A smokey kipper

Nigel Farage’s regal progress was yesterday checked on the Royal Mile. Tee hee! It came down to both sides — Farage versus the “Campaign for Radical Independence” — declaring the other was “fascist” and “racist”. Pot-ism meet kettle-ism.

Let’s not get involved in the semiotics of racism and UKIP. Suffice it to quote a nice throw-away that’s been doing the rounds of late: the English Defence League backs UKIP, presumably because of their shared views on sustainable farming.

However, Farage is quoted in the Guardian‘s story:

“We’ve proved we can get votes in Wales, England and Northern Ireland. We’re still untested in Scotland,” he said. “We’ve not had an opportunity to test Ukip policies with the Scottish people for a very long time.” Asked about Ukip’s chances, he was optimistic. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we did quite creditably.”

At last! a germ of testable UKIP “truth”

UKIP’s “elected” presence in Northern Ireland amounts to one local councillor and one Assembly Member:

• David McNarry was elected the UUP AM for Strangford. There was a rancorous bust-up in the UUP. McNarry was  unstoolled as Vice-Chair of the Assembly Education Committee. He got huffy; and was disciplined by the UUP. It was made clear by Mike Nesbitt that McNarry was unlikely to have the UUP whip restored. McNarry went rogue; and last October announced he had joined UKIP.
• Henry Reilly was also UUP, but is now the duly-elected UKIP Councillor for The Mournes. His address seems to be also that for UKIP NI — which could imply a one-man band. Councillor Reilly is currently involved in a spat with his local press:

A high-profile councillor has been criticised after claims he described regional newspaper journalists as “Provos”.

Cllr Henry Reilly, who is chairman of the UK Independence Party in Northern Ireland, has been urged to withdraw his comments which came at a meeting of Newry and Mourne District Council.

The National Union of Journalists has condemned his comments, saying they were “entirely unacceptable”…

Journalists at the meeting represented the Newry Reporter, Mourne Observer, Newry Democrat, County Down Outlook and the Armargh Down Observer.

NUJ president Barry McCall said the journalists concerned had no right of reply at the meeting and should not have been subjected to verbal abuse.

For the record, at the last Assembly election UKIP stood six candidates and garnered the grand total of 4,152 votes — six-tenths of one per cent of the goal first preference poll. The Kippers didn’t manage quite so well at Council level.

Rejoice! TINA’s back!

It jumps out of the screen (or, if you can find a full text, the page):

If there was another way I would take it. But there is no alternative.

Yes: David Cameron has tripped off to Keighley and made a speech, saying … well, absolutely nothing. Except that he is the current possessor of Ma Thatcher’s handbag, and is prepared to filch the odd trifle therefrom.

Except:

That’s from 1980, when the Tory government was already heading further and further into the slough of despond.

Consider this, from Anthony Wells’s ukpollingreport:

Thatcher’s key economic speech of 1o October 1980 was her  Conference “not for turning” address to the Tory faithful:

If our people feel that they are part of a great nation and they are prepared to will the means to keep it great, a great nation we shall be, and shall remain. So, what can stop us from achieving this? What then stands in our way? The prospect of another winter of discontent? I suppose it might.

But I prefer to believe that certain lessons have been learnt from experience, that we are coming, slowly, painfully, to an autumn of understanding. And I hope that it will be followed by a winter of common sense. If it is not, we shall not be—diverted from our course.

To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the “U” turn, I have only one thing to say. “You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.”

“It’s déjà vu all over again”

And Yogi Berra is still with us (now in his later 80s).

The problem common to Thatcher in 1980, and Cameron in 2013 is: who is their audience?

It is, in short, their own party — and in both cases the speeches are defence mechanisms, self-defences against an increasingly unhappy and fractious parliamentary party. We need to recall that in 1980 Thatcher was not, by any means, the autocratic Tory leader that Galtieri, his Argie military cronies, and near on a thousand unnecessary corpses made her.

Cameron’s electoral problem

It isn’t just the Eastleigh business. The 1979 General Election meant that Thatcher’s Tory benches included 22 Scottish MPs (with 31.4% of Scottish votes) — Cameron has just the one (and 16.7% of the votes). In 1979 Northern Ireland returned five (of the ten in total) MPs as Ulster Unionists (with 36.6% of the poll) — on all matters economic, the UU MPs voted with the Tory Whip: today there is not a single Ulster Unionist MP remaining, despite Cameron’s explicit involvement and rebranding of UCUNF.

Let’s continue.

In September 2012 The Economist had a definitive description of:

The great divide
Economically, socially and politically, the north is becoming another country

The piece went still further back, and deeper into the socio-economics of English history:

The north remains poorer than the south, with sharply lower employment rates and average incomes. In 1965 men in the north were 16% more likely to die under the age of 75 than men in the south. By 2008 they were 20% more likely to, according to a study published last year in the British Medical Journal. This is not just because poor people die young: rich northerners apparently live shorter lives than their southern peers…

Whereas government spending is spread fairly evenly across the country — nurses and teachers are needed roughly in proportion to the population — private-sector growth has been heavily concentrated, mostly in and around London. Between 1997 and 2010 gross value-added, a measure of output, grew by 61% in the three northern regions. In London and the South East, it shot up by 92%. According to a study by the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change at the University of Manchester, the state accounted, directly and indirectly, for 64% of the jobs created in the north between 1998 and 2007, against just 38% in the south.

