Word of the day: antidisestablishmentarianism
May 19th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
In the many debates on political reform in the UK, one idea is disestablishment of the Church of England.
Rightly in my view, it is argued that the UK population is no longer largely devoted to the Anglican faith and that, in multicultural Britain, it is wrong for one religious denomination to be privileged over others with automatic seats in the House of Lords for instance. Therefore church and state should be totally separated.
The opposite position is called “antidisestablishmentarianism’ which is one of the longest non-scientific words in the English language.
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British political institutions (6): devolution & Brexit
May 19th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
This week, I attended the sixth and final session of the course at the City Literary Institute on “British Political Institutions“. This session was on devolution and Brexit and delivered by two lecturers: American Dale Mineshima-Lowe and British Mark Malcolmson.
The UK has a devolved system of government with a Scottish Parliament, a Welsh Assembly and a Northern Ireland Assembly (currently not in operation), but this is categorically not a system of federal government such as in the United States or Australia, partly because less than a fifth of the citizens of the UK are covered by the three bodies in question and partly because the three bodies themselves have different or asymmetrical powers from one another.
The planned exit of the UK from the European Union has further complicated the devolution debate, since there is fierce argument about whether the powers to be repatriated from the EU to the UK should be held by the government at Westminster or devolved to the administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
You can read the devolution section of my guide to the British political system here.
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Reviews of my last two films: “Sherlock Gnomes” & “Let The Sunshine In”
May 16th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
The last two films that I’ve seen – on consecutive days last weekend – could not have been more different.
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“Sherlock Gnomes”
Like the Smurfs, garden gnomes make cute characters for a children’s animated movie. I missed the first outing, the Shakespeare-themed “Gnomeo & Juliet”, because it was issued in the year of my first grandchild’s birth.
Seven years later though, my granddaughter was delighted to be taken to see this return of the little people, this time playing with Arthur Conan Doyle’s character and, like the original “Paddington” film, featuring evil-doing at London’s Natural History Museum and other London locations.
The cast of voices is wide, including James McAvoy and Emily Blun, back as Gnomeo and Juliet, and Johnny Depp and Chiwetel Ejiofor, as Sherlock and Dr Watson. There are jokey lines for children and adults and music from Elton John but, as is so often the case with children’s films, minimal plot.
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“Let The Sunshine In”
Despite the title of this French-language film and the British marketing of it, this is not a cheerful rom-com, but a rather sad and dispiriting tale of an emotionally vulnerable woman in her 50s looking for love and finding only callousness and abuse.
The work has a female director (Claire Denis) and female writers (Christine Angot & Claire Denis – although the screenplay is based on a book by a male author), and it is a starring vehicle for the wonderfully-talented Juliette Binoche (who still looks enchanting 30 years after I first saw her in “The Unbearbale Lightness Of Being”) as the divorced mother and artist Isabelle.
The whole thing is classically French: lots of talking, some love-making, plenty of jazz, and frustratingly opaque (we understand nothing of Isabelle’s background and very little of her motivation). But, heh, I could watch Binoche reading a telephone directory.
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Word of the day: homunculus
May 15th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
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A review of the fascinating book “Enlightenment Now” by Steven Pinker (2018)
May 11th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
The Enlightenment took place from the mid 17th century to the late 18th century but, 300 years later, the triumphs of Enlightenment thinking and values, with their emphasis on reason, science and humanism, still need explaining and defending to a world in which populism and so-called post-truth are seeking to challenge the fruits of progress.
The aim of this book by the renowned American professor of psychology Steven Pinker is “to restate the ideals of the Enlightenment in the language and concepts of the 21st century” and the main theme is that, if we look beyond the headlines to the trendlines, we find that on so many measures of human welfare we are on the whole living in the best of times for humankind. As Pinker puts it: “Here is a shocker: The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being. Here is a second shocker: Almost no one knows about it.”
This is quite a tome: a main text of some 450 pages and then another 70 pages of notes and references. The opening three and closing three chapters are quite heavy going, but the middle 17 chapters – replete with informative data and containing no less than 75 fascinating graphs – eloquently and convincingly make the case for just how far humankind has progressed, especially on the following 14 dimensions:
- Life: For most of human history, average life expectancy was around 30 years but today it is over 70 years and still rising.
- Health: More than five billion lives have been saved by medical advances ranging from the discovery of blood groups to the development of vaccines.
- Sustenance: The use of machines, the development of fertilisers and the Green Revolution have enabled us to feed billions more with less land and much less labour.
- Wealth: In the last 200 years, the rate of extreme poverty in the world has fallen from 90% to 10%, while GDP per capita has soared in almost every country.
- Inequality: In the past 30 years, global inequality has declined (most notably in China) although inequality within rich countries has increased (especially in the US and the UK).
- Environment: Although climate change is a massive challenge, “environmental problems, like other problens, are solvable, given the right knowledge” and a range of intiatives and technologies are discussed.
- Peace: It is argued that “War in the classic sense of an armed conflict between uniformed armies of two nation-states appears to be obsolescent” and battle deaths have fallen dramatcially (with the notable recent exception of the civil war in Syria).
- Safety: Over the last century, the rate of deaths from homicides, motor vehicle accidents, aircraft crashes, occupational accidents and natural disasters have all plummetted.
- Terrorism: Except for 9/11, deaths from terrorst acts are tiny compared to other causes of violent deaths and are not particularly increasing.
- Democracy: The world’s 103 democracies in 2015 embraced 56% of the world’s population while, of the people living in the 60 non-democratic countries, four-fifths reside in a single country, China.
