And now for something jolly

Before I turn my attention to the dire European Arrest Warrant and some of its particularly noxious effects, I shall post a link to a rather jolly site that was called to my attention by one of this blog's readers.

It's called The Neglected Books Page and is just that: a blog that deals with books and writers that have been neglected over the years though they were reasonably well known when they were published. One could (and one often does) argue that most neglected books and authors are that for a good reason: they are simply not good enough to remember for any length of time. But that ignores fashion, laziness, political thinking, ordinary changes in taste. Some neglected books and authors are revived to great acclaim.

I actually do recall the literary periodical that asked various writers and critics which authors they thought had been unjustly forgotten. Two people, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, picked Barbara Pym, who was still around but unpublished and attracting no interest. Barbara Pym, an extremely good writer, immediately became known, published and reprinted. There has been a biography as well and it would be rather difficult to write about the British literature of the second half of the twentieth century without mentioning her and her characters.

Who knows, maybe The Neglected Books Page will revive many more Barbara Pyms.

That very expensive poison

Last Friday I went to the Open Russia Club in London, specifically in Hanover Square, usually an elegant Mayfair space but currently a building site that requires careful navigation. I think it is Crossrail that is causing the havoc but one can never be sure about these things. The Club was co-hosting an event with the Russian Political Club: a discussion led by Luke Harding and Marina Litvinenko about the Litvinenko murder and Luke's book about it and about the inquiry that finally concluded with a very detailed and accurate report.

I assume most people remember the murder of Alexander Litvinenko on November 1, 2006, his slow death in the hospital during which he managed to give detailed information to the police and the public about those responsible for his sufferings. We can recall the various theories, some completely mad, which were often fed to unsuspecting hacks by President Putin and his chekists. There was a real outrage that such an event could happen on British soil to a man who had become a British citizen. Whenever I was asked on the BBC Russian Service what I thought about Anglo-Russian relations and attitudes, I pointed out that however positive most people in this country feel about Russians the murder of Alexander Litvinenko shocked everyone. I also recall my favourite Itsu outlet on Piccadilly being closed for several weeks because of suspected Polonium on the premises.

It took years for an inquiry to take place with many difficulties placed in the way, not least by the FCO (well, there is a surprise) and successive politicians who did not like to upset dear old Vlad and his mates of whom Andrey Lugovoy, the man accused of the murder together with Dmitry Kovtun, is one.

The campaign for the inquiry was led by Alexander's widow, Marina, a lady of steely determination who was finally vindicated earlier this year. She is also extremely photogenic though the light on the stage at Friday's event was such that I could not take any pictures with any hope of them coming out. So, instead, I am putting up a photo of Marina Litvinenko speaking at a meeting outside the Russian embassy on March 1, 2015, which was a time for mourning as it was a few days after the assassination of Boris Nemtsov and a time for protest about Russian activity in Ukraine. The picture, taken by Katharine Szamuely (relation) caused something of a twitter storm and I am happy to reproduce it again.


A few interesting points were raised. One of the questions many of us ask is whether the long-drawn out and very public death was part of a deliberate plan or a complete mess-up by incompetent agents. I have always held the view that this was deliberate (though the agents who left traces of Polonium 210 all over London were clearly incompetent) to frighten any potential FSB agents who might think of rebelling and abandoning the Putin gangster state. "Don't even think of it. This will happen to you." A threat also to those who might have thought of investigating those apartment block explosions though, given the death rate among potential investigators, there cannot be many people left with such weird ambitions.

Marina Litvinenko thinks otherwise. In her opinion, the whole thing went badly wrong as there were several attempts before they finally succeeded and the intention was for Sasha Litvinenko to die quickly of some mysterious illness. Instead, he lingered on in hospital, horrifying everyone with his appearance and spending many of his last hours being interviewed by officers of the Metropolitan Police who then followed up his evidence. Well, maybe. I am still not sure.

Luke Harding agreed with that analysis, telling stories about the two hapless murderers, particularly the second one, Dmitry Kovtun, who told his friends in Germany that he was carrying strong poison to Britain though he did not know exactly what it was. He also tried to get a friend of his who was a chef to add the poison to Litvinenko's food. The friend who was not in London anyway, refused and reported the whole conversation to the police. I don't know. Maybe the FSB does hire incompetents.

Lugovoy had his children with him when he met Litvinenko and introduced them so clearly he had no idea that there was a possibility of radiation. Luke Harding described the presence of the younger Lugovoys as an act of consummate cynicism but to me it seems quite sensible behaviour (assuming there is no knowledge of what the poison was): after all the more normal everybody's behaviour is, the less likely the victim is to tumble as to what is going on until it is too late.

Incidentally, Lugovoy, according to Luke who interviewed him a couple of times, is a great Anglophile, possessing, among other books, the complete works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in Russian and sending his daughter to study in Cambridge. It is obviously, something of a personal tragedy that he cannot come back here without finding himself in the dock, charged with murder. (And my heart bleeds for him.)

Finally, there was praise meted out by the author: firstly to Marina who fought that long and hard battle, then to Sir Robert Owen, the Inquiry Chairman who listened carefully and produced that well argued report, and to Scotland Yard who had continued to investigate the crime even though, officially, the case had been suspended. At the inquiry many hundreds of pages of evidence was produced, including some from the late Boris Berezovsky, written, it seems, in his own inimitable English, and over sixty witnesses. Chapeau bas. Oddly enough, I had personal knowledge about Scotland Yard beavering away. Some years after the murder I was cat-sitting for my good friends, Kira and Leonid Finkelstein and one of the telephone messages I had to take was from a detective sergeant in Scotland Yard who wanted Leonid to call him back in order to discuss some matters pertaining to the Litvinenko case.

We may never know everything about the murder and events around it but we have come close to that.

This might sound familiar

I have been re-reading Harold Nicolson's Diaries and Letters and have now reached the third volume, which starts in July 1945 when he lost his parliamentary seat and returned to literary activity as well as the odd lecture here and there.

