The Ghurkas

The Ghurkas are ferocious, loyal, honest, dependable and terrific soldiers from Nepal who have been fighting for Britain, as part of the army, since the early nineteenth century . They are feared by Britain's enemies and long admired by the British people. When push comes to shove they are amongst the first soldiers sent to the most difficult battles. Right now they are fighting alongside the rest of our men in the most difficult engagements in Afghanistan. Their battle standards have flown around the world and they have never let us down.

It is therefore sickening that the Ghurkas are now having to march in protest against the British government. Some of these magnificent men even returned their medals. They have no alternative because the government will not allow any of these men to live in Britain if they served its army before 1997. That's when Britain decided to base the Ghurkas in the UK rather than Hong Kong, where they had been stationed long term. They were also given a pension at about one quarter the rate of their British born fellow soldiers. The government's rationale was that the pension was based on where they were from, in Nepal, rather than in the UK. 

This has admittedly stopped for the Ghurkas who have been in the army over the last 10 years but the government still will not change these regulations for those who served before 1997. I am not very interested in the rationale of the government, and I think no one else is either. The should pay these people at the same rate of pension as anyone else who served us. 

The total cost for this would be something in the region of £200 million. We're a very rich country, with one of the biggest economies in the world, we can afford it, and its morally right to do it. 

Allowing these magnificent soldiers to live in the country they served shouldn't even be a question. We allow all the other soldiers who are born overseas, and serve in our army, to live in the UK after they serve. The Ghurkas have to be given equal right to settle in the UK under the same terms immediately. 

The total number of men who might take up this right to live in the UK would be about 7,000. Whereas the UK is currently allowing about this number of legal, economic immigrants into the country every 12 days. No one quite knows how many illegal immigrants are also sneaking across our porous borders in addition.

Why are we treating these decent, honorable men worse? Let them in, and pay them properly, now.

Crossing the Platform

Crossing the Platform

We’ve reached the digital age where people are making, distributing and viewing their own material digitally. The gurus call it pier to pier, or User Generated Content (UGC) but it’s more simple than that, it’s when pull became push.

In case you’ve been asleep and hadn’t realized you need to know that you can now see or be seen, hear or be heard, without limitation around the globe, instantly and unless you have the bad fortune to live in one of the totalitarian states can do this without limit unless your credit card runs out.

Everything can be got on the World Wide Web. An infinite variety of media is all now available in the one place, all at once. That’s what the geeky people call Convergence. Blockbusters and broadcasting are probably dead forever because web based distribution will lead to the power that was previously owned by the monolithic media owners now being owned and available to anyone or everyone or is that no one?

This doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a great thing since some of those distribution channels were really well run. There’s something to be said for someone who knows their job making sure the distribution chain is working. What’s the bonus in the “people” having the rights to do what they want when they want when mostly they want to make self-satisfied crap? There’s another way to describe that kind of democracy, and that word is Anarchy.

So beware of what sounds so sexy, because it could just be another way of our describing electronic anarchy.

Now, if it’s going to be bottom up entertainment rather than top down, does that mean that it’s going to get better? Do we achieve Highest Common Factor rather than the glitterati’s common belief that the Lowest Common Denominator is the result of the previously totally dominant top down material generated by the giants.

What it does mean is that the talent can get directly to the audience, and that they are one and the same thing. It means the creator and consumer lines are blurred to the point where they don’t seem to exist.

It also means that you can make low cost totally indie media products to suit yourselves, and if it works in one way or another then you keep on going. You don’t have any restriction, censorship or committees to answer to.

But you also don’t get to make big budget material that looks classy, or has big commercial values. How is anyone going to make a huge production? Can the micro and macro budget industry ends co-exist?

Now anyone can and does generate their own encyclopaedia and anyone can be an author of their own Blog, or create a V Blog to entertain, be entertained or simply as a means of expression. It’s the world looking up its own posterior with a mirror. Someone somewhere is always listening and looking and, depending on who you listen to there are two to three new bloggers signing on every second around the World.

