Soundbites are no substitute for justice

It was just hours before someone declared that justice had been done for Daniel Pelka.  According to the BBC website report, Senior Crown Prosecutor Lisa Windridge said Daniel’s killers had been sentenced for a ''heinous'' crime. ''We are pleased that justice has finally been achieved for Daniel Pelka.''

It hasn’t. Daniel, 4, starved to death by his mother and her partner, died a tragic death as dozens of people failed to notice what was going on.

Justice is not handed out to victims posthumously. Justice is handed out to the criminals, and if we are to have any hope of achieving and maintaining a sensible justice system we need to be able to sort out the differences between crime, punishment, revenge, retribution, public safety, rehabilitation, and any number of other quite difficult ideas.

I have no dispute whatsoever with the 30-year jail sentence in this case. But the process must involve rather more than lock up, throw away the key, hope everybody feels better and can forget what happened.

Sloppy soundbites and turgid thinking provide nothing but comfort blankets for some who may be feeling uneasy.

Royal baby: all circus and no bread

So July 22, 2013 repeats the situation of June 23, 1894, when the royal family had three direct heirs lined up. Not much has been made of this precedent in the Bullshit Media, possibly because the 1894 birth was that of Edward VIII, who proved not to be such a hot royal prospect, and abdicated when he was expected to turn up for work, preferring to shag an American Nazi sympathiser.

Bullshit Media has had a field day dropping its turds this week, gawping and drivelling about how popular the royal circus will be for the next million years or so. Radio 4’s Today programme asks republicans why the public seems, as it does seem, so comfortable with the monarchy.

The answer is that the public feels, justifiably or not, comfortable enough at the moment, and will happily applaud a moderately well organised circus decently stocked with a baby script and clown princes. The monarchy’s weakness will show only when the public doesn’t feel comfortable with life; when the bread issues – unemployment, homelessness, food prices, getting killed abroad for no good reason – become acute and the circus looks like a piss-take.

In tough times an overpaid family which does little but prance about in helicopters and procreate may find that no one gives a flying f**k about them, and would rather turn their royal mansions into publically owned museums.

Ding dong! Ask not for whom the bell should have been tolling...

In the old public school and media circles I once inhabited, chaps would talk about life as if everything was a sporting event and then assess how people had performed during it. Thus reporter x would be deemed to have had a Good War, or a politician would have had a Good Election (without necessarily winning).

So far then, who’s having a good Thatcher Funeral, and who’s having a bad one?

The Thatcherite Right look they’re having a Bad one. The Socialist Workers Party has got it totally wrong.  Russell Brand has written the defining piece so far, and Ed Miliband is having a Good One.

I’m watching it all from my sick-bed (actually housebound, but pottering and tottering).

The Thatcherite right was caught out by a successful campaign to make Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead, a 1939 song by Judy Garland from the film The Wizard Of Oz, top of the pops in the week Thatcher died.  The more they protested, the more successful the campaign became.  The more successful the campaign became, the more they protested. As a non-drinking alcoholic, I can recognize the symptoms: they couldn’t let go.

Russell Brand, a fellow non-practising addict, wrote a beautiful essay in The Guardian which showed why funerals are useful for the living. We sort out our attitudes to death, and to life, the gap between being born and dying. If we are lucky, we can experience the sort of empathy Brand was able feel for the frail old lady watering the roses who had once been a mighty world figure.  We learn about humility, and change.

Ed Miliband won deserved plaudits for a Commons speech  that noted the deep divisions that over Margaret Thatcher’s record as a politician and respected the mourning process, and won more plaudits for leaving it at that.

The supposedly Marxist Socialist Workers Party got it completely wrong, deciding to celebrate the death of the frail old lady watering the roses.  Marxism, and I’m happy to call myself a Marxist, is not humanist, and Marxists believe that class struggle has more social importance than idealized individual humans, polishing their individual humanist egos. But in the face of death, Marxists always support life.   From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! , a key aspiration of communism, is entirely about supporting life.

