Radio Review: The Price of Sacrifice

BBC Radio Reviews

The Testament of Jesse Lamb

With the death toll from Maternal Death Syndrome rising daily and the world on the brink of disaster, teenager Jessie Lamb becomes convinced she must take action. Her act of heroism could save the human race, but will those closest to her offer their support? Jane Rogers dramatises her award-winning novel in five parts.

In the world of the future, or rather the near future, a case of biological terrorism has unleashed a genetically engineered virus, which has travelled the world. It remains dormant until triggered by pregnancy, whereupon it destroys the pregnant mother’s brain, and as they die, the child. 

The only hope for the human race appears to be the sleeper program. This looks to take young women to be implanted with embryos collected before the virus was released upon the world, placed into an induced coma for the term of the pregnancy, kept alive artificially. For a vaccine has been developed, but it can only be used, on these embryos, before implantation, and cannot save the mother. The children born will, however, be immune.

This then is the moral dilemma of the heart of this story: if you are naturally selfish, the human race will become extinct, as infected human beings become old and die. The only hope lies in the sacrifice of young women. They must die to preserve the future; they must give their lives for their children to be born and survive.

Whereas in the First World War, it was the young men who went off to fight, and who were sacrificed to the war machine, here it is young women who must volunteer to give up their lives so that future generations may live.

This is portrayed in a narrative drama this is very gripping. While at the same time as a sleeper program is going ahead, society is breaking down and falling apart around it. Terrorists groups are attacking any biological research into the virus that uses animals, and it poses the question: which parents would like to see their children sacrificed so that future generations might live? I think that our generation is probably far more selfish in this respect than that of our forebears.

The Road To Normandy

It is 75 years since the D-Day Landings, when Allied forces launched a combined naval, air and land assault on Nazi-occupied France. The Allied landings on the Normandy beaches marked the start of a long and costly campaign to liberate north-west Europe from German occupation.

In The Road To Normandy, Dave has, for 40 years, put behind him the fact that he landed on the Normandy beaches on D-Day. He doesn't remember his comrades with any special affection and has no wish to indulge in memories. But, in June 1984 he goes back to Normandy and faces the ghosts of the past - and one ghost in particular. One in a series of The Road To... plays by actor and writer Douglas Livingstone. Ronald Pickup is Dave, Brenda Blethyn plays Thelma, Mick Ford is Pete, Trevor Nichols as Simon and Douglas Livingstone is Bill. First broadcast on Radio 4 in 1985.

The Road to Normandy is a compelling drama which captures both the return of many veterans in 1985, which I myself remember being also noticeable for the presence of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher on the beaches and graveyards of Normandy. It also backtracks to the date itself and the sheer chaos and fear and courage of that time, as the band we follow come ashore on the beach, desperately make their way to the wall while fellow companions are cut down.

The sheer terror after a journey of sea-sickness, and the rush to get to safe ground to fight, is well captured in the narrative of this play, a time when "all hell broke loose".

At its heart is also a secret, the friend Pete who loses his mind through sheer terror and ends up shooting himself. This is part of the trauma of war, a secret that the protagonist Dave and his comrades keep from the reporter who is present in 1985 and also the Pete’s son who is there to honour his dead father for his bravery and for being a brave and courageous casualty of war. But as Dave's sergeant says, Pete was not a coward, he was just driven out of his mind by terror, and it could have been any one of them who had gone that way. By remaining silent, they honour the fact that he died in the conflict.

The sound effects bring the drama to life, and it is a compelling study of what it was like to experience of D-Day, and also to explain that why veterans gather to salute the dead, they are also disinclined to talk about the more harrowing experiences of that day.

It may have been first broadcast in 1985, but it has lost nothing of its power to bring the listener into the heart of the conflict, and glimpse the sadness of those who survived and lost friends, and who come to terms with the memories of that conflict.

As a recent JEP report shows, this was so true to fact:

"Gripped by fear as deafening bombs exploded and bullets tore past him, killing comrades left and right, Royal Marine Commando George Simms was one of the first on the beaches on D-Day."

"As the ramp dropped on his landing craft, the 20-year-old former butcher’s boy from Manchester gripped his rifle and jumped into the waist-deep sea water as “all hell broke lose” when the enemy opened fire on the beach ahead."

“I don’t honestly think there could ever be a day like that day on D-Day, when we were in action,” Mr Simms said.

“Fear. Fear. Absolute fear. There was nobody brave that day, nobody saying ‘Come on lets go and do it’.”

And yet they did it, even though they knew they might die, for a better future for all of us today.

https://jerseyeveningpost.com/news/uk-news/2019/06/03/there-was-nobody-brave-that-day--d-day-veteran-remembers-storming-the-beaches/

Goodnight from Him: A Review

Goodnight from Him: A Review

This was a Radio 4 comedy drama by Roy Smiles. Smiles has written past plays like this one, in which the central protagonists are real people. He wrote - Ying Tong (the Goons), Pythonesque (Monty Python’s Flying Circus) and Dear Arthur, Love John (Dad’s Army).

This play tells the story, not always in chronological order, of Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker from their beginnings in cabaret and repertory theatre, their first meeting at the bar of the Buckstone Club in 1963 and how they were chosen by David Frost for his new show The Frost Report (alongside John Cleese); it details what Barker calls the “extraordinary luck” of getting their own Saturday night BBC1 series The Two Ronnies in 1971 which ran for 16 years until 1986, topping the ratings, until Barker decided to call it a day and retire (although he was lured out of retirement to play Inch, Churchill’s butler, for one last performance).

We see the differences between the extrovert Corbett, able to ad-lib, and Barker, a shy introvert who needed characters to hide behind, and who also was a workaholic - he managed to find the time to write for the show under the –pseudonym Gerald Wiley. It also shows their great strength was that they broke the mould for comedy pairings – they were not a double act, comedian and straight man, as for instance Morecambe and Wise, Little and Large, Hale and Pace, etc – but rather two actors who did their own shows in between – Barker in Porridge and Open All Hours, and Corbett in Sorry.

One strength is the way in which it brings out Barker the perfectionist, calling it a day on all his series when they were still at their height. There were only three series of Porridge and a few specials. This is something notable about good comedies of the time – Fawlty Towers only had two series, To the Manor Born only had two series, Yes Minister only three, Yes Prime Minister only two - and while Dad’s Army ran and ran, it ended on a high note. More comedies that start on a high and go one and on and on – Are You Being Served, Allo Allo, My Family – run out of steam, and become tired parodies of themselves.

Speaking of parodies – Smiles uses parodies of some of their greatest sketches - Fork Handles, the Rude Man at Party, Mastermind from the Two Ronnies and The Class Sketch from The Frost Report, but I felt that these really did not work well.

A few of the parodies of the sketches came across fairly well, but on the whole, they seemed enormously laboured. The introduction and closure sequences, which involved fake news item jokes, fell particularly flat. The parodies were so bad, they made you see how extraordinarily good the Two Ronnies actually were.

Robert Dawes gave a very passable impression of Ronnie Barker, but Aidan McArdle’s Ronnie Corbett varied in Scottish accent, at some times passably like Corbett, but at others very different

Every so often McArdle reminded me of Tony Hancock’s Joshua Merriweather, of whom Patrick Cargill’s Producer said “It is never the same two performances running” (where Hancock incorporated bits of Welsh and impersonations of Robert Newton's 'Long John Silver'. Then McArdle would pull himself back, and we’d get that somewhat plummy Scots Corbett voice).

Addis with Cleese was more of a generic voice than anything, while James Lance as David Frost had little more than a run through Frost’s cliché’s “Great” “Super, Super, Super”. In fact, hearing those makes me wonder if David Nobbs actually cribbed them from life for his TV show Reginald Perrin – it is entirely possible, as Nobbs wrote for “The Frost Report”.

The bottom line: a genre than Smiles has made his own, if you really want laughs and a lighter touch than the heavy handed parodies, watch the real show. But in between the parodies, some good stuff about the two actors and their working relationship.

Cast
Ronnie Barker - Robert Dawes
Ronnie Corbett - Aidan McArdle
David Frost - James Lance
John Cleese - Matt Addis
Writer - Roy Smiles



Producer Liz Anstee

Archive on 4: This is the Army: A Review

This is the Army: Archive on 4, BBC Radio 4

I’ve been listening to a documentary about this presented by John Barrowman on BBC Radio 4.

In May 1941, ex-Sergeant Irving Berlin, then 53, was on tour at Camp Upton, his old Army base in Yaphank, New York during World War I. There he spoke with the commanding officers, including Capt. A.H. Rankin of Special Services, about restaging his original 1917 Army play, Yip! Yip! Yaphank.

As Laurence Bergreen notes:

“To set the wheels in motion, Berlin called Gen. George Marshall in Washington to propose his new all-soldier show. General Marshall approved Berlin's plan to stage a new morale-boosting revue on Broadway, and the production was under way.”