It also considers the electoral impact:

The Conservative Party is retreating in the north, too. Its problem is not just that northern seats tend to be poorer, and thus more likely to vote Labour. Broad mistrust of the Tories, cemented during the 1980s recession, means middle-class voters in the north are actually more likely to vote Labour than are working-class voters in the south. Policy Exchange, a think-tank, points out that Conservatives held two-fifths of northern seats in 1951. They now hold less than a third, mostly in rural areas. In the cities, and in former-coal mining areas, the party is all but invisible. In July the Sheffield Conservative Party was forced to relocate to nearby Rotherham, as it is so short of cash…

And, of course, so much of what ConDem austerity economics has done disproportionately impacts upon the North and the devolved regions: the attacks on public employment, the squeeze on municipal budgets, replacing poor employment with even poorer-paid part-time work, lower productivity, rack-renting public housing, energy costs, transport costs … What, will the line stretch out to th’ crack of doom?

Cameron’s revolting women

This is the most jaw-dropping of the lot: women have turned against the Tories. In every post-War election until 2005 women voters preferred the Tories: it has been a declining gap (it was +12 in 1974), but in the last two general Elections, it has reversed. When one digs down into the most recent YouGov/Sunday Times poll, we find the gender gap is now a chasm:

Note that: a 12 point gender deficit for the Tories.

A curious beast

Peter Hoskin on ConHome finds only luke-warm words for Cameron’s speech (and it was an extended one) today, at Keighley:

David Cameron’s speech on the economy today is a curious beast. Here we have the Prime Minister pronouncing on growth, competition, debt and all that – but it has a thin flavour to it, as though it’s just an appetiser for the Budget in a couple of weeks. There are no new policy announcements, nor anything we haven’t really heard before. Yet perhaps that is the point: Mr Cameron emphasises, à la Lady Thatcher, that “there is no alternative” to the Coalition’s current plan. He speaks of consistency and continuity. It reads like a message telling everyone – from the restless Tory backbenches to Ed Balls and Vince Cable – not to expect a change in course.

That addresses the “what” of the speech (or, perhaps the “what-not?”), but not the more telling “where” (Keighley!)  and “why?” (because he’s dans le merde!). On the other hand, that’s precisely what Nick Robinson has caught on (and saying far more succinctly and elegantly than Malcolm managed here):

Perhaps most revealing, though, is that he feels the need to make this speech at all and who it is aimed at. It is a restatement of the government’s central economic purpose aimed at:

• his own party, which is why he is borrowing Margaret Thatcher’s language
• the North of England
• and women

Look at this paragraph to see what I mean :

“I know things are tough right now. Families are struggling with the bills at the end of the month. Some are just a pay-cheque away from going into the red. Parents are worried about what the future holds for their children. Whole towns are wondering where their economic future lies. And I know that is especially true for people here in Yorkshire and in many parts of the north of our country who didn’t benefit properly from the so-called boom years and worry they won’t do so again. But I’m here to say that’s not going to happen. Because we have a plan to get through these difficulties – and to get through them together.”

A man! A plan! A canal! Panama!

As good a palindrome as you’ll get in these parts to remind us just how much of British politicking involves going round in circles and disappeared up one’s own … canal.

Every day a new distraction

Today’s was William Bloat.

That has divided those who venture these ways into an immediate switch off (the usual “dwell time” on a blog page is reckoned in micro-seconds) or a more positive, Oh, yes! I know that one!

Well, here’s the best-known rendition (from the Clancy’s reunion concert):

Once the final verse gets into one’s neurones, it’s ever-lurking, ready to pop out:

But the strangest turn of the whole concern
Is only just beginnin’:
He went to Hell, but his wife got well,
And she’s still alive and sinnin’
For the razor blade was British-made
But the rope was Belfast linen!

There is considerable debate about that “British-made”. That’s the version Tommy Makem gave us, and he was the first (as far as Malcolm knows) to marry the verse to The Dawning of the Day. Well, even that’s arguable. There’s a delicious, earlier, Makem concert (also on YouTube) when the blade is “Japanese-made”. That’s worth a visit if only to see Tommy trying to break through the rigidity and hyper-politeness of the RTÉ audience (don’t miss the lady with the hat).

We have, then, another opportunity to deploy the pencilled variae lectiones. But this is folk-music, for heaven’s sake! The whole point is modification, adaptation, re-working, interpretation. It’s what kept Cecil Sharp (and others) in tea and biscuits.

What we may grasp at is that the verse was by Raymond Calvert of East Belfast. And that’s Orange country. It seems the original blade was “German-made”.

Confuse a Mudcat

In any case of doubt or difficulty over folkery matters, a ready resort is the Mudcat Café. Sure enough, there’s a couple of threads on William Bloat. What is evident there is the lack of understanding of what goes on in Ulster (even in Irish) humour. Above all, it is wry. It is self-referential. And it crosses all the divides of religion and culture. The same jokes crop up each side of the Great Divide: all that happens is the protagonist is ‘ours’ and the stooge or ‘antagonist’ is one of them uns.

So, depending on where one is — north or south — the razor-blade may be be Free State-made or English-made. Belfast linen, though, is a matter of pride both ways. It’s the same as the Titanic gybe: it took 10,000 Ulstermen/Belfast men/ Irishmen (that bit depends on locality and allegiance) to build it, but only one Englishman to sink it (that bit is common to all parties).

While we in these parts …

The other — perhaps far greater — song that is set to The Dawning of the Day is Paddy Kavanagh’s love-lorn appeal to Hilda Moriarty:

There’s a useful RTÉ archive on the song, including Benedict Kiely asserting that Kavanagh had the tune in mind, and intended it to be a song rather than just a verse. There also is Hilda Moriarty briefly commenting on the inspiration.

For a couple of years in the early ’60s, undergraduate Malcolm used to stagger home, alone, bereft and unloved,  to his cold-water basement flat in Elgin Road, Ballsbridge, after a night at O’Neill’s in Suffolk Street. If it wasn’t Wellington Road, it would be Raglan Road he passed down. He never met or was inspired by a Hilda.