This is totally changing the way we view ourselves, or the rest of the world, and this spreads ideas around the globe virally, without borders, in record time, with no intermediary to slow it up to moderate views or to censor.

This is cool. But how cool is the new order when someone like Rupert Murdoch buys My Space? Are we just changing the labels on the cans, but inside the cans will be just the same?

This is a revolution and the blood is still flowing in the gutter so who knows just yet who wins and who loses when the guillotine is still razoring necks, so no one knows. Nothing-new there then.

People are going to go out less in this brave new world, they are going to stay home, that’s because fuel is too expensive, roads too crowded, transportation reaching gridlock, terrorism being perceived as a constant threat, whilst at home, safe and secure you can give or receive what kind of entertainment when and how you want.

So here’s the story; this is how it has always worked in the recorded media industry. A new and special part of the industry appears out of the blue, let’s say the film business nearly 100 years ago or Pod Casting today. The film industry started very small, in fact it was considered a gimmick with a limited life span, but it very soon become gigantic, rich beyond belief and eventually fat, complacent and self satisfied. That’s what happens to most human commercial endeavour. But then some lean, hungry and very ambitious competitors appear and the fat guys become their fast food, when logic tells you, it should have been the other way around.

The people running the film industry originally made so much money that when a shiny new industry, television arrived they originally saw it as a joke to be ignored, and when that obviously was wrong, they then saw it as a threat. Of course those film guys should have owned this brash newcomer or at least embraced this weak newborn infant, nurtured it and made it their principal source of income. Instead living up to their laughably bad decision making of the past, the film business builds bunkers in which to hunker, hoping, like King Canute to keep the tide from rolling in on their heads. This activity has never worked, and the blind idiots drown before they realise that they are going to have to live with the blowsy but crazily attractive new gizmo.

So, now, instead of either owning or integrating with TV, there were now two tracks marching truculently along parallel lines. Only crossing platforms when they had absolutely no other choice!

Now it was the turn of the Network Television industry to become a huge cash cow for their owners. Billions were earned and they became just as fat and complacent as their film industry colleagues.

It’s of interest to note that despite both those industries being hugely bloated, out of date and missing opportunity after opportunity they were still insanely profitable for their owners. This translates not to their being well run businesses but being businesses in an industry that because of the public’s insatiable appetite for recorded media is almost indestructible, despite both actually suffering from appalling management during the 60 to the 80’s.

Of course this is all edging, inch by painful inch to the point where the customer is going to see what he wants, when he wants and how he wants. Time goes by and guess what, another new toy materialises over the horizon. This time it’s video and the same things happen again. The only difference is that this time around both the television and film industries miss the boat, rather than just one of them, they both wave sadly from the shore as yet another ship sets sail without them being the captain or the master. Video becomes huge, and from it springs DVD, and once again makes a fortune for many new people who mainly come from outside the entertainment industry.

You would think by this time that everyone knows what’s going to happen next and therefore prepares to embrace whatever is coming. And guess what, it then happens again and again and again and is still happening.

In case you’ve been in a very deep cave you will have notice that Television begat Networks and they begat Syndicated television and that created the spawn of the devil know as Cable television, and this begat Satellite television. You have the picture, forgive the pun, loads of different screens, funnily enough playing much the same kinds of things.

Due to the short sightedness of most of the conglomerates concerned the situation exists in which each of these systems has operated along separate railway tracks, parallel with, but rarely fully connected to one another.

They sometimes have come together because of financial engineering or due to one side in the equation or the other being perceived as a having a disproportionately higher market capitalisation at a particular moment. For example the seemingly crazy situation where AOL took over Time Warner when it was the latter which was the cash cow and the former was still primarily a blue-sky company, worth more in the common mind, but actually not earning anything like the company it purchased with its very high value stock.

Wave after wave of new innovation has crashed onto the shore. Because what do mobile phones, the Internet and all the new media players have in common? They are all totally reliant on content to make big profits.

Content is the King, Queen and Ace of what’s necessary for any media system to work commercially. This is going to become ever more obvious as with the Time Warner / AOL deal because the latter needs the content from the former.