Berlin's daughter, Mary Ellin Barrett, who was 15 when she was at the opening-night performance of "This is the Army" on Broadway, remembered that when her father, who normally shunned the spotlight, appeared in the second act in soldier's garb to sing "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning," he was greeted with a standing ovation that lasted 10 minutes.

This was put on to boost morale for the war effort, but it did more than that.

Berlin was granted the chance to add African Americans into this play, which he was not allowed to do in Yip, Yip Yaphank. This would not be unconventional for Berlin, but it would be for the United States Army—no whites and African Americans would appear on stage simultaneously.

This was deliberate on his part. He wanted the show to reflect the whole army, not just part of it. As Bergreen notes:

“This extraordinary gesture derived not so much from Berlin's social beliefs as from his show business background and savvy. In the show business milieu, blacks had long been stars, popular with both African-American and white audiences. By integrating the revue, Berlin was simply importing the conventions with which he was familiar into the army.”

“However, he was not blind to appearances; he knew his gesture would at the least be progressive, and probably controversial. But he believed the armed forces were the great leveller in American society. In his youth, he had seen the Great War reduce barriers separating Jewish, German, Irish, and Italian ethnic groups in the United States. Yet blacks had been excluded from this quiet revolution; even in Yip! Yip! Yaphank, the black numbers had been performed by whites in blackface in the manner of a minstrel show.”

Berlin also in insisted on donating the proceeds of the sheet music sales to the army, a move which upset his financial manager Saul Bornstein who could not believe that such a lucrative source of revenue could simply be handed away.

After Broadway, and a special production for Roosevelt in Washington, the musical production went on a national tour. The national tour of the revue ended in San Francisco on February 13, 1943. By that time, it had earned $2 million for the Army Emergency Relief Fund.

A movie was made, and earned $9,555,586.44--a sum that Jack Warner had agreed a trifle reluctantly, donated to Army Emergency Relief.

Then came the foreign tour. The plan, at first, was for the company to play throughout England for three months, after which This Is the Army would be disbanded for good.

It began in London, when it continued at the Palladium, despite on one occasion a possible bomb on the roof, and despite the air raid sirens and blitz. These were, after all, soldiers, and they stayed. So did the audience. After London the revue toured the provinces--Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Belfast--and returned to London to perform for General Eisenhower on February 6, 1944.

Thanks to Berlin complaining to General Eisenhower about the plans to disband, Eisenhower wrote to General Marshall proposing that This Is the Army play to soldiers on all fronts in the field of combat.

They went to North Africa, Italy, Rome, Egypt, Iran, New Guinea. This was a punishing schedule, and Bergreen notes:

“Few theatrical troupes have suffered as many hardships as did the company of This Is the Army, but the beleaguered soldier-actors prevailed through a combination of ingenuity and enthusiasm. Part of the credit belonged to the men themselves, by now welded into a band with a fanatical devotion to their cause, a fanaticism required to survive, and part belonged to Berlin himself, whose indomitable will had made the worldwide tour possible.”

“The overcrowding aboard decrepit ships, inferior food, isolation, constant danger, and lack of women had all subjected the members of the company to an unusual degree of stress. Without Berlin's example of persistence in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, the company would have quickly disintegrated. With it, however, they could be resourceful and tenacious, even when their surroundings mocked their efforts, battered their health, and reduced the show from a Broadway smash to theatre of the absurd.”

And the prejudices returned in that arena. As Anderson recalled: “In the Pacific, they tried to separate the black guys from the rest of the outfit. We had to produce a paper that said, 'General Marshall gives us orders to travel together.' And they listened to us because they didn't want us to go back to General Marshall. So we were not segregated in living quarters, or in eating, or working.”

As Seymour Greene, trombone player recalled when 93: He everyone in the show felt so strongly about it, that if they arrived at a camp, station or city that was segregated, and the African-American cast members were told they would have to sleep and eat separately, the whole cast and crew would join the African-American Soldiers in the “colored” barracks. -

Forgotten now, one thing that struck me with the BBC Radio 4 archive, and those recalling memories from those days, was the amount of racial prejudice. It was clear that Irving Berlin wanted not only to reflect the mix of races in the musical, but to go some way towards breaking down those barriers.

It could only do so much. Onstage, the numbers were racially separated, but backstage, the company lived and worked as a team, regardless of race. Black and white soldiers lived together, worked together, and travelled together–meaning that they all stayed in the same hotels and boarding houses as they travelled around the country.

As Max Wilk, the oldest surviving member of the company explained in a PBS documentary, the show was the first instance of black and white integration in the armed forces. Private Max Wilk served as the advance man for the company, arranging lodging and booking theatres in places where African-Americans were not welcome, and frequently having to produce a “By order of the Secretary of War” letter to secure blocks of rooms for the entire company in the same facility.

Prejudice runs deep, and in Jersey, there is still, I suspect, a submerged degree of xenophobia against the more recent immigrants. Perhaps we need a musical review to bring together and celebrated the different cultures and diversity in our own Island.

Links:
http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1996/summer/irving-berlin-1.html
http://soldiers.dodlive.mil/2013/01/this-is-the-army-mr-greene-2/



http://www.pbs.org/michael-feinsteins-american-songbook/irving-berlin-this-is-the-army.php

In Our Time is 500 next week!

The BBC Radio 4 Blog mentions "In Our Time" coming up to its 500th edition next week.

On 15th October 1998 Melvyn Bragg welcomed listeners to a new Radio 4 programme called In Our Time. "In this series," he said, "I hope we'll look at the ideas and events which have shaped the century." Thirteen years later, on March 10th, IOT will celebrate its 500th edition. The programme has changed quite a bit since those early days. In 2000 it was extended from half an hour to 45 minutes, and the original two guests became three. And the programme's original remit - to look forward to the 21st century by surveying the key ideas of the 20th - seemed a bit passé post-millennium; so Melvyn and his then producer Charlie Taylor came up with the brilliantly simple format that persists, a decade on.

One of the programmes I found interesting was the one on religion and science, where the late Stephen Jay Gould gave a much more nuanced presentation of his Noma idea. Melvin Bragg introduced it:

Melvyn Bragg : Hello, what space should science leave to religion? What ground should religion give to science? Do they need to give ground to each other at all? The American palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould tackles the old problem in his latest erudite and - odd adjective perhaps - charming book "Rock of Ages - Science and religion in the fullness of life" . In it he writes: "Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate or explain these facts. Religion on the other hand, operates in the equally important but utterly different realm of human purposes. In other words science studies how the heaven's go, religion how to go to heaven, the rocks of ages and the age of rocks." But do the two realms really exclude each other?

Now Michael Ruse, in his review of "Rock of Ages", thinks that, with NOMA, Gould is restricting religion to a domain of belief that does not have any place for miracles, for example. He writes:

What about miracles, for instance. Many non-Creationist Christians would argue for a literal resurrection, with a truly dead Jesus being lowered from the Cross and then coming alive again and rising on the Third Day. Can the Magisterium of religion as it were push aside the Magisterium of science and argue that this is possible? Such Christians would argue that since God is creator of all, it is up to Him, not us, to decide the limits of science. And if He wants a literal resurrection, then this must be possible. However Gould makes it clear that this is not his position, and essentially he reduces or confines religion to sentiment and feeling and will not allow it to make ontological (that is, existence) claims.

This stemmed from two of Gould's main statements about "Noma", or non-overlapping Magisteria:

Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values -- subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve. Similarly, while scientists must operate with ethical principles, some specific to their practice, the validity of these principles can never be inferred from the factual discoveries of science.

The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle" -- operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat. . . . NOMA does impose this 'limitation' on concepts of God . . .."

But in fact, in this "In Our Time", possibly because of the unique format, Gould showed a much more relaxed attitude, and is able to explain that religion can have a place for miracles, but that may still does not bring it into conflict with science, because some of those miracles are outside of that domain:

Stephen Jay Gould : But at that point I just very say "alright I don't happen to believe in the immaculate conception of Mary for example", but that's not a scientific question I will leave that to you, to debate whether or not Mary was conceived without sin and free of the taint of Adam, because that's not a question that science can adjudicate in any case.

In this respect, he is very close to Chesterton, who wrote:

How could physical science prove that man is not depraved? You do not cut a man open to find his sins. You do not boil him until he gives forth the unmistakable green fumes of depravity. How could physical science find any traces of a moral fall? What traces did the writer expect to find? Did he expect to find a fossil Eve with a fossil apple inside her? Did he suppose that the ages would have spared for him a complete skeleton of Adam attached to a slightly faded fig-leaf? The whole paragraph which I have quoted is simply a series of inconsequent sentences, all quite untrue in themselves and all quite irrelevant to each other. Science never said that there could have been no Fall. There might have been ten Falls, one on top of the other, and the thing would have been quite consistent with everything that we know from physical science. Humanity might have grown morally worse for millions of centuries, and the thing would in no way have contradicted the principle of Evolution. Men of science (not being raving lunatics) never said that there had been "an incessant rise in the scale of being;" for an incessant rise would mean a rise without any relapse or failure; and physical evolution is full of relapse and failure.