This is what his son and editor of the three volumes, Nigel Nicolson wrote:

On 25th October [1945] Harold Nicolson flew to Greece to give two lectures in Athens, one on Byron, the other on British democracy. His visit coincided with a new crisis in Greek politics. Greece had had no government since the resignation of Admiral Voulgaris earlier that month, and the Regent, Archbishop Damaskinos, was searching for a new leader to stabilize the country politically and economically. 

 On October 31 Harold Nicolson went to see the Regent.

I find the Regent sitting enormous with his back to the window. We have coffee and cigarettes. After compliments of the highest order the Regent tells me that the Royalists and the Liberals are meeting this afternoon to agree on a joint programme. I ask who would be Prime Minister in such a fusion. He says it would probably be 'a neutral'.I say it would have to be a pretty strong neutral. The Regent says the parties would be so evenly balanced that great strength would not be required. I say the economic situation is far more urgent than the political situation. He makes a helpless gesture indicating 'What would you?'.

On returning to London Nicolson spoke to Hector McNeil, who was then Parliamentary Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs. This is his entry of November 6:

I go to see Hector McNeil at the Foreign Office. He is being sent out to Athens to examine the situation and to 'assist Greece in her efforts for reconstruction'. I tell him that the economic situation comes before anything else, and that to my mind no existing Greek politician or group of politicians have the guts or the repute to apply to the situation the drastic remedies which it needs. The only thing to do is to choose the best Government, and then to assist it by appointing British advisers to the Ministries of Finance and Supply.

Some things have changed. Britain, clearly, is no longer in a position to help or advise the Greeks in their choice of government but the EU has tried to do it on our behalf. The Communist party is no longer as strong as it used to be and not as heavily armed. For the following year, 1946, civil war broke out in Greece in real earnest.

Bah humbug!

Time for me to spread my usual Christmas gloom and misery. Let us start with that iconic Christmas book, Charles Dickens's magnificently well written and utterly ridiculous A Christmas Carol. Gosh, it's a silly book despite the language and the characters (well, one character). Why oh why, I ask every year, does Bob Cratchitt not either change his job (not an indentured slave) or stop having children. In fact, one wonders how on earth he and the missis manage to have children that often. They are not likely to have a great deal of privacy. As for Tiny Tim, don't even start me on him. Little horror. But it is still worth reading if just for the description of the blind beggars' dogs pulling their masters away from Scrooge as he trudges down the street before his highly ridiculous reform. Presumably the dogs will be all over him after it.

And now on to the other iconic Christmas offering, also an astonishingly good and astonishingly silly work of art, the film It's A Wonderful Life. Here is the ending, which shows that George Bailey's rather frustrated and circumscribed life was ALL WORTH IT and also that the people who got money out of him for ... ahem ... sub-prime mortgages were actually not that badly off. I have to admit to still liking the film. It has an excellent cast with James Stewart at the head (who could ask for anything more?) and is a little more complex than its sacchariney reputation has it.

Normal service will resume after the holidays.

Merry Christmas to one and all.

The last political "realignment"

There is some talk going on about the need for a political realignment, for new parties to make a break-through, for old parties to split according to ideas and even ideology - it seems to be leading nowhere. What with the talk and with the many reminiscences of the seventies and eighties that followed Lady Thatcher's death this is undoubtedly a good time to recall the last time an attempt at political realignment seemed to fail though it probably succeeded in the long run and in an unexpected fashion.

In 1981, two years after what turned out to be one of the most significant elections of modern British history, dissatisfied members of the Labour Party, led by the "Gang of Four", Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and Bill Rodgers, set up a new party, which, they hoped, would carry on the more Social-Democratic tradition of the Labour Party, which had been, in their and many others' opinion, taken over by left-wing Marxist activists.

While David Owen and Bill Rodgers were still sitting MPs, Shirley Williams had lost her seat in 1979 and Roy Jenkins had more or less opted out of British politics, which was becoming unpalatable to him in 1977, when he became President of the European Commission. After January 1981 Wembley Conference, which committed the Labour Party to unilateral disarmament, they finally faced up to the fact that they had only two choices: either conform with the left-wing Marxist movement that was taking over the party or to break away and form a new one.

The summary of the party's history on Wikipedia is, in fact, quite good, though many of the details and twists and turns necessarily had to be left out.

The new party formed an electoral alliance with the Liberal Party very soon after its formation and this continued till 1988 when the two parties merged more formally, the mould not having been broken though somewhat dented. As Charles Moore points out in the first volume of his Thatcher biography, the Gang of Four had not been paying enough attention to what was going on in the Conservative Party, underestimating Thatcher and her increasing influence on British politics. One could say that they had made the decision to break away from the Labour Party too late. If only they had done so when the first calls for a new, centrist, Social-Democrat party had started in the mid-seventies ....

For the story of that attempt at political realignment goes back  to some years before 1981, though many of the players are less well remembered than the Gang of Four and their followers. There is the story of the Social Democratic Alliance, a group of Labour politicians at various levels who struck out boldly against the extreme left-wing infiltration of the party and what they saw, with a good deal of justification, as the pusillanimous behaviour by the party leadership and its Gaitskillite social-democratic wing. Though there was half-hearted support from Roy Jenkins, the other later "rebels" shied away from the fight. Indeed, I recall Shirley Williams appearing on TV to tell us all that she could not understand what the SDA's members were complaining about: she could see no extremist infiltration and Militant was not a problem. She might have been that stupid (you can never tell with Baroness Williams as she is now) or she might have been frightened to tell the truth or she might have thought it was a clever manoeuvre.

Then there were the deselection fights in several constituencies with moderate or right-wing MPs, which were painful and long-drawn with varying results. The most important of these was in Newham North-East where the battle against Militant and various Trostskyist infiltrators was fought by the man who probably did more than anyone else to bring the truth out into the open and whose apparently hopeless struggle produced a curious success eventually: Reg Prentice.

It is wonderful to find that his name is being restored into its rightful place in modern British political history  by Geoff Horn's new biography, published by Manchester University Press, called Crossing the Floor - Reg Prentice and the crisis of British social democracy.

