Two minds on museum charging

We were fortunate in having enlightened and dutiful parents and as a consequence there wasn't a holiday that didn't involve a day in South Kensington, Bloomsbury or Kennington. Once in, we couldn't be shifted until closing time, parking Mum near the cafe and checking back every hour or so. Our national museums were vast treasure houses crammed from floor to fourteen-foot ceiling with objects. Not here the solitary Ushabti that languished on the shelf of the Ipswich Museum, but a high Mahogany case crammed with a thousand, classified into Old Kingdom, New Kingdom, Theban Recession, Romano-Graecian and thence by stylistic form and convention. In just one case one learned taxonomy, art history, religious schism and the life-long basis of being able to discriminate. The great museums were all free, of course; intended as philanthropic gifts for the education and enlightenment of the English, a few foreigners being permitted to enter and gasp in wonder at the wealth of our culture. 


From the foregoing you may imagine I'm wholly in favour of maintaining free admission to our museums. Not quite. You see, curatorially  our museums lost their way sometime in the 1980s / 1990s. All these objects, the thinking went, discriminated against the stupid, those who couldn't be bothered to follow up a visit by buying a book or catalogue, or as I did, spending hours in the reference library self-teaching. What the stupid needed, they decided, was interpretation - aimed at a backward twelve year-old. The Mahogany cases packed with Ushabti disappeared to be replaced by a display panel and a single exemplar figure. From now on, the museum would decide what you learned and what objects meant - we were no longer to be allowed the opportunity to do so ourselves. 


And so our great cultural treasure houses hid 95% of their collections away in store and replaced them with graphics panels, video screens and unconvincing mannequins. Worse was to come. Under New Labour, they adopted an attitude of abject apology for cultural hegemony; the museums became a giant apology for slavery, colonialism, European expansionism and for ever thinking that our cultural achievements were superior to those of a naked tribe of goat-keepers scratching in the dirt with sticks. The most sickening and kitsch exemplar of the New Museum came from the National Maritime Museum, with an utterly meretricious little tableau depicting two eighteenth century ladies taking tea at a Pembroke table perched incongruously over a ship's deck grating from which protruded a pleading black hand. Really. It was indescribably awful. 


From that point my commitment to free museums disappeared. They had abandoned academic integrity for politically driven sycophancy; let them then stand or fall without my tax keeping them open. I even found a loophole; if you introduced yourself as a researcher, then the entire treasure-house was open to you on a bespoke basis. Many a blissful afternoon did I spend in the Norman Shaw building at the V&A being brought box after box of prints and drawings I had ordered up from the store, each day being a personally curated exhibition in which I got not only to choose the exhibits but could spend as long as I liked seated at a comfortable desk gazing on each as I held it my hands for as long as I wished, and without a single interpretive label in sight. And it was free. Sometime soon I shall ask the British Museum to produce a few score Ushabti for my personal delectation, and I shall spend a pleasant afternoon arranging them on the desk according the long-remembered taxonomy of my youth. Without a single interpretive label in sight.    

The sound of Europe disintegrating

Please try to find forty minutes to listen to "Greece - Broken marble, Broken Future" - not sure if it's available on iPlayer after tonight or if you need to wait until Sunday, but this is the sound of Europe disintegrating. 

A postcard from home

I'm in a Christmas mood this year unlike the past few and reminded that amongst the log-fired wonky pubs and bleak brown lanes that make up my home County live some of the weirdest creatives known to man. Any County that can host both Neil Innes and Brian Eno is really something special. As a seasonal treat, here's Innes' 'Accountantsea Shanty' ;

Cameron's bluff called on Europe

Such brave words we've had from the Prime Minister on Europe; not one step further, a real repatriation of powers, a treaty re-negotiation, even the threat of a referendum if the UK doesn't get what its people want. And what audacious mendacity. Not a word of it the truth. It's now clear that Cameron will go along with whatever Sarkozy and Merkel have decided without anything in return for the UK, and will wriggle and dissemble and squirm his way out of any threat of a referendum. 


In this not entirely unexpected betrayal of British interests, Cameron has proven himself responsive not only to pressure from the Franco-German alliance but from the US, which has been leaning heavily on the British government to do nothing that would rock a potential Euro settlement. The UK, it seems, is to pay the price for American financial stability. 


Cameron is a politician very much in the mould of Chamberlain, ever ready to see the grievances of others as justification for appeasement. The Germans were angry about the Versailles settlement, so they must be allowed to recover the Sudentenland, the Rhine, Alsace, Danzig to calm them down; Hitler would become a benign Euro statesman, visiting the King at Windsor, taking tea at Balmoral, and fairies would play at the bottom of the garden. 


Of course it's high time we ditched the Chamberlains and Halifaxes from our government. But this time, there's no Churchill waiting in the wings.  

Bastardy and Crime

The August riots were a God-sent opportunity for the nation's army of Sociologists and Statisticians, who have been seriously under-employed since the government halved the number of fatuous studies commissioned. First on the scene was the Ministry of Justice, with a statistical analysis that showed that 76% of those charged following the riots had a previous conviction, and they were likely to be in receipt of Free School meals or benefits, were more likely to have had special educational needs and be absent from school. 


Next up was the Riots, Communities and Victims Panel, a brand new Quango set up by Nick Clegg to report on the riots. In a weasel conclusion, they announced that  "Lack of confidence in the police response to the initial riots encouraged people to test reactions in other areas." or in other words when it was clear that the rioters were getting away with it, others were encouraged to join in. 


And now the Guardian's joint study with the LSE has been published, and reveals that most rioting was opportunistic, a chance to steal and get away with it, that activity was orchestrated via Blackberry Messenger, and that many of the rioters disliked the police. With 76% of them at the time being convicted criminals, you may think their last prejudice a not unreasonable one. 