Dublin is a small place, and Hilda — having discreetly repulsed the inept gropes of Kavanagh — went on to marry Donogh O’Malley, the later Minister of Education. Which, finally, brings us to another personage worthy of respect and admiration.

The rule of Humbuggery

I had no idea of the enormous and unquestionably helpful part that humbug plays in the social life of great peoples dwelling in a state of democratic freedom.

That’s yer eck-shul Churchill, that is. De reel fing. Pukka!

And the greatest exponent of Humbuggery is, as always, the All-powerful State.

A Malcolmian aside

Here’s one worth the asking: when did the United Kingdom abolish feudalism?

Well, not even yet. There are bods wandering the world, still puffing out chests and conning the natives they are of some importance, because they are allowed to flourish a baronial title.

But, on another level, after 9th June 2000, with the Abolition of Feudal Tenure etc. (Scotland) Act. As Clause 1 of the Act has it:

The feudal system of land tenure, that is to say the entire system whereby land is held by a vassal on perpetual tenure from a superior is, on the appointed day, abolished. 

Humbug 101

Here’s a simple example, to become  a British citizen one must demonstrate capabilities in English, for example:

take and pass an English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) course in English with citizenship to demonstrate your knowledge of language and life in the UK, before you apply for naturalisation as a British citizen.

Mr Spock would furrow his Vulcan brow and mutter, “Illogical, Captain”. Surely that should be the qualification for English citizenship. For British citizenship it ought to be a degree of fluency in Welsh (or at a pinch Cornish). For Scottish citizenship, the Guid Scots Tongue or Gàidhlig. And then there’s Ian Adamson and his Ullans.

Advanced study

Once upon  a time we had a Freedom of Information Act. The laudable aim was the citizen should have a right to know what the public authorities, operating in her/his name, knew and were up to.

Officialdom and bureaucracy loathed it.

So Humbuggery set about by-passing it by any means, fair or foul.

An obvious means was to classify anything that wasn’t screwed down as “commercial confidentiality”. This could vary from government Department to Department, largely depending on whether or not the responsible Minister wanted to keep a job. That one was traipsed out, recently and notoriously, in the cover-up over the West Coast Main Line:

The independent report into the fiasco of the franchise for the West Coast Main Line, which runs through the West Midlands, was altered by the Department for Transport (DfT) before it was published, MPs were told.

There had been “redactions” by the department to “remove the identities” of certain civil servants involved in the flawed franchise bidding process, said businessman Sam Laidlaw, the author of the report…

Mr Laidlaw told the committee he presented his report to the DfT on November 28, the department published it on December 6, and there had been redactions to his report made by the department which were “a matter for the department”.

Asked about the changes made, Mr Laidlaw said they were done “to protect the commercial confidentiality of bidders” and “to remove the identity of certain individuals”.

“Redactions”

Now there‘s an interesting term.

As far as Malcolm can recall it is a respectable academic expression meaning no more, no less than “editing”, particularly in the sense of cleaning up meaning and expression for a final published version. As the OED has it:

1.
a. The action of bringing or putting into a definite form; (now) spec. the working or drafting of source material into a distinct, esp. written, form. Usu. with into, (occas.) to.
b. The action or process of revising or editing text, esp. in preparation for publication; (also) an act of editorial revision.
c. A new version of a text; a new edition; spec. an abridged version.
2. The action of driving back; resistance, reaction. Obs. rare.

That, of course, is the Oxford English Dictionary: the term “redaction” implies assisting the reader’s comprehension. In British officialese, of course, the term means precisely the opposite.

At least in Tristram Shandy ,the blank pages and other devices convey some meaning. Compare and contrast the BBC’s Pollard Report (as right). For a prime example of Humbuggery consider this from the first paragraph [1] of that BBC document:

The BBC sought advice from external counsel to identify text that should be redacted in accordance with the legal grounds for redaction. The proposed redactions were considered by members of the Executive Board before being reviewed and approved by a sub-committee of the BBC Trust to ensure the Trust was satisfied that these were in line with the expectations of transparency previously set out. Then, individuals who participated in the Review were provided with an opportunity to read the material in redacted form and make representations concerning the redactions that had been applied. Those representations were then considered, with advice again taken from external counsel, before a final package of proposed redactions was reviewed by members of the Executive Board and approved by the same sub-committee of the BBC Trust.

At a quick check, that’s six separate layers of bureaucratic scrutiny and Humbuggery, before anything could be made public.

Secret courts bill

No, let’s no go there — yet.

Let’s start instead in 1166, at the Assize of Clarendon. Whether or not Goveian history embraces this seminal event, it certainly featured in Malcolm’s schooling. [On the TCD History course, it reappeared, courtesy of Stubbs's Charters.] The significance was that it, in effect, “nationalised” the law of the land; and it led to trial on evidence, before juries, rather than the mumbo-jumbo of trials by ordeal or battle. It was, of course, something of a power-grab — not just taking authority from the baronial courts, but also from the Church’s “kingdom within a kingdom”. King Henry II was destroying an existing arrangement; but also reaching back for an older one: the juries of the Saxon tunmoots.

The Assize of Clarendon was the first of many small advances to creating the Rule of Law that we have known and loved.

The processes of recent years — getting rid of the flummeries of Latin expression and the like, but, above all, the idea of human rights — have made the law more accessible. In a world ruled by Humbuggery all that has to be put into reverse.

Yesterday the Commons retreated on so much of historical procedures. In four votes, LibDem MPs — in grotesque rejection of anything that could be “liberal” or “democratic” — were whipped to support the Tory Humbuggers. Outside Westminster the average LibDem activists must be weeping into their skinny lattes:

Its’s not been the easiest 24 hours to be a Liberal Democrat. It was very hard to watch the majority of our MPs vote to remove the right to a fair trial in civil cases where national security is deemed to be a factor.  Just seven MPs voted in favour of amendments advised by the Joint Committee on Human Rights. The fact that the JCHR had a different view from the Government should surely have raised a huge red flag. An even bigger signal that our MPs were on the wrong course was the fact that Labour were voting in favour of the JCHR amendments. The Bill as it stood was too illiberal for the Party who thought it was ok to lock people up for 3 months without charge.

