A burial to die for?

Posted on September 14, 2014 by leslie

                 A burial to die for?

Bill Hartley attends a green interment

Any listener to BBC Radio Four’s The Archers will be aware that the village of Ambridge has a Green Burial Ground. It gets frequent mentions as characters ranging from the dairyman to Jim Lloyd the retired professor of classics, refer to it in reverential terms. Indeed so embedded has it become in the fictional landscape of Ambridge that one could believe it had been there for decades. The working class character Mike Tucker gives freely of his time to ensure that it is well maintained (a point of some significance about which more in a moment) and middle class busybody Linda Snell maintains a watching brief. The care and attention lavished upon it by this cross section of the community mirrors the way a pagan sacred well might once have been looked after by its devotees. Perhaps the Green Burial Ground is another example of ‘balance’ offsetting those stuffy old Christian characters who persist in anticipating their final resting place to be St. Stephen’s churchyard.

I had always been slightly suspicious of this faddish extension of the Green Movement. After all if you put a body in the earth it will eventually decay, so what does a Green Burial add to this?

Since The Archers has never gone into any detail I took advantage of an opportunity to find out for myself.

The burial ground where I attended an interment was well hidden amongst some farmland just north of Sheffield. We mourners parked our vehicles on a grubby patch of cinders and then looked around fruitlessly for some point of reference to let us know where we might be going. Eventually a converted People Carrier with darkened windows arrived and I correctly guessed that this was the stand in for a hearse.

Fortunately the undertaker had been here before and the cortege led the way towards some scrubland, its ‘natural’ state having been achieved by allowing the land to become overrun with clumps of coarse grass interspersed with hawthorn bushes. The latter had to be circumvented carefully to avoid being whacked in the eye by the thorny branches. Overall it seemed like one of those scraps of land that a farmer has no use for because crops won’t prosper; a far cry from the sylvan scene conjured up by The Archers scriptwriters. In this part of Yorkshire the same effect is achieved when nature colonises an abandoned colliery slagheap.

Presumably in order to help maintain this pristine natural look there was only one footpath leading to the burial area. It didn’t however take us as far as the graveside. At least the ground was dry but I couldn’t help but wonder how the elderly or infirm might pick their way across the uneven surface without a significant risk of falling. It would seem that some basic Health and Safety so pervasive in life is neglected in death when a Green Burial is involved.

The worst part of making one’s way across the ground was inadvertently treading on graves. The only marker allowed at a Green Burial site is a small plaque, easily concealed by the unkempt grass. Once the grave has settled then there is little to denote its presence. Having done this a couple of times I began to feel distinctly uneasy because of the natural desire most of us have to respect a burial place.

The whole concept of Green Burial is of course to accelerate the process of decomposition. This green extreme extends to the choice of coffin and in this case one made from wicker had been chosen. Interestingly I learnt that these are more expensive than the standard chipboard and veneer models usually offered by undertakers. This is where I really start to have an issue with green burials. An elongated laundry basket is, in my opinion, barely on the right side of decency. Anyone who has helped shift a laden wicker basket may anticipate the problem. The weight of the contents makes it shift and creak. Young mourners brought up in the modern trend of keeping death as well hidden as possible, seemed to find this unnerving because wicker coffins lack the rigidity of traditional models. Worse still the weave of the wicker makes it possible to glimpse the contents. What should have been a simple dignified internment was carried out amidst an air of uneasiness that this mourner wished to see over and done with quickly. I felt some relief when the ersatz coffin was lowered into the ground and we could vacate this dismal piece of scrubland.

All burial grounds will eventually reach their capacity when no further interments are possible. Even so they continue to be places of remembrance and reflection, visited not just by relatives of the deceased. Over time a cemetery will evolve into a part of the landscape with the funerary monuments created by past generations perhaps becoming worthy of preservation as an interesting part of our heritage. What I wonder will happen to a Green Burial site when the land reaches its capacity? Unlike a traditional cemetery where relatives may return and care for a grave, all traces of a final resting place will eventually be obscured by vegetation. It seems unlikely that future generations will show the kind of veneration that The Archers scriptwriters bestow on Ambridge’s Green Burial Ground and the eventual fate of the one I visited will be to exist as a burial site only on local authority records.

BILL HARTLEY is a freelance writer from Yorkshire

 

 

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Killing English, with Bill O’Reilly

Posted on September 5, 2014 by leslie

dunce

Killing English, with Bill O’Reilly

Ilana Mercer Educates her Masters 

Richard Burton exulted in his love of English. “I am as thrilled by the English language as I am by a lovely woman,” exclaimed the great actor.

Bill O’Reilly, however, kills it – the English language, that is. The TV personality has a segment on “The Factor,” where he introduces his listeners to English words that he supposedly uses, but whose pronunciation he often botches. Botched this week was the verb “cavil,” pronounced by Mr. OReilly as “kevile,” emphasis on the last syllable. Evel ‘Kevile’!

Mr. O’Reilly once introduced his viewers to the noun “chimera.” The “ch” he enunciated as you would “ch” in “chimp.” It is pronounced as a “k.”

Conjugation doesn’t come easily on the host’s “Talking Points.” These are festooned with errors like, “Laying around,” when he means “lying around.” Too many American writers have a problem with the verb to “lie.” Why? You’re lying on the bed, you lay on the bed last night, and you will lie on it tomorrow. And by the way, a politician can both “lie” through his teeth and be made to “lie” on a rack. They’re a nimble lot.

In the early 2000s, when Mr. O’Reilly’s column was featured on WND, he would make this same conjugation error. I was sufficiently piqued to drop him a polite note. He failed to reply. The mistake, however, was quickly corrected. Myself, I thank my readers profusely when they save me from myself, as they often do, and take this opportunity to ask that they keep their eyes peeled for future faux pas.

Another common error in enunciation is “macabre”. The Americanized dictionary supports the native habit of saying “macabra.” Sorry. The “re” in “macabre” is silent.

Still on enunciation: “PundiNts.” Greg Gutfeld and Hillary Clinton, among many, share the habit of inserting an “n” between the “i” and the “t” when pronouncing the word “pundit.” It’s not there.

“Flaunting” laws instead of “flouting” them is an especially infuriating error of meaning even Colin Powell makes (although killing English is the least of the man’s offenses, given that he helped lie the country into a bloody war).

I recall running for cover, last year, as Bob Costa, National Review’s youthful editor, spoke about a GOP revolt against House Speaker John Boehner. Costa said the following on the “Kudlow Report”:

“… if he lost 17 Republican votes, that means he would have went to a second ballot.”

Noooooo. Flog him! Costa should have said, “He would have GONE.” Together, let’s conjugate the verb to “go,” Mr. Costa. “I am going. I will go. I went. I have previously gone. I had gone. I would have gone.” (My conjugation drill sergeant back in Israel was an ace English teacher from Germany).

Still, Bill O’Reilly and his ilk are semantic saints compared to the rotten writing – it comports with the aberrant thinking – taught in the American English department.

In its December 12, 2008 issue, the Times Literary Supplement had some fun exposing the incomprehensibility factor in the impenetrable prose of a pompous graduate in the postmodern tradition:

“Once the habit of writing comprehensible English has been unlearned, it can be difficult to reacquire the knack. Here is an example of a sentence, which purports to be written in English, but which, we propose, is incomprehensible to all but a few. It is taken from ‘Coincidence and Counterfactuality’: Plotting time and space in narrative fiction by Hilary P. Dannenberg”:

“Historical counterfactuals in narrative fiction frequently take an ontologically different form in which the counterfactual premise engenders a whole narrative world instead of being limited to hypothetical inserts embedded in the main actual world of the narrative text.”

About Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, the Dannenberg dolt writes that it “undertakes a more concerted form of counterfactualizing, in which both the character and the narrator separately map out counterfactual versions of the concluding phase of the novel’s love plot.”

