Culture and anarchy

Jean Nouvel's Philharmonie de Paris

Jean Nouvel's Philharmonie de Paris, though currently running at twice its projected budget, has been judged too far advanced to cancel or modify by the new government of Francois Hollande, which is casting a crtitical eye over the previous government's grands projets.

Public space

The Shard

"Renzo Piano's creation, the tallest building in western Europe, finally opens its 69th-floor viewing platform to the public – at £25 a ticket. What does that buy you? Digital telescopes, jokey panels sending up famous London dwellers (George Orwell installing CCTV cameras, Karl Marx and Margaret Thatcher on a tandem), and of course views stretching for 40 miles."

We have learnt a thing or two in the past several decades. Owen Luder's now demolished, much reviled, and featured in Get Carter Gateshead Trinity Square carpark included a restaurant on the top - which was never used, because of technical problems and a lack of commercial interest.

The good ship Venus

It's a yacht - for the late Steve jobs, by Philippe Starck, building costs (and design fee) almost one third under budget. "Yacht: a light piratical vessel; a light fast sailing ship esp. for the conveyance of royal or other important persons; later a vessel usu. light and comparatively small, for cruising."

When the market picks up... 2

Birmingham Central Library

"A minority of people [support the library] but it's very easy for them to make comments when they carry no responsibility for the economic viability of the area." Clive Dutton, Birmingham City Director of Planning and Regeneration.

Wher I live in West Dorset the chief officer of the local planning authority is jnown as the Director of Environment: planning it seems is a Cinderella for those charged with responsibility for its execution.

"I have never been very certain as to the value of tangible links with the past. They are often more sentimental than valuable... As to Birmingham's buildings, there is little of real worth in our architecture. Its replacement should be an improvement... As for future generations, I think they will be better occuppied in applying their thoughts and energies to forging ahead, rather than looking backwards." Herbert Manzoni, Birmingham City Engineer, responsible for the reconstruction (regeneration?) of the city in the 1960s.



The new library, by Mecanoo, on a separate site



Sommeil des mages

Was that it?

So the world did not end.

Or perhaps it did. Not with a bang but a whimper, as T S Eliot, now almost proverbially, said, now almost a century ago.

The computer connects more slowly; the teapot dribbles; the fire gutters in the grate; the milk sours; the car's battery barely turns over the engine; dawn comes late.



Jon : How will it be, this end of which you have spoken, Brother Enim?


Omnes: Yes, how will it be?

Peter : Well, it will be, as 'twere a mighty rending in the sky, you see, and the mountains shall sink, you see, and the valleys shall rise, you see, and great shall be the tumult thereof.

Jon : Will the veil of the temple be rent in twain?

Peter : The veil of the temple will be rent in twain about two minutes before we see the sign of the manifest flying beast-head in the sky.

Alan : And will there be a mighty wind, Brother Enim?

Peter : Certainly there will be a mighty wind, if the word of God is anything to go by...

Dudley : And will this wind be so mighty as to lay low the mountains of the earth?

Peter : No - it will not be quite as mighty as that - that is why we have come up on the mountain, you stupid nit - to be safe from it. Up here on the mountain we shall be safe - safe as houses.

Alan : And what will happen to the houses?

Peter : Well, naturally, the houses will be swept away and the tents of the ungodly with them, and they will all be consuméd by the power of the heavens and on earth - and serve them right!

Alan : And shall we be consumed?

Peter : Con..sum..éd? No, we shall not be consuméd - we shall be up on the mountain here, you see, while millions burn, having a bit of a giggle.

Jon : When will it be, this end of which you have spoken?

Omnes : Aye, when will it be - when will it be?

Peter : In about thirty seconds time, according to the ancient pyramidic scrolls... and my Ingersoll watch.

Jon : Shall we compose ourselves, then?

Peter : Good plan, Brother Pithy. Prepare for the End of the World! Fifteen seconds...

Alan : Have we got the tinned food?

Dudley : Yes.

Peter : Ten seconds...

Jon : And the tin-opener?

Dudley : Yes.

Peter : Five - four - three - two - one - Zero!

Omnes : (Chanting) Now is the end - Perish The World!

A pause



Peter : It was GMT, wasn't it?

