POSH

Last night I finally went to see a play that opened at the Royal Court in London almost 2 years ago. If you get the chance, take a deep breath and go and see it.

It’s on at the Duke of Yorks theatre, it’s called POSH and it depicts the frightening antics of a group of very privileged young men who have arranged a dinner to celebrate the return of their very exclusive secret club.

Without much of a leap of imagination, the fictitious riot club is based on the Bullingdon Club of which our current Prime Minsiter, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Mayor of London were all members.

So, it’s just a bunch of young toffs who get up to japes and pay off anyone who complains, where’s the harm? What’s all the fuss about, the Prime Minister has far more important things to worry about.

A 'banned' picture of the Bullingdon club in 1987 featuring among others, (2) David Cameron and (8) Boris Johnson

In the 1970’s I worked in a restaurant in Oxford called ‘Colonel Bogeys.’ Yes, not a pleasant name but for a short time it was very popular. I worked as a kitchen hand and rarely had contact with customers, except one night when a group of rowdy young men (this was long before Dave Cameron’s time) arrived and took over one end of the large dining area. They were very drunk and all dressed in the same get up, a bizarre combination of dining suits, starched shirts and bow ties, like 19^th century toffs.

Now, seeing as I had hair down to my ass at the time, on this particular evening it would have been tied in a pony tail, I’m hardly in a position to judge the dress codes of others, but this bunch were all wearing exactly the same laughable rags, down to identical buttons and collar studs.

As I passed by their table (I had been drafted in to being a waiter on this particular evening) carry a load of plates, one of these young men, a diminutive blonde kid, grabbed my apron and said ‘Oi.’

I carefully placed the plates on a nearby table, leant my face right into his so our noses were virtually touching and said quietly. ‘Don’t ‘Oi’ me chum, say excuse me.’

This response caused huge uproar among his chums and the restaurant manager quickly intervened and ushered me out to the kitchens. She then discreetly explained that these young chaps were all members of a dining club, it was ‘the sort of thing that happens in Oxford’ and that I shouldn’t cross them as they were all from very powerful, wealthy families.

I was, as you may be able to imagine, fairly shocked by this information. It quickly spread through the bedraggled kitchen staff, mutterings of revenge plans were hatched, even talk of waiting for this crowd of twats outside the restaurant and ‘doing them.’

However, even at our young age we all knew it was pointless, yes, we may indeed by capable of hospitalizing a few of them, but we knew they’d win in the long run, they always had and they always would.

To say this miniscule contact with the uber-elite of our small island has tainted my vision of our fair and pleasant land is to define understatement.

The pathetic, pitiful arguments put forward by members of such elite clubs that ‘it’s just the same with working class people, they behave just as badly’ or that it is some ways unfair to pick on this tiny group is only worthy of snide derision.

The fact that our current Prime Minister, no matter what his personal behavior was or is now, was once a member of such a foul cauldron of arrogance, ignorance and blatant bigotry tells us more about him than any number of policy horrors he’s ejaculating over our culture.

The play captures the frustration and anger these privileged young men experience as the paltry gains of the 99% represent to them an affront to the natural order. They were born to be in power, they scoff at our bumbling struggle toward some form of tragic equality. Anyone who isn’t like them, and there’s very few of them, is by definition scum. Women, white men who have to work, all black people, Europeans, not homosexuals strangely as many of them are just that, anyone poor, anyone struggling to feed their children and obviously anyone who doesn’t agree that they have an inbuilt, genetic level of right to rule.

Before the play we listened to a panel discussion expertly chaired by Alistair Cambell, the man behind the dodgy dossier, including Luciana Berger, Labour MP; Dr James Tilley, lecturer at Oxford in politics and international relations; Rachel Johnson, Editor in Chief of The Lady (a magazine) who is Boris (Bullingdon Club ’83) Johnson’s sister and the play’s very erudite director Lyndsey Turner.

It was short, interesting and made the entire evening highly stimulating. My 15-year-old daughter loved it, she found the play fairly disturbing. Indeed it is funny and deeply depressing at the same time.

