A review of “Consent Of The Networked”

April 9th, 2012 by Roger Darlington

American writer Rachel MacKinnon has produced an excellent book on “the worldwide struggle for Internet freedom” entitled “Consent Of The Networked” You can read my review here.

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My contribution to a Pesach seder

April 8th, 2012 by Roger Darlington

Vee and I are not religious, so Easter is nothing special for us, but many of our closest friends are Jewish and this year the Passover or Pesach festival almost coincides with Easter. We were invited to take part in a special meal called a seder to celebrate the festival of Pesach and felt honoured to be included in such an important religious and cultural event.

It is a long and elaborate ceremony, full of symbolism and historic references, and we followed most of the standard 15 elements. I confess that the traditional Pesach meal is not as appealing to me as the wonderful Christmas lunch – but sometimes one has to suffer in the interests of multiculturalism. A feature of the meal we attended was that participants are invited to speak about what the festival means to them. This was my contribution:

“For me, Pesach, Passover, the Feast of the Unleavened Bread is essentially about intolerance, about lack of respect for difference, about not allowing people to be themselves, even if that involves a different religion or a different culture or different behaviours and beliefs.

So it is not just about the Jews but about people of all religious beliefs and people of none.

It is not just about a faraway land like Egypt but about here in Europe snd here in London.

It is not just about what happened three millennia ago but what has happened in our lifetimes and what is happening now.

As an illustration of these messages, I invite you to remember that this week was the 20th anniversary of the start of the siege of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina and, at the time, part of the collapsing communist state of Yugoslavia.

The siege of Sarajevo lasted from 1992 to 1996 – an incredible 1,335 days or almost four years. It lasted three times longer than the siege of Stalingrad and a year longer than the siege of Leningrad in the Second World War.

An Orthodox Serb army surrounded a city made up mainly of Bosniak Muslims and Catholic Croats. A civilian population was subject to unrelenting mortar attack and sniper fire.

It is estimated that over 11,000 people were killed including over 1,500 children. A further 56,000 people were wounded including nearly 15,000 children.

This week, the main street of Sarajevo was lined with 11,541 empty red chairs, each one representing a death from the siege. Thousands of the red chairs were little ones representing the deaths of children.

In 2007, I visited Sarajevo with my sister Silvia. Time and time sgain we would see red resin splash marks on the pavements or in the road. Each filled the remnants of a mortar shell on the city. They are known as the Sarajevo roses.

What struck us was that the defining feature of Sarajevo over the ages was the religious mix of its population. We saw how even today within a short walk of each other is an Orthodox church, a Catholic cathedral, a Muslim mosque, and a Jewish synagogue – something that one can experience eslewhere in the world perhaps only in Jerusalem which Vee and I had visited only five months before with Eric and his son Yonatan.

The Sarajevo Synagogue was constructed in 1902 and is now the only functioning synagogue in the city. At the entrance, a stone menorah commemorates the 400 year anniversary of the Jews in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Before the Second World War, there were some 11,000 Jews in the city who were so integrated that there was no ghetto. But some 90% of them were killed in the Holocaust- in this case, not by German Nazis but by Croatian fascist force called the Ustase.

The Holocaust occurred in the lifetime of our parents in our continent. Yet, in spite of this closeness of time and space, the siege of Sarajevo and the wider process of ethnic cleansing in the Balkan wars of the early 1990s could happen in our own lifetimes and again on our continent.

Will we ever learn? Will we ever accept each other with all our diffrences and all our richness?

We meet tonight in one of the most multicultural cities in the world: London.

We meet tonight on the eve of the most multinational event on the globe: the Olympic Games.

Yet, even here, even now, we have instances of intolerance.

Whether it is desecreation of Jewish cemeteries or synagogues.
Whether it is crude Islamphobia against our Muslim citizens
Whether it is blatant racism in the Metropolitan Police.

Tonight we rededicate ourselves against intolerance – in all forms, in all places, in all times. Ultimately we are one family, one race, one world.”

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The caging of America

April 7th, 2012 by Roger Darlington

“Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then.

Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.”

This is an extract from an article in “The New Yorker” magazine earlier this year.

To compare prison rates in the USA with other countries in the world, go here.

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An update on granddaughter Catrin

April 6th, 2012 by Roger Darlington

My darling granddaughter Catrin is now almost 15 months old and an absolute joy. She is such a cheerful baby and a tribute to her parents Richard and Emily. She is very vocal and playful and lots of fun to be with.