Jon : Yes.

Peter : Well, it's not quite the conflagration I'd been banking on. Never mind, lads, same time tomorrow... we must get a winner one day.

Guys with guns

I know nothing about guns, have never touched, let alone fired, one, and never had any desire to. Yet it strikes me, at first sight, as odd that even in a society like the US, for all its history, there are so many guns in private hands - apparently there approaching an average of one for every man, woman, child and old age pensioner. No doubt quite a few people don't possess one - and quite a few people possess several, or even many. No doubt quite a few guns are never fired. No doubt many gun owners, whatever their abstract fears and feelings about their rights, never in practice find themselves threatened by burglars or bears or the storm troopers of oppressive government.

The array, number and variety of guns available to the consumer seems to be vast and the sophistication of some weapons beyond any actual need. It seems to me that they may be a little like smart phones, in that they are things that people actually like to handle, almost compulsively, even if at the time they have no particular need to do anything with them. There is a satisfaction in touching, in running through the features and capabilities of the object, in having the latest version. The more features it has, or could have, the more satisfying it is. The naming of parts. So many guns.

Corrections and clarifications - maybe

no individual - certainly not those in any senior position - is held to serious account in a way that discomforts them

Today it is reported that two former employees of UBS have been charged in the US over Libor manipulation.

The tool bar death of the universe

I am in a position to reveal that the Mayans were right, though not in the way they thought, and that the universe will end tomorrow. It comes about as computer users find they have installed so much additional hardware and and so many programs that the accompanying new toolbars have totally obscured their screens and all they can do is to connect to Facebook and check the weather in multiple ways.

When the market picks up...

Preston bus station

The mark of the idiot

UBS corrupt payments exposed as bank pays £940m to settle Libor claims
...on 18 September 2008 a trader explained to a broker: "If you keep 6s [ie, the six-month Japanese yen Libor rate] unchanged today ... I will fucking do one humongous deal with you ... Like a 50,000 buck deal, whatever ... I need you to keep it as low as possible ... if you do that .... I'll pay you, you know, 50,000 dollars, 100,000 dollars... whatever you want ... I'm a man of my word."

It becomes tedious to highlight reports such as these, it becomes the mark of the idiot who has no place under this amazing panoply of corruption, greed and veniality, where the perpetrators apparently feel no necessity to hide their doings, where they subborn the very language of the ethics they betray, where no individual - certainly not those in any senior position - is held to serious account in a way that discomforts them, where corporations may be 'fined' but are beyond the criminal law, where men of substance and leaders of nations can hardly be unaware of what lies beneath their feet and into which the latter comfortably descend on their retirement from public office.

Two nations

“Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.”
“You speak of — ” said Egremont, hesitantly. “ THE RICH AND THE POOR.”

Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil (1845)

Disraeli in 1878 by Cornelius Jabez Hughes

Disraeli's novel was set in the then present day. Published in 1845, the same year as Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, it's action takes place in the years 1837-44. The words quoted, and that phrase 'two nations', and the consequent notion of 'one-nation' politics that has resounded, one way or another in the Tory party and English politics since, right down to Ed Miliband's recent speech, were put in the mouth of Walter Gerard, father of Sybil and a working-class radical, but there is no doubt that they carry, to a large extent, the author's endorsement.

Disraeli, First Earl of Beaconsfield, was the British Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1850s and 60s, leader of the Conservative Opposition in the late 60s and early 703, and Prime Minister in 1868 and from 1874 to 1880. His policial career yoyo-ed with that of William Gladstone, leader of the Liberal Party. Queen Victoria much preferred Disraeli to the dourer moralist, Gladstone.

It is a long time since a British Prime-Minister to be wrote serious literary novels (or, perhaps, even read them: Harold Macmillan said he liked to 'take a little Trollope to bed' with him), but it is difficult to imagine any modern politician, even one sincerely convinced, uttering such social commentary so vividly. Ed Milliband certainly did not meet Disraeli's standard.