But what of the miraculous itself, such as the Christian idea of Jesus' resurrection:

Stephen Jay Gould : But I think that way about the phenomenon of miracles that is I cannot say as a scientist, that miracles defined technically as suspensions of natural law for a moment don't happen. I suspect they don't, but if they did, I couldn't study them anyway, so I'm going to leave that domain aside. They don't seem to make much of an impact on human history anyway.

Hilary Rose : And prayer?

Stephen Jay Gould : Prayer is the placebo effect, that's one of the most powerful (John laughs) ones we know. I have no doubt that prayer is immensely beneficial for many people, it don't think it changes the character of the world, that can be scientifically adjudicated. But again I would say, for those for whom it is necessary to think that it does, it's outside the realm of science, I'll let them be.

Gould seems to be saying that if miracles, defined as suspensions of natural law - or perhaps as singular anomalies in natural law - exist, then science cannot study them, because they are not repeatable events, which can be tested. He also seems to be taking quite a soft line with regard to prayer, that while he doesn't think it is effecting the natural world, he thinks it is not a testable subject, so "I'll let them be", as he says.

Chesterton considered miracles in his play "Magic", where a conjurer uses magic to change the colour of a light, without any special apparatus or tricks. Because this causes an fervent (and almost Dawkinsian) atheist to suffer a breakdown, because he cannot understand how such a thing could happen, the conjurer takes pity on him. Chesterton argues in the play that if a miracle can have a naturalistic explanation that has the same effect, people will generally prefer the naturalistic to the miraculous:

Conjurer. I am going to tell that poor little lad a lie. I have found in the garden what he did not find in the garden. I have managed to think of a natural explanation of that trick.
Smith. It is much more marvelous to explain a miracle than to work a miracle. What was your explanation, by the way?
Conjurer. I shall not tell you.
Smith. [Starting.] Indeed? Why not?
Conjurer. You would believe it as he believed it. You cannot think [pointing to the lamp] how that trick could be done naturally. I alone found out how it could be done-after I had done it by magic. But if I tell you a natural way of doing it....
Smith. Well?...
Conjurer. Half an hour after I have left this house you will be all saying how it was done.

But perhaps the most interesting part of the In Our Time discussion was at its conclusion, in which Gould commented that both religion and science had the same root - the questioning nature of human beings:

Melvyn Bragg : Can I conclude what for me has been an absorbing discussion by asking Stephen Jay Gould, d'you think it's the same impulse that drives physicists to complete string theory as drives theologians to prove the existence of God?

Stephen Jay Gould : In some very broad sense I suspect it is. We're such a crazy curious species, that's why we're so (indistinct) to do the mostly terrible things to each other, and yet there is this substrate that one can only deem admirable. We are, as Sarvay(?) puts it this little creature, wondering why in the vastness of the heavens we're here and what it's all about and we've got this damnedest desire to find out. Science is a way of finding out in a factual sense. What religion seeks may not be factually resolvable, but it's a similar set of questions. "Why are we here? What's it all about? What can we do? How can we make it better?" that is the most noble part of our nature, and I think we should do everything we can to nurture it, because there's some very ignoble parts as well.

My Dear Children of the Whole World

Vatican City, December 1942. As war rages across the globe, Pope Pius XII prepares to deliver his annual Christmas message. It is perhaps the most important public address he will ever give - and that's why the Pontiff faces the starkest dilemma of his reign. For months beforehand evidence has been growing of a vast, organised genocide of Jews and other races in German-occupied lands. Now the Vatican is coming under increasing pressure to speak out against Nazi atrocities. In private audiences, the British and American ambassadors to the Holy See urge Pius to show moral leadership by explicitly attacking Hitler in his Christmas message. Yet Pius is reluctant to specifically condemn the Holocaust. He is concerned that speaking out risks making things worse. As Pius writes and discards draft after draft of the message, it becomes clear that there are other factors to explain his ambivalence. Europe's future seems to hang in the balance between Nazism and Bolshevism, and it is the latter ideology that he most fears. (1)

The Saturday play on Radio 4 was a fascinating and brilliant look at a moral dilemma. It was set in a murky period in the Church's history, when the British and Americans ambassadors - Sir Francis Osborne (played by Nick Dunning both) and Harold Tittman (Stuart Milligan) wanted Pope Pius to speak out more forcefully about the Nazi treatment of the Jews. One of the the arguments made by the Pope (Hugh Ross) in the play was that he had to be seen to be even-handed with speaking out on issues of justice, and the British bombing of innocent civilians, for example, would also have to be the subject of his talk if he was to speak out forcefully. He argued that to speak out against wartime atrocities in specific detail would mean he would have to speak of the atrocities also committed by the Allies and the Russians. His housekeeper, Mother Pasqualina, fretful over his health, thought he was doing right because he was the Holy Father.

But meanwhile, he is troubled when praying in solitary places by the appearance of a Carmelite nun, Sister Teresia Benedicta, who chides him for not doing enough for the Jews, and whom he asks Monsignor Tardini to find out details. Her appearances are always when he is alone, and the listener is never quite sure whether she is really there or some kind of vision, but she haunts his meditations, asking him to speak out. Yet she has written to the Pope in 1933, when she was forced to resign her post at Münster because of anti-Semitic legislation brought in by the Nazis, and she questions the Pope about why he did not speak out.

As a child of the Jewish people who, by the grace of God, for the past eleven years has also been a child of the Catholic Church, I dare to speak to the Father of Christianity about that which oppresses millions of Germans. For weeks we have seen deeds perpetrated in Germany which mock any sense of justice and humanity, not to mention love of neighbor. For years the leaders of National Socialism have been preaching hatred of the Jews. But the responsibility must fall, after all, on those who brought them to this point and it also falls on those who keep silent in the face of such happenings. Everything that happened and continues to happen on a daily basis originates with a government that calls itself "Christian." For weeks not only Jews but also thousands of faithful Catholics in Germany, and, I believe, all over the world, have been waiting and hoping for the Church of Christ to raise its voice to put a stop to this abuse of Christ's name.(6)

Later, after his Christmas speech - the title of the play - he is devastated by her appearance, her gaunt emaciated figure, her hair shaven, and her ragged clothing. This last appearance, which turns out to be a dream, is her final one. Monsignor Tardini has found out who she was - she was Saint Teresia Benedicta of the Cross, sometimes also known as Saint Edith Stein, a German-Jewish philosopher, who had become a Catholic nun, who had died in the concentration camps for being Jewish.

Ironically, she had fled to the Netherlands, where the the Dutch Bishops' Conference had taken very much the stand that Pius XII had been requested to take. They had ordered a public statement to be read in all the churches of the country on July 20, 1942, condemning Nazi racism. On July 26, 1942, the Reichskommissar of the Netherlands, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, ordered the arrest of all Jewish converts, who had previously been spared, as an act of retaliation for speaking out, and she had been arrested and taken to Auschwitz concentration camp where she was gassed on August 9, 1942, along with her sister Rosa, also a convert. As the Jewish historian Pinchas Lapide sums up:

"The saddest and most thought provoking conclusion is that whilst the Catholic clergy of Holland protested more loudly, expressly and frequently against Jewish persecutions than the religious hierarchy of any other Nazi-occupied country, more Jews - some 11,000 or 79% of the total - were deported from Holland; more than anywhere else in the West."(2)

How does one speak truth to power, when the power in question is capable of marginalising you and retaliating? This is the theme of the play, and it is as pertinent today as it was then. Should one be confrontational, like the Dutch Bishops, or are there other actions which might actually do more good, even if they are seen as being silent in the face of injustice? The question of dealings with China has cropped up, and the morality of doing business with a regime which has a very poor record on human rights. But has America such a good record itself with a foreign policy real politick often designed to protect American interests, rather than justice, and which suspected terrorists can be abducted and tortured? Is Britain so innocent, with a major export being arms sales, nor to terrorists, but often to despotic Middle Eastern regimes?

But this was 1942, and by 1943, the Nazis were on the point of invading the Vatican. Italy had been invaded, and Pius was faced with the choice of how to act when the Nazis could, at any time, take over the Vatican. There is a signed deposition from General Karl Wolff, SS commander for Italy and deputy to Heinrich Himmler, "which states that in September 1943 Adolf Hitler ordered him to develop a plan to invade the Vatican, kidnap the Pope, seize the Vatican assets, and kill the Roman Curia. This plan was to be carried out immediately." The Pope was aware of this, and had made contingency plans, but it meant that any speaking out would risk losing all. Instead, the Vatican moved behind the scenes to save as many Jews as they could.

