Whistle down the wind

I’ve always known that the politics espoused by Green parties were fraudulent, that they advance programmes which would require not just deindustrialisation but a major winnowing of the population. They would require, in other words, some form of democide. Oh, not them and their tofu-eating set, just the ‘others’, the outsiders, the unnecessary people. It really is time that we put the whole of the wretched Green movement under closer scrutiny, time we exposed the hypocrisy and the lies.

Matt Ridley has made an excellent start in an article published by the Spectator on 21 May. Under the title of A green dark age, he outlines the damage that is being done to our countryside by the British government’s new carbon emissions target, adopted under pressure from a range of lobbies, including Greenpeace, an organisation which I hold in the deepest contempt.

I’ll come on to the environment issue in a moment but first I want to touch on another point made in the article, namely the burden a policy based on windmills and such panaceas imposes on consumers in a stealth tax, something called the renewable obligation (RO), tucked in to electricity bills.

At the moment RO adds a cool £1.1billion a year to electricity bills. Ridley suggests that by 2020 this could rise to £8billion, a further thirty per cent. The worst thing about this is that as a form of revenue gathering it’s highly regressive, a reverse Robin Hood policy, which robs the poor, even those too poor to pay income tax, for the benefit of the rich.

In what way does it benefit the rich, you ask? Ridley, who is himself rich and a landowner, gives an honest answer. It benefits them in higher wheat and timber prices; in rents for wind farms, and in something called the ‘feed-in tariff’, which pays three times the market rate to those who produce electricity by ‘renewable' means.

In thinking about this I’m reminded of the old Corn Laws, nineteenth century duties on the import of foreign corn which kept the price of food artificially high, to the benefit of an aristocratic and landed interest. Our present energy policy, the invidious RO, gives every sign of being a twenty-first century version of the Corn Laws.

The original acts helped to restrict economic growth by keeping costs artificially high. They acted as a kind of break on the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution, we all know what that meant, do we not; it meant Blake’s Dark Satanic Mills. If that’s your perception then it’s time to think again. The other point Ridley makes, all too often overlooked, is that the industrial revolution helped save the environment. As Britain turned from wood to coal as a source of energy the forests, long depleted, started to recover, as did natural waterways.

Now what, what can we expect for our green and pleasant land? More of our landscape will be despoiled, that’s what; once again our forests are in danger as the price of wood escalates. Over the country councils require developers who construct a building of more than a 1000 square metres to generate 10% of energy ‘renewably’ on site. The solution is wood, or ‘biomass’, to use the awful euphemism. So, in the case of London, we have the absurd situation of diesel lorries delivering timber, to be dried and burned on site, producing ever more carbon dioxide. The situation is so ludicrous that it would defy even the wit of Jonathan Swift. According to one estimate, as Ridley mentions, Britain is producing six million extra tons of carbon each year as a result of this redirection of the wood supply. Landowners, moreover, are harvesting their timber younger than previously in this booming green lunacy.

Wind farms, who does not hate the sight of wind-farms? I certainly do. You may think they are necessary as a source of clean and renewable power. If you do I urge you to think again, think of the implications of these hideous blots on the landscape for the landscape. As foreign investors rush in to capitalise on British wind - and the wind of British politicians - just remember that it would take require a farm the size of Greater London to generate as much energy as a single coal-fired power station, assuming a never ending windy day.

Oh, but think of the money to be made; think of the money being made, for example, by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, effectively bribed by developers to stop them complaining about the killing of eagles by wind turbines. Then there are the bats, of course, the damage these things cause to them; but who cares about the bats? You should care about yourself, though, enough to make sure that you live nowhere near these monstrous carbuncles, because the noise generated has caused health problems for those who do. The difficulty here is that, as the contagion spreads, it will be difficult for any of us to escape them.

And all this for what, all this disruption, all this stupidity for what? We see our land destroyed, we see the economy weakened, jobs lost or exported elsewhere; we see an ever greater burden of taxation for what? Even if these green emission targets are met at considerable cost to us all it will make not a jot of difference, as our carbon footprint is that of an ant beside the elephant of China.