If, as has been argued, it was a play about a bunch of white working class boys, or a bunch of young black kids and let’s face it many such plays have been produced, and they beat up a barman, the force of law would have been down on them with vengeance.

However this tiny sub-set are effectively above the law, they are the children of the men who make and manipulate the law for their own ends. Through wealth and social connection they can play the game, cheat, steal, destroy and lie their way through life while at the same time, through careful outward behavior convince the rest of us that the country is in good hands with them at the helm.

5% of our population attends expensive private school, an even smaller precentage attend Oxford or Cambridge university. A full 60% of the current government, the cabinet, are from such backgrounds. They have won, they will always win, this is what we are left with at the end of the play. They will, always, win.

 

CEMETERY TECHNOLOGY

There has been a fairly concerted effort this year in the UK from a small minority of Tory politicians, backed up by furious lobbying from some well funded bodies to try and put the brakes on the very impressive roll out of our renewable energy infrastructure.

These chaps are ranting about wind turbines, they will take any opportunity to discredit them, the energy they produce and the supposed massive subsidies the wind farming industry is ‘bleeding out of the tax payer to prop up this green-wash sillyness.’

Then my eye falls on a story in the Independent newspaper I found on the train the other day. The headline said it all;

PICTURE COURTESY visitcumbria.com

Sellafield  Pleads for Extra £276 million.

I just want to focus on the word ‘extra,’ because ladies and gentlemen we have already forked out several hundreds of thousands of wind turbines worth of cash to deal with nuclear waste in my lifetime.

It’s important to point out that Sellafield Nuclear Reprocessing facility in Cumbria isn’t just a nuclear power station, they also deal with the stuff that’s left over when the generating has been done elsewhere.

I quote from the Independent article

‘Sellafield Ltd said that the final costs of building the Evaporator D complex to handle Britain’s liquid nuclear waste will need to be increased from £397m to between £599m and £673m. This is more than six times the original estimate for the project.’

I am not now and never have been ‘opposed’ to nuclear power. I would much prefer to see a new nuclear power station built than another coal burning plant. I am utterly and irrevocably opposed to burning coal, if there is one thing we must stop doing as soon as possible it’s stop burning coal.

However I am very critical of some aspects of the nuclear industry and very aware of the historical link between nuclear power and the nuclear weapons industry, although to a lesser degree today than it was a few years back.

When I heard someone refer to nuclear power as cemetery technology the other day, something clicked in my slow moving brain. It’s a very illuminating term, the sites where these power stations once stood will in effect become cemeteries, we can’t do anything else with that land, it has been taken out of the picture just like a cemetery.

I would be not only happy, but proud if I could erect a 100 meter wind turbine in my garden. It’s very windy where I live and it would produce enough electricity for the surrounding villages and towns, and it wouldn’t burn anything or produce any highly dangerous waste. Yes, it might receive subsidies when it’s constructed, just like the nuclear industry does, although obviously nowhere near as much.

When, in 20-25 years time the turbine comes to the end of it’s productive life, it’s going to cost money to take down. The materials can be re-used to create maybe some other form of renewable energy source we haven’t discovered yet. But in that 20-25 year period, it will produce many gigawatts of electricity without burning anything, we won’t have to send loads of money for Uranium to Australia, coal to Poland, or Gas from Mr Putin or even more money for oil from King Khalid of Saudi Arabia.

When a nuclear power station comes to the end of its productive life, as many are now doing in the UK, it’s a slightly different story as we are seeing with the mind numbing cost of decommissioning the Dounreay site in Scotland.

Due to the highly toxic nature of much of the material still piled up there, a large 24 hour armed police presence is needed as well as all the brave engineers at work trying to figure out what to do with it all.

It’s going to take 20 years minimum and it will cost billions, and I think it’s vital to point out that those billions are not coming from some well funded corporation, no, they are coming from us, the numpty tax payer.

