Paris (version française)

Je me suis réveillé ce matin et je trouve plusieurs mises à jour sur Facebook qui demandent pourquoi les attentats de Paris reçoivent autant d'attention quand les choses semblables se passent ailleurs avec une fréquence choquante. La vie humaine n'est pas soumis à une sorte de taux de change entre les pays, mais je ne pense pas honnêtement que cela est le sentiment que l'on veut exprimer.  En fait, ce sentiment est la chose qui motivent ces attaquants - un désir de faire descendre le monde entier au même niveau effroyable, comme si ça preuve un principe.

La France est un pays que j'adore. Oui, de temps en temps je pense qu'elle est peuplé entièrement par des gens difficiles mais je l'habitais, j'ai visité un certain nombre de ses régions souvent et j'admire la façon dont elle a produit une société culturellement riche et diversifiée qui valorise les libertés des individus . Elle a parfois fait cela d'une manière différente de mon propre pays, mais ça marche en tous les deux. Aucun d'entre eux est parfait (où est le pays parfait?) et elles ont des histoires ensanglantes qui ne doivent pas être passé sous silence, mais le moins que nous puissions faire (le jour de l'Armistice a été juste la semaine dernière) est chérir la paix et la stabilité qui est maintenant en place.

La France est un pays qui incarne la civilisation, et l'Etat Islamique déteste ce fait. Si cela est affaiblie, il n'y a aucun espoir pour les pays comme le Liban et le Yémen, car ils ont rien à viser.

Paris

I've woken up to find a number of Facebook updates that ask why the Paris attacks are receiving so much attention when similar things happen elsewhere with sickening frequency.  Human life is not subject to some kind of exchange rate between countries, but I don't honestly think that is what is intended.  In fact, that is one of the very things that motivate these attackers - a desire to drag everywhere down to the same appalling level, as if to prove a point.

France is a country I love.  Yes, there are times when I think it is populated by a sixty-million member awkward squad but I have lived there, visited a number of its regions frequent times and admire how it has produced a culturally rich and diverse society that values individuals' freedoms.  It has sometimes done this in a different way to my own country, but they both work.  Neither of them are perfect (where is?) and have bloodied histories that should not be glossed over, but the least we can do (Armistice Day was only last week) is treasure the peace and stability that is now in place.

France is a country that exemplifies civilisation, and that is what ISIL despise.  If that is undermined, then there is no hope for the likes of Lebanon and Yemen, because they have nothing to aim for.

Votes for women (and other postcode lotteries)

I’ve seen “Suffragette” twice in the last week.  I know that the way British cinema operates accounts for a few decisions – the casting of Meryl Streep and Carey Mulligan should prevent any bad Hollywood remakes. There are one or two historical cheats, including one that did rankle, where Sonny (Ben Wishaw’s character) and Maud (Carey Mulligan) discuss what it means to have the vote – that Maud would use her vote just the same way Sonny uses his.  The 1912 truth is that Sonny, as a man who owns no property, would be just as vote-less as his wife.

On the whole, it’s a solidly well-made film that pitches things about right for a modern audience, my daughters as well as myself or my wife, and I’m glad that the UK film industry can still produce historical drama with political relevance without just leaving this sort of thing to Ken Loach.

The film ends with a list of when various countries enabled women to vote.  After I visited the Middle East for the first time last year, one of my aunts in Liverpool told me that most of the powers that women have in the West are only two generations old, or three at most.  Another opportunity to work for a few days out in the Persian Gulf has just come in, this time to give a training course, and guess what?

The letter detailing the job requested that male candidates need apply.

I took this to the Athena SWAN representative in my department, and she expressed no surprise at all – The Times and the Daily Telegraph* had run a story on another UK institution actually paying different accommodation allowances to men and women in Qatar a few weeks earlier.  It all reminded me of a confrontation at my former employers twenty years ago when only men were being sent to jobs in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, even if some of my most able colleagues were women.  Ultimately, my current employer cannot climb onto a particularly high horse over this one, as none of the engineering academics are women anyway.  (The Athena SWAN rep herself is a physicist).

If you are a woman and you’re actually reading my blog, can you please consider an engineering career?  We’re all quite friendly, and the whiff of testosterone is nothing like as strong as it is in financial trading.  Once there’s enough of you in this particular workplace then you’ll be rather hard to ignore.

Thank you.

*I’ll link to the Daily Telegraph rather than The Times here, because of the paywall and because, well, Murdoch.

Q: Are we not (Scots)Men? A: We are Devo (Max)

This Thursday I am to vote in a referendum that decides if Scotland becomes an independent country or not.  Patriotic sentiment has nothing to do with this as I did not live here until I was 26.

Oil changes everything doesn’t it?  A Scottish campaign to separate from the UK has run for decades, but the discovery of North Sea Oil did much to make it realistic.  It means a division into two countries of more or less equal wealth, unlike other independence campaigns within Europe.  France could easily lose Corsica behind the sofa and not even notice.  However, Spain would be economically doomed without the Basque Country and Catalonia.