In studied contempt, the TLS marveled that “Coincidence and Counterfactuality” “is published by the University of Nebraska Press. Just think: someone read the book and endorsed its publication, someone edited it, someone else set it in type, designed a cover, compiled an index, read the proofs – yet hardly anyone can understands what’s in it.” [Nobody reads these books.]

Now that’s pellucid prose everyone gets.

A friend – she’s a successful novelist – related this amusing incident:

“I once got hired by the University of Chicago to edit their academic press. The manuscripts were atrocious. I could not understand what was written, and used a red pen heavily in the margins of the manuscripts. After my corrections arrived, I was fired immediately. They told me I was not ‘intellectually sophisticated’ enough for the job. To which I replied: ‘You’re right: F-ck you.’”

Incongruously – after bemoaning the progressives, and how, having infiltrated America’s institutions, they toiled to alter the meaning of the Constitution – Glenn Beck proposed revisionism of his own: rewrite the “Federalist Papers” so that Americans may understand these brilliant, but difficult, debates.

The founders’ English, like Richard Burton’s, is an essential part of the American heritage. Let’s not lose it in translation.

ILANA MERCER is a paleolibertarian writer based in the United States. She pens WND’s longest-standing column, “Return to Reason” and is a Fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. She is a Quarterly Review Contibuting Editor. Illana’s latest book is Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa. Her website is www.IlanaMercer.com. She blogs at www.BarelyaBlog.com.

 

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Rand Paul Opportunistic – and Wrong – on Race

Posted on September 1, 2014 by leslie

 

Rand Paul Opportunistic—and Wrong—on Race

The Ferguson Riots – Ilana Mercer distinguishes between divergent discourses

Police brutality? Yes! Militarization of the police force? You bet! “A Government of Wolves”? Yes again! “The Rise of the Warrior Cop”? No doubt! But racism? Nonsense on stilts! So why have some libertarians applied this rhetoric to the murder-by-cop of black teenager Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri? The same people who would argue against color-coded hate-crime legislation—and rightly so, for a crime is a crime, no matter the skin pigment of perp or prey—would have you believe that it is possible to differentiate a racist from a non-racist shooting or beating.

Predictably, BBC News had taken a more analytical look at the “unrest in Ferguson,” pointing out that liberal outrage had centered on what the left sees as racial injustice. Libertarian anger, conversely, connected “the perceived overreaction by militarized local law enforcement to a critique of the heavy-handed power of government.”

As its libertarian stand-bearers, the BBC chose from the ranks of establishment, libertarian-leaning conservatives. Still, the ideological bifurcation applied by the BBC was sound. With some exceptions, libertarians have consistently warned about a police state rising; the left has played at identity politics, appealing to its unappeasable base.

As refreshingly clever as some of its commentators are, the BBC is inexact. The very embodiment of political opportunism, Sen. Rand Paul has managed to straddle liberal and libertarian narratives, vaporizing as follows:

“… Given the racial disparities in our criminal justice system, it is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them. … Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention.”

The senator from Kentucky is considered “one of the leading figures in today’s libertarian movement.” Even so, on matters libertarian, Rand Paul is a political pragmatist; not the purist his father is. Alas, Rand has imbibed at home some unfortunate, crowd-pleasing habits—the leftist penchant for accusing law enforcement of racism. In 2012, in particular, during the debate between Republican presidential front-runners, in Manchester, New Hampshire, Ron Paul lurched to the left, implicating racism in the unequal outcomes meted by American justice:

“How many times have you seen the white rich person get the electric chair?” he asked. “If we really want to be concerned with racism … we ought to look at the drug laws.”

Laws that prevent the individual from purchasing, selling, ingesting, inhaling and injecting drugs ought to be repudiated and repealed on the grounds that they are wrong, not racist. But statism is not necessarily racism. Drug laws ensnare more blacks, because blacks are more likely to violate them by dealing in drugs or engaging in violence around commerce in drugs, not necessarily because cops are racists.

The following statements are, I believe, not mutually exclusive: cops deal with the reality of crime. The culture of US cops is that of a craven disregard for American lives.

By all means, argue against laws prohibiting victimless “crimes” on the ground that these disproportionally ensnare blacks. But do not err in accusing all cops of targeting blacks, when the former are entrusted with enforcing the law, and the latter violate the law in disproportion to their numbers in the general population.

The left-liberal trend continued on the libertarian Lewrockwell.com where white sympathy with the police was conflated with racism: “This doesn’t mean that racism is not also involved [in Ferguson]. Polls show that a majority of white Americans are content with the police justification for the killing.”

Could it be that ordinary Americans maligned as racists are honestly waiting for more information, or suffer an authoritarian, submissive mindset; are ignorant about police state USA or have simply experienced black crime first hand, or are fearful of experiencing “black-on-white-violence” in all it ferocity?

Clearly, there are many reasons for the acquiescence of whites in what might seem to many of us—myself included—as an unjustified use of lethal, police force.

Riding the same old racism ass was libertarian extraordinaire John Stossel, who managed to cram into an otherwise reasonable column a nod to the irrational racism meme. “Yes, centuries of white people abusing the civil liberties of blacks have left many blacks resentful of police power.” Et tu, Stossel? Here, perpetual black rage against innocent whites is legitimized by harking back to times bygone. Is there a statute of limitations on Honky’s perceived trespasses? This collectivist case for group guilt in perpetuity conjures up South Africa. There, apartheid has become the root-cause excuse, offered up by lily white liberals, for the dysfunction of many young black South Africans, who were born well after the end of apartheid.

While ambient lawlessness is loathsome, the black community’s resistance to a police force sporting a militarized mindset and armaments to match is worthy of lionisation.  Were Michael Brown one of the 2,151 whites slain by police “over the span of more than a decade”—his community of submissives would be silent, rather than protesting on the streets.

Go bros!

In absolute numbers, more whites than blacks are culled by cop, confirms politifact.com. Rand Paul is right and righteous to warn of the universal, indiscriminate “militarization of law enforcement,” coupled with “an erosion of civil liberties and due process that allows the police to become judge and jury—national security letters, no-knock searches, broad general warrants, pre-conviction forfeiture.”

Where, then, is that black politician who would break from his racial orbit and recognize that, black, brown and white, we are all in this together? He’s not in the White House.

MSNBC host Al Sharpton is that fellow whose intelligible spoken English is confined to the words “racial discrimination.” The country’s second-leading race agitator has been deputized by its first as liaison to the White House in Ferguson. With his choice of Sharpton as point man on the ground, President Barack Obama, who was to usher in an America in which “ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony,” is stoking more strife.

Like two pimps in a pod, Sharpton and Obama have collaborated to keep racial grievance going.

ILANA MERCER is a paleolibertarian writer based in the United States. She pens WND’s longest-standing column, “Return to Reason” and is a Fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. She is a Quarterly Review Contributing Editor. Ilana’s latest book is Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons from America from Post-Apartheid South Africa. Her website is www.IlanaMercer.com. She blogs at www.BarelyaBlog.com.

 

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A semblance of change – UK parliamentary politics then and now

Posted on August 28, 2014 by Derek Turner

A semblance of change – UK parliamentary politics then and now

ALEX KURTAGIC finds underlying similarities between the major British political parties

In The Problem of Democracy, Alain de Benoist writes that the term ‘democracy’ is so widely misused today as to have become virtually meaningless. One example of such misuse we find in the observation, often repeated on the Right, but probably also thought by many, that the main political parties of Western democratic nations offer no genuine choice to the electorate – that the political establishment will sell essentially the same politics under two or maybe three different labels, and that, therefore, rather than the voters making a choice between political parties, it is the political parties who make a choice between the voters. In other words, in the next election (as in past ones), voters will not make a choice, because the choice has already been made for them.

