President Zelensky & The Spirit of Ukraine

 

The Ruination of Britain

By Peter Oborne

The New York Times, 21 October, 2022 

LONDON — Until very recently the British Conservative Party was able to claim, with a great deal of credibility, that it was the most successful political party in the Western world.

The party of Benjamin Disraeli, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher has governed Britain for most of the last 200 years. Through much of that time the Conservatives have been synonymous with good sense, financial sobriety and cautious pragmatism. Despised by progressive elites, allergic to ideology, provincial rather than metropolitan, the Conservative Party rejoiced in being the stolid party of the boring middle ground. Not anymore. Today, the Conservatives are synonymous with chaos.

Liz Truss, the latest Tory prime minister to crash and burn, must bear her share of the blame. There are sound reasons for why she was forced to resign after just 44 days, the shortest term in history. It was a foolish notion to suppose that she could sack the most senior Treasury official, reinvent the laws of economic management and defy the collective wisdom of the financial markets. There was going to be only one result.

But the bigger truth is that the hapless Ms. Truss is a symptom rather than the cause of Britain’s chronic crisis of governance, which has reduced the country — once respected around the world — to a global laughingstock. The Conservative Party chose her, remember, even though she was obviously not up to the job. You didn’t need the foresight of Nostradamus to know she would fail. For the fiasco of her premiership and the disastrous state of the country, the Conservative Party must collectively take responsibility.

Oscar Wilde once wrote that to lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune, but to lose both looked like carelessness. For the Tories to lose two prime ministers in the space of three months shows, more than carelessness, that they are out of control. The government is already on its fourth finance minister this year; one of them, Kwasi Kwarteng, crashed the pound and ruined the party’s reputation for good financial management.

Like the Republicans in the United States, the Conservatives are detached from reality. In a generation, they have become a party of monomaniacs, incompetents and ideologues. Like a thoroughbred that has run one race too many, it needs putting out to grass. After a decade or two in the wilderness, perhaps the party can recover — though let’s not rule out the possibility it is finished once and for all.

That’s still a way off. In the wake of Ms. Truss’s resignation, the party announced plans to hold another leadership election, its second in three months. As with the contests that anointed Boris Johnson and Ms. Truss as prime minister, the choice will be made jointly by Tory lawmakers and party members. Even if, by some fluke, a half decent candidate won, it would not help their fortunes. The party is so riven by internal feuds, personal hatred and ideological disagreements that it has become ungovernable.

This is a perilous time. Britain is facing perhaps its biggest economic, political and even constitutional crisis since World War II. It’s daft to expect that the Conservative Party, which has done such damage over the past decade, might at last be about to govern sensibly. Two years could pass before the next general election. But Britain needs one now.

Admittedly Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour opposition, lacks charisma. Though far from brilliant, he conforms to a recent pattern of global leaders — Joe Biden in the United States and Anthony Albanese in Australia are two examples — who are reassuring even if they don’t set the world on fire. His frontline lawmakers, too, look more competent than the Tory shambles. Nor are they scarred by defeat or compromised by failure.

A growing number of Tory voters, let alone the rest of the country, are prepared to give them the time of day. That’s why a general election is in the national interest. It might seem foolhardy to expect the Conservative Party, staring down almost certain defeat, to call an election. But one of the glories of the traditional Conservative Party used to be its readiness to place country before party.

This doctrine was set out by — who else? — Winston Churchill in one of his last acts before standing down as prime minister in 1955. “The first duty of a member of Parliament,” he told an audience at his constituency of Woodford, “is to do what he thinks in his faithful and disinterested judgment is right and necessary for the honor and safety of Great Britain.”

This rhetoric may be orotund, but the argument is irrefutable. It would have been well understood by the patriotic and fair-minded Conservative Party that governed Britain with such wisdom 70 years ago. Today’s Conservatives, by contrast, cling to power for power’s sake. Besides doing further damage to the long-term reputation of their own party, their obstinacy is ensuring the ruination of Britain.

Mr. Oborne is a British journalist, broadcaster and former political commentator for The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail.

Difficulty levels and impact of climate-friendly decisions

 

We Stand With Salman Rushdie

Today, outside the New York Public Library, defending freedom of speech.

"Somebody To Love" / George Michael + Queen at Wembley Stadium 1992

Oh, those analogical times when singer and audiences would interact clapping hands together! No mobiles glued to their hands like synthetic prosthesis. What an emotional, unforgettable moment George Michael left for posterity with this electrifying rendition of "Somebody To Love". How well I remember showing my B2 students this video over the years! A musical jewel from the 90s, for sure.

