Due to an outbreak of weddings & charming American guests, there will be no blog this week. Congrats to Hannah, Phil, Rachel & Allan on their fabulous weddings. Normal service will resume on Friday!
Apologies for the lateness of this blog post - it seemed rude to write personal stuff when I had 9,000 words of work to produce. Fortunately, that's all out of the way, so now I can catch up. I assume most of you read it sneakily on Monday mornings at work anyway!
So, this week, in between producing large reports for work, I was bloody annoyed that a war crimes tribunal is devolving into what amounts to a bitchy fight between two talentless slags.
I am of course, talking about the Trial of Charles Taylor. He's currently on trial for a wide variety of assorted war crimes - most of which feature a recurring theme of recruiting of child soldiers, then either supplying them so badly they are forced to loot and/or commit cannibalism, all the while using them to guard the slaves digging your diamond mines &/or rape camps.
Above: Maybe if the child soldiers were white, there'd be more coverage.
The world's news media has decided that two not-even-that-famous any more celebs arguing over what happened at a particularly squalid dinner party is more important than the trial of man who has been accused of-
• Five counts of war crimes: specifically, terrorizing civilians, murder, outrages on personal dignity, cruel treatment, and looting;
• Five counts of crimes against humanity: specifically, state-sanctioned murder, rape, sexual slavery, mutilating and beating, and enslavement; and
• One count of other serious violations of international humanitarian law: recruiting and using child soldiers.
To quote one other witness, Joseph "ZigZag" Marzah, one of Taylor's erstwhile military commanders, "We executed everybody – babies, women, old men. There were so many executions. I can't remember them all." Taylor had encouraged his commandants - usually former child soldiers themselves - to cannibalise victims, in exchange for $200 of "cigarette money".
It is the prominence given to this squalid dinner party compared to other testimony from the trial that feels odd.
Both Sky News and the BBC News channel cleared their schedules for over an hour and a half, thus devoting more coverage to Naomi Campbell than to the whole of the rest of Taylor's trial since 2007.
In fact, Sky have not covered any of the other 90 witnesses – not even Taylor himself. The Guardian website & the good old Beeb led on the trial when the former president testified, but other outlets - ranging from the Today programme, Channel 4 News & even debaters-bible The Economist have all ignored the trial while in session.
This is at all surprising, but nowhere near as shocking as the lack of attention given to another child-soldier fuelled conflict, that has been rumbling on since the overthrow of appalling dictator of Congo Mbutu Sese Seko in 1997.
Congo's history often seems like an uninterrupted tale of woe. After decades of often brutal foreign rule, first as the private possession of King Leopold II of Belgium and then as a Belgian colony, Congo won its independence in 1960. But within months its first elected Prime Minister had been murdered by Belgium- and U.S.-backed opponents because of his growing ties to the Soviet Union, an assassination that eventually opened the way for army general Mobutu Sese Seko to grab power.
A U.S. favorite during the cold war, Mobutu presided over one of the most corrupt regimes in African history, siphoning off billions from state-owned companies and allowing most of the country to languish in poverty & disorder.
In 1996 neighboring Rwanda and Uganda jointly invaded Congo to eliminate the Hutu militias, known as the Interahamwe, that had been responsible for the Rwandan genocide and were hiding in Congo's eastern forests. As the invading armies advanced across the country, Mobutu fled, and the invaders installed a small-time rebel leader named Laurent Kabila as President.
But things got worse. In 1998, after Kabila got too friendly with the Interahamwe, Uganda and Rwanda invaded Congo again, triggering what became known as Africa's first world war. The scramble for power and resources dragged in forces from at least eight African neighbors, spawned a myriad of Congolese factions and set off campaigns of ethnic cleansing. Kabila, as nasty and corrupt as his predecessor, was shot dead by one of his bodyguards in 2001. His son Joseph, 29, has ruled since.
In Congo, a nation of 63 million people in the heart of Africa, a peace deal signed in 2006 was supposed to halt the war between nine countries, in addition to 20 separate private armies of indigenous Congolese. In short, you probably needed more space in the signing box than for the average, standard form peace treaty.
The war produced a record of human devastation unmatched in recent history. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) estimates that 3.9 million people have died from war-related causes since 1998, making it the world's most lethal conflict since World War II. But you never even heard about it.
The suffering of Congo's people continues. Fighting persists in the east, where rebel holdouts loot, rape and murder. In particular, I was personally involved with a project to protect, arm & train the Northern Pygmy alliance from being preyed upon by militias who regarded them as "subhuman" - with some believing that eating pygmy flesh can confer magical powers. But you never heard about that, either.
