Pubs can sell booze for longer: Gawd bless ya Royal Family

Clearly the Government had not realised how easy they were making this for me. With the Royal Wedding this year, pubs can stay open later, they have announced. Presumably to help us all join in with the 'celebrations.' Throw in some extra Bank Holidays as well, to put us all in a good mood, whydontchya?

Are we really to believe that the Wedding is not being used as propaganda for the House of Windsor?

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5hBg7p0FsMkJ11qtaFzJFDVAs9T3A?docId=B8048511294827797A00

Media review of 'Life and Fate'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/09/life-fate-vasily-grossman
to LBR re Life and Fate

I saw this review of 'Life and Fate' and I thought I would share it. It is indeed a classic.

The comment below the main review was not helpful: the density is the point – it hammers home to you, page after page after page about hope, terror, humanity, war, peace, inhumanity, good, evil: life and fate indeed.

Khodorkovsky and Russian Justice

As part of my recent series of articles on Russia, I have decided to publish Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s speech on the 2nd November 2010, at the close of his trial for fraud. I am keeping my comments to a minimum, save to say this speech is also available on The Economist’s website, with a complementing article of their own, and on the Open Democracy website, both links are below. Finally, there are minor descrepancies between to the two versions, but I attribute this to the translation from Russian to English.

Here in his own words is Mikhail Khodorkovsky:

