Martin Meenagh blog

The Southall Black Sisters Have Been Reprieved! Excellent News A partial victory has occurred, though not yet a conclusive one. The Southall Black Sisters, for whom I and many many others wrote a blog post and signed up on facebook, have had a reprieve for two months. Ealing cannot make up its mind what to do and there is also talk of a judicial review of the decision to withdraw funding from this excellent body dedicated to offering help to minority women fleeing or suffering domestic violence. If you have not yet done so, I urge you to keep up the pressure. Go to the SBS website , or write to your MP, to the Mayoral Candidates, here here here and here , and to the Party Leaders, or join the Downing Street Petition . This body saves lives and anyone decent would want it kept open regardless of politics. What a way to get a smile before Monday!

A Tribute to the United States Marine Corps Here, for no good reason, is a version of 'The Battle Cry of Freedom' , which is one of my favourite books. I remember coming home in the middle of my time at Oxford to my Grandad's old place. I used to take the bus and invariably got back in the dark, and the grand old man would have sandwiches and overstrong tea in the overcold kitchen, and the fire on very warm. I'd go to bed with a book like this--I particularly remember taking all the material for my history special subject on the crisis of the American Union home with me, and reading it obsessively--and the walls were cold because his heating didn't really work and the windows had single panes and I hid in a bed he hadn't changed for decades. And I loved it and I loved him. I never spent a summer when I didn't work when I was at Oxford. In the times I'm thinking of, I was with the agencies in the factories on nightshifts, and, in one mad 72 hours, on day ...

Barack Obama's Pastor The recent silly media dispute in America about Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's pastor, has been the occasion for three refreshing developments. One is Obama's great speech on race , which I think was an address comparable to Lincoln's Cooper Union Address and well worth the time that I spent listening to it. Another was the confirmation, if I needed it, of the determination of the media to ignore John McCain's official preacher de choix, Jim Hagee, and his anticatholic tirades and fifth monarchist , near- anabaptist extremism. A third thing that I thought that I could point out, however, is how much Wright's freewheeling sermons revealed the memory of history that many Africa Americans have but which the vast majority of American society is ignorant about. Let's take the allegation that most people thought was the 'most outrageous' in Wright's sermon, drawn in passion from the depth of his mind; that officials in the Ameri...

Of Oaths and Associations The British government has recently floated the idea of a British oath of allegiance. This was produced as a throwaway suggestion that has occasioned a great deal of negative debate. Some fun suggestions have been made on the Times website as to what it should contain. It is often said that the British have forgotten their history, or rewritten it. This is not quite true. What has happened is that historical events and reactions have become autonomous of their original context. They've passed memetically into behaviour with nobody quite sure what a thing means but everyone dimly aware that it was important, like a repressed Freudian memory. Let's take the oath proposal. How many ministers know more than dimly about the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and that they were officially condemned for taking an oath? Or that oath-taking has a long tradition on the left, but one that tends to be set in an ideology of anti-power rather than one of administration? The Tolpudd...

The Gathered Storm The image next to this blog is a digital fake that circulated after the late Asian Tsunami. It exemplifies what could happen, and what people are prepared to make money from. Its use is simply illustrative. Peak oil is a theory with much more scientific credibility than that associated with carbon-dioxide led global warming, as far as I can tell. It is coming to pass that oil executives are actually now talking about it, and articles are beginning to appear daily that show its passage to the mainstream. Is it too soon to write the bulk of the history of the age of oil, even if its demise leads to wars and displacements to rival those of the twentieth century that have yet to happen? What would we write? That society had been commodified, seventeenth century liberalism plundered for an ideology of rights, that everything and anything was subjected to a religion of materialism and markets based on cheap energy? That effort and value and the human spirit were displaced...