- Equal rights: The rights of racial minorities, women and gay people continue to advance worldwide and surveys show that, in almost every part of the world (even the Islamic Middle East), people are becoming more liberal.
- Knowledge: Now 83% of the world is literate and the number of years spent in schooling has been rising dramatically in most countries.
- Quality of life: Today almost half of the world’s population has Internet access and three-quarters have access to a mobile phone, while the developed world is leading the way on reductions in working time and more access to leisure activities including tourism.
- Happiness: The data shows that, as countries become richer over time, their people become happier, athough the United States is an outlier from the global trend in subjective well-being.
My attempt to summarise such a long work might give the impression that Pinker thinks that all is well in the world, but this is not the case. He recognises the challenges we still face but believes we have the tools – including knowledge and reason – to tackle those challenges and, in the meanwhile, we should look at the big picture (and this book has a very broad canvas) and consider the evidence (and this book has so much data). The result is a view of the world which is encouraging and hopeful.
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British political institutions (5): the civil service
May 10th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
This week, I attended session 5 of the six-week course at the City Literary Institute on “British Political Institutions“. This session was on the civil service and delivered by two lecturers: Phil Chamberlain, who was a former civil servant in what is now the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sports, and Philip Geering, who was once a crown prosecutor and worked in the Attorney-General’s Office.
I have some personal experience of the civil service, since I was a Special Adviser to Merlyn Rees in the Northern Ireland Office from 1974-1976 and in the Home Office from 1976-1978. I have covered the civil service in the section on Government in my guide to the British political system – updated to take account of what I learned from this lecture.
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In short, what is the nuclear deal with Iran?
May 9th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
“Iran and a six-nation negotiating group reached a landmark agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in July 2015. It ended 12 years of deadlock over Tehran’s nuclear programme. Struck in Vienna after nearly two years of intensive talks, the deal limited the Iranian programme to reassure the rest of the world that it would be unable to develop nuclear weapons, in return for sanctions relief.
At its core, the JCPOA is a straightforward bargain. Iran’s acceptance of strict limits on its nuclear programme in return for an escape from the sanctions that grew up around its economy over a decade prior to the accord. Under the deal, Iran unplugged two-thirds of its centrifuges, shipped out 98% of its enriched uranium and filled its plutonium production reactor with concrete.
Tehran also accepted extensive monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has verified 10 times since the agreement, and as recently as February, that Tehran has complied with its terms. In return, all nuclear-related sanctions were lifted in January 2016, reconnecting Iran to global markets.”
This is the opening of a short question & answer briefing on the deal in today’s “Guardian” newspaper.
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The continuing tragedy of Syria’s civil war
May 8th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
I spent two hours this Bank Holiday weekend watching a double programme about the civil war in Syria. It was broadcast by the BBC and presented by its Canadian-born chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet. You can check it out here.
The seven-year Syrian civil war is a conflict which has now lasted longer than the Second World War. Around half a million have been killed, more than 7 million are internally displaced, and some 5 million have been forced to flee the country.
I have followed the war with special anguish because, just a couple of weeks before it began, I spent a week travelling all around Syria and I wrote up an account of the trip here.
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British political institutions (4): the judiciary
May 7th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
I like to attend short courses at the City Literary Institute in central London and I’m now doing a six-week course on “British Political Institutions”. The fourth session of the course was delivered by Mark Geering and covered the judiciary, including an outline of the legal system and the role of the Supreme Court.
I have myself written a guide to the British political system and you can read the section on the judiciary here.
A few hours before the lecture and in preparation for it, I made my first visit to the Supreme Court. There is an informative exhibition and I picked up a couple of explanatory leaflets. However, the court was not actually sitting in London at the time because it was in Belfast to hear a case concerning the refusal of a Christian couple of cake makers who refused an order from a gay customer because they had a religious objection to the writing that he wanted on the cake.
A further illustration of how interesting and varied are court cases came in the lecture itself when we were told about a case which finished up in the Supreme Court when the tax authorities claimed that a Jaffa cake was not really a cake (and therefore not subject to tax) but actually a biscuit (and therefore subject to tax). Our lecturer ran through the factors considered by the court in this case which underlined that judges endeavour to make their judgements on the basis of the evidence.
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A review of the new film “Tully”
May 6th, 2018 by Roger Darlington
Director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody first worked together on the justifiably acclaiimed “Juno”, featuring a teenage girl unexpectedly pregnant. A decade later, the two are paired again for another film with a single-word, woman’s name for the title and again we start with an unplanned pregnancy. This time, however, the pregnant woman is in her early 40s and already has two children, one of whom has special needs.
Marlo (wonderfully played by Charlize Theron) finds that the responsibility of three children (Cody herself is a mother of three), – especially when the baby needs breastfeeding at all times of the day and night and the father is semi-detached – is driving her crazy and reluctantly she accepts an offer from her brother of a night nurse, the eponymous Tully (a delightful Mackenzie Davis), who seems to be the answer to her dreams.
There are so few movies with women in the leading roles in real-life situations, like the challenges of motherhood, and this work really brings home how tough it can be and how little sleep is involved. At the time, some of the scenes and situations seem odd, even uncomfortable, but at the very end, it all makes sense.
Whether you see the finale as a manipulative conceit or an acceptable narrative device (I’m in the later camp) will determine how you rate the film, but this is a welcome attempt to show a side of the female experience that hardly features in mainstream cinema, reminding us that the mind is a beautiful thing.
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