“Respected Court!
Today is for me one more opportunity to look back at the past. I remember October 2003. My last day of freedom. Several weeks after my arrest, I was informed that President Putin had decided that I was going to have to “sup prison gruel” for 8 years. Back then this was hard to believe.
Seven years have already passed since that day. Seven years is in any case quite a long stretch of time, and especially in prison. All of us have had time to reassess and rethink many things.
The prosecutors’ words - “give them 14 years” and “forget about previous court decisions” – lead me to conclude that over these years they have begun to fear me more, and to respect the law even less.
The first time round they at least made the effort to repeal the judicial acts that stood in their way first. Now they have decided that they’ll just leave things as they are. Especially now they would need to repeal not 2 court decisions like last time, but 60.
I do not want now to return to the legal side of the case. Anyone who wanted to understand anything has long since understood it all. I don’t think anyone is seriously expecting an admission of guilt from me. It is hardly likely that anybody would believe me today if I said I had stolen all the oil produced by my own company.
But just the same, no one believes that it’s possible for a Moscow court to make an acquittal in the YUKOS case.
Nonetheless, I want to say something about hope. Hope is the main thing in life.
I remember the end of the 1980s. I was 25 then. Our country was living with the hope of freedom, hope that we would be able to achieve happiness for ourselves and for our children.
These hopes were partly realized, partly not. Responsibility for the fact that the hopes were not realized in full, and not for everyone, probably lies with our whole generation, including myself.
I also remember the end of the last decade. At that time I was 35. We were building the best oil company in Russia. We were putting up sports complexes and cultural centres, laying roads, exploring and developing dozens of new oil fields. We began developing the reserves in East Siberia, introducing new technologies. In general, we were doing then all that Rosneft is proud of today, having taken over YUKOS.
A significant increase in oil production, including as a result of our successes, meant that the country was able to take advantage of a favourable oil situation. We all hoped that the period of shocks and disturbance was behind us and that, in conditions of stability achieved with great effort and sacrifice, we would be able peacefully to build a new life and a great country.
Alas, this hope has not yet been fulfilled. Stability has come to resemble stagnation. Society has frozen. Although hope still lives. Lives on even here, in the Khamovniky courtroom, when I am already nearly 50 years old.
With the coming of a new President, and since that time more than two years have already passed, many of my fellow citizens once again found hope. Hope that Russia will yet become a modern country with a developed civil society. A society free from the arbitrariness of bureaucrats, free from corruption, free from injustice and lawlessness.
It is clear that this could not happen by itself and in one day. But to pretend that we are developing when we are in actual fact standing still, or slipping backwards, even if it is under a cloak of a noble conservatism, is no longer possible, and simply dangerous for the country.
It is impossible to reconcile oneself to the fact that people who call themselves patriots are so desperately resisting any change that will limit their access to the feeding trough, or their ability to get away with anything. It is enough to remember the fate of the amendments to Article 108 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation concerning the arrest of businessmen or the income declarations of bureaucrats. And yet it is precisely the sabotage of reforms that deprives our country of prospects. This is not patriotism. It is hypocrisy.
I am ashamed to see how people – people that in the past I respected – try to justify the arbitrariness of bureaucrats and lawlessness. They exchange their reputation for a quiet life within the framework of the current system, for privileges and sops.
Fortunately, not everyone is like that, and there are increasingly more people of the other kind.
I am proud of the fact that among thousands of employees at YUKOS, after 7 years of persecution, none have agreed to give false testimony, to sell their soul and conscience.
Dozens of people have been personally threatened, have been cut off from family and friends, and thrown in prison. Some have been tortured. But, even though they lost their health and years of their lives, they preserved what they considered most important, their human dignity.
Those who started this shameful case – [First Deputy Prosecutor General Yuri] Biryukov, [Investigator Salavat] Karimov and others - at that time contemptuously called us “traders”, regarding us as scum, ready to do anything to protect our prosperity and escape prison.
Years have passed. And who turned out to be the scum? Who lied, torture and took hostages for the sake of money, and because they were afraid of the bosses?
And this is what they called a “matter of state”!
I am ashamed for my country.
Your honour, I think we all perfectly understand the significance of our trial extends far beyond the fates of Platon [Lebedev] and myself. And even beyond the fates of all those who have innocently suffered in the course of the reprisals against YUKOS that have taken place on such a huge scale, those I found myself unable to protect, but about whom I have not forgotten. I remember every day.
Let’s ask ourselves, what does the entrepreneur, the top class organizer of production, or simply an educated, creative individual, think today looking at our trial and knowing that the result is absolutely predictable?
The obvious conclusion a thinking person would come to is chilling in its simplicity: the bureaucratic and law enforcement machine can do whatever it wants. There is no right of private property. No person who conflicts with the “system” has any rights whatsoever.
Even when enshrined in law, rights are not protected by the courts. Because the courts are either also afraid, or are part of the “system”. Does it come as a surprise that thinking people do not strive to realize themselves here in Russia?
Who will modernize the economy? Prosecutors? Police officers? The security services? We have already attempted modernization like that and it did not work. We were able to build a hydrogen bomb, and even a rocket, but we still can’t make our own first rate modern televisions, our own cheap, competitive, modern cars, our own modern mobile phones, as well as a whole lot of other modern goods.