On September 8, 1943, the Nazis invaded Italy and, suddenly, the Vatican was the local authority. The Nazis gave the Jews 36 hours to come up with 50 kilograms of gold or else the Nazis would take 300 hostages. The Vatican was willing to loan 15 kilos, an offer that eventually proved unnecessary when the Jews obtained an extension for the delivery. Pius XII knew that Jewish deportations from Italy were impending. The Vatican even found out from SS First Lieutenant Kurt Gerstein the fate of those who were to be deported. Publicly, the Pope stayed silent. Privately, Pius did instruct Catholic institutions to take in Jews. The Vatican itself hid 477 Jews and another 4,238 Jews were protected in Roman monasteries and convents.(3)

The Israeli consul, Pinchas E. Lapide, in his 1967 book, commented that: ""Any words of Pius XII, directed against a madman like Hitler, would have brought on an even worse catastrophe... [and] accelerated the massacre of Jews and priests."

But could the Pope have done more? He had seen how speaking out against the Nazis provoked reactions, and perhaps thought that he could do more without losing his authority and being directly confrontational. He was also well aware that the Soviet forces, if they overran Europe, would also have a policy of exterminating Christianity, as he had seen since the Russian revolution:

The Pope's reaction to the Holocaust was complex and inconsistent. At times, he tried to help the Jews and was successful. But these successes only highlight the amount of influence he might have had, if he not chosen to remain silent on so many other occasions. No one knows for sure the motives behind Pius XII's actions, or lack thereof, since the Vatican archives have only been fully opened to select researchers. Historians offer many reasons why Pope Pius XII was not a stronger public advocate for the Jews: A fear of Nazi reprisals, a feeling that public speech would have no effect and might harm the Jews, the idea that private intervention could accomplish more, the anxiety that acting against the German government could provoke a schism among German Catholics, the church's traditional role of being politically neutral and the fear of the growth of communism were the Nazis to be defeated (2)

In the end, he made a Christmas speech:

Christmas Message of 1942.
My Dear Children of the Whole World:

As the Holy Christmas Season comes round each year, the message of Jesus, Who is light in the midst of darkness, echoes once more from the Crib of Bethlehem in the ears of Christians and re-echoes in their hearts with an ever new freshness of joy and piety. It is a message which lights up with heavenly truth a world that is plunged in darkness by fatal errors. It infuses exuberant and trustful joy into mankind, torn by the anxiety of deep, bitter sorrow. It proclaims liberty to the sons of Adam, shackled with the chains of sin and guilt. It promises mercy, love, peace to the countless hosts of those in suffering and tribulation who see their happiness Shattered and their efforts broken in the tempestuous strife and hate of our stormy days

with that, is the condemnation of communism:

Always moved by religious motives, the Church has condemned the various forms of Marxist Socialism; and she condemns them today, because it is her permanent right and duty to safeguard men from currents as thought and influences that jeopardize their external salvation. But the Church cannot ignore or overlook the fact that the worker in his efforts to better his lot, is opposed by a machinery which is not only not in accordance with nature, but is at variance with God's plan and with the purpose He had in creating the goods of earth.

and in that speech, carefully coded, without naming the Jews, he came as close as he felt able to mention their extermination by the Nazi war machine:

hundreds of thousands who through no fault of their own, and solely because of their nation or race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction.

Could he have said more? As it was, there were complaints about that sentence from both sides - the Allies who didn't think it went far enough, and the Axis powers who thought it said too much. Moreover, the Pope was aware that Mussolini could quickly shut off electrical power to Vatican Radio during any broadcast. In fact, two days after Hitler became Chancellor, the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer gave a radio talk which focused on the difference between a leader ("Führer") and a mis-leader ("Verführer"). He was cut-off in mid-sentence. This is the lesson that Pius was painfully aware of: those who were in a position of power, can easily act as bullies to silence anyone who which might challenge their authority, and use the whole propaganda machine of the State to destroy them.

And yet, if the Nazis had won though, how long would it have been before they would have destroyed the Church. Perhaps, as Martin Niemöller noted, there must be a time and a place to speak out:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out --
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out --
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out --
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me -- and there was no one left to speak for me.

Links
(1) http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00y1vxw
(2) http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/piusdef.html
(3) http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/pius.html
(4) http://www.zenit.org/rssenglish-29380
(5) http://www.ewtn.com/library/papaldoc/p12ch42.htm
(6) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Stein#cite_note-2
(7) http://users.binary.net/polycarp/piusxii.html
(8) http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007392

God's President: Mugabe of Zimbabwe

"We know the size of the world we know the total extent. Africa is still lying ready for us it is our duty to take it. It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race more of the best the most human, most honourable race the world possesses." (Cecil Rhodes, "Confession of Faith", 1877)

I've just been catching up on my listening, and have heard the excellent play "God's President: Mugabe of Zimbabwe", which was broadcast in early December. It was a Friday Play specially commissioned by Radio 4 to mark the 30th anniversary year of the Independence of Zimbabwe:

Kwame Kwei-Armah's play tells the story of the tense negotiations around the Lancaster House Conference, and the road to Zimbabwe's Independence.

On 4th March 1980 the Shona majority in Rhodesia was decisive in electing Robert Mugabe to head the first post-independence government as Prime Minister. Six weeks later, on April 18th, Zimbabwe celebrated its first Independence Day. On the 21st December 1979, following three months of talks, the Lancaster House Agreement finally brought independence to Rhodesia following Ian Smith's Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965. Margaret Thatcher's government had invited Bishop Muzorewa and Ian Smith, and the leaders of the Patriotic Front, led by Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe to participate in a Constitutional Conference at Lancaster House in London, to be chaired by the foreign secretary, Lord Carrington.

The purpose of the Conference was to discuss and reach agreement on the terms of an Independence Constitution, and to ensure that elections should be supervised under British authority to enable Rhodesia to proceed to legal independence and the parties to settle their differences by political means.

Robert Mugabe....Lucian Msamati
Edgar Tekere...Danny Sapani
Bishop Muzorewa ...Chuk Iwuji
Lord Carrington ...Richard Cordery
Robin Renwick ...Tony Bell
Joshua Nkomo ...Jude Akuwudike
Ian Smith ...William Gaminara
Sir Shridath Ramphal...Kwame Kwei-Armah
Kenneth Kaunda.. .Ben Onwukwe
Bob Marley ... Lloyd Thomas
With Sean Baker, David Seddon, Alison Pettit
Directed by Jeremy Mortimer.

The play was focused on the events at Lancaster House, but also had time for flashbacks, in order to let us see the background of Robert Mugabe, and how he come from a background where he had witnessed the slaughter of men, women and children under the oppressive regime of Ian Smith. It explained why he was suspicious of Lord Carrington, and why he was so focused on releasing his people from what he saw as a paternalistic colonial regime under which they had be second class citizens. The struggle had been a violent one, and its escalation - coupled with trade sanctions by Britain against Ian Smith's government in Rhodesia impacted on the economies of neighbouring countries, so that Kenneth Kaunda of neighbouring Zambia was also putting pressure on Mugabe to resolve the situation.

The story ends with independence, and a new hope for the country, as it symbolically loses the colonial name of Rhodesia and become reborn as Zimbabwe. But, as Lord Carrington says in the play, no one knows what the future might bring. In the event, Zimbabwe moved steadily towards a dictatorial police state. In a way, the story of Mugabe coming to power, and then using the same kind of repressive apparatus as Ian Smith to maintain his power, is akin to that of a victim of child abuse, who himself grows up to be a child abuser.

How does President Robert Mugabe see himself? In 2009, he saw himself as a hero rather than a dictator:

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, in a rare interview, depicted himself as an African hero battling imperialism and foreign attempts to oust him rather than the widespread perception of a dictator clinging to power at the expense of the welfare of his people and country. The 85-year-old Mugabe, the only leader of Zimbabwe since it became independent from Britain in 1980, rejected repeated assertions by CNN's Christiane Amanpour that his policies have driven the nation once known as Africa's breadbasket to virtual economic collapse. Instead, Mugabe accused Britain and the United States of seeking to oust him by imposing economic sanctions, the effects of which he said were worsened by years of drought. He denied that his country is in economic shambles, saying it grew enough food last year to feed all its people, and defended policies that have driven white farmers off their land as properly restoring that land to indigenous Africans.

"The land reform is the best thing (that) could have ever have happened to an African country," said Mugabe, a former revolutionary leader who came to power when white-ruled Rhodesia became black-ruled Zimbabwe. "It has to do with national sovereignty."

