Cooking the planet George Monbiot has tried to estimate how much energy the UK can run on, how much of that might be produced from renewable sources, and comes up with at least 23 Gw we need to generate from other sources. 23 Gw from carbon fuels will still cook the planet, he says; can nuclear energy become an acceptable source? No easy choices, and Lord May warns we have no evolutionary experience of acting on behalf of a distant future
. Our leaders will not address these issues unless we insist they do. The Climate March on Saturday is a chance to insist.
Opinion Soup To the Everyman Cinema last night with Tom Brent for a public meeting on current affairs. BBC presenter Emily Maitlis chaired a brisk discussion in which Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, outshone distinguished panelists Sir Leon Brittan, Simon Hughes, and Daniel Finkelstein.
Hughes remarked that half of the Britain’s current laws have been enacted since 1970; and Brittan pointed to six anti-terrorist bills since 1997. Brittan, a former Home Secretary, remarked that new laws are rarely required; issues are more commonly administrative than legislative. Chakrabarti spoke of the public’s complicity in this: we respond to outrage and tragedy by demanding action from politicians, who, faced with a choice between diagnosing deficiences of their administration or of inherited legislation, propose new laws.
Terror is not our enemy, nor even our enemy’s cause, but a tactic used by people who consider us enemies. The panel, either sceptical of or hostile to the government’s anti-terrorist measures, acknowledged that the new willingness of such people to die for their cause requires an escalated response from us. So much conversation about escalated responses to terrorism — but silence about how we acquired such enemies. Is this country’s political class as out of touch with this issue as France is with its rioters?
Our chequered country John le Carré says of his character George Smiley, hero of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, that he is a romantic, in love with an England that never existed, committed to standards of behaviour nowhere found. While his avowed love was for the German poets, it might have been he who wrote
Reading Dante in a mood of angry dislike
for my fellow sufferers and for myself
that I dislike them.
But it was Geoffrey Hill, writing in The Orchards Of Syon of his yearning for a mythical Goldengrove, his acquisition of a hard-won knowledge of what wears us down
. (Billy Bragg: I’m not looking for a new love, I’m just looking for a new England.
) Debit the lot to our chequered country. Here are two of the closing stanzas.
LXX
Right, one more time! Pomerium will not
pass muster as orchard. That place of last
reckoning, at the Berlin Wall,
more resembled it; or say Carthage
chemically defoliate, salt understood
here as a chemical. Or the French con-
nection, cordon sanitaire? Contingent
natures of all things save God. Uncompromising
self-sufficiency work for the cockroach.
Difficult to end joyful starting from here,
but I’ll surprise us. Inurements
I allow, endurances I approve;
nothing of ours is irreducible
though passion of failed loves remains
in its own selving. So let us
presume to assume the hierarchies,
Goldengrove, even as these senses fall
and die in your yellow grass, your landscape
of deep disquiet, calm in its forms: the Orchards
of Syon, sway-backed with pear and apple,
the plum, in spring and autumn resplendent.
Syon! Syon! that which sustains us and is
not the politics of envy, nor solidarnosc,
a hard-won knowledge of what wears us down.
LXXI
But now and in memory never so
wholly awaited, the breadth of this
autumnal land. In Goldengrove the full
trees trumpet their colours: earth-casualties
majestic; unreal as in life they build
riches of cadence, not yet decadence,
ruin’s festival. This much is allowed
us, forever tangling with England
in her quiet ways of betrayal. Natural
mother, good but not enough. Again, bring
recollection forward, weeping with rage.
Debit the lot to our chequered country,
crediting even so her haunted music.
Loyal incoherence not official
but now and then inspired: when circling
Heathrow on hold we are entertained
by Windsor’s scaled-down perfect replicas;
or as Sussex, dormant, rippling with shadows
of airflow, tilts, straightens under, and they
switch off the flight chart.
So much for my conclusion, a small
remembrance, nos fidelités sont
des citadelles—PÉGUY. Our fealties taken
to be your places of refuge and defence.
Shame shame shame I could weep. I've been reading how Londoner Babar Ahmad was arrested and beaten by Anti-Terrorist police, then released without charge. The Crown Prosecution Service has shamefully declined to prosecute his assailants, despite expert witnesses and eyewitness testimony. Now he’s being plucked out of the protection of our judicial system and tossed into the now-dangerous waters of the Americans’ — courtesy of a nod from the US and a wink from our Home Secretary.
The US Government seeks his extradition to try him for offences allegedly committed — and punishable — here, but for which they are too delicate to offer evidence to a British court. Under the shameful Extradition Act 2003 the Home Secretary can — and just has — ordered him off to the US, infamous for its recent confusion of ‘foreigners’ and ‘terrorists’, without the US having to present even prima facie evidence to a court here. Once in America, he can be sent to Guantánamo or, as a foreign national, to America’s ‘black site’ prisons in other countries. The US Embassy promises he won’t, but this would seem no obstacle to a President wih Bush’s experience of ignoring international law and other treaty obligations. Pray the High Court puts a stop to this, though the Act leaves it little scope. Pin this one on the politicians.
