The Greenman

Amundsen was cool, but Scott was smarter.

2011-12-14T09:49:00.001-08:00

It's an eternal rule throughout history that there are the cool guys and the smart guys. The former get the fame, the glory and the girls, the later get the critical acclaim, but usually only after they're dead.

Take Elizabethan playwrights. Kit Marlow was the cool one, drinking, wenching and spying like the Renaissance James Bond he was, but the only play of his people know now is Moll Flanders, and that's only because of the bonking and the fact you can see River Song's tits in the TV version, whilst in the years since he died his violent and mysterious death, the quiet chap from Warwickshire has overtaken him to become the best known writer of the era.

Then there are the Romantic Poets. Byron and Shelley were clearly the cool guys who got the girls, but it was Keats, scribbling away at home whilst longing futilely for Fanny who had the real talent.

I could go on, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles? Oasis and Blur? Bill Gates and Steve Jobs? Tony Blair and Gordon Brown? Okay, maybe not the last pair, but I'd be forgetting the date.

Today it is 100 years since Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole and in so doing forever confined Captain Robert Falcon Scott to the category of Great British Looser, where he joins Eddie the Eagle, Fred Goodwin and the England World Cup 2018 team.

Using skis and techniques learnt from the Inuit, Amundsen dog sledded to the pole in double quick time then sailed back, eating his dogs as he went. Scott meanwhile clanked along with all sorts of impedientia including some particularly useless diesel tractors. No doubt about who was cool one.

But Amundsen was essentially a day tripper, who returned home with little more than a few picture postcards. Scott's party though were a fully tooled up scientific expedition. So in the scientific stakes it's Norway Nil Point.

Although Scott never made it back himself, a lot of his samples did, and they were, and still are, amazing discoveries.

Firstly there was the Edwardian version of Frozen Planet - the first movie film of Antarctic creatures ever recorded. Film of Weddell Seals and Killer Whales was truly ground breaking, - and none of it was shot in a Dutch Zoo.

Secondly there were the Emperor Penguin eggs he found. Nobody had grabbed an egg before and whilst he didn't get them back to base himself, but they were recovered from the igloo where he left them later. Skins collected by Scott have also been used as a control sample to measure the prevalence of DDT in the Antarctic.

Perhaps his most important find of all though was one of the fossils that he had with him when he died. This was of the fossil of a 250 million year old fern called Glossopterris. It isn't named after the little Pennine town where I live, but after the Greek glossa meaning tongue, because of the shape of its leaves.

That a tropical fern should turn up in such a frozen wasteland was extremely interesting, and gave the scientists a hint that the wild theory of an Austrian ecologist might actually be true. Eduard Seuss had found fossil of Glossopteris in South America, Africa and India and so postulated that they had all once been a single supercontinent he named Gondwanaland. The discovery of the fern amongst the ice was the killer proof that his theory needed.

(Seuss also gave us the phrase 'the biosphere' by the way, and can claim to be the smart guy who ultimately got a lot less fame than the more renowned fossil hunters Marsh and Cope, who may not have explained very much but did find really cool fossils like Allosaurus and Triceratops.)

In the short term Scott's death was a good career move, making him more famous than his Norwegian rival, but being liked by the Establishment pretty much did for his reputation in the 60s.

Dying perhaps isn't the great career move for explorers that it is for pop stars, and I doubt we would like Brian Cox any more if he'd frozen to death whilst making Wonders of the Universe. But whilst poor old Scott may nt get the Boy Scout badge for planning expeditions, we should give him some credit for science he brought back.

So lets here it for old Scotty. He may not be cool, but he brought back the goods.

Egypt: What the Army Did

2011-12-03T01:19:00.001-08:00

So Egypt has finally managed to have a democratic election. The Islamists did rather well, but didn't dominate, and look set to remain split between an allegedly moderate Muslim Brotherhood and the extremists of

So was this a triumph for the army, the care taker rulers since Mubarek was toppled?

Yes and no.

But first, who actually are the Egyptian Army? This isn't an easy question to answer, as the army is at least three things.

Firstly, at the bottom, it really is the nation-in-arms. This is a difficult thing for us Brits, with our small mercenary army, to get our heads round, but if you listen to the veterans of WWII speak you get a flavour. A large army in a rural country like Egypt is part of the social fabric. The police, trained by Mubarek, Saddat and Nasser to defend the state, might be mindless, brutal thugs doing the regime's bidding, but the army belongs, at least in part, to the people.

Next, the army represents one of the few meritocracies in the country. Egypt is poor and only superficially modernised. Real opportunities are few and generally go to those with connections. The army is one of the few genuine meritocracies in the country, where a man with talent can rise to the top - or almost.

Ability alone might get you a prestigious command of an Armoured Division on the Israeli border, but to get to the real top in Mubarek's Egypt you needed to be an expert in taking and receiving bungs. And these people are still in charge.

What this means in practise is difficult to say, but I expect the Generals to come up with some sort of deal which gets the Muslim Brotherhood into power - but keeps them out of gaol. I imagine it will also mean that if protests continue the Police will continue to be the agent of repression, but that the army itself will be kept safely in the desert.

It's not all bad news, Egypt could still be a model Middle Eastern state, the Muslim Brotherhood could lead the way in showing how Islamism is compatible with democracy, and the corrupt old Generals may just fade away into oblivion.

However the high food prices that triggered the Arab Spring haven't gone down, the hopes of the protesters have not been realised, and the kleptocracy is still there, so we're not out of the woods yet.

Global Warming Report Agrees With Climate Change Denier

2011-11-27T02:05:00.001-08:00

Another month another report on climate change, this time by the Berkely Earth group. More famous for anti-war protests in the sixties, Berkley is also the home to a university apparently.

The Berkley Earth Surface Temperature Report (BEST) discovered that the earth is indeed warming and that this is not a quirk of poor quality or badly placed weather stations, nor of the encroachment of cities into the vicinity of the experts thermometers.

Interestingly this tallies with the results of climate change denier Anthony Watts, who launched his surfacestation.org project four years ago. His tireless volunteers toured the country identifying badly cited weather stations. This pioneering study then allowed the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration to recalibrate the surface temperature record of the USA, chopping out all the dodgy weather stations. Their result was that this led to a slight increase in the recorded warming.

You'd expect Mr Watts to be delighted that a major research group has confirmed his findings, but rather inexplicably his opinion of BEST is that it "the study’s methodology was flawed because it examined data over a 60-year period instead of the 30-year-one that was the basis for his research and some other peer-reviewed studies. He also noted that the report had not yet been peer-reviewed and cited spelling errors as proof of sloppiness." Spelling mistakes by scientists? Unhaerd off!

The report also coincided with a second leak of hacked emails from East Anglia's Climate Research Unit. The point of the leak appeared to be to show that climate scientists hid data that didn't agree with their pre-judged opinion of the science.

This is a view endorsed by Mr Watts, a gentleman who would clearly never do such a thing himself.

Top 5 Films About Trade Unions

2011-11-18T11:04:00.001-08:00

The result from UNITE has come in and so it looks like we're all strike for the biggest strike since the seventies. So to mark the occasion I've decided to look at how cinema has dealt with Trade Unions. Once again there will be no films from the last fifteen years as I haven't watched any films in the last fifteen years.

Films are funded by benevolent Capitalists to provide entertainment for us proles, and so perhaps it's not surprising that some of the greatest roles in the movies have been Trade Unionists, such as Martin Sheen as Carl Fox in Wall Street, Raúl Juliá as Chico Mendes in The Burning Season and.....errr.....well a few in Ken Loach films obviously and ..... erm.

Okay, lets try again.

Films are funded by evil Capitalists in order to extract as much money as possible from gullible proles, and so it's not surprising that most of the portrayals of Trade Unionists are negative.

So here we go with the best of the worst.

5. Carry On at Your Convenience (1971)

Trade Unions were alluded to regularly in the Carry On franchise, such as in Carry On Cleo when the eunuchs are reported to be striking over of loss of assets....

This film finds the team appropriately located in a toilet factory where the local Union boss is a buffoon who calls strikes so he can watch football matches, and whose gullible members nearly bankrupt the firm by following him out. Given the someone proletarian nature of the Carry On audience this was a bit of an own goal and the film was a flop.

It's not exactly awash with jokes, unless you count the first screen appearance of the mighty Morris Marina car, a vehicle whose history is so inextricably linked with the union intransigence that if this was Product Placement it was a grave mistake.

4. On the Waterfront (1954)

It could have been a contender.

A film about why it's good to be a police informer by a Director who snitched on his colleagues to the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

In this film the longshoremen Trade Unionists are shown to be a violent, corrupt and, thanks to some dubious casting, posh.

3. I'm All Right Jack (1959)

Newly demobbed soldier Stanley Windrush (Ian Carmichael) takes a job in his uncle's factory where, being upper class, he shows how lazy the other workers are by doing twice as much work as anyone else.

This prompts Trade Union leader Fred Kite (Peter Sellars) to call an all out strike. When Kite evicts Windrush from his house for being a scab Kite's wife leaves too, leaving this working class hero unable to feed or cloth himself.

So a real hatchet job on the workers then, redeemed by being a very funny and not entirely unrealistic portrayal of industrial relations at the time.

2. The Life of Brian (1979)

In the great pantheon of Trade Union leaders there must surely be a place for Reg (John Cleese).

Committed to Jewish freedom, he is broad minded enough not to acknowledge the achievements of the Roman oppressors. Tragically unable to join the suicide mission to kidnap Pilate's wife due to a bad back, he fearlessly leads the Judean people's front in their war with the People's Front of Judea whilst campaigning for his friend Stan's right to have a baby. A dedicate democrat he refuses to be draw into

Top 5 Unlikely Jobs for a Movie Hero

2011-11-07T12:31:00.000-08:00

The anti-hero has a long cinema history, but surprising thing is how conventional most of them are. Gangsters, with their family values, their business-before-morality ethos and casual attitude to violence represent modern Western values far better than most conventional heroes whilst Rambo, whilst something of an outsider in his first film appearance, soon turned into such a caricature of America military intervention, even helping the Taliban on his third appearance, that he was beyond satire.

Robert de Niro playing a plumber in Brazil is more the sort of thing I'm thinking of, although he wasn't the hero so can't count. Neither does it count if the hero's job has no relevance to the plot, so serial killer accountants, yuppies and the rest can't be included.

So having fixed the rules to ensure the films I like are in it, here is my Top Five.

5. James Mason as an IRA man: Odd Man Out (1947)

The IRA had turned up in films since, such as in John Ford's The Quiet Man and David Lean's Ryan's Daughter.

But whilst the Innisfree IRA cell appears to do little but drink Guinness (not an unrealistic portrayal I believe) and the Kirrary lot do appear to be actually fighting for Irish independence, James Mason's character is neither a harmless drunk nor an effective freedom fighter. Instead he is wounded whilst engaged in nothing more heroic or patriotic than a fairly petty robbery.

This then starts a journey through a strange demi-monde that is clearly a loosely disguised Belfast. Director Carol Read is today better remembered for The Third Man, but Odd Man Out is arguably as good, although its main competition would be a James Cagney gangster film. Perhaps Cagney does baddies better than Mason, but it's still a cracking performance.

4. Boris Karloff as a Monster: Frankenstein (1931)

Those who know the literary Frankenstein know the Monster as a bright chap with a lot to say for himself, but movie versions have always been more physical and less cerebral and Karloff's Monster is definitely in this tradition.

I suppose I'm pushing it to claim being a monster is actually a job, but if it was Karloff's Monster could probably expect his P60 in the post as he soon turns out to be the most human character in the film.

3. Jean Reno as a Hit Man: Léon (1994)

Having disallowed gangsters for being evil Capitalists,and so not antiheroes at all, I'm going to make an exception for hit men, especially Léon as he doesn't even appear to be making any money out of the job.

Leaving aside questions about his relationship with an under age Natalie Portman, and the pot plant, Léon appears to be a regular guy from out of town who has found a rung at the bottom of the social ladder doing jobs the local won't, in this case killing people.

He lives in poor housing, the police pick on him and he has no friends. So if you pretend he's a migrant worker and not a hired murderer what you have is social commentary - and a lot of dead bodies.

2. Gregory Peck as a Lawyer: To Kill A Mocking Bird (1962)

Hollywood likes courtroom drama, but it's rather indifferent about lawyers.

We're not really too bothered about whether or not Sam Bowden gets the chop in Cape Fear, whilst Erin Brockovich got a film made about her because she wasn't a real lawyer. Otherwise the hero is usually in the dock or the jury.

Atticus Finch though is different. Noble, moral, courageous, and a paragon of old style values he chooses to work within the system rather than oppose it. As a result his client gets fitted up for a crime he didn't commit and gets killed, which perhaps tells us something about trying to oppose institutionally racist organisations from the inside.

1. Jimmy Stewart as a Banker: It's A Wonderful Life (1946)

Yes a banker.

True, it was a long time ago, before the wide boys in braces arrived on Wall Street, but it was only fifteen years after the Great Crash.

It's hard to imagine a remake now. Not only is there no-one of the calibre of Jimmy Stewart to play the lead, but I doubt anyone could imagine a banker being saved from committing suicide by a Guardian Angle showing what life would have been like without him.

I mean, what would he show? The out of work cocaine dealers and Porsche salesmen? The lower property prices? The pensioners enjoying their annuities? It just wouldn't work.

Perhaps the remake then could feature the Guardian Angel as the antihero? A sort of Guardian Demon who goes around persuading well adjusted and happy stock brokers to leap off bridges?

Hmmmmmm.

Mr Spielberg? I have an idea for you.......

My Top 5 Horror Films

2011-10-31T09:56:00.000-07:00

I suppose I don't really like horror films.

I certainly don't like slasher movies, which rules out 99% of what usually goes into lists of best horror movies.

I also think that it's impossible for any sane adult to actually be scared in a cinema, unless you're watching Sacha Baron Cohen, but then you're scared for him.

However I admit it's possible to pretend to be frightened if you fancy the person you've gone with - although my dates have never been very impressed with this sort of behaviour.

So here's a rather eclectic mix of films that are technically 'horror' but on the whole wouldn't frighten a neurotic toddler.

Number 5: The Haunting (1963)

Four people spend the night in a haunted house and very little happens.

It may be a moot point when 'subtle' turns into 'boring', but for my money the original version of The Haunting works. It's a haunted house film by the books, but by not over-egging the pudding you do get mounting tension and something worth thinking about.

4. Night of the Demon (1957)

Okay, so who else knew this film was sampled on Kate Bush's The Hounds of Love?

The film suffered a bit in the making, including the insertion of an actual demon over the objections of the writer. However what emerged is still a pretty good and atmospheric tale of black magic - or self delusion.

The main interest though is Niall MacGinnis playing a character that is clearly based on Alistair Crowley. The moral of the story: don't mess with Ritual Magicians.

3. The Call of Cthulhu (2005)

If you've never seen this, please try and track it down.

Basically the H.P.Lovecraft society decided, on a minuscule budget, to make his classic 1928 short story as if it was a contemporary silent movie.

The result is a little strange, but very effective. The effects are cheap, but the design work is good and the lost city of Ry'leh is an Expressionist delight whilst limitations in the acting department are disguised by the format. You actually believe you are watching an eighty year old film.

2. The Wicker Man (1973)

Most pagans regard this film as a documentary with a happy ending, and we'd all move to Summerisle tomorrow even without the service offered by the landlords daughter.

This is Hammer House of Horror's finest moment and it's a British as a wet Sunday afternoon.

Apart from Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward acting their socks off, Paul Giovanni's sound track is the highlight.

1. Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

More Gothic than a weekend in Whitby, Bride is James Whale's masterpiece, the best of a run of films in the thirties that include Bela Lugosi's Dracula and Boris Karloff's Frankenstein. Karloff was always the better actor, and Frankenstein's Monster the better villain.

The two were to team up for the almost as impressive Expressionist sequel, Son of Frankenstein, but Bride is the better film by a whisker.

It's camp as can be, but visually it is an absolute delight.

You can interpret it in as many ways as you like; Christian analogy, gay metaphor - or just a lot of fun.

New Sci-Fi Blog

2011-10-29T11:56:00.000-07:00

I've decided to create a new blog for all my Sci-Fi stuff.

It can be found here

Liam has shot our fox

2011-10-15T12:40:00.000-07:00

Let me be quite clear, I wish Liam Fox hadn't gone......because it was just starting to get interesting. Really interesting.

Not that I mind the demise of a far right minister, but by jumping before he was pushed we may never get to the bottom of what looks like a scandal designed by Central Casting.

Lets also be clear about why he went. It wasn't because he had been helping an old chum feather his nest, nor was it because he's secretly gay. Instead it seems Fox was the conduit for the loony tunes US Neoconservative movement into British politics.

The Neocons, the force behind George W Bush and the invasion of Iraq, have largely morphed into the Tea Party; a wonderfully named movement that to US patriots suggests heroic men tipping horrid English herbs into Boston harbour, but to the rest of the world summons up images of Mad Hatters and March Hares.

Behind both though stands money, lots and lots of money. That's why this is more than about bungs to flat mates - Werrity is very well paid by his US backers and doesn't need any favours from HMG.

Fox's charity, The Atlantic Bridge, was wound up on 30 September, just before the scandal broke, which is a bit of a miracle of timing. By going into voluntary liquidation it has also avoided having to answer any awkward questions from the Charity Commission.

With Thatcher as its patron and Gove, Hague, Osborne and Grayling on the board Atlantic Bridge was no more of a charity than the Monday Club. But what's perhaps more interesting are its friends on the other side of the pond.

It was funded by Lehman Brothers for one thing, and Karl Rove and many other less charismatic US right wingers, pop up to speak to it, receive awards from it or give it money.

Atlantic Bridge also worked closely with the American Legislative Exchange Council, a Koch Industries funded Climate Change denial front group.

I could go on, but I think the get the point.

The question is though, what were they after?

Money obviously, but was this just for personal gain, or where they after more serious political change, the sort of paradigm shift that would open up Britain to big US corporations. Convenient was it not that Fox, formerly Shadow Health Minister, was hanging around with the sort of Neocons who regard the NHS as the spawn of Satan just at the Tories introduce legislation that will pretty much see off the idea of universal public health care?

Which leads on to the next question; was Fox running a parallel foreign policy here, or was it merely convenient for a Prime Minister leading a coalition with the LibDems to have this stuff done at arms length? A Prime Minister who has ahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giflso previously warned about the dangers of too much lobbying?http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

By resigning he is clearly hoping nobody will ask these questions, which must not be allowed to happen.

We are pretty cynical about our politicians in the country, and most people will probably just regard this as a scandal about personal financial gain and possible sexual high jinx.

When it comes to the Tories though, we are possibly not nearly cynical enough.

More on Atlantic Bridge and their Neocon links here.

Here's Greenpeace on ALEC and Climate Change denial.

What we did for Greece

2011-09-28T13:15:00.000-07:00

So should we bail out the Greeks then?

Or rather should we bail out the banks who've got themselves in up to their necks in bad debt, a lot of it owed by Greece?

Well I guess it's a bit like the question of whether you should give your pocket money to the bully who's dangling you over a railway bridge. In principle no, but in practise....

What's interesting I find though is how little is being said about the debt we owe Greece. This I can only put down to the tragic decline in the study of the Classics in our schools.

The Romans conquered the known world thanks to their classical education, and so before we sent out our sons and daughters to carve out an Empire we gave them a thorough grounding in Latin and Greek history. What else would a future District Commissioner in Utter Pradesh ever need?

An unintended blow back from this policy was that whenever things got a bit sticky at the bottom of the Balkans, we tended to side with the guys who spoke Greek.

It all started in 1821 when the Greek speakers, who'd carved out a nice role for themselves in the bureaucracy of the Ottoman Empire, launched one of their regular uprising and for once actually made a bit of progress. The revolt inspired Classically educated Brits and soon Romantics and demobbed officers from the Napoleonic Wars made their way over to the Peloponnese. Lord Byron went, and died shortly after arriving, and the rebel Greek Navy ended up being commanded by Lord Cochrane, a former Royal Navy officer and the model for Jack Aubrey from Master and Commander.

Many of those who went to help though ended up a little disappointed to find that they weren't standing shoulder to shoulder with modern Leonidas's and instead of fighting to the last bullet, the rebels often as not didn't even fighting to the first bullet, and the war consisted quite often of just shouting insults from cover.

The climax of the war was equally bizarre. Worried that imperial rival Russia was going to gain from the insurrection a joint British and French fleet was sent to lend moral support to the Turks. Instead it ended up obliterating the Turkish fleet in a battle that was the last proper battle of wooden sailing ships.

An independent Greece then emerged as a fully fledged Balkan nation, although when they did a stock take they found a few things missing, including the Parthenon Marbles which had been given to Lord Elgin by the Turks just before they scarped.

As a Balkan nation though they part in the confusing series of wars that eventually triggered the First World War. Greece was a late arrival in the conflict and for most of the war did very little.

After the defeat in Gallipoli the British and Australian forces regrouped in Thessaloniki where they spent the next few years camped out in the sunshine in what must have been one of the easier posting of the war.

Greece then sent a delegation to the Versailles conference where they presented a grandiose vision of a Greater Greece which included a huge chunk of what is now Asiatic Turkey. That there were very few Greeks in these new areas, and many of them were lukewarm about the idea, was overlooked by the classically educated British and French leaders. They were committed to dismantling the defeated Ottoman Empire and thought they may as well give as many of the bits as they can to Greece, and so the nation emerged from the war twice as big as it went in.

The new country didn't last very long though, thanks to Kemel Ataturk and resurgent Turkish nationalism and Greece retreated back to its original borders.

However just as it appeared that modern forces were now sculpting the former Classical world, history repeated itself and Greece soon faced the return of an ancient foe: Rome.

Mussolini and the Italian King didn't agree on many things, but they both shared a low opinion of the Greeks. The Italian army, woefully prepared for war, crossed was Adriatic only to be soundly thrashed by the underrated Greek army and just as in North Africa Hitler had to send the German army to bail out his fellow dictator.

Churchill meanwhile was as romantically attached to Greece as Byron had been and sent the Eight Army across from Africa to help. The intervention was a disaster and the British Army soon had to be rescued by the Royal Navy. Some, notably General von Manstein, have claimed that this diversion delayed Operation Barbarossa just enough to save Russia, but the evidence seems scanty.

Greece suffered far more under German and Italian occupation than it ever did under the Turks, and its a now nearly forgotten fact that the first shipment of food aid sent by Oxfam was to Greece, in defiance of the Allied blockade, although it didn't stop 100,000 people starving to death.

The Greeks themselves fought back, with the most effective resistance fighters being the Communists. As the Russians advanced the Greeks then fought themselves with the Germans as bemused onlookers. The Communists gained the upper hand and with the Red Army on the way it looked like Greece would join the rest of Eastern Europe in the Soviet sphere of influence.

However Churchill hadn't given up yet and British troops landed once more, this time to keep the Communists down and Russians out. Indeed so keen was the west to save Greece for democracy that when a military dictatorship took power in 1967 we conveniently looked the other way.

When democracy was restored the way was open to join the European Economic Community, as it was then called. Greece was soon at the heart of the European community of nations, and that's where the problems started.

Once again Greece was the victim of it's friend's kindness. Instead of a left leaning Middle Eastern nation channelling the spirit of the ancient world, they saw in her a westernised democracy with a neoliberal market economy waiting to burst forth.

Waived into the the Eurozone despite some distinctly non-neoliberal domestic policies it took the Credit Crunch to reveal the ghastly mistake that had been made. Worse, rather than just letting the country go bankrupt, drop out and relaunch a devalued Drachma, which would allow them to offer cheap holidays and consumer goods and rebuild their economy, they are being forced to stay so that our banks won't go bankrupt.

So we've sent them romantic poets and taken their marbles, failed to save them from the Nazis but rescued them from communism, ignored their foray into military dictatorship and allowed them to blag their way into a club they can't afford.

You could say that the west has been pretty good friends to Greece, but they might well reply that with friends like us, who needs enemies?

Abortion (And Unleaded Petrol) Prevents Riots

2011-08-16T12:27:00.000-07:00

No I can't prove it to level of statistical significance, but then again neither can anybody else who has put forward their various ideas on how to make our underclass behave themselves and stop helping themselves to free consumer goods. However at least my theory has some peer reviewed research behind it, which makes it stand out slightly.

The reason I post such a obviously shocking claim is due to the miles of column inches being given to Cameron's 'Supercop'Bill Bratton. Bratton is everywhere these days, and in a curious trans-Atlantic about face he is now about he most liberal commentator on the riots going.

Take last Sunday for example. Whilst the supposedly serious Daily Torygraph had "Police to Adopt Zero Tolerance" as its headline, the usually more rabidly right wing Daily Mail had an article by Bratton saying Zero Tolerance was a meaningless phrase coined by Jack Straw and that the solution to the riots is better race relations. It's a bizarre day when liberal England has to import US cops to teach us about the value of social cohesion.

But Bratton's claim to fame is not his take on structural racism, but his aggressive action on gangs and his adoption of the Broken Windows of crime prevention. Nothing worng with either if done properly, but how effective were they really?

Firstly we have to be clear we are looking at relative reduction in crime here. Even after having been Bratton for years the chance of getting yourself topped in LA is still about four times the UK average, whilst the City still boast a good thirteen hundred or so street gangs.

However lets assume for the moment that with legal guns and massive inequality, Bratton wasn't going to achieve more than a relative drop in crime, and look at what he achieved: six straight years of crime going down and a 27% reduction in the murder rate over five years. Well done Mr Bratton.

But then crime went down over the USA as a whole during this period, having peaked in 1991. Why is that?

Now the problem you get with this sort of thing is that the amount of data you need to wade through is just phenomenal, so I'm not going to offer my own cod theories, but just quote the academics who have the skills to dot he job properly.

And the answer is that, whilst Reagan's attempt to put ever black American in prison has had some impact, the main reasons for this are the legalisation of abortion in 1972, the banning of lead in petrol from 1986/7.

The link with abortion is fairly dramatic. Those foetuses aborted in 1973 would be reaching 18, the peak age for committing crime, in 1992 - the year in which crime started to fall. What's more, the states that legalised abortion before Roe versus Wade saw crime peak earlier. Also, research carried out on women who were denied abortions in Sweden from 1939 to 1941 found the 'unwanted' child to be more likely to commit a crime (Forssman, Thuwe 1966).

The link with lead in petrol meanwhile is so clear, and so obvious, it need no explanation.
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So how should we deal with the recent unrest? Well, the evidence from those that know appears to indicate that progressive social and environmental policies are the way forward.

But then, as the Dunning-Kuger Effect shows, those who don't know tend to shout loudest.

Seven Decades of Science Fiction Books: The Eighties

2011-07-27T09:20:00.003-07:00

The eighties, now this is when I started reading sci-fi, so there are going to be some real favourites here. And it was a pretty good decade to get the sci-fi bug really. As well as new books we also had new sub-genres, which is a sure sign of rude health.

Firstly the graphic novel really came of age during this decade. Perhaps they should have their own category, but personally I'd rate Alan Moore's V for Vendetta (1982-5), The Ballad of Halo Jones (1984-6) and Watchmen (1986-7), and Neil Gaiman's Sandman (1989-96) as up their with the best novels.

Given how visual the graphic novel is it's a bit of a surprise that the film versions have only been mediocre, but I suspect perhaps that's because people underestimate the subtlety of a good graphic novel. They may have pictures, but they still require you to have an imagination, whereas cinema doesn't.

A genuine new sub-genre was Steampunk. It's difficult to say when this began, but the novel that brought it to my attention was The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers. A menagerie of weird and wacky ideas including sinister stilt walking clowns and an attempt to catch a body-swapping werewolf by opening a hair removal clinic. It really has to be read to be experienced.