I spent a bit of yesterday talking to some MPs. I appreciated the time they spent discussing with me but despaired at the way they had swallowed some of the lines they had been given on the Bill. I was asked what my response would be to the “we’re paying money to terrorists and can’t prove our innocence” line. Well, my instinctive counter to that was to say:

If I’m suing you cos you tortured me and you put up a defence that I can’t see, how am I supposed to let the Judge know that you are talking hogwash?

I have been told today that a Very Clever Person thinks that’s a good summary of what this Bill means, and why the shredder is the only place for it. There is no amendment that can make it acceptable.

Thank you for that, Caron Lindsay at LibDemVoice: it’s warming to know your party had a shred of decency left. As she goes on:

At one point, our Dr Julian Huppert asked a very important question of Ken Clarke  about whether the Bill covered civil habeas corpus – whether people could be locked up without being told the reason why. Clarke didn’t  know and he laughed about the fact that he had to get it checked out.

We really have reached the pits. The shivering spine recalls it was Hendrik Verwoerd, the primary architect of apartheid, who responded to British government criticism by saying he would give up his restrictive legislation in exchange for the British tolerated Northern Ireland Special Powers Act. That Act was designed to give maximum, even unbridled power to the Ulster Unionist ascendancy. It permitted closing pubs and clubs at a whim, banning meetings and gatherings, closing roads, occupying premises, destroying any building without any sure compensation, enforcing oaths of allegiance (the Lady in Malcolm’s Life had to take one), prohibiting inquests, outlawing “false reports or make false statements by word of mouth or in writing, or in any newspaper, periodical, book, circular, or other printed publication” (the judge of such “falseness” being the persons complained about). All to be enforced by “ if a male, to be once privately whipped”. If all that wasn’t enough,

any act if done without lawful authority or without lawful authority or excuse is an offence against the regulations, the burden of proving that the act was done with lawful authority or with lawful authority or excuse shall rest on the person alleged to be guilty of the offence.

Humbuggery hasn’t gone that far, yet …

Except this new bill allows any — any — trial which could cause political embarrassment to be held behind closed doors, unreported, with all involved (except the arraigned) declared Persil-clean and hoovered by the security services.

As the Guardian editorial has it:

The justice and security bill was cooked up in rage and embarrassment after a run of cases revealed, or threatened to reveal, UK collusion in torture and wrongdoing. There was Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who British judges ruled ended up being tortured in a Moroccan jail with the connivance of British intelligence, and then a string of others whom ministers preferred to pay off and shut up before the facts could emerge. Rather than asking what corruption of culture had embroiled a once-decent state in such indecent things, the government’s instinctive response was to ask the judges to hear the arguments in secret. When the supreme court said no in ringing terms – Lord Hope warning secrecy “cut across absolutely fundamental principles, such as the right to be confronted by one’s accusers and the right to know the reasons for the outcome” – ministers again refused to stop and rethink, but instead resolved to rewrite the law.

That editorial refers back to a Liberty pamphlet, written by Jesse Norman (now a Tory MP) which celebrates Churchill’s stand for human rights, and is prefaced by a quotation from his Fulton, Missouri, speech:

We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

Oddly enough, Mr Norman does not seem to have found himself able to vote, or express a view in Monday’s debate on the Secret Courts bill.

The sky is falling! (selectively)

Murdoch’s Times not only went tabloid, it has acquired some down-market degeneracies with it.

A couple of posts back, Malcolm was whining about the comic’s fullest fluffy Murdochian populism. He now bemoans a parallel ghoulish, blood-chilling, thrill-seeking sensationalism.

The Melanie Phillips memorial meme

What provoked this was the third Comment article in yesterday’s fish-n-chip wrapper. After Finkelstein (a contract artist, so comes with the fixtures and fittings) on the holocaust, and the German Foreign Minister soft-soaping the chasm between Cameron and Merkel, comes Maajid Nawaz:

Muslim patrols are s sign of things to come

We should worry that battle-hardened fanatics could impose their dogma on Britain’s streets

Then — yawn! — his opening tries to draw straight-lines across a very uneven surface:

On the streets of Greece supporters of the far-Right Golden Dawn party patrol neighbourhoods, attacking anyone who looks like an immigrant. In Denmark a group calling itself Call to Islam has declared parts of the country to be “sharia-controlled zones” and its “morality police” confront drinkers and partygoers. In France right-wing vigilantes ran Roma families out of a Marseilles estate and burnt down their camp. In Spain nine Islamist extremists recently kidnapped a woman, tried her for adultery under sharia and attempted to execute her before she managed to escape. And here English Defence League thugs march in towns and cities “reclaiming” the streets from Muslims.

Something very worrying is spreading across Europe. Fascist and and Islamist extremists alike are copying what Hitler’s Brownshirts excelled at — enforcing with threats and violence their version of the law in neighbourhoods, And the moderate middle is left gawping.