Policy debates are very noisy, and the media does much to sharpen the contrast and heighten the drama to fever pitch, but the gap between the parties is even narrower than we think. In all cases, and despite election promises, policy development moves in the same general direction. There is always more immigration, more legislation, more surveillance, more debt, more political correctness, and more emphasis on non-economic forms of equality. Focus remains on economic growth, no matter what the consequences or at what cost; and culturally there seems only the wrecking ball: a revisionism that tends towards devaluation, vulgarisation, and the deprecation of anything that is elevating, heroic, traditional, or aristocratic. While it may seem an exaggeration to say that in effect we have a one-party system, when we examine the political parties historically, the assertion has some basis in reality.

Tories and Conservatives

Today’s Conservatives have nothing to do with the Tory Party of the 1600s. The Tory Party traced its origins to the politics of the English Civil War: the pre-Tories – this was before the term came into use – were a Parliamentarian faction that had become alienated from the radicalism of the reformers. They supported Charles I, a strong monarchy as a counter-balance to the power of Parliament, and the Church of England, which was considered by them a main support for the royal government; while their opponents, the Whigs, supported a strong Parliament with the king reduced to a mere figurehead. Properly speaking, the Tory Party emerged some time later, during the Exclusion Bill crisis of 1678-1681. The Whigs wanted to exclude James, Duke of York, from the throne, due to his support for absolute monarchy, strong connections to France, and recent conversion to Catholicism, which they thought would imperil the Protestant religion and was a threat to civil liberty. As before, the Tories supported the King and rejected the Exclusion Bill.

After the Glorious Revolution, the Tories remained a powerful political force, despite the eventual failure of their founding principles. In this they benefited from Queen Anne’s support, who despised the Whigs. By 1714, however, the Tories were finished as a governing party: upon acceding to the throne, George I formed a government composed entirely of Whigs, who then seized the opportunity to extend their power and crush the Tories completely. The Tories were summarily dismissed from office and pushed out into the wilderness. Though they enjoyed broad support throughout the country, and would have won every election between 1715 and 1747 under a system of proportional representation, the distribution of parliamentary seats was such that they comprised a permanent minority in Parliament, without a hope of ever returning to government.

In the face of Whig omnipotence, the Tories were reduced to supporting Whig factions, until they eventually ceased to function as a coherent political party. The term Tory, which had begun as an insult (meaning ‘outlaw’ or ‘robber’) regained its status as an epithet, and, after the accession of George III, was used pejoratively to refer to supporters of the King. However, even politicians who at this time were labelled ‘Tory’, such as Lord Bute and Lord North (who was Prime Minister during the American Revolution), described themselves as Whig. In fact, no politician described himself as a Tory. Whig hegemony was complete, and from then on there would only be government Whigs and opposition Whigs.

All the same, Toryism – now designated High Toryism, to distinguish it from the debased ‘Tory’ label informally used when referring to Conservatives – still managed to survive, albeit under the surface. In modern times it existed as a strand of the traditionalist faction within the Conservative Party, since there was nowhere else to go. T. S. Eliot, Enoch Powell, and Alan Clark have been described as High Tories, and at one time the Conservative Monday Club, a Right-wing pressure group, was the leading exponent of High Toryism. However, the Monday Club was marginalised and eventually expelled from the Conservative Party, and a successor, the Traditional Britain Group, exists entirely on the outside.

The modern Conservative Party traces its origins to a faction of the Whig Party centred on William Pitt the Younger. This faction rejected the politics of the ‘Old Whigs’ – and opposed the radicalism detonated by the American and French Revolutions. Pitt thought of himself as an ‘independent Whig’, and, unlike the Tories of old, approved of the existing constitutional arrangement and saw no reason to alter the balance of power in favour of the royal prerogative. Neither did subsequent governments of the so-called ‘Friends of Mr Pitt’ consider ‘Tory’ an appropriate label. While temperamentally conservative and associated with the lesser gentry and the Church of England and the Episcopal Church in Scotland, and while sentimentally attached to the old institutions of the monarchy, they were, unlike the Tories, against increasing royal power. More importantly, these Pittites were warlike imperialists, whereas the Tories had been pacific isolationists.

The principles of the modern Conservative Party were laid down by Robert Peel in The Tamworth Manifesto, published in 1834. Subsequent Peelite administrations labelled themselves ‘conservative’ – the term was first used in a Quarterly Review article – but theirs can hardly be considered a conservative founding document, since it was committed to reform in all areas, and only attenuated by an opposition to change when deemed unnecessary. Following a split in the party on the issue of free trade, Peel’s supporters would eventually join the Whigs and the radicals to form the Liberal Party. The Peelites, obviously, supported free trade, while their opponents were protectionists. During the dispute the protectionist faction had rejected the ‘conservative’ label and instead called themselves ‘Tory’. With Peel’s defection, however, and under the leadership of the Earl of Derby and Benjamin Disraeli, these ‘Tories’ adopted the term ‘Conservative’ as the official name of the Party. Note, though, that the Earl of Derby (Edward Smith-Stanley) had begun his political career in the Whig Party, while Benjamin Disraeli had begun his – unsuccessfully – as a Radical.

The Whigs

As we have seen, the Liberal Party was formed out of a merger of the Whig Party and the Radicals. The Whigs were reform-oriented aristocrats, and the term ‘Whig’ was also an insult, meaning ‘cattle driver’. They were influenced by the ideas of Algernon Sidney and John Locke, which found expression in Political Aphorisms: or, the True Maxims of Government Displayed, an anonymous pamphlet published in 1690, and other manifestos. Political Aphorisms argued for

…the equality of individuals in the state of nature, their consent as the foundation of all government, the right of the people to resist a king who violates the original contract, and the principle that power reverts to the people when the government is dissolved.

It also stated that

…every individual is bound by the Law of Nature to exercise self-defence against those who violate that law or, within civil society, the common good.

By the 1770s, Adam Smith, the founder of classical liberalism, became another important influence. During the reign of George III the Whigs fragmented into factions – ‘Greenvillite’, ‘Bedfordite’, ‘Rockinghamite’, and ‘Chathamite’ – but eventually coalesced around two of them: the Rockinghamites, who represented the ‘Old Whigs’ of wealthy aristocratic families, and the Chathamites. Edmund Burke Was aligned with the Rockingham Whigs, who opposed the policies that led to the American Revolution and later sought a negotiated peace.

After Lord North’s departure from government, a coalition of Rockingham Whigs and former Chathamites, led by the Earl of Shelburne, took over. But after Charles James Fox replaced Rockingham following the latter’s death, he quarrelled with Lord Shelburne and destroyed the coalition. Lord Shelburne’s government was brief, and Fox returned to power in coalition with his inveterate enemy, Lord North. This oil-and-vinegar coalition soon fell apart, leading to George III bringing in William Pitt the Younger (Lord Chatham’s son) as his Prime Minister. Charles James Fox and his supporters, now opposition Whigs, saw themselves as legitimate heirs to the Whig tradition.

Fox was politically radical, and was notoriously pampered by his father, who indulged his every whim. On one occasion, for example, he expressed a desire to break his father’s watch, and duly smashed it on the floor, without being restrained or reprimanded for it. On another, his father promised him to let him watch the demolition of a wall in his estate; when he learnt that the wall had already been demolished, Henry Fox ordered the workmen to rebuild the wall and re-demolish it, with Charles in attendance. As a young man, Fox was given free rein to choose his own education, and attended fashionable schools, following which he was taken to Paris and Spa, during which trip his father furnished with abundant funds so he could learn to gamble, and also introduced him to womanising by arranging for him to lose his virginity to one Madame de Quallens. When Fox returned to Eton in 1763, he arrived ‘attired in red-heeled shoes and Paris cut-velvet, adorned with a pigeon-wing hair style tinted with blue powder, and a newly acquired French accent’, which led to a corrective flogging by the headmaster.

