Old Firm, infirm

Other football matters were put into perspective by events concerning Fabrice Muamba. But media attention has quickly and tastelessly returned to the "survival" of Rangers FC, that older patient through whose veins it is proving difficult to pump money.

I expect a way will be found to let the club continue in business. After all, the media assures us (with the same idle metaphor), Scottish football cannot survive without Rangers.

Excuse me? Certainly, clubs traditionally feed on and into their local communities, and the loss of a football club can leave locals as bereft as the loss of a local factory. And certainly, the lack of competition at the top of Scottish football is a pity – compared with twenty-odd years ago, when Aberdeen and Dundee United were reaching European finals. And perhaps, if Celtic have no credible opponents, the sponsors will go home.

But kids will still kick a ball around on any available patch of land. I mean, if the Scottish league goes part-time, will the kids switch to baseball, or croquet, or caber-tossing? Football as a sport will hardly notice the difference. Football as a multi-million-pound circus may well be affected, but that is a business affair – not a sporting one.

In fact it is probably that very circus, that same sea of cash, that is destroying football clubs as a community resource. Manchester United has long since ceased to be part of its local community. It is a global brand with a global support base, and a largely non-UK playing staff (in common with other top “English” teams). If it relocated to Sheffield or Shanghai, there might be the merest blip before business continued as usual. Remember the Brooklyn Dodgers?

The excess of money may also contribute to a growing culture of cheating and ref-baiting. If a missed offside flag can cost a million pounds, or a sly elbow gain 10 million, what antics may not result?

It’s also the excess of money that causes a growing minority of us to lose interest – not that this hurts the owners, as long as Sky and the sponsors keep the taps turned on. Really I’m beginning to think I’d prefer to watch croquet or caber-tossing. (I’ll draw the line at baseball.)

A few months ago I opened my bank statement. I shan’t (and needn’t) name the bank: but the envelope proudly proclaimed the bank’s association with the English Premiership. And I realised: I’ve been bitching about the money “earned” by top footballers, and here I am – in effect – sponsoring those salaries.

I’m not surprised at the bank in question: after all, who better than a bank chief to understand the value of handing out obscene salaries for non-achievement? But I have moved my bank account. And I dare say the bank will notice this about as much as England would notice the demise of Rangers.

And you thought school league tables were bad

I blogged the other day about illegal quota-setting by a privatised traffic warden service. I expressed shock that, within days of the court’s finding, David Cameron would announce the contracting-out of certain areas of police work.

Now, in the aftermath of the murder of 16 civilians by a “rogue” US soldier in Afghanistan, the BBC revived a link to an earlier story referring to the atrocities at My Lai and elsewhere. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15499138

“Officers were under pressure to produce high body counts of enemy in Vietnam and those pressures persist.” That is to say, groups of soldiers had “kill quotas” to fulfil. But I imagine the bad guys had guns, too. So I guess it was just natural to fill the quotas up the easy way, by killing unarmed women and children.

Can this be true? Surely the BBC is making it up. In any case, I imagine American military training nowadays extols discipline, not merely a Space Invaders mentality: so this week’s gunman no longer has the defence that he was “obeying orders”. But can you imagine what might happen if the US, or the UK, sent a privatised peacekeeping force to Afghanistan? Or we could both send one - just to add that competitive edge?

Can David Cameron still be serious about privatising law-enforcement? Altamont could shortly look like a walk in the park.

Just hand over the money and we'll say no more about it

In late January a tribunal found that a traffic warden, Hakim Berkani, had been unfairly dismissed after blowing the whistle on illegal quota-setting by his employer.

Three things are worrying here.

Firstly, he was not employed directly by the authorities, but by NSL – a private contractor. To place law-enforcement in private hands is surely asking for trouble. Tax-collectors in New Testament Judea were widely known to be creaming it: and I am sure the Mafia, experts in collecting revenue, would love to do so with official sanction.

Secondly, NSL is the largest such contractor in the UK, working for 60 local authorities. So there is no reason to be optimistic that the same practices are not operating throughout the country.

Thirdly, and astonishingly, within weeks of Berkani's tribunal, the government is proposing to allow the contracting-out of police work.

Berkani said to reporters: "Do you tell a police officer he should arrest a minimum of 10 people a day?" He was joking. David Cameron is not joking.

Unmasked

I blogged a couple of months ago (Masks) about the Occupy London protest. This is a group of people in V for Vendetta-style Guy Fawkes masks, who camped between St Paul’s Cathedral and the Corporation of London to protest against economic injustice.

Their presence must have been very scary for London’s financial elite. So I am sure their recent eviction has brought sighs of relief and saved the stock market from meltdown.