Well, well: if that had appeared in any inter chat chat-room, Mike Godwin would be invoked:

It was back in 1990 that I set out on a project in memetic engineering. The Nazi-comparison meme, I’d decided, had gotten out of hand – in countless Usenet newsgroups, in many conferences on the Well, and on every BBS that I frequented, the labeling of posters or their ideas as “similar to the Nazis” or “Hitler-like” was a recurrent and often predictable event. It was the kind of thing that made you wonder how debates had ever occurred without having that handy rhetorical hammer…

I developed Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

Then there’s the other matter: proportion. The European Union embraces a population of nigh on half-a-billion. Let’s be generous to Maajid Nawaz: he has identified, at most, a few hundred ne’er-do-wells. His nine Spanish Islamists amount to 0.00000019% of the people of Spain. Similarly, there’s a Grand Canyon of difference between the hysterical:

The complete Islamification of Tower Hamlets continues, as anyone who dares to “look like a fag” or drink alcohol in their declared republic now risks harassment walking in the street.

and the factual:

A small group of individuals were recently seen harassing members of the public in East London, and the council is proactively working with partners in the community and police to monitor for further incidents and take appropriate action.

And the marauding Muslim hordes of E1 amounted to precisely —

A fifth person has been detained after a video of a ‘vigilante Muslim gang’ tormenting members of the public in east London was released on YouTube.

The 17-year-old boy was questioned at a police station in Walthamstow in relation to incidents that were posted on the video sharing website on January 12 and 13.

The pillars of bourgeois society have not even been vibrated. The events Maajid Nawaz wants to daisy-chain are, taken one by one, not insignificant — but on a continental scale do not register on the Richter Scale of earth-shakers.

Another small country about which we know nothing

Curiously, though, Maajid Nawaz omitted one obvious civil disruption.

We have had some eight weeks of continuing street riots in East Belfast, orchestrated by the local UVF. Arson-attempts, especially on Roman Catholic targets, are regular events. The Police Service have reported dozen of officers injured, truing to contain the almost-nightly excursions. Numerous arrests have been made. The cost is now running towards eight figures. And the machinators are known to all:

A small number of senior UVF men are directing the riots in east Belfast that have brought shame on Northern Ireland.

Two senior henchmen of the UVF chief in east Belfast have ignored warnings from the organisation’s leadership to bring an end to the violence which has left dozens of PSNI officers injured and cost millions of pounds.

And while the UVF’s leader in the east of the city — as the ‘Beast from the East’ — could end the rioting immediately, he has failed to bring his men under control.

Even Andrew Gillian, at the [London] Daily Telegraph knows where to go calling:

What East Belfast, Carrickfergus and Newtownabbey do have in common, however, are maverick factions of the Loyalist paramilitary organisation, the Ulster Volunteer Force.

“We’ve got no doubt whatever that this is coming from the UVF,” says Terry Spence, leader of the Police Federation for Northern Ireland.

The East Belfast leader of the UVF – the so-called “Beast from the East” – was not at home to callers when The Telegraph dropped in to his small terraced house in a quiet side street.

His white reinforced front door doesn’t have a knocker or a bell, but there are five CCTV cameras just in case anyone tries to murder him again.

Two of his lieutenants have been spotted in the background helping direct the main East Belfast riots.

Security sources say they are acting with the Beast’s consent, if not the UVF leadership’s active involvement, and he could end the trouble in the area whenever he wanted.

Ugly Doris

If you go to those-in-the-know, you’ll hear a lot about this reclusive figure. Here’s an Analysis from the Irish Times, eighteen months ago:

THE SO-CALLED “Beast from the East” took over the Ulster Volunteer Force in east Belfast about six years ago and has strengthened his power base since then, according to well-placed loyalist sources. He and some of his senior lieutenants are chiefly responsible for the violence in east Belfast over recent days, they say.

He makes his money mainly from “gangster-on-gangster or bad-on-bad crime”, which is chiefly about drug dealing and extorting other criminals – while also managing to maintain some distance from these activities to keep him, so far, out of prison. How to clip his wings is the challenge for the police and also for other members of the UVF…

… what is happening in Short Strand and on the Newtownards Road in east Belfast these past dangerous nights is not about the dissidents. It is about the UVF, which is fomenting the disturbances. And it is primarily about the UVF leader in east Belfast nicknamed the Beast from the East or “Ugly Doris”. The first nom de guerre relates to his east Belfast bailiwick and the second refers to the late Jim Gray, the UDA east Belfast leader or “brigadier” murdered by his own people. He was called Doris Day because of his blond hair and his fondness for Hawaiian shirts, pink jumpers and gold jewellery. The UVF leader is said to resemble Gray only in his strands of blond hair – hence Ugly Doris.

According to senior loyalist sources, the new man, who is in his 40s, has “lost the run of himself” and is becoming increasingly dangerous and, some fear, almost unstable. “He is creating a little empire for himself in east Belfast and is now flexing his muscles,” said one loyalist insider. “He is also partial to cocaine and likes to party . . . He believes he is untouchable.”

The Belfast Telegraph identified the East Belfast UVF as:

… the most powerful paramilitary faction in Northern Ireland.

With a fiefdom stretching from the Lagan’s edge on the Newtownards Road to Millisle, Donaghadee and beyond, it struts a swathe of territory no other loyalist element can match.

It has dwarfed the UDA in east Belfast and the Ards Peninsula to the point where seasoned paramilitaries declare a ‘no contest’ between the two loyalist terror groups.

Note that didn’t say most powerful Loyalist paramilitary faction in Northern Ireland. Nor are we considering a handful of self-advertisers in Brick Lane, or even a tight little gang of perverts in Malaga. This is something far bigger, far nearer to the dystopia with which Maajid Nawaz would wish to chill us.

What you don’t find in those columns, usually, is a given name for the Beast a.k.a. Ugly Doris. He is (pace Susanne Breen) A former prisoner from a well-known loyalist family. His code-title is “S” [the UVF just lurve these Ian Flemingesque touches]. Look a bit further and you’ll find the name of Stephen Matthews.

Now there’s a candidate for Maajid Nawaz’s little black book.

Nice one, Mister Ed!