"You don't leave power when imperialists dictate that you leave," he insisted. "There is regime change. Haven't you heard of (the) regime change program by Britain and the United States that is aimed at getting not just Robert Mugabe out of power but get Robert Mugabe and his party out of power?"(1)

Mugabe clearly still frames any criticism of his regime through the filter of "imperialist interference", and has called South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu a "little man" who "doesn't know what he's talking about". On the subject of white-owned farms, he argued that this was restoring what had been stolen by colonial rule:

"Zimbabwe belongs to the Zimbabweans, pure and simple. They [white settlers] occupied the land illegally. They seized the land from our people." "They are British settlers," he said, later calling them "citizens by colonization, seizing land from original people, indigenous people of the country."(1)

But what is indigenous? There can be no doubt that the while settlers did take over the country, and Cecil Rhodes saw it almost in terms of a divine duty. Yet the country has seen many waves of settlers, and some significant ones altered the make up of the country by also coming in and taking over from the indigenous natives of that time.

It appears that Kalanga speaking societies first emerged in the middle Limpopo valley in the 9th century before moving on to the Zimbabwean highlands. The Zimbabwean plateau eventually became the center of subsequent Kalanga states. The Mapungubwe were the first migrants to this area from South Africa. They spoke Bantu, and inhabited the Great Zimbabwe site from about AD 1000 displacing earlier Khoisan people.

These peoples settled and merged with the native population, and were first termed the Shona in the 1920s.

The Shona gradually developed gold and ivory trade with the coast, and by the mid-15th century had established a strong empire, with its capital at the ancient city of Zimbabwe. This empire, known as Munhumutapa, split by the end of the century, the southern part becoming the Urozwi Empire, which flourished for two centuries.(2)

It is from the time of the Shona empires that we get the word "zimbabwe": Zimbabwe - a word in Shona, the local Bantu language, meant literally "stone houses', and these became the characteristic dwellings of chieftains. Around 100 hilltop ruins survive, of which the most famous and impressive is the group known as Great Zimbabwe. In the 13th century this location succeeds the Mapungubwe as the main centre of Shona power.

But the most significant change came just before the colonial West made its mark on Africa, when another displaced people came and conquered. These were a tribal group of warriors and cattle-breeders - the Ndebele - who easily subdue the agricultural Shona.

In 1834, the Ndebele people arrived while fleeing from the Zulu leader Shaka, making the area their new empire, Matabeleland. In 1837-38, the Rozwi Empire along with other Shona states were conquered by the Ndebele, who arrived from south of the Limpopo and forced them to pay tribute and concentrate in northern Zimbabwe.(3)

By the time the British began arriving in the mid-19th century, the Shona people had long been subjected to slave raids. The once-powerful Urozwi Empire had been destroyed in the 1830s by the Ndebele, who, under Mzilikaze, had fled from the Zulus in South Africa.(4)

The Ndebele were, in turn, displaced by the British colonists.

After the decline of Great Zimbabwe, which had begun in the 13th century, the fragmented Shona tribes allied themselves and created the Rozwi state and encompassed over half of present day Zimbabwe. This state lasted until 1834 when it was invaded by Ndebele warriors and came under the rule of Lobengula. Lobengula soon found himself having to deal with Cecil Rhodes and the British South Africa Company (BSAC) and signed a contract giving up mineral rights to his land in exchange for guns, ammunition and money.(5)

But it is against this background of different ethnic groups that the internal dissent between Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe can be understood:

Following independence, Zimbabwe initially made significant economic and social progress, but internal dissent became increasingly evident. The long-simmering rivalry erupted between Mugabe's dominant ZANU-Patriotic Front Party, which represented the majority Shona ethnic groups, and Nkomo's ZAPU, which had the support of the minority Ndebele.(6

Who has claim to land? What is the "native title" to land? At what point does claim to a land become "ancestral"?

Was it the Khoisan people who were displaced by the Shona?
Was it the Shona who were displaced by the Ndebele?
Was it the Ndebele who were displaced by the White Settlers?

By not really considering the problem of how to resolve land rights in a peaceful and equitable manner, the Lancaster House agreement laid up trouble for the future. Moreover, by framing the issue in terms of colonialism by Robert Mugabe, the broader nature of the question of indigenous rights is thereby avoided. But the same kind of land grab that took place after Rhodes has happened elsewhere in Africa and across the world, where tribal groups are displaced by other governments. For example, in Kenya:

Violations of land rights, including the rights of the generations of Kenyans displaced through historic and recent evictions, are one of the key unresolved issues in Kenya, which former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan acknowledged in the aftermath of Kenya's electoral violence in 2007-2008

In the last decade there have been several attempts at comprehensive land reform that would allow for final and fair determination of land ownership and create a system to restore land to those unlawfully evicted or to compensate them...While the adoption by the government of a new land policy in August 2009 marks a significant step forward, it still needs to be translated into effective protection on the ground for Kenya's most marginalized.(6)

In Botswana:

Botswana's Government must step up efforts to tackle the challenges faced by many indigenous communities, such as land rights, according to a new report by a United Nations independent expert.(7)

And in Peru:

President Alan Garcia of Peru has refused to sign a law that would give indigenous people more power to stop oil and mining projects on their lands. The law was approved by Congress, but Mr Garcia said he could not let indigenous communities stop development that would benefit all Peruvians. (8)

And Nicaragua

Since the early 1990s, Awas Tingni community members had experienced increasing incursions into areas they consider to be theirs, most dramatically in the form of a government concession of logging rights to a multinational company. They pursued remedies inside Nicaragua to no avail.(9)

What is happening is that the claim of subsidiary group of peoples native to a locality is put aside in place of national interests, and this leads to conflict over the land rights. This is an issue which is gradually being resolved in by international legal judgments in favour of smaller ethnic tribal groups, where the incursions of governments are relatively recent, and the identification of the group can be particularly clear in terms of culture and genetic identity, but the problem remains, and Robert Mugabe's framing of the narrative purely in terms of colonial domination only creates a blind spot and a dead end.

Links
(1) http://zimbabweblackbook.wordpress.com/2009/09/25/mugabe-denies-blame-for-zimbabwe-woes/
(2) http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/Africa/Zimbabwe-HISTORY.html#ixzz1BWkXqJRK
(3) http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ad28
(4) http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/Africa/Zimbabwe-HISTORY.html#ixzz1BWkeaxlo
(5) http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/Africa/Zimbabwe-HISTORY.html#ixzz1BWknVqGX
(6) http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2010/02/04/kenya-landmark-ruling-indigenous-land-rights
(7) http://www.allvoices.com/news/5300180-botswana-un-turns-attention-to-indigenous-land-rights-in-country
(8) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10399962
(9) https://segue.southwestern.edu/userfiles/ANT3520301-f08/Hale%20Activist%20Research.pdf

Industrial Disputes

"Ask yourselves - What can upset Hari Seldon's careful scheme of history, eh?" He peered from one to the other with a mild, questioning anxiety. "What were Seldon's original assumptions? First, that there would be no fundamental change in human society over the next thousand years. "For instance, suppose there were a major change in the Galaxy's technology, such as finding a new principle for the utilization of energy, or perfecting the study of electronic neurobiology. Social changes would render Seldon's original equations obsolete. But that hasn't happened, has it now?" (Foundation and Empire, Isaac Asimov)

In the first of two programmes, Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Industrial Revolution. Between the middle of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth, Britain was transformed. This was a revolution, but not a political one: over the course of a few generations industrialisation swept the nation. Inventions such as the machine loom and the steam engine changed the face of manufacturing; cheap iron and steel became widely available; and vast new cities grew up around factory towns.

All this had profound effects - not all of them positive - as an agrarian and primitive society was turned into an industrial empire, the richest nation on Earth. But why did this revolution take place here rather than abroad? And why did it begin in the first place?

Jeremy Black - Professor of History at the University of Exeter
Pat Hudson - Professor Emerita of History at Cardiff University
William Ashworth - Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Liverpool. (1)

This programme was something of a first, it went out live, so that Melvin Bragg's newsletter was written before the programme began. In it, he asked:

"And then there's this great Industrial Revolution. I wonder what they're going to say? In the briefings and the extracts that I've read, there is a tendency to play down the contribution of individuals. There is talk of how the colonial possessions of Britain gave it a flying start. Of how the slave trade brought in goods which plumped the economy and the Indian textile industry fed, and was fed by, Britain in protectionist and unfair ways. There is talk about mercantile nexus. On it goes. With some historians it's a bit of a fight to foreground individuals. All is flow. Perhaps I'm being unfair. One of the pleasures of this programme is to have your own ideas and find them expertly proved to be wrong when you hit the air at 9:02." (Melvin Bragg) (2)

Poor Melvin. There must have been blood on the Green Room carpet afterwards. He innocently asked the question about the main factors behind the industrial revolution, and was pounced on by Professor Pat Hudson, who not only criticised the role of individuals, but also accused him, in a heated discussion, of being racist when he asked if individuals had no part to contribute in the shaping of the industrial revolution:

Bragg: Pat, what were the 3 main causes of the Industrial Revolution?