Fox would divide his party on the issue of the French Revolution, which he supported, and his Radical allies. Edmund Burke, who, as a sympathiser of the colonists’ grievances in America and a supporter of the American independence, was respected by liberals, would defect to Pitt in 1791, after which and many others would break with Fox by 1793 and also defect to Pitt by 1794. Upon Pitt’s death in 1809, Lord Grenville formed a government of national unity, called the Ministry of All the Talents, during which Whig defectors returned to the fold. When the Ministry of All the Talents fell a year later, the Foxite Whigs were excluded from power for a generation.

Yet the climax of Whiggism was soon to come, as the Whigs regained unity around moral causes, pushing for the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of the Catholics, relief for the poor, and Parliamentary reform, with which they returned to power in 1830. These causes were spearheaded by the Radical Whig faction, whose writings had been influential in the period leading up to the American Revolution. Under the premiership of Lord Grey, the disciple and successor of Charles James Fox, they passed the Reform Act 1832, which widened the electoral franchise by redistributing power on the basis of population, thus ending a practice, in place since 1432, which defined the voting qualification as any male freehold owner of land worth 40 shillings or above. Under the old regime many boroughs – known as ‘rotten boroughs’ or ‘pocket boroughs’ – would be controlled by powerful land-owning families, while populous manufacturing towns went unrepresented. The enfranchisement of the upper middle class thus shifted power away from the landed aristocracy and towards the urban middle classes. This sowed the seeds for the decline for Whiggism, for henceforth the House of Commons became a site of systematic middle class liberalism. Incidentally, William Pitt the Younger had already proposed electoral reform along these lines in 1785, but his motion was defeated.

Chairing the Member by William Hogarth

The Radicals

British radicalism began during the crisis between the American colonies and Great Britain. They drew from the Leveller tradition, which originated during the English Civil War. As expressed in the manifesto, An Agreement of the People, published between 1647 and 1649, the Levellers, who were not a political party but a movement, emphasised popular sovereignty, extended suffrage, equality before the law, and religious tolerance. Politically speaking, however, the term Radical is credited to the Whig Charles James Fox, who called for a ‘radical reform’ of the electoral system.

The Radicals actively agitated during the French Revolution. The radical pamphleteer and nonconformist cleric Richard Price saw in the French Revolution a fulfilment of prophecy, and his sermon, A Discourse on the Love of our Country, preached on the 101st anniversary of the Glorious Revolution, was met with an unexpected and energetic reply by Edmund Burke, titled Reflections on the Revolution in France. Though it would later prove influential among classical liberals (not just traditional conservatism), the immediate response was The Rights of Man, by Thomas Paine, and A Vindication of the Rights of Man by proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (the mother of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein), who followed up with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, where she extended Price’s argument for the equality of women. Together with William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft’s husband, they argued for republicanism, agrarian socialism, and anarchism.

Needless to say, the Radicals were radical egalitarians, and encouraged mass support for democratic reform along with rejection of the monarchy, the aristocracy, and all forms of privilege. The middle class radicals sought to broaden the franchise to include commercial and industrial interests and towns without parliamentary representation. The ‘popular radicals’, drawn from the middle class and from the artisanate, agitated to assert wider rights, including poverty relief – while the ‘philosophical radicals’, who were antipathetic to the popular faction, established the theoretical basis for electoral reform via Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism.

From 1836, working class radicals coalesced around the Chartist movement, named after the People’s Charter, The Charter called for universal suffrage over the age of 21; a secret ballot; no property qualification for members of Parliament; payment for MPs (so poor men could serve); constituencies of equal size; and annual elections for Parliament. The Chartists also led mass demonstrations and petitions to Parliament voicing economic grievances. Though unsuccessful, their cause was taken up by the Anti-Corn Law League, which was dissolved upon repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Its members would carry on within the Liberal Party.

The Liberal Party

The Liberal Party resulting from the Whig-Radical fusion was initially dominated by John Russell and Lord Palmerston. Its first leader would be William Gladstone, who took over after Palmerston died and Russell retired. The first Liberal government was led by Gladstone after victory in the general election of 1868. The Party then became a national membership organisation in 1877, thereby becoming a modern political party.

It was during this period that the trade unions movement began entering politics. After the Second Reform Act 1867, which enfranchised the urban working class, and the Third Reform Act 1885, which enfranchised Catholic voters in Ireland, the Liberal Party began endorsing some of the candidates sponsored by the trade unions, since there was no Labour Party. The first Lib-Lab candidate was George Odger, who ran in the Southwark by-election of 1870.

The Liberals would reach their apex in the 1890s, which also saw the formation of the Independent Labour Party in 1893. From then on the Liberal Party went into decline, their electoral support gobbled up at an accelerating pace by the Labour Party, which also benefited from Liberal defectors. The Liberals were divided by World War I, and by the early 1920s, they were barely managing one third of the vote. The Great Depression further divided the liberals, and by the 1935 election, they were reduced to seventeen seats in Parliament. Subsequent elections saw ever-shrinking liberal representation, which was reduced to twelve seats in 1945, nine in 1950, six in 1951, and five in 1957. It seemed at this point that the Liberal Party would become extinct, but they managed to cling on, if only because a smattering of constituencies in rural Scotland and Wales remained attached to their Liberal traditions, and because the Liberals and the Conservatives agreed each to contest only one of the two seats in Bolton and Huddersfield.

The Liberal Party would enjoy a minor revival under Jo Grimond, who had become an MP for the remote constituency of Orkney and Shetland. Grimond repositioned the party as a non-socialist alternative to the Conservatives, and his appeal was to the younger middle-class suburban generation. While the Liberals became a serious third force in British politics, they remained unable to break through the dominance of Labour and the Conservatives.

Thus was established a pattern of ever-Leftward drift that has become characteristic of modern politics: the Tories were annihilated by their competitors on the Left, the Whigs; the Whigs then fused with the Radicals on their Left to form the Liberal Party; and the Liberal Party was then nearly extinguished by the rise a new party even further to the Left, the Labour Party.

The Labour Party

When the urban proletariat was enfranchised by the Second Reform Act 1867, it was felt that a party was needed to represent their interests. As already noted, the party originated in the trades union movement, which in 1893 led to the formation of the Independent Labour Party. The intellectual foundations were laid down by the Fabian Socialists. In 1900, the Trade Union Congress proposed a conference, attended by various socialist groups, which then created the Labour Representation Committee, whose mission was to coordinate the MPs sponsored by the trade unions. The LRC eventually led to the formal adoption of ‘The Labour Party’ as its designation in 1906. The LRC included two members of the Social Democratic Federation, a Marxist organisation supported by William Morris and Eleanor Marx (Karl’s youngest daughter), which later established the British Socialist Party. The BSP emerged as an explicitly revolutionary socialist organisation after the Bolshevik Revolution, and, following negotiations with other communist groups, formed the Communist Party of Great Britain. The Labour Party kept its distance from communism, however, and the first Labour Party Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, was a committed anti-communist, so the CPGB remained isolated and small. Nevertheless, after 1956, defectors of the CPGB, such as E. P. Thompson and John Saville, of the Communist Party Historians Group, a subdivision of the CPGB, would begin to rethink their orthodox Marxism, leading to the emergence of the New Left. Other defectors would go straight to the Labour Party. This, of course, meant that the Labour Party began turning towards Marxism.

The Social Democratic Party

The Labour Party was a natural target for infiltration by communists. From the 1950s, some came from the Socialist Review Group. Membership of the SRG was tiny, so they adopted an entryist strategy, working within the Labour Party to spread Trotskyist propaganda and recruit. Nearly two-thirds of the Labour League of Youth were members of the SRG. The communist influence cannot be overlooked, for by 1983 the Labour Party enjoyed the approval even of hardcore Marxist Eric Hobsbawm, a man who refused to apologise for the tens of millions of dead under Stalin on the grounds that the aim of the worker’s revolution justifies the means.