The weekly corrida de toros (always a lot of bull, but today a bit of horse) of Dave and Ed was a nice one today. Only the true die-hard thought Cameron did the business. Even the ranks of ConHome could scarce forbear to fleer:

[Miliband] probably won the exchanges on points, despite Cameron having the better of the arguments.  The Prime Minister all but used the “R” word, alluding to consulting the public and gaining the “full-hearted consent of the British people”.  His insistence that a Conservative Government would want to take powers back from Brussels, and that a Labour Government would give more away, was right.  But my sense is that to the lay voter hinting that you want a referendum in future while arguing that you don’t want one now looks muddled.

That’s Paul Goodman who, despite Malcolm’s partisan sniping is good — and getting better:

Downing Street must be anxious about women’s votes.  From the Tory backbenches, John Glen raised the gain which the Government’s proposed pension reforms will bring to some women, and Mary Macleod plugged childcare: I may be wrong, but both questions had the smell of the Whips’ Office about them. Laura Sandys asked about the great horsemeat scandal.  Cue the Rebekah Brooks jokes.

Edible equines

That’s another chewy matter, currently being digested across the media, including Slugger O’Toole, where Pete Baker has opened his Boucherie Chevaline. Not surprisingly, it’s a bizarre goulash of serious concern and dismal punning:

• One of the few, very, very, few, successful native industries Ireland could boast of was its meat industry, specifically beef. Following the Irish economic collapse it was about the only economic success story Ireland could point to. This will absolutely devastate it.
• I was just checking my burgers in the fridge there……Aaaannnnd they’re off!!!

For different reasons, Malcolm likes both of those … and had to participate, in part recollecting an earlier post here:

I know two things about a horse
And one of them is rather coarse.

Even so, the presence of real meat (beef, horse, or whatever) in burgers is the least of his worries. It’s not the meat that concerns him: like the 99.9% of known germs slaughtered by household cleaners … the problem lies with the other and unknown bits.

One small wrinkle: the Irish tests which revealed the horse DNA date from two months since. What’s been happening since? Why does it become public only now?

Back to the bear pit

Miliband’s smirk at PMQs must have registered all the way to Brighton: he was winning, and he knew it.

Inevitably the Tory (and other) commentators are getting antsy. Hence the demands for a definitive statement of the Labour position, usually expressed in the whinge: Miliband must commit NOW! To which must go the answer: No chance!

Simon Jenkins (in the Guardian) tried, rather tortuously, to reel in his sprat:

From the moment in 2003 that Gordon Brown stopped Tony Blair joining the euro, Cameron’s speech was waiting to happen. The evolving euro would sooner or later need a tight political corset to enforce fiscal, budgetary and monetary union. Britain and other states would not join this, and would therefore need to negotiate their relationship with this euro-specific regime. Labour’s Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, both party to Brown’s victory over Blair, know this well. There need be no disagreement.

No disagreement? Come, come: that’s not the nature of British adversarial politics.

James Forsyth, Speccie-lating away, would like to see a Tory ploy in the whole thing:

Those close to Cameron are arguing that Miliband has now shut the door to Labour offering a referendum, putting Labour on the wrong side of public opinion. They believe that once Cameron has actually delivered his speech, the atmosphere will change and Miliband will have to say what he would do.

Oddly enough, Benedict Brogan got the message:

On a succession of vital topics raised in the interview, Mr Miliband said he couldn’t answer because we are too far out from an election: we will have to wait for the manifesto.

One has to read the rest of that, in the context of the tormented Torygraph, fully to realise Brogan’s frustrated pain that Miliband is not to be hooked. The full beef is hoarsely delivered by David Hughes:

Labour is marching on the spot, going nowhere fast. While the party’s policy review is churning away, Miliband appears to think that he and his front bench can confine themselves to lobbing bricks at the Tories and leaving it at that.

Is that wise? At the last general election Labour won just 8.6 million votes – that’s just a smidgen more than Michael Foot got when facing Margaret Thatcher in 1983 in what is generally regarded as Labour’s most abject post-war electoral performance. That suggests there’s a big job of work to do rebuilding the party, thrashing out a credible post-Blairite position. Instead, Ed Miliband seems content to coast, apparently seduced by Labour’s opinion poll lead into believing the next election is in the bag.

Big mistake.

Which amounts to a genteel version of those pointless and repetitive demonstrators’ chants:

— Wha’ d’we want?
— A target to hit!
— When d’we wan’ it?
— Now!

A problem made in and by the Tory party to eviscerate itself

The bottom line has to be there is no European crisis. Thanks to a steady steer from Angela Merkel, the worst of the €-mess seems to be passed. Ireland is selling bonds again. The appalling Berlusconi is polling at 20-25% and won’t be coming back. Greece and Spain are bleeding; but still only walking wounded. François Hollande has opened his second front (albeit in Mali); and dragged Cameron part-way into the mire: nice one, Frankie!

Only Cameron’s Britain seems to have conniptions; and so — after six months of dither — we may be able to read Cameron’s lips. As Miliband summed it:

The biggest change that we need in Europe is a move from austerity to growth and jobs, but the Prime Minister has absolutely nothing to say about that. This is the reality: the reason the Prime Minister is changing his mind has nothing to do with the national interest. It is because he has lost control of his party. He thinks that his problems on Europe will end on Friday, but they are only just beginning.

The Cameron speech, now on Friday, is:

• not about Britain — though it may include a “shopping list” of unrealisable aims,
• not about a referendum — though Cameron will do his best to imply just that,
• not about Europe, for Cameron and his government have rendered themselves impotent side-liners.

No: it is essentially about:

• fabricating some semblance of Tory unity until the 2015 election (any hopes for the Euro elections of 2014 must already be written off);
• fending off UKIP and Tory back-benchers’ night-stalkers — if Tory policy on Europe came as a stick of seaside rock, the six letters through the stick would read F-A-R-A-G-E;
• The referendum, which Cameron flinched away from before, has now become the last hope: that (not 10% or whatever in the polls) is a measure of how successful UKIP has been.