Even some of the most media savvy analysts are blinded and confused by the technology. Somehow it’s this means of viewing that seems sexy whereas the content, to them, is the add on. The facts are entirely the other way around. You’re not dumb enough to go overboard praising a screwdriver for it enabling you to put a plug on a computer are you? All screens are just places for you to put on content. Nothing more, nothing less.

Many years ago there were many wonderful movies made where the hero and heroine saw each other fleetingly across two railway platforms, through the ever prevailing but oh so romantic fog of London, and the smoke generated by the train’s engine separating them and their unrequited love. They want to get together for some personalized inter activity; they want to go to bed together, and it isn’t to read……..

Their frustration is a bit like the film distribution companies looking at the mobile phone companies and thinking they would make a wonderful lover, perhaps even a wedding partner. Or perhaps it’s the other way around and it’s the gigantic Google data-bases of this world who cast about them, looking longingly at those very attractive curves of those advertising television billions, or even some bloody water company who wants to sex up their ultimately very boring profile??

I have news for anyone that’s been asleep the last few years; it’s all of the above and then some. Why, simply put we have a fairly static number of Western Dollars being pursued by a growing proliferation of narrowcasters. Forget the monolithic cash cows of the recent past represented by the old TV stations. They’re still there, and will continue to be, but now they’re less broadcasters beaming the big event show into everyone’s living room but the narrowcaster trying to cut through the cluttering proliferation to a more selective and selecting group of more narrowly focused viewers and / or participants. Again we’re looking at the need for these groups to come together for some inter-active personalized activity, they need some good loving!

This last description of the service end user as the viewer or customer and that they will be future participants further re-defines the entire dynamic of what skill sets industry professionals are going to have to possess or perish. People who view in the very near future will be demand to see what they want, when they want and more importantly how they want. And what people more than ever is to in charge of their time, and they’ve proven how willing they are to pay for what they want.

Essential in this change will be true inter activity for the viewer that has so far, only just begun on TV. Examples of this currently available are some voting techniques, choices of camera angles for sporting events, choices of matches to view and the now famous and ubiquitous “Red Button” which provides additional information or further choices.

The other major change coming rapidly at us is the BRIC countries. These are Brazil, Russia, India, and China and for good measure we’ll add the rest of the Asian Tiger economies who share a new insatiable frontier for these products and services. They want some very different products with varying sensibilities but mainstream films, music and above all personalised inter activity.

How personal media liberty will mesh with some authoritarian centrally controlled nation states remains to be seen. It seems improbable that these two diametrically magnetic poles can live together, and might well lead to meltdown in one or the other. It seems like something is going to have to give. Who knows what that will be?

The Cost of Fame

I have worked with many very famous people. In making films you get to meet stars. Everyone from Mickey Rooney, with nods to Roger Moore, Peter Finch, Michael Caine, Shelley Winters, Twiggy, Vincent Price, Ray Milland, Sir John Gielgud, Rita Tushingham, Barbra Parkin, novelists like Wilbur Smith, groups like The Who and Deep Purple. I have known and worked with these and many others of their ilk. Their fame allows you access to other famous people. Of course none of these people are being described by me here.

There is a cost of fame. You could see it on the face of Heather Mills outside the Divorce Court in London. There is a seemingly insane desire to be seen to be in the right if you are a seeker of fame. Being rich and famous means that you are surrounded by people telling you how wonderful you are, all day, every day. No one ever tells you that what you say or do might be wrong. Those that are close to you generally rely on you for their money, lifestyle or simple affirmation of fame by association.

Heather Mills does not know how out of touch she is. Poor Heather cannot see that the near twenty five million pounds Paul is having to pay her in a divorce settlement should be enough for Heather to pay for the A class travel she thinks their daughter is entitled. Heather wants more. Could I apply to Paul for adoption?

Another thing I have noticed with very famous people is that their faces become very smooth, like a baby's bum. I don't really know why this is, but I am sure I am on to some new Newtonian law of evolution that no one else has noticed. Rich, famous people get smoother skin. Of course it could be that they can afford more time and money in very pampering and expensive spas.