I downloaded the Judy Garland song. I think it is fair enough, if the Thatcher funeral is to be a public, participatory event, to register my dissent from public adulation of the deeds of Margaret Thatcher and that the download did that effectively.

Then a friend posted online: “Thatcherism or the death of Thatcher has brought out the wide spread and contagious disease known as 'immensely passive aggressive assholism' on Facebook threads across the country. Also known as 'I really judge and hate everything you stand for but I'm gonna be polite and pretend like I don't know that we are insulting each other whilst talking as though I am a professor of political theory,' disease. There is no known immunisation but symptoms are relieved by getting involved in your own community and getting off of Facebook.”

She has nailed the paradox. She’s right about the passive aggressive assholism. She’s wrong in that this might be a good week to just be polite and try not to insult anyone. Her antidote to all this bad behaviour – get involved in your own community – is helpful. Thatcher’s funeral, just like anybody else’s, reminds that we all have to die and death is a sad business for those left living.  And the way we move on is by helping each other.

There is, after all, such a thing as society. Whoever said there wasn’t?

Same old Old Street, always changing

I see from Professor Tim Stonor's blog that there has been a conference about improving Old Street roundabout as an urban space.Mmmmmmm....
I lived very close to the Old Street roundabout from 1997 to 2004. It was great, but the thing I learned about it was that the Old Street roundabout is always being regenerated, in the same way that the Forth Bridge was always being repainted. I don’t think there was a single day during those seven years when some part of the transport infrastructure that meets there (and there is a huge amount of that) was not under repair/malfunctioning/being redisigned. And there is always something there that someone will think they can improve.

The golden days of OlympicsJPAT

Now that the London Olympics 2012 are under way, a few TV viewers, in the gaps between being thrilled by the sporting prowess on show, may ask who gave planning permission for all these buildings in Stratford, East London,  to be erected.

I have written about this at some detail for Corporate Watch UK, but one quick answer is that it all started in 2004 with something called the Olympic Joint Planning Authority Team. This was made up of  democratically elected councillors from planning committees of the four boroughs that circle the Olympic Park.

On September 9, 2004, it granted outline permission for the Park, which was then just a circle on a map, and gave permission for 50 or so trees to be chopped down. You might think this important body has had a busy time since then. But no; as soon as our councillors had given permission they were kicked out of the way, and an unelected Government-appointed body, the Olympic Delivery Authority, took over.

Democracy doesn't lie down that easily, however. And on August 20, 2010,  OlympicJPAT was still going strong, as its website, which has since disappeared, demonstrated:

How green were my Olympics

The Manor Gardens Allotments, which used to be on a small island in the Lea Navigation, were concreted over to make way for the London Olympics 2012. The gardeners were moved to new allotments in Waltham Forest.

The conflict of interest between the allotment holders and the Olympic Delivery Authority presented a remarkable cultural clash. Intriguingly both sides in the conflict can trace their origins back to the same Victorian tradition - the philosophy of muscular Christianity. Those tracings present a fascinating picture of the social scales, shapes and sizes of democratic, economic and political processes.

The Manor Gardens Allotments are[1] the last trace of the Eton Mission to the East End started just after 1880. This mission was one of several undertaken by Oxford and Cambridge University colleges and public schools. These missions involved young men and sometimes women of wealthy and privileged backgrounds going out the East End and undertaking socially, morally and educationally improving works among the impoverished working classes.

The Eton Mission began just before 1883 in Hackney Wick with the building of a church and the establishment of premises for various clubs: men’s clubs, boy’s clubs, Sunday Schools, classes and social welfare programmes. It was funded by Eton College, then the pinnacle of wealth and privilege in the British education system and producer of endless Prime Ministers.[2]

Among the activities organised were several sports activities. The reason for their inclusion was based broadly in the Victorian philosophy of ‘muscular Christianity’ ideas prominent at Rugby public school under Dr Thomas Arnold.

