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,