The Congolese army, which was meant to be both symbol and protector in the reunited country, has cut its own murderous swath, carrying out executions and razing hundreds of villages. Even deadlier are the side effects of war, the scars left by years of brutality that disfigure Congo's society and infrastructure. The country is plagued by bad sanitation, disease, malnutrition and dislocation. Routine and treatable illnesses have become weapons of mass destruction.
According to the IRC, which has conducted a series of detailed mortality surveys over the past ten years, 1,250 Congolese still die every day because of war-related causes--the vast majority succumbing to diseases and malnutrition that wouldn't exist in peaceful times. In many respects, the country remains as broken, volatile and dangerous as ever, which is to say, among the very worst places on earth.
Yet Congo's troubles rarely make news headlines, and the country is often low on international donors' lists of places to help. After Sudan, Congo is the second largest nation in sub-Saharan Africa, a land so vast and ungovernable that it has long been perceived as the continent's ultimate hellhole, the setting for Joseph Conrad's 1899 book Heart of Darkness.
It is in part because of that malign reputation--and because the nation's feckless rulers have consistently reinforced it--that the world has been willing to let Congo bleed. Since 2000, the U.N. has spent billions on its peacekeeping mission in Congo, which is known by its French acronym, MONUC, and it is at the moment the largest U.N. force anywhere in the world. However, the troops number just 17,500, a tiny force to secure a country almost the size of the EU. Many of the battalions are besieged in their bases by the resurgent militias. But you didn't hear about that.
In February, the U.N. and aid groups working in Congo asked for $682 million in humanitarian funds. So far, they have received just $94 million--or $9.40 for every person in need. By comparison, Oxfam estimates that Haiti appeal last year raised $550 for each person. But you didn't hear about that - and they don't have a former member of the Fugees running for President to make headlines - so you probably won't.
In short, the message from The Hague today is you can have as many child soldiers as you like, but if you really want to impress the 21st-century western media, then no matter how brutal your crimes you do need to have a celebrity on board.
Depressing. What we need is a celeb to take up the cause...
This is a stew recipe taught to me by an old friend, who I used to debate with.
He was a Ugandan, and had spent some of his childhood as an abducted child soldier in the Lord's Resistance Army. There are few University Debaters who are genuinely imposing; very few who you really believe when they talk about the problems of tiny African countries. However, there is something very convincing about having a 6'6" Ugandan who's eyes wordlessly proclaimed "real machete experience" telling you the way it is.
By the way, he advised getting a Panga, rather than a machete - they are bigger, even scarier knives that look a bit like this:
For a team from a tiny university in the middle of a glum swamp, we did pretty well. But there would always be a point where we'd have to discuss Africa, and then things would go horribly wrong. Some bespectacled Oxbridge gnome would insist that the problems of Africa were easily solved by a more neo-liberal economic outlook or something, which would prompt from my debate partner "the speech", as we called it.
This would usually start with the phrase "You - white man - want to tell ME how to solve the problems of AFRICA?!?!?" Then there'd be a story about growing up in the third world, told with a frankly terrifying chopping action with his hands. We'd often lose that round, usually at a crucial part of the tournament. Long on charisma and gut-wrenching terror, short on analysis & facts, tragically.
Looking back, I am impressed by the integrity of the judges - I'd have given him a string of firsts, just to avoid the possible bloodsoaked freakout on telling him he came last. Usually, after we got back to Bristol, the gentleman in question would cook me this stew - based on a recipe his mother taught him, improvised from easily available UK ingredients.
It's delicious, warming and spicy - it also spends a large amount of time unattended on the hob, so it's perfect for entertaining at short notice, or alternatively for saying "I can't believe the judge in round four gave us a third!"
Panga Stew
Serves 4
Olive oil 2 red onions 4 cloves garlic 6 sausages – about 400g One pack of Supermarket Chorizo Cheating lazy chillies - English Provender company does the best, in my opinion. A glass of dry sherry, vermouth or Dry White wine - my chum was quite the Sherry drinker, oddly enough. 5 or 6 decent-sized tomatoes - or a couple of cans of tomatoes. 2 x 400g tins chick peas small bunch parsley
1.) Warm the olive oil in a deep pan. I use a cast iron casserole. Peel the onions, roughly chop them and add them to the oil, stirring to coat them, then letting them cook. Peel the garlic, slice it (with a panga, if you like) and stir it into the onions. Cook until the onions are soft.