No other country has made such an agreement with the United States. Other invited European governments inquired politely if the fishing rights were to be reciprocated — would they be free to help themselves to US citizens they wanted to try? Not a chance; and that ended the matter. But not here. The Blair government apparently does not wish to allow protecting its citizens to result in a shortage of British prisoners in Guantánamo. Poodle up, boys.
Repeal this Act. Demand prosecution of the officers who assaulted Babar Ahmad, the only crime for which evidence is on offer. Demand Ahmad’s prosecution in a British court for provable crimes; or his compensation for this unwarranted persecution.
Do it. Unless heads roll for this, they’ll be coming for you next.
» www.stoppoliticalterror.com
» www.freebabarahmad.com
Acid rain Celebrate! The acidity of rain in Britain has dropped substantially in the last 22 years, according to a BBC report.
Passionate and brave To East Finchley and the wonderful old Phoenix Cinema fleapit last night to see The Constant Gardener, adapted from John Le Carré’s novel. The shivers weren’t entirely from Bill Nighy’s suave villain — the heating was off.
The hero and his wife lose their lives exposing a pharma company’s conduct of reckless drug trials among poor Africans, far from the supervision that protects patients in rich countries, and the collusion of the British government in this. (See BUKO Pharma-Kampagne.)
That is passionate and brave, but as long as we persist in spinning tales of noble individuals fighting evil corporations and governments, nothing changes. Phrases such as Big Business, the Establishment or the System serve only to mask the fact that there is no one here but us chickens. Our governments and businesses are driven by our profit motive, our greed, insistence on our comfort before their health.
In demonising our governments and businesses we are children blaming an imaginary evil twin. It is our dark side these organisations manifest, knowing they will be rewarded if they keep their unsavoury work out of sight, and allow us to bask in the sunlight of our own self-approval.
It is our greed and fears our governments and businesses represent when negotiating the terms of trade that keep so much of the planet in poverty. We can enjoy the moral buzz of deprecating all this but nothing changes until we first acknowledge and then refuse our complicity in it. It is our heel that grinds the world’s poor. The cloak of ‘market forces’ provides a disguise sufficient only to our self deceptions.
We strut on the world’s stage crowing our nobility, democracy and good intentions, oblivious to the evil that we do.
Maxx in town This week saw my mother Bel Macdonald (aka Maxx from her signature) in town for a visit. We heard author, journalist and former MP Matthew Parris talk about a castle in Spain, sat through the West End hit Ducktastic!, the worst thing I’ve seen sitting down, watched part of a trial at the Central Criminal Courts, viewed the Schweppes Portrait Photography winners at the National Portrait Gallery, and stayed on to watch the Lord Mayor’s Show and visit Dr Johnson’s house in Gough Square. Then clippety clop back to Birmingham and a Sunday drive around the Peak District National Park. Whew, that’s enough till Christmas.
Fairytales Twenty years ago Cecilia Bjärno pressed on me a tape, Fairytales by the late Radka Toneff. Her interpretations of melancholy standards like “My Funny Valentine”, “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress” and “Lost In The Stars” haunted me for years and more than almost anything else, inspired me to sing myself. Decades later, when Barb Jungr asked me to sing something, I attempted a song I had learned from the album by ear, apologising that I couldn’t identify it. (Neither could Barb, but that might have had something to do with my singing before her lessons.) Of the entire magical album, this was my favourite.
Seek and ye shall find. When I turned to the Web I found that Fairytales could not be had even from Amazon, but iTunes delivered a copy in minutes. And I discovered that my much-loved song, note-for-note as I remembered it, is called “Before Love Went Out Of Style” and is credited to our very own Fran Landesman and the late Dudley Moore. This remains my all-time favourite jazz album; find it if you can.
Mars attacks
To Hampstead Observatory last night on an impromptu invitation from Candace & Paul. Mars is as close to Earth as it gets, and its disc can be seen through the Hampstead Scientific Society’s 6-inch telescope. 
All I could see was a blurry white disc, but I was assured that this was exciting, being much larger than the much smaller disc I would normally see. Outside the dome, a smaller telescope was aimed at the Pleiades and I gazed through it as long as I decently could. In the telescope’s tiny field a small patch of stars burned cold, clear and sharp. Afterwards at home to calm down with the last of the summer beer.
First week at work for Gilgamesh Athoraya, who joined us on Monday as an apprentice. Yesterday he made his first fixes to the running system, an excellent omen for the future. Well done, G.
Also in: trip reports of the Elsinore conference from Adrian Smith and Horacio Cisneros.