tax regimes for the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man; she also presides over the many offshore jurisdictions the world complains about in the British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies like Gibraltar, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands and the Turks and Caicos where huge wealth enjoys low, if any, tax. She is not alone as France shelters Monaco, Germany uses Switzerland and Luxembourg (hypocritical EU chief Juncker blessing sweet-heart tax deals while her Premier); the Irish Republic’s whole economic basis would be threatened if tax privileges were cut back, so dependent has she become on offshore entities operating there. The Netherlands coins it in hosting the world’s largest number of holding companies able to pay dividends offshore tax-free.

It hardly needs to be said that these avoidance structures damage the countries where the revenue and true profits are actually earned and logically where the bulk of the tax should be paid. The loss of tax revenue due to avoidance affects - all public services, all health spending, all subsidies for the poor, all infrastructure improvements – for the benefit of less than 1% of the population.

Fairness is a good test of a tax system and numerous leaks as of late have shone a bright light on many murky corners. The 2007 Falciani List of undeclared accounts at HSBC Geneva was followed up by the Lagarde List of other culprits: many were Greek and although the List was handed over, the corrupt Greek elite sat on this information and pursued nobody: the French claim they recovered €800m in unpaid tax.

In 2016, hacks on Panama offshore lawyers Mossack Fonseca reaped a huge harvest globally exposing the offshore manoeuvres of senior politicians in Pakistan, Iraq, Russia, Ukraine and Iceland among others. The ultimate sources of cash were mainly China, Russia and the UK and while the transactions were probably legal, the protagonists were highly secretive which in itself creates suspicion. Most recently a leak of information from Bermudan-based offshore law firm Appleby has highlighted activities of large entities like Apple, Glencore and Nike including aggressive avoidance schemes. Dozens of prominent people are also named, notably Trump fundraisers but also no less than H M The Queen whose Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall are active offshore. This may be good accountancy but it is rotten politics as the Windsors seek to avoid taxes levied in their own name!

Philip and Tina Green, laughing all the way to the bank

You do not have to be a red revolutionary or to be consumed by bitter envy to choke over the unfairness of these shenanigans. It is Robin Hood in reverse, robbing the poor to pay for the rich. Why do we tolerate a system which allows a rag-trade tycoon of mixed history like Sir Philip Green to organise his wife Tina to become a resident in Monaco, transfer ownership of his empire to her, held in a Jersey trust, and pay out a dividend of £1.2bn, mainly to her, entirely tax-free? It is excessive in business terms and obscene in social terms.

Tax avoidance can only be combatted on an international basis. Tax havens need to be shut down, new taxable income yardsticks established, new tax avoidance doctrines need to be developed and embraced legally; reforming governments must heed the growing swell of public opinion calling for an end to tax inequality based on one law for the super-rich and another for the rest. If some mogul rattles his begging-bowl and pinstripe-suited tax experts complain that they will lose their livelihood, I imagine “the barely managing” and the poor in the UK will chorus: “Well, ain’t that a shame!”

SMD

16.11.17

Text copyright © Sidney Donald 2017

FLIRTING WITH DANGER

Kipling told us that “the female of the species is more deadly than the male” and recent events at Westminster may have added credibility to that saying. We are told of a young woman’s knee being “almost” fondled in 2015, triggering off a cascade of demands that the alleged perpetrator be ejected from public life.  Ministers and back-benchers are being accused and condemned before the evidence has been forensically presented and the public is left to assume the official world is heavily populated by predatory males of the Casanova variety. The media of course are having a field-day.

I hesitate to draw general conclusions from this fracas and from the concurrent revelations about show-biz misbehaviour. Parliament is its own closed world, rightly given many privileges, but it is wildly untypical of normal domestic life. Members of Parliament are often from the ranks of the abrasive, the unscrupulous and the self-regarding so that type is over-represented. Bored to tears by the committee stage of some obscure legislation, depressed by the neo-Gothic, quasi-ecclesiastical gloom of their surroundings, they stumble into the oasis of the Members Bar. If they can elbow past the SNP members, apparently almost permanent fixtures at this watering-hole, they can booze away cheaply and after, say, their sixth shot, inevitably their true character comes to the fore and the ladies should run for cover. Pumped up by the booze and by their ineffable self-importance, they easily believe they have a divine right to exercise droit du seigneur upon young (and even the not-so-young) women in Westminster.

Show business is another closed world whose antics are Byzantine. Actors, male and female, are for ever seeking better parts (or even a first role) and will literally do anything to secure their goals. Those with the power to dispense patronage are an irresistible magnet to the profession. “The casting couch” is rightly a by-word and a few squalid moments may be all that is necessary to get that part. Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey probably did behave disgracefully and crudely - they may be candidates for police investigation. Nobody is deeply shocked by this kind of behaviour by “artistes” – nothing better is expected, however much indignation is generated.