Disraeli was hardly the modern idea of a social paragon. As a young man he engaged in financial speculation was was ruined in his early 20s by the collapse of a South American mining bubble. he in fact returned to literature to try, with limited success, to recoup his financial fortunes (but was rather more than the Jeffery Archer of his times, on several considerations). Financial embarrasment plagued him until his marriage to a rich widow, twelve years older than he, in 1839. Though initially based on expediency, the marriage grew to be deeply affectionate. In earlier years, before he entered parliament, his dubious relations with woment, in the words of his biographer, Lord Blake, contributed to "the understandable aura of distrust which hung around his name for so many years".

Disraeli's social consciousness, though vivid and real, did not mean that, at the time of the great Reform Acts of the nineteenth century (how the word 'reform' has by comparison become debased to petty political partisanship in our own time), he was liberal in his political view or deviated from an idea of society in which justice and harmony were established by mutual respect and fulfilment of obligations between the classes rather than by equality.

Disraeli was of Jewish origin, but his parents were non-observant and he was baptisted in the Christian religion at the age of twelve and remained a practising Anglican throughout his life. Nevertheless, his obvious Jewishness hampered, though clearly did not thwart, his political career. It is difficult to imagine in our supposedly more inclusive and enlightened age someone so obviously Jewish, almost architypically so in appearance, becoming leader of one of our main political parties and Prime Minister.

An emperor in the hand is worth two peasants in the bush

"Enlighteners hoped for a benevolent despot who would take their advice and enforce enlightened policies from above. Voltaire placed such hopes in Frederick the Great, Diderot in Catherine the Great. It must be said that Joseph II had little interest in the philosophes. Although he met many of them, including Buffon, d'Alembert, Grimm and Turgot in Paris in 1777, it was well known that on his return journey through Switzerland he passed the gates of Ferney without calling on Voltaire, even though the latter was expecting him, had arranged a diner party in his honour, and placed peasants in the trees to provide an ovation. It may well be that in general Enlighteners' hopes of obtaining the prince's ear and influencing policy were more or less fantastic."

Ritchie Robertson, 'Freemasons vs Jesuits: Conspiract theories in Enlightenment Germany', Times Literary Supplement, 12 October 2012

Furniture apocalypse

Final luxury

It seems cutting edge furniture design is not going to survive the end of the world, to judge from this picture of the interior of a 'luxury' survival bunker now selling like hot cakes from California to New York, as people brush down their dubious interpretations of the Mayan calendar.

Hot cakes are not going to do too well either, as the bunker is reported to have a mini fridge and microwave but 'little other space for food preparation' and only a small dining area. Presumably there won't be much time (or need?) for eating once the world ends. But the lucky survivors will still be able to watch their favourite tv programmes.

It's just sour grapes on my part.

The onion strikes back

Large

Is the onion the only organism that is skin through and through? Skin deep, as one might say.

Time was when peeling an onion was a struggle with several hard thick, tough inedible layers, which  elaborated their defence by being part inedible and part edible as one penetrated lower.

'Modern' onions (mostly it seems grown in Egypt - has unrest there provided yet another opportunity for commodity traders?) have clearly been bred (the edict must have gone out from the minarets of Tesco and Sainsbury) to have just one thin, distinct, disposable outer skin. But the process has gone too far and the skin is so thin it is difficult to detach from the next layer down except by tedious scraping.

Soak the rich

Our deputy prime minister and leader of the fast fading Liberal Democrat party, anxious to differentiate himself from his coalition government partner the Conservative party, proposes that universal benefits for old people should be means tested.

It is impossible, he says, to justify giving free bus passes to multimillionaires. I am sure the common man will cheer when all the multimillionaires are turned of the Number 39 and that the Treasury coffers and bus company receipts will boom prodigiously.

With political debate of this quality from our leaders we need not fear. No doubt Mr Clegg would say he is just using a colourful expression to catch the voters' attention, but the effect is to embed a proposal in the political agenda, from which it then becomes difficult to remove it, without consideration of its actual practicality or specific effects, a tactic increasingly favoured by government politicians when proposing ideas with little public endorsement that require them to take what they are fond of describing, in a self-congratulatory way, as 'difficult decisions', by which they mean decisions likely to be unpopular, although usually with people who would not have voted for them anyway.