And lastly, the ‘carbuncle’ argument. A wind turbine is a large, industrial installation, if it’s stuck on the top of a hill you can see it for miles.

However earlier this year I drove through Yorkshire, all along the coast are massive, smoke belching power stations which burn through millions of tons of imported coal a year. You can see them from 100’s of miles away, they are a massive carbuncle, the ugliest of eyesores, giant, countryside disfiguring lumps of human engineering excerement and yet I don’t hear middle class NIMBY Telegraph readers putting signs outside their Yorkshire houses saying ‘No More Drax B, Bring Down the Chimneys!’

Maybe that’s because the people of Yorkshire are slightly more realistic, they know where their electricity comes from, they can see it every day. Some cosseted Tory neighbor of Ms Brooks or the Camerons don’t want that ‘ugliness’ near their nice houses.

 Well, I live also in the Cotswolds and I think, due to it’s high hills and windy enchantments we should be the new North Yorkshire. We should have massive, 150 meter tall wind turbines on every hill, we should walk around proudly knowing we are producing electricity for the low-landers. I’m talking hundreds of turbines, spinning away day and night, their gentle whooshing sending the children of the Cotswolds into gentle sleep on late summer evenings.

Then we could knock down those vile coal burners in Yorkshire and return that wild, savage coastline to it’s former natural beauty. Nice

WAR HERO IN MY FAMILY

This is a picture of my father Reg, taken in 1945

Tonight at 7:00 on Channel 5, the episode of War Hero in my Family which features my father is broadcast.

It follows my short journey to discover what my father actually did in World War II. I knew he was in the RAF, I knew he flew about in bombers, that was about it.

What I actually discovered was fiarly remarkable. My dad was in 192 squadron stationed in Norfolk. That meant nothing to me until I found out a little more. He never told us anything about it and what emerges in the program is one of the reasons why he never did.  One of the few clues he gave us was his annoyance with 'the damn back room boffins' and I now understand why he might have been a little annoyed with them.

Amazing stuff. I'm very proud of the old duffer. You can see a teaser about the show here.

http://www.channel5.com/shows/war-hero-in-my-family/episodes/episode-6-338

Sunday Morning Thought Piece

I spent a wonderful two hours yesterday evening with my 15 year old daughter and her oldest pal, we were discussing ‘why we are here’ and ‘belief’ and the theory of evolution.

As the discussion developed, the realisation hit me that this girl, who attends a fee paying Catholic school, has been taught that there are two ‘belief systems’ that might explain where we come from and why we’re here.

The question she asked me that sparked the whole thing off was;

‘So, do you believe in evolution Robert?’

This single question revealed everything about her education. On the one hand is the traditional Christian belief that God made the heavens and the earth, the other is belief in evolution.

Unlike the truly barking mad evangelical nutbags in many American schools who set out to prove evolution is the work of Satan or some other such fear based patriarchal mental torture, her British religious education is clearly far more subtle.

Two ‘belief systems’, one written down on clay tablets by the newly powerful males of an ancient desert dwelling tribe 2-3 thousand years ago, one developed by countless scientists in a complex peer review process over the last 150 years.

She is clearly being taught that these two ideas have equal weight.

She is not taught that God made the earth 5 thousand years ago and gentle men in robes walked with Dinosaurs, her teachers fully accept that you have to be actually clinically insane to believe that… oh wait, that’s what is taught in many American schools.

She is taught that while science may answer many questions about the development of the world and all that lives upon it, God created the universe in ways that are too mysterious for us, mere mortals, to ever understand.

So I started to explain as best I could the difference between a theory and a belief. I explained how the theory of evolution was never written down as a law, it’s a theory which by its very nature is evolving, changing and developing as science allows us to investigate further. 

I tried to explained the process, how peer reviewed science is more like a discussion, where arguments are based on research, how the discussion is by its nature very complex and detailed, how scientists don’t all agree with each other. I tried to give examples of how new research can develop new strands of the theory, new techniques like mapping the human genome make it possible for us to read our genetic heritage.

