Britain 100 years ago in colour
I really like the Daily Mail website these days - loads of fun things to read. It never disappoints.
I also like old colour pictures, so I thought I would love this article with previously unseen colour pictures of the UK 100 years ago, but in fact they're a little boring. Anyway here you
go.
Labels: England, London
12yr old boy accused of throwing a sausage
... in court, makes
amusing copy though obviously the detail is rather more complex. But it was this that caught my eye from his mother:
"It had quite a bit of an effect on him. He couldn't sleep. He takes sleeping tablets anyway - but they didn't work."
Labels: England, kids
Martin Amis
The
readers interview in the Independent with Martin Amis is quite funny. Also, and not so funny, it contains this statement:
Well, make the most of being Hizbollah while you can. As its leader, Hasan [sic] Nasrallah, famously advised the West: "We don't want anything from you. We just want to eliminate you."
I can't find any source for this quote on the internet or in UK newspapers since 1991 except Amis himself. The New York Times never mentioned it. I am not in anyway suggesting he has made it up (though he's clearly not telling the truth about it being famous - maybe he means infamous?), it is probably the case that he has just got the quote wrong in some ways (ie say it was destroy not eliminate (it's not though)). Can anyone provide the source?
Update: Ah, maybe Amis has got his leaders wrong. Mark Steyn (yes, I know, this isn't a good source) says "In the words of Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah: ''We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.'"
Update II: The mystery deepens. Amis has clearly got the wrong person. Only Mark Steyn has quoted Massawi in the UK press over the last four years, but in 2001 this
guy quoted him. You'll note that it's not clear now he is advising the West. So anyone find a reference before 2001? And who is this Massawi person - Wikipedia has never heard of him.
Update III: Maybe they mean former Hezbollah leader Abbas al-Musawi (not that similar a name, I admit). He was killed by the Israelis in 1992. But no-one links that quote to him.
Update IV: Chris Brooke suggests, persuasively, that they mean
Husayn Al-Musawi, who whilst not a leader of Hezbollah was a 'prominent member'. I can't find any reference online or in the searchable UK news database (or on the NYT) linking him to that quote or a version of it, the nearest I've found so far is "In the future, we will wipe out every trace of Israel in Palestine". I've emailed the academic referred to in Update II to ask what his source was, but so far I have had no reply.
Labels: Decent Left, England
Gerard Baker
So at the risk of finding myself in the dock with him [Tony Blair] when the modern elites have their Nuremberg, let me take issue.
In
The Times. Do you think he might take himself a bit too seriously?
Labels: Decent Left, defence, England, Iraq
Blair and buggery
Jamie links to a Blair speech in which the Prime Minister
warns the Army about cowardice. As Jamie says, Blairs farewell is essentially: "We’ve all let him down in our various ways, and we should all be thoroughly ashamed of ourselves."
Jamie
also links to the
new searchable online database of Old Baily Trials. He finds the ones involving animal buggery. I found the
sad case of George and Basil Blog, who had their gold watch nicked.
Labels: Blair, Bloggy, Decent Left, defence, England
Tyler Brule
I'd missed this.
Tyler Brule has written his last FT column. Our household, for one, is discussing whether there is any point in buying the Weekend FT anymore.
Labels: England
The Top Dog Index
Despite my predictions, the Henry 'Scoop' Jackson Society haven't come up with this yet, so I've made a stab. The idea is twofold - first, to try to justify their famous statement, that Britain was 'unquestionably the world's second most important power', and second, to provide an index for global power comparable to what the World Economic Forum's
Global Competitive Index does for, er, global competitiveness. So far I've concentated on hard power, ie military spending, but I've also included economic power in that (though not trade yet, which I might include in soft power - you can't expect consistency, I'm afraid).