UK gun control

The British Bill of Rights of 1689 restored the 'ancient right' to bear arms to Protestants that had been removed from them by the Catholic monarch, James II. The bill made that right "suitable to their condition and degree, and such as are allowed by law". It would perhaps in modern times be difficult to determine what kind of arms was suitable to any particular person’s ‘condition or degree’. I do not believe the question in practice arises since the common law right to bear arms (of any sort – even knife blades over three inches in length may not be carried in public now without reasonable cause) has always been subject to restriction by statute law, which has accumulated considerably. There were several acts in the 19th century that limited it, mainly aimed at, but not solely applicable to, Highlanders, vagrants and poachers: it must have been thought that their ‘condition or degree’ was not entirely self-evident in this matter. More widely applicable restrictive legislation was passed in 1903, 1920 and 1937. Those acts did not have criminals solely in mind. The 1968 act was a general codifying act that introduced further restrictions. Further legislation was introduced after horrific shooting incidents here, at Hungerford in 1988 and Dunblane in 1997. The result was to make this country one of the most restrictive of the right to bear firearms of any in the world and there was more legislation in 2006.

So strict is the legislation that the government had to allow special dispensation for the sports shooting events of the 2002 Commonwealth Games and the 2012 Olympic Games. It is actually illegal for sports pistol shooters to train in the UK.

All this must sound strange to many transatlantic ears, but there is remarkably little pressure here even from shooters and their organisations for significant relaxation of the law, and general public opinion apparently favours even greater control. The general US refusal to countenance legal restrictions on firearms is a topic of some fascination, and incomprehension, on this side of the Atlantic, even though we here have, in principle, a similar 'constitutional' right to 'bear arms' of our own.
Fully and semi-automatic weapons (often the focus of debate in other countries) are completely banned in the UK. No firearm can be bought or owned without being specifically licensed on a firearms certificate, for which the police must be satisfied in each case that the owner has good reason to possess that particular firearm and that he or she will not create a public danger. Shotguns are less strictly controlled and are quite commonly founf ein rrual communities but they must be capable of holding no more than three cartridges. Self defence is no longer regarded as a possible good reason for owning a firearm. Virtually no-one would dream of arguing that an individual's need to protect themselves from an over-mighty state could be regarded as good reason - either in general or, certainly, in particular. Ironically it could, I think, be argued that, although the meaning of the second amendment is disputed in the US, historically the British right to bear arms is theoretically more of a right counterbalancing state power, but that is certainly not an active issue in the UK.

The use and possession of firearms by criminals nevertheless remains a public concern, but, whether or not it is because of this legal framework, the UK has one of the lowest gun homicide rates in the world: in relation to population it is almost 43 times less than in the USA and 3 times less than in Germany. Most police are also unarmed and shooting fatalities of the police are also extremely rare: there were 3 in the ten years from 2000/01. However, armed police are becoming a more common sight, especially in locations thought to be vulnerable to terrorism - to the distress of some sections of society. So far surveys of rank and file police officers have found a majority opinion opposed to their routine arming with guns.
There have been a few cases of police shooting people either unnecessarily or entirely mistakenly, and they have attracted considerable public concern. One such case where the police appear to have been over-zealous or precipitate in shooting a criminal suspect has been the subject of inquiry that concluded in the past few days that the man was killed unlawfully. Such a case is not unprecedented but prosecutions, or even disciplinary sanctions, of indiividual officers seldom, if ever ensue. Such incidents, as wen a few years ago an innocent man was shot and killed by police as he left a public house because they assumed the wrapped-up table leg he was carrying was a firearm, provoke significant public concern, possibly fuelled by an apprehension that UK policing may be headed in an unwelcome 'American' direction.

Facts on the ground

According to at least one UK newspaper, president Obama in Newtown issued the "strongest call for change in gun policy of any political leader in a generation", but he did so without once uttering the words 'gun' or 'control'. A representative of one US gun-owners' group interviewed on BBC radio opined that legal restrictions on gun availability were not only unneccessary (with the expected idea that it is people not guns that kill people) but completely impracticable - impracticable not just because largely unfettered gun ownership is widely held to be a constitutional right, but simply because there are too many millions of guns (almost as many guns in private ownership as the population of the country) and gun owners for restrictions to be implemented. What is needed, he said, is better mental health treatment.

