July 30, 2005
"The whole world in a city"
The reason I got to Bill Drummond's site was that I was Googling on the words "The Whole World in a City".
This was part of Ken Livingstone's speech in the wake of the July 7th bombs, according to a poster I saw in a newsagent this morning. (For some reason the text doesn't seem to have made it to the net, so maybe it was improved by the Evening Standard's subs.) Ken Livingstone was saying that the people of London "the whole world in a city" will never be divided against one another. The phrase is a good one to apply to London. The list of victims of the 7th July showed what an extraordinarily varied population this city has. Travelling on the tube you hear French, Amharic, Swahili, Swedish, Cantonese.
It was one of the reasons we won the Olympics, I sense. The French video implied that the world should be so lucky as to visit Paris and experience its unique glamour. The British video talked about what a London games might mean for children all over the world. The image was of a child watching TV somewhere and dreaming of competing on a world stage, to impress another child watching TV somewhere else in the world.
London - and perhaps modern Britain - is about media, communication, a global vision. In the last few years, particularly during the ghastly Iraq adventure, I have been reminded painfully of Dean Acheson's prescient and still stinging remark: "Britain has lost an Empire and not yet found a role".
Blair, with his marketing man's instincts, seems to have recently woken to the drawbacks of the British role as handmaiden to the American hegemon. He tried to get global warming and the plight of Africa onto the US's agenda, and succeeded in reasonable measure. If he can get international competitiveness onto Europe's agenda he will have done a good thing.
"The whole world in a city" is a good model (even if nicked - as Bill Drummond's entry implies- from Liverpool) because it allows the modern outlook of London to chime with London's (and Britain's) historic role. London trades with anyone, without prejudice or dogma. And the values of free trade are the values of democracy: freedom of conscience, individual property, equality before the law, democratic franchise.
Way to go, Ken.
Posted by Mark at 9:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Good writing
Following a link I found this. Whoever Bill is, he writes well.
Aaah. Reading further it turns out to "former pop star Bill Drummond". Drummond is a talent. This was clear ever since he made "Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu" with Tammy Wynette and recorded the grande dame of country's query:
"Bill, you're your from Scotland. Can you tell why I have such a big lesbian following there?"
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July 26, 2005
Ghost mail trains
Half a mile out of Euston station in London there is a huge redbrick shed on the right hand side of the track which seems to host a number of old-fashioned bright red mail trains. The tracks leading to the shed are overgrown with weeds and the entrance to the shed is barred by a galvanised steel fence. What are these ghostly trains? Have they been sitting there ever since the railways lost the post office contract during the post-Hatfield meltdown?
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July 19, 2005
Bugmenot
Annoyed by compulsory registration on news sites? Fret no more, the site Bugmenot lends you a log-in. Also available as a plug-in to Firefox.
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July 18, 2005
Single parents banned from pools
New council regulations in the UK now prohibit parents with children from accompanying them swimming unless there is one adult per child. This is irrespective of the availability of lifeguards, buoyancy aids etc. This new policy has not been announced in response to any greater risk of drowning, which statistics show to be unchanged.
Here is an anguished discussion of this looney-tunes policy, which condemns the children of single parents to far greater risks of obesity, social exclusion and drowning.
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July 14, 2005
Bomber named as "Lindsey Germaine"
The bomber has been named as "Lindsey Germaine" - a Jamaican-born Briton.
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Libération names Fourth London bomber - Lindsay Jermaine
Quoting Nicolas Sarkozy's account of the briefing given by the British government yesterday in Bruxelles, this morning's French press have two major revelations:
- The suicide bombers were, according to Sarkozy, the escapees (8 were arrested out of 13, leaving 5 others) from a cell that was otherwise cleaned up in the spring of 2004 when 600kg of explosives were recovered;
- Libération this morning, citing French security sources, names the fourth bomber - as yet unnamed by the British authorities- as Lindsay Jermaine - "of English stock".
Charles Clarke has angrily denied all this.