I was once traveling in a helicopter with a very famous pop star, who had made many millions of pounds. He was pilot and I was his very nervous passenger. He looked down at the traffic stuck in traffic jams on the roads below us and turned to me, "I don't understand why more people don't use helicopters." he said, not thinking for a second that it was because we can't afford them. Another perfect example of being in an entirely different world to you or me.

There was another when an equally successful singer from another rock band invited me to his just completed hotel for dinner. He had built this gorgeous place in the English countryside complete with guitar shaped pool. Every room was a state of the art suite, and the kitchen was both huge and magnificent. He had invested many millions of pounds. He had asked me there to give an opinion on his new venture and how profitable this investment would be. Simple arithmetic meant that if each of his suites was full every night for the next two hundred years he would never reach profit. When I told him the sad news he became upset, not with his advisers who let him get into this situation, but with me for telling him that the Emperor had no clothes.

It's a synergistic situation, the rich and famous and their coterie of brown nosing friends. Both feed of each other and its hard to fit in if you're honest, or don't need to eat rubbish for a living. Let's face facts, it must be great to be told how beautiful, rich, talented, desirable and incredible you are every day. It isn't quite like that for me and my friends and family. I suppose they love and like me, but there are reservations. If I do something particularly stupid I hope they tell me, and in fact I'm sure they will.

Who's happier? I think I am, because its better to remember who you are. When victorious generals returned to ancient Rome for their triumphal processions there was a man who stood behind them as they drove their chariots through the adoring crowds, his job, to whisper in the general's ear, "remember you are mortal." In our fame obsessed culture more rich and famous people would do well to remember that they are just men and women. Like they say in the States, get over themselves!

My Bubble, Your Bubble, One Big Bubble?

Have you noticed what’s happening? It’s like this. Everyone is going somewhere else. I started to really take note when I was still working in academia, toiling at the University of East London I took the Docklands Light Railway quite regularly travelling between uncountable meetings of various acronymic bodies all with the words Thames Gateway somewhere in the title. During those trips I was asked the question, “do you know which was the language most spoken by passengers on the DLR. Quick as a flash I realized it wasn’t going to be English. But seeing as how nearby Newham is supposedly the second biggest Bangladeshi community in the World, I assumed the answer must be Sirhati. Wrong, the most spoken language is Russian. Don’t ask me why there are so many Russians but I had a theory. Perhaps every Russian young man wanted to be part of the building boom around Canary Wharf. All of those amazing looking, Russian speaking young women, the genetically worryingly different looking offspring of hairy shot putting women, are the bricklaying off duty distractions for these young men. They are a kind of bling ridden RAGS, an acronym for Russian Anglo Good time Slappers. I say this without the slightest evidence, other than the very sketchy way these pneumatic breasted but skinny bummed women dress and speak into customised mobile phones. Other women of an English persuasion grumpily inform me that normal women are just not made that way, and therefore these remarkable bodies are purely the result of enhancement surgery. Wonderful stuff if that’s the result!

So apart from the fact that there a great many Russians and Bangladeshis in East London what else do we know? We know that huge numbers of people have immigrated to the UK in the recent past. It depends on who you listen to what numbers you believe. I have to swiftly announce a vested interest here. All my grandparents bar one came to this country from somewhere else. They were Russians and Polish and into their past were German roots, and going back even further they probably originated from Israel or Khazaria, whichever version of history you subscribe to. But then again you are reaching back a millennia or two or more, so it isn’t too urgent an enquiry. Almost everyone on that train, any train in the UK, comes from somewhere else like me, either in the dim and distant past, or in the last few years. We arrived here for various reasons. Looking for better economic chances, more freedom, free expression, whatever drives men and women to move on. I know it wasn’t the weather.

All of these people came to this little United Kingdom over a very long period. Otherwise we would all be Picts or Celts or some such. Whereas we are a dolly mixture, a sort of early version of the rainbow nation, except most people never realized it, as they were too concerned being terribly British, which was a bloody myth. We are also Saxons, Romans, Jutes, Normans, Vikings, Huguenot French, Jews from many countries, West Indians, Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, Arabs and we could go on to name a hundred more countries. We supposedly have a bigger concentration of Polish people in the UK than anywhere else in the World except Warsaw, more Irish than any place other than Dublin and there’s certainly more Australians in Earl’s Court in London than you could fit into most cities in that fair country.

