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Books
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Talking to a brick wall: how to make politicians listen?
Tweet It took me a long time to warm to advertising agencies. The first time I worked with one I was working in sales management on Fairy Washing Up Liquid. I was due to attend a meeting at which I was to be told what consumers really thought of the brand. I remember my reluctance [...] read our review »
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Douglas Murray – Bloody Sunday: Truth, Lies and the Saville Inquiry, Book Review
Tweet The aftermath of the Saville Inquiry into the events around Bloody Sunday has left me, and I suspect many others, with one enduring image: Prime Minister David Cameron’s apology in the House of Commons, where he says that the actions of the British Army were ‘unjustified and unjustifiable.’ But there’s a lot more to [...] read our review » -
“I loathe Ireland and the Irish.”
Tweet In the Irish Times, Brian Cosgrove takes up temporary residence in An Irishman’s Diary in the hope that, with the lifting of European copyright restrictions on James Joyce’s major works, a greater familiarity with Joyce’s ”sometimes ruthless realism” may change the nature of the “annual Edwardian charade” that is Bloomsday. From the Irish Times The devastating cultural [...] read our review »
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Comment on Taking years off your life – NI life expectancy deprivation gaps show increase over last decade
on 19 May 2013 at 8:41 pm
[N.B. The following was typed, but not posted, an hour back.]
I’d have to suggest the way these figures are presented makes them as indigestible as possible.
For me the Guardian’s version, comparing by health regions, is at least as telling. And what it tells is actually quite shocking: for men, only Orkney has a worse “improvement” than Belfast; for women Belfast, is worst — if only just.
I cannot for the life [sic] of me see what bus-stops have to do with it. That’s only a PR-man’s translation of “N[orthern] I[reland] M[ultiple] D[eprivation] M[easure] Ward rank”. The official guide specifically says that NIMDM ranking:
“is a relative measure of deprivation and so it cannot be used to determine how much more deprived one area is from another.”
So, for once, I accept part of Harry Flashman‘s point.
Why not specify the Ward (which involves where people live), rather than anything to do with the irrelevant Translink?
We know that life-expectancy is a function of social class: that is well established. Just ask why housing- and working-conditions link to circulatory disease and cancer (which used also to be the case with killers like TB). So is the improvement in life-expectancy.
Across the UK the best gains were achieved in Kensington and Chelsea, and in Westminster. What is questionable is whether that reflects decanting more vulnerable social classes (i.e should we be invoking changes in house-prices — as a correlating factor?). Or is it a matter of hearing the messages?
I’m suggesting the main issue here is health-education. Health education is actually quite cheap: it is very cost-efficient compared to most other interventions. Clearly, NI’s health education is failing in comparison with all other parts of the UK. So, someone, somewhere is “responsible” (which, in my book, means “answerable”).
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Comment on Has the Protestant Working Class lost out in the Peace Process?
on 19 May 2013 at 5:42 pm
sonofstrongbow @ 5:37 pm:
… a nationalist defined Irish (mono) culture …
I guess you’ve never stood between a Dubliner and a Corkman at the same bar.
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Comment on Radical Independence & The Jamaican, Ugandan & Pakistani UKIP candidates
on 19 May 2013 at 5:09 pm
Sorry, UPC, I looked back at that earlier thread. All I see is my excess of quoted journalism. One precise citation was:
Martin Williams’ piece for the Herald Scotland [7 Sep 2010]. He made it clear that it was a Scots-led vice gang which spent £50,000 advertising brothels in the Northern Ireland capital.
Far from suggesting “all Scottish people are signed up UVF members”, which would be arrant nonsense, the focus was on Ashleigh Beuken, Yvonne Dawson. Malcolm McNeill, and Stephen Craig. They all had Scottish addresses, and were reckoned by the prosecution to have made £2½ million from the Belfast sex-trade. Just four names: I make that 0.00007612% of the population of Scotland.
Please assist me, and this exchange, further with a precise cut-and-paste.