Here is my speedy translation of the full Libération article:
Sarkozy drops a clanger in Bruxelles
The fourth suicide bomber is Lindsay Jermaine - of British stock - says France
By Patricia TOURANCHEAU
Thursday 14th July 2005
According to the French intelligence services, the London suicide bombers belonged to the same network as the Britons of Pakistani origin who were partially arrested in Great Britain in March 2004. So Nicholas Sarkozy, French interior minister explained yesterday in Bruxelles at the EU council meeting. "It seems that part of that team were arrested in spring 2004..." The bombers, according to the french minister, weren't amongst those arrested at the time.
Out of "the 13 presumed terrorists identified by the British only 8 were arrested and 5 escaped. The arrests were part of an operation which recovered 600kg of explosives," said the senior French police officer, who yesterday revealed to Libération the fact that amongst the five who escaped from the operation was Mohammed Kahn, one of the alleged suicide bombers who struck on the London Underground. This Briton of Pakistani descent has been on the list of Scotland Yard's "targets" for the last 15 months, only with a different age and a different first name - Kayoun instead of Sidique, but "it's the same man" who gave the police the slip. The fourth bomber could be a Briton of native stock - Lindsay Jermaine.
The remarks of the French minister, badly translated, brought him a stinging response from his British opposite number Richard [sic] Clarke. "I have heard reports on Mr. Sarkozy's comments in the press and they are completely without foundation," he said, underlining that there had been "neither in the Council nor in the dicussions with Sarkozy any exchange or discussion of any kind about the investigation. Therefore Mr. Sarkozy is mistaken, to be polite about it," he said, adding that he himself was not familiar with the details of this allegation, and that he "had absolutely no idea where [Sarkozy] could have received information which would have led him to make those remarks." Asked to say whether he had asked his French counterpart to to correct his statement, Clarke said: "No, I haven't seen him. He left the Council during the meeting. He did not think it appropriate to stay until the end of the discussions. That is, perhaps, his style. But he is a great French leader and I wish him well."
Posted by Mark at 8:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 13, 2005
You will fail (part 2)
Hyde Park yesterday ... in hot weather I try to go swimming outdoors. My current favourite is the Serpentine. It is scrummy. The cool air, the smell of the bushes around the lake. The strange murky weed flickering by just under my goggles as I do the crawl.
And Hyde Park is extraordinary too because it is full of every nation on earth. French, German, Japanese, Serbian, Russian, Chinese, Kuwaiti, Pakistani, Swedish ... all chatting in their own tongues and innocently disporting themselves. And most of them are not tourists. No: these people live here. They like the easy tolerance, the laid-back atmosphere. They like that no one dictates to them, that they do what they like, live how they like.
Such a city is a soft target for a terrorist. You could blow people up 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year if you wanted. And even the most liberal Brit feels a flicker of anger with the deluded nutters who carried out these attack. And yet how resilient this tolerance is. We will get over this and carry on.
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July 12, 2005
British bribed their way to Olympics - insuates Parisian mayor
Mayor of Paris Bertard Delanoe has returned to the attack, insinuating that Blair and Coe bribed their way to winning the Olympics for London.
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You will fail
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July 7, 2005
"Jacques le Loser"
Even the British press has not turned on Chirac with the vitriol of the French. In their coverage of Paris missing out on the Olympic bid, Libération make use of an increasingly popular English import - loser. As in "Jacques le Loser".
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July 5, 2005
Box office blues
The US box office is suffering a prolonged slump. Any mystery as to why this is vanishes as soon as one examines the current top ten:
1. "War of the Worlds," $77.6 million.
2. "Batman Begins," $18.7 million.
3. "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," $12.7 million.
4. "Bewitched," $10.8 million.
5. "Herbie: Fully Loaded," $10.5 million.
6. "Madagascar," $7 million.
7. "Rebound," $6 million.
8. "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith," $5 million.
9. "The Longest Yard," $3.5 million.
10. "George Romero's Land of the Dead," $3.2 million.
A series of tired franchise re-treads the like of which are hard to recall for their wearying lack of imagination. Even the "new" films seem to be misfiring: on "Rebound" a user writes: "No one laughed - it was so sad."
Why is nobody watching this guff? Possibly because, as Morrissey said: "it says nothing to me about my life."
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