Hudson: "We must get away from the idea that the Industrial Revolution was caused by a wave of gadgets or by a peculiar inventive ability of British science or scientists-"

Bragg: Why?? WHY?? You are not giving this fair due in my mind-Why must we get away from it? People invent stuff, they made things, this made things happen and you keep denying it.

Bragg: ..."Oh its all to do with the broad sweep of history". Listen people invented things that hadn't been there before which enabled things to happen that had not happened before.

Hudson: Can I say that that really does characterise nationalistic accounts of the period with a peculiar sort of emphasis on British genius or.

Bragg: I didn't say that!

Hudson: "Or the superiority of the British as a race, this characterises some really almost racist accounts of the Industrial Revolution."

Bragg: Hold on! When you start talking about my arguments as racist-that's really not on!

Of course, Professor Hudson is well known for downplaying the part of individuals and technology. In her article in BBC History Magazine, no doubt also a summary of her book on the subject, the reader will look in vain for any mention of entrepreneurial or engineering genius:

For a few decades in the 19th century British manufactured goods dominated world trade. Most mass manufactured items were produced more efficiently and competitively in Britain than elsewhere. She also had the commercial, financial and political power to edge out rivals at home and abroad. In some industries, most notably textiles, massive changes took place in technology and in the organisation of production causing dramatic productivity growth. This in turn brought a steep decline in prices. In many other sectors more modest organisational improvements coupled with greater specialisation and the employment of cheap labour brought similar, though less dramatic, results. An unprecedented range and variety of products thus came within the grasp of a new mass market both within Britain and overseas. No other country could at first compete so Britain became the workshop of the world.

This is the "lucky geography" argument that is becoming increasingly prevalent in today's history. A society becomes dominant because it has the resources available, whether in agriculture, or natural resources such as coal, which can hence be exploited more readily than in other societies, and so that society steals a march on others.

There is also what C.P. Snow called a "Tolstoyan" idea of history. Snow suggested that there were two competing ideas in historical explanation. One was the Tolstoyan one, that individuals didn't really matter, so that if one individual had not come up with an idea or invention, or done something important, someone else would have done pretty much the same thing. A good example from the field of science is the calculus, which was independently invented by both Newton and Leibniz. Again, both Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace were thinking along the same lines about evolution. But Snow saw that there were exceptions. On Einstein, he commented that:

As with Rutherford, as with most scientists, if Einstein had never lived, most of his work would soon have been done by someone else, and in much the same form. He said himself that that was true of the special theory of relativity. But, when he generalised the special theory so as to include the gravitational field, he did something that might not have been done for generations: and, above all, might not have been done that way. It might, some good theoreticians have suggested, have ultimately been done in a way easier for others to handle. It remains an extraordinary monolith, like a Henry Moore sculpture, which he alone could have constructed. (CP Snow, Variety of Men)

The "Churchillian" notion of history sees it as driven by individuals who seize the moment, rather than a general background of forces; it is these individuals who change the world. As can be seen from Snow's account, history can in many ways be understood best on Tolstoy's terms, but the Churchillian people do exist, and do make changes. Whoever was President in the White House would have probably ordered the atomic bomb to be used against Japan. Germany might well have headed towards dictatorship and war regardless of who was the dictator in charge. But individuals also make a difference - another dictator in Germany more in the mould of Mussolini, or Stalin, or Franco, might not have put in place a genocidal policy to destroy the Jews.

Moreover, with her decrying of a "wave of gadgets", Professor Hudson nevertheless brings in the same gadgets, minus inventors, by the back door:

The period from the late 18th century to the mid-Victorian years witnessed a major shake up and change in both the economy and society. This was seen in the organisation and finance of industry and commerce, the skills and work practices of production and technology, massive population growth and urbanisation and the development and disciplining of labour. Canal, river, road and sea transport were all greatly improved. From the 1840s, railways revolutionised the speed of communication and the transport of passengers and, more gradually, freight.

If the steam engine is not a "gadget", I don't know what is. Moreover, while canals could move freight around more easily and faster than the bad and almost unusable roads of the time, the railway could move freight around at huge speeds. With the invention of the telegraph (another gadget), communication also changed beyond recognition. The gadgets also changed the way society worked - time became centralised and standardised because of the railways. Wars also changed - the problems with supply lines could be radically altered, and far more cheaply than any other means of transport.

Now it is possible to take the Tolstoyan view, and say the time was ripe for these inventions, and if one person had not invented one, someone else might have done so. Nonetheless, the "gadgets" and their inventors also fed back into the industrial revolution, especially as entrepreneurs saw the opportunities provided by inventions. Taking Professor Hudson's point, the background culture had also to be ripe for such change - what she didn't cite, but might have done, was that earlier steam engines, such as that described by Hero of Alexandria, or the those mentioned by Taqi al-Din in 1551 and developed by Giovanni Branca in 1629 never saw any practical use.

The steam engine didn't come out of nowhere either - Papin's digester, a steam pressure cooker for extracting fats from bones by high pressure steam used a steam-release valve, which was to prove essential in the later development of the steam engine. But it was Newcomen and Watt who developed the steam engine as such, and Watt, more than Newcomen, applied scientific concepts rather than just existing technology to improve the engine, and also saw the economic potential of a massively improved design. 80% of the steam used by the Newcomen engine was wasted. Humphrey Gainsborough had also similar ideas to Watt, but did not have the commercial nous to exploit the market for such engines.

Likewise, in a different field, George Stephenson and Humphrey Davy both had similar ideas for a mining safety lamp, and Stephenson was actually accused by Davy of stealing Davy's ideas, although this was proven to be unfounded. The designs were different, but worked on the same principle, of letting air into the lamp by tiny holes.

But the importance of the "gadget" can most clearly be seen in the invention of the wheel. No one knew who invented the wheel, yet its use in transport and farming was of immense importance, so that the knowledge of the technology spread rapidly, but not to South America, where no such invention was ever made. Geography does play an important role here, but it is hindering the dissemination of technological knowledge, rather than anything "lucky" about geographical resources.

Moreover, the suppression of knowledge can also play a part. If it hadn't been for the Reformation, which aided significantly by the printing press (another gadget), Europe would have been under the sway of a Catholicism wedded to Aristotelian ideas about the universe, and resistant to any changes. How long it would taken for astronomy to have changed is debatable, but the freer movement of ideas after the Reformation undoubtedly contributed to scientific advances. The Reformation led to a culture in which there were more scientific geniuses outside of the domain of Catholicism not because of any racial superiority, but definitely because of a culture of freedom. This could be described as "uniquely Reformation". In a similar way, British non-conformist culture definitely provided more non-University educational opportunities for self-taught individuals, and more opportunities for inventors to get commercial exploitation of labour saving inventions.

Returning to Professor Hudson's remarks on the industrial revolution not occurring because of the "peculiar inventive ability of British science or scientists". I can agree more with this remark, because the Royal Society actually played little part in the industrial revolution. George Stephenson was self-taught. Watt was working as an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow. The main inventors seem to have been outside the mainstream of the scientific community. But perhaps this should be considered in more detail. Why were the inventors mostly outside the scientific establishment? Why were there no major inventions coming from there? Why were there such opportunities for creative inventors?

It can also be argued that there are two parts to the industrial revolution. One comes with improvements such as Hagreave's spinning jenny, which was a technological advance, a labour saving device, but not one which changed the basic operations in textiles, which were still functioning by manpower. The other comes with the introduction of automatic mechanical power, such as we find in steam engines and railways.

The first kind of improvement introduces a new gadget, but the second introduces a real revolution in how - in terms of physics - "work" is done - taking it from manpower to automation. It was these "power gadgets" that made the Industrial revolution quite unlike any other development, and changed the demographics, the way of working, the marking of time, and made a fundamental change in human society quite unlike any other, so that in around one hundred years, there was a seismic shift from 80% of the population working on the land to 80% working in the cities.

Once they arrived, the "power gadgets" began a process of change which is still with us today, which is why I see this as the critical tipping factor in the Industrial revolution, marking it out from other changes, and making it qualitatively different (provided the sources of energy are not consumed) and why I begin with the quote from Asimov - "suppose there were a major change in the technology"

The ideological agenda which ignores this change is misguided. When Professor Hudson uses a washing machine, or turns on an electrical gadget, I hope she reflects on the fundamental change in society that "power gadgets" have brought about, and how they set in motion an impetus for change and better gadgets that is with us still. We are still struggling to understand and cope with the environmental and ethical problems brought about by that change.

Links
(1) http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wqdc7
(2) http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio4/2010/12/the_industrial_revolution_and_the_in_our_time_puppy.html
(3) http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/workshop_of_the_world_01.shtml

A Taxing Dilemma

BBC Radio 4's documentary programme looked this week at tax matters, and in particular, how large corporations manage to re-arrange their corporate structure to avoid paying tax.