New law in Spain could help families in their search for long lost relatives

Spain’s Law of Democratic Memory would condemn the regime of Francisco Franco and create a national DNA bank to help search for the disappeared.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY SANTI DONAIRE

TEXT BY JORDAN SALAMA

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, JULY 26, 2022

Well into her nineties, Rosa Coscollá still remembered with perfect clarity the day that two policemen entered her house and took away her father. The year was 1939, near the end of the Spanish Civil War. She was just 15 at the time, living in the rural town of Xeraco, south of the city of Valencia.

When she saw her father for the next and last time, he was in jail—badly wounded, malnourished, a political prisoner. Vicente Coscollá Ibáñez was soon executed, and Rosa spent the rest of her life hoping for the day when DNA samples would be obtained from the mass grave to confirm where her father was supposedly buried.

"In her final years, she was obsessed with her father's case," says Jaume Coscollá Ferrer, Rosa's nephew. "She wanted to bring her father back and bury him—even a piece of his body, a bone, anything—with her."

Rosa died last year at 98, but her family’s situation is far from unique. Thousands living in Spain today lost relatives between 1939 and 1975, when Francisco Franco’s brutal military dictatorship killed or disappeared more than 114,000 people.

This week, the country is expected to pass a new law: Ley de Memoria Democrática (Law of Democratic Memory). It will declare that the Franco regime and its politically-motivated criminal sentences were illegal, and make the Spanish government legally responsible for recovering the bodies of the disappeared.

In 1977, two years after Franco’s death, Spain’s parliament passed an amnesty law. It declared that members of the regime could not be prosecuted for crimes committed during the dictator’s rule—or during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), which saw more than half a million deaths and led to Franco’s rise to power. The law became known as El Pacto del Olvido — The Pact of Forgetting. Franco officials and allies reintegrated into public and private spheres of influence without much, if any, retribution for the human rights violations they committed.

The right-wing Franco regime targeted not only members of the political opposition, but also unionists, members of the LGBT community, Romani people, and anyone else deemed enemies of the state. Some 2,500 mass graves are now thought to be scattered throughout the country; of the tens of thousands of bodies, they may hold, only a fraction have been identified.

In addition, for the first time, all assets that were seized by the military during the dictatorship will be investigated, and any titles of nobility granted by Franco will be eliminated. The new law will also establish a State Prosecutors’ Office for Human Rights and Democratic Memory, to create a national DNA bank and to investigate cases of human rights violations during the war and the dictatorship.

Though it has faced steep political hurdles, the 2022 Law of Democratic Memory would not the first of its kind to be passed. It builds upon the country’s 2007 Law of Historical Memory, which expanded rights for victims of the war and the dictatorship but was largely criticized for falling short in its scope.

The new law brings renewed hope to families whose relatives’ disappearances have loomed over the past 80 years. “There are so many families who, disgracefully, still can’t find their relatives,” says Laura Martín, whose great-grandfather, a town mayor, was assassinated for his left-wing politics and recently exhumed from a mass grave in Paterna, Valencia.

In addition, Martín sees a need to revisit the legal cases surrounding the assassinations. Many were marred by corrupt trials, she says, and justice never was served. “This new law supports the reality of those trials, which were completely unjust.”

Spanish photographer Santi Donaire has spent the past six years documenting the exhumation of mass graves and visiting the homes of these families whose relatives were murdered during the dictatorship. His black-and-white photographs are poignant reminders of the long-lasting wounds of political violence. “This is a project about a society that tries to repair its wounds, seek justice and rediscover its past,” he says.

Donaire’s project began in 2016, when he joined a search for the still-missing remains of the Federico García Lorca. The renowned Spanish poet was executed near the city of Granada by Nationalist forces at the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936—allegedly for his socialist political beliefs and then-rumored identity as a gay man.

“What surprised me the most was the absence of any television or newspaper media, and the lack of institutional help in the search for one of the most important authors of Western literature,” Donaire says. If there was so little interest in the search for Lorca, Donaire thought, there would be even less effort to track down regular, anonymous people who had been disappeared.

But historical and societal trauma does not easily fade with the passage of time. Often this trauma is passed down through the generations, and many families resolve themselves to silence—out of shame or fear, or in order to shield younger members from the painful past. Some descendants, like Rosa, die waiting for closure.