At some point in the future, as we go down in a sea of green, we might perhaps recall William Hague, once Foreign Secretary, whose immortal words are carved on his gravestone – “We showed the Chinese the UK’s international moral leadership on this issue.” Yes, remember that as you sit in your blacked-out and freezing home, listening to the sound of the roaring wind.

Castles, Ghosts and Witches

I flew up to Edinburgh early on Friday morning for a long weekend with some dear friends who moved earlier this year to a village called Dirleton to the east of the city. It was a trip I was so looking forward to, planned some time in advance. At the beginning of the week things were not looking so good because Vulcan’s hissy fit in Iceland was sending up so much dust and ash! In the end, I’m happy to say, it was all sound and fury signifying nothing.

It’s almost two years since I was last in Edinburgh, there for the International Festival. The city is as beautiful, and as dirty, as ever. The tram works on Princes Street are still not finished, but the thoroughfare is now far less of a mess than it was in August, 2009. This whole project seems to have been something of a local farce. Not only is the route shorter than planned but the scheme is also millions over budget, another massive waste of time and money that looks to be of minimal benefit to local people. I’ve yet to find a soul who has a good word to say about it, although I suppose I should have spoken to the foreign companies who were awarded the contract.

It’s not Edinburgh I want talk about; no, it’s East Lothian, a county in a part of Scotland I had never been to before. Dirleton itself is absolutely delightful. It’s not like any Scottish village I’ve ever seen, more English in appearance and general atmosphere, with a lovely central green. Close by is the most marvellous castle, parts of which date back to the thirteenth century. I adore romantic ruins and this is one is particularly charming, set in such beautiful gardens.

The other romantic delight is the nearby Archerfield House, originally founded in the late 1600s with substantial remodelling the following century. Once the home of Herbert Asquith, Prime Minister at the outbreak of the First World War, the place went in to sad decline after the Second, a fate reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead. Happy to say it has been beautifully restored as a hotel adjacent to two splendid golf links. As guests of my friends we had a round on the Fidra on Saturday afternoon. My game, I regret to say, does not improve. Dash it all: I blame it on the wind!

On Sunday, my appetite whetted by the Dirleton fortress, we did a spot of castle bagging. I was told there was one particular monument that was bound to appeal to me, situated on top of a rocky headland. This is Tantallon Castle, once the property of the Douglas earls of Angus. Actually it’s not at all a castle as traditionally conceived, a keep surrounded by four walls. No, Tantallon itself is in the shape of a huge single wall built to make use of the defensive possibilities of the sea cliffs. In a state of ruin it’s still a formidable and majestic place. Once besieged by the king of Scotland in person, it last saw action during the seventeenth century Civil Wars. Occupied by troops loyal to the crown, it was bombarded in 1651 by Parliamentary forces under the command of General Monck, Cromwell’s artillery chief. After the surrender it was left in a state of ruin, never again reoccupied.

No, that’s not quite true. There is one inhabitant, a courtly gentleman dressed in a ruff, a style favoured in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. This is the Tantallon Ghost, last seen in a photograph taken in 2008, peering through one of the upper windows into the courtyard. Sadly he declined to show himself when I was there, no matter how much I willed it!

There are marvellous views from the grounds of Tantallon over the Firth of Forth and on to the nearby Bass Rock, the same kind of volcanic plug upon which Edinburgh Castle was built. Though this is the first time I’ve seen the Rock it’s not the first time I’ve visited it. No, I came through the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Catriona, the sequel to Kidnapped. It was here that David Balfour, the priggish and self-important hero of the story, was kidnapped and confined for a second time. I remember it principally for the Tale of Tod Laprick, a story within a story, another eerie encounter, this time with a warlock and a shape shifter, one who takes the form of a gannet, in which the island abounds.