When in 1981, under the leadership of Michael Foot, the Labour Party adopted a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from the European Economic Community (the precursor of the European Union), a so-called ‘gang of four’, already alienated by the Trotskyist drift of the Labour Party, defected to form the Social Democratic Party. Their ideology was social liberalism. This new party, however, challenged the Liberal position as the third party, and they both realised that it would be counter-productive to compete with one another. They therefore formed an alliance, the SDP-Liberal Alliance, in which guise they fought elections.

The Alliance’s share of the vote made gains at the expense of Labour’s, but the first-past-the-post electoral system still meant that the Alliance had only dozens of MPs, while Labour had hundreds. Moreover, this was during the height of the Thatcher era, so the Alliance had no hope of being in government.

The Liberal Democrats

The Liberal Democrats resulted from the formal merger – the logical conclusion of the Alliance – of the Liberal Party with the Social Democratic Party in 1988.

Ideologically, the party’s origins are reflected in the fact that the party is composed of economic liberals and social liberals. The economic liberals, also called Orange Bookers after their manifesto, represent, numerically, only a one-third minority. The social liberals favour policies aimed at equality of outcome and reductions in social inequality. All Liberal Democrat party leaders up until Nick Clegg took over in 2007 have been social liberals. Nick Clegg, by contrast, is a personal and economic liberal and was a contributor to the Orange Book. This clearly made him a viable coalition partner for David Cameron after the 2010 general election.

Liberal supremacy

From a historical perspective, it becomes clear that liberal supremacy exists not only in the imagination of Right-wingers: it is real. And while there are socialist tendencies in both the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrat Party, the Conservatives, like them, are committed to egalitarianism: David Cameron is a signatory of Unite Against Fascism, a thuggish group that descends from the Anti-Nazi League, which was organised by Tony Cliff’s Socialist Worker’s Party, a Marxist group. Cameron has also been praised by Martin Kettle, contributor of Marxism Today and son of high-ranking communist Arnold Kettle, as ‘good for Britain’. What we have is a consensus around liberalism that has mild socialist leanings. Even though the Daily Mail has recently attacked Ed Miliband by drawing attention to his father, Ralph Miliband, a Marxist theorist of the New Left who was briefly a member of the Labour Party, Ed remains committed to capitalism.

Any political opposition to liberalism today remains strictly marginal, existing in the form of fissiparous grouplets, think tanks, and fora that meet quietly at privately held events. Oppositional ideas remain largely unutterable, since for most ordinary citizens they remain unthinkable. Even if they would welcome change, before change is possible it has to be sayable, and before it is sayable, it has to be thinkable.

Having said that, no hegemony lasts forever, and while the liberals now seem all-powerful, and while the Left continues to enjoy power in the academic ecosystem, from where they continue to drive the long-term Leftward drift of liberalism and therefore politics in general, it bears remembering that radicals were once on the fringes, and, in the case of the Marxists, they were also forced to operate as clandestine or semi-clandestine grouplets, think tanks, and fora. It may well be that liberalism will one day decline and come to be dislodged by something else. When, and what that something else will look like, however, is yet to be determined. For the time being it looks as liberalism will remain a formidable force for some time to come.

ALEX KURTAGIC is an artist, freelance writer and novelist

 

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Manifesto for Sad People

Posted on August 28, 2014 by leslie

Albert Camus

Manifesto for Sad People

Edward Dutton Enjoys the Definitive Application of Absurdism

Adventures in Stationery: A Journey through Your Pencil Case, James Ward, 2014, Profile Books, Hardback, 280pp.

The philosophical school known as Absurdism developed from the belief that life has no ultimate meaning and, as such, life itself is absurd. Existentialist philosophers argued that we could cope with the absurdity of existence by finding beauty and stimulation in the insignificant and unimportant. This kind of self-created meaning could give the post-religious Man something to strive for; something to take his mind off the insanity of struggling against the Void. With no ‘hope,’ for Albert Camus insists that ‘hope’ is simply a way of avoiding confronting the absurdity of life, one must live every moment to the full. One must look for the positive in everyday things; in boring things.

Investing meaning specifically in ‘boring’ things, however, was never actually articulated by the likes of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard or Nobel-prize winning Algerian-French novelist Albert Camus. This has been left to their successor, James Ward; a 33 year-old office worker from Worcester Park, a nondescript conurbation which straddles the south-west London-Surrey border and was home to John Major as a baby. For many years, Ward has kept a witty and original blog called I Like Boring Things. Continue reading →

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Mission to Kabul, a Footnote in Weltpolitik STODDARD MARTIN

Posted on August 27, 2014 by leslie

 

Wilhelm II

Mission to Kabul: a Footnote in Weltpolitik

Stoddard Martin discerns a curious continuity in German foreign policy

The Kaiser’s Mission to Kabul: A Secret Expedition to Afghanistan in World War 1, Jules Stewart, I. B. Tauris, London, 2014, HB, £20

It does not surprise me that the U.S. National Security Agency should have wanted to tap the telephone of Angela Merkel. A Prussian ‘eastie’ who becomes leader of the conservative, historically western Christian Democratic Party must be, at least on the surface of it, a riddle wrapped in an enigma[i]. Frau Merkel goes religiously to the Wagner festival at Bayreuth and cheers volubly in Brazil for her World Cup-winning football team while sitting two seats away from Vladimir Putin – a German speaker who spent nine years running the KGB in East Germany’s most west-damaged city, Dresden. Following the Iraq War-opposing chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, deposed to become Germany’s main dealmaker with Gazprom, Mrs Merkel has been billed as a west-friendly leader, the German Margaret Thatcher etc. She smiled at George W. Bush, befriended David Cameron (though doing little to help him against his Euro-sceptic flank) and appears at the same time to be the originator of Barack Obama’s policy dictum, ‘Don’t do stupid stuff!’ She is alleged to have conspired to bring down one crooked European colleague, Silvio Berlusconi, yet overtly campaigned to keep another in power, Nicolas Sarkozy; latterly she is said to have had good relations with the former[ii], while formerly it was claimed she had bad relations with the latter. Who is she really? The NSA might be forgiven for wondering, even if a likely answer is that she is a sphinx without a secret.

A German friend asked by an English colleague ‘What does Mrs Merkel want?’ responded without hesitation, ‘To win the war’. This may or may not give the game away. What is reasonable to posit is that Angela Merkel, possibly more than any postwar German leader, is the true face of her country’s historic role. In foreign affairs she speaks softly, smiles, proceeds with caution, keeps a bit under the radar with an eye always on the national interest. But what is that interest precisely? To the extent to which it is opaque, the NSA would not be doing its job not to try to find out, just as the BND (Germany’s equivalent, Bundesnachtrichtendienst) would be failing in its remit not to try to ascertain America’s deepest intentions, thus phone-taps on Secretaries of State John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, to which it recently admitted. Full score to both sides on that issue, and quits. It feels like shadow play and is possibly in aid of getting German inclusion into the Echelon system of intelligence sharing, up ‘til now restricted to the ‘five eyes’ of old Anglo-Saxony: the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Who might object to modern German inclusion? Perhaps mainly those who feel that their historic primacy is being eroded: on the American side Britain, which helped set up the CIA in the first place, on the German, France, which has been the postwar face of European military policy, for obvious reasons. Old spooks may be cautious about inviting in old enemies. But Germany has by now long been second to the U.S. as the major western economic and political power, so it is only logical that she should be its principal partner in strategic management, even if adjustment to this status must carry on slowly enough so that the others can get used to their new places at the table.