As I'm pretty sure the World Economic Forum knows, you can just about get any result you want in these things by choosing your inputs, and as importantly, your weightings. I've gone for seven categories - Population, GDP, PPP GDP, Military Spending, No. of troops, Aircraft Carriers, and UN SC permanent membership. Clearly there is some overlap here - GDP for instance with population, but also things like troops and military spending. But hey-ho. The weightings I began with are 18% for population, 30% for GDP, 5% for PPP GDP, 15% for troops, 25% for military spending, 5% for aircraft carriers and 2% for UNSC membership.
Of the seven categories the US scores highest for four categories, China two, and all Permanent Members in one. For each category I take each country's ratio of the highest value, and then multiply it by the weighting. So for GDP, for instance, the US has the highest at $13.26bn, and Lebanon's is $0.022bn, so Lebanon's score is 0.22/13.26 which equals 0.2% of the US level, and then for both the US and Lebanon it is multiplied by the 30% weighting for that category. These are then summed across the categories to give a total score out of 100.
Anyway, drum roll (note the category scores are before weighting...
Top Dog Index | Country | Pop. | GDP | PPP | Troops | Mil. Ex | A/C | UN | TOTAL |
| United States | 23% | 100% | 100% | 63% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 80.58 |
| China | 100% | 19% | 81% | 100% | 16% | 0% | 100% | 48.77 |
| India | 85% | 6% | 30% | 59% | 4% | 8% | 0% | 28.82 |
| Russia | 11% | 7% | 13% | 46% | 28% | 8% | 100% | 21.17 |
| Japan | 10% | 34% | 31% | 11% | 9% | 0% | 0% | 17.15 |
| United Kingdom | 5% | 18% | 15% | 8% | 9% | 17% | 100% | 13.31 |
| France | 5% | 17% | 15% | 11% | 9% | 8% | 100% | 12.95 |
| Germany | 6% | 22% | 20% | 13% | 7% | 0% | 0% | 12.25 |
| Italy | 4% | 14% | 13% | 10% | 5% | 8% | 0% | 8.93 |
| Korea | 4% | 7% | 8% | 30% | 4% | 0% | 0% | 8.65 |
| Brazil | 14% | 7% | 13% | 13% | 2% | 8% | 0% | 8.18 |
| Pakistan | 12% | 1% | 3% | 27% | 1% | 0% | 0% | 6.91 |
| Indonesia | 17% | 3% | 8% | 14% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 6.41 |
| Turkey | 6% | 3% | 5% | 23% | 2% | 0% | 0% | 6.09 |
| Spain | 3% | 9% | 9% | 8% | 2% | 8% | 0% | 5.76 |
| Iran | 5% | 2% | 5% | 24% | 1% | 0% | 0% | 5.68 |
| Mexico | 8% | 6% | 9% | 9% | 1% | 0% | 0% | 5.31 |
Pretty damn exciting, eh? Anyway on the current hard-power version of the "
Top Dog" index, I'm afraid, at least for the H'S'JS, that the UK is not 2nd, at least not 'unquestionably'. The United States is the clear leader, with 81%, followed by China, 49%, then India, 29%, Russia, 21%, Japan 17%, then us, on a respectable 13%, slightly higher than France and Germany. Italy just pips Korea and Brazil.