Then there was Cyberpunk. I suppose an unbiased list would give this decades award to the book that begins "The sky was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel." Not really my genre but still, great book. And those of us who've grown up with the Information Revolution sometimes forget how new ideas like this are. When I were a lad sci-fi computers were, at best, avatars of HAL from 2001. The one in the original Star Trek seems little better than a Sinclair Spectrum. Arthur C Clarke may have said that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but it took William Gibson to show us how close we were to that point. This may not have been the first cyberpunk novel, that may have been Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad, serialised in New Worlds in 1969, but it in the book that popularised the genre.

Another novelty was in Bob Shaw's The Ragged Astronauts , about a binary planet with shared atmosphere, hence interplanetary travel could be accomplished in a balloon.

Rather more complex was Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer. Set in a future where the galaxy has been colonised but the earth has slipped back into medieval barbarism, the titular hero is a Journeyman of the Guild of the Seeker After Truth And Penitence. The layers of deception laid down by the author are Byzantine in their complexity and nobody is as they seem.

Another almost winner is a novel in an unlikely location for a science fiction story; a wood in Kent. This is Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock,a place that is it not only bigger on the inside than the outside, but also a place where myths take physical form.

I read the book whilst living in the woods of Newbury during a record cold winter, which probably increased its effect on me a touch, but it is a magnificent and thoughtful book. Alas I have to admit that although you could make an attempt at explaining all this by means of Relativity and Jungian archetypes, I have to ultimately classify Mythago Wood as fantasy and not sci-fi.

Gosh that's a lot of worthy winners, and I haven't had time to mention Carl Sagan's Contact, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaiden's Tale, Greg Bear's Eon, Frank Herbert's Dune and many others.

Instead I'll skip straight to the winner; Consider Phlegas by Iain M Banks, the first of his Culture novels.

It is difficult to describe how much I love these books. Firstly here is top notch space opera, lasers, battles, robots, The Works. Secondly we also have something that has largely disappeared from the silver screen - an optimistic, liberal future.

Banks's Culture is a strange beast. It is not only Post-Scarcity, it's also post-human. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat has been ditched in place of the Dictatorship of the Artificial Mind. It clearly works, because Banks says it does, but does beg some interesting questions. Do the controlling Minds really have the best interests of human being at heart?

And what do those humans (and not quite humans) actually do? Banks describes their spaceships in details. Communist from the inside and Anarchist from the outside, they skip merrily about his stories. However as we only ever get to hear about how the Culture interacts with other civilisations we don't learn alot about the daily lives of its less adventurous denizens. Oodles of sex and drugs are clearly on the menu, but its not clear how they avoid the pointless debauchery of Brave New World.

But most of these questions are for the future for in Consider Phlegas we are catapulted into the middle of the best space war since Bob Heinlein passed on as the Culture takes on the Idirans, a bunch of space faring warriors who make the Klingons look like a bunch of boy scouts.

We have not yet seen a film version of any of these books, which is probably fortunate, but thanks to his non-sci-fi output Banks has at least received the critical acclaim he deserves, and which previous writers have been denied. As a book of the decade Consider Phelgas could well mark the high point of the genre.

Winner: Consider Phlegas by Iain M Banks (1987)

Seven Decades of Science Fiction Books: The Seventies

2011-07-27T09:20:00.001-07:00

In the sixties the sci-fi novel had managed the quantum leap to serious literary style, but still nobody took them seriously. Still it was a strong decade for the genre.

In 1970 Larry Niven gave us Ringworld, an artificial habitat the size of three million earths. Unfortunately it's an idea bigger than his imagination and instead of a thriving civilisation of several trillion people we land in an almost abandoned desert, which is a bit of a disappointment.

Another big concept novel is Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke, a welcome return to top form by the British master. Once again though the idea is bigger than novel and once it's all over we are not much wiser about Rama or its designers.

One writer who could take the Big Concept and run with it though was Philip José Farmer, who in 1971 gave us To You Scattered Bodies Go, the first of his Riverworld series. Here we had everyone who had ever lived brought back to life and youth for some unknown reason on a specially made planet whose surface is a 20 million mile long version of the Mississippi.

Eventually pretty much everyone would turn up in Riverworld, from Herman Goering to Jesus. Framer himself even has a cameo under pseudonym. The series would run to five books and an anthology of short stories and although such high concept stuff often disappoints in the final real, Farmer does a pretty good job of bringing it to a conclusion. Basically the Buddhists were right.

Meanwhile back in Blighty John Brunner had two more classics left in him. Sheep Look Up gives us a vision of environmental apocalypse with corrupt corporations, a compliant legal system and a President chosen because the "public obviously wanted a figurehead who'd look good and make comforting noises."

Then he wrote Shockwave Rider, which looked at the social effects of technology. A natural disaster reveals the truth, quickly suppressed by the authorities, that people are actually happier with less gadgets. The hero then sets out to destroy the corrupt system by means of a computer program that reproduces itself - the first computer virus in sci-fi. I'd dearly love to give Brunner an award, but I will once again have to pass him over.

Another writer from the sixties still knocking them out was Philip K Dick, and this decade he produced A Scanner Darkly and Flow My Tears The Policeman Said. The latter is set in a future police state in which a television star wakes up an finds he no longer exists. Boy, aren't there a few people I'd like that to happen to in real life.

Another author I feel guilty about not manging to give a winners medal to is Ursula Le Guin. Having started strongly in the sixties, in the seventies she gave us The World for World is Forest, which is Avatar for grown ups. She also wrote The Lathe of Heaven , a moral tale about being careful what you wish for, and Eye of the Heron, a feminist view of both men who oppress by violence and those who choose to get themselves beaten up by opposing them.

Best of all she wrote The Dispossessed, a political novel that compares a planet split between capitalism, with the anarchists who live on its moon. It's clear where the author affections lie, but fair play to her she gives her opponents a fair hearing and her capitalists are environmentally friendly whilst the authoritarians do seem to actually be trying to be a Dictatorship of the Proletarian. However its the anarchists who are the interesting ones. Two hundred years into their experiment centripetal forces are threatening to create hierarchies and everyone is still dirt poor.

But my winner is neither a grim prediction of the future or a meditation on political realities, but something completely differnet. Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is really a radio show, but it turns into a decent book (or decent pair of books really as it makes very little sense without The Restaurent at the End of the Universe.

I started my review of the decade by discussing authors who went for the Big Concept, and you don't get many bigger questions than the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. You also don't get many better answers than 42.

Winner: The Hichhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams(1979)

Seven Decades of Science Fiction Books: The Sixties

2011-07-27T00:00:00.000-07:00

Now its getting really hard. Heinlein, Clark and Asimov were still busy, the former writing his best stuff. But there were new kids on the block, and a very new style of writing.

At the heart of this revolution was a British magazine called New World's, especially after Michael Moorcock took over editorship in 1964. It never made any money, and was funded by the success of the Elric books (and apparently by the regular sale of dirty jokes to Playboy magazine written by Christopher Priest), but it helped launch a whole galaxy of sci-fi greats; J G Ballard, Brian Aldis, Harlan Ellison, George R R Martin, Norman Spinrad, John Brunner and Philip Jose Farmer. However when it comes to the best book of the decade I'm torn between three Yanks and a Brit.

Firstly there's Kurt Vonnegut, maybe not Slaughterhouse 5, but the rather better Cat's Cradle. Having survived the fire bombing of Dresden whilst a POW and then been sent to search for survivors using candles made from victims of the death camps, Vonnegut has a certain view on life. However he leavens his grim stories with ironic humour. He also introduced us to the world's best science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout, but unfortunately he's fictional so can't win.

Then there's Ursula Le Guin. Best know for Earthsea, her science fiction books are at least as good. Her debut novel, Rocannon's World, gave us Lord of the Rings in space, and The Left Hand of Darkness, and everyday tale of life on a planet of gender-shifting humans in which the king gets pregnant.

The final American is Philip K Dick. Drug addled and by the end of his life arguably clinically insane, his books resemble the decade as a whole: brilliant and revolutionary, confusing and conservative all at the same time. Unlike some of the space operas and nuts-and-bolts sci-fi stories his tales of warped realities and fractured identities have aged well and are as unsettling and believable today as when they were written. His stand out stories of the decade include Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the book that became Blade Runner, and The Man in the High Castle, an outstanding alternative history (or is it an alternative reality?) story.

The token Brit is the scandalously underrated John Brunner. He wrote a lot of mediocre storied for money, but he also wrote four absolute classics and in the sixties these were Jagged Orbitt and Stand on Zanzibar . The first gave us a twenty-first century America where arms manufacturers and racial tensions had stoked an arms race in personal weaponry, whilst the second gave a grim vision of the world in the year 2010. This is a planet straining under the weight of 7 billion people, a place characterised by random spree killings, anti-technological eco-terrorists, an obsession with cosmetic beauty treatments and powerful corporations.

Picking a winning out of these is going to be tough.

Whilst I was planning this blog I was sure Stand on Zanzibar would be the winner. If sci-fi is about predicting the future then the winner has to be Brunner.

However he is typical of the decade only in so far as he represents that strand of the New Left who still clung on to rationality whilst everyone else went to discover themselves by meditating in an Ashram in California.

But if sci-fi really reflects contemporary themes then it's got to be Philip K Dick. Picking his best book is difficult, but my personal favourite is The Man in the High Castle. Alternative history, life in fascist state, five overlapping sub-plots, a book-within-the-book and a meditation on the nature of reality, Philip K Dick shows us why this was the decade that the sci-fi book grew up and became serious literature.

It was also massively ahead of it time. Psychedelia, opposition to the Vietnam War and the whole counter-culture thing were years in the future in 1962. So Dick isn't just a product of his time, he is, as much as Jack Kerouac and the Beatniks, a foretaste of the wackiness and rebellion that was to come. And it was to be quite a trip.

Winner: The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick (1962)

Seven Decades of Science Fiction Books: The Fifties

2011-07-26T09:26:00.001-07:00

Now it's getting hard.

The fifties was when sci-fi really took off. The age of the Atom Bomb and the Space Race people were split into believing we were on the verge of curing all the world's ills, or else that we would blow ourselves to oblivion. In the end we did neither, but we did write a lot of good books.

This was the decade that defined sci-fi, and for me four authors stand out.

Firstly there was Bob Heinlein, an all American right wing individualist nut job, but a first rate writer. Starship Troopers is scarily fascistic, but pretty much gave us the well known Star Trek future of minimal states with massive navies as well as Avatar-style power armour.

Then there was Ray Bradbury, who this decade wrote The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury though was more of a stylist than an ideas man, so he only gets the bronze medal.

So this leaves the two giants of the fifties to battle it out: Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke. It's a tough choice, in no small part because both have written an awful lot of guff over the years.

Asimov gave us the big picture, the fall and rise of space empires in the Foundation Trilogy , time travel in The End of Eternity, space opera whodunnits in The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun and robots by the bucket load.

Clarke, the man who invented the communications satellite, eventually became the master of the 'nuts and bolts' style of realistic near-future stories. However in the 50s he was writing about broader topics and his great books of this decade are The City and the Stars, Childhood's End and the short story The Sentinel - which eventually turned into 2001 A Space Odyssey.

It's a close call, and I'm tempted to give the award to Asimov's Foundation for the breadth of its vision. However the sheer 1950ishness of a space empire with atomic powered spaceships and a filing system based on microfilm lets it down and, to be honest, it's not that well written.

So maybe it's just patriotism, but I'm going to give the award to the Englishman for Childhood's End. Clarke not have predicted the future of space travel, but he did predict the future of sci-fi as he gave us giant alien spaceships hovering over our cities and the world's children being rounded up to give to the aliens fifty years before District 9 and Torchwood: Children of Earth.

Winner: : Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke (1953)

Seven Decades of Science Fiction Books: The Fourties

2011-07-26T09:24:00.001-07:00

Funnily enough there weren't all that many great sci-fi books written in the 1940s.

Partly his was because H G Wells died in 1946, a year after the war he predicted had been brought to an end in a flash of heat rather similar to a Martian death ray.

The winner then is rather obvious. It is of course George Orwell's 1948 taster of what life might be like during the Cold War - Nineteen Eighty-Four.

A sombre book made even darker by the fact that Orwell died just after finishing it. It appears to be his last will testament, a pessimistic look back at his life's futile struggle against totalitarianisms from Barcelona to the Blitz.

But of course he didn't mean to die when he did. "Don't let it happen" was his motto, and he certainly didn't want anyone who read his book to give up and let Big Brother take over.

Optimists have even see hope in the essay on Newspeak at the back of the book. It's written in the past tense, so does that mean it was written after the time of Big Brother?

Neither was he sure that English Socialism would mutate into IngSoc. His near contemporary essay The Lion and the Unicorn sets out a curious vision of a post-war England after the Revolution in which the judges still wear wigs and the pubs still serve warm beer.

Compared to Huxley's globalised world of trivial hedonism and slick advertising, the world of Big Brother seems rather old fashioned. Doublespeak is mere crude propaganda compared to the delights of the Feelies. But Orwell still packs his punch.

Maybe the future of 1984 came crashing down with the Berlin Wall, but maybe not.

We are still Airstrip One, 'Compassionate Conservatism' and 'Blue Labour' show Doublespeak is alive and well but today called Triangultion. Rupert Murdoch does a good line in Prolefeed and despite the Credit Crunch the Ministry of Plenty is still trying to convince us we've never had it so good. Perhaps today we call the Ministry of Truth Fox News, Room 101 Guantanamo Bay, and as for English Socialism? Well, it has clearly been to see O'Brien and now thinks two plus two equals five.

Winner: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1948)

Seven Decades of Science Fiction Books: The Thirties

2011-07-19T13:33:00.001-07:00

Sci-Fi is primarily a literary medium as frankly the pictures are better, so having done Sci-Fi films I thought I'd have a look at books. I've started 20 years earlier as literary sci-fi is at least a decade or two ahead of the cinema.

Had a started this list earlier the thirties would have been the first decade since the 1880s not to be won by H.G. Wells, but it would be a close call. Wells published The Shape of Things to Come in 1933, his last great book, in which he predicted a devastating world war beginning in January 1940, and ending with the world run from an air base in Basra. Hmmm.

There was also Olaf Stapledon who in 1930 published Last and First Men, a history of the entire future of the human race over the next two billion years and which included in its predictions the prominent death of a British Princess in Paris. He followed that in 1937 with Star Maker, a history of the entire universe. He didn't exactly do kitchen sink drama, and his books aren't exactly easy to read either, but they are dizzying in their perspective.

A slightly left field choice would be pulp horror writer H. P. Lovecraft's Shadow Out of Time. Loecraft may have been possibly insane, potentially a Nazi and certainly a bit of a weirdo, but he could write. Most of his work is clearly fantasy or horror, but this book, whilst set in the Cthulhu Mythos universe, can count as sci-fi as its the one about the body swaping, time travelling Great Race of Yith. The final scene where the hero, now back in his own body, discovers an ancient manuscript in his handwriting would make a pretty good Doctor Who scene.

However despite the stiff competition I will, rather predictably, give the prize to Aldrous Huxley's Brave New World. The idea of a future that is trivial, uniform and soulless must have seemed pretty boring compared to the grand adventures of Wells and Stapledon. But lets face it - this is what we've got.

Huxley was a strange chap, and although always described as a dystopia, I suspect he was rather ambivalent about the future he created, at least when it comes to the sex and drugs. His later utopia, The Island, quite a lot of both as well.

But that's not the main point of the book. Instead Huxley looked at how industrialisation had changed the workplace, and imagined those forces being set to work on society. He realised that the best best way to hide the truth was not to ban books, but to deluge us with trivia.

Huxley released that the prison we need to really fear does not have walls made of the things we hate and fear, but bars forged from the things we crave and desire. The book is hilariously funny in places, but also unrelentingly grim as Huxley describes a world that is shockingly familiar to us. When the hero finally hangs himself, you can see why.

Winner: Brave New World by Aldrous Huxley (1932)

Is Cameron finished?

2011-07-18T09:01:00.000-07:00

It takes a lot to get rid of British Prime Minsters - just look at how Major, Brown and Blair clung on despite all that was thrown at them, but with men and women taking and hits and going down all around him, the PM must be vulnerable.

I'm going to take a shot myself and say that this is it for the former Bullingdon boy, and here's why.

1. Cameron was Murdoch's puppy

We all knew Cameron wasn't a real politician, just a former PR man. However I think we're only just beginning to realise quite how much of a News International PR man he remained after taking office.

Maybe he's just a very sociable chap, but the number of engagements he's had with NI staff does raise a few eyebrows. That Rebekah Brooks should be the only person to visit Chequers twice, or that Coulson visited two month after his second resignation does raise a few eyebrows. And that's just the official stuff, there's also the weddings, the horse riding, the high fives when he meets old NI mates etc etc.

This may not be breaking any rules, but one thing is sure though; whoever gets nicked next, whether it's James Murdoch or the tea boy, Cameron will turn out to have been one of their bestest buddies.

2. He's pissed off the wrong people

Cameron can take flak from lefties like me all day long, but when his own side starts shooting at him he's in trouble.

The Police can usually be relied on to bend a few rules, and arms, to keep a Tory PM in power, but it seems the good will has dried up. Sir Paul Stephenson's resignation letter clearly stated that his embarrassing friend, Neil Wallace, was considerably cleaner than Cameron's. There was also a hint - and it's no more than a hint - that the presence of Coulson in Cameron's inner circle prevented the Commissioner being completely candid with the PM about the investigation. Potentially explosive stuff.

More serious is what his old NI chums are up to. No doubt they are currently denying everything and telling Plod nothing, but if this becomes an untenable position they may start to squeal like canaries. I mean look at them, would you trust that lot to keep their gobs shut if you were all in a fix and only one of you could get out? If they had principles they wouldn't be in this mess.

3. The Lib Dems aren't going to bend over and take it forever.

Hard to believe now but the Lib Dems were once the party of the honourable uncommitted, the people who hated party bias in the press. New Labour suddenly forgot they hated Murdoch when he backed Blair and although he howls now, Brown did everything biologically possible to keep News International on side.

Going into the coalition has seen all that flushed down the toilet. When Vince Cable declared war on Rupert Murdoch, in a secretly recorded comment to an undercover journalist, he wasn't praised for being so honest, but lambasted for caving in the next day with an apology. The Lib Dems now have a chance to make amends.

Games Theory says Clegg should wield the knife - right between the shoulder blades. As the junior partner they're getting all the flak (the Tory voters love the cuts) and backing Cameron will just make it worse, and the revenge of the voters more deadly. On the other hand by doing the decent thing he could regain the support of the uncommitted middle of British politics. The constitution is a bit vague on the exact situation, but he could even be the one the Queen asks to become PM.

4. Nobody ever liked him much anyway.

Cameron has been making right wing Tories uneasy for a while. His posturing on Climate Change (and we know it was only posturing - but they don't), his easy going attitude to gays and black people and his platitudes about the NHS have been getting them shifting uncomfortably in their seats for a while. They put up with him because he seemed about to win them a General Election.

That he spectacularly failed to do. Instead he allied with the fake Tories in the Lib Dems so he could hold at bay the very real ones on his back benches. I doubt many true blue Conservatives want to make this crisis any worse, but the temptation to ditch Cameron may eventually get too strong.

So that's it, Cameron is toast. Maybe. Possibly.

The problem is the mechanism. The Judge led inquiry will let him off the hook, just like Hutton whitewashed Blair. The Lib Dems aren't going to want to No Confidence him as they'd be out on their ear too. Neither will Labour lead a popular crusade as most of this sh*t happened on their watch.

Possibly it will be the Men in Grey again, just like with Lady Thatcher.

Or maybe he will just eventually disappear up his own arse?

We can hope.

Meanwhile you will note that I'm not going to say 'when' it will bring him down. Let's not forget, between Watergate and Impeachment Nixon managed to get himself re-elected.

Six Decades of Sci-Fi Films

2011-07-12T13:04:00.002-07:00

Nothing dates like the future, as you can see by this trawl through the best of sixty years of science fiction films.

We were going to travel to the stars, be devoured by aliens, replace ourselves with replicants, disappear into cyberspace or be landed with a ship load of space refugees.

Instead the shuttle has been paid off, the aliens are silent, the clones don't work, cyberspace crashes if you move too far from the base station and if we don't do something about Climate Change the refugees will be us.

But lets ignore grim reality and look to back at the future as presented on the silver screen.

The Fifties: The Forbidden Planet(1956)

Well you know you're in the the fifties when you watch Forbidden Planet. Spaceships that look like flying saucers, computers the size of tower blocks, and women relegated to housework.

But what a great film this is. Having grown up in the seventies watching corny CSO special effects on Doctor Who, I couldn't believe a film that looked this good could be made so long ago. As a prediction of the future it is probably pants, but as a vision of how we hoped the future would turn out, it's fantastic. Great style doesn't date, and neither does the look of this film.

As a take on Shakespeare its interesting too, with the Krell's supersized superscience replacing magic and a bit of Freud creeping in for good measure to impress pseudo-intellectuals like me.

And yes, that is a young Leslie Nielson of Police Squad! as the romantic lead.

The Sixties: 2001 A Space Odyssey (1969)

The first time I watched this film I couldn't make head nor tail of it. I then read Arthur C Clark's novelisation and realised it was obvious. I then watched the film again and thought, hang on a minute.

And that's what's fantastic about Kubrick's film. He took Clark's nuts and bolts sci-fi story of heroic space exploration and benevolent aliens and turned it inside out. Now the aliens teach the ape-men to make clubs that turn into orbiting nuclear bombs, and the shiny future is full of charmless, corporate yes-men who lie to the public and miss their daughter's birthday.

And then there's Freud again. I mean, look at the Discovery One, swimming towards the black hole and then giving us the Star Child.

True, you need to be on pot to really want to watch a film this pretentious, this long and this slow, but then this is the sixties and most of the audience apparently were.

The Seventies: Alien (1979)

If you were expecting Star Wars then you're reading the wrong blog. Alien is the genre defining film of this decade.

Now you could argue that the genre concerned is the slasher movie, but it is a sci-fi movie really. Here we have space not as mysterious and exciting, but as the boring, everyday workplace of a bunch of interstellar truck drivers.

Apparently J.G.Ballard was approached to write the novelisation of Alien, but he looked at the monosyllabic dialogue and turned the offer down, only to realise his mistake when he saw the film. You can see where he went wrong though. The script is okay, but it's Ridley Scott's direction and H.R.Giger's designs that make it a classic.

And of course Freud is there in bucket loads too, as this alien doesn't just eat you, it impregnates you and you give birth to its off spring. Yuck.

The Eighties: Blade Runner (1982)

Blade Runner almost gets my vote as best movie of all time.

Almost, but not quite, and the reason is a rather annoying one.

Everyone knows the debate about whether Decker is a replicant. It seems fairly clear director Scott intended him to be, and every time they retouch the film and release a new version this becomes clearer. But, and its a very big but, no matter how they tweak it they can't get round the fact that Harrison Ford was clearly not trying to play a replicant. It's not a bad performance by Ford, but that's part of the problem. His Blade Runner is too human.

But Ford isn't the star of the show. That is clearly Rutger Hauer. This is Mr Guinness's finest moment. He is handsome, noble and menacing throughout the film, in the way that only Robert Shaw could equal. He murders his father (Freud again, need I say) bumps off the nice J.F. Sebastian, is really mean to Decker, and then ends the film with one of the best soliloquys in cinema.

Ultimately Blade Runner may not amount to a hill of beans, but so well made, well acted and well designed is this dystopian classic that you'll come away thinking it was more profound than Proust.

The Nineties: The Matrix (1999)

In the nineties computerised special effects arrived and the only limit to what could be shown on screen was human imagination.

Unfortunately that turned out to be a fairly serious limitation, and mostly we just got superhero stories, but we did get the Matrix.

Okay, so the sequels have reduced the concept to utter silliness, and the idea (and the name) were both nicked from a Tom Baker Dr Who story (1976's The Deadly Assassin), but it was still a jaw dropping film when it came out.

Not that it's an optimistic film, along with the runner up for this decade, Terminator II, it shows a pretty grim future. Alien and Blade Runner may have shown that the future doesn't hold much for those at the bottom of the social ladder, but these films suggest that the only things that can look forward with optimism are our PCs.

The Noughties: District 9 (2009)

The special effects continued to get better, but whilst this has revitalised the fantasy genre and TV sci-fi, in the movies it was largely the same backward looking stuff, as epitomised by that vapid rubbish Avatar, which re fought the Vietnam war with ten foot high smurfs three and half decades after everyone else moved on.

There were a few exceptions though, and chief amongst them was District 9, a stunningly original South African film. The hero who becomes more humane as he becomes less human, and the alien racism analogy had been done before, although possibly not done better.

However the invasion by crap aliens was new. Previously First Contact was either a Very Bad Thing or a Very Good Thing. Here it's just a hassle, another problem for the UN, another opportunity for the evil corporations.

Summary

So what have we learnt in sixty years of sci-fi films? Well, if this list is anything to go by the optimism has certainly gone.

In the fifties and sixties we looked forward to boldly going in search of adventure and excitement, admittedly in the service of some sort of quasi-fascistic state.

In the seventies and eighties it became apparent that this Brave New World wasn't for everyone, and that there'd be a lower strata of workers either to be used as alien-fodder for the corporations or abandoned on a dying earth whilst the elite moved to Mars.

Then in the nineties the future was given over to the machines, and any aliens we met were in a worse state than.

All said, I think I wish I was back in the fifties.

The Best of Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor

2011-07-12T13:03:00.001-07:00

Well this should be easy. Paul McGann, the Doctor for one night only. What's his best story then?

Well, I could cheat and consider media other than TV, in which case I'd go for the animated version of the Douglas Adams story Shada that he voiced.

But no, I'll have to play fair and nominate the story known only as Doctor Who The TV Movie. This was an attempt to revive the series by setting it in the USA, something it notably failed to do.

It's not so much that the story is actively bad, it just has a complete absence of anything good in it. This is Doctor Who by numbers with lines such as "Would you like a jelly baby?" (groan), "Don't mind him he's English" (cringe) and "I'm half human" (roll around on floor going 'nooooooooo!').

Eric Roberts makes a passable villain, although he's clearly not The Master, and Daphne Ashbrook makes a passable companion.

There's certainly been worse stories on US television, but is it Doctor Who? Only just. Yes there's a blue box, but where is the multi-layered plot, the monsters who turn out to have hearts of gold, the moral dilemmas etc etc.

But enough of the plot, what about McGann? Well, before I answer that lest have a quick recap of the debut stories of the various Doctors. William Hartnell was of course perfect from the word go, Patrick Troughton's first outing is, alas, lost forever whilst Jon Pertwee spent most of his first story out cold in a hospital bed. Tom Baker left us for a while in the TARDIS leaving Sarah Jane to carry the story whilst Peter Davidson spent most of his debut in a box. The less said about the intial appearances of Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy the better.

So you'd have to say McGann's debut performance was probably the best since The First Doctor's thirty three years earlier. He was The Doctor straight out of the box. Debonair and romantic, he could have been the best of Doctor Who. Instead he will remain a one hit wonder.

The Best of Doctor Who: The Seventh Doctor

2011-07-12T13:02:00.003-07:00

If any actor who played the Doctor has grounds for asking for his money back its Sylvester McCoy.

Originally recruited to clown around with Bonnie Langford in a series of embarrassingly bad episodes, it seems he'd been taken on by an out-of-touch production team to see out the twilight of the series in some pre-CBBC slot for adolescents who haven't the energy to change channels. It was so bad you really did want to hide behind the sofa.

But then Andrew Cartmell took over as script editor. He couldn't save the write off that was McCoy's first series, but for the show's 25th anniversary series he got to work on his Master Plan. Out went the comedy Time Lord and Bonnie Langford, and in came a darker Doctor and a companion with a back story.