I was interested to see one Occupier interviewed – without his mask. It is now the powerful who are keeping a low profile. The Corporation of London continues to hide – behind the bailiffs and police officers who carry out their bidding.  But the Corporation at least expressed “regret”, while St Paul’s has (to my knowledge) remained silent.

Mary Ann Sieghart wrote recently in the Independent celebrating the tolerance she sees in the Church of England. She links this to its status as the Established Church: belonging to all, it seeks to be the servant of all. (David Cameron celebrated the same tolerance in a recent statement about this country’s Christian values.)

Certainly, in a world where some religious groups preach death to homosexuals or to poets they don’t approve of, the C of E – by contrast – is certainly a broad church. It tolerates many voices, including scepticism of its own stated beliefs.

But is it possible to be too tolerant? Pastor Niemoller spoke with regret of the failure of the German church to oppose the Nazi regime. In Kenya, Bishop David Gitari challenged economic injustice and political corruption – and at one point was actively asked by government figures to make sure the church maintained its role of prophetic moral challenge to those in power.

The Church of England has the same role and the same invitation. The role (shared with other denominations) derives from a Biblical call for justice, and has led people (from Wilberforce to Barnardo to Desmond Tutu) to show us that the world can be better, if we will it so.

The invitation derives from its status as the established church, which places its senior bishops in the House of Lords. Thus (if the mood so takes them) they can challenge our thinking from Parliament as well as from pulpit.

And from time to time, they have done so. David Shephard wrote Bias to the Poor (and thereby ruled himself out of contention for the Canterbury post while Thatcher ruled). John Sentamu cut up his clerical collar on national TV in protest against the Mugabe regime.  I think it was David Jenkins who dared to “pray for our enemies” during the Falklands war.

But on the whole, the established church, understandably, does not want to rock the boat. Sieghart values a church “that is prepared to move – albeit a generation behind the rest of society – with the times”. I would like to see a church which moves ahead of society: which takes the lead, like Wilberforce, like the Quaker reformers, like the Jubilee campaign: which sides with the vulnerable in the (often hidden) face of the comfortable and the corporate.

The trouble is, challenging the government has been portrayed (at least since Thatcher, perhaps longer) as disloyal. But the opposition’s official title is Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Opposition to bad legislation – indeed, forcing the government to properly justify good legislation – is an essential function in a democracy.

It is also a function which the church forgets at peril to its relevance. We do not make the gospel “relevant” by changing the message to fit what people already believe, any more than we make the speed limit “relevant” by changing it to match the speed people already drive at.

The new fundamentalism

A Devon town council was told by the High Court it was acting illegally by allowing (presumably Christian) prayers to be said before meetings. The council found a surprising defender in Baroness Warsi, Britain’s first female Muslim cabinet minister. She wrote in the Daily Telegraph:

“To create a more just society, people need to feel stronger in their religious identities and more confident in their creeds. … You cannot and should not extract these Christian foundations from the evolution of our nations any more than you can or should erase the spires from our landscapes."

The British Humanist Association waded in, saying Baroness Warsi’s comments are “outdated, unwarranted and divisive”. Let’s take those one at a time.

Outdated? The intellectuals at the BHA can do better than this. To value an idea according to whether it originated long ago or last week – or on a Thursday, to paraphrase Chesterton – is like saying that job interviewers should appoint the candidate born first, or last, or under Scorpio.

Unwarranted? Means: without basis. Richard Dawkins gives the game away by declaring that Warsi’s comments have “no logical basis” (italics mine). I think he mistakes the nature of faith. I have no logical basis for believing God exists, just as he has no logical basis for believing God does not exist. Or for believing that new ideas are better than old ones. Dawkins and the Baroness each take up a position with a clear basis – in their respective faiths.

(Meanwhile, the idea that God would submit himself for examination by Dawkins is laughable. The opposite may eventually occur, but that is another matter.)

Divisive? This is the most puzzling accusation. I would say Warsi's comments are the opposite. A person of one religion is finding common cause with people of another religion, even though important differences remain. If a secularist tries to discourage this, if a humanist wants Muslim and Christian to disagree: who is being divisive?

The Baroness speaks of “militant secularisation” as a form of totalitarianism. I look forward to the BHA showing us that this is not so – although there is “no logical basis” for that hope: since there is no logical connection between loving one's neighbour and hating God.

First among sequels

Time to reflect on another year’s Hollywood output. And beneath the smart oak veneer of the Oscar lists lurks the usual compressed sawdust of remakes, adaptations and (above all) sequels. Sadly, I haven’t managed to see Hangover 2, Transformers 3 or Mission Impossible 4: so my comments will be generalised, taking in films from earlier years. But nothing much changes.