Seumas Milne is Partly Right ; a personal note I apologise immediately for the length and occasional personal fatuity that may strike you in the following post. Yesterday's Guardian carried a piece by Seamus Milne , who is very much a man of the left, and who was in his time a man of the far left, which called for a strategic alliance between the forces of the progressive left and religion. Mr Milne pointed to populist campaigns that were based around the idea of social justice--a Catholic term--and drew a contrast between those aspects of religion that he did not like (based around constraints on sexual behaviour and reproductive technology) and those that were associated with the campaigns that he did approve of. Mr Milne also noted--and I am summarizing here-- that liberalism was characterised increasingly by a defence of consumption, capitalism, and wars for ostensibly liberal aims. He noted that many religious individuals had seen these things for what they were. He didn't...

Well Done, Exile Say what you like about the Exile --and a great many people no doubt will, given how freely that very funny man believes in free speech--he has courage. You can find a link to the most recent Dutch film to find itself ensconced in controversy over anti-islamism, fitna , at Exile's site, and terrifying watching it makes. A hat-tip to him for being consistent in his commitment to free speech. I warn you now that the Exile's blog is often characterised by offensive language and references of a sexual nature and to the war in Iraq, as well as coruscating personal abuse of his foes, that may well offend you, my single reader in the maximum security twilight home, so don't go if you can't put up with that sort of thing.

Another Extraordinary Person The floor of some of the main buildings of University College Dublin--I cannot speak for them all--has a very convenient colour system embedded in it. There are five or six lines that go to different places, and an individual who wants to find their way around simply picks their main colour line, follows it, and then branches off into the subdivisions. It makes the very sixties formalism and anonymity of the corridors liveable, and I rather liked it when I was there for a few days some weeks ago. So I was pleased to read this morning of a brilliant Russian-Jewish former security guard and labourer in Israel who has solved the mystery of the 'coloured road' , a mathematical problem which has defied the wits of many. The mystery is of how to divine instructions for directions that would be foolproof and which could be read backward, so that any piece of information sent along a path could be directed to a destination or tracked from whence it came ev...

The non-panic about a Supreme Court bomb The Michael Gorbey case is an interesting one in the quality of press coverage afforded to it. Mr Gorbey was discovered in the American government district in January. It is in the public domain and does not prejudice his American trial that he had a long list of convictions for violent, arms related offences. He was found walking with a loaded shotgun near the Capitol. He had four knives, a samurai sword, and a flak jacket on his person, according to reports , and was on his way to the Supreme Court. In his van was a powerful bomb and many rounds of ammunition, according to the police. Had it exploded, the American Capitol district would have experienced the effects of a very powerful street bomb. Mr Gorbey comes from Utah, and is currently based in West Virginia. He has a girlfriend. He is a representative American. He is white. The press is therefore struggling to make the story interesting. Imagine if he had come, say, from Jordan, and had ...

Constitutional Shenanigans The British Constitution is a very odd thing. It is an unwritten grab-bag of historical conventions, understandings, mutually contradictory 'settlements' and statutes. Those who try and follow it fairly soon realise the sense of the 'organic' description that best fits it and that reminds people of the interplay of light and shade in a forest built up over a thousand years. Attempts to reform the system formally tend to be piecemeal. Since the Instrument of Government and the Humble Petition and Advice of Cromwell's disastrous time strangled the Levellers and Diggers, England has only really been able to look to the Dutch invasion of 1688-9 for a written constitutional tradition. That incursion resulted in a coup d'etat, and the 'Bill of Rights' enshrining Parliament's privileges and trial by jury. The Bill is not to be confused with the American document enshrining individual liberties. It protected legislators until Mo...

Good Easter News This blog of a weekend--and if you are my one reader who has been following these posts, you'll know this--has a tendency to be somewhat gloomy. So I thought, this Easter weekend that I'd go looking for some news that shows that our descent to economic slowdown and permanent war need not be relentless. The ineluctable features of the present world crisis remain, of course. The markets will keep falling, and the trillions upon trillions of dollars of funny money, debt and deficits run up by some of the world's most important economies will continue to have an effect. The Balkans will keep smouldering, and hatred will have its run in people's hearts. Climate change and energy deficits will continue. However, it's not all bad tonight. I note good news from the Vatican to start with. One of Italy's most prominent Muslims, Magdi Allam, has converted to Catholicism . This is his personal decision, and I have no responsibility or wish to convert anyo...