But being Brits we are nothing if not ingenious, so while these people pour into our country we leave for somewhere else, in almost as big numbers. So we continue to send vast numbers to Australia, France, New Zealand, America, Canada, and Spain. This works fine because the French send huge numbers of their people here to work in our City financial institutions, there are also several hundred thousand American in London, there are also huge numbers of Canadians living in the States, and New Zealanders who live in Australia. So we don’t have one-way traffic here, as everyone is swapping where they are for somewhere else. Like a giant swap market, we all think the other guy has got something better going on someplace else. In proof of this Time magazine recently stated that 31% of London’s current population was born outside Britain, and New York had an immigrant population of 34%. There are many people who believe that this figure is over 40% in both these huge cities. But the interesting statistic is the number of people leaving whilst these tides of humanity were arriving. Hong Kong is the third leg of the financial human traffic tripod, with enormous numbers of Asians joining the local Chinese community that will eventually render it cosmopolitan. Perversely there is now a huge Chinese community in Vancouver, British Columbia. It all supports my contention that everyone seems to wants to be somewhere else.

Recent polls demonstrate that the vast majority of English people would like to live somewhere else in the World. The most popular destination is Australia.

If the traffic were one way, inwards to London, the population would have become unmanageable long ago. What’s really happening is that we have different movements, both in and out, for different but allied reasons. We have, for example, the super rich Russian oligarchs coming here because the tax regime has been generous, there are very nice things to buy, and we’re between the USA and mainland Europe both psychologically and geographically. Our politics are stable and our law enforcement is OK, at least a whole lot better than Putin and his ex KGB cronies are likely to provide. On the other hand, we have those young, poorer Russians, travelling with the Docklands Light Railway. They’re probably here for just the same reasons as the odd million or two young Poles, to better themselves economically in a place that’s not too bad. Mostly they all think they’ll be going home, or moving on to a third country. History proves that most will stay, just like my grandparents who came from the same kind of place for the same kind of reasons. It’s only two generations since he travelled on the London underground (subway to the uninitiated) and, not being able to read English got totally lost when he had to take a journey with which he wasn’t familiar. Too embarrassed to admit to this deficiency he wouldn’t ask anyone for the route but stoically travelled to every station until he saw a familiar looking sign. I asked him about this in the direct way children have, “why didn’t you ask someone for help?” and he looked at me with that kind smile he reserved for me and said, “What, I should ask the Cossack gunuffs!” It meant he still harboured fear and loathing for the Cossack attacks from his childhood in the Tsar’s Empire, when they used to kill and maim the Jewish community without mercy, before the Nazis got up to speed. Yes, there is that other reason why people come to our country, and still do. They’re running from today’s Cossacks, Nazis and other genocidal lunatics. My poppa, in his late sixties, was still that frightened little boy, scared to expose any weakness that could expose him to attack. That’s the other reason people move on. We should be strong and secure enough to welcome and help the weak and oppressed, otherwise there’s no reason to be us is there.

This does not mean we throw away our common sense and become a place where people come not to seek their fortune but to remove ours. Spongers, of whom we have enough of our own, should not be allowed into our country, and those that have already crept in should be thrown out. Don’t you agree that we should all have to abide by the rules of our country and breathe the air together in our one big bubble?

What Happened to Us?

What happened to us?



Have you noticed how society seems to have become a bit of a mess lately? I see evidence of this everywhere I look. Have we really lost our direction? At the end of this article you can reach your judgement as to whether I am simply a grumpy old man, well not in the first bloom of youth, or someone who is saying what you are thinking.

Apart from struggling for my daily commercial life I also do some lecturing and pursue some other academic pursuits. This takes me to a variety of Further and Higher Education establishments. Sadly I have to report that most of the young adults swear most of the time and you are considered strange if you ask them to stop, which I do.