Now you can argue that if you were going to do this you wouldn't really want to do it with actors of such limited range as McCoy and Sophie Aldred, but that's what happened and, to be fair to the two leads, they did their best and, if nothing else, their genuine affection for each other did show through.

McCoy's second season began with a bang with Ben Aaronovitch's Remembrance of the Daleks, which took us back to Foreman's Scrap Yard in 1963, gave us duelling Dalek factions in league with the National Front and introduced us to UNIT's forerunner The Intrusions Counter-Measures Group.

The series then went off the rails a bit before coming back strongly with the pointless, baffling but wonderfully surreal Greatest Show in the Galaxy. Don't ask me what it's about, but menacing kites and a killer bus conductor work for me.

McCoy's third series though was his best. Four top notch stories and not a bad episode amongst them. The show had been throwing up at least one utterly cringe worthy script a year since Tom Baker hung up his scarf, so this was the best series since the Key to Time.

First there was Battlefield, a welcome return for UNIT and the Brigadier as they fight an honourable foe in the form of Jean Marsh's Morgaine and her dimension shifting knights. Fortunately UNIT are all tooled up with their new ass-kicking female Brigadier and a range of bullets for all eventualities.

Then there was Ghost Light, which was very much in Sapphire and Steel territory being set in a Victorian mansion populated by strange characters and evolutionary throwbacks.

Next we had The Curse of Fenric, set in Northumbria in World War II and featuring code breakers, a Viking curse, Russian commandos, vampires, Nicholas Parsons as a consience troubled vicar, and lots of hints that the Doctor is now 'more than just a Time Lord'.

Finally there was Survival, in which Anthony Ainsley as The Master finally stops doing a poor impersonation of Roger Delgado and becomes the feral predator I suspect he always wanted to play.

And that was that. Literally. The BBC canned the series and it was all over.

So what's the best Seventh Doctor story then? Well I'd have liked it to have been Battlefield, but the pacing is a little uneven thanks to it being stretched from three episodes to four episode and the knights look cheap (because they were). Still it was nice to see old Lethbridge-Stewart doing all right, married to the previously invisible Doris and living in a huge mansion. How he paid for it I've no idea. Maybe he pocketed a few of the gold bullets.

So the winner has to be The Curse of Fenric. Had it featured a more iconic Doctor and a more iconic monster it would be a contender for the best ever story, I'm sure. Watching it now I realise that thanks to Cartmell the jump from the old series to the new wasn't that great after all.

With a contemporary theme (pollution), the Doctor hovering in the background letting his companion do all the work and poor old Ace gets put through the emotional wringer, this could have been an RTD script. But whereas the new series likes to paint it characters in black and white, here we are in shades of grey again and there is no Ghost in the Machine ending, but instead a complicated denouement that I would explain to you if only I could remember it.

Shortly after broadcast Doctor Who was no more, but at least the old series went out on a high.

The Best of Doctor Who: The Sixth Doctor

2011-07-12T13:02:00.001-07:00

Colin Baker - he was the crap one right?

Wrong. He was the loud one, the fat one, the one worst served by the BBC in terms of stories and production values, but he was a pretty good Doctor. Egotistical, boastful, verbose, unpredictable and occasionally violent, he was a bit different from his predecessors.

Colin Baker got the role on the basis of a scenery chewing performance in Blake's 7 and a speech at a wedding. The costume is, admittedly, a disaster, but that was imposed on Baker by John Nathan-Turner, a producer who had really lost the plot by this stage.

So dressed like a wally Colin Baker had to navigate some of the worst Doctor Who stories ever written. Is there any point in watching?

Well yes, because of all the actors who flew the TARDIS, none could deliver a comic line better than Colin Baker, and given some of the guff he was asked to act in, you need a good laugh.

However if I want you to love Colin Baker there's no point in going over episodes like The Two Doctors, in which the welcome return of Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines was ruined by a dull script, or Timelash in which Paul Darrow from Blake's 7 returns the favour to Baker by putting in an OTT performance, but looses the battle against risible sets and dire special effects.

Instead lets go straight to the highlight of Colin Baker's brief tenure; Revelation of the Daleks.

Like all the best Dalek episodes, the metal dustbins are kept in the background for most of the story, and instead we have a complex series of at least five overlapping subplots set around a cryogenic storage facility for the dead rich.

Davros is secretly making a new Dalek army from bits of dead humans (hmm, so that's where RTD got the idea from.........). Meanwhile we also have Orsini and Bostock, an errant knight and his squire on their way to assassinate Davros. Then we have the to rival Dalek faction out to get Davros too. Whilst all this is going on we have bodysnatchers, some dodgy food production, power struggles in management structure and a loopy DJ.

An idea of what we have in store is given when one of the characters comments on recently departed client "I hope we're on time, she's already beginning to froth." After that the killer lines come fast and furious. The founder of Alternative Comedy, Alexi Sale, plays the DJ, but it's a credit to the rest of the cast, who deliver the blackest of lines with deadly seriousness, that he isn't the funniest.

The best double act of all though is the Doctor and Peri. Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant always sparkled when together. Take the fob watch scene - you have to see it to appreciate it - which shows how good they are at spinning out even the weakest of puns.

The only down side to putting Revelation forward as his best adventure is that he's barely in it. There's so much going on that he's periferal to most of the story, and in the end Davros's empire more or less falls apart under its own contradictions rather being brought low by some inexplicable special ability of the Doctor and/or the TARDIS. But that's another reason I like the story - it's realistic, that's how Dictatorships usually end.

If every Sixth Doctor story had been this good we'd all be singing the praise of Colin Baker as one of the great Doctors. Alas they weren't.

However the Sixth Doctor has gone on to a long and productive second lease of life in books and audio releases, and Colin Baker has had the pleasure of being voted the best audio Doctor of all. He has even, thanks to the animated webcast Real Time, obtained a costume worthy of his character. All of which must be some compensation for being so diabolically treated by the BBC.

The Best of Doctor Who: The Fifth Doctor

2011-07-12T13:01:00.002-07:00

We're now in 1981, and properly into the John Nathan-Turner years.

Now before I go on I should saw that Doctor Who fans owe a considerable debt to the man who produced the series for the whole of the 1980s. Without him the show would probably have died a death shorty after Tom Baker hung up his scarf, and if that had happened it's hard to see the show eventually coming back in the way that it did.

However what Nathan-Turner actually did with the show was not good. By executive order he removed all elements of magic, myth and horror, banned his actors from humour or ad-libs, disintegrated the sonic screwdriver, reduced the Doctor to a rather helpless victim of events, and extracted the show from its regular Saturday teatime slot. So with everything that made the show good expunged, I switched off.

So Peter Davidson isn't my favourite Doctor then. A good actor, Davidson might have made a great Doctor had he been a little older, served with better scripts, and been allowed to play the character the way he wanted to. Choosing the best of the Fifth Doctor stories then isn't going to be too hard, as there are only really two I'll watch again.

I suppose in passing I should mention Kinda, very meaningful but don't ask me what it means, and The Black Orchid, very atmospheric but a bit ridiculous, but as I've not watched either in nearly thirty years I can't really say more.

I'm tempted to give the award to The Five Doctors. The plot isn't great. It couldn't be otherwise really as Terrance Dicks had to cram in so many Doctors and Companions that by the end the latter are reduced to doing nothing more than standing around and shaking hands with each other. But it does have a sparkling performance by Patrick Troughton, an enjoyable turn by Jon Pertwee and Richard Hurndall in the role-of-his-life as the First Doctor. It also has Tom Baker who, even in some out-of-context footage from the aborted Shada, easily out Doctors his successor.

The story can also claim what may be the best battle scene in the old series, when the Raston Warrior Robot obliterates a cyberman patrol - Doctor Who isn't usually remembered for squirting innards and severed limbs. The cyberman are otherwise total crap in this episode, as they are throughout the 1980s, but they do at least die spectacularly well.

However the standout story of the Davidson era is The Caves of Androzani. Robert Holmes again comes up with interesting characters and Peter Davidson acts his socks off.

He starts off in typically wimpish form with lines like; "What do we do now?" - "Surrender." and "How do we get out of this?" - "I really have no idea." And he has to be rescued from his own execution by a villain of all people. However by episode three he seems to have grown some balls and manages to eventually rescue Peri and save the day.

And best of all he then dies. Hurray!

The Best of Doctor Who: The Fourth Doctor

2011-07-12T13:01:00.001-07:00

Ah, the Tom Baker years, and Doctor Who reaches heights never attained before or since.

And depths too, to be honest, but we'll forget about that.

The curly one started off with a few earth based stories left over from the Pertwee years, then blasted off into space for a series of Gothic horror film remakes that are amongst the best of the series. He then said good by to the earth and ditched his last human companion to search for the Key to Time.

Then things started to go a bit wobbly. They gave the job of script editor to a zany comedy writer - a very brave move. The seventies then came to an end, Douglas Adams left to become a demi-god, and a new script editor was appointed to vowed to end all the "late sixties hippie ideas derived form Third World cultures" which had infested the series. Arguably it was all downhill from there.

But back to the highlights, and what a lot there are.

There's Terror of the Zygons with its atmospheric Scottishness, although it does have a terrible CSO monster and the Brigadier in kilt. Not good.

Then there are the best of the horror remakes; The Pyramids of Mars and The Brain of Morbius, both of which also have the incomparable Sarah Jane.

Another near-perfect story is The Robots of Death. Agatha Christie in space with a claustrophobic setting and wonderfully scary Regency-style robots.

The Talons of Weng Chiang, a tribute to the best of Victorian noire is another near winner. A collection of cliches from swirling fogs to inscrutable Chinese, giant rats in the sewers and sneaky oriental assassins, it also has some of Robert Holmes's most sparkling dialogue, not just from the Doctor and Leila, but also from a great cast of supporting characters. Brilliant stuff.

The Key to Time was an interesting concept for the next series. Alas, it didn't produce any classic episodes, but Mary Tamm looked superb and easily gets the prize of best dressed companion. If her Ice Maiden costume doesn't tickle your fancy, then just look at her mock-Medieval outfit for The Androids of Tara. personally I think Tom Baker (and Richard Dawkins) married the wrong Romana.

The Douglas Adams years tend to divide fans, and I'm not completely in the camp that thinks he was the best thing that ever happened to Who, but The City of Death is very funny, very stylish thanks to being shot in Paris, and actually a very original idea.

Shada doesn't count as it was never broadcast, but I also suspect it wouldn't have been as great as many fans expect. I mean, it includes the Doctor on a bicycle being chased by a flying globe. How rubbish would that have been?

As I've said, Tom Baker's last season was a bit uneven, but there's he no doubt he went out on a high. Logopolis is an interesting story, as The Doctor comes up against his most deadly enemy to date, namely entropy. Baker acts his socks off here, and the final fall from Jodrell bank is a fittingly dramatic way for it all to end.

So what's the best of the Fourth Doctor then?

Well it was almost The Genesis of the Daleks. Here we have Doctor Who at its peak: Tom Baker, Liz Sladen, Ian Marter, a Terry Nation script, the Daleks, Davros, the camp chap from Allo Allo in a minor roll, they're all there.

Why doesn't it win? Partly I suppose I've watched it so many times it's lost some of its fizz, partly its a touch too long, partly I have my doubts about the point it's trying to make - is genocide really that bad when we're talking about the Daleks?

Mainly though its because I prefer dark humour to deep thought.

So my vote for the Best of the Fourth Doctor goes to The Deadly Assassin, Robert Holmes's deliciously satirical political thriller set on Gallifrey.

The Time Lords had been on the periphery of the Doctor Who universe for a while. We'd had sneaky peaks in The War Games and The Three Doctors, but now we were going to find out the whole truth. All seeing, all powerful and supposedly all good, they could have been stupefyingly boring, but not in Holmes's capable hands.

Instead of the vaguely Buddhist ascended masters hinted at before, here we had a bunch of old fuddy-duddies who can now barely work the technology they have inherited and who now care more for status and tradition that science and art. No wonder there are so many renegade Time Lords.

The set design is spectacular, the acting first rate and then there's The Matrix, an idea so good someone else had to make a film about it.

But most of all what makes it great is the script. With ideas nicked from The Manchurian Candidate and Porterhouse Blue, and contemporary references to Harold Wilson's resignation and the Kennedy assassination Holmes created a masterpiece leavened with his inimitable dialogue.

Then there's the ending. The Master is defeated, Gallifrey is saved, so what do the Time Lords do? The embark on a cover up of course. Delicious, simply delicious.

A classic episode from a classic Doctor.

The Best of Doctor Who: The Third Doctor

2011-07-05T14:14:00.000-07:00

Ah, now we're getting somewhere. It's 1970, Doctor Who goes colour and Jon Pertwee takes the reins and to cap it all I'm born! (Three days before the first episode of The Ambassador's of Death to be precise).

Its difficult to know what the BBC thought they were getting when they signed up Pertwee, a comedy actor who'd had bit parts in Carry On films? Probably not the dandy action man they actually got anyway.

As Pertwee is one favourite Whos, the honourable mentions are going to be quite long, so lets crank up Bessie, reverse the polarity of the neutron flow, and get on with it.

Firstly there's the debut story itself, Spearhead from Space, which gave us the Autons and the classic scene of the dummies gunning down hapless shoppers. UNIT get their colour debut to and whilst the Brigadier's gang often appear to have been reduced to little more than a flag party and have lost their sixties gizmo's, they do contribute to a significant amount of gun play and enjoyable mayhem for the rest of the Third Doctor's tenure.

The first season also ends with a cracker too in Inferno, which features the destruction of a parallel earth and a baddy Brigadier.

The next season saw the arrival of The Master, played by the late and great Roger Delgado. Horrendously overused, he started well with Terror of the Autons and the series also contains The Daemons, a story of witchcraft and devilry in an English village which scores ten out of ten for atmosphere, but loses all its points for a silly plot and a useless Doctor.

Once the Third Doctor actually gets to leave earth we have enjoyable romp in The Carnival of Monsters.

Another favourite of mine is The Day of the Daleks, the first story that actually uses time travel as plot device. Hard to believe it took them ten years to use time travel in a story about a time traveller isn't it? A tale of Freedom Fighters from the future trying to change history whilst being hunted by time travelling cyborgs, it does sound a little like a certain Arnie movie doesn't it?

Then there's The Three Doctors. Not much to write home about in many ways, but worth while to see Troughton and Pertwee playfully sending each other up and Hartnell's last TV appearance - filmed in his garage as he was too ill to get to the studio. Sad to think that all three are no no longer with us.

Another honourable mention must go to The Time Warrior, which introduced those root-vegetable clones, the Sontarans and the late Liz Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith in a passable medieval yarn.

A better Sarah Jane story though is The Dinosaur Invasion. Now mostly remembered for the lamentable condition of the titular sauropods, it is a good story with some well meaning, but very sinister, eco-utopians as the real villains. Never trust a hippy indeed.

So what the top Pertwee story then? Well it was almost The Curse of Peladon, the story of a primitive planet petitioning to join the swanky Galactic Federation, which by complete coincidence came out just as Heath was trying to get us into the Common Market. Here we have Jo Grant not being completely useless for a change and the plot twist of the Ice Warriors now being goodies.

However for the award of best-of-Pertwee we have to have an earth bound adventure. It also needs to be from his first series, as the Third Doctor, and the series generally, was never again so gritty and serious.

So my award goes to The Silurians, and not just because it's set in Derbyshire. The idea of aliens who have been here all along, and who probably have a better claim on the earth than we do, was a startlingly original one. It's also done really well.

Production values are pretty good and whilst the papermache Allosaurus is a bit of an embarrassment - they had a bit of a problem with dinosaurs in the Pertwee years - the underground base and the caves are greats sets and scenes of the epidemic outbreak at railway station are frighteningly realistic.

The Doctor's companions are on top form as well. The Brigadier is the ruthless killing machine he ought to be, as opposed to the cuddly Colonle Blimp he became, and the Doctor is for once paired up with a female companion with something betwen her ears. Women's Lib came slowly to Doctor who, and Liz Shaw, a Cambridge Graduate in a miniskirt was the first stab at a serious female character. She was ditched after one series and replaced with the vacous Jo Grant, but it was a start.

There are some familiar faces in the cast including Avon from Blake's Seven as a UNIT officer, Mackay from Porridge as a scientist and Geoffrey Palmer as an administrator.

The reason its the winner though is Malcolm Hulke's serious and layered script.

Both factions, the Silurians and the humans, are split into hawks and doves, but unlike in the New Series, they aren't caricatured as good and bad. Major Baker, the leading human hawk, turns out to be genuinely brave man whilst his opposite numbers in the reptile camp are eventually proved right when the Brigadier blows up their caves and wipes them all out.

Written whilst the National Front and the Black Panthers where in the news, this is remarkably even handed and grown up stuff, a million miles from the simplistic "Racism's bad, mckay?" approach of RTD in the New Series. Instead Hulke created a genuine moral dilemma, with no easy answers.

The arrival of the seventies then showed that Doctor Who was really was now a program for the grown ups as well as the kiddies, and was willing to tackle big issues. It now looked good as well - apart from the Allosaurus and the miniskirts - and this story really has worn well - apart from the Allosaurus and the miniskirts.

Hard to believe then that it was made so long ago, but then forty one isn't very old, is it?

The Best of Doctor Who: The Second Doctor

2011-07-04T23:48:00.000-07:00

Like Matt Smith, I do love Patrick Troughton's cosmic hobo, but oh dear oh dear, most of his actual stories are pretty rubbish.

The Second Doctor is at his best in the ensemble pieces The Three Doctors and The Five Doctors, but these are properly Third and Fifth Doctor stories and can't count in this list.

Honourable mentions then are fairly few. There's The Web of Fear, which featured the unlikely combination of Yetis and the London Underground and introduced the redoubtable Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart.

Then there's The Invasion with its scenes of Cybermen marching past London landmarks being battled by, the now Brigadier, Lethbridge-Stewart and the newly formed UNIT, who here are all high-tech with an HQ in C-130 Hercules.

And then there's The Tomb of the Cybermen, a blatant rip off of The Mummy's Curse. When I was young this used to regularly win readers polls as the best episode ever, mainly voted for by people who'd never seen it as it was one of the famous Lost Episodes. Then a copy was found down the back of a filing cabinet and when people actually saw it they found it tedious, repetitive and pointless. It doesn't win any more.

But amongst all this dross there still has to be a winner, so I'm going to go for The War Games, his last story.

At ten episodes its not exactly a story you sit down and watch in one go. There is also a lot of pointless going over the same ground at a geological pace and the Doctor is rather less than dynamic too. It doesn't help that the story gets its own internal geography messed up too, but there is a lot of atmospheric war-is-hell stuff, which is actually rather exciting.

However the story really gets going once the aliens appear. With hindsight the Companions are a little slow to realise what the boxes that appear with a strange groaning noise, and which are bigger on the inside than on the outside, actually are.

Then there is the appearance of the Time Lords themselves. We'd met the Meddling Monk on William Hartnell's watch, but this was the first time the Doctor's own race had been name checked. And what an information dump we get about them! Of course, it's all old hat now, but back then it was all completely new. Who knew the Doctor had stolen his TARDIS, or that the Time Lords could be such killjoys?

So it may be longer than the Hundred Years War, but it gets there in the end and is a fine way to send off the Second Doctor.

The Best of Doctor Who: The First Doctor

2011-07-04T13:19:00.000-07:00

I've managed to keep my inner Nerd at bay on this blog for long enough, so here I go with a run down of my favourite Doctor Who episodes, choosing my favourite episode for each the venerable Time Lords eleven incarnations.

We start then with old grumpy himself, William Hartnell's First Doctor.

Before we come to the winner of the title of Best First Doctor story, honourable mention must be made of those that didn't quite make it.

The Tenth Planet must be a contender, with the first appearance of the Cybermen and the first regeneration scene. Alas the BBC in their wisdom wiped the tape of the last episode, which rather spoils it.

Flawed but canonically important is The War Machines, with its very sixties titular robots, and the first monsters-versus-soldiers battles. No UNIT yet, but the idea was there.

Then there's The Time Meddlar, staring the bloke from the Carry On films, which introduced the first of numerous renegade Time Lords and also started the trend for casting comedy actors as villains.

A very, very strong candidate is the Dalek Invasion of Earth, with its sinister scenes of a deserted London, which were a dry run for Terry Nation's seminal Survivors, and the metallic compost bins lording it over a conquered humanity aided by their black shirted Robomen.

But even this is trumped by the triumph of the first ever story, 100,000BC. Most of it's a load of rubbish about cave men, but the scene when Ian and Barbara leave behind the drab junkyard of 1963 and enter the TARDIS is fantastic, it's like watching the fifties turn into the sixties before your very eyes. But 100,000BC is not the winner, only the appetiser.

The best of William Hartnell's episodes is without doubt the one that turned the show from being an educational romp through history into a sci-fi phenomena. After three episodes of Ian teaching cave men to make fire we find ourselves in a futuristic city amidst a radioactive forest. Suddenly Barbara is menaced by a sink plunger on a stick - and then credits roll.

This is, of course, The Daleks.

The pepperpots have been done to death since, used and abused for good and ill, but these Dalek's are different. Yes they are cold, yes they are ruthless, they say 'Exterminate' (but not until episode four), but they are not the Nazi stand-ins they later became. Trapped in their Expressionist city amidst the fossilised remains of the world they have destroyed, they are to be pitied as well as feared and are perhaps more familiar than we would like to think.

Outside the city are the Thals, pacifist fashion victims who believe in live and let live until convinced of the virtues of violence by the TARDIS crew, who need to get into the Dalek city to refuel the TARDIS. Ian, at least, gets a twinge of conscience over this 'war for oil' (or mercury), but what is the Doctor's real motivation?

We are never quite sure, which is one of the reason's Hartnell's Doctor is so great.

Romanes Eunt Domus

2011-06-25T09:01:00.000-07:00

(From Lammas 2010 issue of Pentacle)

History rarely repeats itself, but some themes seem universal.

In 43CE our little island was invaded by the western world’s only superpower.

Claudius, an obscure non-entity had been elevated to Commander-in-Chief of the world’s most powerful army by fluke of history and accident of birth. Political weakness and the chance of plunder were Claudius’s main reasons for invasion, but fears of British based religious extremists plotting terrorism in occupied Gaul provided the excuse.

Roman shock and awe led to quick victory and Claudius was shipped over for a mock battle near Colchester where amongst his war elephants he declared “Mission Accomplished”. The tribes of Britain were now Britannia. Civilisation had arrived.

Then in 410CE it all came to an end.

Duel on a Dark Mountain

1600 years later I am in Wales and, yes, it is raining.

Romanisation has become Globalisation, and we are part of a new Empire that straddles the entire globe. It is seemingly as universal and unassailable as Rome at its height, but here in Wales I found people planning for what happens after it has gone.

The event I’m at is called Uncivilisation, a cultural event that describes itself as a "training camp for the unknown world ahead". Set amongst the hills of Llangollen you can tell it’s an environmentalists convention by the scent of wood smoke and curried lentils. There are tents, camper vans and a strange space age contraption that is apparently called a hexayurt.

The usual suspects seem to be lurking around, and those not reading The Guardian appear to work for the paper. All very cosy and comforting to someone like me, but there are some worrying signs stuck up: “There is no Plan B”, “Myth of Progress”, “Age of Ecocide”, “Time to Look Down” and “A Fall is Coming”. They’re an optimistic lot I see.

Uncivilisation is part of the Dark Mountain project, started a year ago by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine. Kingsnorth, a writer for The Ecologist and The Guardian describes himself as a “recovering environmentalist”. What he claims to be recovering from is the delusion that our way of life is sustainable, that wind farms, solar power and tidal barrages will be enough to make a future that is cleaner, greener and more just, but otherwise identical to the present.

However Kingnorth wasn’t the only Guardian scribbler there. George Monbiot, fearless columnist, was along too. Monbiot and Kingsnorth had sparred before and Monbiot was there to make a robust defence of “Social Democracy 2.0” and to tell us why he wasn’t climbing any dark mountains yet.

Kingsnorth opted out personal combat with the mighty Monbiot and instead sent poor old Dougald up in his place. Monbiot had clearly arrived in pugilistic form, perhaps expecting he was being set up as the ritual sacrifice to the Dark Mountain faithful. Using the polemic tactics with which he has dispatched numerous Climate Change deniers he put Hine firmly on the spot for some of the things written in the Dark Mountain prospectus and book.

George has no time for a post-Apocalyptic world where all a man needs to make his way is some stubble, a mullet and a sawn off shotgun even if the women are beautiful and deadly and clad entirely in fitted leather. If he did he would spend more Saturday nights in Basingstoke.

The system we are fighting, he told the festival, is more robust than we give it credit for. Oil may peak, but it won't run out, and coal seems to be going to last almost forever. Though the biosphere may wither and the climate boil, industrial capitalism will blunder on - unless we do something to stop it, and nihilism and taking to the hills to live solitary and frugal lives in hexayurts will not do that.

So don’t give up progress, he said. Don’t expect an ecological apocalypse to do the hard work for you. We either campaign for a better world, or get a worse one.

Ouch.

I’m not sure they’re planning on inviting him back next year.

What the Romans Really Did For Us

If Hine felt Monbiot had been a touch ungrateful after they’d kindly invited him along, it was as nothing to how the Romans felt towards the Iceni in 60CE.

The Romans had expected to be welcomed with open arms by the tribe, after wiping out the Catuvellauni, their chief rivals. But revelations of the torture and ill treatment of a captive Queen and her daughters led to a revolt which nearly swept the Romans into the sea.

But they recovered, and eventually occupied Britain for more than three and a half centuries - a longer period of time than that which separates us from Oliver Cromwell.

They managed this because Rome wasn’t so much an Empire as a franchise. As Tacitus puts it, they were adept at “employing even kings to make others slaves”. The Romans didn’t import the elite who ruled Britannia, they found it amongst the gentry of the conquered Celts. Given a title and a nice villa, the local aristocrats “were gradually led into the demoralising vices of porticoes, baths and grand dinner parties. The naïve Britons described these things as ‘civilisation‘, when in fact they were simply part of their enslavement”.

It couldn’t last forever though. By the start of the fifth century the barbarians were at the gate. In 407CE the Legions departed. In 410CE the Emperor rejected a plea for help. The porticoes crumbled, the baths silted up and dinner parties came to an end.

Britannia had become a failed state.

The Unknown World Ahead

Compared to that our Credit Crunch has been rather mild. The instruments of our enslavement to the consumer culture are still there and most people are hopeful of a return to the good times.

But maybe also cultures don’t need to actually be destroyed to collapse. The historian Arnold Toynbee believed that Rome was doomed the moment they stopped expanding and built Hadrian’s wall. Their economy had been built on plunder and their self respect on a belief in a mission to Romanise the whole world. Once there were no more conquests, once it was apparent that there were barbarians who would never be Roman, it was the beginning of the end.

Our economy is based on the presumption of infinite growth, and even if we don’t voluntarily put the brakes on to save the biosphere, Peak Oil, the time when oil production falls and demand continues to rise, may do the job instead.

How will we feel when progress comes to an end? When each generation is little worse off than the one before? We may not have long to wait to find out.

Citizen Arthur

So what actually happens when civilisations do collapse?

The end of the Roman era is shrouded in darkness, but there are clues.

The cities were mostly abandoned and life moved to the countryside. Roman life evidently carried on in some places, but it was a mean and miserable existence compared with the glory of the Empire’s height. The archaeology shows decline, entrenchment and insecurity. But what where they afraid of?

Barbarians certainly, but possibly ones closer to home than many suppose. In Gaul there was a peasants revolt which was suppressed by Imperial troops. Could it be that in Britain there was a similar uprising but, with no Legions coming to help, the peasants won?