East Lothian is rich in the traditions and tales of witchcraft, no place more so than the seaside town of North Berwick, a Scottish version of Salem. It was a place I simply had to visit. It is here in the late sixteenth century, in the green by Saint Andrew’s Church, that local witches gathered, supposedly under the guidance of Satan himself, to cast spells against James VI, returning by sea from a trip to Denmark. The magic was ineffective, for despite the conjured storms the king made it safely to port.

What is certain is that a hysterical witch-hunt followed, in which hundreds of women were arrested, many confessing under torture to meeting Satan at the nocturnal sabbat. Among the accused was Agnes Sampson, also known as the Wise Woman of Keith, a local midwife and healer, who was even interrogated by the king in person. After gruesome tortures she was finally garrotted and burned as a witch on 28 January, 1591.

I’ve written about this before in a piece I called To Kill a King: the Story of the North Berwick Witches. Superstitious James may have been, the author of a work on demonology, but the persecution of these women, healers and innocent victims, had a clear political purpose, proving that the king, as a ‘man of God’, could defy the powers of Satan and the schemes of Francis Stewart, earl of Bothwell, his principal enemy and the real devil behind various conspiracies. I said a silent prayer in memory of Agnes and all the other victims of this tragedy.

From the crimes of the past to the pleasures of the present the weekend was rounded off with a super dinner at Archerfield House. I’m grateful to all concerned for a magical time amongst castles, ghosts and witches.

Democracy made us nauseated

There is a museum in the town of Gori in Georgia dedicated to the life of its most famous son – Josef Stalin. So, all those nostalgic for the old Europe, the Europe of dictators and diktats, can head off in its general direction. Actually, if you are coming from the west, there is really no need to travel that far, either to the east or to the past. No, go to Belarus instead, where a tyrannical past is a living present, where Alyaksandr Lukashenko, the president, acts as something of a curator in a living Stalinist museum.

It’s all in place, a truly delightful reminder of times gone by; there are political prisoners aplenty, sudden arrests, show trails and a planned economy that, in the comforting old style, invariably overfull-fills shortages, a problem addressed by a flourishing black market.

Since last December’s fraudulent presidential election Lukashenko has been busy over-fulfilling the jails of Minsk with his former opponents, using the pretext of a bombing in the city’s subway in early April. A rather convenient excuse at that, a sort of Sergey Kirov Murder or Reichstag Fire moment, which has allowed the petty-tyrant to vilify not just his political opponents but democracy itself. “Before the elections”, he announced, “we had so much so-called democracy that it has made us nauseated.” Given the present condition of the country Belarus must be feeling so much better.

The show trails of people like Andrei Sannikov, a former diplomat who stood against the Stalin manqué in the election, are clearly intended as an entertainment, intended to distract people from the lamentable state of the economy. As the Economist reported, unable to sustain his pre-election promise to raise salaries, Lukashenka has been obliged to devalue the currency by as much as 30%, thereby wiping out the value of savings.

Oh, but it’s not his fault, he protests; no, it’s all the fault of foreigners who threaten Belarus from abroad, waging "a bitter information and political war" against the country. Who these wicked foreigners, the ghosts of Lukashenko’s febrile imagination, are is just a tad difficult to determine. Doubtless they include Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, who refused to sit in the same room as him during the recent Chernobyl commemoration in the Ukraine. Never at a loss for the most fitting kind of words, Lukashenko responded with a witty broadside: “I don’t want to talk about types like Barroso and other morons and arseholes and the like.”

Alas for this particular Stalinist moron and arsehole his world is moving in ever decreasing circles. Under threat from international human rights lawyers, busy gathering material for a real trial, the places he can go in safety diminish by the day. In the end we may find that old dictators never die; they simply fade into irrelevance, or into Minsk, which probably amounts to the same thing.

First Aid

I wrote the following article last July on the My Telegraph blog site. I’m reviving it here in the light of recent developments.

This is the age of austerity, the age of fiscal realism. The mad Labour jamboree is over and the country has woken up with the most appalling hangover. Government departments are being asked to consider the unthinkable, reductions in expenditure of up to forty per cent. We are all going to be touched by this in one way or another, the price of past financial irresponsibility.

