Year: 2007

Back in Edinburgh for the hogmanay celebrations and it opened with the torchlight procession from the High Street to Carlton Hill and a surprise close up fireworks display which we captured on video for that full blog experience.

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Longer:

The former BNP success story of Tipton has failed to regain their seat they lost due to the previous moronic BNP councillor not bothering to turn up to meetings. Labour won, and the BNP previously only 20 votes behind were beaten by the Conservatives. I knew the class of the area would improve after I moved in.

Saw some Shakespear recently. Jean-Luc Piccard (or Patrick Stewart) played Macbeth and somehow made it much more interesting than it was at school (apologies to Harry Quinn).

Then we saw The Winters Tale which isn’t performed often in Scotland according to the programme. There’s probably a good reason, only Shakespear can get away with an ending along the lines of “oh The Queen hasn’t been dead for 20 years, she’s just been sleeping”.

Finally A Midsummer Nights Dream by The Footsbarn Travelling Theatre which was the best of the three and had masks (it was part of the Stourbridge Mask Festival, amazing things happen in Englandshire). You have to be quite devoted to acting to buy a field in France and set up a travelling theatre company. Even the children weren’t too fidgety, which is impressive for a Shakespear play without an interval.

Having successfully got Labour elected (you won’t hear me say that much) in place of the BNP in Tipton, I was disgusted to see Westmorland’s Tebay motorway services, which I’d always thought to be quite classy, selling the BNP newsletter in their shop. Sent them a grumpy feedback form.

The lengthy named UKTV Gold 2 digital channel has decided that if they are going to have a stupid name they may as well have one that isn’t so long and renamed to Dave. I feel this reflects the meaningfulness of most digital TV channels.

Meanwhile digital radio is great and I look forward to Channel 4’s new multiplex (well, not the station from Closer magazine obviously, or anything with 24 hour big brother coverage). Chill radio is my favourite for ambient background music, although it does lack the handy “ban” button that last.fm sports when it gets too musack.

The BBC meanwhile is not doing its public service duty to support open platforms and access to programming by using proprietary software for its iPlayer. You can’t even control what the iPlayer is doing, and it’ll happily eat up all your bandwidth given a chance. They did put out a press release saying Linux and MacOS users will get a Flash based player, I’ve tried it and it works well if you don’t mind the window being about 600 pixels across. I think I’ll stick to UK Nova.

Tipton has a problem with racism. Racism is not acceptable and as a resident of Tipton you should work to get rid of it. Racist and fascist graffiti is common around Tipton, if you see it you should remove it. But here is something simpler you can do:

There is an election in Sandwell on May 3rd. Last year Labour lost three seats and the xenophobic BNP party won 3 seats. See the BBC results page for Sandwell 2006 election. Use your vote on May 3rd for a party which is not racist. You have until April 18th to register to vote, see aboutmyvote for details.

Sandwell is a key area for the BNP in this years elections. With only 1/3rd of voters taking part in the elections last year it is easy to defeat them by simply using your vote and urging your friends and neighbours to use theirs.

Don’t accept racism in Tipton. Vote on May 3rd.

Not acceptable (and not just because of the spelling)	Much nicer

I joined the SNP today. I don’t agree with all their policies, but I do agree with more of them than any other party and I’ll be voting for them in May. It doesn’t cost much either, a pound a month at a minimum. The political system is important to support and there are falling numbers of members of most parties, leaving them dependent on large donations from businessmen including the Evil Brian Souter. Somebody has to support the parties, so seems to me like every citizens duty to do so.

I read the book Empire by Niall Ferguson, an interesting history of the British Empire, an Empire that covered a quarter of the world’s land by the end of the first world war. What’s interesting about the British Empire is that much of it was started and run by commercial entities and only later did government formally take over.

It started in the Caribbean with English sailors taking islands away from the Spanish. These were largely profitable and government soon took over the running. In the East there was dispute with the Dutch who were trading in India and the East Indies (Indonesia, Malasia etc), but that was solved when the Dutch king William taking over the English throne and splitting the east up with England getting India and the Dutch getting the East Indies. The Indian colony was run by a privately owned company, the East India Company, who slowly took over the whole sub-continent, from modern day Pakistan to Burma.

North America was fought over against the French in the Seven Years War. France losing the war allowed Britain to become the dominant world power for the next two centuries. One obvious problem being the revolution in the US which started when the British lowered taxes on imports and all the local smugglers got annoyed that they couldn’t compete any more. France helped the US in their fight for independence mostly to get back at Britiain. As with a lot of wars the politics is not as simple as is often made out and many British supported independence for the US and many US residents supported British rule. When the rebels one the war most Loyalists went to Canada, which helps explain why Canada stayed part of the Empire for so long. Losing the US wasn’t considered much of a problem since it was an inhospitable place already populated with natives and wasn’t generating any revenue (unlike the Caribean islands which were invaluable for growing sugar).