So guns join the growing mountain of facts on the ground, whether on the arid soil of the middle east or in the verdant pastures of the financial industry: Things which oppress the rights or enjoyment of others but which, whatever their merits or demerits, are beyond the community's judgement or remedy.

There is, I think, a growing tendency for people not to bother to defend what are said to be injusticies but simply to say they exist and are not going to be changed - and so there is no point in discussing them. It is the mentality of that ugly internet injunction to 'get over it'. It is a tendency also, it seems to me, extending to future rather as well as existing situations: we can do it and so we shall. It is something which, as a blatantly explicit rationale, we have been, in western societies at least, unaccustomed to in post-war years,

The long arm of the law 4

Orgreave, Yorkshire, 1984

Mick Antoniw, Assembly Member for Pontypridd, is also pushing for an inquiry, noting that in relation to Orgreave: "No action was taken against the police in respect of fabrication of evidence or the attempt to pervert the course of justice."


Vera Baird, police and crime commissioner for the Northumbria area, said her experience as a barrister during the strike suggested that potentially there were hundreds of cases where police might have perverted the course of justice. She herself dealt with two or three cases a week during the strike, many involving "invented allegations, copied notebooks and allegations from officers that weren't even at the scene".


Baird, solicitor-general during the last Labour government, who represented a number of miners at Orgreave who were acquitted after police tampered with evidence, said: "It was scandalous. There were an awful lot of cases."



"At Orgreave in 1984, police officers on horseback and on foot were filmed beating picketing miners with truncheons, but South Yorkshire police claimed the miners had attacked them first, and prosecuted 95 men for riot and unlawful assembly, which carried potential life sentences. All 95 were acquitted after the prosecution case collapsed following revelations in court that police officers’ statements had been dictated to them in order to establish evidence of a riot, and one officer’s signature on a statement had been forged."

Forgive and remember

Professor Stephen Hawkin and ten other eminent personages, many I expect replete with honours themslves, urge the government formally to pardon (I suppose formally it would be done in the name of the Queen) the late Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician, Second World War code-breaker, and 'father of the modern computer', who was convicted of 'gross indecency' (code for practising homosexuality) a few years after the end of the war, suffered hormone therapy intended to 'correct' his sexuality and committed suicide.

Much as one finds Turing's treatment and suffering appalling, much as one recognises his brilliance and service to his country and fellow citizens, much as one recognises that, ahd he been living now, he would have received official honours and perhaps private wealth, rather than prosecution and forcible medical treatment, one wonders. Would this new measure be a symbol or an exception? Is it intended that all who were in the past properly, according to the laws and procedures of the time, convicted for things that are no longer offences or generally even regarded as morally reprehensible should be pardoned? Perhaps such an act of parliament could be framed, but I doubt there would be much public or political interest in it. Lord Grade, who drated the letter to the Daily Telegraph, has suggested a more general extension, but only apparently to those convicted of homosexual offences. Yet it is the individual on whom the focus now rests. Is this, if it succeeds, intended to be a measure in lieu, to be a symbol of such general pardon? Or is such treatment to be a posthumous honour extended only to deceased unfortunates who clear some hurdle of fame, celebrity or achievement? 

We have a surfeit of honours already and their credit is not improved by elaboration. (Recently one or two have even had to be vomitted up in a fit of public indigestion.) Why should the repute, the peace or the honour of the late Alan Turing depend upon state recognition? A few years ago our then prime minister, Gordon Brown, said he was 'proud' to extend a personal 'apology' to Turing - apologies (at least for misdeeds sufficiently remote in the past) being more in political vogue than pardons. It seems to me there may have been a little moral confusion there - should one not rather than being proud to offer the apology (for what others did) confess to shame for having to say it? I suppose pride and shame are actually inseparable and the failure to recognise it is what is wrong with our 'honours system'.

Does anybody doubt that the state did much in the past (not to mention the present) of which any honourable person would now be ashamed?

The long arm of the law 3

Ministers have agree to pay more than £2m to the family of a prominent Libyan dissident abducted with the help of MI6 and secretly flown to Tripoli where he was tortured by the security police of the former dictator Muammar Gaddafi.


The Saadi family had accepted a settlement of £2.23m, the high court heard on Thursday. The government paid the sum by way of compensation and without admitting any liability.