The traditional view is that Germany is a land power which, apart from Lebensraum in contiguous regions, has little colonial ambition. This may have been true before the later 19th century, though the Holy Roman Empire – Germany’s First Reich – pushed boundaries continually west, south and east. Under the Hohenstaufen, it seemed to invade Italy every summer, only to retreat in the autumn, either from fever or insurrection. The emperors went with other potentates of Christendom on the Crusades – Barbarossa is as much of a name to conjure with in that context as Coeur de Lion – and this was arguably the start of European imperialism. The Crusades may be filed in the category of contiguous land grab – Vienna to Constantinople to Jerusalem is an unbroken trek – and in future centuries Baghdad to Persia to Afghanistan merely continue that outreach into ‘Aryan’ heartlands. This form of German foreign policy is what The Kaiser’s Mission to Kabul is about, taking the subject from the establishment of the Second Reich to the present day. There were of course movements in other directions once Bismarck had consolidated that Reich: Germany, while not participant in the carve-up of the New World and Africa with England, France and Spain, or even little Portugal and Holland, in the 16th-19th centuries, did under Victoria’s favourite grandson, Wilhelm II, throw itself energetically into that ‘great game’, with its expats in the Americas and China and explorers in west and east Africa having major impact on development in those far-flung regions.

The Moslem world became a major target. In Morocco Germany was involved in a dispute that threatened world war a decade before the first one broke out. In Ottoman lands she cultivated friends from Constantinople to Baghdad, leading the decayed empire to align itself with the Central Powers. Once world war had commenced, the Kaiser (rumoured for propaganda reasons to have embraced Islam) approved a mission to Afghanistan so as to threaten British India sufficiently that it could not send troops to the western front. The mission was led by a Bavarian soldier, Oskar von Niedermayer, and a Prussian diplomat, Otto von Hentig, the former to train fighters, the latter to persuade the king to forswear cession of foreign policy to the Raj as well as the subsidies that secured it. German activity in this guise appeared on the side of indigenous self-determination; the Indian revolutionary Mahendra Pratap was also in the party, which was partly directed from the Oriental desk of the Auswartiges Amt in Berlin by the lifelong enthusiast for anti-colonial jihad, Max von Oppenheim. In Baghdad German operatives stimulated insurrectionist elements, as did ‘the German Lawrence’ Wilhelm Wassmuss in the deserts of Iran. Meanwhile, at Kabul, Niedermayer  trained up an army of 40,000 while Hentig made far-sighted attempts to influence ‘hearts and minds’. After German reversals in 1916, the mission had to be abandoned, and the pair returned home by divergent yet equally perilous routes, Hentig’s through China and the U.S. involving arrests and escapes which made the British F.O. view him as a kind of Scarlet Pimpernel. Jules Stewart tells a tale of adventure as if out of Conrad or Kipling; his main purpose, however, is to show how the mission laid groundwork for major developments in Afghanistan in the postwar epoch and after.

Weimar Germans came to build roads, dams, schools and infrastructure. They provided credits, even contracts at a loss, to get their feet under the table – the Kabul to Berlin air service via Baghdad, for example, lost money but constituted a public relations coup. Given the inflation of the ‘20s and unemployment of the ‘30s, German engineers and designers were willing to expatriate themselves at a much cheaper rate than their British counterparts; a result is that by 1937 Germany was shipping steel to Afghanistan worth 2.8 million rupees while Britain was only managing 38,600 worth. Hitler, being racist, was loath to back any project which might advance Indian independence – like many Nazis, he hoped for common cause with a British Empire made German-friendly – thus in the second war, Hentig, now at the Auswartiges Amt himself, was unable to advance any mission like the one he had fronted on the ground for the Kaiser. As a footnote to his story, he was apparently able to help persuade the Führer that Germany had an interest in encouraging a Jewish state in Palestine: though demonstrably not an anti-Semite, Hentig played on the prejudices of his leader shrewdly enough to promote a cause that might have otherwise seemed anathema[iii]. The anti-Semitic French writer Céline liked to rant that, whatever Hitler preached, the Foreign Office in Berlin was still run by ‘yids’[iv]; and while this may be a flagrant instance of Célinian rigolade, Stewart argues that Max von Oppenheim was still partly directing German Middle Eastern policy behind the scenes: ‘There is in fact every reason to believe that [he] was… actively involved in relations and negotiations between officials of the Third Reich and leaders of the pro-Axis Arab independence and unity movements.’[v]

Postwar Germany, once it had regained its footing, continued to ply a path towards Afghanistan, as well as over the 14,000 miles of country separating it from Kabul. The German capital was selected as site for a first major international conference about the future of that faraway land after bombing of the twin towers by Al Qaeda in 2001 resulted in western action against its Taliban government. Germany provided the third largest NATO force operating in the region; in the tradition of Niedermayer it busied itself training army and police, while in that of Hentig it encouraged a policy of ‘hearts and minds’. Closer to home Germany has been one of the six nations directly involved in negotiating nuclear matters with Iran; and in Iraq, despite Schröder’s famous refusal to join in the younger Bush’s ‘abenteuer’, it has now taken a lead in European action against ISIS to defend Kurdistan. Its relations with Turkey remain strong, and its links to Israel – though often opaque – are essential. Thus we can see the thrust and continuity of German foreign policy without even beginning to discuss how it operates in regard to Russia, the Caucasus, China, Africa and Latin America. For a nation which still believes it prudent to take a low profile, it is increasingly ‘batting at its own weight’, if not – to paraphrase David Cameron – above it. From a strategic point of view intelligent policy-makers in old Anglo-Saxony must recognize the benefit of this development in a fused ‘new world order’. One of them, General Sir David Richards, has contributed an appreciative foreword to Jules Stewart’s fast-moving account of an Ur-modern German covert op. The book is a page-turner, and I. B. Tauris should once again be commended for having produced in handsome form fine insight into the historical forces at work in a complex and conflicted region of our contemporary world.

[i] cf. Churchill in a radio broadcast in October 1939: ‘I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.’

[ii] By Berlusconi himself, in an interview with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight earlier this year.

[iii] A memorandum Hentig wrote ‘served as a basis for the Report to Hitler by the Foreign Office’; this led to a private meeting in which he argued the case to a bemused Führer. Stewart cites among sources Nora Levin, The Holocaust: the Destruction of European Jewry 1933-1945 (New York: Crowell, 1968), p. 132.

[iv] See my ‘Celine Redux‘ in Quarterly Review (Autumn 2011).

[v] Stewart quotes Lionel Grossman, The Passion of Max von Oppenheim (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2013), p. 232.

 

Stoddard Martin is an author and publisher

 

 

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Endnotes STUART MILLSON

Posted on August 24, 2014 by leslie

ENDNOTES, September 2014

In this edition: a report from the Proms: William Mathias and Elgar, and composers of the Great War  * Coronation music from Somm Records  * Classic Sibelius from Iceland.

For conductor Mark Wigglesworth, Sir Edward Elgar’s First Symphony of 1908 was made for the Royal Albert Hall – a surging work for large orchestra, with a slow movement of peace and ease-of-heart, filling the high, wide spaces of the great Kensington concert hall. Interviewed in this year’s Proms prospectus, Mr. Wigglesworth talks of the work’s many qualities: it was first championed by the Wagner conductor, Hans Richter (who described Elgar as “this English genius”); and how a fine-line needs to be observed today when conducting Elgar, between sentiment and sentimentality. (In our rather cynical age, Elgar’s great gift for pure melody and national emotion sparks an automatic smirk or suspicion from some – hence, perhaps, the constant need for conductors and performers to speak of their need to “refresh” Elgar performances and look at the composer anew.)

However, no matter what is said about Sir Edward, the music always seems to stand up and stand on its own, touching audiences with its irresistible, persuasive, hard-to-define heart-and-soul; music that really does speak to you in your own language – genuinely telling a story, taking you with it, and never leaving you guessing about what might be meant. The famous nobilmente introduction of the symphony – a soft-tread, slow-march theme – builds to a great re-statement of the tune from the whole orchestra, with horns and brass rising and glinting above the swell of strings. Some readers may be familiar with Sir Adrian Boult’s, Vernon Handley’s or Bryden Thomson’s, landmark recordings of the work with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and will know of the huge role for brass players that those records clearly reveal. And yet for the Proms performance with Mark Wigglesworth, his ensemble – the BBC National Orchestra of Wales – brought something of a change of mood; playing the opening with a deep softness, almost a sigh – the same noble strength, but the tune having something of a benediction about it.