While the US was unprofitable, Australia had even more harsh terrain and was up to 8 months sailing away, so it was populated with convicts who worked as slaves for a period for the relatively few free landowners. Far more slaves however were taken to the Caribbean and the US from Western Africa, about three million in total. But somewhere in the 18th century the political mood about slavery changes and the slave trade is banned. Not only is it banned between British colonies, but the British Navy is also sent to stop the trade of Africans to Brazil and later of Easten Africans to Arabia and Persia.

David Livingstone was a church missionary who went to Africa to convert them all to Christianity. He only ever converted one person, who reverted after a month because he preferred polygamy, so Livingstone turned into an explorer and was the first white person to cross central Africa. He convinced the government to fund the founding of a colony in Eastern Africa which failed horribly when the ship couldn’t sail up the Zambizi because of some waterfalls Livingstone had failed to chart correctly. As usual though private enterprise succeeded where government had failed, and the main difference was a horrific new machine gun called the Maxim Gun, a small number of which could kill a whole tribe of Zulu warriors before a battle had begun. South Africa was colonised to mine for gold and diamonds and the monopolistic De Beers company funded much of the murderous expansion north into Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Eventually the British had colonised a solid path of continent from South Africa to Egypt.

Egypt had been squabbled over with France for ages but was sorted out with the Entente Cordiale. With Egypt, British interests moved into the Middle East, much of which was occupied by the Turkish Ottoman Emptire. During the first world war the Germans trained and encouraged the Turks to fight the British. Much of the British army in the area was made up of forces from the Colonies: India, East Africa, Egypt and ANZACS (Australia and New Zealand), many of whom were promptly killed. When Germany and Turkey were defeated British took over their empires, gaining British a number of colonies in the Middle East: Palestine, Jordan, Transjordan (Syria) and Mesopotamia (Iraq), and Western Africa.

Between the world wars the world was understandably poor, and people questioned the need for an Empire that seemed to benefit a few wealthy businessmen but not the country as a whole. After the second world war the national debt was worse and the costs of socialist government such as the NHS high, and most of the empire was wound up in a couple of decades. For all the brutality in taking over lands and turning them into countries, once the British were in power they were a largely benign government. The dismantling of the empire was in many countries a disaster that created wars and dictators. In many places the empire did a good job of spreading representative government, and it was certainly better than any of the alternatives during the middle of the twentieth century (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Communist Russia, Imperialist Japan). It also spread the English language and free trade, all largely beneficial.

This book missed out a number of colonies which would have been interesting to learn about, from Hong Kong to Cyprus and especially Mesopotamia, but is otherwise an excellent introduction to an important part of world history we often forget about.

I finished reading One Palestine Complete, the history of Palestine during the British Mandate. Predictably enough the violence between the Jews and the Arabs gets worse, with Arabs doing their small scale terrorist thing and Jews setting up people’s malitias armed and trained with a blind eye turned by the British. Although the Zionists had licence to immigrate as many Jews as they wanted they took relitavely low numbers to keep the economy running smoothly. When fascism took hold in Europe they knew they could not take all the Jews being persecuted and prioritised only fit, male, educated people. They were happy at the number of suitable candidates fascism supplied them, Ben-Gurion (later first Prime Minister of Israel) said “We want Hitler to be destroyed but as long as he exists we are interested in exploiting that for the good of Palestine”. People with mental disabilities were not allowed to immigrate, and a fund was set up to return those who had become mentally ill. Eventually the British realised they weren’t going to solve the problems of Palestine and it was costing a lot of money, so they packed up and left. The UN vote for partition caused a worldwide diplomatic campaign with bribery on a huge scale, the Jewish Agency set aside a million dollars for it. On Nover 29 1947 they voted to split Palestine into two states, one for the Jews and one for the Arabs. The Arabs were against the plan, being in the majority they would be happy with one democratic state. The Zionists accepted but everyone knew it was an unworkable plan with a long contorted border that would still leave a majority of Arabs in the proposed boundary. Towards the end of the mandate the Zionist malitias (Haganah, Palmach, Etzel and Lechi) invaded several Arab cities and areas including Tiberias, Safed, Haifa and Jaffa. The Arabs were unorganised and leaderless and deserted the invaded cities. The British handed over control to the Jewish Agency and the UN, completing the task set out in the Balfour declaration and UN mandate to advance the Jewish state, while ignoring the needs of those already living there.

I also read The Lord of the Flies, which was good but probably better read as a 10-13 year old. And I got Derren Brown, Tricks of the Mind, for Christmas, a lightweight and fun introduction to memory techniques, hypnotism, mind reading (obviously not literally, but reading the clues in peoples speech and body movements) and NLP (a very good pyramid scheme).