Another person influenced by these ideas was the Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who, at the same time as the Eton Mission started, was busy organising a revival of classical Greece’s Olympic Games.

“Thomas Arnold, the leader and classic model of English educators,” wrote de Coubertin “gave the precise formula for the role of athletics in education.”[3] In 1883 de Coubertin visited England to see how this public school athleticism worked in education.

The Eton Mission and particularly the sports clubs flourished. In 1924 four wealthy and well-connected Old Etonians set up the Manor Charitable Trust to administer them. They and their donors gave land for and funded an astonishing array of sports facilities, including the allotments - tilling the land being a healthy Christian activity - that became the Manor Garden Allotments.

After World War Two the Trust’s interests became more educational. Trustees purchased land outside of London, and the Trust eventually evolved into the Villiers Park Educational Trust which today helps ‘gifted and talented children’ from under-privileged backgrounds get into university.

The boys’ clubs closed in 1967 and, despite much recent somewhat nostalgic history about them, little is immediately publicly available about the disposal of the Trust’s assets. By 2000, however, the land on which the allotments stood was owned by the Lea Valley Regional Park Authority.[4] This land was compulsorily purchased by the Olympic Development Authority.

While the Eton Manor clubs thrived and declined, de Coubertin’s Olympic Movement grew into the global corporation which is today’s International Olympic Committee. Victorian ideals thus inspired both the creation and the temporary destruction of the Manor Gardens Allotments.

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Olympic Reading

Books

Brohm, Jean-Mari, Essays. Sport: A Prison of Measured Time. Translated by Ian Fraser. Ink Links, London NW5 2JS. 1978.

Hill, Christopher. Olympic Politics, Manchester University Press, Manchester. 1992.

Articles

MacAloon, John J. ‘Legacy’ as Managerial/Magical Discourse in Contemporary Olympic Affairs, International Journal of the History of Sport, 25: 14, (2008) pp 2060 — 2071).

Johansen, Michelle. Adventures in the Wild East: The Early Years of the Eton Manor Boys’ Clubs. This lecture was delivered at the ‘Up the Manor’ Project Launch in September 2007. http://villierspark.org.uk/web_images//pdfs/michelles_lecture_the_early_years.pdf

Villiers Park Educational Trust, Our History, http://villierspark.org.uk

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[1] The allotments are due to return to the Olympic Park area when the Games have finished, so I continue to use the present tense.

[2] Plus ca change…

[3] De Coubertin, Physical exercises in the modern world. Lecture given at the Sorbonne, November 1892. (cited at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_de_Coubertin )

[4] Answer given by the Lea Valley Regional Park Authority to a Freedom of Information Act question from Julian Cheyne of the Clay’s Lane Residents Association.

Bypass bliss to Pompey

THE London to Portsmouth road will from this week finally consist entirely of bypasses.
When the Hindhead Tunnel opens on Wednesday car drivers will travel on dual carriageway all the way from Putney Heath to the Portsmouth ferry terminal. Their only inconveniences will be two roundabouts.
The opening means that the London to Portsmouth road has now been completely moved off the route it originally took when it was first designated as the A3 in 1923.
It also means that the A3 now spends all its time avoiding places rather than going to them. The historic towns, whose centres were all pretty near wrecked one way or another by car traffic, are now deviations off the main road rather than stops on it.
Kingston-upon-Thames, Esher, Ripley, Guildford, Godalming, Liphook, Petersfield, and Cosham were all towns that once had thriving businesses based on the through transport of the Portsmouth Road. The various bypasses have restored some of the peace to their centres, but often the historic travellers’ staging posts have been lost.
Now Hindhead joins the list of places saved from the blight of the A3 – and the common and the Devil’s Punchbowl can once again be enjoyed in all their glory.