It’s the European front where Scotland has its biggest gamble.  I’ve never voted for the Conservative Party in my life, but I’ll concede that they have always been better at handling the EU than Labour.  Not any more – the Conservative fear of losing votes to the UKIP will lead to a referendum that may withdraw the UK from the EU.  Scotland has the will to be stay in the EU if treated separately, but the Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy will do all he can to block Scotland’s membership, as he has his own interests to protect.  The UK only ever joined the EU because Charles de Gaulle died; maybe Scotland has a similar wait.

Seeing as EU students have free tuition at Scottish universities, as well as opportunities through the Erasmus+ programme, much of my livelihood depends on Scotland being in the European Union.  Being British is something I can dispense with, but European is a tougher link to break.

On Friday morning, what I want to hear from all political parties is what the next step actually is.  Because of the way the Better Together/No Thanks campaign has been run, nobody knows what a Scotland run by anyone other than the Scottish Nationalist Party or the Greens would look like.  I’ve already put Labour’s canvassers on the spot about this one – that their party could well be running Scotland in 2016; what are the policies?  Much of the Yes campaign has been based on social reform, but the SNP have no real ideas there.  Alex Salmond seems a media-capable leader but I’m amazed the likes of Nicola Sturgeon are trusted with as much as selling ice creams at the beach.  A Labour Party that is no longer scared of floating voters in marginal West Midlands seats may find the courage to propose a few things.  I won’t hold my breath; in Glasgow, the Labour party has been phoning it in for years.  The Liberal Democrats may have something planned already.  The Conservatives have nothing to lose by showing their hand.

I still can’t hear the term “Devo” without picturing grown men with synthesisers wearing overalls with inverted flowerpots as hats.  “Devo Max” – giving further devolved powers to Scotland – should be the result of a “No” vote.  I would then be very interested to see what happens in the north and west of England, which have just as much reason to be tired of London rule as Scotland or Wales have.  Independence may be beyond their reach, unless they want to frack for shale gas.  However, studies are growing ever more critical of the lack of autonomy for the English provinces, and even Michael Heseltine agrees that the over-centralisation of power in London is counter-productive.  I can speculate that Britain’s local government reform in the 1970s would have been better off being like the French one - creating regional assemblies along German or US lines rather than fooling around with county boundaries.

My final doubt, as tempted to vote for independence as I am, is the monarchy.  I don’t call it the “English royal family” as others do (it’s a line of German princes with some Scots aristocrats married in), but it is a mediaeval relic that any new, bold society would be better off without.  The fact that it is to be kept no matter what shows that the only thing that is radical about independence is independence itself.

Comment éviter les spoilers au cinéma sans mourir durant l'essai

La semaine passée, j'ai regardé le film "Deux jours, une nuit" avec un groupe d'amis. C'est un film sérieux mais pas ennuyeux, et je peux le recommander à tous. En plus, j'ai trouvé le film facile à comprendre sans faire trop d'attention aux sous-titres, ce qui est quelque chose de très rare pour moi avec le cinéma français moderne. (L'anglais est ma langue maternelle.)

Si vous l'avez déjà regardé, ou si vous n'en avez pas l'intention, continuez à lire mon texte. Sinon, arrêtez de lire ce que j'ai écrit ici ! L'ironie ici est, dans un article où je critique les spoilers, il faut vous en donner un !

La BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) est un organisme britannique pour la censure et la restriction du cinéma. Elle a approuvé ce film pour les majeurs et pour les adolescents de plus de quinze ans - un certificat "15" - mais sa mission est aussi de donner les raisons d'une telle certification.

Normalement, c'est le sexe, la violence, des mots gros.. Visible à tous, au début de ce film, il y a le certificat avec les mots "contient une tentative de suicide" ! Je suis d'avis qu'une telle divulgation ruine le droit du réalisateur à raconter une histoire à sa façon. En plus, on est adultes mais le système nous traite encore comme des enfants.

Faking History

The real sign of ageing isn't the grey hair or balding, it's knowing the difference between your past and what is presented as history.

I grew up with a pop culture that wilfully misremembered the 1950s and 1960s - the mere act of putting fashion, music, cinema and other things in boxes labelled by decades is clumsy to start with, but what they are filled with is clumsier still.  My parents were the first to point out that "the swinging sixties" barely existed - and they were the people dispensing the contraceptives.  My father-in-law rarely saw Teddy Boys in full glory as seen in a thousand cheap television documentaries because few people in his home town were paid enough to afford the complete outfit.  I have had a love-hate relationship with some of this stuff over the years; as much as driving away with Jane Merrow in an E-type Jaguar may appeal as a fantasy, it's always a pain to have a recent Golden Age mythologised when you are trying to make your own mark on the world.

Of course, I was never around when Patrick McGoohan filmed The Prisoner and The Beatles recorded Paperback Writer and Rain, too young to read J G Ballard's novels when they were first published.  Rather like the television panelist who was a self-declared expert on the 1960s but had never heard of The Seekers, I'm only on holiday in someone else's past.  Living there is out of the question.