Many of the young men spit on the floor and when I told one of them to stop he simply couldn't understand why and instantly tried aggressive behaviour as his default position.

I also insist that the young men and women do not slouch with their feet on the empty chairs or listen to their MP3 players or take phone calls during lessons. They look at me as if I am deranged and I have had to eject a couple of them because they simply refused to live with this rule. Yesterday a young man appeared 45 minutes late for a one-hour lecture and couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t allow him entry.

However this is not just a story aimed at the more moronic of our young. We have a Government that lies and when discovered who does not apologise but justifies. This is about people who are supposed to know better.

Recently we, in the UK, have been barraged with a variety of different numbers of foreigners admitted to work legally. Don’t get me wrong I have nothing against those of foreign origin, my grandparents included!

I’m not so much worried about the foreigners as I am about the liars running our lives, our Government. This is not a political argument, this is about morality.

It is worrying that there are wildly varying numbers of illegal aliens we're told who are living among us. Surely if we know how many this is, we would know who they are and where they live and could simply kick them out.

This reminds me of my headmaster of many decades ago asking me "where did you lose your cap Klinger?" For me to respond, aged 11, but clearly brighter than him, "if I knew where I'd lost it sir it would be on my head."

The facts are that our Government lost all control of this situation and has since sought to obscure this from the public. Years ago the Klinger family lived in California, and they had similar problems, albeit their largest number of illegal aliens were from Central and South America. They seemed to have a more enlightened approach to the same problem. Every so often they had an amnesty to regularise the situation. That way at a given moment in time you knew how many people there were and what resources you needed to plan for. Anyone there, making a contribution to society at that moment in time, was allowed to stay, and rendered legal. This was a tremendous benefit to both the previously illegal and to the society in which they lived. It also stopped the lying and cheating and back room bullyboy tactics of those who take advantage of the weak and the oppressed.
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Unfortunately, for short-term political reasons, we also have many politicians of every hue who are at ease with a more relaxed version of the truth. Yes, liars.

In the last weeks we have had the most senior police officer in the country hear his department roundly condemned by an official enquiry and he did not resign. We have had a junior minister who called for more severe punishments for those using their mobile telephone whilst driving caught by the police using his mobile telephone whilst he was driving, and he did not resign. We had two senior ministers of our Government tell us figures for immigration that they changed (upwards) on the same day, and again, upwards, the following morning; and neither of them resigned.

It isn’t that long ago that the British system was honour driven. If you were caught doing wrong, or failing to live up to your public duty, you resigned. It was stoic and a very good idea. The whole world looked with envy on our incorruptible civil service bureaucracy, it was all that was best about our country. Honest, efficient, and above suspicion. Of course no system was, or can be one hundred percent perfect, but it can aim for it. We seem to have given up on this, and to be prepared to accept lies, half-truths and spin; and we’re all the worse for it.

In the same vein we have the ever-present debate about climate change. It is an obsession that knows no limit. With every passing day we have further legislation and threats of draconian rules and regulations to enforce eco friendly behaviour. The big new “right on” behaviour is for us to purchase carbon offsets so that we can mitigate the damage we're supposedly doing to our planet. No one has justified this to me as yet. There are people who are gaining from this, and they are businessmen with a vested interest. Just like no one except local and national government will gain from taxing our rubbish collections. However, because these actions are being taken in the name of protecting the planet no one dares even raise a question mark. Instead we are told we must make these and many other alterations to our behaviour to stop our imminent demise.

So I must sort my rubbish while over 20% of the planet’s energy is burnt on the freeways of California, and 2 new fossil fuel power stations a week are being built in China?

I, for one, recognise climate change when I see it, but also recognize that there has always been climate change and always will be. Now the politically correct guardians of the gates of moral right and certainty are convinced that they know the cause, the effect and the cure. They don't and most scientists know this but still stood applauding when Al Gore received a Nobel Prize for his very iffy documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth" which a British court recently found was wrong on at least 9 major counts. Should we simply re-name the
film, "An Inconvenient Opinion"?