Others have formed associations to continue the search for traces of their lost relatives. Even those who have succeeded in properly burying their relatives, such as Martín’s great-grandfather, say that the significance of the law stretches far beyond individual families, and requires a national reckoning of memory and justice.

“The country needs this reparation, this revelation, this realization that the Spanish government committed a very large error and we cannot forget it,” Martín says. “In 80 years, time has cured absolutely nothing. We need to recognize this history in order to bury it as it deserves.”

Photojournalist Santi Donaire began documenting the excavation of mass graves in 2016, during several months as a freelancer with the ArqueoAntro Scientific Association, which was investigating the disappearance of people during the Francisco Franco regime. Donaire has continued to document cases of the disappeared on his own. Follow him on Instagram @esedonaire.

Welcome to California

 

Published in 2018 by the Guttmacher Institute in New York, Abortion Worldwide: Uneven Progress and Unequal Access provides the most current information on the incidence of abortion and unintended pregnancy worldwide, as well as trends since 1990, as women and couples increasingly want smaller families. It examines laws that regulate abortion and how they have evolved, and the current safety of abortion provision. It documents the barriers women face to preventing unintended pregnancies and obtaining safe abortions, and the impacts of unsafe abortion on women’s well-being. This study provides a comprehensive update to findings from the 2009 Abortion Worldwide: A Decade of Uneven Progress.

The situation of induced abortion has changed markedly over the past few decades. This report provides updated information on the incidence of abortion worldwide, the laws that regulate abortion and the safety of its provision. It also looks at unintended pregnancy, its relationship to abortion, and the impact that both have on women and couples who increasingly want smaller families and more control over the timing of their births.

JUBILANT. Pictures of a Career in Education

After a jubilant teaching career of 42 years, I feel it's time to look back with joy and gratefulness upon retirement by sharing these photographs of alumni and colleagues, taken over the last two decades, to celebrate the transforming power of education and the privilege of teaching.

Love was in the air. Two of them met in that class and have been together 

ever since. School of Physics, Seville University. 19.05.2004

The enthusiasm of beginners. Engineering School. 23.05.2005

A passion for education. B2 students at the ETSI. 13.05.2005

Relax and enjoy. End of term smiles. ETSI, 14.05.2009

Out for a drink at the Alameda on the last day of classes.14.05.2009

Running into a former student at Seville 2009 Pride March

A bit of staging at the foot of the flag-inspired Expo 92
European Union Pavilion. 13.05.2010

Learning English with films in English. 26.11.2010

Posing by the Lucca poster, at ETSI Room 202. 20.05.2011

After watching the film THE HELP at the Avenida Cinema, 8.12.2011

Self-explanatory. Classroom at UNC Chapel Hill. 24.04.2012

LDOC at UNC-Chapel Hill. 25.04.2012

Pair Work in B1. ETSI Room 203. 26.05.2012

The Human Factor at the Teatro Central terrace. 9.05.2013 

B2 Students behind the windows of Room 201 at ETSI. 20.02.2014

After Bonus Class for Keen B2 Students with Baby Child at ETSI. 14.07.2014

   Running into students at Seville Pride. 28.06.2015

With students and colleagues to see film THE MARTIAN. 28.10.2015

Volunteering for Europe. Giving a talk to secondary school students from the 

IES Triana, on behalf of the European Commission and the idea of a united 

Europe.  An unforgettable professional experience. 12.05.2017

My colleague Laura's gorgeous home-made cupcakes at the end of term. 

Already missing you.12.07.2017

Three Techies. Thanks for posing, guys. 24.05.2018

Thumbs up! Great B2 group and best classroom ever. Taken just weeks 

before the Covid-19 pandemic and social distancing. 14th, November 2019

The Power of Cinema: Taking students and alumni to see 

Jane Campion's masterpiece The Power of the Dog. 23.03.2022

Having drinks with my last students at the Alameda to celebrate 

the end of classes and of my teaching career. 26.05.2022

Co-workers from different languages and departments at the farewell do. 

I shall proudly remember that day! Aula Verde, Instituto de Idiomas, 11.07.2022 

Jubilate, don't hesitate. Cake, flowers and more. Darling colleagues
Laura and Felicia, Masters of my Retirement Ceremony. 11.07.2022

Normal People_series

Normal People is an Irish drama television series of twelve 30-minute episodes produced by Element Pictures for BBC Three. Based on the novel of the same name by Sally Rooney, and stunningly directed by Hettie Macdonald, the series follows the relationship between Marianne Sheridan (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Connell Waldron (Paul Mescal), as they navigate adulthood from their final days in secondary school in County Sligo, on Ireland's Atlantic coast, to their undergraduate years in Trinity College, Dublin. 