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Comment on Has the Protestant Working Class lost out in the Peace Process?
on 19 May 2013 at 4:44 pm
I’ve just done something I do not recall from any previous Slugger thread: I printed off the whole thing so far. I wanted to study it as a text.
Then I tried to think through a summation. It came out remarkably similar to that by Brian Walker @ 2:23 pm.
Then, to muse on …
Why is NI so different? After all, most of the social comparisons are not greatly out of line with the rest of the UK. Certainly not to the extent they were historically.
For a start, it is not to my mind quite the case propounded by Gareth Mulvenna:
While the white working class of the East End have adapted to the refashioning or withdraw into a familiar sense of British identity by moving away from the area, the Protestant working class in parts of Belfast are arguably still coming to terms with the breakdown of community and civic structures which occurred in the early 1970s.
I had to revisit and old stamping ground — Dagenham and beyond (“not so much mad, as seven stops beyond Barking”) — three times in recent weeks. What was interesting is the old Becontree Estate is one of the few areas in London where the Union Flag, and more commonly the cross of St George, are commonly flown. Note that is not the same as #flegs: it is largely a continued protest against ethnic mixing. That means the “white working class” (frequently third and fourth generation immigrants themselves, many from Ireland, imported to the Ford plant) feel “their” housing stock is being alienated.
So what is the gripe among the “Protestant working class”? It is more to do with status, and the lost right to swagger.
That leads me on to the main difference of NI “Britishness”. The ambition of those patriotic NI “Britons” appears to have again a statelet all of their very own. As they had between June 1922 and March 1972; and which was so badly managed, it relied on oppression and coercion. The Ulster Unionism of that half-century is still felt by many to be the norm.
We’ve been waiting a while for the next bit of Chris Donnelly‘s analysis. So far he focused on employment (or not) and education.
Now, as I recall in 1923 unemployment in NI was 23%. By 1938 it had risen to near 30%. Much of that total and disproportionately more of the increase seems to have impacted on the topic here: the Protestant working class of Belfast. H&W was down to some 1500 employees. The “Wee Yard” had long gone. There were the unemployed disturbances of 1924, 1926 and 1932. I’d be asking why the social order then was side-tracked into the later Protestant sectarianism, by whom, and to what effect.
Today there is the odd isolated pocket where unemployment reaches those levels of the pre-War period: as I recall, Larne — those 260 jobs at FG Wilson — and Magherafelt in particular. I believe [West] Belfast is rapidly matching Derry as a jobs black-spot? But even then no worse than (say) Hull or Middlesbrough. And certainly well below parts of Birmingham.
Finally, that photograph in the headline piece. I don’t know whether the presence of two women represents “equal opportunities”; but balding males of a certain age and girth seem to predominate.
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Comment on Radical Independence & The Jamaican, Ugandan & Pakistani UKIP candidates
on 19 May 2013 at 4:40 am
Yes, indeed: students are revolting. It’s what they always were. Long may the tradition persist. Massed ranks of obedience and dutiful compliance are contrary to Scottish, archipelagian, or even European natures. Anyway, it annoys the hell out of Gradgrinds and Goveians.
I’d stand by my assertions that:
1. There are some deeply unpleasant types who have opportunistically thrown their lot in with UKIP (see above for examples).
2. There is something wacky, tacky and rackety about the whole UKIP operation. Witness the number of resignations, expulsions, and profiteerings at public expense over recent years.
But also:
3. Kippery has added to the general laugh-level of UK politics. Where else could one find an eccentric like Godfrey Bloom and his “clean behind the fridge”?
Which brings me, by close association, to “swivel-eyed loons”. Even that has upsides.. Suddenly Andrew Feldman has a public profile that reaches beyond 0.0001% of the politically aware.. And, as the ultimate example of local humour, the twitterati have spent half their weekend obsessing and conflicting over the better hash tag: #loongate or #swivelgate?
There is hope for us yet.