Update: In response to Nick's comments, I've changed it about a bit, lowering population, adding a Nuke's column (you can see the weights at the top of the table)
Top Dog Index | Weight | 13 | 30 | 5 | 10 | 25 | 5 | 10 | 2 | 100.00 |
| Name | Pop | GDP | PPP | Troops | Mil.Ex | A/C | Nukes | UN | Total |
| United States | 23% | 100% | 100% | 63% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 86.28 |
| China | 100% | 19% | 81% | 100% | 16% | 0% | 100% | 100% | 48.77 |
| India | 85% | 6% | 30% | 59% | 4% | 8% | 100% | 0% | 31.65 |
| Russia | 11% | 7% | 13% | 46% | 28% | 8% | 100% | 100% | 28.33 |
| United Kingdom | 5% | 18% | 15% | 8% | 9% | 17% | 100% | 100% | 22.66 |
| France | 5% | 17% | 15% | 11% | 9% | 8% | 100% | 100% | 22.13 |
| Japan | 10% | 34% | 31% | 11% | 9% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 16.13 |
| Pakistan | 12% | 1% | 3% | 27% | 1% | 0% | 100% | 0% | 14.95 |
| Israel | 1% | 1% | 1% | 7% | 2% | 0% | 100% | 0% | 11.64 |
| Germany | 6% | 22% | 20% | 13% | 7% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 11.31 |
| Italy | 4% | 14% | 13% | 10% | 5% | 8% | 0% | 0% | 8.20 |
| Korea | 4% | 7% | 8% | 30% | 4% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 6.94 |
| Brazil | 14% | 7% | 13% | 13% | 2% | 8% | 0% | 0% | 6.84 |
| Spain | 3% | 9% | 9% | 8% | 2% | 8% | 0% | 0% | 5.21 |
| Indonesia | 17% | 3% | 8% | 14% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 4.86 |
| Turkey | 6% | 3% | 5% | 23% | 2% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 4.67 |
| Mexico | 8% | 6% | 9% | 9% | 1% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 4.47 |
Labels: defence, economics, England, newspapers, Nukes, politics
Daily Mail free add-on
"I wish I'd never met Mum and Dad" is a reasonably interesting article in the Daily Mail about adopted children who find that their birth parents, when they finally meet them, aren't what they were hoping for. One women, called Sophie, does seem to have had a bit of a nightmare given she didn't actually want to meet her birth parents. However on her 18th birthday her real mother decided to get in touch (I think that is the first legally allowed age). Unfortunately the story then descends into class-related disaster, as Sophie, who is into horse-riding and "living a very different - and much more privileged - life" takes issue with her "scruffy & thick-set" father, whose "accent sounded a bit common" and who lived in a small council terrace. It gets worse when she is persuaded to visit the family house on the council estate , as her father starts ringing around the extended family of cousins, brothers, step-sisters etc who all descend on mass.
Apparently, at least according to the Daily Mail, class is often a factor in such relationships, as the parents who give up their children for adoption are often less middle-class than the adopters.
Labels: England
Callaghan, economic troubles and Nukes
Oliver notes in this
post that:
Ford worked with two Prime Ministers, one of them appalling (Harold Wilson) and one, in my minority view, good and underrated (James Callaghan). Wilson - a man of colossal vanity who was convinced he was held in high regard in Washington - wrote to Ford in October 1974 in effect giving an ultimatum that Britain would make defence cuts regardless of the damage to Nato's capabilities. Ford responded with a measured statement of fact, worrying about the effect on US allies and expressing the hope that the US would not be the only power capable of international intervention. When Callaghan sought Ford's assistance in the sterling crisis of 1976 - a long story, much recounted, in which I consider that Callaghan and his Chancellor, Denis Healey, performed with credit and to the lasting benefit of the country - the President immediately offered to help.
New government documents released
today (about 20 years too late) appear (at least on the Guardian's reporting) to refine this story - Callaghan might have also made a similar threat:
As telephone transcripts released today show, Callaghan used the questions over Britain's Nato commitment in an attempt to win American and German support to press the IMF to come up with more flexible terms for the loan. He told President Gerald Ford that without an IMF solution "we would be forced into action which would put at risk this country's contribution as an ally and a partner in the western alliance".
Labels: defence, England, Nukes
Trident
I'll post a
comment I made over at Jamie's:
I'm strangely optimistic about Trident's replacement, or moreover, it not happening. A lot has been made about the lack of controversy over replacing it compared with that of the early 1980s. But there seems also a lack of controversy about scrapping it too. This might reflect general political apathy, or just that the support/opposition for it is spread more evenly across the polical classes.
In the end I think it'll be like ID cards - popular (ish) until the cost is known, and then given a choice of the carriers or the subs they'll go for the carriers.