Wait a moment; I can suggest one possible way out: leave England; set yourself up as a Third World Country, claim poverty and apply for aid, doled out with far less scrutiny than income support. Yes, that’s the way to do it! One department, you see, is set to escape the Treasury scythe, that for International Development (DFID), whose budget is to be ‘ring fenced.’

How extraordinary it is when all sorts of activities important to the interests and well-being of the people of this country are under close examination that foreign aid is to escape. So, fewer schools in England; more schools in the Republic of Ismaelia (Don’t bother looking it up; it’s the fictional country in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop!) Except when you look closely there are no new schools in Ismaelia, no, just lots of new jags and mercs. No matter; look on the bright side: it keeps the motor industry going.

Joseph Stalin is reputed to have dismissed the power of the Catholic Church by asking how many divisions the Pope had. Well, at my own peril, I have to ask just how many votes are there in overseas aid? And, in true rhetorical fashion, I will hazard an answer: none, not one. Oh people may say that they care about it; people may say that it’s the moral thing to do, to assist those in need, but nobody is going to vote for it; for we are all governed by self-interest to a greater or greater degree. In other words, this is an area where cuts could be made, savage cuts, with no political repercussions whatsoever.

I admire our new coalition government for the boldness of its actions, boldness far greater, I must confess, than I thought Liberal Democrats were capable of. But still there is a halo of self-righteousness, of do-gooding, of doing good unto those poor benighted foreigners. I’m glad that the government has had the sense to end the doles to China of all places, but much of the aid budget that remains is still used for the most worthless of causes.

The report in the Sunday Telegraph on the stupid wastefulness of so much foreign ‘aid’ was both maddening and revealing. By its own audit the DFID has concluded that a quarter of its projects do not achieve their aims. This means, in practical terms, that some £463million was effectively thrown away last year as ‘conscience money’, thrown away, in some cases, on things that did not actually exist, like the seven hundred ‘ghost’ teachers in Malawi. Then there is the money spent on school text books and improved classrooms in Kenya, except it wasn’t; it went into the pockets of corrupt officials in a project that has cost £55million since 2005.

From large to small this carnival of absurdity goes on. Did you know, for instance, that it cost you £190,991 on “strengthening the voice of older people in the Ukraine,” or almost £1.5million to support a wind turbine scheme on Pitcairn, an island with a population of fifty whose energy needs are met by a diesel generator?

If I ruled the world…sorry, if I ruled Britain not a penny of tax-payers money would be wasted on foreign aid, and I could not care less what the EU or UN targets are (the ring-fenced budget is set to go up). I’m not heartless, just practical. Foreign aid is little better than a scam that feeds corruption, inefficiency and waste across the world. There will, of course, always be instances where some form of emergency assistance is required, as with the Haiti earthquake, but these should be dealt with on a case by case basis. Unfortunately, given the present thinking, charity seems to begin everywhere but home.

Oh Britain, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?
Other dictators all drive Porsches, I must make amends.
Extorted hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,
So Britain, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?


Postscript

As I say, I wrote this a year ago. All across the world, as it says in the latest Spectator editorial (Charity not Waste), governments have cut overseas donations because they cannot give away money they do not have. Not us. If you think aid goes to the poor, even to poor dictators, it’s time to think again. The chief beneficiary of our ring-fenced aid budget is India, a country that is able to afford a space programme, a nuclear programme and –wait for it – its own foreign aid programme!

We were faced with the absurd spectacle earlier this year of David Cameron pleading with the Indian government for a greater share in their economic boom whole handing out alms...or bribes. As our military budget is now being reduced a further £4billion is being extracted through the tax system for foreign largesse, leaving Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary, to point out in a leaked letter to the Prime Minister that it makes no sense at all for the government to pass a law binding itself to Labour’s aid targets. Yes, indeed, it makes no sense; it never made sense, wasteful foreign aid and wasteful foreign wars, cash and crusades. Will we ever be rid of the legacy of Blair?