2.)Cut each sausage into about three fat chunks. Mix these in with the softened onions then add a teaspoon or so of the chillies. Then stir in the chorizo. Pour in a glass of dry sherry, vermouth or white wine and bring it to an enthusiastic bubble. Chop the tomatoes roughly, add them and bring them to the boil, then add the chickpeas, drained of their canning liquor and rinsed, then pour in a can of water, then season with salt and black pepper. Bring to the boil then turn down to a simmer and leave to cook, slowly, half covered with a lid for 45 minutes.
3.)Stir from time to time, and check the liquor levels. What you want to end up with is a brick-red sauce with a wonderful spiciness from the chillies and chorizo. Chop the parsley, but only roughly, then stir into the stew.
Serve in shallow bowls, making certain everyone gets a fair bit of sausage. Otherwise, there may be violence.
It's been pointed out to me that my blog, while well written, could use some search engine optimisation. That's why I'm going to write about Porn. Steamy, dirty, nasty porn. The sort of thing you might buy in this wonderfully named shop in Soho:
If you're not a fan of Porn, please feel free to not read this article. Instead, you can click on this link - it leads to a video of a baby panda sneezing. (Honestly. It really does. You do trust me, right?)
Of course, if you're not a fan of Porn, that's statistically unlikely.
Porn isn't a small business. It's a major industry. Pornography - particularly on the internet -is now estimated to generate around $14bn worldwide, roughly the same amount as Hollywood's US box office receipts. The US leads the world in pornography (USA! USA!); about 211 new films are produced every week. The Los Angeles area is the centre of the film boom and most of those in the trade are perfectly respectable citizens. Admittedly, they tend to have more surgery & fake tan than most, but they pay their taxes, and are citizens just like everyone else. As are the consumers of their products.
It's not just an American phenomenon. In the UK, we spend more money at strip clubs than we do in the West End, regional theatres and orchestra performances combined.
Of course, there's all kinds of other sexual stuff on the internet that you don't have to pay for. Indeed, one of the people I used to work with on Bizarre magazine used to say "you aren't a real pervert if there's a pay-site for what you're into".
On websites like deviantart and in chatrooms like mIRC, you can find pretty much any fetish you like. While working my stint at Bizarre, I did see some stuff that made even me blanch - from women who liked to have sex with men dressed in werewolf costumes, to men who were unaccountably attracted to balloons. There are even whole websites devoted to people who find Sarah Palin attractive.
People who are into this sort of thing are, by definition, perverts. But is that a bad thing? Sadly, the UK's CPS prosecutors seem to think so, and don't worry, they are "protecting" us. Mostly, it seems, from ourselves.
Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 makes it illegal to use the internet to send or receive a message or communication which is any of the following:
Yes, saying annoying things on the internet is illegal in England.
I'll just give you a second to digest that. Just have a quick flip through the Guardian Comment is Free while you think about it. Then call the Police, and have the writer of this article arrested.
Of course, I don't really want him arrested. He's wrong, not a criminal. Free speech anyone?
Clearly, the people who framed this law should probably not spend five minutes on any internet forum, or read the comment pages of any major newspaper - indeed, reading the speeches of contenders in the Labour leadership contest is probably an absolute no-go area for most people, as in many ways, offence is in the eye of the beholder.
Of course, this could just be an obscure law no-one cares about - there are plenty of those on the statute books. But the CPS are pushing this one to the hilt. For example, this year a clearly jokey tweet was held to be "menacing" under this act, and the tweeter was sent to prison. Ridiculous.
However, an even more egregious case has come to my attention.
The saga began last summer when, following an anonymous tip-off, police raided Andrew Holland's home looking for indecent images of children. They found none, but they did find two clips, one involving a woman purportedly having sex with a tiger, and one which is believed to have depicted sado-masochistic activity between consenting adults.
Holland's was charged with possessing extreme porn, and denied access to his children as a result, despite the fact that there was no suggestion anything paedophilic was involved. Would this happen to a Burglar? To a fraudster? No, of course not - but once a "crime" is defined as sexual, all rights go out the window.
In a first court appearance in January of this year, the "tiger porn" charge was dropped when prosecuting counsel discovered the volume control and at the end of the 7 second clip heard the animated tiger turn to camera and say: "That beats doing adverts for a living" - it was an cartoon spoof of Tony the Tiger from the Frosties cereal adverts.
The clip was therefore deemed to be "unrealistic" and out of scope as far as extreme porn legislation was concerned. The court then turned its attention to the allegedly more serious clip involving adult interaction.