But then we have learnt how to put on a beautiful display of obsolete models of foreign companies, produced here in Russia, while the rare creations of Russian inventors, if they do find application, find it not here in our own country but abroad
Whatever happened to last year’s presidential initiatives in the realm of industrial policy? Have they been buried? But they offered a real chance to kick the oil addiction. Why buried? Because to put them into practice the country needs not just one Korolev, and not just one Sakharov, under the protective wing of an all-powerful Beria and his million-strong host, but hundreds of thousands of Korolevs and Sakharovs, protected by just and comprehensible laws and independent courts that will give life to these laws, and not just a place on a dusty shelf, as happened in its day to the Constitution of 1937.
Where are these Korolevs and Sakharovs today? Have they left the country? Are they getting ready to leave? Or have they gone again into “internal emigration”? Or have they hidden themselves among the grey bureaucrats so as not to be crushed by the “system”?
We, citizens of Russia, patriots of our country, can and must change this.
How can Moscow become a financial centre for Eurasia if our prosecutors, in a public trial, directly and unambiguously, just like 20 or 50 years ago, demand that the striving to increase production and capitalization of a private company be classified as a criminal, mercenary objective, for which a person ought to be locked up for 14 years?
If under one court sentence a company that paid more taxes than anyone else in the country – YUKOS paid more taxes than any other Russian company with the exception of Gazprom – turns out not to have fully paid its taxes; and under a second court sentence, the one now being proposed, it is clear, there has been no object for taxation at all since it was all stolen?
A country that tolerates a situation where the bureaucratic and law enforcement machine in its own interests and not at all in the interests of the country holds tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of talented entrepreneurs, managers, and ordinary people in prison, instead of, and together with, criminals, is a sick country.
A state that destroys its own best companies that were ready to become global champions; a state that holds its own citizens in contempt, a state that trusts only bureaucrats and the security services, is a sick state.
Hope is the main engine of major reforms and transformations, the guarantor of their success. If hope dies, if deep disappointment takes its place, then who and what will be able to lead our Russia out of a new stagnation?
I do not exaggerate when I say that millions of eyes throughout all Russia and the whole world are watching the outcome of this trial.
They are watching with hope, the hope that Russia will after all become a country of freedom and the law, a country where the law will be above the bureaucrat.
Where supporting opposition parties will cease to be a cause for repression.
Where the security services will protect the people and the law, and not the bureaucracy from the people and from the law.
Where human rights will no longer depend on the mood of the tsar, whether good or evil.
Where, on the contrary, government will be truly dependent on the citizens, and the courts will depend only on the law and on God. Call this conscience, if you prefer.
I believe that this is how it will be.
I am far from being an ideal person, but I am a person with an idea. For me, as for anybody, it is hard to live in prison, and I do not want to die here.
But if I have to, I will have no hesitation. What I believe in is worth dying for. I think I have shown this.
And my respected opponents? What do you believe in? That the bosses are always right? In money? In the impunity of the “system”? I don’t know. It’s for you to decide.
Your Honour!
In your hands lies far more than just the fates of two people. Here and now the fate of every citizen of our country is being decided. People on the streets of Moscow and Chita, Petersburg and Tomsk, and other cities and settlements, who do not count on becoming victims of police lawlessness. Those who have set up their own business, built a house, achieved success and want to pass it on to their children, and not to raiders in uniform. And finally, those who want honourably to perform their duty for a fair wage, not expecting to be fired at any moment by corrupt bosses on any pretext.
This is not about Platon and me. At least, not only about us. It is about the hopes of many citizens of our country. About the hope that tomorrow the courts will be able to protect their rights, if yet again some bureaucrats or other get it into their heads brazenly and demonstratively to violate these rights.
I know there are people (I have named them during the trial) who want to keep us in prison. To keep us in prison forever! Indeed, they do not even try to hide it very much, publicly talking about the existence of a “bottomless” case file.
Why don’t they hide it? Because they want to show that they are above the law, and they will always accomplish “what they have thought up”. For the time being, it’s true, they have accomplished the opposite. They have made a symbol out of us, out of two ordinary people, a symbol of the struggle with arbitrariness. That is what they have managed to do. It is not our merit. It is theirs. But for them a conviction is essential, to avoid becoming “scapegoats”.
I want to hope that the court will withstand their psychological pressure. And pressure there will be, we all know that, just as we know through whom it will come.
I want an independent judiciary to become a reality and the norm in my country. I want the phrase born in Soviet times, about “the most just court system in the world”, to stop sounding as ironic today as it did in those days. I do not want us to leave as an inheritance for our children and grandchildren the very dangerous symbols of totalitarianism.
Your Honour, I am ready to understand that it is not easy for you, perhaps it is even terrifying, and I wish you courage.
Everyone understands that your verdict in this case, whatever it will be, will become part of the history of Russia. Moreover, it will form the development of the country for future generations. And you understand this better than many. All the names - those of the prosecutors, and of the judges - will go down in history, as did the names of those who took part in the infamous Soviet trials.”