There is one question that no-one has asked of the rioters so far to my knowledge; "did you grow up with your biological father?" You see, I think I know the answer to this already - that an overwhelming majority of them will be growing up or have grown up with an absent father - but it would be nice to see the figures. 

BBC pensions - It's what we do

For anyone who joined the BBC before 1996, the Television Tax provides a generous pension:

Example Retires at 55 after 30 years service on final salary of £60,000
30/60ths x £60,000 = £30,000 at age 60
4% reduction for early retirement at 55
You get £28,800 a year

After decades of overmanning, gold-plating, empire-building and staggering inefficiency, the vast bloated Soviet bureaucracy that is our national broadcaster has accumulated a terrifying pension liability on the most generous of terms - with some 17,000 staff in the pipeline entitled to this 'old' pension. The pension fund is forecast to be £2bn - £3bn short. With a freeze on the TV Tax and a falling payroll, the ability of current staff to pay for previous staff diminishes alarmingly. In fairness, they can't apply cuts retrospectively. Thus it's looking more and more likely that these obligations can only be met by diverting broadcasting budgets.


It may be that the only longer term option is to form a vehicle to inherit all the pension liabilities of the BBC, and sell-off most of the rest of the broadcaster to the commercial sector, retaining only World Service radio and News 24 / Parliament TV, to boost the pension fund.   

Europe trades freedom for comfort

Domestic peace and union were the natural consequences of the moderate and comprehensive policy embraced by the Romans. If we turn our eyes towards the monarchies of Asia, we shall behold despotism in the centre, and weakness in the extremities; the collection of the revenue, or the administration of justice, enforced by the presence of an army; hostile barbarians established in the heart of the country, hereditary satraps usurping the dominion of the provinces, and subjects inclined to rebellion, though incapable of freedom. But the obedience of the Roman world was uniform, voluntary, and permanent. The vanquished nations, blended into one great people, resigned the hope, nay, even the wish, of resuming their independence, and scarcely considered their own existence as distinct from the existence of Rome. (Gibbon, Chapter II)


These first Europeans as a result became soft; avoiding military service, they relied on foreign mercenaries to defend the Empire. Immured in the comfort of trade and modest prosperity they were content to put aside local allegiances and bonds of culture and nation, prepared to unlearn the ancient legends that defined them as separate and distinct peoples, and in the process lost the clarion that would rally them together in their defence. They burned their colours as symbols of superstition. Their identity was further diluted by mass immigration, as every aspirational would-be came to claim a share of the wealth and comfort;


A perpetual stream of strangers and provincials flowed into the capacious bosom of Rome. Whatever was strange or odious, whoever was guilty or suspected, might hope, in the obscurity of that immense capital, to elude the vigilance of the law (Gibbon, Chapter XV)

As a result, Rome fell not after brutal conquest, not after some epochian battle, but with a gentle shove at the border barrier by the barbarians. It was an uncontested walkover. And Europe plunged into its first dark age.  

Next week, much of Europe is set to surrender its sovereignty and democratic freedom in exchange for the mess of pottage that is technocratic rule from Brussels. The prospect of financial hardship has frightened them in a way the unimagined prospect of democratic non-being has not. Comfort has triumphed free will. As slaves they will be fed, housed and cared for, more or less, whereas as free men they would have to fight, struggle and face failure and destitution. There are also many on our Island who would embrace the comfort of slavery over the hardship and uncertainty of freedom. For the sake of our descendants, and in obligation to those our ancestors who have shed a thousand years of blood in defence of our realm, they must not prevail.

EURO going, going ....

Another day, and the Euro will become even more endangered. "In 30 years, I've never heard such talk from a bank chief" quotes the Mail, as the Bank advises us all to take cover as the imminent end of the Euro approaches. Meanwhile, in the Brussels bunker, Von Rumple calls on non-existent divisions and corps to move to his aid, but all he's got defending the Eurocapital are a few insane boys and some decimated BB rated banks. The Reich gold is in the alpine redoubt, as Generalfeldmarshall  Merkel prepares for the Fifth Reich, jealously guarding the wealth that will back the new NordReich Eurozone from the ruins of the Berlaymont.. 


It's time to let the Eurobanks fall as they will. Apart from the banks, firms are strong and cash-rich and asset-rich; these will not diminish as the banks crash, and will enjoy a bounce and a recovery in share values once the drag of the bankrupt Euro financial sector is removed from the markets. 


We're not going to move on out of recession without this major catharsis. It will be a huge hammer blow, but suddenly the chains and shackles will have been shattered and fall away, and the economy will rise. C'mon. let's get it done. 

RIP King Leka I

RIP Leka Zog, Son of King Zog the First, who didn't rule as Leka I. His son, born in 1982, also won't rule under the title Leka II. The House of Zogu goes on.  

Ford, British Leyland and Fleet St Print Chapels

The 1975 Employment Protection Act obliged employers to allow paid employees time-off to carry out Trade Union duties. This actually just recognised and enshrined in law the position then obtaining at the vast Midlands auto plants, and in Fleet Street, where the papers paid 'protection' money to the print chapels that included many TU officials drawing full wage packets without doing a stroke of work. 


Folk forget it was the much-despised Murdoch who broke the back of these practices when he moved NI to Wapping. The car plants just became insolvent and disappeared. The law is an anachronistic little bit of Socialist legislation way beyond its sell-by date and needs to be quietly scrapped. 


Cameron's announcement yesterday that it was to go in the public sector (and presumably the private sector, too) was just common sense.