Prior to the Elgar, the audience was treated to a rare outing for the William Mathias Violin Concerto, Mathias being one of Wales’s foremost composers of the 20th century. Soloist Matthew Trusler enthralled everyone by truly getting under the skin of the concerto, a piece which had something of the heavy weather and unsettling skies of Britten’s concerto, but with, possibly, a darkening Welsh landscape here and there – especially in one craggy trombone passage – a taut, demanding work.

Composers often seem to have the gift of prophecy, or at least, they seem to pick up what is “in the air” – but Elgar’s First Symphony seems to have no trace of the menace of European conflict which would rumble in the distance as the world edged closer to 1914. However, his Coronation March of 1911, newly-recorded by the Somm label, takes us into a mood, not of glory for a Royal occasion written in an optimistic key, but an uncertain, yearning, even austere, slow march – as if we were walking toward one of Wilfred Owen’s Western Front skies or ridges (such as the foreboding atmosphere and place described in his poem, Spring Offensive – “sharp on their souls hung the imminent line of grass/Fearfully flashed the sky’s mysterious glass…”). I wonder what King George V or the coronation onlookers must have thought of this march? Elgar once said… “we walk like ghosts”, and in this piece of ceremonial music, we find exactly what the writer W.B. Yeats termed: “Elgar’s heroic melancholy”. The piece is despatched for Somm Records in great, martial style – with solemn, piercing woodwind sounds – by the London Symphonic Concert Band, conducted by Tom Higgins. Full marks to Somm’s sound engineers for the way in which they have captured the sense of time and occasion, not just of the Elgar, but a rich, rare and surprising array of royal music – some of it written by the American, Sousa (his march, Imperial Edward, from 1901), and a Coronation March – again for Victoria’s son and heir – by the French romantic master, Saint-Saens.

Returning to the Proms (and this performance is available on the BBC Radio i-player until about the second week of September), the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Andrew Manze performed a Sunday-night programme of music by composers from England, Germany and Australia, who served in, and – apart from Vaughan Williams, whose “Pastoral Symphony” ended the concert – lost their lives during the First World War. Baritone Roderick Williams sang George Butterworth’s songs from Housman’s A Shropshire Lad – the BBC Scottish players softly accompanying their guest soloist, so that not one word was lost or drowned. Although written well before The Great War, the Housman poetry, which evokes rural Shropshire (“the lads in their hundreds” at Ludlow fair, ploughboys, the road to the Welsh Marches in moonlight) – conveys a sense of a once happy breed – noble and “handsome of heart” – obliterated in the blasted landscapes of a faraway war. That war also claimed the life of Frederick Kelly, an Australian romantic composer (also an athlete, rowing champion and friend of Rupert Brooke), and Rudi Stephan, a 28-year-old – born in the Grand Duchy of Hesse – killed by a bullet through the brain whilst fighting the Russians on the German Eastern Front in 1915. Stephan’s Music for Orchestra of 1912 opened this memorial Proms concert – a revelation for most of the audience, if not the orchestra, as very little of this remarkable man’s music is known or even in existence. (Surviving remnants of his comparatively small output were actually destroyed in bombing raids during the Second World War.)

Fortunately, we are able to enjoy a glimpse of the great musical horizons that might have been through this 1912 piece – a work that clearly stands in the shadow of Richard Strauss, or Mahler, but which has a somewhat lighter, quicker touch than either of those great Titans: Stephan taking us into a “sommerwind” of Webern-like early-20th-century late-romanticism, rather than overwhelming his audience in a Straussian-Wagnerian Alpine forest. Had Stephan lived, had the war not happened, Sir Henry Wood’s Proms would undoubtedly have been filled with the symphonic music of Stephan, alongside – even possibly exceeding Mahler; and with his English contemporary, Butterworth – as great a figure, perhaps, as Vaughan Williams.

Finally, Endnotes goes to Finland, or rather to Iceland, for a Reykjavik-recorded performance of Sibelius’s suites, King Christian ll and Pelléas et Mélisande (with the rare fairytale, Swanwhite, Op. 47 also included). Under conductor, Petri Sakari – who has made a great speciality of Sibelius (the incidental music for The Tempest on Naxos records is one of the most haunting Sibelius performances on record) – this Chandos collection takes us to “the Castle Gate” itself; to a monumental, yet delicate, old-world side of the composer – and readers may remember the theme music to Patrick Moore’s television programme The Sky at Night (the movement, At the Castle Gate, from the Pelleas score). The Iceland Symphony Orchestra is entirely at one with this music; the intimate, sometimes folk-spirited tunes being played with a chamber-like thoughtfulness and finesse. This is an outstanding issue – and ideal music for this poignant end-of-summer season.

Stuart Millson is Classical Music Editor of The Quarterly Review.

 

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EpiQR – River Grille, Bristol EM MARSHALL-LUCK

Posted on August 22, 2014 by Derek Turner

EM MARSHALL-LUCK

River Grille

Prince Street, Narrow Quay, Bristol, BS1 4QF

Situated in the smart and shiny yet austerely façaded Bristol Hotel, the River Grille restaurant faces out on the other side from the gritty main road, overlooking the river by a bridge sporting fanciful modern bronze-coloured sculptures reminiscent of slender gramophone horns, with the lights of myriad shops, restaurants, bars and cafés reflecting atmospherically on the wet cobbles. One felt glad to be indoors, looking out such ephemeral beauty from the safety of a warm and dry room.

The restaurant itself is reached through the piano bar, with its cosy sofas and low tables. The dining area aims for a mixture of rustic – with its light wooden floorboards and tablecloth-less tables – and modern. Dark brown wicker chairs match the dark brown tables while lighter beige cushions tie in with the colour of the extensive banquette along a long brown wall. Lighting is also modern, with lampshades formed of long golden spikes, and the paintings on the wall are colourful post-Expressionist naive-style representations of a food-orientated nature.

The loos were clean and smart – only one ladies and gents each, but reasonably spacious as a result. Gilchrist and Soames hand wash and hand lotion were provided – although it was a shame that in the gents (well, it would be, wouldn’t it?) selfish and thoughtless patrons had deemed it appropriate to  throw used hand towels on top of the pile of clean ones, rather than in the bin provided, and that staff had not rectified this issue.

Music was live on the Saturday evening that we visited; a saxophonist and pianist desperately trying to drown out with their reasonably decent jazz (and far from succeeding) the execrable and horrendously intrusive thumping sound presumably emanating from a neighbouring nightclub. The noise of the bass beats thudded through and over and above everything; such that one yearned for a pair of wire-cutters.

Service was friendly, attentive and swift, and we were soon seated at a table by the window with a fine view of the river. Mineral water was brought on request and, with it, two types of foccacia with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. The plain foccacia was slightly dry and hard and the olive foccacia was also a little on the resilient side – both could have done with being a little softer and fluffier.

One is presented with the choice between a la carte or set menus, the latter offering a selection of four starters, mains and desserts at a very reasonable £19.95 for two courses or £24.95 for three, with a good range covering fish, meat and vegetarian dishes. (Since writing this review, the menu and its format and prices have changed, with new and highly acclaimed chef, Matt Lord, now at the helm.) The a la carte menu was also pretty good – not many starters perhaps, but it had a decent selection of mains including salads and grills (steak and pork), winter game choices, two reasonably imaginative vegetarian options, and the market catch fish of the day. I found myself mildly irritated by the unnecessary affectation of the grill accompaniments being listed on the menu in quotation marks. Food is sourced as locally as possible, although this isn’t mentioned on the menu, nor were suppliers listed.