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Comment on Radical Independence & The Jamaican, Ugandan & Pakistani UKIP candidates
on 19 May 2013 at 12:00 am
@UPC
Huh?
Give me a clue? Date? Context?
I don’t do sweeping generalisations sober. That one seems over the top, even lubricated.
Put up or shut up.
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Comment on Radical Independence & The Jamaican, Ugandan & Pakistani UKIP candidates
on 18 May 2013 at 9:26 pm
I know this one has been doing the rounds for some weeks. It still suggests guilt by association —
“The EDL endorsed UKIP. Presumably because of shared values on sustainable farming.”
If UKIP are as clean as the driven snow (ahem!):
Why do the elected kippers in Lincolnshire refuse to sign the all-party anti-racist pledge, that aims to treat all citizens equally?
Why did Eric Kitson resign his newly-won seat at Stourport-on-Severn?
Did Anna-Maria Crampton (an East Sussex kipper candidate) not identify Jews for causing the Holocaust? And her two-cents’ worth that WW2 was a Jewish bankers’ plot to make the world feel guilty: that might strike a bell.
Did it not require public exposure of Cornish-candidate Sue Bowen’s BNP past to oblige UKIP to disown her a week before the election?
Ditto Alan Ryall in Suffolk?
Was Mark Jenkinson, a UKIP candidate in Cumbria, well-advised to post that n-word picture?
Have we forgotten Somerset’s kipper candidate Alex Wood’, his Nazi salute, and the knife clenched in his teeth? Oh, sorry: he was imitating a plant, wasn’t he? Even so, his bit about Africa wasn’t a good start: “”I mean just look at the mud huts they live in and how they all kill each other. It’s quite barbaric. This is what UKIP wants to prevent – our country ending up like Africa or some third world trash can.”
Oh, and in that context, what about Gabbi Coleman, the UKIP candidate in Tonbridge? She told us she knew Woods, that he was a Nazi, so did others, but they thought everyone should keep quiet about it. As to her Facebook page, and the picture of Mo Farah …
Shall we overlook Chris Scotton, UKIP candidate in Leicester, assuring us that EDL racism was “just ethnic banter”?
Finally (for the time being), there is that curious story about Andrew Eccles (Tottington Ward, Bury). A BNP candidate just up the road in 2010: but a fully-smoked kipper in 2012 — with a strong line on all things Pakistani. Apparently he was solicited to stand for UKIP by an old mate: Peter Entwistle, UKIP’s Bury organiser. Eccles’s other media success was to try to sponsor a “Burn the Koran Day”.
I’d suggest at some point there we had enough feathers for the Duck Test.
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Comment on UKIP: We’ve proved we can get votes in Wales, England and Northern Ireland…
on 18 May 2013 at 11:40 am
Interesting how everyone else’s take differs from mine.
I was merely observing that Farage’s “proved we can get votes in Wales, England and Northern Ireland” was a bit … well … hyperbolic.
You are telling me that Henry Reilly, from hardly the most representative part of South Down, which itself is hardly the most representative part of NI, is a player. And that UKIP in NI (which operates from said Henry Reilly’s home address) is a factor. Hmmm …
I know “swivel-eyed loons” are the flavour of the weekend.
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Comment on It’s Derry again – with London and Liverpool, commemorating the Battle of the Atlantic
on 12 May 2013 at 12:22 pm
On past experience, I guess I’m inviting an abusive tirade …
However, here goes.
Surely the essential purpose of the RN and USN presences in Lough Foyle was to counter the threat of Dönitz’s U-boats. If a commemorative tie was needed, how else might that significance be depicted? Does the 617 Squadron badge, for one example, equally “memorialize the Nazi enemy”?
On the other hand, there were the plans to raise U-778 from the sea-bed off Malin Head, to match U-538 at Birkenhead. As I recall one of the prime movers in that was Shaun Gallagher of the SDLP.