A People’s Republic of Britannia, what would that look like? lt could have been a wild a lawless place of ruined cities and roving gang, a fifth century Bosnia or Iraq. Or it could be that country life continued as it had only freed of the Roman yoke and a parasitic elite.

A surviving Roman comedy called Querolus, tentatively dated to this time and set in Gaul, gives us a clue. In it the peasants sit in court under an oak tree dispensing “woodland law”. It is a land where, by prudish Roman standards, “anything goes”.

Might these newly free and licentious peasants perhaps also now have woodland gods along with their woodland law?

At the start of their occupation the Romans had felled the sacred groves of the druids, and by the end they had imposed a centralised form of Christianity. But with the legions gone, the Roman Church left behind didn‘t seem to be in great shape.. According to the monk Gildas “Britain has priests, but they are fools.” Was this fifth century Liberation Theology?

Into all this at some point drift the Anglo-Saxons. A vigorous and independently minded people who rejuvenated a tired land, according to the traditional view. Violent invaders who ethnically cleaned the local Celts through a system of apartheid according to a more modern view.

And amongst these shadows there rides the figure of Arthur. Defender of Christianity against the pagans? Champion of the native Celts opposing German aggressors? Or maybe first amongst equals fighting the return of tyranny and privilege?

The truth is obscure, but what we do know is the stories that were told of this time and perhaps in a way this is more important, for it is by the stories we tell that we really reveal who we are.

To The Foothills!

Faced with the collapse of civilisation as we know it, stories may seem a strange weapon to arm oneself with, but Dark Mountain believes they will ultimately prove more useful than a shotgun and cellar full of baked beans.

Dark Mountain wants stories. Stories that recapture the vitality of a movement that has grown used to compromise and disappointment. Stories that capture the excitement of a protest camp on the eve of eviction, the simplicity of life in a bender under the stars. Stories that put nature centre stage and say that there is more to ecology than technological fixes.

“Old gods are rearing their heads” it says in the Dark Mountain Manifesto, and so they are, but the Goddess was only noticeable in Llangollen by her absence (although Katherine Jenkins was booked for the following month).

So why don’t we help them out with our stories?

I share most, if not all, of Monbiot’s concerns, but I like the sound of Dark Mountain. There are stories that need to be told, and Pagans are good at telling stories.

If anyone wants to join these strange dreamers I’m sure they’d be more than welcome.

Sources:

The Decline and Fall of Roman Britain (Neil Faulkner)
Conquest: The Roman Invasion of Britain (John Peddie)
A Study of History (Arnold Toynbee)
Evidence for an apartheid-like social structure in early Anglo-Saxon England (Mark G Thomas, Michael P.H Stumpf, and Heinrich Härke)

For more on Dark Mountain

Toxic Fuel

2011-06-22T11:51:00.000-07:00

(Since writing this for the Beltane issue of Pentacle I've met the Chief of the Beaver Lake Cree who told me I had the wrong totem animal for his tribe. The rest of it's still valid though. Unfortunately.)

In the forest of northern Canada, in the tales of the Woodland Cree, the Trickster often takes the form of a Raven. In one tale, common to many tribes, he banishes the primordial darkness by stealing the Moon. Finding a cabin in the woods in which the Moon is imprisoned, he transforms into a pine needle and is drunk by the lady of the house whilst she is collecting water. Reborn as a baby he demands to play with the Moon. Then, seizing his opportunity, he escapes through the smoke hole. Breaking up the Moon he forms the Sun and the Stars. The darkness is banished but the Moon has left its mark on the Raven, and his feathers, formerly as white as the snow, are now burnt black like the night.

Our local Co-op is traditional supermarket shopping. The checkout staff chat away happily to themselves whilst firing your shopping down the conveyer belt. They appear to know every customer in the queue except you and discuss in intimate details their numerous relatives and mutual friends whilst you are waiting to pay. Then when that’s done there is none of this “would you like any help with your packing” nonsense. Instead the lever is pulled and your groceries are squashed into a corner so they can serve the next person.

However over the last few years there have been subtle changes in the store. First it was the Fairtrade chocolate, then Fairtrade wine, then Fairtrade and organic coffee, then reusable shopping bags, then cucumber without any plastic wrapping and so on. Even the café, previously a place that served chips and beans only, reopened as the Fairtrade Espresso Bar. Gradually I started to wonder if by any chance the Co-op, cheap place to do your shopping, might actually be the same as the Co-op, ethical place to stick your money.

They are indeed one and the same and as well as selling you stuff and taking your money, they’ll also bury you when you’ve shuffled off to the Summerlands. They also turn their hand to campaigning every now and again, and whilst it may seem a long way from the baked bean aisle to the woodlands of the Cree, the Co-op is now helping a First Nation people in a fight to save their environment and ours.

In one corner we have a medley of international oil companies including Shell, Exxon, Total and BP, whilst up against them we have a tribe of about 900 people up in Alberta, Canada. Not so much David taking on Goliath so much as a Smart car taking on a 400 ton dumper truck.

The issue in hand is the exploitation of tar sands, a dirty form of oil that Canada hopes to exploit and sell to its southern rival to help fuel their addiction to oversized cars.

Tar sands contain bitumen, the sticky black stuff that is used to make asphalt. If you dig them out of the ground in industrial quantities and boil them for long enough you can get oil, the sticky black stuff that is used to make money.

The effect on the wildlife can be imagined. Trees are clear cut, the soil is stripped away and vast machines carve our great scars in the ground. Roads carved through the virgin forest stop the caribou from migrating. Tailing ponds of toxic sludge trap migrating birds, and like the raven in the tale above, turn them black - more than 1600 ducks in one tank alone.

For us, separated from our pagan ancestors by hundreds of years and living in a post-industrial landscape that few of them would recognise, a few acres of struggling trees is a forest. For the Woodland Cree, a forest is boreal woodland stretching from coast to coast across a continent broken only by wild rivers. This is the same forest in which their ancestors first told the tales of the Raven and in which the Trickster, in his many guises, still roams.

It’s no surprise then that the Cree aren’t planning to taking this lying down. One nation whose ancestral lands are threatened has led the way. In May 2008 the Beaver Lake Cree Nation released their Kétuskéno Declaration, putting down a line in the oily sand.

The declaration begins “Let it be known that we, the Beaver Lake Cree Nation, are the keepers of the lands”. It continues “We keep this land in honour of our ancestors and on behalf of our future generations, so that as long as the sun shines, the rivers flow and the grass grows, we can continue our traditional way of life. This is the land where we and our future generations will practise our spiritual ways and exercise our rational rights”. You don’t have to have grown up watching cheap westerns to know that that’s fighting talk.

However it‘s not just the Cree Nations who should be worrying about tar sands. Climate Change threatens us all and we need less oil, not more. The extraction of oil from tar sands is one of the most energy intensive industries around. To extract two units of energy from the ground you need to use one unit of energy to boil out the bitumen. This is three times as much as you use to drill for oil the conventional way. It’s probably better for the environment to drive a Land Rover on ordinary petrol than a Mondeo on fuel made from tar sands.

Such is the energy demands of tar sands extraction that there has even been talk of building nuclear reactors up there just to boil the oil out. That’s probably not going to happen, but what is happening is that natural gas, one of the cleanest of fossil fuels, is being piped in to be used to extract one of the dirtiest. If extraction gets into full swing the amount of gas they’ll need would be enough to heat all of Canada’s 12 million homes.

I could go on, but you’ve probably had enough doom and gloom. Hopefully though what separates readers of Pentacle from readers of Fairy and Fetish or other pagan publications is that you want to actually do something about it.

There’s plenty of reasons to support this campaign. Preservation of a real wilderness is one. Helping to fight Climate Change by stopping one of the dirtiest of dirty fuels is certainly another. Then there’s solidarity with a pagan people who genuinely want to be caretakers of the earth. But there is another reason to back this campaign, one that I think trumps all those.

We can win this one.

Tar sands are not having a good year. In January Shell announced it would slow development after a shareholder revolt. Then California, home to more gas guzzlers than any other state and a key market for the oil, announced a series of measures aimed at promoting low carbon fuels. In February BP shareholders launched their own revolt and shortly afterwards Whole Foods, a major US organic food chain, announced it would be boycotting any fuel associated with tar sands.

The campaign against tar sands reads like a gazetteer of environmental groups. Greenpeace Canada have been digger diving at the extraction site, which must be really good fun when the diggers are bigger than your house. Friends of the Earth in this country have been campaigning too. WWF (the panda people, not the wrestlers) have produced a feature length film called Dirty Oil dishing the dirt. And so on. If you want to help, you’re in good company.

Those shareholder resolutions for the BP and Shell Annual General Meetings will be being voted on pretty much as this magazine comes out. If you’re in a pension fund, and you’re quick, you can ask your pension fund manager to vote against tar sands. Money talks, and the £40 billion invested in these companies gives the pension fund managers loud voices.

The Beaver Lake Cree meanwhile are putting their trust in something with the dull sounding name of Treaty Number Six. It was signed in 1876 by someone with the anything-but-dull name of Chief Ko-Pah-A-Wa-Ke-Mum. In return for giving away vast tracts of their land to good old Queen Victoria, the Cree kept the rights to hunt, fish and gather plants and medicines, undisturbed by the Crown.

This is where the Co-op comes in. A fighting fund called The Raven Trust has been set up and the Co-op has dropped a fair chunk of its money into the kitty. This has allowed the Beaver Lake Cree to hire a hot shot lawyer specialising in First Nation cases to fight their case.

Lets wish him all the best and hope he has the cunning of the Raven.

The Spy Who Loved Me

2011-05-30T02:17:00.000-07:00

I watched this film the other week with my boys as they'd never seen a James Bond film and wanted to know what one was like. We didn't survive past the credit sequence, but for the few minutes I was watching I was struck in quick succession by these thoughts.

- How did they think they could get away with just remaking You Only Live Twice just by substituting nuclear submarines for space ships? I suppose Roald Dahl's 1967 script, with its gratuitously exotic location, outlandish plot to take over the world, random and bizarre assassination attempts on Bond and climatic battle in the baddie's lair, is what they've been remaking for the last 44 years, but this is a bit blatant.

- Barbara Bach is decent eye candy, but who told her she could act?

- On the other hand, how did an ugly git like Ringo Starr end up marrying her? (Yes, I do know the answer.)

- What does Roger Moore think he looks like in that yellow ski suit? It even has flares.

- The opening stunt though is really, really good. There had to be a reason we watched this rubbish, and Rick Sylverster's leap into the abyss is one of those reasons.

Even in these days of CGI wonders, it's still jaw dropping. In fact the way it is so obviously not CGI is what makes it so great. Sylvester actually does what James Bond does; ski off a sheer cliff and then wait an interminable age before deploying his parachute. The tracking shot as he falls in absolute silence is heart stoppingly good and makes the corny Union Jack parachute forgivable.

We switched off then, and from memory the only thing I missed of interest in the rest of the film was the gorgeous Caroline Munro, star of various seventies fantasy films, usually involving Doug McClure and a rubber dinosaur, who has a cameo as a baddie helicopter pilot.

Unfortunately this was her only Bond film, a pity because she's have acted the likes of Barbara Bach off the screen.

Botox Makes You A Psychopath: Proved (Sort Of)

2011-05-18T11:36:00.000-07:00

We all know that people who use artificial means to augment their natural attributes are vain, shallow and self centred with very little regard for their less beautiful brethren. Well now there is some scientific evidence to back this up. Apparently it all comes down to something I thought that only married men did.

Some time ago I discovered that the secret to a happy marriage was to pretend to be listening even if you aren't. The trick is to copy your other half's body language; smiling when they smile, frowning when they smile and so on. Apparently though we all do it unconsciously whether we're married or not.

According to an article in the online journal Social, Psychological and Personality Science by doing this we gain empathy into what the other person is thinking.

It's a curious idea, that to know another's emotions you have to mimic their facial expressions, but it's real science so there must be something in it.

The problem with people who've been botoxed, facelifted or otherwise artificially beautified is that they can't. Their faces are stuck in a sort of bemused half smile and even if you are gurning away like Phil Cool sucking on a lemon, they can't even raise an eyebrow to reciprocate.

The result is that they are less likely to understand what you're thinking. 7% less likely according to the study, which is enough in my book to catagorise them all as sociopaths.

Of course, the fact that they've been botoxed probably means they're rich enough not to need to care what you think.

Don't Mention The War

2011-05-17T12:26:00.000-07:00

According to Lisa Simpson all wars are wrong apart from the American War of Independence and the Second World War. As they didn't officially participate in either that causes a few problems when it comes to war memorials in Ireland.

The Queen today laid a wreath at Dublin's Garden of Remembrance, a memorial to "all those who gave their lives in the cause of Irish Freedom". It was a tricky thing for a British Head of State to do, honouring those who fought against us, but as a significant proportion of the world has fought wars of liberation against us, she's had quite a lot of practise.

Remembering their war dead though is also a sensitive problem for the Irish.

The Garden of Remembrance is a moving place with a wonderful statue of The Children of Lir, dying at the moment of liberation.

The memorial is dedicated to those who died fighting the British occupation from 1798 to 1921. The second date shows the problem. 1921 was the date of the formation of the Irish Free State, and also the start of the Irish Civil War. If you were in the old IRA in 1921 and were killed by a Brit soldier you’re in the Garden of Remembrance. If you were killed by an Irish soldier with a British rifle, you're not.

Instead Irish have tended to remember not the end of their final struggle for freedom, but the beginning; the Easter Uprising.

Easter 1916 pushed almost all the right buttons; a glorious, romantic, decisive, failure. It was also a complete cock up, with 90% of the troops not turning up, and the survivors were pelted with rotten fruit afterwards by an ungrateful population. But the subsequent retribution by the authorities stirred up the latent republicanism in the Irish and, as W B Yeats put it, a terrible beauty was born.

The war of urban assassination and rural guerrilla warfare then instigated by Michael Collins and Tom Barry was inglorious, unromantic, and indecisive. The most important battle of the war, the ambush at Crossbarry, although a significant victory for the IRA, is still highly contentious and the one fact everyone can agree on is that the last British soldiers killed were shot whilst waving a flag of truce.

Remembering all would therefore be rather tricky, even if it wasn't for the problem of deciding when it actually ended. Was it 1921 when the Treaty was signed? 1923 when the Civil War ended? 1926 when De Valera founded Fianna Foil and opted for the democratic route to a Republic? 1972 when the Official IRA declared a ceasefire in Northern Ireland? 1998 when the Good Friday Agreement was signed? Etc etc. It's not surprising really they opt to remember 1916 instead.

Commemorations began seriously in 1966, with an event which, if you'd made it up, would have got you accused of stereotyping. The Garden of Remembrance was opened, which was great, but the march past by the Irish Army was somewhat spoilt by the empty VIP grandstand - someone had forgotten to sent out the invites.

The IRA also decided to play their part, neatly blowing up the column in the middle of O'Connell street on which a statue of Admiral Nelson stood. The Irish Army then turned up to blow poor Nelson up again so the bits could be carried away by lorry, but being somewhat less proficient with explosives than the RAs ended up taking out every window in the street in the process.

The spot on which old Nelson stood is now the impressively spikey Spire of Dublin, but before that it was occupied by a piece of modern art known locally as the "floozie in the Jacuzzi", and O'Connell street now only has statues of two famous adulterers (Parnell and O'Connell himself).

However there was another group of veterans who were feeling a bit left out. Irishmen who'd served in the British Army had been meeting on Remembrance Sunday at the Irish National War Memorial Gardens since it opened in 1948. By the 1980s though the place was virtually derelict, and with two groups meeting at different times to remember men who were effectively fighting on opposite sides in the same war the Irish government decided to try to do something promote some sort of national remembrance day.

The result was National Day of Commemoration, held on the nearest Sunday to July 11th. The idea was to remember the dead of the wars of liberation, both World Wars and modern Irish soldiers who've died serving as UN Peacekeepers.

A reasonable compromise, but as some have pointed out the rather woolly wording of what the day actually commemorates does mean that the Blue Shirts who fought for Franco also get remembered. Fair enough I suppose, they were soldiers too, and by all accounts they killed more fascists than republicans.

All told the Queen probably had the easier job, she just dumped the flowers and ran. Ireland meanwhile is getting ready for the centenary of the Easter Uprising in five years time. They hope that by then the chaps at the top of the page will be ancient history, but if not they might just be creating even more problems for themselves.

Victory in the Great Bear Rainforest - Ten Years On

2011-05-05T09:59:00.000-07:00

(From the Lammas 2001 issue of Pentacle Magazine)

A Legend

According to the stories of the Kitasoo and Gitga’at people, when the great glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age, The Creator proceeded to set aside an island on which every tenth Black Bear would be born white. On this island the Spirit Bears would “live in peace forever” to remind the people of the time when their green forest was once white.

And so even today, on Princess Royal Island, where grey wolves roam, eagles soar and wild salmon return the streams of their birth as part of an age old cycle, amidst one thousand-year-old Red and Yellow cedar and Sitka spruce trees, every tenth Black Bear cub is born white. They remind us still of how fragile our climate is.

An Action

May 13th 1998. Trafalgar Square. The Canadian Air Force Colonel was already having a bad day. It was late morning on a hot, late spring day. Tourists pressed behind the barriers sweltered in the heat, whilst laid back police officers in shirtsleeves looked on. Scarlet uniformed Royal Canadian Mounted Police formed a Guard of Honour next to the red carpet that ran up the steps of Canada House.

In a few minutes Her Majesty the Queen would arrive to formally open the refurbished embassy, and it was his job to make sure things ran smoothly. They were running anything but smoothly right now. Instead of ‘God Save the Queen’ the message the tourists were getting was ‘God Save Canada’s Rainforest’, spelt out on a banner 170 feet long hanging off Nelson’s Column.

The Queen was minutes away, surely nothing else could go wrong. Suddenly he spotted movement in the crowd. A gap had suddenly appeared in the barrier and from it emerged four more Mounties. This wasn’t part of the plan. The British police, thinking these were late arrivals from his party had already stopped the traffic and waved them across the road. Cursing the limey’s he rushed forwards, but the Mounties were already on the red carpet. Turning to the still applauding crowd of confused tourists they unrolled a scroll marked Greenpeace and began reading….

The Battle for the Trees

The area known as the Great Bear Rainforest is a lush, temperate rainforest, the size of Switzerland that links the mountains with the sea in British Columbia, on Canada’s West Coast. For thousands of years it has been the home to First Nation’s people who left their signs on the ancient trees, some twice the height of Nelson’s Column. For generations too the forest has been logged for timber, but with the arrival of the large multi-national corporations in the 1960’s the rate of logging increased rapidly. By the 1990’s an acre of forest was being lost every twelve seconds in massive ‘clearcuts’, up to 100 acres in size, in which all trees and bushes were removed.

By 1995 Vancouver Island to the south had been almost completely deforested, and the logging roads were driving into virgin forest. Amongst the areas under threat were the Spirit Bear’s home on Princess Royal Island and the valley of Ista, sacred to the Nuxalk tribe. It was here that The Creator, through The Great Spirit, set the first Nuxalk on the earth, and for ten thousand years the tribe lived in balance with Nature.

This was too much for the Nuxalk and they struck back. Hereditary chiefs blocked logging roads and ended up in jail, others visited Britain to raise awareness of the campaign. In Manchester they ‘confiscated’ cedar planks from a timber yard. The planks were handed into a police station as stolen property as the Nuxalk claimed the multi-nationals had not had permission to remove the wood from their land.

However the Indians were not the only people fighting these cowboys. The Forest Action Network (FAN) was formed in the summer of 1993 when the clearcuts threatened Clayoquot Sound, the last pristine area of Vancouver Island. With legal and political efforts to stop the clearcuts failing, FAN took direct action and an estimated 800 people were arrested for blocking roads. When resistance was still continuing in autumn the government decided to compromise and launched a scientific inquiry that would eventually recommend a ban on clearcutting. Meanwhile the battle had spread to other parts of the Great Bear Rainforest.

FAN formed an alliance with the Nuxalk nation, and in their little yacht the Starlet they set out from their base in the town of Bella Coola to stop the cuts. Their ‘bottom line’ was ‘no logging in pristine valleys’. Communications with the outside world were difficult, and usually involved activists having to dive overboard carrying bicycles, swim ashore, and pedal off in search of fishing parties who could carry messages and film back to Bella Coola.

By this time though the Great Bear Rainforest was an international campaign, and Greenpeace entered the fray. As well as joining the blockades, Greenpeace started a series of high profile actions across Europe. The aim was to cut off the main market for clearcut timber. The campaign started with a European tour for ‘Stumpy’, a 400 year old tree stump. After that Greenpeace lobbied DIY stores, timber yards, and furniture suppliers. They also occupied a ship bringing rainforest timber to Glasgow before carrying out the most high profile action of all in Trafalgar Square. At last the Canadian press took notice, and the action was carried in all the main papers.

The logging multi-nationals though had no intention of taking all this lying down. When slinging activists in jail for a month at a time showed no sign of stopping the blockades, they hired the leading anti-environmental PR agency Burson-Marstellar, as the embattled GM food industry was later to do. An industry funded front organisation, the Forest Alliance, was formed and Greenpeace renegade Patrick Moore was hired to chair it. He was soon in Europe trying to keep the market for clearcut timber open.

The logging industry claimed that the clearcuts, once replanted, would return to their original state, that clearcuts were no more destructive to wildlife than natural events such as fires, and that it’s work was needed to preserve jobs. Unfortunately the truth was rather different, as any journalist that covered the actions in the forest could see. Replanted, second-growth forests are monocultures that could not compare with the rich wildlife habitats of old-growth forest, whilst even the most destructive forest fire could not clear an area of vegetation as completely as a clearcut. It was the issue of jobs though that would finally scupper the logging industry.

Trapped in the middle between environmentalists wanting to save the trees and the multi-nationals trying to save their profits were the loggers, the ‘silent majority’ in the campaign. Theirs was a ‘Catch 22’ situation. Whilst they relied on the multi-nationals for a living, they also knew that when the forest went, so would their jobs.

Sustainable Forestry

Such was the situation in the summer of 1998. But the events in Trafalgar Square market the beginning of the final act. By autumn no major company in Europe was admitting to importing timber from the Great Bear Rainforest. The focus of the campaign moved back to Canada, and the first of the multi-nationals agree to amend its ways.

The issue had always been about how to log the forest, not whether we should log the forest. Clearcutting, which uses large machinery, is very profitable, but small-scale, selective, logging creates more jobs, whilst having a minimal impact on the environment Saving the forest turned out to have other benefits as well. Amongst the 200 species found to have antibiotic, anti-viral and antifungal properties was taxol, which is now used to treat ovarian cancer.

The future of the forest looked bright.

Back to the Barricades

But this was a false dawn. The temptation to turn the trees into dollars turned out to be too much for logging giant Interfor, and last year they resumed clearcutting.

Once again, many brave Canadians came out to resist. None were braver than Betty Krawczyk, aged 72, who in October 2000 was sentenced to a year in prison for blockading a logging road. Her punishment contrasted with the sentences given to five Interfor workers convicted of assault after an incident in which a hundred people, who’d arrived in Interfor vehicles, attacked protestors, and hospitalised three. They were conditionally discharged and told to go to anger management classes! It would seem that in Canada they still fear the Crone.

Greenpeace sent the MV Arctic Sunrise to the area, and the campaign was back in full swing. But this time the government had no stomach for the fight. Betty Krawcyzk was released in January 2001 and at the end of March Greenpeace Canada’s Forests Campaigner Tamara Stark, with tears in her eyes, was able to Email with the news that a moratorium had been announced on logging pristine valley’s in the Great Bear Rainforest. For the Canadian government to even use the name was a major step forward, as previously the area had been known officially as the Mid Coast Timber Supply Region.

Global Forests Under Threat

With victory in British Columbia the campaign to save the world’s ancient forests moves elsewhere. In the Amazon the battle rages as you read this, and whilst the giant logging companies threaten to move on the Tiga, the giant coniferous forest that runs across northern Asia, environmentalists are preparing the campaign to save it.

The world’s ancient forests, as well as providing a spiritual and temporal home for tribal people, a source of employment for the future and a habitat for charismatic megafauna, are also a vital organ of Gaia – the earth’s self-regulating control system. The forests absorb some of the carbon dioxide produced by our addiction to fossil fuels, and produce rain that waters our crops and cools our globally warmed earth. They the earth’s air conditioning system.

To help save them you don’t need to travel to exotic parts of the world, the solution is near at hand; in your local supermarket, DIY store and timber yard. If you are buying a wood product, whether it’s charcoal for your incense burner or a new altar, check to see if it has a Forest Stewardship Council logo. FSC wood is a way that ensures the forests will be with us forever. If you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem.

Meet the Duke of Cambridge

2011-04-30T13:34:00.001-07:00

The aristocrat formerly known as Prince William must be pretty pleased with how his wedding went yesterday, but what, I wonder, does he make of his new name?

I guess nobody turns down the chance to become a Duke, but whether or not he realises that he is now sharing a name with the biggest buffoon ever to command the British Army is another question.

Prince George of Cambridge wasn't born in the fens, but in Hanover, and was the grandson of King George III of England, the mad one. He came to England after serving for a time in the Hanoverian army and was soon the Colonel of fashionable cavalry regiment. The nearest he got to active service was garrisoning the Ionian Islands, but nevertheless he swiftly became Inspector of Cavalry.

In 1854 the first major European was in nearly two generations broke out. In the intervening years the British Army had hardly been at peace though, and had been fighting a series of bloody wars against fearsome Sikhs and Afghans. The Honourable East India Company possibly had more experienced officers in its service than any other army in the world, and they all wanted to make their names fighting the Russians.

However in the mid nineteenth century heroic service on the Plains of Afghanistan counted for a lot less than blue blood, and so the 'Indians' stayed out east and George sailed to Crimea in command of a Division of Infantry.

Why the world's first industrial nation should go to war with an army whose leadership had more titles, and less military experience, the top table at yesterday's wedding is such a remarkable fact that it needs some explanation. The British Establishment doesn't usually need much of an excuse to be incompetent, but in this case the stupidity was at least partially wilful.

Back in the good old days of the English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell had turned the course of history by putting together a pretty effective force of cavalry, called his Ironsides. So thoroughly professional were they that Prince Ruport's dandified Cavaliers were swiftly put to flight and King Charles's head was soon enough on the block.

This act of regicide, and the Commonwealth that was inaugurated afterwards at sword point, so horrified the aristocracy that once the monarchy was restored they vowed to never let it happen again.

Hence forth officers in the army would not be promoted on merit, but would have to buy their rank. The idea was that the army would then be led by gentleman of private means who, having no need of the King's shilling, would fight only in defence of their own wealth and status and never against their own kind.

The army survived the Napoleonic Wars thanks to the genius of the Duke of Wellington, and a sort of Darwinian natural selection that allowed talented, but impoverished officers, to rise to the top by filling dead men’s shoes.

The virtues of an aristocratic army were then shown as they rounded up Luddites and massacred protesting Manchunians. The Crimean War though was to prove a slightly tougher test of this force than Peterloo.

The first battle was an assault across the River Alma. Lord Raglan had put the famous Light Division, of Peninsula fame, up front and stuck George's 1st Division right behind them. Raglan then issued one of his famously ambiguous orders and told George to "act as necessary".

A professional soldier would have understood immediately that his job was to support the Light Division, reinforcing success and guarding against failure. George though was no such thing. The Lights carried the Russian defences at bayonet point, but then faced an immediate counter attack. George did nothing and so the Light Division was repulsed, and the army had to attack the Russian position all over again.

A real army would at this point have either quietly found a safe posting for George to be sent to where he couldn't do any more harm, or shot him to encourage the others, but then the British Army in 1854 wasn't a real army. The McNeill–Tulloch Report into the war later concluded that the senior officers weren't fit to dig latrines, but this was quietly shelved and a better report compiled, thus demonstrating that they couldn't even pull off a good cover up, and George ended up Commander-in-Chief of the entire army.