Dr Horn, an expert on social-democratic politics in the Labour Party, has produced an exhaustive and detailed account of the gradual disintegration of that party in the seventies and eighties and of the gradual control exerted over trade unions, local party organizations and, eventually, the national organization. Perhaps, it is a little too detailed for a non-geek. After a while, one gets exhausted by the account of all the meetings and all the resolutions but it is worth persevering as much of what happened afterwards in British politics is rooted in those apparently boring squabbles, hastily called meetings, dubious votes, legal injunctions and, most of all, inability on the part of Labour's right, the Gaitskillites to throw off their political paralysis.

There were exceptions to the latter and one of the most important ones was Reg Prentice, a man of impeccable socialist credentials who, nevertheless, stood up against union violence, political intimidation and extreme left-wing ideology, proclaiming over and over again the need for law and order, for sensible economic compromises, for parliamentary democracy. For his pains he was deselected in his constituency and was subjected to a good deal of harassment. He tried to fight back but did not succeed, thought of standing as an independent when he realized that his idea of a new, social-democratic party was not being taken up by his colleagues and, eventually, crossed the floor and joined the Conservative Party.

Prentice was a decent and honourable man though not an easy one to deal with. Men who feel inspired by a political mission rarely are and if they are losing the battle even less so. For all of that he was right as many in the Labour Party recognized too late.

The book tries to be objective but one cannot help feeling some contempt for the so-called Right in the Labour Party, the supposed Gaitskillites and self-defined social-democrats who did not have the courage to back either the rebels of the SDA or Reg Prentice when these tried to persuade the grandees that the Labour Party had to split and a new political alignment was needed. Nor does Dr Horn spare the two leaders of the time, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan who turned out to be incapable of dealing with the clearly evidenced infiltration. Their punishment was to watch the Labour Party's decade of growing political irrelevance.

The realignment did not happen as envisaged even when the new party was formed. By this time many of the electorate who might have supported it in the mid-seventies had decided that they quite liked Thatcher's Conservatives and voted accordingly. The left-wing activists of the Labour Party were right in one thing: the post-war consensus was failing the country and changes were needed. They simply were wrong as to which kind of changes and the Labour establishment was powerless to fight them.

It would not be correct to say that there was no realignment at all. After a decade or more of progressive destruction and disintegration, after the split that created the SDP, after Michael Foot's spectacularly inept leadership of the party, there was a concerted effort to sort the mess out. It took a few years and a good deal of money but Militant tendency was defeated and its influence in the party negated. It took another few years for the policies to be changed and for the party to become electable under the much disliked yet highly successful Tony Blair.

Dr Horn discusses briefly whether New Labour is, in fact, the social-democrat party that Reg Prentice and the others would have liked to see. Perhaps it is. But one can also argue that we now have two or even three social-democrat parties and, confusingly, the electorate do not seem to like any of them all that much.

Geoff Horn:                 

Crossing the floor - Reg Prentice and the crisis of British social democracy

2013                          Manchester University Press

Gladstone's influence

On another blog I shall be reviewing Dick Leonard's interesting but not entirely adequate double biography of those two Victorian political titans, Disraeli and Gladstone, The Great Rivalry. It is generally accepted that they created modern British politics though the party Gladstone left behind lasted a considerably shorter time than did the one Disraeli left.

There is one other aspect of Gladstone's political activity that, perhaps, is not emphasised often enough and that is his long service as Chancellor of the Exchequer. This is what Dick Leonard says:

There are many who consider Gladstone to be the greatest man ever to have held the premiership ...... Few, however, would challenge his pre-eminence as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He held the post for far longer than any of his successors, serving four times, twice in conjunction with the premiership, for a total of 12 and a half years. He effectively created the post as it exists in modern times, and none of his successors has rivalled the impact which he made.

Before his time, the Prime Minister still wielded substantial financial powers in his function as First Lord of the Treasury, and the Chancellor played only a secondary role, comparable to that of the chief Secretary to the Treasury today. Gladstone subsumed to his office all the financial powers formerly wielded by the Prime Minister and clearly established that the Chancellor should normally be seen as the second person in the government, even though the office remained - in formal terms - junior to those of the sercretaries of state.

In the words of [Roy] Jenkins, one of his most successful followers in the office, he gave his annual budgets 'such a sweep and force that their presentation became a fixture of the national life to Derby Day or the State Opening of Parliament'.

There is some incoherence in that: what exactly does he mean by describing Gladstone (and subsequently Churchill) as being the "greatest man ever to have held the premiership"? Were they the greatest Prime Ministers? In what way were they the greatest men?

Furthermore, I beg leave to disagree with the judgement that Roy Jenkins was one of the successful post-Gladstone Chancellors.

However, the main point here is what the effect of Gladstone's undoubtedly highly influential chancellorship has been and that, alas, one cannot call healthy. Budget Day has, indeed, become one of the great events in the political calendar but the most obvious result of that is the budget is not seriously discussed in any detail. Disraeli's budget of 1852 was voted out and the government fell. Can anyone seriously imagine something like that happening nowadays?

Not only is the Budget always voted through but it is always voted through as a whole - the many different sections are not separated out either for serious debating or voting purposes. Or, in other words, thanks to Mr Gladstone's activity and influence, Parliament or, to be precise, the House of Commons lost its power over the finances that the Executive needs, the very issue over which battles of various kinds were fought between the Legislative and the Executive or between Parliament and the Crown. Ironic, is it not that it should be a great leader of the Liberal Party who should be responsible for that development.

Writing in margins of books

Last Saturday the Guildhall Library, an institution in the City of London that is not perhaps as well known as it ought to be, held an open day. Apart from exhibiting some of its treasures, which include a Shakespeare First Folio in its original binding as well as Lloyds Lists that go back to the beginning of that publication and some spectacular cookery books from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the staff organized several talks. I attended two, the one on Regency cooks, cooking and kitchens, of course, and the one on books as history, given by David Pearson, highly important librarian and the author of a study with the same title.