Labels: Decent Left, defence, England, Nukes, Taxation
Live Blogging - AaroWatch
I've got a lead here on the (briliant) boys at
Aaronovitch Watch. I've just watched (in fact it might still be on - it certainly seems like it) a programme celebrating that pretty dull programme,
University Challenge. Anyway, as you might imagine, it's terribly self-congratulatory, and given Ian Hislop and Steven Fry are two of the talking-heads (and I've just seen the Private Eye team, Hislop, Wheen, Booker (Brooker?) and the other one -
Stars by Simply Red for someone who can come up with worse people to be stuck in a lift with), at times almost unbearable. On the other good hand it had Aaro trying to defend his unfunny stint on the programme, when I think he and his team answered every question with the name of a member of
Marx Brothers (he is still going on about it being an attack on the Establishment or something like that, which is interesting from someone who today is one of Britain's most Establishment journalists). The exciting bit, and forgive the bad photographs of my TV screen, is the picture of Aaro as a young man! Here's Old (note he's not wearing some strange Invisible Man mask in real life, I'm not sure where that's come from) and Young Aaro!
ps My god, it
is still going on. They're raving about a film version now.
Labels: Bloggy, Decent Left, England, politics, TV
Blair and the Bee Gees
Surely the news in this story is not that Blair's plane missed a turn on the runway, but that
he is spending the festive period with
Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees?!
Labels: England
Happy Christmas
This feels a bit wrong, but I'm trying to get something to work on the computer (which has run out of USB ports) and so I'll take the time to say 'Happy Christmas'.
Tim Worstall - we really are not worthy - is
still posting about Paul Krugman. Maybe they celebrate later in Portugal. I'll point out that
this post is wrong, at least in England, as Christmas Day is not a shopping day, so there are at most 364 shopping days to go and you could argue about some of those. I hope its not a leap year next year.
Labels: England, Posts I had to retract later
World of Books
Rather
amusing piece in the Sunday Times on bad literary goings-on.
Labels: England, newspapers
Royal Navy 'face tinpot future'...
...declares
Admiral Sir Alan West, as rumours swirl that the MOD is going to scrap the aircraft carrier programme. The problem with the programme, I imagine, is that no-one at the MOD believes it is going to cost the stated cost of £3.7bn or whatever it is.
Labels: defence, economics, England
2006 Review of Matt T Blog year - Jan to June
Truth be told, not a vintage year. Here's the first half.
January 2006
Nothing, sorry.
February 2006
2nd:
Alcohol aides night drivers, declares a 1950s textbook.
5th: Dan's favourite singer, Mick Hucknall, discusses
politics.
12th: I
transform Tony Blair using a new face-transforming website.
March 2006
8th: I attack an
Alice Thompson column as the 'most self pitying' I have ever read.
18th: And then
Gerard Baker comes along and beats her.
29th:
I take issue with Oliver Kamm's positive obituary for Casper Weinberger, and argue that Iran-Contra negates everything else.
April 2006
12th: "As if I were a black trying to purchase food in a Mississippi diner in 1955" -
yes it can only be Carol Gould trying to buy a drink in a London pub.
18th: The Euston Manifesto arrives! I
create a handy cut out and keep guide to which project each British Decent has signed up to, and criticise the manifesto on two grounds - first the whinge about a lack of media coverage given many of them are senior people in the media, and second, their criticism of other people for spending more time attacking the domestic left and not enough time helping Iraqis, given this seems exactly what they do. Looking back I think this latter criticism is really why I could never give it a chance - I am still shocked by Nick Cohen, Stephen Pollard and Peter Tatchell's reaction to being asked to 'unite against terror' and I think it says a lot about them (though Tatchell did apologise subsequently for his).
30th:
Pollard goes one better, declaring in his Maida Vale Manifesto, which still has less than 10 signatories, that "The mainstream Left has demonstrated clearly which side of the battle to preserve Western civilisation and freedom it is on. The Left, in any recognisable form, is now the enemy". I ask whether he is calling for the arrest of leading left-wing figures.