He then spent the next forty years vigorously resisting any attempt to bring the army into the modern age. His most famous quip, delivered to a fellow officer, was "Brains? I don't believe in brains! You haven't any, I know, Sir!", pretty much summed up his approach to soldiering.

An example of how little he learnt from the debacle of Crimea is that when war with Russia again looked likely in 1878, the man he named to lead the crucial expedition was the same officer who penned the order that sent the Light Brigade to their doom, now 75 years old.

Fortunately for the nation (or unfortunately for our enemies, depending on your point of view) George had a nemesis in the form of Sir Garnet Wolseley. As aristocratic and snobbish as any of his brother officers, Wolseley though didn't purchase his commission and initially served in the engineers, where promotion was by examination. He then fought and won a series of small wars for the nation, which gave him the clout to get things done. He slowly pushed through a degree of reform and reduced George's role to largely that of being a figurehead. Ironically he eventually succeed him as Commander-in-Chief only to discover he now had no power to do anything.

When war broke out in South Africa in 1899 the day was saved by the Army Corps Wolseley had formed in the teeth of George's intransigence, but the catastrophes of Black Week showed that very little had really changed since the Alma.

However if his military conquests were almost non-existent, in the bedroom George had considerably more success. Nominally, but possibly not legally, married to an actress, his bedpost had more notches in it than most. Whilst he may never have been able to out think Wolseley, he appears to have had the edge in other ways.

However as none of the fruit of his overactive loins were considered legitimate by the exacting standards of the time, his title lapsed on his death until it was revived yesterday to be given, by the Queen, to Prince William.

I wonder what message she was trying to send to her grandson?

Census protests

2011-03-27T13:20:00.000-07:00

So, it's census day. Will you be filling yours in?

Maybe you'll be boycotting it because of the links with Lockheed.

Up to you I suppose, but the idea of a boycott is that it's supposed to be a sacrifice for you and not other people, and as the census is used to calculate funding for health, education and social services you may wish to consider how your non-appearance will affect your local hospital, school or child protection team.

However if you do decide to register a protest of some kind you'll be in good company.

A hundred years ago the Suffragette's decided that if they couldn't vote they may as well not officially exist. Boycotting took many forms, including staying out all night and partying at the local church hall, which is the sort of protest I like.

Not all followed this boycott, and when the 1911 census data was made public last year, researchers were surprised to find the names of prominent Suffragettes on it, which shows that even then those who talk the talk may not always walk the walk.

The most imaginative use of the census though was made by Emily Davison.

Davison was certainly at the spikier end of the Suffragette movement, attacking a man she mistook for the Chancellor of the Exchequer and planting a bomb at Lloyd George's house. She became a Suffragette martyr in 1913 when she died under the King's horse at the Derby, which is definitely not the sort of protest I like.

However she also protested in fluffier ways, and census night 1911 found her hiding in a broom cupboard in the Houses of Parliament. Next day she could tell the census officers, in all honesty, that one woman at least was now in Parliament.

The broom cupboard is still there, and thanks to Tony Benn a plaque with her picture on hangs in it, "one of very few monuments to democracy in the whole building".

End of the Arab Spring

2011-03-25T15:20:00.000-07:00

How easy it looked back in January. Wikileaks reveals Western doubts about President Ben Ali and a few weeks later he is almost bloodlessly removed from office. Shortly afterward the Egyptian army removes Mubarek from power.

The future looked rosy. Information was being set free, and the people were following.

Now things don't look so great. Civil war in Libya, probable civil war in Yemen, brutal state repression in Bahrain and Syria and so on.

True, the West stepped in and saved Benghazi at the eleventh hour, but even as I type Gaddafi is altering his tactics and his men are trading in their military vehicles for civilian 4x4s and swapping their armour for human shields. The Libyan rebels aren't saved yet.

There are significant differences between the current intervention in Libya and the 2003 invasion of Iraq; a UN mandate and regional support being one, that this is aerial interdiction and not invasion being another. But there could one similarity.

Under Saddam Iraq was unjust but at peace. Now it is in a state of turmoil and strife. Libya may well be going to follow suit. And this is the liberal dilemma: unleash civil war across the region or back the tyrants.

Do we do nothing and let the security forces brutally restore the status quo, as in Bahrain, or do we intervene and trigger a civil war, like in Libya? Keep Arabia happy under its dictators, the failed policy since World War II, or intervene and unleash forces you can't control, the failed policy of the last decade?

To do or not to do, that is the question?

Lets look at the facts. A quarter of the population of the region is under 29. Unemployment in Saudi Arabia is 40%, and they're doing better than most. Across Arabia 100 million young people will enter the jobs market over the next ten years.

Meanwhile economic and climate woes are pushing up world food prices, which are going to go up even further when the unrest triggers an oil spike and transport and fertiliser costs rocket.

This is a huge mass of disinherited humanity that cannot be ignored.

Even Jordan's Queen Rania, who may yet end up playing Marie Antoinette in this drama, has looked down from her ivory tower and seen the ticking time bomb.

At the same time the environmental stresses on the region are huge. To thousands of years of soil erosion is about to be added drought and climatic change.

This is what is driving the revolts, not a conspiracy by the West to grab the oil, or French Imperialism or other conspiracy theories (although the West does like grabbing oil and the French are empire building in North Africa, it's just that these aren't the main factors here).

There are no easy solutions here, and certainly bombs aren't going to solve the problem (on that I agree with the pacifists, where I part company is that I think if judiciously placed they may alleviate the symptoms slightly).

Economic and environmental justice is the answer, economic and environmental justice. Say it over and over again.

How we get that is another matter entirely. And I don't have the answers.

Gay Nazi Wizard in the Desert, or the Real English Patient

2011-03-24T07:20:00.000-07:00

With all eyes on the Libyan desert again I can't resist telling the story of Count László Ede Almásy de Zsadány et Törökszentmiklós, the central character in the novel and film The English Patient.

Dashingly played by Ralph Fiennes he explores the desert, woos Kirsten Scott Thomas, reluctantly helps the Germans in the war and ends up hideously injured and in the care of Juliette Binoche. Lucy chap.

The real Almásy was indeed a Hungarian aristocrat, although not officially a Count. He really did explore the desert in search of the legendary oasis of Zerzura, a copy of Herodotus at his side, by car and aeroplane. He really did find a cave painted with stone age scenes of swimmers. He even claimed to have found Zerzura, but others disagreed.

However Almásy also had what, we might call a colourful, side. He always claimed he was a Hungarian Royalist and not a Nazi, but certainly his Dad felt no qualm about courting the Brownshirts. He was also into ritual magic in a big way and as well as his son he would invite along Unity, the Nazi one of the Mitford sisters.

It is also doubtful whether he would have cared much for the charms of either Ms Scott Thomas or Ms Binoche. Recently revealed letters confirm that he was gay with a boyfriend in the Wehrmacht. We don't know much about this fellow, but as he died after stepping on one of his own land mines it seems Almásy didn't fancy him for his brains.

Contemporary film footage of Almásy, and hints in the memoirs of his fellow explorers, also suggest that Almásy's tastes extended beyond men in uniform, and certainly he did seem to pay a lot of attention to African boys on his adventures.

But if Almásy wasn't exactly a classic romantic hero, he was genuinely a military one.

Just like in the film, he really did sneak German spies into Egypt across the desert. Unlike the Long Range Desert Group, who were doing the same thing in the opposite direction, Almásy was pretty much a one man band, and whilst the LRDG ran like a scheduled bus service, Almásy's one great mission was a wing-and-a-prayer adventure that only just succeeded.

Almásy's men were from the Brandenberg Division. This unit, which was made up of various non-Germans fluant in other languages, often operated behind enemy lines throwing confusion amongst the enemy ranks. Almásy though appears to have got the soldiers nobody else wanted and as well as leading the mission he had to teach them how to drive, repair their vehicles for them as they went and show them how to navigate by the stars when their compasses failed. They appear to have complained all the way there and back.

His route took him 2500 miles from German occupied Libya, across the Great Sand Sea and through the Gilf Kebir plateau, home of Zerzura and the cave of swimmers. Although he didn't know it when he set off, Bletchley Park's Enigma code breakers were onto him from the start. Fortunately though for the fake count, the messages they intercepted only told them where he'd been and not where he was going. As his convoy of four vehicles crossed the desert, patrols from the Sudan Defence Force fanned out to intercept. The were just too late, and Almásy was able to slip through and deliver his spies into Cairo.

He now had to get back.

The SDF was now moving into position to block as the passes through the Gilf Kebir. Unable to get ahead of them, Almásy's slotted his convoy between two SDF convoys and hoped their trail of dust would be taken for another SDF patrol. Once in the Gilf Kebir he then used his knowledge of the labyrinthine gullies to hide until nightfall, before slipping through in the dark and back to Libya.

Although Almásy made it back undiscovered, the two spies didn't fare so well.

Setting up camp in a boat on the river Nile, they proceeded to recruit a network of belly dancers and other exotic characters. Recruitment of these agents was a job the two took very seriously and a bevy of Jewish ladies-of-the-night were interviewed very thoroughly and regularly. As a token gesture towards being real spies they had a radio hidden in the cocktail bar of their yacht with which they tried rather half heartedly to send back messages to HQ, but it rarely worked properly.

Had this been Monte Carlo in the twenties they might have got away with it, but such behaviour couldn't go unnoticed for long in wartime Cairo. British intelligence watched the men long enough to gather all the information they wanted on pro-German Egyptians and then they swooped, rounding up the future President Anwar Sadat in the process.

Almásy tried a few more times to help the Germans, but his plans all failed. Eventually he returned to Budapest where he finally did something really heroic by using his contacts in the Catholic Church to save several Jewish families from the gas chambers.

He died in 1951, with absolutely no idea of how famous he would become.

With the Libyan Rebels

2011-03-24T02:38:00.001-07:00

What are we to make of the war in Libya? Republican hawks are sceptical, Liberal doves are enthusiastic. Some accuse the West of abandoning the Arab people, of trying to grab the oil. Noam Chomsky does both.

Seventy years ago a former pacifist was out in the Libyan desert being similarly bamboozled.

Vladamir Peniakoff was born in Belgium, of Russian intellectual emigre parents, and educated in Cambridge. He started off as a conscientious objector to the First World War before eventually signing up as a gunner in.....the French army.

An international sort of guy he toured Europe on the eve of the Second World War. Deciding that Hitler needed to be stopped but that the French had no intention of doing so, he joined the British Army.

Despite being overweight and middle aged, he threw himself into the war with gusto, divorcing his wife, sending his children to South Africa and giving his possessions away to charity. He clearly intended death or glory, but the Army was having none of it. Seeing an education and and the ability to speak Arabic they decided he was too bright to be a real soldier and posted him to the Intelligence Corps, where he was expected to find a comfortable desk for the duration.

Madman that he was he didn't stay in the office for long and, after volunteering for special duties, he found himself training Libyan rebels in the desert.

The desert tribesmen had been fighting a guerrilla war against the Italian colonisers. Having grown up on such tales as The Green Shadow Popski, as he was known, had images of tough, hard living marksmen who laughed at danger.

What he found instead was a charming group of devout and very sensitive men who couldn't hit a barn door at five paces. His rather fruity Egyptian Arabic so offended their sensitive natures that one man spent three days sulking in his tent after being called an 'ass'.

They were keen to learn though, and at the end of the day whilst they tried to sleep in their tents, the training team were often woken by the noise of tribesmen drilling themselves on the parade ground.

But if they enjoyed the square bashing, the actual fighting was less to their tastes, especially when they came up against Rommel's Africa Corps. So instead of fighters, the Libyans were used as intelligence gathers and Popski disappeared into the desert, occasionally meeting desert patrols to pass back more or less useless information on the Germans.

In the end Popski realised that if the war was to be won he'd have to do it himself, so he eventually raised an SAS-like team of marauders himself to take the fight to the enemy. Popski's Private Army, as it was called, spent as much time confusing their own high command about what they were up to as the Germans and fought a particularly idiosyncratic war through North Africa and into Italy.

Popski's Private Army, like Long Range Desert Group and the Special Air Service the other wild, irregular units that the war threw up, was disbanded when the war ended. Today's SAS is a much more professional outfit, as was recently illustrated by the way a team was captured by Libyan rebels whilst allegedly looking for hotel rooms.

If others are in the desert now training the anti-Gaddafi forces I hope they have more success than Popski had, and that they've finally found somewhere to stay.

An Italian First

2011-03-17T12:52:00.001-07:00

No, it's not the title of Most Breast Obsessed Nation in Europe, which, to be honest, really belongs to us.

Nor is it Most Salacious Political Scandal of the Twenty First Century, a title which, despite strenuous efforts by Mr Berlusconi, still belongs to the bisexual ménage à trois/drinking driving scandal that (literally) did for Austria's Neo-Nazi Jörg Haider.

No, it is that the Italian's can claim to have achieved one of the big three firsts in global exploration. It's a controversial claim, and the story ends in disaster and features monumental incompetence, so it's quite an appropriate achievement for the nation.

Italians haven't fared too well as explorers. Even many of their famous Alps were first climbed by plucky Brits. The expedition that should have been the pinnacle of Italian mountaineering, the 1865 ascent of the Matterhorn, was greeted just short the summit by a gaggle of English ex-Public School boys throwing snowballs and abuse. (Although the Italians, unlike the Alpine Club rowdies, made it down again in one piece).

However despite a slow start, it may actually have been the Italians who were first to the second of the earth's three poles. These being the North Pole, South Pole and the top of Everest.

It's a controversial claim because when I was a lad all the school textbooks had an Yank Admiral called Peary down as the chap who discovered the North Pole. Peary was an all-American type of bloke who led an all-American type of party. So typically all-American was it that they even had a black sailor called Henson go in front on foot to check for polar bears and crevasses whilst Peary rode on a sled.

Had the expedition actually been where it claimed to be a black American would have been the first person to set foot on the top of the world. Unfortunately it probably wasn't.

The case against is that neither Henson nor the Inuits that accompanied the party to the pole were navigators, so nobody was checking Peary's figures. Secondly Peary's average speed mysteriously doubles after he sent back the last fellow who could actually read a map. Finally there was the small point that rather than send his expedition report off to a panel of international experts for verification, such as the panel that had thrown out a claim by fellow American Frederick Cook the previous year, Peary had his claim upheld by the all-American National Geographic Society.

So although they didn't know it when they started out, the Italian expedition of 1928 under the leadership of Umberto Nobile was heading into terra incognita.

Now these Italians weren't planning on walking to the pole, that would be far too much like hard work. Instead, they had a machine; the 105 metre long, 2250bhp airship Italia.

Flying north one of the Swedish crew was able to drop off a letter to his mum as they flew over her house. They stopped off at Spitsbergen and then on 28th May 1928 headed for the pole. With a tail wind and the three German engines purring like finely tuned tigers, the Italia reached the pole in only 19 hours.

Then it all started to go wrong.

Had they gone with the wind they could have been safely in North America and drinking Canada dry the next day. However they didn't want to risk an icy touch down in the frozen tundra, and so instead turned round and headed back to Norway.

They found themselves flying into the teeth of a gale. In order to find better weather Nobile let the craft rise too far, and the Italia vented valuable hydrogen. Now too heavy to fly she dived into the pack ice. One man was killed in the crash, nine dumped onto the ice and six more were still trapped in the airship when she rose back into the air and were never seen again.

The survivors searched around to see what else had fallen out of the Italia. They had some food, a tent, a gun, some charts and a radio. An aerial was improvised from the wreckage and an SOS message sent.

Now come the cock ups.

A ship, the Citta di Milano, was waiting for the Italia but when she didn't show up the Captain did nothing apart from send a telegram to Rome. They didn't even keep a thorough radio watch and missed the SOS messages. The Fascist government in Rome meanwhile weren't too keen on Nobile and didn't issue any orders to look for him.

Realising that they were probably on their own, three of the survivors then set of on foot to try to get help. One died (and was allegedly eaten, although there is a more heroic version of the story) whilst the other two walked on until they ran out of ice.

Fortunately, although their own government didn't seem to care about them, other people were bothered about Nobile and his crew, and soon aviators from all the nations bordering the arctic were milling about in an uncoordinated way trying to find them. One of the planes, carrying the Antarctic explorer Roald Amundsen, was lost, giving the first man to reach the South Pole a grave on the opposite side of the world.

After a month of searching the Swedish pilot Einar Lundborg sighted the survivors camp. He was only able to rescue one man, and he insisted it was Nobile. He went back to get another but crashed and found himself trapped on the ice as well.

Eventually it was a Russians who saved the day. The Icebreaker Krasin eventually rescued all the surviving survivors, who were busy holding the polar bears at bay with their one gun, and five downed rescuers as well for good measure.

Nobile returned to Italy where he was ostracised by Mussolini's government.

He and his crew outlived the Deuce though, and in 1945 he was forgiven and finally paid. He and what was left of his crew lived out long lives, unlike most of their rescuers who died of various causes. The officers of the Krasin perishing in Stalin's purges.

Like Apollo 13, the rescue had rather overshadowed the voyage. At the time people still thought Peary had reached the pole and so it was not until 1989 that people started to consider the Italia's crew the first to reach the pole. That they didn't set foot on the top of the world doesn't really matter, as the polar ice moves anyway. If you wish to be pedantic about it the first people to the pole would be a group of Stalin's Russians about whom we know very little, which is a bit anti-climatic.

Instead I prefer the story of Nobile's disastrous expedition. So much more daring, so much more incompetent, so much more Italian.

Happy 150th Birthday Italy

2011-03-16T14:21:00.000-07:00

I know it's Saint Patrick's Day today, but it is also the birthday of another famously Catholic country - Italy.

Given the country's tortorous route to it's current status as a united Republic, the exact date is a moot point, but on 17th March 1861 the first Italian parliament, which had met for the first time the previous month, declared Victor Emmanuel II King of Italy. The boundaries of the state still hadn't been finalised, and in 1861 Rome wasn't even part of the country, although that didn't stop it becoming the capital.

Unification was a triumph for Giueppe Garibaldi, namesake of the famous biscuit. Clad in his Nottingham Forest football kit, the former resident of South Shields had defeated the Neapolitians (despite the names it was a real battle and not an episode of Ready, Steady, Cook) and then triumphantly marched the length of Italy. 'Marched' here is actually a bit of a euphanism as he did the last bit by train, but he was a first rate chap Garibaldi so lets not take too much away from him.

It had been a long time coming, but Italy had finally become a second rate, first rate power. It then went on to be a second rate colonial power (loosing heavily to the Ethiopeans), a second rate combatant in the First World War (loosing a lot to the Austrians), a second rate fascist state (loosing to us and the Greeks) and finally a second rate memeber of the EU, joining us in being not quite as important as the French and Germans.

Not that it matters much. The food, opera, women, football, style, cars, weather, architecture and certainly the political scandals are definately first rate, so I guess they can't really grumble, and if Italy is really just a rich industrial country welded onto a poor rural one, at least it is holding together better than Belgium. Or the UK.

Happy birthday Italy.

How to cook a data set

2011-03-09T10:23:00.000-08:00

Take a look at this chart, which has been doing the rounds of Climate Change denier blogs and other discussion forums under the title of 'NASA satellites reveal no Global Warming for 30 years'. The original source appears to be here, a blog called C3 Headlines.

Pretty conclusive heh? Four out of six data points showing cooling easily balancing out the two that show warming. The source of the data, the very respectable National Space Science and Technology Centre, adds a touch of respectability too.

So what's the trick?

Well, the data isn't made up. The original numbers are all here and, although it takes a bit of time to wade through them, the figures used on the chart are correct.

What's been done is a bit of good old fashioned cherry picking. That's easy enough to do, but what some eagle eyed denier has spotted is that the cherries that are worth picking lie at 5 year intervals. Neat.

The result is a bit like the Bible Code. If you have a big enough set of numbers then, rather like the million monkies with their typewriters coming up with Hamlet, there's always going to be a pattern that shows what you want to find. If you searched hard enough you'd probably find the results of the Six Nations rugby tournament hidden somewhere.

This trick wouldn't have worked last month, where the figures would have been 0.19, -0.04, -0.18, 0.03, -0.13 and 0.02 - a clear warming trend, even though this has been a cold winter.

The trick certainly didn't work last February either, when the data set would have shown an even stronger warming trend: 0.18, -0.09, -0.01, -0.24, -0.32, -0.07.

Games like this can be played all day, but they don't really prove anything. The only way to tell if we're warming or cooling is to do a proper statistical analysis, and that's shown on the bottom line of the data - a warming trend of 0.14 degrees per decade. At 15 years this trend becomes statistically significant with a confidence level of 95%. So, we are warming.

But I'm not going to leave it there.

If any climate scientist had tried to use a trick liked this to 'prove' Climate Change, then it would have been all over for the discipline. C3 Headlines can get away with this stuff because it serves a particularly gullible and self interested client group.

Scientists by contrast have to be open, honest and upfront. When Professor Phil Jones and the UAE were accused of fraud after Climategate their entire body of work was on trial.

The likes of C3 Headlines though are expendable. They put out their bogus data, which can ultimately be denied itself by those who fund it and quote from it.

As Jay Inslee, a Washington Democrat, lamented on Tuesday, if only the media would stop reporting the debate about Climate Change as if it was a divorce trial and start showing how barren the cupboard was on the denier side.

Edward II and the Red Hot Slanders.

2011-03-03T11:07:00.000-08:00

There are two things everyone knows about Edward II; that he was an effeminate wuss and he met his end after they 'got medieval on his ass'. Students of history may also remember something about the Battle of Bannockburn and a bit of tabloid banter about his French wife, but mainly its the cross dressing and the poker that sticks in the memory.

Mostly we have Mel Gibson to thank for this.

Mel Gibson's contribution to historical accuracy in movies is only exceeded by his contributions to temperance and Christian-Jewish harmony (Gallipoli being the exception that proves the rule). Going over the errors in Braveheart would take rather a long time, but lets just say the absence of a bridge in the Battle of Stirling Bridge is one of the minor ones.

Lets leave most of that aside and just concentrate on poor old Edward II, who couldn't have been more camp in the film if he'd been played by John Inman. However despite some evidence to the contrary, being gay doesn't make you a limp wristed sissy any more than being an Australian makes you an alcoholic racist.

By the same token though having one of the most ruthless and effective military leaders of the Middle Ages for a Dad doesn't make you a great general any more than appearing in a few good films makes you a great director.

And that was really Edward's problem. He was lousy military leader, a lousy peacetime leader, and a lousy absolute monarch. In British history he's the embarrassing one between Edward I "Hammer of the Scots" and Edward III "Hammer of the French". Fair enough, that's the problem with hereditary monarchies, sometimes the guy you get just isn't up to the job.

But let's be clear about what talents you needed to be the top dog at the time of the knights. You needed to be single minded, ruthless, to be prepared to use extreme violence, to double cross your opponents, and to trust nobody. Today if you were recruiting for someone with that skill mix your best bet would be to try the local maximum security prison.

Edward, by contrast, appears to have been a pretty cool guy, and quite butch with it.

He enjoyed swimming, boating , music, dancing and romances. He enjoyed practical jobs like digging ditches and shoeing horses and liked the company of ordinary people. Quite a regular guy really, but someone who would stand out as a bit odd in the Royal Family today, let alone seven centuries ago.

Edward may not even have been gay. Being accused of sodomy by a medieval chroniclers is a bit like being played by an English actor in a Hollywood movie, it's just a quick way of telling the audience you're a baddie.

However we don't know that he wasn't gay. Given that there were 21 male monarchs between Harold II and Henry Tudor, then if 5% are gay we can make an educated guess that it was either him or Richard the Lionheart. However as Richard 'outed' himself on at least two occasions, once on the eve of his marriage whilst standing in church wearing only his pants, and spent a night in bed with the King of France, the smart money would probably go on it being him.

The main evidence for his sexuality is his preference for the company of his mate Piers Gaviscon over his, supposedly very beautiful, French wife. Beautiful she may have been by the standards of the time, but I doubt she was in the Sophie Marceau category of seductiveness, not least because she was twelve when she married him.

So Edward may or may not have been gay, but at least he doesn't appear to have been a paedophile.

And the red hot poker?

Well that isn't mentioned until a decade or so after he was deposed, and contemporary accounts say he was suffocated. The truth is we don't know as the people who got rid of him weren't too keen on the story getting out. One historian even has him being banished to Italy and living out his days peacefully in the sun.

I think that's stretching credibility a bit, but if there was ever an English monarch who would have gladly swapped being King for punting around Venice it was Edward. A useless king, but a better person than many of his critics.

For more on Edward try this excellent blog.

The SDP: Thirty Years On

2011-03-03T01:31:00.000-08:00

"We tried out drugs and LSD, now we're trying the SDP. Talking about p-p-p-p-p-proportional representation" is what Spitting Image had The Who singing in 1981.

Not a strictly accurate account of Pete Townshend or Roger Dalrey's politics (Townshend is still Labour man whilst Dalrey campaigns for the Countryside Alliance) but it does say something about the left wing circles who the Gang of Four attracted round them in the early 1980s.

Hindsight has made the SDP a bit of a joke, with quips about David Owen crossing the road to get to the middle and urging tactical voting for the Tories because it was their turn next.

However they did briefly come very close to becoming the second party in British politics. The first-past-the-post electoral system, lack of union support and the 'Falklands factor' dropped them from a high of 50% in the polls at the nadir of Mrs. Thatcher's first government, to 25% in the popular vote in 1983 but only 23 MPs - a poor showing considering 30 sitting MPs had defected from other parties prior to the election.

That was really that for them and the years of the Alliance with the Liberals was just a prelude to merger into the Democrats which has then been followed by electoral suicide in the form of coalition with Cameron's Neoliberal Tory Party.

So was the SDP just a flash in the pan, a transient political party cashing in on a few protest votes from disaffected liberals who hated equally the Thatcher cuts and Labour civil war?

To a large extent it was, and the derision with which the party is now held is in no small part because, The Guardian's Polly Toynbee aside, who is still prepared to admit to voting for them. Not only did the unions turn their back on the party, but the sensible wing of the Labour Party, who saw off the Militants regard them as both turncoats who jumped ship in the middle of the battle and closet Tories who should never have been in the party at all.

Glossop Labour Club for instance have a special place in their hearts for Shirley Williams. Allegedly, on the eve of her defection, she visited the club and gave a speech on loyalty to the party. The next day she was on the news as one of the Gang of Four and a few days after that they received a bill from her for the dry cleaning of her fur coat, which she's got oil on after trapping it in the door of the Lada belonging to the local volunteer who'd kindly picked her up from the station.

However if we look beyond the personalities to the politics the picture becomes less clear. Michael Foot's 1983 Labour manifesto, which included such ideas as nationalising the banks doesn't seem half so daft now as it did then, but three years after the Winter of Discontent and in the midst of Labour infighting with the Militant tendency, it was never going to be an election winner.

Ignore David Owen's gradual drift to right as the 1980s wore on, the SDP's 1983 manifesto, with voting reform, mild trade union reform and support for the public sector strong would be popular today if Ed Milliband was to propose it. You can argue that New Labour had become the SDP, but I think they were more right wing than that and resembled, if I'm charitable, Gladstone's Liberal Party.

However politics is about more than just policies, and looking back the SDP appears to be made up of an odd bunch of uncharismatic politicians, most of whom were damaged goods in one way or another. Even the least odious of them, Roy Jenkins, was persona non grata after working for the EU, inspiring the Yes Minister quip that the only way back into British policits after Brussels was to form your own party.

Could these misfits have ever made up a government? Without the Falklands War the 1983 election would have been very different, and if the SDP had become the main opposition party could they, perhaps under Paddy Ashdown's leadership, beaten John Major's Tories in 1992?