Bated breath?

Last Monday Nick Robinson, the BBC Political Editor, gave a bald assessment of just how desperate Cameron’s position is:

… he has set out how we might get that referendum on Europe after the next election, but there is a series of ifs:

• If he wins the next election alone (in other words doesn’t have to get this past Nick Clegg)
• If he can persuade other European countries, particularly Germany that they need and want treaty change
• If Britain can then get what it wants in negotiations
• If he thinks he can then win a referendum

If all that happens, well then, yes, there will be a referendum which he thinks will approve a new better settlement for Europe.

But his difficulty in giving that big speech on Europe in about a week’s time is what if he’s wrong on any one of those ifs?

There’s as much chance of all that coming to pass as Mrs Brooks’s ex-policehorse, Raisa, doing a Lazarus out of the Tesco’s chiller.

Saying “different things”, South Antrim

There was a brief note on ConHome:

Boundary changes blow

“David Cameron’s slim hopes of pushing through boundary changes that would deliver the Tories 20 extra safe seats have been dealt a blow by the Ulster Unionists.” - The Times (£)

 Malcolm hadn’t seen this elsewhere, apart from below the fold on page 17. So he thinks The Times pay-wall should give way:

Unionists deal blow to Tory boundary plan

Roland Watson Political Editor

David Cameron’s slim hopes of pushing through boundary changes that would deliver the Tories 20 extra safe seats have been dealt a blow by the Ulster Unionists.

The Tories need support from across the minor parties if they are to see through the changes after Nick Clegg said he would no longer support them following the defeat last summer of his plans to reform the House of Lords.

But William McCrea, the DUP MP for South Antrim, said he would not back the changes, which would cut the number of MPs from 650 to 600, and in Northern Ireland from 18 to 16.

Mr McCrea also told The Times that the boundary review process should be halted quickly to prevent public money being wasted.

Government sources who have tried to canvass support from the DUP said that “different Unionists say different things”.

The Tories would need all of the eight DUP MPs and six SNP MPs to have the chance of overhauling the 312 combined tally of Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs.

Mr Cameron had been pressed by the 1922 Committee to force boundary changes through before the election, thus boosting Tory hopes. But Labour and Liberal Democrat peers are expected to win a vote today that would delay any changes until 2018.

Dr McCrea may have the dogma, even if the hair has AWOLed over the years. Explaining the abstruse connection must await the end of this post.

The devil is in the numerical detail

Anyone with half a wit knew that, once Clegg had pulled the plug, the baby was out with the bath-water. Subsequently Paul Goodman came up on ConHome to regurgitate his calculations, which amount to 320 for the Tory gerrymander and 321 against. His punch-line acknowledges potentially-defaulting Nadines:

On the darker side, the biggest Commons obstacle to the new boundaries could be Conservative MPs themselves.  More gain than lose from the changes, but not all losers can be guaranteed to vote for their likely or certain removal from the next Parliament.

Doing the maths while minding mice at the crossroads? [See The Hair of the Dogma, page 171, and all is apparent.]

Bilbo on Boa Island

Malcolm spent thirty-six hours while a hacking,wracking, rancid cough developed into the full-blown streaming head-cold. This meant much of the Saturday press passed him by.

So, this Sunday morning, sniffling over coffee and marmalade, he ignored the trivial newsy stuff and concentrated on the real meat: the supplements.

And, as a further consequence, in short order he read:

• Douglas Kennedy, in The Times [£], on Mark Binelli’s The Last Days of Detroit;

and

• Michael Viney in the Irish Times on a The Flora of County Fermanagh.

One so dystopian it underlines Malcolm’s settled intention never to go near Motown: the other … well, try this from Viney himself:

The landscape of Fermanagh, it occurred to me, would be Ireland’s best refuge for hobbits, if we had them. The heights of the county are frowning and wild, it’s true, and even quite scary at the windy clefts of Cuilcagh’s summit, or under the Cliffs of Magho. Great limestone caves and swallow holes speak of unexplored tunnels to alien lands: Donegal, Leitrim, Cavan, hemming the Shire on three sides, and closing it off from the sea.

In the rain shadow of all this, however, is the intimate, drumlin landscape of grottoes, gorges, woods and hundreds of hushed, reedy lakes.

Even the great expanse of Lough Erne, an ideal playground for hobbits when young, is full of little islands for modest, measured lives.

Malcolm has always conceived Hobbiton in rural Worcestershire, around Tolkien’s own home in Evesham, now transliterated to Waikato Valley of New Zealand’s Northern Island. Yet, on one of the few balmy summer days that bless the Lakelands, Viney’s conceit would figure.

After all: Derrin/Doirín, Pollnagollum and Slawin/Sleamhain may also exist in an alternative, happier, healthier universe.

A ‘minor’ study in relativity

From the running strap-line, across the BBC News website:

LATEST:

Nine police officers were injured and 18 people were arrested during minor rioting in Belfast last night

Now, if it had been in Brixton, or Tottenham …

What’s in a name?

… That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Juliet’s soliloquy, (II, ii, 44-45), of course and now so clichéed as to need an occasional reference for respectability.

And then there’s the vexed question of the Six Counties of Northern Ireland. In English, this is “Northern Ireland”  — though the most northernly part of Ireland is Malin Head, which is in Donegal — and so, in the parlance, paradoxically in the “South”. Nor, of course, is a Northern Irishman exclusively an “Ulsterman” — because Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan are in the ancient province of Ulaidh, but are not in Northern Ireland.