May 2006
9th:
YouGOV pay me my £50!
17th: In Rome, and I tell the hotel receptionist "Excuse me the phone in our room doesn't work". She replies,"This is Italy. Many things don't work."
30th: I
prove President Bush is not as unpopular as the polls suggest.
June 2006
12th:
I show that the Serie A is not the goal desert commentators think it is.
Labels: Bloggy, Decent Left, England, Iraq, Review of Year, Web
The sheer "affrontery" of the disrespectful
From The Sun, August 1997:
Hol family's hate mail
CRIPPLED Carl Bullman has been sent hate mail after taking his family on holiday on the day of Princess Diana's funeral.
A poison pen fiend also accuses him of "affrontery" in cleaning his car the day before the service. The writer called him "thoughtless and ignorant" adding: "Everyone's in mourning. You mock her."
Carl, 39, and wife Tina watched part of the service before setting off with their three children for North Wales. He even pulled over to observe the minute's silence.
Police are quizzing neighbours in Bloxwich, West Mids. Carl said: "The holiday was booked weeks ago. We weren't being disrespectful to Diana. Like everyone we were heartbroken."
Labels: England, Royalty
Royal hagiographies
Sarah Bradford's
King George VI is worse than her Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. I'm quite willing to believe he had some qualities - the way in which he rescued the Monarchy after the disasters of the Abdication, an interest in the lives of his subjects that went beyond the vague awareness they existed of George V, his support in wartime for the Prime Minister. But this book seems to imply he had hardly any defects, with a lot of over-the-top puffery ('his Royal memory' - ie he remembered something about a person he'd met before) - and any faults he did have, such as his horrendous temper, are often passed off as amusing Royal quirks.
One particular instance is illustrative. Any royal biography that covers the reign of Edward VIII will tell you that one consequence of his louche lifestyle was that State papers were 'returned marked with rings from cocktail glasses on them'. Bradford introduces this story with what seems to be the usual amount of evidence for it, 'there were stories'. Later, p.489 of the paperback, we learn that George VI
showed secret State telegrams from our country's Ambassador to the Foreign Office, to the pro-German King of Greece who of course happened to be his relative. There is no criticism of this behaviour (which in turn raises the issue over whether you ever fully trust your Monarch if they have relations who are foreign heads of state?) - merely a mention that the Foreign Office though it 'bordering on the unconstitutional'.
Labels: defence, England, Royalty
Father Jack...er the Bishop of Southwark, was not mugged
No, it appears
it's a story of rather too much Christmas cheer at the Irish embassy.
Labels: England
IDS and Blair's Breakdown Britain
I thought there were a lot of worrying statistics and facts in this
IDS piece on current British society (via Chris Dillow) based on a report he is releasing today:
Our report shows that 750,000 more people have incomes below 40% of median income than a decade ago [MT update: Note, I calculate this to be (in 2004/05) £122 per week for a two adult household, £66 per week for a single adult, £180 per week for two adults living with two children, and £124 per week for a single adult living with two children - It'll be interesting to see the Report as you would have thought any access to government benefits would have raised income above these levels - maybe he means pre-benefits? Or students?]
Almost 11m people in Britain today suffer from relationship problems as a result of debt
Last month the prison population reached 80,000 for the first time. In 1993 the number incarcerated was just 45,000.
On the other hand I am less convinced by its view that it is all the current government's fault - most parents after all were born and went to school under Tory governments, and most of the worse trends have been getting worse for quite some time. Furthermore:
Even those who win promotion or salary increases can face marginal tax rates of up to 90%, leaving a large section of society with little incentive to better itself.
This is an oft-repeated statistic and usually you know it is going to lead to the right-wing quackery solution of a 'flat tax' (though IDS is nowhere near that simple, at least in this piece), but I really question how important it is. Chris Dillow again noted that there are two incentives going on - the first to get a job, and the second to get a better paid job. Labour have worried most about the first, and least about the second. This is not necessarily the wrong priority - how many people on below 40% of median income have jobs?
