Tuesday, 22nd May 2007
3:14pm
I couldn't agree more with Sam Marlowe's review of In Extremis, Howard Brenton’s reimagining of the 12th-century historical love story of Abelard and Heloise, which has just been revived at the Globe:
The fervent spiritual and fleshly connection of Oliver Boot and Sally Bretton as the lovers is wildly, irresistibly sexy. But no less involving is their clash with Bernard of Clairvaux (Jack Laskey), the Cistercian abbot who sees their espousal of the theories of Aristotle and Plato as highly dangerous. A thrilling debate ensues, in which fundamentalism is pitched against rationality and the true meanings of love and faith are reconsidered. Dove’s production and Brenton’s writing swing between the shamelessly broad and the intricate, and anywhere else they might at times look crude. On a warm night at the Globe, under an open sky, the treatment seems perfectly apt: cheeky, robust, yet tough-minded too.
Nor is Brenton’s argument predictably stacked. The inflexible belief system of Laskey’s cadaverous Bernard, so full of zeal that he vomits it up, choking on the tongues he practically talks in, allows for a sense of mystery and wonderment that is emphatically human. Yet when, according to Christian doctrine, God is Love, the urgent, ardent couplings of Abelard and Heloise begin to assume an elevating, almost devotional quality.
...[O]verall the whole balances rigour and entertainment with aplomb, resulting in a genuinely challenging piece of popular theatre.
We went on Saturday. I'd not been to the Globe before, having rather ignorantly dismissed it as a tourist attraction, I couldn't have been more wrong. It's plenty more alive than a host of West End or subsidised places.
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1:23pm
I was about to flag up an important point in David Cameron's piece today when I spotted that Tim Worstall had beaten me to it. Mr Cameron's piece made this point:
Since then, however, we have been overtaken by countries such as Sweden, the Netherlands and some states in the US.
Indeed. And guess what? Sweden, the Netherlands and some states, have voucher schemes.
Some critics of grammar schools and selection have argued that selection and vouchers are incompatible. Nonsense. A voucher doesn't guarantee entry into a school, any more than a cheque book does. It enables it. The purpose of vouchers is to give those who can't afford to write out a cheque the same power as those who can - to take the decision out of the hands of bureaucrats and put it into parents' hands. And, of course, to engender competition between schools, as in the private sector.
There is nothing about vouchers which would, or should, stop schools from deciding their own admissions. Just as in the independent sector today there are some schools which select on the basis of academic ability and some which use other criteria, so with a voucher scheme schools should be free to choose. Choice works both ways.
UPDATE: A correspondent rightly points out that Sweden "expressly forbids selection by ability in oversubscribed schools, so it stands in total contradiction to the grammar school principle." Yes, true for Sweden and I should have made that clear. But not for the Netherlands, as Reform points out:
The displays all of the qualities of school choice – easy market entry, choice of institutions – for which David Willetts and David Cameron have rightly called. Two-thirds of secondary schools are run by independent organisations and funded by the taxpayer according to parental choice.
§ It is also selective. Children are assessed at age 12 through either a test or by teacher assessment. A minority of children are then taught in separate institutions offering either academic or vocational learning. While most children are taught in combined schools, offering both types of courses, most of these are the results of amalgamations of separate vocational and academic schools in the 1990s. In practice the separate buildings still exist, so that children of different abilities are still taught separately in many cases.
§ The result is not the exclusion of some pupils that senior Conservatives may fear. In fact the Dutch system is respected worldwide for its quality and breadth, including its vocational options. In 2004, 55 per cent of pupils took vocational courses from age 14. The system is extremely flexible; in practice many children move from vocational to academic courses. In contrast British vocational education is very weak (and, according to the Education Select Committee last week, the value of the new diplomas is questionable).
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1:11pm
David T makes an important point at Harry's Place about the Palestinian deaths in Gaza:
Since the beginning of the year 150 Palestinians have been killed in "internal violence" in Gaza.
In the past week, more than 50 have died in "clashes" at the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian Refugee camp.
I am looking for information on rallies and other events protesting these deaths.
So far I have checked the home pages of the following groups:
The International Solidarity Movement.
The Palestinian Solidarity Campaign.
The Scottish Palestinian Solidarity Campaign.
The Exeter Palestinian Solidarity Campaign.
The York Palestinian Solidarity Campaign.
The Brighton Palestinian Solidarity Campaign.
At the time of writing, they have nothing to say about these deaths at all.