The focus is mainly on Connell's and Marianne's weaving in and out of each other's romantic lives. Among her peers at secondary school Marianne is regarded as an oddball, though she rejects having any care for social standing. Her home life is complicated by her irritable mother Denise and resentful brother Alan in the face of her high academic standing. Her father is deceased and is revealed to have been a domestic abuser—something her family avoids in conversation. Connell is a handsome, high-achieving athletic student living with his single mother Lorraine, who is employed by Denise as a cleaner. He is popular in the school community, though he is diminished by his remaining silent during the bullying of Marianne. This creates complexity as their relationship develops. 

Beautifully shot, in the best BBC tradition, both leading actors give a mesmerizing, outstanding performance. Mescal and Edgar-Jones simply have chemistry on camera, mostly in those long close-ups. A captivating minimalist score giving structure to the story line. Twelve bingeable episodes. A must-see series.

Tunnel 29

The Tunnel is a 77-minute black-and-white documentary film that chronicled how three West Berlin university students organized the escape of 29 friends and family members by digging a tunnel underneath the Berlin Wall from a former factory in West Berlin into the Communist East. It was shot by NBC cameramen and first aired in the US on December 10th, 1962. It was produced by Reuven Frank and narrated by Piers Anderson. Breathtaking to watch 60 years later! Mind-blowing viewing!

I also recommend the BBC Radio 4's Tunnel 29 podcast series by Helena Merriman, released in October 2019, and her book Tunnel 29 (Hodder and Stoughton, 2021), where the whole story is told amazingly, and which is being turned into a mini TV series by the producers of Chernobyl. Unputdownable!

Kisses to Kevin_short film

 

A Flowchart To Determine What Religion You Should Follow

 

Reality check: the Northern Ireland protocol isn’t the problem, Brexit is

The Tories are addicted to conflict with the EU, for fear of taking responsibility for the consequences of liberation

By Rafael Behr

The Guardian, 17 May 2022

The Conservative party was happy with Brexit, but not for long. A deal that was great in 2019 is now not great. What could fix it? What change would bring enduring satisfaction? The answer is obvious to anyone familiar with the patterns of English Euroscepticism – nothing. There is no concession big enough, no deal good enough, just as no single fix can end the cravings of a drug addict. The long-term solution is to get sober.That is not on Liz Truss’s agenda. On Tuesday, the foreign secretary informed parliament of a government plan to assert its own version of the Northern Ireland protocol. That is a threat designed to prod the EU into renegotiating the 2019 withdrawal agreement, which was itself the outcome of a renegotiation made necessary because Theresa May had done a deal that Conservative MPs also didn’t like.

One reason continental leaders don’t want to talk about changes amounting to a new treaty is their certain knowledge that the Tories would be dissatisfied again soon enough. Another reason is that a revised deal would involve trusting Boris Johnson, which EU governments have done before and which no one does twice.

Truss’s account of the problem in Northern Ireland elides frustration with border checks across the Irish sea and a wider complaint about the residue of EU jurisdiction in Northern Ireland that Brexit hardliners see as a stain on UK sovereignty. She is egged on by Tory backbenchers who are convinced that the protocol was foisted on Britain; that it amounts to a regulatory land-grab and that its provisions are applied with pernickety spite as punishment by Brussels of an ex-colony that had the temerity to break free.

Believing that version of events requires two psychological traits that come easily to the fervent Eurosceptic. One is a capacity to forget that every problem currently associated with Brexit, including the specific danger in Northern Ireland, was signalled by remainers and dismissed with contempt as scaremongering by leavers. The other is a need to still feel victimised by Brussels even after leaving the EU, since ending that ordeal removes any excuse for Brexit not delivering its promised bounties.

That is the addiction – the sadomasochistic compulsion to be oppressed by foreigners for fear of taking responsibility for the consequences of liberation.

It is true that customs checks in the Irish Sea are a symbolic injury to unionist feeling in Northern Ireland. But it is also true that Johnson knowingly inflicted that injury, denied he had done it, then whipped the grievance up when he should have been hosing it down. A constitutional crisis at Stormont was not prefigured in the letter of the protocol, but it was made likely by the prime minister’s irresponsible and negligent handling of the politics of the protocol from the day he signed it.