Politicians and actors are not regarded as role models but the life-style of the leading lights in their profession is often enviable. It probably does not help this delicate situation that the leading light in global politics is none other than Donald J. Trump, 45^th President of the USA. He cannot be looked upon as a role model as his groping predilections are well documented and his locker-room opinions on women have embarrassed him and his family. An oaf, a blowhard and an ignoramus, Trump is not qualified to inject an element of decency into the debate, which his predecessor Barack Obama actually could.

Flirting is innocent

The great majority of citizens behave in a relatively civilised way. In the workplace sexual advances are restricted by the hierarchy required in any business. Predatory bosses are rare and, if power-mania afflicts them, these days there will normally be some kind of complaints procedure to deter them. Out-of-hours dalliances are no doubt widespread, but there we are talking about the actions of “consenting adults in private” which is not the law’s business. Date-rape, indecency and violence are clearly against the law and the police and courts can dispense justice to victims.

More difficult to avoid is the cloud of innuendo and pre-judgement surrounding these matters. The “perpetrators” may be unpleasant people without many supporters and the “victims” may be fantasists with an axe to grind. Hard evidence of the truth can be elusive, and accusations must be tested.

How sad it would be if a young man pursuing a “cracker” finds that she is an explosive firework in disguise, responding to his conventional wooing with wild assertions, complaints and law-suits. Boy- meets- girl is a human rite of passage – it does not need parliamentary approval, whatever noisy Amber Rudd may want. Self-righteous lectures from Ruth Davidson, Yvette Cooper, Caroline Lucas and Nicola Sturgeon are not welcome and merely encourage a busy-body political culture. Of course the physical and psychological integrity of all women and all men should be defended – that is a given – but witch-hunts, hysteria and lynch-mobs can have no place in a civilised society. Let’s calm down!

SMD

8.11.17

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2017

MELLOW AUTUMN

Autumn Flowers

Autumn in essence is the climax and culmination of the year providing the crowning glory to what has come before. The sadness and elegiac tone is not to be overdone; the colours, the textures the aromas and the sheer vitality of autumn are beyond compare. English Autumn and American Fall are celebratory firework displays making us happy to be alive and allowing us a rest before a New Year calls us for new effort and fresh challenges. John Donne struck the right note:

No Spring nor Summer beauty hath such grace

As I have seen on one autumnal face.

We celebrate this delightful time in all sorts of ways, in poetry, in music, in painting and by simple observation of the natural world about us. Keats’ Ode to Autumn is apparently the most anthologised of all poems but surely its high diction cannot be condemned as hackneyed:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

I am old-fashioned enough to prefer the clear recitation by that great actor Robert Donat, who recorded many of Keats’ works, and whose classic tones fit the piece exactly.

https://robert-donat.com/listen/

The glorious foliage of New England in The Fall is one of the great sights of the US, refreshing, inspiring and humbling.

The Beauty of New England, USA

The great event of Autumn is the harvest, that joyous culmination of hard farming work and Nature’s fecundity. Nowadays the event is taken for granted, mechanisation sparing much of the sweat, and we look back nostalgically to earlier times:

The Harvesters by Pieter Breughel the Elder (1565)

Harvest was a time for celebration, for Hallowe’en parties, for church Harvest Festivals for Thanksgiving, making autumn a happy few months.

Harvest Time by John Atkinson (1910s)

Autumn is of course honoured in the charming Baroque chamber music of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, composed in Venice in 1723. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z21_VpNipfg

Popular music enjoyed The Autumn Leaves, originally a French song, made famous in English by the incomparable voice of Nat “King” Cole in 1950. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEMCeymW1Ow

Heady autumn eventually gently passes. How much we loved walking in wellies through a carpet of fallen leaves, smelling damp earth and incipient woodland decay. As autumn draws to an end we soon participate in the solemnity of Remembrance. In England the highlight is the wreath-laying and march-past at the Cenotaph in Whitehall. This year the Queen, though present, will delegate her wreath-laying duties to Prince Charles, a reminder that she is in her autumn years. The grey-coated Guards will line the ceremonial routes and the massed bands will play their utterly poignant and patriotic music, including a military version of Purcell’s Dido’s Lament.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3wAarmPYKU

The massed bands at The Cenotaph

Autumn’s disappearance is gradual, weather dependent but inevitable. Do not despair, this golden season will be back next year in all her glory.

Late-flowering blue-purple Asters

SMD

5.11.17

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2017