RESPECT and the Stop the War Coalition both usually protest the deaths of Palestinians.
Not today, though.
It is as if these Palestinians have not died at all, or that their deaths are simply unimportant and not worthy of note.
Or doesn't it count if a Palestinian kills another Palestinian?
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9:32am
In his Times Noteboook, Oliver Kamm refers to the curious notion of not speaking ill of the dead:
Is there merit in the mild hypocrisy of not speaking ill of the recently deceased? Not in the case of public figures who influence policy or exercise office. After 9/11, Falwell held responsible not the theocratic fanatics who ordered and committed mass murder, but American feminists, homosexuals and civil libertarians. A toxic figure in life is not less so in posthumous influence.
Quite. A while ago I wrote in the Sunday Telegraph about Peter Ustinov:
The praise heaped on Sir Peter Ustinov since his death last week has been stomach-churning. He may well have had a gift for anecdote and he was a perfectly adequate actor; but his politics were so vile, and his judgment so warped, that it beggars belief that his death should have been met with praise such as "great humanitarian", "selfless" and "visionary".
Except, of course, that it doesn't beggar belief at all. Ustinov was representative of, and admired by, a loathsome strand of thinking that infects the British establishment, which holds that if a man is clubbable and witty, he is a "good chap". And, even better, if he is a man of affairs: then he is a "very good chap". It doesn't matter what he thinks.
I have tried to fathom how else a man with Ustinov's record of excusing tyrants and defending tyranny could have been so eulogised. The butchers of Tiananmen Square, Stalin, Milosevic, bin Laden, Saddam: he defended or gave succour to the lot.
Among his many accolades, Sir Peter was chancellor of Durham University. In an address to the university in 2000, he made clear that, as far as he was concerned, Chinese dissidents are not real human beings: "People are annoyed with the Chinese for not respecting more human rights. But with a population that size it's very difficult to have the same attitude to human rights." So it is fine to kill them or let them rot in prison. We really should be more understanding of the Chinese government.
Hardly surprising really, given his attitude to the gulags. In his book, My Russia - a grotesque piece of Soviet sycophancy - he conceded only that Stalin had caused "suffering" to "thousands" - as if the gulags were a nasty outbreak of food poisoning on a busy night in a Solihull balti house. Then there was his television series, Peter Ustinov's Russia. Noel Malcolm's review said it all: Ustinov showed "all the investigative inclinations of an Intourist guide with a coach party and a lobotomy".
...Not that it was only Communists he defended. He opposed the military action against the Taliban in Afghanistan and criticised moves against Osama bin Laden: "You can't fight terrorism without becoming a terrorist yourself." Is that right, Sir Peter? What a shame he won't be around to point that out to al-Qaeda's next victims.
He opposed - as if I needed to tell you - the Iraq war and thus would rather Saddam Hussein were still in power. Not just Saddam: he considered it quite wrong that Slobodan Milosevic should have been removed from power and put on trial. He should have been left alone to murder at will. Intervention against ethnic cleansing in Kosovo "was a mistake because it was not done through the UN".
There were some people he did want to convict, though: businessmen. "The formation of the committee for the World Criminal Court is very important because there are corporations more powerful than many governments." Stalin: OK; business: criminal; al-Qaeda and the US: moral equals. Murdering Chinese dissidents: good; removing tyrants: bad. That was the world view of Sir Peter Ustinov, "humanitarian".
I was bombarded with emails, and the Sunday Telegraph received many letters. Almost all attacked me for being unseemly enough to point out Ustinov's disgusting sycophancy towards tryranny in the week after he had died. I still don't get it. If a man was a sh*t then he was a sh*t, and it makes no difference whether one says that the day after he dies or ten years later.
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9:15am
This story is bizarre:
Cheryl Tustain, 39, had an operation for thyroid cancer in 1998. Nine years later she found it virtually impossible to buy travel insurance for a long weekend in New York.
“I called company after company, all the big names. Of the dozen or so I called, some refused to insure me outright. The rest gave me such ridiculously high quotes I couldn’t afford it,” she said.
So far, it reads like a good story. She can't get sensible coverage because she had cancer. A scandal, even. We should all be righteously indignated.
Except she could get coverage. Quite easily and cheaply, as it happens. But - oh my, what a scandal - she had to ask around:
“A third said they couldn’t cover me. The others offered me premiums of about £200,” she said. She eventually got a quote of £50 from Esure, an internet-based company.