His theme was exactly that: books as a subject of historical study rather than their own subjects. It is almost a truism to say that the future of books, publishing and the form literacy will take is unpredictable, with the growth of electronic publishing and the proliferations of electronic reading tools. What will happen when there will be a whole generation who will learn to read on tablets and ipads? Will there even be such a generation?

My own view and, I think, Mr Pearson shares it, is that there will always be a demand for books as a physical entity for all kinds of reasons, some purely tactile, some more intellectual. Will this mean that we might go back to a less industrial production and once again see many distinctions between individual publications of the same book? It's not impossible but, equally, unpredictable.

Who, for example, knew in the seventies when publishers were consolidating into huge conglomerates that several decades later there would be a flowering of small publishers, all highly individual? The unpredictability is, in itself, exciting.

The journey each book takes, the list of its owners, their attitudes and what they take from those books are all part of history and of our understanding of society. No frequenter of second-hand bookshops can possibly deny the excitement of finding a long sought volume that happens to have been given as a present or a prize to someone a hundred years ago and was then owned by someone else, perhaps, in another country. On my last trip to Budapest undertaken partly to have a look at the books my recently deceased aunt left I found many that had belonged to my family and were left behind when we upped and left. There was a copy of The Tempest that had been published in London in 1904; a delightful little tome, one of the Temple editions. The inscription was to my mother from her then best friend who somehow managed to find this book in Moscow in 1947. In my mother's possession it travelled to Budapest but was left behind to be looked after by my aunt along with many other books; it is now in London, still in the family's possession. That is a great deal of history behind one small book.

Inscriptions are all very well but what of people writing in books? What of people who underline or mark important passages, scribble question marks, exclamation marks or even comments? I must admit I have not done anything of the kind since I stopped using textbooks for revision (and that was a long time ago) though I do occasionally make a short notation with a page number at the back when I am reading a book for a review. Even then I prefer to do it on a piece of paper that I use as a bookmark. But is it actually wrong?

Mr Pearson, interestingly enough, despite being a librarian, does not thinks so. He told a story of him giving a talk to the various librarians of the Houses of Parliament when he asked them how they would react if they saw David Cameron making a note in a book. The obvious answer is that they would faint with surprise to see the Boy-King picking up a book and actually reading it but, clearly, they were all too polite to say so. Apparently, about half said they would rush over and stop him while the other half clearly thought of future historians being fascinated what the Prime Minister of the day thought of some particular pronouncement (assuming any future historian remembers this Prime Minister).

There is something to that. One of the joys of studying the history of Bolshevism (and there are very few joys, indeed) is reading the comments, mostly extremely rude ones, Lenin made on the margins of the various books written by his colleagues and predecessors.

Recently I have been reading Earls of Creation by James Lees-Milne, a study of five eighteenth century earls who also happen to have been architects and garden designers. The third Earl of Burlington, designer and owner of Chiswick House, was a great admirer of Andrea Palladio and owned several copies of his Quattro Libri, in one of which he wrote meticulous marginal notes about the builidngs he had seen during his two Italian trips and what he thought of them. Historians of architecture, of the eighteenth century, of English houses and other related matters must remain eternally grateful that the noble earl did not consider the books he owned to be untouchable with pen or pencil.

Finally, there are those readers at London Library, past and present, the despair of librarians and the object of much huffing and puffing in the comments' book, who insist on correcting typos and misprints as well as pointing out wrong dates, erroneous facts and, above all, non sequiturs in detective stories. What pleasure they give to the rest of us, especially those of us who cannot quite muster enough courage to do the same.

A fine review of a good book

I had better start with a declaration of multiple interests: both John O'Sullivan, author of this review and Douglas Murray, author of the book in question, are friends of mine and people with whom I often agree. In fact, make that almost always agree. But not always. For instance, while I am quite fond of Noel Coward's songs and some plays I do not admire him quite to the degree John O'Sullivan does.

The subject in question is serious: Douglas Murray not only attended the Saville inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday but seems to have read the ten volumes of the report before writing his book, Bloody Sunday - Truth, Lies and the Saville Inquiry, which goes beyond the mythology of what that report said and also beyond the mythology of the actual events. Murray takes no sides though he is not too fond of the Provos as who could be. Instead, he analyzes the history behind Bloody Sunday, the many loyalties that led to the tragedy and the immediate events before those fateful shots.

These events are our history as well. We should pay attention to them and not pretend that the province over the water has nothing to do with us.

Max Boot and his book

This lunchtime I attended a meeting organized by the Henry Jackson Society at which the noted American author, consultant, editorialist, lecturer, and military historian, Max Boot, gave a presentation of his latest book, Invisible Armies, a history of guerrilla warfare that includes insurgency and terrorism as well as a discussion of how governments and armies have dealt with it in the past and might want to deal with it in the present and future.

Judging by this, the book has had a tremendous response in the States and it looks absolutely fascinating though long. I suppose it is a long and complicated subject. While I fully intend to read the book at some stage, I have not done so. In fact, I have no idea whether anybody is intending to publish it in Britain though the author is busy promoting it this week and next. Therefore, my comments are predicated on what I heard at the presentation, much of which was absolutely fascinating and I found myself nodding in agreement.

In particular, I agree with Mr Boot's insistence that both the insurrectionists and their opponents need to master the three 'p's: politics, propaganda and public opinion. While the Romans put down any insurrection with exemplary ruthlessness, the British in North America at the end of the eighteenth century, found themselves defeated because public opinion at home had turned against the war. In fact, they had also been defeated militarily but that would not have mattered so much if Lord North's government could muster support for a continuation of the war and greater resources being pushed in.

Interestingly, Mr Boot did not use this argument in a later discussion about Vietnam (raised by someone in the audience) though there the US had actually won militarily but found itself the defeated side as a result of public opinion and proganda back home.

Where I have to disagree with Mr Boot is his assertion, repeated several times, that the new kind of insurgency and terrorism that involved mass propaganda was not possible before the early nineteenth century (apart from the American War of Independence, presumably) because of the technology of communication as well as of irregular warfare. To be fair, he may not say this in the book. What, I thought to myself, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a time of insurrection and terrorism for ideas that were not rooted in nationalism necessarily and also a time of an intensive propaganda war?