Meanwhile, if Tory backbenchers had not found all the resentment they needed in Northern Ireland, they would have gone hunting for reasons to be dissatisfied with Brexit in England instead.

One of Johnson’s complaints about an Irish Sea border, as expressed in an interview earlier this week, was that regulatory checks create “extra barriers to trade and burdens on business.” That generates “a great deal of faff and botheration”, which increases living costs. Those barriers are uniquely upsetting to Northern Ireland unionists on the level of national identity, but the faff and botheration incur costs also at Dover, Grimsby, Felixstowe; any place where goods move between Britain and the EU.

In other words, the prime minister’s economic rationale for wanting to fix the Northern Ireland protocol contains a complaint about conditions that are intrinsic to the Brexit model he chose.

That is yet another reason why no one in Brussels wants to reopen the 2019 deal. The negotiation would founder on first principles. Brussels says that if Britain is no longer automatically applying EU rules, it must prove that its exports comply. The Brexit ultras think that Brussels is only imposing that requirement out of petty vindictiveness and that the very Britishness of British standards should be sufficient guarantee of quality. That has been the impasse in every chilly phone call and deadlocked meeting between the two sides since 2016.

The Tories cannot budge on that point because doing so would involve accepting two indisputable facts about Brexit. First, exiting the single market was bad for UK businesses (and the losses are not made up by free-trade deals with other countries). Second, Britain had the levers to steer EU policy as a member state and surrendered that power when it left.

No minister serving in the current cabinet can admit those truths. Until that changes, UK policy towards the EU will amount to little more than rattling the cage of delusion that Brexit imposes on its believers. Some Eurosceptics find perverse pleasure in captivity, but that is their fetish and not something anyone else needs to indulge.

When policies fail on such a Titanic scale, it is usual to have some debate about a change of direction. That isn’t happening, because the opposition has no alternative destination in mind, or none that it advertises in public.

Keir Starmer is mindful that his support for a second referendum back in the day is still a vulnerability in constituencies where the Tories want to drive Brexit ever deeper as a wedge between Labour and its estranged core voters. One function of Truss’s bill overriding the Northern Ireland protocol is that anyone opposing it can be cast as an unrepentant remainer.

Labour’s absence from the conversation is not only metaphorical. Two opposition seats on the European scrutiny committee, which notionally holds the government to account on EU matters, are effectively vacant because the Labour MPs who sat there have moved on to frontbench jobs, and haven’t been replaced.

Labour strategists take the view that sanity in EU policy only becomes available by winning an election fought on other issues – things voters actually care about – and not by dancing to a drum that Johnson beats to distract from all his other failures. That is probably true. But it means the parameters of Brexit debate are set by marginal differences between maniacs and hardliners over the optimal pace for fleeing reality.

It is a formula for perpetual crisis. The constitutional mess that Johnson has made of Northern Ireland is so far the gravest episode, but unlikely to be the last. The problem isn’t that the protocol cannot be made to work as written, but that it was written to enact a Brexit that doesn’t work.

Related article: Spiralling inflation, crops left in the field and travel chaos: 10 reasons Brexit has been disastrous for Britain

A Message from Premier League Footballer Jake Daniels

This season has been a fantastic one for me on the pitch. I’ve made my first-team debut, scored 30 goals for the youth team, signed my first professional contract and shared success with my team-mates, going on a great run in the FA Youth Cup and lifting the Lancashire FA Pro-Youth Cup. 

But off the pitch I’ve been hiding the real me and who I really am. I’ve known my whole life that I’m gay, and I now feel that I’m ready to come out and be myself.

It’s a step into the unknown being one of the first footballers in this country to reveal my sexuality, but I’ve been inspired by Josh Cavallo, Matt Morton and athletes from other sports, like Tom Daley, to have the courage and determination to drive change.        

In reaching this point, I’ve had some of the best support and advice from my family, my Club, my agent and Stonewall, who have all been incredibly pro-active in putting my interests and welfare first. I have also confided in my team-mates in the youth team here at Blackpool, and they too have embraced the news and supported my decision to open up and tell people.   

I’ve hated lying my whole life and feeling the need to change to fit in. I want to be a role model myself by doing this.

There are people out there in the same space as me that may not feel comfortable revealing their sexuality. I just want to tell them that you don’t have to change who you are, or how you should be, just to fit in.

You being you, and being happy, is what matters most.

Jake Daniels