I have simply had enough of the thought police now patrolling the corridors of our local and national government nanny state who tell us what to eat and drink, how much to exercise and how to look after our children. They are seeking to run every aspect of our lives in a realisation of an Orwellian nightmare. It is long past time we spoke up.

The reasons why this is all so important are not quite so obvious. I truly believe that we are allowing all the ingredients for a totalitarian state to be put in place without too much thought and virtually no protest. We all understood when some of the tougher laws were introduced they were created to deal with the ongoing terrorist threat. But we have to be extremely careful not to become a totalitarian state whilst protecting our democracy.

Of course while we have a basically decent and well-intentioned, paternalistic and democratic leadership in place we can all sleep safely in our bed. Heaven forbid, through any kind of national emergency and we find ourselves in the hands of someone less benevolent we could be living in a dictatorship.

The increasingly strident rules and laws already make for a less civilised and pleasant place for us all to live in. You can measure the downward spiral of a society by its use of euphemism. When words lose their power and we avoid difficult truths we are in danger of not waking up before it is too late. I am not saying that many of these new laws and regulations have been thought up with evil in mind. No, I firmly believe that the people doing this were well intentioned, but deluded. It is not the job of our political leaders to rule on our lifestyles. That is the job of every individual, for you and me, for our moral conventions. Our religion, our spirituality, our traditions, our evolution to a chosen path, these are the guides to live by. Not the political theorists in the Town Hall. With all the laws and regulations coming into force in our country we are in grave danger. Wake up and be afraid, be very afraid.

Going to the Bejing Olympics?

The last week or so has seen a seemingly popular uprising by the Tibetan people against their Chinese occupiers. Now we are beginning to witness the news of the brutal repression of this by the Chinese government. This news has dribbled out of Tibet despite the authorities largely efficient efforts to cynically censor this whole affair from the world.

I am against the Chinese government in this, as are, I suspect, the vast majority of people watching these events unfold. I have always wanted Tibet free and the Dali Lama in his rightful place. His exile has gone on too long as has the apparent effort toward ethnic cleansing by the Chinese government.

We should seek to apply as much pressure as we can on our governments for them to do the same to their Chinese counterparts to end this unjust and ill conceived occupation. I don't believe we should include a boycott of the Olympics, one of the few global event which should remain above politics. If the West boycotts Bejing the Chinese will find an excuse to lead a boycott of London's Olympics in 2012, and then we're on the slippery slope to not holding global sporting events. My belief is that these events are amongst the more important glue ingredients for international understanding.

What we should do is go to the Olympics, and while we're there, in the full glare of the media spotlight, make a big noise about Tibet and other human rights abuses in China, of which there are many. What we mustn't do is go to the Olympics and allow ourselves to be dragged in front of the global media for picture opportunities in seeming support of the Chinese government. That would be too much like the English soccer team giving the Nazi salute, out of politeness, at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. We can never live that moment of infamy down, and I fear we might be about to repeat that terrible mistake.

The Chinese political establishment inhabit a very sophisticated society and would clearly understand a well thought out global response to their totally unacceptable human rights position, particularly with regard to Tibet. It's time they got out of that small country and started to behave like a responsible member of the family of nations rather than as the neighborhood bully.

Loving the Anglo American Way of Life

What is it about the Anglo American way of life that makes other people from other nations so jealous? I believe its because they know that there is so much to be envied. They mock our culture but then buy our films, music, writing, architecture, design and other creativity by the bucket load. Our language dominates the world, and is the commonly accepted big brand for everything from commercial air traffic to finance. If two people from diverse third countries get together, the accepted common language will almost always be English.

It’s that open export of our ideas and our concepts that has made ours the global culture. The internet came out of British and American brains willing to share. Compare this to similarly able French or Italian speakers from largely inward looking cultures and you can see why their countries culture simply is not expanding. They used to be happy to share their undoubted brilliance through centuries of inspiration, but then, like the Germans, Dutch, Japanese and others, they simply got left behind.