http://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/mikhail-khodorkovsky/mikhail-khodorkovsky-final-trial-speech#
http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2010/11/trial_mikhail_khodorkovsky

Drugs and a hero of 7/7

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-12118069

This is a story of a firefighter that has been jailed for 14 years on a conviction of drugs smuggling. This firefighter was commended for his rescue work during the bombings in London on the 7th July 2005.

This story reminds me of the axiom: 'There will always be someone, poor enough, desperate enough or stupid enough to get involved in the drugs trade. The rewards are just that big.'

For even more on X Factor....

...look to Irvine Welsh comments on Tony Wilson.

"Tony Wilson was a one-off, as brash, ballsy, knowing and erudite asthe city he loved so much. Manchester –and popular culture- are allthe poorer for his absence. This is the era of the Simon Cowell’s andPop Idol’s, instead of the Tony Wilson’s and Factory’s. Enough said. "

http://www.irvinewelsh.net/journalism.aspx

X Factor

X Factor really is awful. Dreadful in fact. Here is Charlie Booker to explain why:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5LS5arkuaE&feature=grec_index

Since this video was made, Charlie Booker has married Konnie Huq, and the delightful Konnie now works, youv'e guessed it, on X Factor. I have no reason to believe that Charlie Booker's view has changed at all. I agree with him in all, but one respect. He claims the show is the same as last year, and previous years. Really? I believe him to be too generous. How about being exactly the same as the show last week??

Vasily Grossman's 'Life and Fate'

Continuing my theme of winter reading (see below Anne Applebaum's Gulag), I am now half way through Vasily Grossman’s fictional work Life and Fate. Written in Soviet Russia, it is an epic 860+ pages about the battle of Stalingrad. In order to read this book, I have found it to be extremely helpful to have previously read about the History of Twentieth Century Europe and of the Soviet Union in particular. Having said that, this book would be useful for anyone that wanted to learn about this period, so take note any students out there, this book will help you get op marks if you quote from it.

It also reminds me that for each book we read, context is everything. Clearly Grossman has understood the political and societal circumstances in which he is writing such an anti-Stalinist work, and he yet writes it anyway. This is brave stuff indeed. Moreover, what has equally impressed me is the level of that understanding. Grossman clearly knows about the purges of 1937, the famine surrounding collectivisation, the dehumanization of the Kulaks, the conditions of the Gulags as well as the nature of the Nazi regime the Soviets are fighting against. In fact he hammers home his understanding of both regimes and their capacity to inflict cruel and harsh punishments on the citizens underneath them.

On a personal note; this book has every chance of getting into my all time Top 5 books list, it is that good. A list, which has not had a new entry for quite some time, the impact the books have made on me has proved them to be so immovable.

For more see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_and_Fate

Playing at 70

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-12083945

This Grandad of eight is still playing rugby at the age of 70 years young. He is my inspiration.

The Windsor’s: Kings of the Propaganda Wedding

When it comes to her Maj and her offspring I cannot help but cringe. Our country does not seem able to outgrow the need for a monarchy. Realism must play its part here, over and above my own dislike for all things regal. There are no signs of Republicanism amongst the British people, despite some protesters throwing paint all over Charlie and “wicked’s” car. (But it isn’t Charlie and ‘wicked’ Camilla’s car is it? It’s our car really.) And when I call Camilla ‘wicked’ I make no moral judgement on her character. As I will make clear immediately below – I couldn’t give a thru pence halfpenny about her morality or otherwise; she is called ‘wicked’ because that is how she described her feelings on hearing the news of the imminent wedding of William and Kate wotsherface. I was shocked at the use of slang. In fact, you couldn’t have shocked me more than if she had followed this up, by declaring she was buying the happy couple rubber bondage gear and a pet lamb with which to tutor in the ways of righteousness.