Since 1945, Mr Boot said, about forty per cent of insurgencies have been successful but, of course, that still means that sixty per cent were not. In his opinion, reasonably enough, insurgencies were successful if the government in question was already unpopular and lacked legitimacy in people's eyes. Castro and Guevara were successful against Batista's government but Guevara could not export that to other countries, such as Bolivia, where to government was reasonably popular, reasonably legitimate and reasonably reformist. End of Guevara. Unfortunately, that does not explain while the hardly legitimate and hardly popular Castro government has survived all this time. Possibly because the answer might not fit with Mr Boot's other point and that is the likelihood of a government being successful against insurgencies and terrorists if it takes the trouble to demonstrate its legitimacy and ability to bring the people on side (if only temporarily).

As two case studies, he compared the ferocious behaviour of the French paras in Algiers to the far more nuanced behaviour of the British in Malaya under Sir Harold Briggs and Sir Robert Grainger Ker Thompson. The British did, indeed, develop a very good multi-faceted plan and dealt with the emergency far better than the French did with the Algerian insurgency, which ended with a comprehensive French defeat both militarily and, more importantly, with regards to public opinion. Of course, the British had two advantages: the Communist insurrectionists in Malaya did not have all that much public support and based their strategy on fear and, perhaps more importantly, the country was far away and not much was known at home about what was going on.

Which brings me to another civil war and insurgencythat was fought for about ten years after the ending of the Second World War, in the Baltic States, parts of Western Ukraine and even, for a shorter period, in Poland. Nowhere in that area was the new government seen as legitimate and after the first post-liberation/occupation period made no particular efforts to bring the people on side. Yet every insurgency was put down, often because of theparticipants' mistakes but even more often because of the untramelled brutality of the official forces. What does that tell us and can that be discussed in the same way as the French behaviour in Algiers and British in Malaya when we are looking to the future?

Reading matter

I have been reading two hefty volumes in tandem (apart from boring EU and Parliamentary material and variable detective stories). One is Anne Applebaum's Iron Curtain, a highly informative account of the bloody aftermath of World War II in Eastern Europe and the equally bloody Soviet and Communist attempt to turn those countries into totalitarian states. The other one is Thomas Penn's Winter King, an equally informative account of how after a century of bloody civil war the first Tudor King attempted in a bloody fashion to impose the nearest to a totalitarian structure he could create given the technology of the period on England. Methinks there is a pattern here. Perhaps I should get out more.

Sayers being prescient

This is a slightly odd posting for me, firstly because I rarely use this blog for writing about a book I happen to be reading (though I seem to have ranted about modern detective stories and a history of cookery books before) and, secondly, because I may seem to be trespassing on the territory so ably occupied by the Boss of EURef, the early days of World War II.

The book I am reading is David Coomes's Dorothy L. Sayers - A Careless Rage for Life. Unusually, Mr Coomes spends considerably less time on the detective stories than on Sayers's religious writings (he is the erstwhile Head of Religion at the BBC), plays and, less happily, on attempts to get at the person beneath the carapace she had built for herself. The book is outstandingly good in that it quotes Sayers herself, her less well known essays, articles and many letters extensively. Whatever one thinks of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, there is no question, that Sayers was a superb writer. Her prose sparkles, whatever the theme.

Sayers more or less stopped writing about Wimsey in 1937, putting aside around 170 pages of a planned novel, Thrones, Dominations, completed much later by another detective story writer, Jill Paton Walsh. There are many possible explanations as to why Sayers decided not to carry on with the book and the most likely one is that she really did lose interest in the Wimsey saga and gained interest in many other things, not least the theatre and playwriting in general.

However, in the autumn of 1939 the Spectator decided that it might be a good idea to revive Lord and Lady Peter Wimsey as well as a number of other characters in order that they should discuss the war and provide some well-written patriotic propaganda. A number of Letters to and fro the various people appeared through late 1939 and early 1940 after which the scheme was abandoned. Jill Paton Walsh put the published Letters to good use as a starting point to her second novel about the Wimseys, Bunter and others, A Presumption of Death. There has, since been a third novel, The Attenbury Emeralds and I do hope that there will be no more. I fear my hopes will not be realized. (I did write about the three novels on another forum for those who might be interested.)

There is one particular passage in the Letters that is surely of interest to all of us, those who are interested in Sayers as she expressed very strong convictions and those who are interested in the way this country developed during and after the war. David Coomes, who quotes it is unhappy with the sentiments and thinks Sayers shows herself to be merely tetchy because of private problems. As an ex-BBC man he, presumably, finds those sentiments deeply unpalatable.

Lord Peter, somewhere in Europe on an unspecified mission is writing to his wife, Harriet.

You are a writer - there is something you must tell the people, but it is difficult to express. You must find the words. Tell them, this is a battle of a new kind, and it is they who have to fight it, and they must do it themselves and alone. They must not continually ask for leadership - they must lead themselves. This is a war against submission to leadership, and we might easily win it in the field and yet lose it in our own country ...

It's not enough to rouse up the Government to do this and that. You must rouse the people. You must make them understand that their salvation is in themselves and in each separate man and woman among them. If it's only a local committee or amateur theatricals or the avoiding being run over in the black-out, the important thing is each man's personal responsibility. They must not look to the State for guidance - they must learn to guide the State. Somehow you must contrive to tell them this. It is the only thing that matters. 

I think we can safely say that the battle was lost in this country and not just on the left or among professed admirers of the state. The fact that so many supposed opponents of that, so many supposed eurosceptics, so many supposedly on the side of freedom can still solemnly call for a leader to take them out of the wilderness would have horrified Miss Sayers.

These are NOT voluntary organizations

I spent part of yesterday in journeying to and from Oxford and reading an elegantly short book edited by the highly distinguished Tom G. Palmer (full disclosure: he is a friend of long standing and we both love cats), entitled The Morality of Capitalism.