My passport’s green

Even among the northern (missing capital deliberately so — see more on this below) Irish there is no agreement on what one is: British? Irish? Northern Irish? Ulster Scots? When Penguin Books included Seamus Heaney with Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Medbh McGuckian and Paul Muldoon, in the The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, he was the one who famously objected:

Don’t be surprised if I demur, for, be advised
My passport’s green.
No glass of ours was ever raised
To toast The Queen.

He made up for it, though, at Dublin Castle in May 2011.

The People with No Name

That is the title of a fine book by Patrick Griffin, in Malcolm’s view the best account of the Ulster protestant diaspora who occupied and extended the Western frontier of the American colonies. It is subtitled: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764.

The opening paragraph of that book illustrates the nominal confusions with a variety of names:

BETWEEN 1718 and 1775, more than 100,000 men and women journeyed from the Irish province of Ulster to the American colonies. Their migration represented the single largest movement of any group from the British Isles to British North America during the eighteenth century. In a first wave beginning in 1718 and cresting in 1729, these people outnumbered all others sailing across the Atlantic, with the notable exception of those bound to the New World in slave ships. By sheer force of numbers, this earliest generation of migrants had a profound influence on the great transformations of the age. Even before they left Ulster, they contributed to the triumph of the Protestant cause in Ireland, paving the way for an unprecedented extension of English power into the kingdom. They also figured prominently in the British transatlantic trading system by producing linen, one of the most important commodities exchanged throughout the empire. Sailing when they did, Ulster’s Presbyterian migrants played a formative role in the transition from an English to a British Atlantic. Before their migration, Puritans and adventurers leaving England during the seventeenth century for the North American mainland and the Caribbean dominated the transatlantic world. After men and women from Ulster boarded ships for America, the cultural parameters of the Atlantic broadened, as they and thousands of land-hungry voyagers from the labor-rich peripheries of the British Isles sought their fortunes in a vast, underpopulated New World. In America, Ulster’s men and women again had a hand in a number of defining developments of the period, including the displacement of the continent’s indigenous peoples, the extension of the frontier, the growth of ethnic diversity, and the outbreak of religious revivals. In the abstract, therefore, the group contributed to the forces and processes that dwarfed the individual but yoked together disparate regions into a broad Atlantic system.

The editor of Gaelscéal, Ciarán Dunbar, has picked up Griffin’s essential thesis, inverted it, and now puts up a ruminative thread on Slugger O’Toole:

Whilst working on Gaelscéal on Tuesday last I realized that I did not know the correct Irish term for ‘Northern Irish,’ so I quickly checked focal.ie, the ‘National Terminology Database’ for Irish.

That was a fruitless journey for they had no such term, I requested they provide one.

The term was one I have strangely never needed in Irish and I have never thought about it to date.

On the day, we simply used the English term in single speech marks.

That night I heard two terms used on TG4, ‘Tuaisceart-Éireannaigh’, agus ‘Éireannaigh Thuaisceartacha’, both translating into English as  ‘Northern Irish’ but with a subtle difference in meaning in Irish which the English doesn’t capture.

One implies a mere geographical distinction, the other, perhaps, a clear political distinction.

A meaningless distinction for most but one could argue that constitutional  future of the Northern Ireland state rests on this distinction, whether the Northern Irish are ‘Tuaisceart-Éireannaigh’ or ‘Éireannaigh Thuaisceartacha’ at the end of the day.

Malcolm queries whether English cannot capture precisely the distinction between Tuaisceart-Éireannaigh, and Éireannaigh Thuaisceartacha by doing what he did above: capitalising or not the “n” of “northern”.

Proconsul

Beyond that, the thread provided Malcolm with a bit of further diversion, the Latin version of wikipedia. Yes, indeed: there is one — even if somewhat abbreviated for the present. And here is its definitive statement on the topic:

Hibernia Septentrionalis, quondam (H)ultonia (Anglice: Northern Ireland, Hibernice: Tuaisceart Éireann) est provincia in Hibernia et Regno Britanniarum. Caput est Belfastium et dux gubernationis est Petrus Robinson; ille est dux factionis civilis qui appellatur Factio Unionistarum Democratica. Successit Reverendum Ioannem Paisley, qui abdicavit in Iunio 2008. Proconsul est Martinus McGuinness. Ille est membrum factionis civilis Sinn Fein (Latine: Nos Ipsi), olim dux Exercitus Republicani Hibernici.

Apart from stroking Malcolm’s self-esteem (that even after half-a-century, his TCD Latin, ever so rusty, can still cope), there were several amusements in that.

One was Máirtín Mag Aonghusa transmogrified from the deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland into the far more concise, even poetic, ‘proconsul’. Which instantly directed Malcolm’s butterfly mind to Kipling:

The overfaithful sword returns the user
His heart’s desire at price of his heart’s blood.
The clamour of the arrogant accuser
Wastes that one hour we needed to make good
This was foretold of old at our outgoing;
This we accepted who have squandered, knowing,
The strength and glory of our reputations
At the day’s need, as it were dross, to guard
The tender and new-dedicate foundations
Against the sea we fear — not man’s award.

The subject there was originally Sir Alfred Milner, who was the British High Commissioner in South Africa during the Boer War. The “Oh, gosh!” thing is, stripping from one context to the other, the elevation of  Máirtín to ‘proconsul’ almost works.

“Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt”

Moving swiftly on, there is the conceit of Petrus Robinson, dux Factionis Unionistarum Democraticae (3rd declension, feminine: genitive case!). Thus rendering the DUP into Latin gives us the acronym FUD:

generally a strategic attempt to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information. An individual firm, for example, might use FUD to invite unfavorable opinions and speculation about a competitor’s product; to increase the general estimation of switching costs among current customers; or to maintain leverage over a current business partner who could potentially become a rival.

In the case of the DUP, precisely.