Bicycling and the City I used to love bicycling. Since I came to London, I have not been able to. Sometimes I am glad that I can't. There seems to have been a huge change in the way cyclists are treated and the way bicyclists behave in recent years and I am not altogether sure that it is for the good. David Cameron, the Tory Leader, has been selfishly breaking all the rules himself, for instance. You never used to get Quinten Hogg doing that when he bicycled to Parliament. He used a Moulton folding bicycle and was always very safe with it. Firstly, one is now required, on this convenient, useful form of transport, to dress like some harlequin fool. It is also a requirement that an expensive bike with huge locks be carted about. The most disturbing thing about bicycling though, is how self-righteous one is supposed to be when breaking the law and making life poorer for others. So, riding on the pavement, going the wrong way up one-way streets, cutting in front of traffic and going ...

Adam Smith on War Adam Smith used to be at Balliol, which was my college for most of my fifteen years in Oxford, before he left in 1746 to do 'less drinking and more thinking'. In 1776, he more or less invented economics with what Borders, if it had a clue, would no doubt describe as the 'Enlightenment Classic', The Wealth of Nations . Like many great works, Smith's words contain quotes that challenge any simplistic reading of his ideas. So, for instance, the apostle of markets and commerce warned citizens to be wary of concentrations of capital and of business as an ongoing conspiracy against the public. Smith pointed out that those who profess to trade for the public good are often neither public nor good. You can, on the morning that McDonalds contemplated being offered the sponsorship of British hospitals, read Milton Friedman on Smith's view of business in a semi-mad lecture here . This Good Friday Morning, recalling the Iraq War, both Glenn Greenwald , th...

Mikhail Gorbachev, Christian The man who either confessed his faith to, or was awakened by Pope John Paul II has been to Assisi . There, he has prayed, unrecognised and with humility. I always liked Mikhail Gorbachev. Now I like him even more.

Merkel in Israel It is somewhat fitting that the first Head of Government to address the Knesset should be the Chancellor of Germany. The trip of Angela Merkel to Israel has been either overshadowed or overlooked depending on your point of view, and it is somewhat less than Nixon in China of course. But it still has a resonance and an importance that many overlook. I admire Angela Merkel tremendously. She gets on with the job, whatever it is. Those silly enough to make themselves enemies end up either working for her or lying on the side of the road. Her modus operandi seems to consist of hard work and common sense, and in most things she appears the practical, sensible German physicist that she is. In an histrionic political world, she is a light of sense. She is also somewhat put-upon by bullies who never quite realise what they are dealing with. I was particularly struck by the story of Vladimir Putin, who found out that Angie had a dog phobia, and promptly made sure he had a big ...

The Southall Black Sisters In keeping with the somewhat crazy and damascene nature of the blog this Palm Sunday, I would like to reveal another somewhat difficult thing. Yasmin Alibhai Brown is right about something. This sticks in my craw. 'Yazza', or the 'Yazzmonster' as her critics refer to her (who have also, in a minor way, insulted me because of my friends) has this week run a piece on the Southall Black Sisters . Alibhai-Brown is usually wrong, as a rule. On this issue, she is absolutely right. Southall Black Sisters are an organisation that supports black and asian women, and indeed women of all colours, who happen to be poor, or suffering violence, or isolated. They were deeply involved in the landmark Karanjit Ahluwalia case for instance. Mrs Ahluwalia was regularly beaten senseless by her husband, who returned home one night and decided to threaten her with a hot iron, demand £200, and announce that he would beat her near death in the morning. Then he went ...