More than this there is a sense of excitement in Britain and the States that is simply missing elsewhere. This comes from more than what some might regard as cultural imperialism. It is what advertising people call buzz marketing. There is a good vibe, a buzz coming out of the Anglo American experience that attracts others to it. This is plainly not because we get everything right, we clearly don’t, but what we do get right is a national generosity of spirit that is all too rare elsewhere.

I have been traveling between Britain and America for about forty years, and there is something reassuring about being at the nexus of London, New York and Los Angeles. It is where the decisions are made and executed regarding the driving forces of finance, culture and communications and where the prime movers of foreign adventures, both good and bad, are fed from and upon. Perhaps this will change as the BRIC economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China begin to dominate the global economy of the coming century.

I suspect this will not happen for a multitude of reasons. One is that the prime movers of those economies actually seem to want to live in either Britain or America, and while that’s the case I believe the levers of power and choice will stay in our countries. It is simply more fun to live here and safer. The other main reason is that not only has the Anglo American culture been exported for a long while, but so has our capital. We have always invested overseas in a much bigger fashion than our natural competitors. For example Germany and France might invest more in their infrastructure than we do, for which I am envious, but they have never matched us for long term international investment. We have also been brilliantly successful encouraging future leaders of the world to come to our two countries for their education, military training and social polishing.

I am not primarily interested in the economic benefits or wonderful modern culture of living within the Anglo American context. We also have had more real democracy, within a stable context, for a longer time. Despite our many faults we are also both inclined to be interventionist countries for what we believe to be the right reasons, to be on the side of the good guys. We are the people who other countries come to for help because we have a track record for helping those that cannot help themselves. We have got some balls, and that’s no bad thing. Even when our NATO allies join us in a fight regarding a third party, like Afghanistan, which is legal and more or less universally agreed upon, they mostly try to weasel out of the battlefront. Kind of a war lite!

If there are to be global responses to global problems I am convinced these will still have to be led by certain states taking a lead. I see nothing to suggest that the U.S.A. and U.K. will not continue to be at the forefront of the supposedly new world order. Why would I want to be anywhere else but at the centre of events.

I love England and America because they’re terrific and I understand them, and, as important, they understand me. My family lives in both places, and so have I. There are more reasons for loving these places including obvious, wider freedoms of expression and ways to earn a living that have become the norm for many countries grudging in their admiration for the Anglo American lifestyle.

However there are also some growing differences between Britain and America that are beginning to become obvious and that often go unremarked.

One of the things I love about America is that its basic social shape or lifestyle has not changed perceptibly in all the time I have been going there, whereas in the UK everything has changed. This statement will astonish many Americans as they believe theirs is the country, which is moving forward quickly whereas they believe little old England is stuck in the past. In some ways I wish this were so, but the opposite is true. There is a consistency to American life, not always a good thing, but largely it is. In the UK we live in what has become perhaps the biggest Western social experiment in modern times. Our laws are evolving so fast no one I know can keep pace. For example there are so many initiatives, laws and regulations supposedly to curtail the ill effects of climate change that they are beginning to change the very fabric of our lives. We now also have something approaching five million closed circuit television cameras in place in Britain, photographing the average city dweller up to 400 times a day. We are about to develop biometric identity cards for our people and a national data base for almost every heading. It is ironic that the country who’s author George Orwell bought the world the nightmare visions of 1984 and Animal Farm is also the place where these are apparently coming to life. Perversely I am certain that many of these new laws are being created with the best of intent, without their proponents understanding the huge and imminent danger of a slip over the cliff of civilization their ideas are taking us toward. Unless these issues are addressed just one bad undemocratic leadership will result in an inevitable totalitarian British state,

My hope is that there will be a massive national realization of and revulsion to the dangers of a drift toward a police state in the U.K. Hopefully just as there was a Thatcher to beat back the seemingly unmanageable power of the trade unions there will be another political figure to harness this natural democratic and evolutionary trend in our national character. As the emergence of other great leaders in British history has proven we are capable of finding just the right person at the right time. If we don’t then America might find itself even more politically isolated in future, just when its economy and therefore its military will be much weaker. We need each other to be strong, and we need each other to be free, and so does the rest of the world.