I try to see her each week and this week I collected her from nursery before feeding and bathing her and putting her to sleep. She is so close to walking but just not quite there yet.

Catrin sitting pretty

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The water shortage in the south-east of England

April 5th, 2012 by Roger Darlington

Following two consecutive exceptionally dry winters, seven water companies in London and the South East of England today bring into force a hosepipe ban as the first in what may be a series of measures designed to reduce demand for water when the supply situation is so critical. As well as being affected by the ban as a consumer, I now have a professional interest in the drought facing this part of the country since I have just been appointed Chair of the Customer Challenge Group at South East Water.

Even in normal times, there is a difficult situation in this part of the country for the water sector because the east and south of England have less rain than the west and north but population growth is higher in the east and the south. However, these are not normal times. We are experiencing the worst drought conditions since 1976. Earlier this week, I visited Water UK – the industry body representing the water sect or – and they are starting to think the unthinkable: suppose we have a third consecutive dry winter?

BBC online has examined eight possible solutions here.

Meanwhile water companies have a responsibility to minimise leakage. You can check out the performance of each company in this respect here.

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Remembering the siege of Sarajevo

April 5th, 2012 by Roger Darlington

Twenty years ago today, the siege of Sarajevo began. It was the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare lasting from from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996 – a total of 1,335 days. The siege lasted three times longer than the siege of Stalingrad and a year longer than the siege of Leningrad in the Second World War.

It is estimated that nearly 10,000 people were killed or went missing in the city, including over 1,500 children. An additional 56,000 people were wounded, including nearly 15,000 children.

All this occurred in ‘civilsed’ Europe in the late 20th century after all we were supposed to have learned from the Second World War. It shows that ‘civilisation’ is a thin veneer and we must never take our liberties for granted.

In 2007, my sister and I visited Sarajevo and, although we were there as tourists, we learned and saw a lot relating to the siege. You can read my account of the trip here.

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My personal guide to the state of Iran

April 4th, 2012 by Roger Darlington

I was in the British Museum yesterday with my Chinese ‘family’ looking at the Egyptian mummies. When we stopped for refreshments in the main court, I found myself in conversation with an Iranian family – a software engineer, his wife, and their daughter.

My Iranian friend was astonished to find a Westerner who had recently visited Iran and knew something about its politics. I hope that he didn’t think I was a spy (I gave him my business card) and I hope that he isn’t one (he spoke excellent English).

I told him about my travels in Iran [see my account here] and we spoke about an Iranian film which coincidentally I saw this week [my review here]. I didn’t tell him that I have read two books of Iranian history [my reviews here] – that really would have made him suspicious.

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Ever heard of the International Institute for Finance?

April 3rd, 2012 by Roger Darlington

No, neither had I until today.

It is not being paranoid or conspiratorial to acknowledge that the world is run by power elites. It is obvious to anyone who has studied politics or sociology. But it is important that we struggle to have more transparency over the existence of these elites and try all we can to make them more accountable.

One of these groups is the International Institute for Finance. To obtain some idea of its power and influence, read this article.

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Could you manage on £4.2 million a year?

April 2nd, 2012 by Roger Darlington

In an earlier posting, I invited you to check your income against the average for the UK, and a range of other countries around the world. I doubt whether you earn as much as the chief executive of a top British company. The average annual pay of a FTSE 100 boss now stands at £4.2 million, according the employment research group Incomes Data Services.

How can this happen? According to a new report from the High Pay Centre, it is because the remuneration committees of these companies are full of current or former company bosses who are busy awarding each other outrageous pay packages. The report reveals that 46% of people sitting on remuneration committees are current or former lead executives.

I am Chair of a Remuneration Committee of an organisation which is currently debating whether we can afford to give staff their first cost of living pay increase in three years. Meanwhile senior levels of the private sector are making a mockery of the Government’s assertion that “we’re all in this together”.

Of course, people with special skills and responsibilities deserve to be paid more than others, but £4.2 million is 170 times the UK average salary. Does anyone really deserve or need such a scale of remuneration?

Does it matter that the UK – like the USA – has such massive differentials in pay which are growing wider all the time? There is an impressive body of research that suggests that nations with wide income differentials perform much worse on a whole range of social incomes than countries – like the Scandinavian nations – with a narrower range of incomes. I recommend the examination of this thesis in the book “The Spirit Level” [my review here].

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