March of the Women

In January, 1911 Votes for Women, the paper of the Women’s Social and Political Union, an organisation campaigning for female suffrage in Britain, announced a new song which it described as a hymn and a call to battle. This was March of the Women, composed the previous year by Ethel Smyth. That same month it was given its first public performance by the Suffrage Choir in Pall Mall, introduced by Emmeline Pankhurst, head of the WSPU, as the suffrage movement’s new anthem.

I love it. It’s one of the most stirring songs ever written. If I had been alive then I would have been a militant suffragette alongside Emmeline and Cristobel Pankhurst, two of my all-time heroines. Yes, I would have sung those words at the top of my voice, those wonderful, heroic words;

Shout, shout, up with your song!
Cry with the wind, for the dawn is break-ing;
March, march, swing you a-long,
Wide blows our ban-ner, and hope is wa-king.
Song with its sto-ry, dreams with their glo-ry
Lo! they call, and glad is their word!
Loud and lou-der it swells,
Thun-der of free-dom, the voice of the Lord!

Long, long -- we in the past
Cowered in dread from the light of heaven,
Strong, strong -- stand we at last,
Fearless in faith and with sight new given.
Strength with its beauty, Life with its duty,
(Hear the voice, oh hear and obey!)
These, these -- beckon us on!
Open your eyes to the blaze of day.

Comrades -- ye who have dared
First in the battle to strive and sorrow!
Scorned, spurned -- nought have ye cared,
Raising your eyes to a wider morrow,
Ways that are weary, days that are dreary,
Toil and pain by faith ye have borne;
Hail, hail -- victors ye stand,
Wearing the wreath that the brave have worn!

Life, strife -- those two are one,
Naught can ye win but by faith and daring.
On, on -- that ye have done
But for the work of to-day preparing.
Firm in reliance, laugh a defiance,
(Laugh in hope, for sure is the end)
March, march -- many as one,
Shoulder to shoulder and friend to friend.


Such brave words for such brave women, women who fought so tenaciously in the face of hostility and hardship for something that we now consider to be a fundamental right. I’m no great enthusiast for specifically female causes, or for the forms of women’s liberation that emerged in the States from the 1960s onwards, but the campaign over the suffrage was something different, something all women could feel strongly about, no matter their class, politics or religion. Oh, bliss was in that dawn to be alive but to be young, and a woman, was very heaven.

Homage to Catalonia

The Tate Modern in London is running an exhibition at the moment dedicated to the work of Joan Miró, who along with Dali and Picasso is part of the triumvirate of genius produced by Spain in the previous century, shapers not just of their own unique art but the art of the world. But Miró had a unique identity of his own, Spanish, yes, but Catalan, the region to the north-east of the country which had such an influence on his paintings, through its landscape, its folklore and its traditions.

Of the three I far prefer Miró, not just because of the quality of his work, the joyfulness and exuberance, but because he was far less of a political artist than his contemporaries; far less of a communist than Picasso, far less of an eccentric than Dali. Under the title Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, the organisers of the exhibition have certainly attempt to give his work a certain political narrative, and those who want to follow this path can do no better than read the essay in the catalogue; otherwise just enjoy the joyfulness of the art.

There really is only one sure thing one can say about Miró – he was passionate about his passion for Catalonia. He may have been linked politically with communism and artistically with surrealism but he was clever enough to keep his distance from both, always following his own independent path.

And what a path it was. I must have stood in front of The Farm, a painting once owned by Ernest Hemingway, for ten minutes or more absorbing all of the wonderful detail. Painted while he was still in his twenties it marks the lifelong engagement of the painter with his land and his home. You will find it in the same room as other less familiar works, including The Rut, Mont-roig, The Church and the Village, House with a Palm Tree and Catalan Landscape (The Hunter), a wonderfully exciting combination of colours and images. One can also see the progression in his work, from the early realism to a more abstract combination of symbols and signs.