Sooner or later, it was going to be my own past that would be distorted.  My last post mentions the first time that it was - reading Ronald Reagan's obituary and barely recognising the man it described - but politics will always come up with extreme examples.  Now we have the twentieth anniversary of Britpop, with all the magazine retrospectives and broadcasts that brings.  As a keen record-buyer and concert-goer of the time, much of what is being commemorated has me puzzled.

It was only ever a loose musical movement in its day and many of the acts I was listening to - The Lightning Seeds, Super Furry Animals, Stereolab, Dubstar - now seem to have been left out.  It's not as though they were obscure cult figures - they all had hit singles - but mid-1990s British pop music has been reduced to its muddiest and least adventurous by cultural policemen.

Now Britpop means Oasis, particularly if you skip their first few singles and start at "Live Forever", or Blur at their laziest and most arch.  Suede tried their best to avoid the Britpop label at the time; I don't know if this was a lucky escape, or if it would restore some balance if they were included.

There's an article on The Quietus that says much of what went wrong; it was too London-based, too retro, too ironic to make any serious points.  This is true of its worst acts, but I don't want a genuinely interesting few years of British pop culture - cinema, television and comics also had a good patch at same time - flushed down the toilet because of such tunnel vision, or the fact that the dullest runners won the race.

Ashes to ashes, rust to rust

It’s been a strange week of watching opinions fly back and forth since I turned the radio on over Monday lunchtime and noticed that everyone was talking about Margaret Thatcher in the past tense. After writing a couple of Facebook updates about the ex ex-prime minister, I felt that Facebook’s soundbite approach was no longer adequate. It’s just as well I don’t use Twitter.

Ken Livingstone repeated during the week the old notion that “history is written by the victors”. If the web has granted the world anything, it’s the fact that anyone free to use it, victor or vanquished, now has a voice, even if it is just to comment on funny cat pictures. No, I’m not going to lazily embed a YouTube link to “Tramp the Dirt Down” - one of Elvis Costello’s worst songs - or celebrate the death of an old woman from a stroke, I’m just going to give my side of the story.

Thatcherism is not dead. In fact, it isn’t even ill. Margaret Thatcher never lived long enough to see her beliefs discredited - the fact that she spent most of the last ten years needing to be told which day of the week it was meant that this was out of the question. Nor do I expect the likes of Norman Tebbit to suddenly shrug to the television cameras and ask “what was all that about, then?” The man’s belief in devil-take-the-hindmost market economics is unswerving, despite its consequences being all around us. He’d have made a bloody good pope.

But Tebbit is only the second-most misquoted Conservative minister of my lifetime. His “on your bike” (look up the full speech and you’ll find a somewhat different message) is only trumped by “no such thing as society” – again, one line taken out of context from an interview given by his boss to Woman’s Own magazine.

I grew up in 1970s and 1980s north-west England and now live in central-belt Scotland; both regions with that suffered under the decline of old industry and largely left out of the soft economies that have dubiously replaced it. All rhetoric, left-wing or right-wing, does well from having a bogeyman, and Margaret Thatcher was gift to her enemies in that. You can fairly blame her for many things in these places, but why not just go for it and blame her for everything?

I have sat next to old men in a shopping centre built on the site of a former steel forge saying that Thatcher closed the works down, when the factory in question barely survived the 1960s. I have been on trains crossing the River Clyde hearing Glaswegians telling their Canadian relatives that that section of the river used to be all shipyards until Thatcher did away with them – the more prosaic truth being that shipbuilding moved west years beforehand as the water in Glasgow city centre is too shallow and narrow for modern vessels.

My parents were both pharmacists who spent much of their careers dispensing tranquilisers to people in social dumping grounds before weaning them back off. The rioting in inner cities was logical; these places had been screwed for years, it’s just that the residents were now awake and alert to their surroundings in the short term. In the long term, heroin replaced Valium.

Many of the tributes have come from overseas. People who never saw the lop-sided treatment of the economy have eulogised some miracle worker who ended the cold war and apartheid. Both Gorbachev and de Klerk were astute enough to realise they’d inherited countries that were unsustainable. Painting Thatcher (and Reagan before her) as visionaries is ridiculous; they merely picked up the telephone. Let’s not let history exaggerate their importance just because big events happened on their watch.

Her true legacy is the continued delusion that we can all be successful in business, the castration of local government, the lie that free markets provide the solution to social issues, the demonisation of the poor rather than of poverty, the cockeyed faith in tertiary industry rather than maintaining a mixed economy. Her spirit is alive in “the bedroom tax”, which acknowledges the real-life problem of misallocated social housing but then financially penalises tenants as though they are responsible for someone else's administrative error. The Conservative Party, both then and now, can spot a social issue or under-performing public institution but will always blame the easiest target, or do away with the institution rather than repair it. It’s a good job Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron never qualified as vets; they’d have shot the horse every time.

Lastly, I’m not even going to blame her for all of that. Without public support she would have been a crank, even within her own party, or just somebody who helped invent cheap and nasty substitutes for ice cream. I’m going to blame the millions of people who voted for her, time after time, even though they knew that the success of her policies depended on writing off whole areas of the country.