Armageddon Coming No, not really. Well, possibly. Eventually. How would I know? I do know that times are rapidly changing and my source for that piece of information is the Daily Mail's content. The newspaper which once ran a write-in competition on the question 'How Much Do You Admire Mr Hitler?', and which is a by-word for conservatism has come over all funny. It has run a moving article about a six-foot, 220 pound paratrooper who has transformed into a shapely size 12 woman. I'm not kidding. These sorts of stories, given modern technology, are becoming more and more common and they strike at the heart of our notions of gender and sex. I have to say that I'm in two minds about such transformations myself. The glib thing to do would be to associate with Germaine Greer (or Camille Paglia , one of my favourite egotistical maniacs I suspect) and note that 'a mutilated man is not a woman'. However, a little imaginative sympathy--and some admiration for Jan M...

The Descent Quickens For months now I've been going on about what is coming, economically and politically, and I have been glad when some of my gloomier predictions have not materialised. I've not been alone in warning that the vast debts of the United States were a clear and present danger to that republic. Nor that the euro might fall apart . Nor in warning that giving the regimes of this earth the idea of cutting up sovereign states and justifying it by some spurious appeal to invented nationality is a bad thing. Nor in noting that wheat and oil price rises in common with a vast wall of monetary surplus could easily lead to stagflation . Nor in detailing the advantages of religion compared to the global destruction of individual character and the capacity of societies to survive presented by consumerism, materialism and global capitalism. However, I take no pleasure in the lurching descent pattern we now seem locked into. Tonight, nationalist nuclear hardliners have won Ira...

Leon Greenman OBE I have just found out, from the blogspot of Bob From Brockley , that Leon Greenman has died. My pal Lou and I met him in 1997. He was a tough wiry man, and an Auschwitz survivor. I have never forgotten his human fire and how strongly he evoked the sadness that any human being would surely feel at the disgusting crime of the holocaust, as much as he made me proud to be of a species that could produce the likes of him. Leon lost his wife and child in the holocaust. In life, he was variously a singer, and a hairdresser, and had a stall on the market. He had the honour and experienced the horror of having had the National Front brick his house. Leon was very active in anti-fascist politics. Here is a link to his book , An Englishman in Auschwitz . I have no clue about his religious belief, but I hope that he rests in peace. You can read his Guardian obituary here .

Academic Brainwashing I have often been struck in my multiple careers by how professional life is often maintained by a form of brainwashing. Any teacher familiar with the mixture of morally decadent coursework and social engineering that constitutes many A-levels these days will see my point. So will anyone toiling away in the publish-or- perish environment of academia, with its prescribed mindsets and subtle bigotries. It's also of course the case that many universities are barely centres of learning at all, and that even the best ones rely on the unwillingness of their employees to push points to strip them of money or to trash them via the kangaroo courts that often end careers. Even the University of Chicago, for instance, once turned around to me and refused to pay for two years' worth of very successful lectures after a byzantine dispute about a cheque they lost. So I was very struck by this lovely article about the trials and perils of an academic I admire, Lisa Ruddic...

Arthur Conan Doyle's election campaign I'm a great fan of Arthur Conan Doyle. He was a curiously modern figure, both transatlantic in his business interests and spiritualism, and a Liberal Unionist, a sort of neoconservative of his day. Doyle was a little fairer and less malicious than that group in his politics (perhaps because of the Jesuit education that would have taught him the inutility of malice), and of course also involved himself in legal campaigns like those of George Edalji and Oscar Slater , amongst others. He is remembered as the inventor of Sherlock Holmes, of course--a character he came to hate, and which he saw as undermining his ambitions to be a serious, Walter-Scott style of author. What a lot of people don't know though, is that Conan Doyle actually once stood for a seat in the House of Commons. In 1900 , England was in the grip of 'khaki fever'. A war against Boer insurgents in South Africa had apparently led to their imminent defeat by the f...