Finally IDS says:
A child from a family in poverty today is less likely to rise to the top of the income scale than a child in 1970.
I've heard this before, and it obviously is not outlandish if - as we know - inequality has risen and social mobility has fallen. But how do they know about children born today?
Nevertheless this report certainly sounds a more useful occupation for IDS than flying to Washington and agreeing with Republicans that Britain needs to increase its defence budget (and in any case that role is now over filled by excitable Blairites). He concludes:
The increasing gap between those in severe long-term poverty and the rest of us has depressing implications for the future health and cohesion of our society.
Update: Here's the
report - which a quick glance suggests could be quite informative.
And here's the chart on the issue of poverty. IDS's claim is that the 60% of median income target has been abused, so there's now a larger proportion of people on 62% (say) than on 58%, which helps meet the targets set on poverty reduction. However this has been bought at the expense of more people on 40% (125,000 families with children, apparently). I wonder if the data is accurate enough to arrive at that conclusion, but its certainly thought-provoking. Here's the chart - click for larger version.
Labels: economics, England, politics, Taxation
Value destruction
Two rather unfortunate developments have just knocked value off the house I am buying.
1. It has just been hit by a
tornado.
and worse, obviously;
2. The world's media are declaring that it is in Kensal Green, or worse than worse - Harlesden - whereas we are off the view it is Queen's Park.
Of course for a lot of people it has been far worse - one house looks totally destroyed. Remarkably no-one has died, though one man I believe has been taken to hospital.
Labels: economics, England, environment
Replacing Trident
On
Comment Is Free a commenter suggested today that we only
pretend to replace Trident, hence getting the deterrrent capability without spending the tens of billions of pounds. This is an interesting idea, but fails as to make the pretence believed we would have to spend the money on it anyway, unless we can get the US to take part in the subterfuge too, and pretend to give us them for free.
Incidentally I am on my way back from Edinburgh (which is a delightful place, although isn't the new Scottish Parliament building unattractive?) and the press there is full of comment on where the nuclear submarines will be based if Scotland goes its separate ways. It seems to me an obvious solution would be to ask the US if they could be based at
King's Bay, which (I think) is where the US's near identical ships are.
Labels: defence, England, politics
Train pricing in the UK
Can anyone explain why two singles are sometimes, often, in fact usually cheaper than a return on British trains? I'd always assumed returns were a bit cheaper because the company got a guaranteed payment, and sometimes seat (if it was a fixed date and time return), and maybe also because it segmented the market into those who were unwilling to pay for flexibility and those who were.
Labels: economics, England
The Ashes
As with many children and even adults,
Chris Brooke's cat was introduced to cricket during the Ashes of 2005, and thus probably sees The Ashes as being a close (and sometimes not even that) fought contest which England win, instead of the one-sided embarassment that us older folk know and love.
Hopefully such youthful innocence won't be dashed, though the early signs are not good (or perhaps that's how newer fans imagine it always starts, as England lure the Aussies into a false sense of superiority). On the other hand having it totally one-sided does help with the time zone - in 2002 I watched a lot of the Ashes and was in bed by 2am, as often England were mostly out by then. This year I am Sky +ing it, which means I record the seven hours it is on, and then watch it at 30 times normal speed. It takes just 14 mins, and Glenn McGrath seems almost pacey.
It's reasonably hard to regain the Ashes, as you need to win. England are currently 7 to 1 on Betfair if you fancy a punt.
Labels: England, sport
Xmas
Has anyone seen the usual newspaper letters debate where someone writes in and says 'I hate how people use Xmas when it should be Christmas' and then someone else writes in and says something along the lines of (mercifully I forget the details) 'In fact the X has a long tradition as a sign of the Cross'? I fear, like Christmas itself, it arrives earlier and earlier and I've missed it, and there's nothing I like more than such things - the question of when the Millennium began, and more importantly, if anyone was really going to care that much, kept me occupied for months.
Labels: England