Maybe, but probably not. The Labour Party wasn't about to disappear overnight and would surly have siphoned at least as many votes off the SDP as the Democrats did from them in reality.

And their lies the problem. Three party politics has done the left no favours at all. If you read the figures one way you can see that Blair's big achievement was not to steal voters from the Conservatives, but from the Democrats. As long as there's a strong third party Labour can't form a majority.

Which makes the next election look quite promising for Ed then.

My Top Five Jean Reno Films

2011-02-05T03:59:00.000-08:00

Okay, here's a question for you all: what country does Jean Reno come from?

Well, yes, he is French now, but he was actually born in Morocco of Spanish parents and only moved to France when he was seventeen.

I bet you didn't know that.

Number 5: The Big Blue

A triumph of style over substance, Luc Besson's film does require you to be in the mood for long, arty underwater shots set to music.

I first watched it at the solar powered cinema at the Big Green Gathering where the charitable donations of itinerant dope peddler had got me into a suitably sublime frame of mind. Watched with a clear head it's a tad boring, but it does manage to make free diving seem interesting, rather than just weird and masochistic.

Reno though is great. When he makes his first appearance, out of a battered, old Fiat 500, he still manages to look cooler than 99% of other actors in flashier cars.

Number 4: Nikita

I love Nikita, but it only gets number 4 because this is a Jean Reno top 5 and not an Anne Parillaud top 5.

Reno only has a cameo as 'Victor: The Cleaner", but what a cameo. The US remake was competently done and featured Harvey Keitel in the same role. Nothing wrong with Keitel's performance, but Reno blows him out of the water easily.

And it's got Anne Parillaud in it - but I think I've already said that.

Number 3: Les Visiteurs

Reno plays Godefroy de Papincourt, a Don Quixote-esq knight thrown through time into the twentieth century. Accompanied by his Baldrick-like squire Jacquouille (which means something very rude in French) they blunder through modern France.

The American remake set the story in medieval England and the contemporary USA, which misses most of the point of the original film, where the Revolution has turned society upside down so Jacquouille's descendant now has Godefroy's castle.

Acting honours go, after Reno, to Valérie Lemercier who plays Godefroy's medieval princess bride and her modern descendant, still regal and demur despite being married to a boorish, bourgeois dentist.

There aren't many good French comedies, but this is one. In fact, this might be the only one.

Number 2: Roseanne's Grave

You've probably never heard of it, but this is a lovely little romantic comedy.

Not that you'd guess the genre from the theme; Reno's wife (Mercedes Ruehl) is dying of a heart condition and Reno is determined that she'll get the last plot in the cemetery. That means keeping everybody else alive, not an easy job when his village includes smokers, dangerous drivers, an elderly patient on a life support machine and an escaped kidnapper with a hit man after them.

Despite all this we actually end up with a happy ending, and a great joke ("Is the Mayor of New York still Italian?" "Why would anybody want to stop being Italian?"). A great little film.

Number 1: Léon

But what we really want to see is not Reno playing a romantic Everyman, but a ruthless killer.

Victor's cameo in Nikita was so good we clearly hadn't seen the last of him, so resurrected and renamed he returns as Léon. Characterised by a woolly hat, shades and a pet plant (and not a lot else) Reno's hit man loner teams up with a young Natalie Portman and shoots lots of people whilst Gary Oldman's OTT drug addict cop tries to get him.

It's a basic shoot-'em-up thriller, complete with the obligatory obliteration of a SWAT team (see Terminator II, Speed, etc), it's Reno who makes it all worth watching.

A character-led hit-man movie, this is probably the most violent film I've ever seen in an Art House cinema, which just goes to show how thoroughly confusing Jean Reno films can be.

Egypt: What Will The Army Do?

2011-02-03T01:19:00.000-08:00

As the drama in Egypt unfolds, the key question is - what will the army do?

Usually in discussing Africa the answer would be simple: they'd do what the President said unless it involved fighting another army with guns, in which case they'd run a mile.

Egypt though is a bit different. They are a real army and if it hadn't been their bad luck to fight the Israel in most of their wars they'd have an excellent reputation. As Nasser said, in one of his wittier moments, the problem was that there were a quarter of a million Jews in the Israeli army and none in the Egyptian.

However their success in the early stages of the 1973 Yom Kippur war stands out as the only success in conventional warfare of a Arab army against Israel. They took the IDF (and many of their own soldiers) completely by surprise with their attack across the Suez canal, neatly removing the sand banks that Israel had erected with fire hoses. They then used their newly aquired Soviet anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to fight off the Israeli counter attacks. Israel has never revealed how many planes it lost in the war, and pundits speculate up to half their air force was shot down.

If their Syrian allies hadn't been obliterates in the Golan Heights they might be there still. Unfortunately the Egyptians had to launch an unplanned attack into the Sinai desert to rescue Syria. Defeat was inevitable when peace eventually broke out the Egyptian army was virtually surrounded and on its last legs.

In the years since then the army, although struggling with mass illiteracy in its ranks like most African armies, has become more professional. They meet the Yanks every couple of years to play war games, but hopefully haven't picked up too many bad habits from them.

So far the army seems to be playing a straight bat, dispersing the pro-Mubarak thugs and leaving the other demonstrators alone. So far, so good.

Whether or not a country with the grinding economic problems that Egypt has really needs half a million men in uniform is a good questions, but at the moment it seems that the Egyptian army is that very rare thing in Africa: an army that is more of a threat to the nations enemies than its own people.

My Banker Joke

2011-01-31T12:07:00.000-08:00

Vince Cable only tells his in private, but I'm not ashamed to do it in public.

A rich man had three young sons and asked them what they would like for Christmas.

The first said he would like some toy soldiers, so he bought him the Brigade of Guards.

The second said he's like a train set, so he bought him Network Rail.

The third said he's like a cowboy outfit, so he bought him Royal Bank of Scotland.........

Spies, Lies and Police Intelligence

2011-01-17T09:12:00.001-08:00

Firstly I would like to make it completely clear that I have never slept with the undercover-police-agent-formerly-known-as-Mark-Stone. (Unless there is the possibility of compensation, in which case I may reconsider my position.)

As far as I know our paths never crossed as my time as a wandering direct Action Anarchist Type Person came to an end before his began. Although it's now ancient history, my experience of the Police at the time does shed some light on his activities.

It's a tail of spies, Special Branch, Special Forces, informers, a major intelligence cock up and there's a joke about half way down.

Whilst camped out in the Bollin Valley under what is now the Second Runway of Manchester Airport we met the police in various guises. As the border between Cheshire and Greater Manchester ran through the camps, officers from both forces policed us.

The Cheshire bobbies all looked like Dixon of Dock Green, rotund and red faced they were always cheerful until they took a dislike to you. Then you were arrested first and they decided what they were going to charge you with later.

Greater Manchester by contrast sent their Tactical Support group to keep an eye on us. Dressed like Storm Trooper from Star Wars and with attitudes to match, they were never-the-less generally fair and we soon came to a good working relationship. For example, people on the camp who really shouldn't have been there because of their drug or mental health problems were allowed to leave without harassment or fear of arrest.

Co-ordination of the policing effort was done by the airport's police force. Trained to deal with terrorists, they can usually be seen totting sub machine guns inside the perimeter fence.

To smooth things over they appointed a veteran copper as Police liaison officer. Alan Jones was his name and he was easily the most sorted copper I've ever met. He was proud of the fact he's held his marksman's license for longer than any other officer at the airport, and his common sense and down-to-earth attitude greatly helped to make the protest as peaceful as it was.

An example is that shortly after the camps were set up the Police started making statements that they were worried the camps could be used by terrorists to attack the airport. Initially we put this down to the usual negative propaganda. however Alan Jones showed us a diagram in a secret document. It showed a hole in the ground about two metres square and was marked 'IRA mortar pit'. He then pointed to a similar sized hole we'd dug in our camp that was screened from view by a bender.

Barely able to keep straight faces we explained that he was pointing to our latrine and once he'd confirmed for himself it was for motions and not munitions we heard no more about this.

It was from Alan that we learnt of the arrival of Special Branch on the scene. He'd returned to his office one day and found people he'd never seen before in his office and rooting through his papers, which is never a good way to introduce yourself to a Police Officer.

Alan said he expressed surprise when Branch told him who they were after. By now he knew who the important people were in our non-hierarchical protest, and none of them were on the list.

He never told me who was under surveillance, but it was easy enough to figure out, especially when the house in the nearby village of Mobberley was raided one night after some of them had stayed their. True to form the Special Branch were after political people, with their targets being left wingers who'd attached themselves to our protest. They were nice people on the whole, but they had violent backgrounds and rather quaint views of starting the revolution with symbolic acts of aggression against the state. Two of them tried this later and got a year in jail, so it was fair enough for Special Branch to be after them and not us. They were not peaceful protesters and our cause was diminished by association with theirs.

With the violent elements identified and the rest of us practically adopting Alan's one of our own the protest looked like it was going to be completely peaceful. But then it all went wrong.

In one of the other camps a protesters was asked to leave after he was found to be having a sexual relationship with a fifteen year old girl. He evidently didn't take this very well and appears to have then gone to every journalist he could find with a story of how we'd booby-trapped the woods and that a horrible fate awaited the first Policeman to come and get us. Thanks to the presence of Swampy in the camp Cliff Richard the press had been crawling through the woods for weeks without coming to any harm so, with the exception of those much respected papers The Daily Express and the Manchester Evening News the hacks had generally treated his story with the contempt he deserved.

Unfortunately he also went to the Police. Alan Jones appears to have known about this,and to have told his superiors the story was plainly b*llocks, but that didn't stop what happened next.

We knew exactly when he eviction was going to start a couple of days in advance. thanks to a boycott by the British climbing community of involvement in the eviction of environmental protesters, a group of Sheffield climbers had the monopoly on getting crusties out of trees. One of their regulars shared a house with a more principled climber, and before every eviction he rang he protesters to warn them. Unfortunately they usually didn't believe him, but we did and so everyone was ready when the cry of alarm went up from Zion Tree camp.

By this time we all knew how this worked. Police or bailiffs or security guards or all three would raid the camp arresting anyone who wasn't up a tree, down a tunnel or 'locked on' to something solid. Then things calmed down a bit until the specialists arrived.

This time though, things were different. There was no wall of yellow high visibility vests, instead it was a group of no more than ten men in black, who ripped down tents, and bundled people off in quick-cuffs. John Fraser-Williams, a free-lance journalist in the camp, didn't react quickly enough and received a truncheon on the ear.

Warned in advance, everyone who had a tunnel or a tree house to get to was safely in place, but this didn't stop these people. Our tunnels all featured heavy duty iron doors made by a wandering blacksmith called, for want of a better name, John the Blacksmith. Behind each door was positioned a protester attached to a concrete block with a bicycle D-lock to prevent the Forces of Darkness using brute force and ignorance to get in.

However that's what the Zion Tree tunnel received and Jon, the young man in the doorway, was lucky to escape serious injury as sledge hammers stoved in his tunnel door, narrowly missing him.

I was patrolling the perimeter of our adjoining camp at the time. Having checked it wasn't us getting hit I made my way to the bridge over the Bollin that connected us to Zion Tree. My torch picked out two figures and I immediately apologised and turned off the light, thinking these were protesters out on some nefarious 'pixie mission'. Then I realised that the thing being sabotaged was our bridge. Hang on a minute I thought, and turned on the torch again. Two men in black boiler suits and balaclavas stared back at me, now fortunately separated by a partially destroyed bridge. "F*** off" said one of them, and as they were bigger and more aggressive than me, I did.

As swiftly as they had arrived, the Men in Black disappeared again. The people they'd picked up were dumped by the side of the road shocked, bruised, in Fraser-William's case bleeding, but suspiciously not under arrest.

Circumstantial evidence suggests to me that they were the SAS, called in to deal with the alleged booby traps. They had walked through a pitch dark forest without being noticed, had been wielding sledgehammers and had not arrested anyone.

Other Men in Black had appeared before, including the group that beat up my friend Jonathon, but these were probably just security guards who'd removed their high visibility vests. These guys were more highly trained and whilst any army unit could have supplied troops with the right skills, only the SAS has troops on call to help the Police, so I suspect these guys were from the SAS's on-call counter-terrorism unit out on what, for them, was probably a pleasant morning's training.

The press coverage of this was scathing of the Police and as a liaison chappy myself I was summoned to the office Kevin Hart, Gold Commander for the day, to be given the soft soap on why the police had done nothing wrong. Apparently every officer on duty that morning had had his truncheon inspected (ooh-err Madam) and there was no trace of blood which, if true, suggests the Men in Black were Special Forces. John Fraser-Williams, it was suggested, was a journalist out to get a good story who had, if not actually faked his injury, at least gored it up a bit for the cameras.

If that took a bit of believing, at least the Police learnt from their mistake and the rest of the evictions went very peacefully, with bailiffs and protesters sharing sandwiches and cigarettes at designated breaks from the action. Surveillance there was a plenty, from Thames Valley officers trying to work their way through the backlog of warrants from the Newbury Bypass campaign, to the green suited Brays private detectives, who were a regular feature of protests in the 1990s, but it was all open and peaceful.

Well mostly open, for there is a coda which makes the intelligence cock up even more mysterious. In our camp was a guy who'd been a security guard at the Newbury. He'd changed sides, he said , after witnessing the heroics of a lone protester who'd single handedly disabled a convoy of police vans and coaches carrying security guards by leaping out from the woods, throwing himself under a coach, slashing the compressed air pipe to the brakes (which makes them lock on) and then legging it.

He didn't do much, but he built his own tree house and was evicted by climbers with everyone else. However when fellow tree squatters arrived at the station to be banged up shortly afterwards he'd mysteriously been released. Equally suspicious his twigloo had turned out to be full of climbing gear nicked from fellow campers.

Who exactly he was and what he was doing is unclear. 'Mark Stone' was well financed and got the nickname 'Flash', this chap appeared to be permanently skint. 'Stone' got involved at the heart of everything, our spy did almost nothing except smoke roll ups. He appeared to have no political views at all, liked fast cars, and admitted to still being in the employ of a security company and working at music festivals. He'd also infiltrated the most primitive, laid back and least secretive camp on the site. He was very little use to us and you wonder if he was any use to the Police. Perhaps he was an early test model of 'Mark Stone', a primitive archetype, not fully operational yet?

That Police were infiltrating Earth First! at that time was also confirmed later that summer in a wet field in Wales. The Earth First! camp in 1997 was possibly the high water mark of the movement, and the camp just south of Glasgow was buzzed by helicopters and circled by Police cars. The Scottish bobbies went out of their way to tell us how much nicer they were than English cops, and generally they were. So I do apologise for the rude words that people spelt out with their bodies when the helicopter flew over. Don't blame the others - it was my idea.

The camp ended on a bit of a downer with the EF!ers not willing to take part in the planned mass action unless they were told what it was. The action was to be an attempt to shut down a nuclear power station, and the organisers rightly didn't want the plan to leak out. However the trust necessary for this sort of action wasn't there. had this been Greenpeace it would have happened, and so I pretty much decided then that that was were I should be and two years later I was in a Police cell with the Executive Director.

However for those of us scattered to the four winds by the end of the Manchester Airport action the camp was a chance for us to meet up. As we left we promised to meet again, and seeing a black board with a notice chalked up about a camp in Bangor in a few weeks time, we decided that the Welsh coast in August sounded fun.

I should add that at this time my telephone at home developed a strange fault which meant it rang as soon as you hung up on a call, but I'm sure that was just a coincidence.

Anyway I arrived at Brewery Fields in Bangor, where there were plans for a nice housing estate, to find only Welsh rain and a circling Police helicopter. I pitched camp and next day i eventually found the six other drowned rats who had turned up. The 'mass protest' it turned out, had been organised by a local campaigner who'd been to the gathering and being too shy to talk or give a workshop, had chalked up his proposed protest instead. Still he'd got us, and a Police helicopter, so it wasn't a total loss. The rain even stopped after three days.

It was also proof of plain clothes officers visiting the camp. Not a big surprise really, it wasn't exactly high security. You didn't even have to pay if you looked poor enough.

So that's my rather rambling story.

It's not as good as Mark's, but if the Daily Mail had paid me more it would have been a lot better.

Should an Eco-warrior like Avatar?

2010-12-27T11:23:00.000-08:00

Having refused to succumb to the hype and see it in the cinema, it's taken me a year to watch Avatar, but thanks to a cheap one month trial with Sky Movies I've finally managed to see it.

I doubt I'll watch it again.

However as the bad guys have giant bulldozers and hate trees it does suggest it should be the sort of film eco-warriors ought to like, but then the same was said of Steven Seagal's On Deadly Ground, and that was just a load of juvenile rubbish.

However Avatar is certainly a phenomena, so it deserves analysis. Millions of otherwise sane people paid good money to view it and, although they mainly went for the special effects, they certainly didn't complain too much about a plot that seemingly takes to pieces the culture they come from and spits it back at them.

Appearances though can be deceptive, and Avatar I suspect is not what it at first appears.

Firstly it's not that contemporary. Despite the reference to Shock and Awe, we're not in the War on Terror here, we're in Vietnam. We have a jungle, we have helicopters, we have a mad colonel, we have something resembling napalm. Nobody says "Charlie don't surf", but pretty much all the other cliches are there.

Secondly it's not that liberal. Sigourney Weaver's character makes the case for a rational study of the forest but she is brushed aside, first by the Na'vi and then by the military to eventually, like the Headmaster in If, die pointlessly for her trouble. Liberals are clearly loosers.

Instead the Na'vi befriend Sully, an ex-marine who can shoot, fight and perform outlandish macho stunts with the best of them, and eventually leads The People to a Battle of Omdurman style slaughter in the best Hollywood tradition.

I originally called it Aliens meets Fern Gully, but really it's Apocalypse Now meets Dances With Wolves (or rather A Man Called Horse, the film that kick started the genre).

Not that we can blame America too much for this. Imperial England always preferred natives primitive and warlike to the cultured and peaceful. Scottish Highlanders, Zulus and Afghans have of course very interesting cultures, but the Victorians saw them as simple warriors who, despite their intransigence, were far preferable to the peaceful but complex Irishman, Hausa or Hindu.

This is of course a highly reactionary view, and one with a few disturbing parallels that Cameron probably didn't intend.

The corporation with it's giant bulldozers and utter disregard for anything except money is clearly meant to represent Capitalism. However Cameron also appears to lump in science and anything resembling human society as the 'bad stuff' that must be opposed.

The idea that the excesses of Neoliberalism can only be tamed by a rejection of science and a return to a simpler society is one that attracts a few on the fringes of the environment movement, but they generally steer clear of fetishising the violence of archetypal warrior. New Agers and Primitivists are usually peaceful people.

However the Neoconservative movement in America, of which George W Bush was the puppet, were heavily into the idea. True, they hated trees as much as anyone, but they want to replace reason with the Bible and love wars. They also idealise a make-believe past, in their case a 1950s America of the white, the straight and the middle class, which is just as anachronistic in the modern world as the society of Na'vi.

Looking further back you can even see similarities to the Nazis, who banned 'Jewish' science, hated Capitalists , dabbled in magic, idolised of ancient pagan warriors and supposedly loved of their native oak forests.

The sleep of reason brings forth monsters.

So should eco-warriors like Avatar?

Err, no.

The special effects are good though.

p.s. in case anyone things I'm the sort of boring old git who hates all modern films I should add I watched District 9 last week and loved it!

The Day Hitler Ran Away

2010-12-27T04:59:00.001-08:00

Halloween 1914 was a horrible time. Military historians call it The First Battle of Ypres, but that dry name does little to convey the horrors that were taking place in Flanders. The German name for the battle, Kindermord bei Ypern ("The Massacre of the Innocents") speaks much more eloquently. However if events had taken a very slightly different turn that Samhain, the world may have been spared worse horrors to come.

The First World War was fought with offensive weapons from the nineteenth century - the bayonet and the cavalry sword, and defensive weapons from the twentieth - quick-firing artillery and machine guns. It was fought between industrial nations who with steam technology and miles of railways could support armies of millions in the field all year round. The result were battles longer and bloodier than before or since.

In October 1914 no trenches had yet been dug, and at the northern edge of the line British and German soldiers fought each other in the open in what became known as the Race To The Sea. As each side tried to outflank the other, a series of bloody and confused battles took place.

On 31st October the Germans attacked and destroyed the 1st Battalion of the South Wales Borders guarding the town of Gheluvelt. By a twist of fate this was the same infantry battalion that had been wiped out nearly 36 years earlier by the Zulus at the battle of Isandhlwana.

The victorious Germans, consisting of the 16th, 244th and 245th Bavarian Regiments had broken through the British line and could have turned the battle. Instead they settled down for a rest in the grounds of the Chateau and a bit of looting in the village.

British Generals of the Great War don't have a terrific reputation, but one who definitely wasn't a Colonel Bogey was Brigadier General Charles FitzClarence. He'd already won a Victoria Cross serving with Baden-Powell in Mafeking and he was about to make a valiant attempt to win another one.

Rounding up the only men he could find, the 2nd Battalion of the Worcester Regiment, he launched a counter attack. He was outnumbered, and German artillery killed or injured a quarter of his men before the attack started, but surprise and pluck carried the day and the Bavarians were routed. The gap was plugged and the day saved.

The Germans had had their chance and blown it. It was to be four long and bloody years before they got another. Fitzclarence though was not there then. Eleven days after the Battle of Gheluvelt he was shot dead whilst leading another counterattack.

The victory restored the status quo, allowed a fixed front line to form and paved the way to four years of murderous and intransigent trench warfare. Perhaps it might have been better if Fitzclarence had been a coward and a duffer, as the war might well have ended up being over by Christmas. But the what ifs of the battle extend well beyond this, and concern the fate of a certain private in the 16th Bavarian Regiment.

On 8th October 1914 Adolf Hitler (seated rather appropriately on the extreme right in the picture above) took his oath to the King of Bavaria and went straight off to the front. His job was as a messenger, carrying messages to and from headquarters. Tradition has him braving shell fire at the front, but new research suggests that most of the time he was several miles back with the top brass. He probably also used the telephone as often as his own feet.

Never-the-less the 16th was his regiment and, unless he had been posted somewhere else, we would expect him to be with it. Historians can't definitely place him on the battlefield (the Wikipedia entry is tellingly blank) but he wasn't wounded and there's no record of him being anywhere else. I suspect Hitler's own silence on the matter is revealing. A vain man, if he'd had an excuse not to be associated with the defeat, he'd surely have told someone.

19,530 German's died in the First Battle of Ypres. That one of them wasn't Hitler is surely one of fate's bitterest ironies. Fitzclarence not only saved the First World War for Britain, he also came close to preventing the Second.

But if Hitler was present when his regiment turned tail and ran for their lives, what effect did it have on him? "Who know?" is probably the best answer, but as this is a blog and not a text book, I'll have a punt.

As most people know, at the end of May 1940 the British Expeditionary Force was trapped in Dunkirk. The German tanks halted allowing the Royal Navy evacuated them by sea. Why?

First this was a act of omission not commission. The Panzers had arrived at the edge of the town with no infantry support. To advance further before they arrived would have been to risk heavy casualties and Field Marshal von Rundstedt's decision, which Hitler endorsed, was tactically a sensible one. Strategically though, it was a major blunder. Destroying the BEF, Britain's only serious soldiers, would have been worth any losses. Von Rundstudt should have been ordered to press the attack.

The most likely explanation is that the Germans didn't think the Brits were going anywhere. They had their minds on other things and were happy to let the Luftwaffe bomb the Tommies into submission.

But could the ghosts of Gheluvelt had come back to haunt Hitler?

A week before the Dunkirk evacuation began, a British armoured counter attack at Arras had unsettled General Rommel, smashing much of his Division and almost breaking through.

Did this incident bring back bad memories for the Fuhrer?

Did Hitler fear what might happen if he pressed the BEF too hard?

Did he see the ghosts of his former comrades fleeing from Chateau at Gheluvelt?

Doctor Who Christmas Special

2010-12-26T04:26:00.000-08:00

Writing a Doctor Who Christmas special must be a pretty thankless task.

It has to topical (not that easy really), different from the previous however-many-there-have-been and feature a guest celebrity who may not be able to act much as has to be shown in a good light.

I imagine when Steven Moffat asked round the office to see who'd like to pen it he found everyone had to go home early.

Within those limitiations though I enjoyed it. A bit obvious, but the jokes carried it over. The kids were a bit bored because there was no alien invasion, but the grown ups appreciated it.

Yes it would have helped if it had been realised a bit less literally; if the sets had suggested Dickensian London rather than looking like the back lot form a BBC costume drama, if 'Clive' had been a flying alien monster that suggested a shark and not a literal CGI shark and so on, but I'll pass on that. This sort of absurdist set design has worked before, such as in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.

Finally though the Moffat-Smith-Gillian combination don't really need a script at all. The best stories of the last season (The Dream Master one, the Prisoner Zero one, the Van Gogh one etc) had minimal plots and were character led.

Hopefully Moffat will pen a Genesis of the Daleks or similar that will crown Matt Smith's incarnation in the blue box, but whilst we're waiting these character led adventures are great fun.

My Top 5 Literary Dads

2010-12-09T12:13:00.000-08:00

This list turned out to be harder list than I thought.

I never realised until I thought about it how many fools, tyrants and just plain absent Dads there are around. Really, we do get a pretty bum deal from the great writers.

King Lear as a Model Parent? Get away. Heathcliff as your Dad? Sign junior up for an ASBO and counselling ASAP. The father in Swallows and Amazons? His sole contribution to the books is to respond to his children's requests to go sailing with "If not duffers, won't drown. If duffers, better off drowned." I doubt event then you could pass that off as a thorough risk assessment.

So here we go with my top (pretty much only) five fathers in literature.

No.5 Odysseus in the Odyssey

Lets be frank, as a father Odysseus has a few shortcomings. To miss your son's birthday once is sometimes inevitable for a working Dad. But to miss the first 20 is going a bit far, especially when you've spent the best part of the last decade hanging around with nymphs and doing drugs.

When he does get home Odysseus does go a bit OTT as well, murdering all the house guests and stringing up most of the servants. However, these things happen in military families so I'm told.

However at least he gets there in the end, which is what counts I suppose.

4. Prospero in The Tempest

Prospero stands as a literary reminder of the virtues, and pitfalls, of home schooling. Although I suspect Ariel did all the cooking and Caliban all the nappies, Prospero does seem to have given little Miranda a fairly decent grounding in most of the necessary skills in life, although he does seem to have neglected one rather important area.

Not that this would have mattered if he hadn't ensured that a ship load of lusty Italian sailors would wash on their little island, probably with their shirts sticking to their chests.

Perhaps not the best way to teach your daughter the facts of life, but what teenage girl would really object?

3. Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mocking Bird

Shakespeare may have written "First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers", but he may have made an exception for Atticus.

The epitome of upright virtue, who shields his children from the worst of the racist society he lives in whilst ensuring they have the values to challenge it, Atticus is also a dead shot with a rifle, which must come in useful at Fun Fairs.

However for all his liberal values, you suspect it was the late Mrs Finch who got her hands dirty when Jem and Scout were little.

However the main charge that can be laid against him is that his example has caused many otherwise harmless young men to take up careers in Law. Personally I'm with Shakespeare.

2. Mr Bennett from Pride and Prejudice

Having children means having to put your Hell Raising years behind you - or at least postpone them until they go off to University. It's therefore vitally important for a Dad to be able to entertain himself close to home, and Mr Bennett, the philosopher with a fondness for books and nature, does just that.

Laughing at his sillier children, he is never-the-less a best friend to his brighter ones. In a time when parents were supposed to be ogres, Mr Bennett was an early practitioner of the theories of Dr Spock, allowing his daughters the freedom to learn from their own mistakes.

