How are payments made in the UK?

June 3rd, 2016 by Roger Darlington

Payments UK has released a new report giving an overview of current and future trends in UK payment behaviour. The report, UK Payment Markets 2016, reveals that cash continues to be the most popular method of payment, constituting 45% of all payments in 2015.

It also predicts, however, that by 2025, cash payment will have dropped to make up just one in four (27%) of all payments. The increasing popularity of contactless payments is driving credit, debit and charge card payments to make up a larger share of the total payment market. This is predicted in the report to reach half of all payments (50%) by 2025.

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Britain fourth on ‘good country’ index thanks to science and technology

June 3rd, 2016 by Roger Darlington

The British are not very good at taking pride in themselves or their country, so we should celebrate this news that the UK has come fourth in the latest version of something called the good country index. A major factor is its global contribution to science and technology, thanks to the high number of journal exports, Nobel prizes and international publications it has produced.

The index compiles data on 35 indices. The top three nations in the current index are – in order – Sweden, Denmark and The Netherlands. The United States is ranked 21. Where does your country come in the index? You can check it out here.

Posted in British current affairs, World current affairs | Comments (0)

Visit to Sark (7): the speech by Graham Robinson

June 2nd, 2016 by Roger Darlington

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve done a series of posts about my weekend on the Channel Island of Sark in order to attend the launch of a book by Eric Lee. The work is called “Operation Basalt: The British Raid On Sark And Hitler’s Commando Order” and I’ve reviewed it here.

At the launch event, we heard a short speech from Graham Robinson, the son of one of the 12 commandos who were on that raid in 1942. You can now read his moving contribution here.

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Some good news: renewable energy smashes global records

June 2nd, 2016 by Roger Darlington

If you follow the news – and I’m a bit of a news junkie – most of it is depressing, so it’s a good idea to highlight positive news stories when they come along. Like this one:

“An upsurge in new wind, solar and hydro plants and capacity saw renewable energy smash global records last year, according to a report on new supply.

Some 147 Gigawatts of renewable electricity came online in 2015 – the largest annual increase ever and as much as Africa’s entire power generating capacity.

Clean energy investment increased to $286bn (£198bn), with solar energy accounting for 56% of the total and wind power for 38%.

Overall, more than twice as much money was spent on renewables than on coal and gas-fired power generation ($130bn in 2015), the REN21 global status report found.”

Visit to Sark (6): the video from James Edgar

June 1st, 2016 by Roger Darlington

Regular readers of NightHawk will know that I recently spent a weekend on the Channel Island of Sark in order to attend the launch of a book by my good friend Eric Lee. The work is called “Operation Basalt: The British Raid On Sark And Hitler’s Commando Order” and I’ve reviewed it here.

We had a special guest ‘appearance’ at the book launch: a video message from Corporal James Edgar the last surviving member of the 12-man commando team that launched the raid in 1942. He now lives in Australia. On the day of the launch event, he had his 96th birthday and all those present at the launch sang ‘happy birthday’ to him.

You can see the message from James Edgar here.

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The continuing debate over the Oxford comma

June 1st, 2016 by Roger Darlington

If you don’t know what the Oxford comma is, why it’s called that, and why it’s controversial, this short news item explains all. If you already know what I’m talking about, you probably have an opinion on the subject.

If you want to know my view on the Oxford comma, check out my advice on punctuation – look at Note 4 under the sub-heading ‘How to use the comma’.

It’s not the kind of issue that will decide the EU referendum in the UK or the presidential election in the US, but it does excite teachers, educationalists, linguists and others [note that I didn’t use the Oxford comma there].

Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)

A review of a new book on the Kurds and Kurdistan

May 31st, 2016 by Roger Darlington

The Middle East is perhaps the most turbulent and complicated region in the world in terms of the conflicts and parties involved. A recently-published book, entitled “The Kurdish Spring: A New Map Of The Middle East”, looks at events since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, examining the history of Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran from the perspective of the Kurds in those four countries. You can read my review here.

Posted in History, World current affairs | Comments (0)

Two birthdays in the family today

May 30th, 2016 by Roger Darlington

Two members of our family have birthdays today: Lucas is 8 and Peter is 78 – which has a certain symmetry.

Now, I’m guessing, dear reader, that you’re aged somewhere between 8 and 78, so I have two questions for you: do you remember what it was like to be 8 and can you imagine what it will be like to be 78?

That’s the thing about life: it’s one thing after another – but it’s better than the alternative.

Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (5)

Why a visit to Hiroshima is more complicated than you might think

May 28th, 2016 by Roger Darlington

This week, Barack Obama became the first serving American President to visit Hiroshima, the site of the first atomic bomb to be dropped on a city on 6 August 1945 – a weapon used, of course, by the Americans. A lot of the media coverage mentioned that Obama did not apologise for the bombing, but that would have been wholly inappropriate and quite wrong.

It is easy – and indeed totally right – to be horrified by the death and destruction that was wreaked that day and the deaths and injuries that followed up to this day. But what most media reports failed to highlight was Japan’s culpability for this event and the country’s continued failure to acknowledge the role it played in the Second World War.

In October 1998, I was a member of a trade union delegation to Japan that visited Tokyo and Kyoto. Afterwards I stayed on in the country for a few more days on my own because I wanted to go to Hiroshima. I spent a whole day in the city and some three hours at the Peace Memorial Museum.

Of course, I was horrified by the photographs and films that I viewed and the statistics for death and injury that were displayed. But I was also disturbed by the account presented in the displays, all of which were in English as well as Japanese. The whole emphasis of the narrative up to the dropping of the bomb was one of the Japanese as innocent victims rather than as ruthless aggressors.

In effect, the Second World War did not begin with German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938 or German invasion of Poland in 1939, but with Japanese occupation of Manchuria in China in 1931. What the Chinese understandably call ‘the rape of Nanjing’ by Japanese soldiers in December 1937-January 1938 was played down at the museum with the figures for Chinese deaths being disputed.

Then, when it came in the museum’s description of the start of the war between Japan and the USA in December 1941, this occurrence was represented as some kind of accidental outbreak of hostilities rather than an unprovoked and undeclared attack on Pearl Harbor with the substantial loss of American lives.

The museum gives little attention to the well-substantiated fears at the time that an American land invasion of mainland Japan would have resulted in months of further war and hundred of thousands of further American (and Japanese) deaths. All the evidence of Japanese resistance on island after island made it clear that the Japanese would have fought long and bitterly with massive further casualties and only the clear demonstration of the effect of the atomic bomb prevented this scenario.

In some ways, the most memorable thing I saw in Hiroshima was not in the Peace Memorial Museum; it was in one of the nearby parks; it was a monument to the Korean victims and survivors of the bombing. The English label explains that, of the roughly 200,000 people who were killed that day, some 20,000 were Korean. What were they doing in a Japanese city? Well, Japan had ruthlessly occupied Korea since 1910 and forced Koreans into both military and civilian service in the war effort.

The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 but it took until 1970 for this monument to the Korean victims to be erected. Could it be that the Japanese valued Japanese lives above Korean lives?

What I am describing here is part of a much bigger picture: the failure of so much of Japanese society even today to acknowledge their culpability for what happened in the Pacific theatre of war. School text books present a whitewashed version of the Japanese role in the war and some Japanese politicians still attend ceremonies at the burial site of Japanese war criminals.

This is in stark contrast to the situation in post-war Germany where, to their credit, Germans have acknowledged the horrors of Nazism and freely discuss and debate all aspects of Germany’s actions in the war.

Posted in History | Comments (1)