It seems to me that there is a unique and personal language in the work of Miró that defies the straightjacket of politics, something that makes him far more interesting than Dali or Picasso. In Dog Barking at the Moon, painted in 1926, the symbolism is as mysterious as it is beguiling. The series known as the Dream Pictures say nothing about external affairs and the outside world and everything about the artist's own personal consciousness.

There are paintings that make a political statement, the most obvious here being Still-Life with Old Shoe painted in 1937, a brilliantly glowing piece of work, and Untitled (Head of a Man), usually interpreted as statements about the Spanish Civil War, as well as the Constellations series painted in the 1940s. But these are the exceptions and, in contrast to Goya and Picasso, more obvious political painters, Miró is far more of a mystic and a visionary, far more poetic in the way that he sees the world.

There is a steady process of simplification, of breaking complexity right down to the most basic elements, simple lines and primary colours. The message is stark and easily deciphered. I look at Painting (1927) and what do I see, a random collection of lines and colours? No, I see desire, I see sensuality.

Over the thirteen rooms you will find more than one hundred and twenty works, not just painting but also lithographs and sculpture. With reference to the latter I particularly liked The Ladder of the Escaping Eye. The ladder, the motif of the whole exhibition, the ladder of escaping, is appropriate enough, though not perhaps in the way that the curators perceived. The escape is in the art itself, the gateway beyond history, the gateway to a parallel universe. It’s Miró’s triumph.

Apocalypse postponed

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

It’s Sunday evening. I’m still here. If you are reading this you are obviously still here. Yesterday was not Judgement Day – only Saturday. Saturday: excellent and fair. Yes, there was no Rapture; Jesus did not come; the righteous - actually more the deluded and self-righteous – were not lifted bodily into heaven, leaving behind little piles of clothing, here, there and everywhere for the rest of us. The end, after all, was not nigh.

The Book of Matthew warns against false prophets in the form of ravening wolves. Actually I think stupid prophets are far more of a danger; prophets like Harold Camping, who runs a network called Family Radio Worldwide, which he used to broadcast the coming Apocalypse, an announcement supplemented by a billboard blitz. “We learn from the Bible”, his website says, “that Holy God plans to rescue about 200 million people. On the first Day of Judgement (i.e. yesterday) they will be raptured into Heaven because God had great mercy for them.”

I imagine Camping assumed he would be first upon whom Holy God would bestow his mercy, the first to shuffle off his mortal threads, because that same Holy God seemingly granted him, and him alone, access to the divine Mind. One begins to appreciate the concern of the Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation that the Bible in the wrong hands was full of potential pitfalls; that a subtle message was capable of being misread and misinterpreted, capable of misuse by all sorts of charlatans. But Camping is not a ravening wolf; just as silly ass preaching to a lot of deluded sheep.

We’ve been here before; we’ve seen this kind of silliness to which American fundamentalists in particular seem to be prone. One of my earliest articles was a piece I called Christian Whackos and Mooning Messiahs. This concerned one Christine Darg, another American evangelist, who was convinced that Jesus would make his reappearance on earth at the Golden Gate in Jerusalem. Certain of the time and the date, she even set up a webcam to record this earth-shattering event. Time passed. Jesus did not come. No Jesus, just lots of profane mooners, anxious to record their arses for posterity. It was the appearance of everyone but Jesus, all those bare backsides, which caused the camera to be removed just as quickly as it was put up.

Yes, it’s funny; people like Darg and Camping are beyond ridiculous, a parody of faith, literal-minded to a numbingly stupid degree. Derision is the best way of dealing with them, and the poor fools who are taken in by their pretensions, pretensions which verge on the comically sacrilegious.

One other way, of course, was to be smart enough to see a potential business opportunity, to be as smart as the atheist in New Hampshire who set up Eternal Earth-bound Pets. Apparently he has more than 250 clients, convinced that they were off to heaven, who paid up to $135 (£83) to have their pets picked up and cared for after the vanishing. “They would be disappointed twice”, he told the Wall Street Journal, “once because they weren’t raptured and again because I don’t do refunds.”

I can only laugh.