While the government axes public spending to try to cut the deficit, Michael Robinson investigates loopholes which let big businesses slash their UK tax bills. This month George Osborne said he plans to make Britain the most attractive corporate tax regime in the G20. But some companies have already moved abroad for tax reasons. And for others able to operate on a global scale, there are many ways for them to reduce their tax liability. So how does the Government square the tax circle?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00vhgpl/File_on_4_A_Taxing_Dilemma/

Surprisingly, there was little about offshore jurisdictions. The main problems came from variable tax regimes within the European Union, and the fact that European law trumps British tax law.

In the Republic of Ireland, for example, there are offices where the name plates bear reference to subsidiaries of UK companies but where the companies themselves are simply wealth holding companies. All they hold is money - they have no fixed assets, no employees, and while they have to have directors, the directors receive no remuneration. In essence, they are empty shells, a channel for profits, and yet any tax they would pay is levied at Irish corporation tax rates, and not British ones, which are higher.

The UK had sought to stop this loophole, by means of the CFC (Control of Foreign Company Rules) which declared that companies who structured their corporation to avoid paying UK tax would still be caught in the net - it declared that profits would be applicable at UK corporation tax rates where there were "wholly artificial arrangements intended to escape the [UK] tax normally payable".

The UK therefore decided to pursue this in the case of Cadbury Schweppes:

The position of Cadbury Schweppes Cadbury Schweppes had set up two subsidiaries in Ireland to raise finance and provide that finance to other subsidiaries in the Cadbury Schweppes group. The Irish profits were subject to tax at 10 per cent under the rules then applicable to companies established in the International Financial Services Centre in Dublin. It was agreed by the parties that the set up in Ireland was to enable the profit from the intra-group financing transactions to benefit from the low tax regime in Ireland.(1)

The arguments centred around the "motive" of the company, which is a notoriously difficult area for anything to be proven. The UK argued that the company was subject to CFC rules and should pay UK tax, Cadbury Schweppes maintained it was just part of a general corporate strategy with no particular intent to avoid paying UK tax:

In its written statement to the ECJ before the case was heard the UK Government put forward the proposition that the Irish subsidiaries were solely incorporated to avoid UK taxation and the activities were superfluous to the group's commercial business. Cadbury Schweppes maintained that it had incorporated the Irish subsidiaries to conduct a commercial business of raising and lending money. (1)

The EU courts decision was that any tax avoidance structure had to be shown to be one set up with "wholly artificial arrangements" and the CFC rules would not apply if it could be shown "that controlled company is actually established in the host Member State and carries on genuine economic activities there". Otherwise this would be contradictory to EU law, and a restriction on intra-EU free movement. Clearly, despite to all intents and purposes, there being no operations in the Cadbury Schweppes arrangements in Ireland, the Court accepted that it was set up to "conduct a commercial business of raising and lending money", and therefore the ruling was that the CFC rules could not apply.

The same situation arise with Vodaphone and Luxembourg in 1999:

There are always a number of twists and turns to these UK/ECJ cases and Vodafone is no exception. The case centres around the takeover of Mannesmann in Germany by Vodafone in 1999 and, in particular, the establishment of a subsidiary in Luxembourg which owned the European sub-subsidiary companies in Europe and lent money to those sub-subsidiaries and, in return, earned interest on the loans. The UK Revenue argued that the interest income of the Luxembourg subsidiary should be treated as if it had been received by the UK parent company under the then CFC legislation (2)

But once more this was challenged in the Courts, on the basis of the previous ruling, effectively saying that member states could not interfere in the tax regimes of other member states, and that a company had its own freedoms:

The objective of freedom of establishment is to allow a Community national (including a company) to participate on a stable and continuing basis, in the economic life of another Member State. (2)

The Court of Justice in its judgement yet again provided a reminder to national courts that they are obliged to interpret domestic legislation in a manner consistent with Community law. The treaty is directly effective and supreme over domestic law. (2)

The Court reminded us that it is settled case law that the fact that a taxpayer sought to benefit from a tax advantage provided by another Member State does not deprive them of the right to have their freedoms protected.(2)

What this means, essentially, is that while low corporation tax regimes outside the EU may be subject to challenge, tax competition within the EU could not be subject to the same kind of challenge. It is a major headache which is still present within the UK, as more companies seek to minimise UK corporation tax by restructuring their tax systems to take advantage of the ruling, and billions are lost in UK revenue.

As a result - and this will be familiar to Jersey readers - the UK is facing increasing pressure to increase taxes on that part of its tax intake that cannot be restructured abroad - namely domestic taxes - duties on drink, tobacco and petrol - widening the social security payments (essentially starting to function as a payroll tax) - and increasing VAT, as well as cutting back on benefits expenditure.

This targets the home population, who cannot so easily avoid the tax, and it is almost a mirror image of Jersey's solutions to its zero / ten regime.

But the Cadbury Schweppes ruling has other implications for Jersey. Jersey's Comptroller of Taxes has a very similar clause against tax avoidance schemes in Jersey tax law, but if a corporation structured its system to hold profits elsewhere without direct Jersey shareholdings - ostensibly to "conduct a commercial business of raising and lending money", but at an effective tax rate less than the 20% on local shareholders, Jersey could face a real challenge in proving that its rules applied. Whether it is commercially viable yet is debatable, but in principle the opportunity may yet arise. Of course any dividends or funds that eventually ended up back with Jersey residents from the corporate group would be taxed at 20%, but in the meantime, potentially taxable revenue would be outside the Jersey tax system.

Clearly the move to seek tax harmonisation within the EU would go some way to correcting these anomalies, as the situation as it stands is leading to a "race to the bottom", with the money moving to areas within the EU where it is least taxed. But this is unlikely to happen while EU countries such as Ireland are struggling to cope with the world economic downturn:

Dublin's favourable tax regime for big corporations - currently only 12.5 percent - will remain "a cornerstone of Irish industrial policy," a spokesman for the ministry of finance told Dow Jones news wire. His comments came after the American Chamber of Commerce in Ireland urged Prime Minister Brian Cowen to "categorically rule-out" EU pressure on corporate tax. "We have to realise that we are still way out of line in terms of our cost competitiveness, and Ireland's competitive corporation tax rate is one of the few competitive advantages we have" (3)

EU officials have frequently raised the issue of greater tax harmonisation in Europe, with a recent report by ex-commissioner Mario Monti identifying tax divergences as a damaging factor to the internal market. (3)

It is ironic that it is not (for once) offshore "tax havens" that are causing most disruption, but the way in which tax regimes and competition operate with in the EU itself.

Links
(1) www.icaew.com/index.cfm/route/142022/icaew_ga/en/Technical_and_Business_Topics/Faculties/News/Cadbury_Schweppes_and_the_UK_CFC_rules__The_ECJ_Judgment
(2) http://www.accountancyireland.ie/Archive/2006/December-2006/Cadbury-Schweppes--Is-it-really-the-Tonic-Irish-Revenue-Ordered/
(3) http://euobserver.com/19/30950

Britain's Abandoned Homes

An empty dwelling that is left unoccupied is a wasted asset for the owner and for someone in need of housing. If it is not maintained, it will, over time, begin to impact on its surroundings and is at risk from being broken into by vandals and squatters. The only effective way to reduce the negative impact of an empty dwelling is to occupy it. (Basingstoke Council Website)

Jolyon Jenkins investigates the scandal of the million houses standing empty. With five million people on housing waiting lists the government is keen to get them back into use. This is not about second homes, or holiday homes. This is about the empty houses to be found in almost every neighbourhood - the run-down or derelict house that sticks out like a sore thumb. These buildings blight communities, attract crime and devalue neighbouring property. Potential family homes are standing empty despite the chronic housing shortage, which has got dramatically worse since the recession. House building rates have virtually collapsed and unoccupied houses are becoming a political hot potato. We investigate the reasons for the empty homes crisis in this country, focusing on properties in Bristol. Jolyon Jenkins talks to the owners, both developers and private individuals, to ask why it is that so many have been standing empty for years, and what it would take to get them lived in again. (1)

This was a fascinating Radio 4 program which interviewed various people to show the very widely different reasons for why homes are left abandoned to rack and ruin. It began with the case of the widower who had moved in and out of his home and had been very happy there with his wife. Since she died and he had become ill, and was no longer living there, the place had had squatters and fallen into decay with electrics pulled out and the roof leaking. It was a heartbreaking story because it was clear both to the interviewer and to the widower himself that the reason he had clung on to the property for so long was because of all the happy years he had spent there with his wife and which only now could he think of letting go. He had put the property up for auction as he had insufficient funds to make it habitable and had taken the advice of the agents as to the reserved price. However of 10 properties including his that were up in this particular auction, only two were sold. He was loath to reduce the price as he felt that he had to take the professional opinion of the agent.