Alas, like many hippy parents, his values didn't entirely rub off on his off-spring, and his second daughter eventually chooses to marry the man with the largest country estate in Derbyshire.

1. The Father in The Road

In a blasted future in which the death of Nature is equated to the death of God, the unnamed man and his son travelling through a Nuclear Winter (or whatever) are clearly going nowhere geographically, but spiritually it's another matter. The man has the map, but the boy has the moral compass.

George Monbiot believes the power of this book is that it shows that although we can survive without civilisation, we cannot survive without a biosphere, and if nothing else it certainly makes you value the cornucopia that is your fridge.

But surgically remove from the story the Mad Max elements, and it is still powerful stuff. As a father, how do you cope with the idea that one day you won't be around to look after your children in a cruel and dangerous world? Can you really claim to be one of the 'good guys' when the way your food gets to the table may not be terribly moral?

Finally, how as parents do we deal with passing on to our children a world which is in considerably worse shape than the one we inherited? Difficult, but important questions.

Military Intelligence Blunders and Climate Change Denial: Lessons to Learn

2010-11-15T11:52:00.000-08:00

1. "Well, don't worry about it."
The Failure of Imagination.

Early in the morning of the 7th September 1941 a technician monitoring a radar on the northern tip of Hawaii noticed some unexplained blips. As a good soldier he reported it to the Duty Officer, Lieutenant Kermit Tyler. "Well, don't worry about it," the officer replied. Forty minutes later bombs were raining down on Pearl Harbour, most of the US Pacific Fleet was on fire or underwater and over 2000 people dead.

The attack has become synonymous for the failure of military intelligence. Famously an oxymoron, intelligence failures are generally responsible for worst disasters in military history, from Lord Chelmsford going off to chase phantom Zulus and leaving his camp at Isandhlwana poorly defended, to the USA blundering into Vietnam thinking they were only facing a few foreign infiltrators.

But if failure to spot the warning signs in war can lead to the deaths of thousands, being ambushed by Climate Change could lead to the deaths of millions, and we are being bigger Muppets than the unfortunate Lieutenant Kermit.

Military intelligence failures don't just happen because someone is being dense, they happen because one bunch or people has outsmarted another, and this is a lesson that those of us who want to do something about Climate Change, especially scientists, often forget.

Figuring out relativity was easy by comparison, as there was no Cavorite industry hacking Einstein's emails and claiming it was all down to Ether. Darwin met a bit of resistance on Evolution, but it took the Creationist nearly a hundred years come up with Intelligent Design, by which time the science was settled.

But back to 1941. Tyler wasn't to blame, he was on his second day in the job and nobody had told him anything, but the authorities in Honolulu most definitely were. Tensions were rising and intercepted radio messages told the Americans an attack was coming. The response though was just to bunch the aeroplanes more closely together on the tarmac.

This may sound daft, but it meant they could be more easily guarded by sentries. This was because the only attack the commanders could imagine was a sabotage by secret agents. That the entire Japanese Fleet would silently steam half way across the Pacific to bomb them was something they just couldn't envisage. It didn't matter that the Royal Navy had pulled a similar trick on the Italians the year before, in their world this sort of thing was unimaginable.

And that I suspect is where most people are with Climate Change. It is too big to imagine. The blips on the radar screen are getting bigger, but we'd rather not worry about it.

2. "I'm not worried because he's not worried"
The Denial Loop

Egypt's surprise attack across the Suez Canal in October 1973 was one of the great coup's of all time. The Egyptians crossed the canal by surprise, dug in, and fought off counter-attacks by the hitherto invincible Israeli Army. Only an intemperate advance brought on by the collapse of their Syrian allies prevented the first Arab victory in war over Israel.

Egypt had been planning the operation for six years, and had ran exercise after exercise, sometimes mobilising of thousands of civilians as well as tens of thousands of soldiers. The result was that when the actual assault came, even the Egyptian soldiers involved were taken by surprise, not believing it was the real thing until they were actually ordered to put their boats into the water.

But it still shouldn't have worked. Against them was the combined intelligence might of MOSSAD and the CIA. Israel had the agents on the ground and the Americans had the spy planes and satellites. Together they should have seen it coming.

What went wrong instead was that each agency looked at the other and, seeing no reaction, assumed they knew something they didn't. MOSSAD didn't panic because the CIA didn't panic, and the CIA didn't panic because MOSSAD didn't panic, and so on.

Campaigners trying to convince a sceptical public know the problem only too well. If Climate Change was a real threat the government would do something about it, says Joe Public. Whilst in the corridors of power the green lobbyists are told that the government would love to do something to limited our fossil fuel consumption, only the public won't allow them to you see......

3. "I'm not lying, he is"
Bluff and counter bluff.

If you want to point to where it all went wrong for America in Vietnam most historians will point you to the Tet Offensive in February 1968. For three years Westmoreland and the military had been telling the public that the war was as good as won. Then suddenly there were thousands of guys in black pyjamas running around South Vietnam's major cities and blowing things up. No matter that by the end of the week most of them were dead, the damage had been done.

The shock the American public felt after Tet was similar to that felt by scientists and activists after Climategate. Despite the well documented funding of dubious Climate Change denying lobby groups by the fossil fuel industry, and not withstanding the rather obvious fact that lots of rich people are going to loose a lot of money if we give up on fossil fuels, when a few stolen emails are quoted out of context a surprisingly large number of otherwise sensible people choose to believe that there really is a scientific conspiracy. Why? Are people really that stupid?

The CIA aren't stupid, and although they get a lot of the blame for Vietnam, mostly they did a good job. The agency base in Saigon had been telling Washington for years that this was a full blown insurgency and not just a bit of cross border raiding, but the top brass at Langley hadn't believed them, and by the start of 1968 they were signally back to America that something big was in the pipeline.

Something big was indeed brewing; a major offensive involving attacks in every major southern city. Insurgencies by their very nature are secret, but the Vietnamese knew they couldn't keep something this size secret, so instead they went for an elaborate bluff.

The spot they chose was Khe Sanh, a US marine base on the border. It was no threat to the Viet Cong, who could easily bypass it, but at the end of 1967 the Vietnamese started moving large forces up to Khe Sanh. At the same time they planted documents which said the plans for a national offensive were just a bluff and that Khe Sanh was the real objective.

The trick worked better than they could have expected. France had quit Vietnam fifteen years earlier when their outpost at Dien Bien Phu fell, and President Johnson was terrified of a similar debacle. Ignoring the numerous intelligence reports which suggested Khe Sanh was the bluff, he ordered a model of the base constructed in the White House basement. So whilst he was busy watching a struggle for a few square metres of worthless jungle, the Viet Cong overran huge chunks of South Vietnam.

Poor old Johnson. He wasn't a bad bloke, and the chants of "Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" really hurt him. But in the end the demonstrators were right and he was wrong. The Americans were taken by surprise, lots of people died, and it was all pointless from then on.

But the world of bluff and double bluff can be confusing, and in the end, like Johnson, we can just end up seeing what we're most afraid of and not what's really out there.

Why did so many people fall for Climategate? Maybe they don't like clever clogs, maybe they like idea that a lot of self-righteous beardy people have got it wrong, or maybe they just like their cars and foreign holidays. Either way the deniers found that the easiest way to protect an extremely plausible conspiracy is to suggest an utterly implausible one.

4. "None so blind as those who don't wish to see."
When all else fails, ignore the inconvenient facts.

General Montgomery had a brilliant plan, one that would definitely end the war by Christmas. It involved a desperate race to reach a bridge captured by paratroopers before they were overrun by the Germans. True, the relief force would be advancing down a single road where one German with a panzerfaust could hold up the entire army, and true, to date the only race Monty had looked likely to win was onto a pedestal, but it might just work.

The Dutch resistance weren't so sure and brought back worrying reports of German tanks refitting in the woods. They were ignored. Major Urquhart, the intelligence officer, wasn't too impressed either and kept producing aeriel photographs of said panzers in the woods. He was sent on sick leave. Nothing was to stop the master plan.

The result was heroic, but pointless.

But it was a really good plan, and that's the problem. If only our climate wasn't so sensitive to pesky carbon molecules, then we could build paradise. Whether it's Social Democracy 2.0, the cutthroat world of the Neoliberals or even a Marxist workers paradise, it all depends on using cheap energy with no consequences.

There are no easy answer to stupidity, and the only solution to bad intelligence is better intelligence.

Perhaps though we could take heart from the biggest military intelligence disaster of this decade; the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. We couldn't stop the war, but at least most of us saw through the deceit. You can fool all of the military all of the time, but you can only fool all of the people some of the time.

My Ten Favourite English Villages

2010-11-08T23:57:00.001-08:00

The English village, a place that exists more in myth than reality today. Formerly the home of wise yeomen and stout women, where paternalistic squires guide the simple folks in their charming rustic ways, and Mr Darcy baths in the pond once a year. Today the village is more likely to be the home of the urban stockbroker and his simple wife.

Whilst many English villages are no doubt lovely places to live (provided you don't mind driving ten miles just to buy a pint of milk) they mostly have very little to detain the visitor. This extremely subjective list is of places I, as a townie, like to visit.

10. Lacock, Wiltshire

A village owned by the National Trust has to go into any top ten of English villages, but Lacock is real thing and not just a tourist honeypot. The village is mostly eighteenth century but the church, a pub and the magnificent tithe barn are Medieval. Merrie England at its best, you can even incarcerate yourself in the lock up and relive those glorious days when urchins starved in the gutters and toffs had the right to run you over in the street.

9. Mobberley, Cheshire

Mobberley barely counts as a village, being a small town now or even a suburb of Wilmslow.

In legend it was the home of the farmer who sold his white stallion to a mysterious wizard and this story starts Alan Garner'sThe Weirdstone of Brisingamen.

Considering it is set in one of the flattest parts of the country, it was also home to one of our most famous mountaineers, George Mallory, who when he wasn't streaking through Swiss Hotel lobbies was a pioneering 'Everester'. He died on the mountain in 1924, although we don't know if he was going up or coming down at the time.

My connection with Mobberley was in 1997 when, after three months camped out of the site of the new runway at Manchetser airport I was rudely evicted and so shifted my tent to paddock in the village. There I discovered the advantages of squatting a posh post code and started to rub shoulders with the rich and famous. I met Terry Waite, was interviewed by Davina McCall, bumped into Neil and Christina Hamilton at a Vicar's tea party and got myself invited to Westminster by Martin Bell.

Rather more interesting though, Mobberley is adjacent to Lindow Moss, the place where nearly 2000 years ago the unfortunate Pete Marsh (as he's know) died a triple death. The Moss is now just soggy fields, but when the mist comes down (as it likes to do) you can still feel yourself between the worlds. It's a pity about the jumbo jets though.

8. Hurst Green, Lancashire

What can you say about a village that boast the magnificent Jacobean pile of Stoneyhurst College and Tolkien's favourite pub? JRR was a frequent visitor to the village and some people have traced the entire geography of the Shire in the local area, from the Brandywine Bridge (pictured) to the Barrow Downs. The village can also claim that the weather station at the college has been in continuous use for longer than any other, and has been charting our slowly warming climate since 1846.

7. Little Salkeld, Cumbria

Little the place certainly is, but it has two big attractions; the Long Meg stone circle, and the Organic Watermill.

The former is one of the biggest and best circles in the country, and also one of the least known. Wordsworth may have eulogised it, but when it is standing room only at nearby Castlerigg, you can often have the place to yourself.

The Organic Watermill not only produces some of the best organic flour in the country (and definitely the best porridge oats) but also has an excellent cafe. Although it has fairly stiff competition in the form of the nearby Organic Bakery at Melmerby, it wins by a wafer thin slice of rye bread.

6. Edensor, Derbyshire

Edensor is an estate village of Chatsworth, so this is really a proxy award for the Devonshire's little pad in the country. However the place has it's own charms, from a magnificent Weeping Willow on the green to a modest teashop. The church has the graves of Sir Joseph Paxton, the genius behind the Crystal Palace, and Lord Frederick Cavendish who was assassinated by Irish Nationalist in 1882 (by accident, they were going for the chap he was standing next to).

The most famous current resident is the Dowager Duchess herself, last survivor, and most normal, of Mitford sisters and one of the few people left alive to have taken tea with Hitler. If you walk up the hill towards Bakewell at the right time of the year you get a chance to scrump some of her blackberries.

5. Ribchester, Lancashire

"It is written upon a wall in Rome; Ribchester was as rich as any town in Christendom".

Actually it isn't, but Ribchester is interesting for being two street English village sat on top of one of the most important Roman towns in the north of England. The remains of the Bath House are easily visible next to the river, and a small museum has some of the items found on the site, including replicas of the magnificent parade helmet and cavalryman relief.

Other bits of the old fort are scattered through the village, like the two pillars in front of the White Bull pub (pictured) and once a year the Romans return for the annual festival. Ribchester also has a double, if rather tenuous on both counts, King Arthur connection.

As principle northern cavalry barracks Ribchester is the most likely base for the Sarmartian Cataphracts sent to Britain in 175AD. The Samartians would have brought with them their dragon banners and stories of swords in stones and may for a while have been commanded by one Lucius Artorius Castus. Then, after the Romans left Ribchester may have become the southern capital of Rheged, whose leader Urien is another Arthur candidate.

4. Cropredy, Oxfordshire

Cropredy is a pleasant enough place in its own right, with the river Churwell, the bridge that was the scene of two Civil War battles and a brace of decent pubs. However for one long weekend a year it turns into the Cropredy Festival.

Cropredy Festival is an institution in itself. Originally the annual reunion of the band Fairport Convention whose members have included singer-songwriting legend Richard Thompson and the immortal Sandy Denny, the festival has now developed a life of its own and if the band themselves ever forgot to turn up, I suspect that most of the festival goers wouldn't mind too much.

The village itself has adopted the festival as its own. Whilst the residents of Pilton man the barricades during Glastonbury, Cropredy village becomes an extension of the festival, a mixture of bazaar, outdoor kitchen, chill out zone and festival fringe. Indeed, before the festival became a four day event I, like many people, used to turn up a day early to spend the Thursday night in either the Brassnose or the Red Lion.

With the village full of aging folk fans high on Wadsworth 6X it is perhaps a scene rather more Hoggarth than Constable, but Cropredy has always been the friendly festival and whilst there you are always aware that you are still in a English village, whereas Glastonbury these days reminds me rather more of the Trafford Centre.

3. Asford-in-the-Water

Ashford sneaks in at number three as it's currently our favourite picnic spot. Ashford is practical as well as pretty as I can sit myself down on one of the park benches in Hall Orchard Playing Fields, under a pair of magnificent English elms trees, whilst my boys play football with real goalposts.

A short walk away is also the best shop in Derbyshire; Ibbotson's, where you can buy the best home made chutney in Derbyshire, cakes and fresh coffee. The village also has one of the most scenic cricket grouns in the country (where my father-in-law played his last match for the illustrious Midland Bank Sheffield Branch team) and is of course home to the annual Derbyshire ritual of well dressings. Nearby are Monsal and Miller's Dales and also Fin Cop - the sight of one of the Iron Age forts that guarded the valleys that led into the Peak.

The area is a regular drive out for car clubs and it's not unusual to see a dozen or so identical vehicles heading in convoy throught the village. Last time I was there it was the turn of the Aston Martin owners. Unfortunately one of the elderly would-be James Bond's missed the right turn in the centre of the village and threw the party into chaos. For the next hour it was like the last scene in The Pink Panther as Aston Martin's of various vintages arrived from random directions, circled a few times, and then disappeared a different way to search for their mates.

2. Avebury, Wiltshire

I could have done a Top Ten of villages with stone circles attached, but instead I'll limit myself to Avebury, the stone circle with a village attached.If you arrive in mid summer it seems that Avebury is more of a National Trust exhibit than a village, but a village indeed it is. This Lammas the local cricket team could be seen bravely trying to finish their game amidst the throngs of Druids and New Agers, and rumour has it that the place can even be quite quiet in the middle of winter.

It would be nice to say the village and the circle exist in perfect harmony, but that wouldn't be true. In conserving the latter Alexander Keiller not only knocked down a fair proportion of the former, but he also shut of the villagers supply of cheap stone.

Avebury though isn't just a village and a stone circle, it is the centre of a ritual landscape that can only be fully appreciated on foot. When you walk over a rise and suddenly find yourself staring at the might of Silbury Hill, or discover a hawthorn tree bedecked with ribbons, you learn a little of how this spiritual landscape has been lived in for 4000 years.

And then afterwards you can retire to the Red Lion, drinking in which is a necessary, but not sufficient, requirement to call yourself a Druid.

1. Bamburgh, Northumberland

The picture almost says it all, but when you discover that on the far side of castle is one of Northumberland's finest beaches you realise why Bamburgh gets my Number One.

The castle has stood there since the time of the Gododdin. Mallory besieged the place and it may have been the inspiration for Lancelot's Joyous Garde. In Anglo-Saxon times it was the court of one of the most civilised kingdoms in Europe, and it may even have been here that the poem Beowolf was first recited. Just across the water is Lindisfarne and viewing the holy island from the castle you realise just how daring the Vikings were in 793 to sack the monastry right under the noses of the warriors in the fortress.

Add in the Crastor kippers served up for breakfast in the local B&Bs and you have the perfect destination for a weekend away. Anyone planning a bit of romance though (which doesn't go terribly well with kippers - or so my wife says) may wish to consider the story of King Oswiu and Queen Eanfled, whose failure to co-ordinate their love-making at the castle led to the demise of the Celtic Church.

By the Rocket's Red Glare

2010-11-05T10:37:00.000-07:00

Britain has given America some great gifts: democracy, the English language and Catherine Zeta Jones come immediately to mind. All three may have been well and truly ****ed by the Yanks since, but at least they acknowledge where they came from.

However I feel we never really get the credit we deserve for giving them the most famous line in their national anthem.

The rocket's being referred to are not those that are currently illuminating the night sky here, but those being fired at Fort McHenry by the Royal Navy at the Battle of Baltimore during the War of 1812. Britain's military was at that time in the middle of a love affair with rockets that had started with a bang 34 years previously in India, and was to eventually fizzle out over South Africa.

Gunpowder appears to have reached India from China in the Fourteenth century, although references in Vedic literature to "weapons of fire" may indicate the previous use of some other type of fiery missile. They had first been fired at the British in 1755, but had been dismissed as a fairly useless gimmick.

That view was hastily revised in 1780 when the army of the East India Company fought the Kingdom of Mysore at the Battle of Pollilur. A barrage of rockets blew up the ammunition wagons and John Company's army, which included elite Scottish Highlanders, surrendered. The battle was the first British defeat suffered on the sub-continent.

Thanks to the rockets the reverse was not seen as being the result of Indian, or Moslem, pluck, but fiendish oriental ingenuity. It helped that Tipu Sultan, who ascended to the throne of Mysore two years after Pollilur, was a bit of a gadget-man. A mechanical tiger of his, powered by bellows and depicted savaging a East India Company soldier, who moans realistically, is on display in the V&A museum. His reputation carried on past his eventual defeat into the nineteenth century, and Jules Verne even made him the uncle of that ultimate gadget-man, Captain Nemo.

Meanwhile the armies greatest brains were set to work on rocketry, and the result was the Congreve War Rockets that Francis Key Scott saw being fired in 1814. (Yes I know I said this was 'The War of 1812', but that was just it's name. It actually lasted until 1815.) The rocket was lighter and longer ranged than conventional artillery and was employed smiting the King's enemies around the world. 25,000 of them were fired at the peaceful Danes in 1807 and a rocket battery was the sole British unit present at the 'Battle of the Nations' that defeated Napoleon for the first time in 1813. The rocket as a weapon had just one drawback, one that will be familiar to anyone who has had to flee from an errant firework - they were so inaccurate it was almost impossible to hit anything with them.

This didn't put the military off and indeed they clung to their Congreve rockets even after a (slightly) improved version, the Hale's spin-stabilised War Rocket, was invented. Mr Hale was unable to sell them to his own country and it was actually the Americans who debuted the new missile, against the Mexicans in 1847.

The Russian, Italian and Austrian armies all adopted it, to little effect. The German army was meanwhile busy showing the world that breech loading rifles and artillery were the future and that fireworks had no place on the modern battlefield. Never-the-less the British Army and Royal Navy eventually bought Hale's toy and carried it with them on various colonial wars for Ethiopia to Afghanistan.

In 1879 an unfortunately Major Russell found himself in charge of a rocket battery at the Battle of Isandhlwana. As a Zulu Impi descended on him he managed to fire off just one rocket - which missed, before having to resort to his sword. This just about summed up the performance of the war rocket. Two years later when a battery of Navy rockets went off to fight the Boers where they were similarly ineffective.

That was pretty much it for the gunpowder war rocket. They remained on the official inventory until 1919, before finally being pensioned off along with the cavalry lance and other relics of the previous century.

It was not the end for rockets. Twenty five years later chemical fueled V2s were falling on London. This time though nobody felt like turning the result into poetry.

Dressed to Kill

2010-11-03T15:06:00.000-07:00

The famed 'flag march', where Indian and Pakistani soldiers engage in a competitive display of high-camp macho posturing, is to be toned down, tragic collateral damage from improving relations between the two nuclear armed states.

This is bad news for tourists, who loved the spectacle, but somewhat indifferent news for military pundits, for whom a rule of thumb is that the more a nation postures in peacetime, the less effective it is in time of war.

To be fair to the Indian and Pakistani armies, guys doing the high kicking with fans on their heads are only border guards: had things kicked off on the sub-continent the real fighting would have been carried out by scruffier soldiers.

The stereotype of the army that is all trouser and no mouth, so to speak, is that of the African 'banana republic'. These soldiers, with their paratrooper berets, starched camouflage gear and shades, used to be a feature of the evening news when I was growing up - every dictator worth his salt had division or so. You knew just by looking at them that the only operation they could carry out even semi-competently was the Military Coup. By contrast the soldiers that did the real fighting: the Viet Cong, the SAS, the Taliban, always looked like sh*t by comparison.

Historically the supreme prize for show over substance goes though to the Romanian army of the First World War. The Romanians, at that time, has a reputation of being 'the Neapolitans of Eastern Europe' and under the leadership of General Ion Emanuel Florescu their army's drab Khaki became a work of art. Uniforms were enlivened with commemorative plaques and emblems, and special get-up was designed for engineers, brewers, baggage handlers and every other hanger on in the army. The General's Orders of the Day usually included a dress code as well. So fastidious was the Romanian grunt about his appearance that a rule had be enacted that banned the use of make up to all except commissioned officers.

Whatever amorous thoughts the suited-and-booted Romanian soldier inspired in the ladies, it certainly wasn't matched by a lust for combat. When Romania entered the war on the Allies side in 1916, their army put on rather a poor show. Indeed stories abound of whole Romania units mistaking their frustrated Russian allies for their Austro-Hungarian enemies and trying to surrender to them.

All of which suggests that if we want peace, rather than toning down their flag ceremony, India and Pakistan should be spicing it up a bit, perhaps even letting the rest of the world take part.

Perhaps we can dream of a world where combat troops have been replaced by combat troupes and where we can all sleep safer in our beds?

ISOF: How to make a torturer

2010-10-25T02:54:00.000-07:00

When Greece was finally restored to the principles of democracy it helped found, the inner working of one of Europe's most brutal regimes was revealed. For seven years The Colonels had used their security services to suppress opposition and behavior they considered socially unacceptable. With no civil rights to speak of torture was routine for political dissidents and rock music fans alike.

Once sanity and human rights were restored the Greeks launched one of the most thorough investigations ever into how torturers operate. One result was the award winning film Your Neighbours Son. In the film we get to meet Michalis Petrou, a recruit to the ESA who rose to become one of the country's top two torturers. The other one was apparently a Grade A psychopath, but even Petrou's victims acknowledge that he was really just a regular guy made into a monster by the system.

The recent Wikileaks Iraq War Diaries have showed how US approved torture didn't end on November 17th 1974. A repeating meme in the logs is how US and British forces repeatedly turned a blind eye to torture and even handed suspects over for interrogation to known abusers.

Key operators in this brutal trade were the Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF). A US trained unit distinguished by their balaclavas and US equipment, recruited solely for the purpose of internal security. This article by Shane Bauer in The Nation last year was written before the War Logs were released, but in it shows how the same techniques used by the ESA have been used in making the ISOF.

Firstly recruits are taken in young and naive. The ESA recruited from the Greek countryside and the ISOF, it seems, from the Iraqi desert. We don't now how exactly they were trained, but we can have a guess that similar dehumanising and desensitising techniques were used. Certainly when the ISOF were released onto the streets they were subsequently given the same direct political control, and freedom from all legal controls, as the ESA. The Colonels controlled their agents directly, as do the Iraqi politicians.

So seven years after Saddam Hussein was toppled form power Iraq seems to be back where it began - under the control of politically controlled torture squads. The only difference appears to be that compared with the ISOF, Saddam's lot were amateurs.

Less than Astute

2010-10-22T13:38:00.000-07:00

HMS Astute is certainly not the first British sub to crash into something it shouldn't. In recent years subs have hit everything from the bottom of the Red Sea to a French ballistic missile submarine. However coming in the week that the government took the axe to local government jobs it does make you wonder whether they really need their expensive toys.

Once upon a time the military strength of a nation was easy to calculate; you had so many ships and so many soldiers. Then at the end of the nineteenth century there was an explosion in military technology. On land it wasn't just enough to count noses, you also needed to know how many rifles, artillery piece and machine guns an army had.

At sea things were even more complicated. Armored Battleships were so expensive that the race was on to find something cheaper that could sink them. The result was the Torpedo Boat, a barely seaworthy vessel that had a mathematical chance of sinking an ironclad - and a somewhat better chance of sinking itself. To counter this navies invented the Torpedo Boat Destroyer. At the same time the Cruiser was invented, a less heavily armoured version of the ironclad Battleship could patrol the oceans without requiring a fleet of colliers to follow it.

Comparing these different ships was like playing paper-wraps-stone. A Battleship couldn't catch a Cruiser and a Cruiser couldn't outfight a Battleship. The result was to leave naval planners utterly baffled, a condition that got even worse in the twentieth century when the naval mine and the submarine arrived. Every navy worth its salt had to have a bit of everything because everyone else did too.

When was came in 1914 the result was not what people expected. The Royal Navy went to war expecting a second Trafalgar, but instead its Battleships spent almost the entire war hiding in harbour. The submarine meanwhile proved utterly devastating to a land power like Germany, but almost useless to a naval power like us.

The twentieth century ended much like the previous one, with any serious navy having something of everything, including seriously expensive Hunter-Killer submarines. We have the Astute class because the Russians have the Akula class because the Americans have the Seawolf class and so on.

To make matters worse unlike Aircraft Carriers, which can at least be used to land marines or evacuate refugees, and Frigates and Destroyers which can at a pinch be turned on Somalian pirates or Caribbean drug runners, nuclear submarines can't really do much except play with other subs.

True they can sink surface ships, but 28 years after Maggie torpedo the Belgrano this doesn't seem like the sort of thing nice nations do. They can also fire cruise missiles at land targets but that would be, as Pitt the Younger said about an earlier naval operation, "like breaking windows with golden guineas". When the War on Terror started an imaginative US defence contractor came up with the idea of using them to fire Special Forces out of the torpedo tubes, but funnily enough the troops didn't seem too keen.

Council workers on the Isle of Skye wondering if their P45s are in the post may well look out at the Navy trying to rescue its newest ship and wonder whether that really is the best way to spend £1.3 billion.

Great Hostage Rescues of US Military History

2010-10-13T13:48:00.001-07:00

As the USA hastily amends it's account of its failure to rescue the British aid worker Linda Norgrove, perhaps we should remember some of the previous occasions when real life turned out to be a bit different to Rambo.