The essays are uneven but I do recommend the book to all either because they might find pithy arguments to back their own opinions or because they might find it interesting to read arguments that oppose their opinions and undermine their emotions. As John Milton, one of this blog's patron saints, explained some centuries ago, one reason why speech must not be controlled is because even people who are in the right (and he thought there were people in the right) need to be able to test their opinions against opposing ones.

I shall try to do several postings about the book and the various essays, some more critical than others and some that will use the essays as a starting point, a little like sermon texts. (Yes, you can stop reading now, if you wish to.)

Today's "text" comes from David Boaz's excellent piece Competition and Cooperation (on page 31), which argues the to me irrefutable point that a free economy (not the crony capitalism and regulatory statism we have) relies on competition but cannot exist without co-operation that involves our free participation.

In particular, the author differentiates between all organizations that are "voluntary", whether they are businesses that need to make profits or charities that do not, and those created by the states, who, obviously enough, enforces our participation in them.

Some analysts distinguish between commercial and nonprofit organizations, arguing that businesses are part of the market, not of civil society; but I follow the tradition that the real distinction is between associations that are coercive — the state — and those that are natural or voluntary—everything else. Whether a particular association is established to make a profit or to achieve some other purpose, the key characteristic is that our participation in it is voluntarily chosen.

This clarity of division has been muddied, probably deliberately, by the change in terminology. The trouble, particularly in Britain, lies with the expression "voluntary organizations". In many cases this term has replaced the old word "charity" as the bodies in question are not precisely charities: they do not raise money from private donors, either individual or corporate, for specific and clearly understood aims. Instead they receive money from the state. They are not, therefore, accountable to the donors in the way they spend that money, pursuing a particular charitable purpose.

In fact, they are, despite their preferred description, not voluntary organizations. As they are funded by local or central government with, in the case of the larger ones, the occasional grant from some transnational body, they are actually part of the state machinery and rely on hand-outs that are taken from that patient milch-cow, the taxpayer, whose participation in the funding is far from voluntary. They are also, controlled in their aims and activity by the state, its minions and its political ideas.

The subject has been much in evidence in the fairly vehement discussions in my borough, where the Council has managed to reduce local tax for the third year running without, they say, reducing essential services. So far as I can make it out, they are not wrong though there is some debate going on about Meals-on-Wheels. As I don't know the rights and wrongs of it, I cannot comment.

I can, however, comment about another and far more vociferous complaint. It seems that the Council has saved money by cutting back on its grants to "voluntary organizations", who appear unable to function without hand-outs from taxes, and by selling a rather fine but somewhat dilapidated building where a number of these organizations had offices for which they, presumably, paid no rent. The building is going to become a free school, which is yet another good idea.

Over twenty "voluntary organizations", we are told in tones of horror, will have to close. What will happen to their clients? Well, what indeed.

My immediate question was about the number. Why on earth do we need that many "voluntary organizations"? After all, if twenty-plus will close, many more will remain open and functioning at the Council's that is our expense. Do we really have that many different vulnerable groups who need all this help? Is there not, perhaps, some overlap between the various groups and their activity, with money going out more than once for the same purpose? Could they not, perhaps, be inventing problems and vulnerabilities in order to survive and keep claiming money?

Neither I nor anyone else knows the answer to those questions but I strongly suspect that if these organizations were really voluntary (and there is nothing to stop them from becoming that now); if they had to present proper plans and well defined aims to potential donors and be evaluated by the people who might voluntarily give them money rather rather than tick boxes on forms created by local councils and civil servants on the basis of their own priorities, we would find out those answers. We would probably find out exactly how useful these "voluntary organizations" are to anyone except the people who work in them either for money or for free.

Good things here

If you want to read good arguments about the morality of capitalism (let's face it, the only political system that spreads wealth fairly widely) then you might like to have a look at this book. The Morality of Capitalism is free to download and my friend Tom Palmer (another cat-lover) wrote the introduction as well as a couple of chapters.

Monarchy Matters

It is about time this blog had a book review and I can think of no better subject than Peter Whittle’s recent Monarchy Matters, published by the Social Affairs Unit. (Full disclosure: Peter is a friend and I have at various time written both for the New Culture Forum, of which he is the Director, and for the Social Affairs Unit.)

There is something about the Monarchy that seems to send even sane people completely loopy. Some of the comments before the (first) Royal Wedding of 2011 could not be characterized as anything but insane. People who would never call themselves Republican and would scream with horror if one accused them of toeing the left-wing establishment line, choked with bile and predicted dire events, such as a complete lack of interest, disgust with the expense, maybe a riot or two (though how that could happen with a complete lack of interest was never explained). When reasonably sane people like Melanie Phillips boil with anger because …. Good Heavens! … the Beckhams were invited to the wedding, you know something has gone desperately wrong. (To be fair to Ms Phillips, she did later write that it was all a huge success and the leftie whiners had been proved wrong. No mention of her own piece of whining.)

What had gone wrong, just as it had done with the Golden Jubilee and the Queen Mother’s funeral, was the mentality of those who presume to lecture us or lay down the rules of our thinking, whether they be on the Left or the Right. The wedding was a huge success – more than a million people turned out to watch the event, many millions watched it at home and billions did across the world. The bride looked lovely, the groom looked nervous, the best man looked worried then cheerful and the maid of honour stole every male heart in the land. The Queen’s yellow outfit became an instant success and so on, and so on. The point is, at Peter Whittle, explains in this excellent little book, the Monarchy reasserted its position as the unifying symbol of the nation, the one institution that we can all look to and accept as our own. It is at one with the country, no matter what the bien pensants might think or say. It is at one with the Commonwealth, as seen in Canada when the now married Duke and Duchess of Cambridge garnered applause and adoration on their recent visit. In fact, I would say that there is more life in the Monarchy than in the Commonwealth but that is an argument for another time.