Only about one third of the British people would prefer to elect their own head of State. If you listen to the royal watchers in the media, the assorted ‘court correspondents’ employed by TV, Radio and the newspapers, the Windsor’s did indeed have the most beastly time of it during the 1990s. There was all that awful business with divorces, affairs and what not. It really did mean the Windsor’s were in a right pickle and the public were beginning to turn against them.

To which I just sigh. I am a Republican because I quite simply don’t believe my head of state should depend upon who they happen to have been born to. The British people should get the opportunity to decide who they want as their head of state are and have the opportunity to replace them with someone else if they so desire. Any ill-feeling towards the Windsor’s in the 1990s had no Republican edge whatsoever if it is not based on that fundamental principle. Complaints about who slept with whom, and who treated who meanly, are merely an extension of the British obsession with Soap Opera. The Windsor’s pretend to be above us and celebrity culture, whilst needing to share their lives with their subjects, in the posh-est soap opera of them all.

So what does all this have to do with the Wedding in 2011? Allow me to explain. Many years ago I came across a rumour that the wedding in the early 1980s between Charlie and Lady Di was ‘arranged.’ For the Windsor’s, so the rumour went, the motives were clear. Good old Chuck, whatever else he was, wasn’t a looker. Nor for that matter is his current wife, but I digress. Charlie had to marry a good sort – decent breeding, blue blood, all that sort of thing, but above all, she had to be a good looking filly, don’t you know. The bride had to be good looking, to bear good looking children and thereby guarantee the monarchy, and the House of Windsor’s reign well into the next (and now current) century. Good looking heirs to the throne and a good looking Queenie-to-be are more photogenic with which to impress their subjects, after all. Why couldn’t they let love take its natural course? Well, says the rumour, who knows who Charlie would have ended up marrying? (Cue ‘wicked’ Camilla). So Enter Lady Di as the perfect replacement and bearer of well bred sproglettes.

Now if any of this is even partly true this isn’t just cynical, but positively barbaric. I am not suggesting for a second that William and Kate wotsherface do not have genuine affections for each other. I have no proof to make that claim and couldn’t care a less anyway.

What I do believe to be significant is that the wedding will be stage managed as an ‘event’, in no less a cynical way than Charlie and Diana’s wedding was. Big showpiece, give the crowd what they want. Hide the dress til the last minute. Because the plebs can’t wait to see it, and the whole thing will be televised, beamed across all four corners of the old empire. Order in some mugs (the china variety that is. It’s beneath me to suggest that those watching the Wedding Event of the spring are mugs. Although – it appears I just have. Besides, there won’t be any need to order them in, they can’t wait to lap it all up.)

Now you may think I am being a bit too harsh on the Windsor’s. (Or should that be the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha’s[1], which is their original name before all that awful business in 1914 got in the way and forced them to look for something less, ahem, Germanic. Which raises another point, I had to raise a chuckle to see P. Harry over in Germany collecting some daft award – but was anyone else not embarrassed he didn’t bother to speak in German? He was home after all.) And I am certain they have more than enough people to defend them (don’t get me started on that poxy national anthem of ours). But we pesky Republicans refuse to go away. Yet, being realistic, I doubt we will see a Republic in my lifetime, and there are other battles more worthy of fighting.

No, we Republicans are in the minority in the UK now, and will be the other side of the Wedding. No Republic has ever been born without some recourse to violence, though who is to blame for that in the past, the Republicans or the Monarchists, is open to debate. I for one am not advocating some violent recourse here, or anywhere else. Much better to ignore the whole staged managed soap operatic pantomime. Indeed ignorance in this case, is the most effective response. So don’t expect me to be watching, or taking part in any street parties. I will be at home, telly off and reading some George Orwell. Now – where did I put that copy of 1984?

[1] http://www.royal.gov.uk/ThecurrentRoyalFamily/TheRoyalFamilyname/Overview.aspx

Dirk Gently

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/tv/2010/12/douglas-adams-dirk-gently-stephen-mangan.shtml

I always found Dirk Gently to be funnier than Hitchhikers. I am looking forward to this.