The wine list was also fine, if slightly pricey. I approved of the division of the wines into types: sparkling; fresh, dry and unoaked whites; aromatic, floral, fruit driven or fuller-bodied and rounded whites; then light, soft and fruity reds; medium bodied; juicy or rich; robust and spicy. Such listings might perhaps encourage those who know and usually stick to what they like to experiment a little more – always a Good Thing. There were only two roses and one dessert wine, however, which I did find disappointing – as was the fact that there were no English wines present on the list, nor anything spectacularly exciting, unusual or interesting. Most of the wines listed were from Australia, Chile, Italy and France.

We opted for a bottle of the house red – Solandia, Nero D’Avola 2011 from Sicily. I was expecting something good, if not outstanding, but I believe that this must be the best house red I’ve ever experienced. It was a dark, rich ruby colour with a nose of black berry fruits and cherries and a slight hint of liquorice, too.  The taste was soft, rounded and well balanced – with those blackberries, blackcurrants and cherries being tempered by a dash of sweetening vanilla; and there was a touch of ash and coffee in the mixture as well. The wine developed and gained complexity as it breathed, resulting in a spectacularly fine wine by the end of the meal.

My husband started with the cold press of ham and pheasant, with tomato and mustard seed jam, veal sauce and granary toast, all served on a slate. This was pronounced a very lemon-y dish that was slightly on the pedestrian side – the flavours rather nondescript; perfectly inoffensive, but not cuisine that leapt off the plate.  The tomato relish and accompanying toasted bread were, nevertheless, very good – the relish pleasantly tangy and the bread fresh and crisp, while the crunchy mustard seeds added an extra textural dimension.

I had chosen the game sausage. The sausage itself was undeniably good – flavoursome and quite spicy, and was served on a crostini, with a paprika bacon stew with white beans and micro herb salad, which complemented the sausage well.  The cassoulet-type stew might be a little too much on the salty side for some, yet I enjoyed it. On the whole, both elements were pleasantly warming and filling without being overpowering or leaving too little room for the main course.

Yet these hefty, hearty and reasonably generously-portioned starters were in stark contrast to my main at least. I had been unable to resist the rosemary-crusted venison and was presented with a plate consisting of three small slices of venison – one can imagine that some customers might be mildly outraged at being charged £20.95 for so diminutive a portion. However, these scanty pieces of meat were very good indeed – served pinker than I had requested but nevertheless full of flavour; very gamey, succulent and tender – almost to the point of melting, and the accompanying jus worked well with the venison. The advertised buttered kale had – to my regret and disappointment – mutated into spinach, while the rosemary-infused potato gratin had a layer of bacon running through it – a nice touch, although said bacon was not desperately flavoursome. The final element of the dish, puréed broad beans (mashed, actually, not puréed – but let’s not quibble), lent a welcome addition of sweetness to what was otherwise quite a salty meal.

My husband was less successful in his choice of an eight-oz sirloin steak, which he found somewhat disappointing – rather stringy in places and not as flavoursome as it should have been, especially considering its weight; while the lack of a steak knife exacerbated the difficulty of the process of dissection. The accompanying chips, however, were very good: nicely firm on the outside, but soft and fluffy on the inside, and the béarnaise sauce was also excellent. The vegetable accompaniment came in the form of tomatoes on the vine – fine for advertising their freshness and flavour, but which made them somewhat awkward to manage in the context of a knife-and-fork operation.

The cessation of the saxophonist and his accompanist, who had been battling valiantly on, led to light pop, jazz and easy listening piped music that was so discreet that at first it just sounded like tinklings coming from the kitchen radio. I know I usually complain about non-classical music in restaurants, but, quite frankly, almost anything would have been welcome to try to mitigate that ghastly boom boom boom, so we were grateful for at least some continued shield against it.

On to desserts – my crème brulée was good, although the pistachios were rather shy, hardly making their presence felt at all – and soft, rather than crunchy and flavoursome, when they did.  ‘Hedgerow salad’ was, in fact, a selection of flavoursome and fresh berries, and the clean taste aptly complemented the richness of the brulée. The accompanying biscotti was dry and crumbly and nutty in taste.

My husband’s apple crumble was a little on the dry side (the crème anglaise was definitely necessary) but otherwise good – the apple fresh and in decent-sized chunks, and the constituent particles of the crumble topping of a suitable size to complement the texture.  The vanilla ice-cream, too, was good, not overpoweringly flavoursome, but with just enough presence to add an extra dimension.

I also indulged (as usual) in a dessert wine – Conchya y Toro late harvest Sauvignon Blanc, from the Maule Valley in Chile. It was a good golden – almost apricot – colour, with a full, rich, sweet and fruity nose. Although the taste was full of apricots and honey whilst remaining very clean and entirely free from any sense of being sticky or cloying, it nevertheless didn’t fully deliver;  that final heaven-sent riot of flavours that thrills and enchants, and uplifts one’s senses to ecstatic delights, was not quite there. Mind you, it was the best dessert wine I’ve had in a restaurant for a good year or two.

The staff were content to let us sit, savouring our wines and chatting relaxedly long after the other customers had gone, and although they did indeed set the surrounding tables for breakfast, there was absolutely no sense of wishing to get rid of us – which was a very welcome conclusion to overall an enjoyable meal.

EM MARSHALL-LUCK is the QR’s restaurant critic

 

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‘The prison house of language’? LIAM GUILAR

Posted on August 21, 2014 by Derek Turner

‘THE PRISON HOUSE OF LANGUAGE’?

 

Midwinter, Wessex, eight seven eight AD.

Metalled men, fur wrapped, steaming

still to watch the hawk strike, then urge

their shaggy ponies through the snow.

Guthrum, refusing a verb’s negation,

approaches an unexpected victory.

Alfred, snug in a stale syntax,

wakes to martyrdom battering his walls.

Flees to the fens, learns modality

or changing a tense, can make now then,

tomorrow different. Unlike the hawk.

 

LIAM GUILAR lives in Australia where he teaches English. He studied Medieval Literature first as an undergraduate at Birmingham University and then as a post graduate at the University of Queensland in Australia. He spent several decades searching for wild rivers in remote parts of the world. He has had four collections of poems published; the most recent Rough Spun to Close Weave, is published by Ginninderra press http://www.ginninderrapress.com.au/poetry.html He runs a blog at http://ladygodivaandme.blogspot.com.au

 

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Arthur Seaton Approaches Eighty BILL HARTLEY

Posted on August 21, 2014 by leslie

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, credit Wikipedia

Arthur Seaton Approaches Eighty

Bill Hartley contemplates the decline of a once fractious class

Arthur Seaton would be close to eighty by now, that is if he’d survived so long. The Angry Young Man of Alan Sillitoe’s 1958 novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning did have what we might describe these days as an unhealthy lifestyle. Food was generally fried whether cooked at home or brought in from the Fish and Chip shop; the only form of takeaway available in 1950s Nottingham. Salad did put in an appearance at one meal in the book but it was Christmas and so something exotic was to be expected.

Then there was the smoking that could be done anywhere during Arthur’s waking moments: home, factory or pub. As for booze, well Arthur’s consumption would nowadays fit into the binge drinking category we hear so much about. He did have an occasional night off but for Arthur drinking during the week was simply limbering up for the excesses of the weekend. When we first meet him he is about to collapse down a flight of stairs having consumed thirteen pints and seven gins.

Arthur did possess a bicycle but he was not a prototype of the lycra clad zealots one sees today. For him it was a way of getting to work or to the nearest canal bank for a spot of fishing; the latter being an activity he might have listed under ‘recreations’ although it’s likely the term would have had to be explained to him. Other spare time activities of the non public house kind were restricted to football and chasing after women. Continue reading →

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