Evidence of the UK's role in the operation – believed to be the only case where an entire family was subjected to "extraordinary rendition" – came to light after Gaddafi's fall in 2011.

CIA correspondence with Libyan intelligence, found in the spy chief Moussa Koussa's office in Tripoli by Human Rights Watch, states: "We are … aware that your service had been co-operating with the British to effect [Saadi's] removal to Tripoli … the Hong Kong government may be able to co-ordinate with you to render [Saadi] and his family into your custody."

The operation was arranged in 2004 at the time of Tony Blair's "deal in the desert" with Gaddafi, after which UK intelligence services helped track down and hand over his opponents.

Another Libyan victim was Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who was rendered alongside his pregnant wife. A letter from the MI6 head of counter-terrorism Sir Mark Allen to Koussa, also found in Tripoli, said: "I congratulate you on the safe arrival of [Belhaj]. This was the least we could do for you and for Libya. I know I did not pay for the air cargo [but] the intelligence [on him] was British."

The long arm of the law 2

David Cameron has apologised to the family of the murdered Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane and agreed that there was state collusion between police officers and soldiers and his loyalist killers...

One of the security force whistleblowers in the Finucane case, the ex-military intelligence officer Ian Hurst, who belonged to a secretive army unit running agents inside the UDA, said there was little chance of either police or military handlers or their loyalist informers facing the courts. He has faced charges of breaching the Official Secrets Act for leaking information about the role of army intelligence in running agents within the UDA who committed crimes including the targeting of Finucane.

The long arm of the law

It's official: big banks are beyond the law:

The department spared HSBC a criminal prosecution only because it considered the bank too big to prosecute. Listing a catalogue of mistakes by HSBC over almost a decade, the DoJ admitted that "collateral consequences" were a factor in its decision not to pursue criminal charges. Those consequences, it said, could have included a ban on doing business in the US, resulting in huge job losses.

Corporations are 'regulated'; private citizens are prosecuted; senior executive are (once in a while) deprived of their honours (but not their pensions).

Who needs a haircut?

More Slough now

We seem to have a Government here full of junior ministers (and some senior) who specialise in bright wheezes. the latest comes from one Nick Boles, scion of privilege, comfort and rural preservation, who has announced, "All we need to do is build on another 2-3% of land and we'll have solved a housing problem."

His intervention arouses both horror and approval from different sections of society. The applauding commercial interests look over their shoulders to the comforting (to their ambitions rather than their actual sales expectations) existence of large numbers of people who cannot find afford to buy a house.

There seems to be an assumption that planning is largely responsible for what gets built, in the sense of it being the author of development. That is surely not so. It acts as a constraint on commercial and individual development proposals. It tries to determine where they do or do not get built and (to some extent) what form they take and what they look like but it doesn't draw up development proposals itself. It was only introduced when the country came to have so much built development and so much of it was detrimental that it could no longer be regarded as a sponge large enough to soak up all the damage.

Of course much of what we now value in towns and country was built without any planning controls, but one can hardly deny that an awful lot that we deplore was as well. Those thinking of just turning back the clock should look at rural development in Texas, where there are no planning controls outside city territory. I have seen it. It does not enhance the landscape; it is not durable; it does not benefit the poor or people of modest means - and exactly as Andrew Motion points out it is a common good lost for ever for the benefit of the relatively priviliged (despite the fact that the building is not going to last long).

The reasons why housing is unaffordable are a complex mix of economic, commercial, social and cultural factors. The idea that the problem is simply that the 'planners' will not allow development is mistaken and the government suggestion that all we need to do is allow X million more houses to be built by commercial developers (with a diminishing requirement for a few 'affordable' houses to be included). - anywhere, anyhow - will benefit commercial developers, landowners, wealthy would-be residents of the countryside, before it does anything to help low-income people who cannot afford to build a house.

I think planning at local authority level is often muddle headed, verbose and intellectually and politically corrupt. Not totally so, but it desperately needs qualitative improvement. The idea that the solution is to throw it out the window makes me weep. Leave it to commercial interests - they will fix it - like they've fixed everything else around us. Yes, a few enterprising individuals might get to self-build their individual houses somewhere which might be valuable contributions to the built environment, but at what cost to the rest of society? We have multiple social problems.