It's called competition. Different companies have different prices for different services. You look around, and find the one that suits you best.
Woman seeks quotes for travel insurance and buys the cheapest. Where's the story in that?
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Monday, 21st May 2007
11:06am
Neil Clark is not the only buffoon to have misremembered the Carter years. The former President himself says that President Bush is the worst in history. Not according to the American people. Here's a Newsweek poll:
The approval rating for US President George W Bush has fallen to an all-time low of 28 per cent, according to a poll in Newsweek.
And here's a Gallup poll:
The latest Gallup poll shows that while the president has an approval rating of 33 percent...
Terrible, terrible ratings, indeed.
But nothing like as bad as one of President Bush's predecessors':
In July 1980, Carter received a favorable rating of only 21% in the Gallup Poll. That was the lowest rating any president, including Richard Nixon at the time of his resignation, had received since polling began in 1936.
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10:31am
Janet Daley is on blistering form today over David Willetts' speech from last week:
So let's get this straight: it is now the official Conservative view that parents who struggle and sacrifice their time and money in the interests of helping their children to get on in life are a problem. No, Mr Willetts, it will not do to say that that was not quite what you meant. It is what you damn well said. And it is not just morally objectionable, it is logically absurd from your own point of view.
If you genuinely wish to improve the lot of the disadvantaged, then you cannot want the poor to remain in poverty - and yet by saying that it is only the poorest (those families in receipt of free school meals) whom you deem to be worthy of support, you are effectively branding all those who climb out of poverty by their own efforts as unworthy of your help. So staying poor becomes virtuous (deserving) but pulling yourself out - or pushing your children out - of poverty becomes a vice (undeserving).
...The Cameron project has, at a stroke, restored patrician condescension to the heart of Conservative philosophy. Apparently oblivious to the sinister aspect that their own upper-class, public-school backgrounds would inject into this debate, they have revived a species of class war that prevailed in this country long before the Marxist version: the aristocratic loathing of the middle-class upstart.
UPDATE: Daniel Finkelstein does not approve. At all.
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10:12am
How the BBC's journalists must have missed not being able to distort the situation in Gaza over the past few months. How they must be relieved to have the opportunity once more.
Here's how its website reported the IDF strike on Gaza: Israel resumed air strikes on Gaza on Tuesday after a six-month lull. It followed several rocket attacks on Israel.
Several? Several?
Amazing, isn't it, that one has to rely on
a private blogger rather than the BBC for a proper summary of what has been happening:
An elderly Israeli woman was badly wounded today [16th May] by rockets fired from Gaza on the Israeli Negev town of Sderot. On Tuesday, 24 rockets hit Israel and wounded 30 people. Throughout today, 21 Kassams were fired at Israel. Sderot has been repeatedly hit. Virtually none of this has been reported in the British media; the few references there have been have been made only as an afterthought to the reporting of Israel’s air raids against Hamas targets in the last couple of days...Since Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Palestinian terrorists have fired more than 1,300 rockets into Israel. Even while they are tearing themselves apart — at least 17 Palestinians are reported to have been killed in Gaza in fighting between Fatah and Hamas —they can still find the means to bombard Israel. In the circumstances, Israel’s self-restraint has been truly bizarre. No other country would have experienced such sustained rocket attack for so long and do virtually nothing in response. No other country in the world is expected in such circumstances to respond to such acts of war by turning the other cheek. Only the Jewish state.
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9:10am
The Jeff Randall piece I link to below prompts an idea for this site: Shoot On Sight.
We all have our bugbears - annoyances and crimes against proper behaviour that drive us round the bend. So I'm starting a regular section where I propose types of people who should be shot on sight.
Do post your own suggestions in the comments section of these posts.
I'll kick off with two slam dunks.
People Who Gob In The Street
Need I say any more? There are few more disgusting habits than spitting out one's phlegm in the street, but the habit seems ever more widespread. Shoot on sight!
Men In Three Quarter Length Shorts
It is - just - permissable for a man under 25 to wear these outrages against all that is decent in dress sense. But for any man halfway through his third decade to do it is just...well, it's plain wrong, More to the point, these people look like twats. It is, perhaps, arguable that looking such a pillock is punishment enough, but mine is a firm dictatorship, and I have to stick to my guns. Shoot on sight! (I am partiularly proud of having found this photograph, which combines three-quarter length trousers with sandals and socks. A double whammy. )
(BTW, please keep your suggestions to types of people rather than individual names.)
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