Monarchy Matters traces the ups and downs of that institutions history and relationship with the people of this country and points out the interesting fact that, no matter what happens, only 18 per cent consistently say that they would prefer a presidential system (and many of them blanch when one points to the likely candidates for that presidential position). Nearly 70 per cent, in other words, consistently prefer the system as it is and are prepared to overlook problems with individual members of what is sometimes referred to as the Firm, understanding full well that it is the actual institution that matters not personal foibles, particularly as they tend to be over-ruled when needs be. (Diana was the one important exception in that respect, as no one can take Fergie seriously, and even her vagaries as well as the tragic death are now part of the royal mythology.)

Many monarchists out there feel that, although they might be in the right, they do not necessarily have the arguments with which to defeat the media produced propaganda. Well, here is a book that will provide them with arguments to be used.

(A version of this article will be published in the September issue of the Salisbury Review.)

No sooner do I ask ...

... than I get a reply from a reader. I knew someone would know the answer to the puzzle of the banker who was the best Homeric scholar. It was, apparently, Walter Leaf (1852 - 1927). Wikipedia tells us about his banking career, which was spectacular:

In 1877 he entered the family firm, becoming in 1888 chairman of Leaf & Company Ltd. Later he became chairman of the Westminster Bank. He was one of the founders of the International Chamber of Commerce, of which he was elected president in 1925. From 1919 to 1921 he was president of the Institute of Bankers. He was president of the Hellenic Society and the Classical Association. He married Charlotte Symonds, daughter of John Addington Symonds.

From another source we find that he was a pioneer of psychical research:

Leaf was also an active member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), London, and served a tenure on the council (1889-1902). He took part in the SPR sittings with the medium Leonora Piper in 1889-90 and frequently contributed to the Journal and the Proceedings of the SPR.

The really important aspect of his career was sent to me by the aforementioned reader of this blog and it is taken from the current Cambridge University Press edition of The Iliad, which was edited by Walter Leaf:

Walter Leaf (1852-1927) was a banker and classicist, whose various positions as chairman of the Westminster Bank, founder of the London Chamber of Commerce and president of the Hellenic Society reflected his wide-ranging professional and scholarly interests. Leaf was educated at Harrow School and won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1870. He became senior classic in 1874 and was elected to a fellowship the following year. As a scholar Leaf was concerned with uncovering the physical reality of the classical world, a stance which set him apart from Jane Harrison and the Cambridge Ritual School. Leaf ’s The Iliad, with introduction and notes, first appeared in two volumes (1886–8), and was regarded for several decades as the best English edition of Homer’s epic poem. Volume 2 of the second (1902) edition comprises Leaf ’s preface, an introduction to books 13–24 of the poem, and the annotated text.

I feel more than usually inadequate.

A fascinating interview

John O'Sullivan is one of the best political commentators around and I do not say that just because he is a friend of many years standing. (In fact, I knew him before he was famous and important but that was a long time ago.) His book on Pope John Paul II, Thatcher and Reagan was a splendid and astonishingly (for someone who lived through those years) exciting account of a breathtaking period of modern history. I blogged about it here.

Since then the book has been translated into many languages, most recently into Italian. Here is an interview by Kathryn Jean Lopez of the National Review with John O'Sullivan about the launch of his book, its importance and many other matters.

Approaching it from the right side

A friend has passed on to me his copy of Mark Levin's Liberty and Tyranny, the American publishing sensation last year. Subtitled, A Conservative Manifesto, it is a summary of conservative ideas as opposed to what Mark Levin calls "Statist" ones. How right he is not to subscribe to that ridiculous misuse of the word "liberal". There is nothing liberal about people who want to strengthen the state, take away people's liberties and impose their own idea of utopia on them.

Mark Levin is a writer, a journalist, a radio show host and another perpetual thorn in the left's collective side. He is also a constitutional lawyer. A real one.

The book swings along at a merry pace and, so far, there are only two quotes that I want to share with those who have not yet read the book. [Spelling as given, i.e. American.]

And yet, the Statist has an insatiable appetite for control. His sights are set on his next meal even before he has fully digested his last. He is constantly agitating for government action. And in furtherance of that purpose, the Statist speaks in the tongue of the demagogue, concocting one pretext and grievance after another to manipulate public perceptions and build popular momentum for the divestiture of liberty and property from its rightful possessors. The industrious, earnest, and successful are demonized as perpetrators of various offenses against the public good, which justifies government intervention on behalf of an endless parade of "victims". In this way, the perpetrator and the victim are subordinated to the government's authority - the former by outright theft, the latter by a dependent existence. In truth, both are made victims by the real perpetrator, the Statist.

It is, of course, important to recognize how much of this has already been put into place and to what extent we have all become both "perpetrators" and "victims" as defined by Statists. It is also of some importance to try to define what the response ought to be.

However, the Conservative seeks to preserve and improve civil society, not engage in a mindless defense of the status quo inasmuch as the status quo may well be a condition created by the Statist and destructive of civil society - such as the 1960s cultural degradations, which are all too prevalent today. It is the Statist, then, who rejects even minor change if such change promotes the civil society, thereby challenging his authority.

We see this reluctance to accept change in many from the europhiliacs to the trade unions who are threatening the country with all manner of ills if the slightest necessary change is made to the current suicidal state of affairs.

But what of the times our own entitlements are taken away. Here is a story in yesterday's Scotsman. It seems that

FAMILIES will have to take more responsibility for looking after their frail relatives because the state can no longer afford to care for a soaring elderly population, Scotland's councils have warned.

Setting aside the thought that these days not all people over fifty or even sixty, seventy and eighty are so frail as to need constant care, one needs to ask why it should be considered to be such a terrible idea that families be asked to look after their relatives. Just another example, one might say, of our reluctance to take responsibility for what should be our duty.

Yes, but hang on a minute. In its fraudulent claim that it can look after us all and, particularly the frail and the elderly, the state has taxed us to a considerable extent, smugly taking away our money in order to use it for "our benefit". Now it tells us (and Scotland is not the only part of the country where this is true or going to be true) that it cannot do so and we have to take our share. With what, may one ask. Is the state going to stop taxing us to the point where we have no money to care for anyone who needs extra care in our families?