The most famous failure was Operation Eagle's Claw in 1980, the attempt to rescue the hostages held in the former US Embassy in Tehran. The operation was supposed to begin with a night rendezvous between eight helicopters and six transport planes at a secret place called Desert One. This wasn't quite the remote spot it was supposed to be and the first thing the US special forces had to do was detain a bus load of Iranians who'd been driving past.

The bus was followed by another lorry which refused to stop. The Americans decided to stop it anyway by firing an anti-tank rocket at it. Unfortunately it turned out to be a petrol tanker and the resulting explosion lit up the desert from horizon to horizon. The driver, a smuggler probably, miraculously survived and legged it into the desert.

Undaunted the team planned to carry on, but they were already two helicopters down due to mechanical failure and the pilots, having flown through a sand storm at ultra low level, were bushed. They all agreed to call it a day, but as one of the choppers took off it stuck a tanker plane resulting in another huge explosion and the death of eight men. The surviving Americans quickly skedaddled in the surviving aircraft leaving debris scattered across the desert and a party of extremely confused bus passengers.

Had it not all gone wrong so quickly the plan was to fly the assault force 1000 miles to Tehran where they would sneak into town, rescue the hostages, bus them across the city to a sports stadium to be picked up by the choppers again, flown another 400 miles to an Iranian air base that had hopefully been captured by paratroopers and then finally fly out. The Iranians were, presumably, just going to stand by and watch. When told of the plan after his eventual release one hostage remarked "Thank God for the sandstorm."

For the elite of the US armed forces the rest of the 1980s was not a great decade either. Delta Force, the hostage rescue team at the heart of Eagle's Claw, was soon mired in financial scandal including the purchase of a number of sports cars, supposedly for the purposes of covert reconnaissance. That might have been a bit of fun at the tax payers expense, but more serious stuff was going wrong. When Reagan decided to invade Grenada a team of Navy SEALs parachuted into the sea to help - and promptly all drowned. It turned out the week they'd been due to practise this insertion technique they'd all bunked off.

The 'hostages' on Grenada, the students at the medical school, all came through more or less unscathed. They actually never saw a Grenadan soldier and the only danger came from the US Navy who decide to shoot up their campus before the troops landed.

The 1990s weren't a startling success either. There were no famous hostage rescues, but a group of Rangers and Delta Force almost became hostages themselves when their mission to kidnap Somalian warlords went wrong. The story has since been Hollywoodised, but the opinion of America's greatest infantryman, David H Hackworth, of the plan was that there wasn't one things wrong with it - there was everything wrong with it.

Quite how the War on Terror has been going this last decade or so is somewhat harder to say. The most famous hostage rescue of the Iraq War was that of Private Jessica Lynch. Allegedly captured, and raped, by dastardly towel heads after putting up a heroic resistance and being horribly wounded, she was liberated by brave special forces before the wicked Arabs could do anything worse to her.

Eventually the truth came out. Lynch had been in a convoy that got lost, and she had been in a minor road accident. The battle she allegedly fought in (and won a medal for) happened whilst she was out cold and the hospital she was sprung from was not only unguarded, but the medics had been trying to hand her back to the US Army for two days.

What else the cream of the US army has been up to is a little unclear given the secretive nature of their work, but what we do know is that Osama Bin Laden is very much alive and Linda Norgrove isn't.

None of this means that US Special Forces are incompetent (although many of their officers certainly have been) it's just that war tends to be more Laurel and Hardy than Rambo. Laughing at men who put their lives on the line may be a little mean, but it's generally a better strategy than believing the Hollywood hype and sending in the Marines.

Could Britain have lost in 1940?

2010-10-03T01:23:00.001-07:00

Druids planning outdoor rituals know that the weather in these Isles can be a little fickle. This autumn we had a mild weekend for our, now officially 'religious' rites, but this time of year you can't always guarantee that.

Seventy years ago though it wasn't Druids who were hoping for mild weather over the equinox. In fact,if there were any around, they were wishing for exactly the opposite as across the Channel, in occupied France, German Generals were wondering whether a rag-tag fleet of requisition Rhine barges would really be able to transport their army across the sea to England.

In the event Operation Sea Lion was called off at the end of August. The weather, unusually mild for the time of year in 1940, would have been the least of Germany's worries. An undefeated RAF, a rapidly reforming Army, a fully mobilised Royal Navy, and an unyielding Winston Churchill stood waiting for them and Hitler chose to strike east at Russia rather than risk a Channel crossing.

But could things have been different? If just one of these factors could be changed, could Germany have won the war in 1940? In the frustrating and occasionally illuminating world of Counter-Factual History, anything is possible.

Firstly there's the weather. The invasion was scheduled for the period 19th - 26th September, when the tide was right to allow the invasion barges to land at high tide and avoid the improvised defences on the beaches (made from builders scaffolding - a far cry from the concrete of the Atlantic Wall that faced the Allies on D-Day.) A low pressure suddenly turned left and headed for Norway leaving calm seas for the barges. Hindsight tells us the invaders would have crossed safely, but the German planners didn't have hindsight. An accurate seven day forecast was impossible with 1940s technology. In 1944 the Allies had ships at sea to help, but it was still a bit of a gamble. It would have been a brave man who launched his flat bottomed barges into the English Channel that September.

But it wasn't the weather that led to Sea Lion being cancelled, but the failure of the Luftwaffe to defeat the RAF in the Battle of Britain. Could they have won? On the face of it, no. Contrary to some myths, the RAF never came close to loosing. In 1940 we had the best air defence system in the world and the Germans barely dented it.

However the RAF was quite capable of defeating itself. Dowding used his planes as aerial guerrillas, attacking the Luftwaffe by surprise in small groups, disrupting their formations and disappearing into thin air. It worked, but was unpopular. Dowding had devised the system, but it was the individual squadron leaders who carried it out. It takes a selfless leader to delegate such responsibility, and few of Dowding's colleagues shared his gift. The rival 'Big Wing' tactics were ineffective when tried, shooting down just a single German fighter in ten massive sorties, but it was popular with such charismatic fliers as Douglas Barder.

In November 1940 Dowding was ousted from the top of the RAF by the 'Big Winger' Leigh-Mallory. Leigh-Mallory was eventually to use his ideas in battle over occupied France, where the Germans shot his planes out of the sky at four times the rate they were downing Luftwaffe aircraft. Fortunately by this stage of the war it didn't really matter.

So with a favourable weather forecast and the RAF immolating itself with the wrong tactics, the German Army could well have set forth on the invasion of England. In May 1940 they had sent the British Expeditionary Force packing from Belgium, and morale would have been sky high. But the army that struggled ashore from its rickety barges would not have been the force that had overrun Poland and France, whilst the British Army it faced was not the bedraggled and demoralised one that had limped home from Dunkirk four months earlier.

Only a handful of tanks would have accompanied the invaders, whilst the defenders, under the command of possibly Britain's best General of the war, had assembled a small number of motorised brigades to oppose them. General Brooke only had a few tanks himself, but they would probably have been enough to at least hold the Germans. The invaders would also have found that Britain's renowned sense of fair play has temporarily gone on strike, and there were plans to set fire to the sea, carry out sabotage in the German's rear areas and even drop mustard gas on the Germans. Unless reinforcements could be brought up quickly, the Germans would have been unlikely to have captured more than a few square miles of England.

Whether or not the second wave would have made it would depend on the Royal Navy. The Navy was aware of the danger, and had been recalling cruisers and destroyers from all over the world. Later experience in the Pacific would suggest that warships could be defeated by air power, but at this stage of the war that might not be true. The Luftwaffe had very little experience of attacking ships and if the worst came to the worst the Royal Navy would have brought out its Battleships - and the Germans simply didn't have a bomb big enough to destroy a Battleship. Maybe if their own Battleships the Tirpitz and the Bismark, or the aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin, had been finished they might have had a chance, but as things stood in September 1940, they didn't.

All this though assumes though that Britain still wanted to fight. The crucial decisions were made in a series of War Cabinet meetings held between 25th and 28th May 1940. The French Army was collapsing and the Royal Navy were desperately trying to evacuate the BEF from Dunkirk. Things looked grim.

The War Cabinet consisted of Churchill, the affable Tory Peer Lord Halifax, former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and the Labour men Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood. Later in the war Cabinet meetings would become mere formalities as nobody would dare challenge Churchill, but only two weeks into the job, Winston did not at this time have the authority he later earned.

Churchill wanted to fight on regardless, Halifax meanwhile wanted to open negotiations using the Italians as intermediaries, something that Churchill thought would destroy the countries fragile morale when the news inevitably leaked out. Attlee favoured Churchill's position, whilst Greenwood appears to have been on the fence, but in any event the Labour men would probably have been unwilling to challenge the Conservatives at this point in the Coalition Government. The balance was therefore held by Chamberlain.

History has not been kind to Neville Chamberlain. He was not a great Prime Minister, but neither was he all that bad. A One Nation Tory more interested in reform at home than war abroad, he was the wrong man for the job in such troubled times. He usually gets the blame for Munich, but in 1938 the Opposition, and the country as a whole, were not ready to fight. He also appeased the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, but Churchill was right behind him on that one. In 1940 though, despite his instincts for peace, he came down on the side of war. Bolstered by a favourable report from the Navy he backed Churchill and Britain fought on.

But what if the people present at those fateful meetings had been sat in different seats? Perhaps here we have nearest to a possible alliterative history.

Wind the clock back a fortnight to another meeting at Westminster, this time between Chamberlain, Halifax, Churchill and Chief Whip David Margesson. Margesson has just told Chamberlain that Attlee will not enter a coalition whilst he is Prime Minister. Chamberlain then bluntly turned to Halifax and Churchill and asked who should succeed him. There then followed a very long pause indeed before Halifax ruled himself out.

Had he not done so he would probably have become Prime Minister. He was most likely Chamberlain's preferred choice. Churchill, although he had been right about Hitler, had been responsible for the disaster of Gallipoli in the First World War and Narvik in this one. A maverick and a rebel, who annoyed the Conservatives by joining the Liberals and had wound up the Trade Unions by using armoured cars during General Strike, he was hardly the ideal choice to lead a Government of National Unity.

Whilst Churchill had been turing up in the House of Commons drunk to defend the pro-Nazi King Edward VIII and railing against "the twin dangers of Hitler and Ghandi", Halifax meanwhile had been Governor of India, where he had actually released the Mahatma from jail and invited him to private talks. Politically they were chalk and cheese.

Churchill would have continued to serve under Halifax, but as the latter was one of the architects of Appeasement there is little doubt what Prime Minister Halifax would have done on 25th May. Britain would have made peace and Germany would have given terms that Halifax could not refuse.

There would not have been a Battle of Britain and no need for an Operation Sea Lion but there would also have been no D Day. It's difficult to say who would have won the war, but the result would be that either Hitler or Stalin would have become master of the whole of Europe.

There would probably have still been a Cold War between a totalitarian Europe and a democratic America, but without British nuclear physicists there may not have been a Manhattan Project. The first atomic bomb might have been built by Heissenberg or Kurchatov and fitted to one of Wernher von Braun's rockets - the man almost certainly having no qualms about serving whoever would let him play with his dangerous toys.

And so history turned. Churchill, the warmonger, became the hero and Halifax, the peacemaker, was forgotten. Britain fought on, Brooke's soldiers and the Royal Navy waited for an enemy that never came, the RAF won the Battle of Britain and whilst the weather remained calm, the German barges stayed in port. Hitler turned East and the rest is history. Real history.

Bibliography
Operation Sea Lion Richard Cox
Fateful Choices Ian Kershaw
More What If? Robert Cowley (editor)

Back to 1980s? Hopefully.

2010-09-28T13:49:00.000-07:00

So it was the big day at the Labour Conference, so what did we get?

Well no big surprises, there was the usual biographical stuff you expect from a new leader, although at least with the Miliband family they don't have to try too hard to make it interesting, and the predictable mea culpa from a Party that has just been given a kick up the pants by the electorate.

What we also got, in fairly lightweight form admittedly, was also a bit of the old The Crisis of the Left. How did the Party of Keir Hardy and Clement Attlee end up mired in Iraq and taken for a ride by the wide boys in the City? How did Labour become the party of Liberal Interventionism and Neoliberal Economics?

The current Crisis of the Left goes back to the 1980s. By then virtually everything the social democrats wanted had been achieved. True, Britain lagged a bit behind the rest of Europe, but basically we were there. The workers had power, the people had rights and the NHS, schools and social services had money. It didn't necessarily work as well as it should, but the basics of civil society were there.

This left the Left in a quandary. Is it Onwards to the Glorious Revolution still, or do we become the new conservatives, defending the status quo against the forces of the right? The result split the left. Meanwhile the ongoing collapse of the totalitarian communist countries in the East gave succour to a Right that had just discovered it's own revolutionary doctrine. Cloaked in the language of freedom beloved of the Flower Children of the now defunct New Right, Neoliberalism made the parties of the Right the new revolutionaries.

The result was a bloody and brutal decade in which what was left of the ideals of the nineteenth century and the 1960s were crushed, literally so in the Battles of Orgreave and the Beanfield, metaphorically so in the hearts of those who were to form New Labour.

Blair, Brown, Mandelson and the rest accepted the demise of the old Left and through a mixture of naivety, realpolitik, arrogance, greedy and plain old stupidity sought to achieve the ideals of the Old Left using the tools of the New Right. The result was an Iraqi imbroglio, a Credit Crunch, a massive PFI bill and all the rest.

And so in walks Ed.

Hopefully out goes Liberal Interventionism, formerly known as the White Man's Burden. Nobody has the stomach for any more wars, not even the Generals who in Basra and Helmand have had to suffer the worst indignity a British Army can ever endure - being rescued by the Yanks.

Neoliberallism will no doubt linger a little longer, but a system that has brought massive inequality, environmental devastation and an economic collapse every five years or so must crumble at some point.

In 1985 Neil Kinnock had to acknowledge the failure of the tactics of the NUM and shout down the Militants who wanted to hang onto an old dogma, long past its usefulness. Kinnock did both whilst reaffirming the compassionate values at the heart of the Left.

Miliband will no doubt be his own man, but I hope he will be the new Kinnock, not the new Blair.

Mystical Airman

2010-09-10T13:33:00.000-07:00

As you can't help but notice it's seventy years since the Battle of Britain ended. But who actually won it?

Well us, obviously, but who was in charge? Most people know that Nelson won Trafalgar and Montgomery won Alamein, but the man who led the RAF to victory over the Luftwaffe has mysteriously dropped out of history. Possibly because he was unjustly sacked shortly after his victory, but probably also because he spent the last years of his life literally away with the faeries.

In 1940 Dowding didn't just have to fight the Germans, he also had to fight his own side. His method of defending Britain, with fighters dispersed to avoid being destroyed on the ground and swooping on the Germans in small groups didn't go down too well with his colleagues who believed that aeroplanes should be paraded in huge aerial formations like battleships. Never mind that when it was tried it didn't work, if the top brass left the tactics to the jocks in the fighter planes how could they justify their own existence?

Dowding was nothing if not his own person. he fought ,and won, the Battle of Britain his way and for his trouble was sacked in November 1940. Having a lot of time on his hands he wrote up his autobiography which he called "Twelve Legions of Angels". The title was perhaps a hint of what was to come next.

The country having no further use him, Dowding retired form the RAF and then took the unusual step of joining the Theosophical society. Rejecting Christianity, he mixed the eastern mysticism of the theosophers with an earthy interest in faeries. In between he hunted ghosts, joined spiritualists on esoteric journeys where he met the departed spirits of deceased airmen, lobbied the House of Lords for the humane treatment of animals and argued the virtues of vegetarianism. He knew his former colleagues thought him a crank, but he didn't care.

To go from war hero to premature hippy is quite a feat, but Dowding seems to have managed it. So if anyone ever asks you what New Age weirdos have ever done for the counrty, you can say that one won us The Battle of Britain!

2010-08-12T11:52:00.000-07:00

Toxic Fuel (From Pentacle Issue 31, Spring 2010)

2010-06-09T13:58:00.000-07:00

In the forest of northern Canada, in the tales of the Woodland Cree, the Trickster often takes the form of a Raven. In one tale, common to many tribes, he banishes the primordial darkness by stealing the Moon. Finding a cabin in the woods in which the Moon is imprisoned, he transforms into a pine needle and is drunk by the lady of the house whilst she is collecting water. Reborn as a baby he demands to play with the Moon. Then, seizing his opportunity, he escapes through the smoke hole. Breaking up the Moon he forms the Sun and the Stars. The darkness is banished but the Moon has left its mark on the Raven, and his feathers, formerly as white as the snow, are now burnt black like the night.

Our local Co-op is traditional supermarket shopping. The checkout staff chat away happily to themselves whilst firing your shopping down the conveyer belt. They appear to know every customer in the queue except you and discuss in intimate details their numerous relatives and mutual friends whilst you are waiting to pay. Then when that’s done there is none of this “would you like any help with your packing” nonsense. Instead the lever is pulled and your groceries are squashed into a corner so they can serve the next person.

However over the last few years there have been subtle changes in the store. First it was the Fairtrade chocolate, then Fairtrade wine, then Fairtrade and organic coffee, then reusable shopping bags, then cucumber without any plastic wrapping and so on. Even the café, previously a place that served chips and beans only, reopened as the Fairtrade Espresso Bar. Gradually I started to wonder if by any chance the Co-op, cheap place to do your shopping, might actually be the same as the Co-op, ethical place to stick your money.

They are indeed one and the same and as well as selling you stuff and taking your money, they’ll also bury you when you’ve shuffled off to the Summerlands. They also turn their hand to campaigning every now and again, and whilst it may seem a long way from the baked bean aisle to the woodlands of the Cree, the Co-op is now helping a First Nation people in a fight to save their environment and ours.

In one corner we have a medley of international oil companies including Shell, Exxon, Total and BP, whilst up against them we have a tribe of about 900 people up in Alberta, Canada. Not so much David taking on Goliath so much as a Smart car taking on a 400 ton dumper truck.

The issue in hand is the exploitation of tar sands, a dirty form of oil that Canada hopes to exploit and sell to its southern rival to help fuel their addiction to oversized cars.

Tar sands contain bitumen, the sticky black stuff that is used to make asphalt. If you dig them out of the ground in industrial quantities and boil them for long enough you can get oil, the sticky black stuff that is used to make money.

The effect on the wildlife can be imagined. Trees are clear cut, the soil is stripped away and vast machines carve our great scars in the ground. Roads carved through the virgin forest stop the caribou from migrating. Tailing ponds of toxic sludge trap migrating birds, and like the raven in the tale above, turn them black - more than 1600 ducks in one tank alone.

For us, separated from our pagan ancestors by hundreds of years and living in a post-industrial landscape that few of them would recognise, a few acres of struggling trees is a forest. For the Woodland Cree, a forest is boreal woodland stretching from coast to coast across a continent broken only by wild rivers. This is the same forest in which their ancestors first told the tales of the Raven and in which the Trickster, in his many guises, still roams.

It’s no surprise then that the Cree aren’t planning to taking this lying down. One nation whose ancestral lands are threatened has led the way. In May 2008 the Beaver Lake Cree Nation released their Kétuskéno Declaration, putting down a line in the oily sand.

The declaration begins “Let it be known that we, the Beaver Lake Cree Nation, are the keepers of the lands”. It continues “We keep this land in honour of our ancestors and on behalf of our future generations, so that as long as the sun shines, the rivers flow and the grass grows, we can continue our traditional way of life. This is the land where we and our future generations will practise our spiritual ways and exercise our rational rights”. You don’t have to have grown up watching cheap westerns to know that that’s fighting talk.

However it‘s not just the Cree Nations who should be worrying about tar sands. Climate Change threatens us all and we need less oil, not more. The extraction of oil from tar sands is one of the most energy intensive industries around. To extract two units of energy from the ground you need to use one unit of energy to boil out the bitumen. This is three times as much as you use to drill for oil the conventional way. It’s probably better for the environment to drive a Land Rover on ordinary petrol than a Mondeo on fuel made from tar sands.

Such is the energy demands of tar sands extraction that there has even been talk of building nuclear reactors up there just to boil the oil out. That’s probably not going to happen, but what is happening is that natural gas, one of the cleanest of fossil fuels, is being piped in to be used to extract one of the dirtiest. If extraction gets into full swing the amount of gas they’ll need would be enough to heat all of Canada’s 12 million homes.

I could go on, but you’ve probably had enough doom and gloom. Hopefully though what separates readers of Pentacle from readers of Fairy and Fetish or other pagan publications is that you want to actually do something about it.

There’s plenty of reasons to support this campaign. Preservation of a real wilderness is one. Helping to fight Climate Change by stopping one of the dirtiest of dirty fuels is certainly another. Then there’s solidarity with a pagan people who genuinely want to be caretakers of the earth. But there is another reason to back this campaign, one that I think trumps all those.

We can win this one.

Tar sands are not having a good year. In January Shell announced it would slow development after a shareholder revolt. Then California, home to more gas guzzlers than any other state and a key market for the oil, announced a series of measures aimed at promoting low carbon fuels. In February BP shareholders launched their own revolt and shortly afterwards Whole Foods, a major US organic food chain, announced it would be boycotting any fuel associated with tar sands.

The campaign against tar sands reads like a gazetteer of environmental groups. Greenpeace Canada have been digger diving at the extraction site, which must be really good fun when the diggers are bigger than your house. Friends of the Earth in this country have been campaigning too. WWF (the panda people, not the wrestlers) have produced a feature length film called Dirty Oil dishing the dirt. And so on. If you want to help, you’re in good company.

Those shareholder resolutions for the BP and Shell Annual General Meetings will be being voted on pretty much as this magazine comes out. If you’re in a pension fund, and you’re quick, you can ask your pension fund manager to vote against tar sands. Money talks, and the £40 billion invested in these companies gives the pension fund managers loud voices.

The Beaver Lake Cree meanwhile are putting their trust in something with the dull sounding name of Treaty Number Six. It was signed in 1876 by someone with the anything-but-dull name of Chief Ko-Pah-A-Wa-Ke-Mum. In return for giving away vast tracts of their land to good old Queen Victoria, the Cree kept the rights to hunt, fish and gather plants and medicines, undisturbed by the Crown.

This is where the Co-op comes in. A fighting fund called The Raven Trust has been set up and the Co-op has dropped a fair chunk of its money into the kitty. This has allowed the Beaver Lake Cree to hire a hot shot lawyer specialising in First Nation cases to fight their case.

Lets wish him all the best and hope he has the cunning of the Raven.

(Pentacle is now in the shops.)

Duel on a Dark Mountain

2010-05-30T02:41:00.000-07:00

Last night I was in Wales, where they are planning for the end of the world.

The event was the Uncivilisation: Dark Mountain Festival, a cultural event that describes itself as a "training camp for the unknown world ahead". The prosperous, industrial civilisation that we know and sometimes love is unsustainable and could be coming to sticky end soon and the environmentalists who are trying to stop this are either desperately optimistic or in serious denial.

Dark Mountain was started a year ago by journalist and Guardian writer Paul Kingsnorth and social networking expert Dougal Hine, and the highlight of the first day of the festival was a debate between Dougal and Guardian columnist George Monbiot. (Guardian environment editor John Vidal was also hanging around and most of those attending the festival appeared to be Guardian readers, so it was all a bit of a Guardian love-in really.)

George had clearly arrived in pugilistic form, perhaps expecting he was being set up as the ritual sacrifice to the Dark Mountain the faithful. Using the polemic tactics with which he has dispatched Ian Plimer and others he put Dougal firmly on the spot for some of the things written in the Dark Mountain prospectus and book.

George has no time for a post-Apocalyptic future where the men have stubble and shotguns and the women wear fur bikinis. If he did he would spend more Saturday nights in Lewisham. The system we are fighting, he told the festival, is more robust than we give it credit for. Oil may peak, but it won't run out, coal seems to be going to last almost forever, and though the biosphere may wither and the climate boil, industrial capitalism will blunder on - unless we do something to stop it, and nihilism and taking to the hills to live solitary and frugal lives in hexayurts will not do that.

Perhaps not since social ecologist Murray Bookchin laid into Earth First! founder Dave Foreman has one strand of the environment movement laid into another. (Okay, I'm forgetting Monbiot laying into David Bellamy, and also Monbiot laying into the CPRE and also....I think I see a pattern here) and for much the same reasons.

Both movements have their roots in Deep Ecology and the writings of Arne Naess, and having been to numerous Earth First! gigs in the 1990s it was easy to see the Dark Mountaineers as EF!ers got a bit middle aged and jaded. Both movements rejected the promise of social democracy to solve the crisis, and both movements at least flirt with primitivism and a return to a simpler age.

All of that is Kryptonite to the approach of Enlightment inspired thinkers like Bookchin and Monbiot. But beyond Monbiot's sound and fury he does appear to be willing to give the Dark Mountaineers a chance. They are after all, by their own admission, a cultural and not a political movement.

Perhaps Monbiot's actions were more significant than his words. As (literal) darkness fell the Dark Mountain literati went into a conspiratorial huddle whilst George let his (metaphorical) hair down and enjoyed the music. Dark Mountain was clearly being warned, but not ignored.

Perhaps what Dark Mountain will become then is a chance for those of us who repeatedly bang our heads against the wall in the hope of making a saner world to pretend for a couple of days that it doesn't matter, that the world will stand or fall without us and that, should it fall, we will survive at least in spirit.

Maybe we should all just put our feet up and enjoy the music occassionally.

RIP New Labour

2010-05-12T11:58:00.000-07:00

A week after John Major's disgraced and discredited government finally shuffled out of office I was being interviewed on a sofa by Davina McCall for the Big Breakfast. I'd just been turfed out of my camp on the proposed site of Manchester Airport's Second Runway and Davina wanted to know what we were going to do next. "Well" I replied, "We've got a new government. Hopefully they'll listen to us and start taking the environment seriously."

Oh how naive I was!

New Labour not only had no intention of stopping new runways in the north of England, they were planning them in the south as too. Jets were good, they made money. But the best jets of all, like the best schools, and the best hospitals, were private ones.

If I had to pick one object that typified where New Labour went wrong it would be the private jet.

Private jets carrying the Master of High Finance around the world to convince us all that Greed is Good and prosperity is round the corner......and private jets taking terror suspects to torture and illegal detention.

When Blair eventually left office he even got is own so he could fly round the world with his message of hope, which included trying to tell the world to take Climate Change serious. Seriously.

When New Labour came into power in 1997 those jets were very bust ferrying people to and from South East Asia as financial turmoil gripped the markets there. New Labour listened to the Masters of High Finance and refused to let the Tiger economies rescue their own banks. "Don't worry, it can't happen here" we were told. Ten years later we are in the same boat as the Indonesians, the Koreans and all the rest.

And what was New Labour doing on the eve of the storm braking? Getting ready to launch a crackdown on Incapacity Benefit. Six months after later sick banks were being handed billions to stave off total disaster. Socialism is alive and well, but only for the rich.

Public finances, already groaning at the cost of privately financed schools, hospital and prisons finally gave up the pretence of being balanced and sank inexorably and terminally into the red.

And so here we are, in debt up to our eyeballs, with two and a half million officially unemployed, a million odd under-employed.

Thirteen wasted years have come to an end and I really can't be bothered to get upset about a Tory PM as it's hard to see how they could be worse.

They've allowed BP to drill for oil in the deep water west of Shetland (and set the Security Services on Greenpeace when they tried to stop this) using technology that has just gone disastrously wrong in Gulf of Mexico. They've tried and fail to get us to grow GM crops, they've planned a new generation of coal fired power stations. So much for putting "the environment at the heart of policy-making."

They've bungled two wars, one of them definitely illegal. They've fluffed electoral reform.

They've ................ gone. That's all that counts.

Now, will you give us the Labour Party back please?