There is a comprehensive account of the surrender of the U-boats, and their arrival at Lisahally, on the Barrow Submariners Association site. It includes:
I hesitate to question why some folk have to find dissension and division where none previously existed.
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Comment on ‘Note from the Next Door Neighbours’: a 90 second read from South Armagh
on 8 May 2013 at 1:36 pm
antamadan @ 12:14 pm:
I suspect because it’s comparing chalk and cheese. Let’s not be fooled by the statistics and methodologies, it’s really as subjective as a Top Gear rating for cars. One might as well weigh the ivy (when it helps to have $32+ billion in endowments, as at Harvard), or do in on the Duck Density.
One usual “rating” (the chalk) for UK universities is the Times Higher Education Supplement‘s. World rankings are quoted from the QS classifications (the cheese) — to which your post links.
A cynic would suggest that the UK eschews the QS-ratings because
[a] it’s the Murdoch clout again; and
[b] Oxford (home of so many journos and politicos) trails Cambridge and UCL in the QS tables. But, that, of course, would just be a cynic; or
[c] the fingers of two hands count the number of UK institutions in the top fifty, and they include such dubious joints as Bristol and Manchester, to which “only Oxford-rejects go anyway, darling”.
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Comment on 2013 elections: the alienation of Freelander man
on 6 May 2013 at 1:49 pm
Now we’ve got that other business off our backs, is it possible to return to the main issue?
Even at the expense of referring to another newspaper opinion piece? Dangerous, but …
There are a handful of decent right-of-centre columnists whom I try not to miss. Obviously the stables at the Torygraph and the Mail exclude themselves.
One I do rate — not because I agree with him, but because he is human and humane — is Tim Montgomerie, now featured behind the pay-wall at the Times. I’d suggest the opening four paragraphs of Montgomerie’s pice this Monday are as good a check-list as you’ll find:
There are at least six policy-points there that I find close to abominable; but I’m not a Tory, and not seduced by Farage’s forked tongue to bite his rotten apple.
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Comment on 2013 elections: the alienation of Freelander man
on 5 May 2013 at 7:46 pm
Turgon @ 7:20 pm:
In paragraph order:
I didn’t. By definition, it is impossible to demonstrate an impossible; and I never implied it, anyway.
Probably so. No, it’s not.
I didn’t say that: I was using irony: “Glad you seem to be claiming …” Seem, Turgon.
Fair enough, but it’s still the opposite of Rawnsley. And vice versa.
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Comment on ‘Note from the Next Door Neighbours’: a 90 second read from South Armagh
on 5 May 2013 at 7:15 pm
minervabradley @ 6:51 pm:
My only quibble there is how we “measure” any intervention’s success or otherwise. My fear is it comes down — as ever in the modern education system — to box-ticking.
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Comment on 2013 elections: the alienation of Freelander man
on 5 May 2013 at 7:10 pm
Oh, Turgon-the-Wise, you are so prickly. And, when I’ve nothing to retract, I cannot do so — fully or not.
“This discussion” is not the same as “the headline piece”. Glad you seem to be claiming “borrowings” by Rawnsley from your piece, on the basis of post hoc ergo propter hoc. However, his point (and a valid one) is the direct opposite of yours:
Now show me “a defamatory lie”, for “defamation” does not necessarily require a “lie”. So, by the by, here is a plagiary in the form of an unattributed quotation. Your starter for ten, perhaps, to identify the source:
Whilom ther was dwellynge in my contree
And erchedeken, a man of heigh degree,
That boldely dide execucioun
In punysshynge of fornicacioun,
Of wicchecraft, and eek of bawderye,
Of difamacioun, and avowtrye,
Of chirche reves, and of testamentz,
Of contractes and of lakke of sacramentz,
Of usure, and of symonye also.
And a bonus for explaining avowtrye. Hint: it’s got little directly to do with “avow”.
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Comment on 2013 elections: the alienation of Freelander man
on 5 May 2013 at 4:50 pm
This discussion looks like an elongated, and less well-composed version of Andrew Rawnsley’s piece in today’s [London edition] Observer.