Furthermore, in its fraudulent claim that it can look after us, the state has produced regulation after regulation that has made it impossible for private individuals and companies to run care homes for those frail sick and elderly. Now it tells us that we need to find some way to look after the frail. Where exactly are we going to do it? Are those regulations going to be changed to make it easier for us to do so?

In other words, we must start with the notion that it is not the state's business to look after us and it should stop pretending it can do so; stop taxing us in that pretence or making it impossible through ridiculous and vindictive regulations for us to do so for ourselves. Sadly, that is not how the story is reported or accepted by many: the state should be looking after us; how dare it give the task over to the families of those frail elderly people?

Is that word so important?

Norman M. Naimark, Professor of East European Studies at Stanford University and author of several important books on the darker aspects of Soviet history (yes, I know, are there any others?) has just published an interesting study of Stalin's criminal rule: Stalin's Genocides. I have not seen it yet though I fully intend to read it on the grounds that there might be some new information or analysis there.

What intrigued me about the title and the blurb given out by Princeton University Press is the insistence that somehow it is important to prove that those crimes were genocide.

The book puts forward the important argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them.

Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era, challenges the widely held notion that Stalin's crimes do not constitute genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and harrowing episodes of Stalin's systematic destruction of his own populace--the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror--and examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition, Naimark compares Stalin's crimes with those of the most notorious genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler.

There are still some people (among whom there are various academic historians such as the egregious J. Arch Getty) who do go on bleating that the purge just growed and growed like Topsy without the little guy at the top knowing anything about it but many a document has been unearthed that has shown up the fallacy of that school of thought. Still, there is no harm in repeating the truth and publishing some more evidence.

Does it matter, however, whether what Stalin indulged in was genocide? The victims of Stalinism probably outnumber the victims of Hitler (and we can argue who was responsible for the fantastically high casualty rate on the Eastern Front). Even if anybody disputes that, there can be no question that there is no real need to compare Stalin to Hitler in order to prove that he and his system were evil. Or is there?

>Genocide is a relatively new term in international relations though, undoubtedly, the concept has existed in reality for many centuries. It's just it did not matter to people whether they were exterminating someone else for ethnic, religious or any other reason.

According to this summary

In 1944, a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) sought to describe Nazi policies of systematic murder, including the destruction of the European Jews. He formed the word "genocide" by combining geno-, from the Greek word for race or tribe, with -cide, from the Latin word for killing. In proposing this new term, Lemkin had in mind "a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves."

The next year, the International Military Tribunal held at Nuremberg, Germany, charged top Nazis with "crimes against humanity." The word “genocide” was included in the indictment, but as a descriptive, not legal, term.

On December 9, 1948, in the shadow of the Holocaust and in no small part due to the tireless efforts of Lemkin himself, the United Nations approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This convention establishes "genocide” as an international crime, which signatory nations “undertake to prevent and punish.” It defines genocide as:

[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

As we know this activity was directed not just at Jews but the Roma and, to some extent, Slavs in Poland and the old Soviet Union.

There is, nevertheless, a problem with the definition or, rather, not so much with the definition but the importance accorded to this particular form of mass murder just as there was a problem with the definition of crimes against humanity in the framework of an aggressive war. (There were many other problems with the Nuremberg Trials but this is not the place to discuss them. Readers, however, are free to pile in.)

Unsurprisingly, the Soviet Union happily supported both that narrow definition of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg (a wider definition might have interfered with some members of the Soviet legal team) and the prioritizing genocide, as defined by the UN Convention above any common and garden mass murder.

One of the unintended consequences of that Convention was that everything, whether it be the Turkish massacres of Armenians in 1915 or Stalin's wide-ranging crimes, need to be defined as genocide. Otherwise, people might not take them seriously. Yet when one thinks about it, is it really so much more heinous to murder millions of Ukrainian peasants, let us say, because they were Ukrainians than it is to murder them because they were peasants?

The Left wants silence

This is the unsurprising conclusion Andrew Klavan comes to after the publication of his "controversial" or different from the usual consensus novel Empire of Lies is cancelled in France. The reason given is that the publisher in question is too worried about the political and religious aspects of the plot. Apparently, it is all about the main-stream media trying to hush up details of a plot. Fantasy! Couldn't possibly happen!

The book’s French cancellation is, I realize, a rather small cultural event. Yet it gives specific color to the recent revelations on the Daily Caller website that left-wing journalists conspired to suppress scandals that might harm Barack Obama and to the brouhaha over Breitbart’s online release of a video that resulted in a government worker’s momentarily losing her job. In both stories, one thing leaps out at me: everywhere, the Left favors fewer voices and less information, and conservatives favor more. Everywhere, the Left seeks to disappear its opposition, whereas the Right is willing to meet them head-on.

I am going to try to get hold of a copy and read it.

Economics for non-economists

Yesterday I went to the launch of a new book by Madsen Pirie of the Adam Smith Institute, called Understanding Economics and subtitled Economics for non-economists. Dr Pirie maintains that economics is an intuitive discipline and depends largely on people understanding their own and others' actions and desires. The aim of his book is to explain the basic principles to all of us and not just those whose brains have been somewhat befuddled by academic economists.

The chapters I read on my way home yesterday deal with trade and its beneficial effect on all those who participate in it. As this happens to be something I more or less understand and more than agree with, I can testify to those chapters being clear and persuasive. I may, later on, take issue with Dr Pirie's apparent assumption that people will always make a rational decision to improve their performance and productivity. History is littered with examples of people, for instance the peasants of Russia, who, offered ideas and assistance to improve their productivity, refused to do so, continued with their inadequate methods and nursed resentment against those who did better. I shall see how Dr Pirie deals with that problem. In the meantime, I do recommend the book - it is clearly written and assumes an intelligent but not specialist reader.

The launch took place in St Stephen's Club, the favourite grazing place of all conservatives and the garden space was shared (and separated by a niftily tied rope) with the Conservative Way Forward's summer party where Lady Thatcher was the guest of honour. Would she have preferred the ASI launch, one wonders.