This young woman is bright, inquisitive and articulate, I’ve known her since she was 2. Her parents are well-educated, funny and charming people. They are practicing Catholics and clearly not bigots, racists or indeed homophobes. If they lived in the USA, they would not vote for Mitt Romney and would not support the Tea Party, and yet, I assume, they consider evolution to be a belief.

I think this is still a truly fundamental problem standing in the way of our development as a species. In no way am I saying that human investigation into spiritual experience and a greater understanding of self is in any way backward looking, but concrete, law based religious belief is the yoke the human race most needs to shed.

We now know the theory, not the belief, the very well supported theory the world is more than 5 thousand years old and that Dinosaurs died out quite a few million years before homo erectus emerged from the plains of central Africa. We know the theory, not belief that Homo sapiens are one species, many different cultures and languages but one single species. This is not based on laws written by a few old blokes sitting around a fire, but thousands of scientists who have spent lifetimes researching, cataloging and theorising on why birds have feathers, fish have gills and human beings have language.

(photo Jim Harrison 2003)

The two time Pulitzer Prize winning sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson wrote a book called ‘Creation’ in which he held out a friendly hand to religious leaders, claiming that together science and religion could further human understanding, so we can possibly assume he’s not a Dawkinite.

Wilson said recently that he believes there will be a decline in organised religion in the coming century and a lot less emphasis upon idealistic ideologies, (despite what’s happening in America) we’ll see a need to focus on conflict resolution and work out how to get along with each other, but the biggest stumbling block is

‘the creation story.’

‘That’s the killer, the creation story.” Said Wilson, “like it’s set in stone and people have to have complete fidelity to the creation story of their tribe, and if you question that creation story, with something like evolution then they get offended and they get hostile because you are attacking their tribe.’

I’m very grateful I’d heard him say that as yesterday evening I tried to introduce the notion of the theory off evolution without making it an attack on anything, rather something that required further investigation.

My Facebook Fail

So here’s my worry.

It’s probably linked to the Facebook IPO and the experience that for the first time since the early 1990’s I feel utterly out of touch with a profound shift that’s taking place in the media.

I just don’t use Facebook, not for any weird big-brother-control-freak-privacy-paranoia weirdness, I just don’t use it.

I’ve tried, I’ve got a Facebook page but it just doesn’t ‘engage‘ me. I probably got there once a month at the most.

Sure, it’s a great way of keeping in touch with my friends but I find when I re-meet an old friend I haven’t seen in a while, we catch up by gossiping, laughing and generally interacting in meat-space.

I personally find the internet is a great place to communicate with people I don’t know and will generally never meet.

I understand that I may have a hangover from old school media thinking, in some ways seeing these tools as a broadcast or publishing medium rather than a true form of social media where no one individual is a broadcaster, but making a show like Fully Charged is a very different experience from making a traditional TV show, broadcasting it and moving on.

I am still getting comments and interactions generated by Carpool and Fully Charged episodes I made two and three years ago. I am super aware of the audience reaction, of which particular shows are more popular, which are generally ignored.

But none of this happens of Facebook and obviously if I had any sense, it should. That, lets face it, is where the vast majority of the worlds net connected mobile using population go, every day, all the time.

the people I know, particularly of my generation have adopted Facebook with ease, they are all nattering away to each other all the time.

Not only that, but every company I’ve ever heard of has a Facebook page, even the BBC uses Facebook as the online presence of their long running radio and TV series.

Indeed there is both a Carpool and Fully Charged Facebook page, you’ll be able to find it easier than me. It makes no sense that I don’t use them, they’ve been set up for me by people who know how to use Facebook, I’ve seen the pages and know I should update them, feed stuff into them.

I never do.

So does this mean I’m a massive fail at Facebook and I’m being left behind like a tragic, befuddled old bloke outside the massive party that everyone’s attending.

Or could it mean that due to its overarching power, ubiquity and corporate bulk, it will become annoying, slow moving and dull and I will be proved less wrong?