Another empty property had been bought by a small to middling developer, where the customary practice had been to invest 30% of the funding for buying the site and renovating the property and in this case putting extra flats in the large garden area. The remainder of the funding would come from loans from the bank. The developers explained that there was a two-year cycle between buying the site and starting work and having a finished property for sale. During that period, both themselves and the banks would be putting money in and it would not be repaid in full with profits to the developer until after the two or three years had elapsed. The credit crunch had hit the developer badly and finance from the bank was no longer forthcoming. So the property lay empty, half gutted, with just the foundation of the new building in the garden and the developer had over £1 million debt to the bank and simply could not afford to pay for any more work to be done. The developer didn't ask for sympathy but just a chance to explain what had happened to them and to thousands of other developers all across Britain.

Another property in Bristol had an overgrown garden and when the interviewer looked through the letterbox the hallway was choked with junk mail. It turned out that the owner had bought the property as an investment but had trouble with tenants and had decided to leave the property empty until they could decide what to do with it. Several years had passed, and they still had not come to a decision.

These properties are empty in a land which is facing a huge housing shortage but the matter is being addressed by the charity Empty Homes which highlights those properties which have been left empty for a long period of time and which are either privately owned or government-owned. For the government as well has been known to leave property empty:

Empty Homes was established in 1992 as "The Empty Homes Agency" a campaigning voice for those who needed homes, and for those who were dismayed at the thousands of homes left empty and abandoned. Those principles have remained with us ever since. In the past few years we have successfully challenged government over the thousands of publicly-owned empty properties. We successfully campaigned for tax-breaks for owners of empty homes who wish to bring them back into use. We have given a voice to individuals, enabling them to secure action on empty homes that affect them, and have helped many successful local campaigns to bring empty homes back into use. As a result of our campaigns, today every council has a named person who seeks to get empty homes back into use, with the powers and resources to do so. (2)

When I was helping distribute leaflets in St Helier, around six years ago, I came across a number of flats which were obviously left derelict, glass doors boarded up, grimy door handles, and where one could see through a letterbox, the tell-tale sign of masses of junk mail. Back in the 1980s, my friend Ken Webb was helping with the census, and he was quite angered at the number of properties, flats and houses, which had been left empty in Jersey. He reckoned that had they been in use could have reduced the housing demand for social housing by at least 20%. That might be optimistic, but how many houses or flats are just left empty because the owners want a particular rent and are not prepared to reduce their prices? The census doesn't give us that sort of information because it counts people, not the absence of people.

In England, the law was enacted to enable councils to bring empty homes back into use for a fixed period without the use of compulsory purchase. I was not aware of this and it came as quite a surprise when the programme mentioned that councils had statutory powers to do this. Whether this would help the housing situation in Jersey is another matter, because in the first instance we need a methodology for accurate counting of empty properties. It would probably be resisted as an infringement of the owner's right to do what they want with their own property. However, it should be noted that the legislation in England is only used for long-term abandoned properties where they had been left empty for some years and it is not applied lightly before persuasion has been used:

All councils in England and Wales have powers to bring empty homes back into use. Many are very good at it, some are not. Most councils seek to persuade and help the owner to bring their property back into use; they only use legal powers such as Empty Dwelling Management Orders when help and persuasion have failed. Most empty homes are brought back into use eventually by their owner. But in many cases this takes years. Empty homes often decline fast - they become overrun with weeds and attacked by the weather. They are often used by squatters, fly tippers, vandals and are sometimes subject to arson. The whole neighbourhood suffers waiting for the owner to deal with their property.(3)

Of course one aspect of leaving properties derelict, simply to fall apart, has to do with planning laws in Jersey. If the owner cannot get permission to demolish a property so that they may build something in its place, they may simply leave it to fall apart or until it is so unsafe that it has to be knocked down. Even in St Brelade's Bay, which one might consider a prosperous neighbourhood, I remember one property owner who was not able to develop his property to his liking and simply built another property further back from the road and left the original standing empty for a good 20 years until finally he obtained planning permission for a massive development of flats on the whole site and promptly sold it and moved out. The empty property, windows boarded up, which could have been used to house a family and had been a family home in the past was quite rightly highlighted in the mid-1980s by the Warden of Communicare, Captain John Le Page, himself no stranger to the need for social housing in the London district where he had been based before coming to Jersey.

How do the Empty Dwelling Management Orders work? Effectively as a programme explained, it is rather like the council stepping in like an individual who has leased the property and under the terms of the lease is able to make repairs and let it out for income. The difference of course, is that the individual pays the owner, whereas the Council does not. But the council uses the rental income to reimburse itself for the costs of any refurbishment of the property and at the end of the period which can be no longer than seven years, a habitable property in good condition reverts to the owner. So it is not quite as Draconian as may appear at first sight and is a good deal better than the only option which was available before and which is available in Jersey of compulsory purchase:

On 6 April 2006, The Housing Act 2004 introduced Empty Dwelling Management Orders (EDMOs). The intention of EDMOs is to bridge the gap between voluntary measures proposed by the property owners and the existing enforcement procedures, such as compulsory purchase.
There are two types of EDMO; an interim EDMO and a final EDMO. An interim EDMO lasts for a maximum period of 12 months. During this period the housing authority cannot arrange occupation of the property without seeking the consent of the owner. In effect, this means the owner has a final opportunity to reach an agreed solution. Where such agreements cannot be reached, an interim EDMO can be revoked and replaced with a final EDMO. A final EDMO lasts for a fixed period of no more than 7 years. The Council does not require the consent of the owner to grant occupation rights under a final EDMO.(4)

Councils must fund any works needed to make a property habitable and must normally recoup their costs from rental income.(5)

Once a final EDMO is made, the council has the right to possession of the property for a fixed period of time up to seven years. It must take whatever steps it considers appropriate to get the property occupied or to keep it occupied and ensure that it is properly managed. Importantly, it can put a tenant in the property without seeking your consent.(5)

When I walk through St Helier, the visible signs of commercial property that has been left empty often for a longish period is all too evident -- empty shop fronts or in attempts to conceal the fact that the shop has been empty for some time, a recent innovation, has been to place artwork in the windows or on any hoardings. But one can go round St Helier, or any other part of the island, and fairly easily count the number of empty commercial premises. Offices are more difficult although signs to let (like the one that has been there for the better part of a decade on the office development near Green Street car park) can provide some indication and they are usually on the market provided that the landlord can agree suitable terms so they will appear on the books of property agents. But it is considerably more difficult to quantify the number of empty dwellings in Jersey and even when that is done, to decide if the numbers are sufficiently large to warrant Empty Dwelling Management Orders.

When I was reflecting on the programme, and also researching the background of items like EDMOs, I try to find if there was anything online about Jersey and empty properties. There is, but the properties are not in Jersey, and yet there is a clear Jersey link. I don't think it does Jersey's image particularly good as an offshore centre and one has to remember that whatever glowing reports come in from outside scrutiny (and I think it is fair for Jersey to sing the praises of those reports) the average member of the public in the UK will read the report on empty housing and not unnaturally blame the vagaries of offshore companies which also, as the article points out, means they can avoid any capital gains tax when the properties were sold:

Take the Park Lane townhouses, which Palmer estimates are worth £10m apiece. The key leaseholds on each are held by Konzeo Ltd and Weleta Ltd, two companies incorporated in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), a tax haven in the Caribbean. Both firms ignored multiple letters from Palmer asking them to explain why the buildings were unoccupied and threatening to issue a compulsory purchase order - until a gang of squatters, plus their dogs, moved in and were pictured on the front page of the Sun in January. Within a five-minute walk of Park Lane are 21 of the grandest properties on Palmer's list, worth between £6m and £50m each by his estimation. Of these, seven are registered to BVI companies, with others owned by firms incorporated in Jersey, Guernsey and Switzerland.

John Samson, a property law expert at Taylor Wessing, says offshore-registered firms buy expensive London property as an investment, just like art or any other commodity. "One of the reasons that people buy property in London, and in particular Mayfair, is that there is almost always a demand for it," says Samson. "Investors believe the value will not only be maintained but will go up, regardless of whether it is lived in or not."

Upper Grosvenor Street in Mayfair ought to be one of the most desirable addresses in London. Yet four grand properties on the street have remained empty for up to eight years, abandoned and left to ruin by their offshore owners. No 21, registered to Boss Holdings in Jersey and worth around £15m, has been vacant for at least eight years. Down the street, the handsome twin townhouses at Nos 41 and 42 have both been empty for around five years. The leaseholds on both belong to BVI firms.

Links
(1) http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00txgs9
(2) http://www.emptyhomes.com/index.html
(3) http://reportemptyhomes.com/faq
(4) http://www.basingstoke.gov.uk/housing/emptyhomes/edmo.htm
(5) http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/housing/pdf/152870.pdf
(6) http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/oct/16/empty-houses-london-wealthy-owners