I think I even recognise some “borrowings”.
I’m recollecting the late Julian Critchley, the Tory MP for Rochester between 1959-64, then retreaded for Aldershot for 1970-1997. Critchley was a gad-fly to whom Thatcher never took (and whom he mocked disgracefully — it was he, not as frequently-cited Denis Healey, who stuck on her the moniker, “the Great She-Elephant”). As a result the ministerial team was denied one of the brighter sparks in sight.
My reason for this memory is that Critchley deplored the dumbing-down of the Tory Party, and the arrival of the “garagistes” (I’ll stand correction on that spelling, though I reckon Critchley would have made it as effete as possible). So, three decades on, and the change of a single initial letter, we are fulfilling his prophecy.
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Comment on If you live in a glass house, don`t throw stones…at UKIP
on 5 May 2013 at 4:30 pm
DC @ 12:36 pm:
Be honest: you enjoyed that,didn’t you?
Oddly enough, so did I: both times.
Now, can anyone explain how we went from UKIP to the US constitution?
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Comment on ‘Note from the Next Door Neighbours’: a 90 second read from South Armagh
on 5 May 2013 at 12:04 pm
If I follow minervabradley @ 11:52 pm correctly, the “spend” for each NI child diagnosed on the ASD spectrum is minute, derisory, deplorable.
Quite what worthwhile remedial work can be done on a budget of only a few hundred per pupil escapes me. It certainly isn’t “intensive”.
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Comment on If you live in a glass house, don`t throw stones…at UKIP
on 4 May 2013 at 10:17 am
Well, well: so much for “man and ball”. I’ve never seen such on Slugger before. And no sign of a warning card, either. Such unwonted license.
For information, Flashman (and anyone else seduced by his nonsense), I used the reference to Kipling’s Recessional in its proper context.
It was Kipling’s comment on Victoria’s Jubilee — which is why it is prominently headed “1897″. The fourth stanza is:
That follows the third stanza about our navies melt away … our pomp of yesterday.
Got it yet, Flashman? With your pseudonym you should.
It’s a warning that the great Victorian British Empire is over the hill, on the slide.
The poem, please note, is in the precise form of a good Ancient & Modern hymn. It is a warning that the WASPs are being overtaken by lesser breeds without the [Anglican] Law — Prussians and Russians in particular (who might qualify as Gentiles) — and even the despicable French.
Yes, Flashman, WASPs — the types so offended that Obama is in the White House and Rubio and Cruz are in the ascendant. In which connection, let’s not forget the “little brown” [pace George HW Bush] George P. Bush.
Perhaps Recessional should be read alongside the other verse that Kipling cooked for the Jubilee: The White Man’s Burden. Kipling possessed considerable sensitivity; and recognised that one didn’t fit the occasion. So he presented it to Teddy Roosevelt, then the coming star of the GOP.
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Comment on British & Irish flags at new Korean War Memorial for Ulster troops
on 3 May 2013 at 10:08 pm
GEF @ 6:01 am:
Sorry: just picked this one up.
To which the response is “yes”and “no”. There were Irish very much at the sharp end. Which is where I wanted to point in my post @ 2:24pm.
You didn’t need to be in uniform to be involved, or to be heroic. A clerical collar or a habit sufficed.
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Comment on British & Irish flags at new Korean War Memorial for Ulster troops
on 3 May 2013 at 2:24 pm
Finally:
One other site brings it even nearer home: Irish Men and Women Who Gave Their Lives in the Korean War — http://www.illyria.com/irishkor.html.
Read the whole of the Irish Embassy in Seoul’s press release, especially the “Notes for Editors”, for the account of the civilian dead: http://www.embassyofireland.or.kr/home/index.aspx?id=81828. That goes a long way to answering some aspects of Harry Flashman @ 9:09 am‘s query. It’s a heroic story, too.
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