Generally, I don’t get the point of remakes. I can understand that you remake a foreign-language film in English to spare your audience the trouble of mumbling as they read the subtitles aloud to themselves. And before anyone starts, no, The Lion King is not a rip-off of a Japanese original. Disney says so, and the American courts agree. So I’m not going to argue. 

(Osamu Tezuka, 1965)

But to remake The Ladykillers or Psycho? What's the point? Why not re-release the original? If I want to come up with a great painting, I’m not going to try to update The Mona Lisa.

Or you could have another go at a film that didn’t quite work first time around. The Twelve Chairs had a great plot and some fine moments, but somehow the whole thing fell flat. An idea like that deserves a second chance. And Judge Dredd could be watchable, but needs a lead actor who’s prepared to wear the helmet at all times, as the comic-book character does. (Maybe it needs an actor recognisable from his chin alone, as Kirk Douglas was. Any ideas?)

Ah yes, Judge Dredd. I’ve nothing against adaptations as such. The idea of turning Romeo and Juliet into a ballet seems barmy (“Hey, this would be good if we could just get rid of all the words!”) – but it works. Monty Python had fun imagining Wuthering Heights in semaphore, or the smoke-signal version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. And I’ve read some novels that would make perfectly good haiku, or toilet paper.

Perhaps my disappointment is in how persistently film-makers go to the back catalogue of novels, sixties TV series, or fairground rides. Or pen-and-paper games (Battleship). What next: Noughts and Crosses of the Caribbean? Doesn't anyone have ideas of their own any more? (See my earlier posting: Harry Potter and the Search Engine.) (And check out Remake: redux part 2 – scroll down to the second cartoon – on http://christopolisillustration.wordpress.com/2010/03.)

And then there are the sequels. These days people seem to actively expect sequels. It is alleged that The Madness of King George was so-called because The Madness of George III would have confused Americans who hadn’t seen the first two. What would today’s filmgoers make of Henry V? Malcolm X? Catch-22? Fahrenheit 451?

Sequels are such big business that we have invented new words for follow-ups differently related to the original: such as prequel, for a film set earlier than the original story. The idea isn’t new: El Cid dies at the end of his story, so people wanting to write another story about him were short of options. But the word is new – along with simulquel, threequel, and (ouch) squeakquel.

Again, I don’t object to sequels as such. But it’s the sheer number of them, compared with original output. Wikipedia says 2011 saw twenty-eight sequels made, and I expect that's just in Hollywood. Of the top ten grossest films, excuse me, the ten top-grossing films of 2011, eight are sequels and another is already called "Part 1". If Never-Ending Story truly was never-ending (and it felt like it), why did we need a second one?

A wunch of bankers

So, they have annulled Fred Goodwin’s knighthood. Serve him right? He was clearly motivated by greed to gamble with other people’s security. Mind you, we tolerated this – and our government did not challenge his obscene bonuses – as long as he kept rolling a double six.

On the one hand, we might ask whether his punishment is sufficient. In China they go to the other extreme. Adulteration of baby milk by Sanlo led to a scandal of Nestlé proportions – such that it was necessary to jail protesting parents – and dealers Zhang Yujun and Geng Jinping were executed. Of course, China is run by a bunch of commie tyrants. Couldn’t they just have annulled their fishing permits, say, like any civilised nation? We can’t be handing out serious penalties to oligarchs.

On the other hand, I wonder where else we might apply a similar sanction to that inflicted on Mr Goodwin. If an award “for services to banking” (i.e. for making money) can be revoked if one loses money, then can a lifetime Oscar be revoked if the recipient turns out a couple of real turkeys? Or all those Oscars for Titanic, if we ever decide it was actually quite a dull film?

Olympic medals are already routinely withdrawn from people who turn out to have been using drugs. (But not from the steroid-pumped East German women swimmers from the 60s, 70s and 80s. Why not?)

Then there’s Henry Kissinger. Suppose someone spotted that he was involved in the bombing of Cambodia, not to mention Operation Condor: might the Nobel people cancel his Peace Prize? And what about Menachem Begin? 

And if we’re thinking about Nobel Prizes, then let’s not forget Milton Friedman, winner of the Economics prize in 1976. This is the guru behind Thatcher’s Cainite policies (not noticeably changed by her successors), which have allowed some people – such as Fred Goodwin – to become very rich. Hooray! But their fortune has come at great cost to others (and to society, if we still believe that such a thing exists). Now that we know this, now that we have seen the despair and the decay, is it time to annul Friedman’s prize along with Goodwin’s honour?