In March, following advice from his legal team, Holland pleaded guilty to possessing one extreme porn clip and was stunned to be told that he might face a prison sentence. Holland then spoke to members of Consenting Adult Action Network and sexual rights organisation Backlash, who put him in touch with their legal adviser, Myles Jackman of Audu and Co in King's Cross, London.
Jackman, a solicitor specialising in extreme pornography offences (I bet that is a great business card), advised Holland that contrary to previous advice, there were grounds for pleading not guilty. On this basis, Holland took the unusual step of applying to the court for permission to "vacate his plea". This is a technical device whereby an individual may go back on a guilty plea at any time before sentencing.
In May a judge granted Holland leave to vacate his plea from guilty back to not guilty. Holland was therefore due to stand trial again. The CPS, however, declined to offer any evidence on the day (yeah, fucking it up for free as usual), and the matter is at an end - at a cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds to the taxpayer. The CPS has not yet commented on this matter, or on the fact that on each charge, it was not until the day of the court appearance that they decided the evidence to hand was inadequate.
I assume putting out a statement saying "Basically, we are really, really incompetent" is just too humiliating.
Of course, had Mr.Holland not contacted Backlash in the first place he would have been sentenced for an offence which other people have not only escaped prosecution for, but in fact have made fortunes over in the Libel courts. Yes, I'm thinking of you, Max Mosely.
Why should we criminalise relatively odd porn if we don't criminalise the sex acts themselves? Of course we should criminalise some sex acts; but if the acts are legal (or impossible), why is it right to criminalise seeing images of them? I just don't see a harm to it; certainly not one which justifies spending a fortune and hugely limiting liberty. Fortunately, Mr. Holland has since be reunited with his children.
Other cases have not ended so well. For example, Kent Police are in the process of using the Obscene Publications Act as a means to prosecute an individual, Gavin Smith, of Swanscombe for publishing obscenity in respect of a log of a private online chat he had with another individual. This case marks an extension of the law into an area that its originators could never have envisaged – text chat. Most internet users would regard it as person-to-person conversation.
The legal principle at stake here is whether internet chat constitutes "publication" in the ordinary sense of the word, or can be treated as private conversation. If the former is the conclusion, then anyone with even a passing interest in unusual sexual fantasies may need to be very careful in respect of any online conversations they have in future.
IRC will no longer be quite the refuge of the bizarre and the outlandish it once was. In my opinion, that's a shame. There's a case for the state to legislate to outlaw some things - but private conversation and private, harmless fantasies should not be one of them.
So, in short, we live in a country were the CPS are willing to prosecute a man for being a bit kinky, but not willing to prosecute a man who beat someone to death. Not for the first time, I do worry about the country.
Well, I need an innuendo filled recipe to fit in with the above. Hmmm. Hard.
(See what I did there?)
Italian Sausage in a White Wine & Cream sauce
What you need
12 Italian Sausages (.com?) One Red onion, sliced Half a bottle of wine One tub of single cream Half a punnet of mushrooms, sliced 300g of Penne Pasta Olive oil
One large pan for the sauce, one large pan for the pasta
1.) Slice the skin of each sausage, and slide the skin off, leaving you with a large pile of sausage meat. Bring the pasta pan to boil while you do this, but do not add the pasta yet.
2.) Add the onion to the pan, and fry in the oil until the onion becomes tender. Then crumble in the sausage meat. Fry the sausage meat until all the flesh looks cooked; try to avoid it forming balls or clumps by vigorous stirring.
3.) Add the pasta to the boiling water.
4.) Add the mushrooms in to the sauce mixture, stirring them in until they begin to take on a golden yellow hue.
5.) Add the wine. I've said use a half bottle, but you generally want to cover the meat rather than drown it. It's generally a judgement call. Simmer this for about five minutes, until most of the alcohol has burned off the wine, but a reasonable amount of liquid remains.
6.) Turn down the heat, then stir in the cream and the basil in to the sauce.
7.) Drain the pasta, then stir the pasta into the sauce.
8.) Serve to middle class dinner party you have invited your cute-but-sleazy bohemian friend to. Orgy optional.
Lots of people this week are lamenting the end of the UK Film Council.
I'm a fully paid up cinephile - I'm probably in the cinema twice a week, splitting my time between my local beret-and-turtleneck arthouse (The Curzon on the Kings Road) & the much more low rent picture palace just along from it, which shows an assortment of hollywood shlockbusters - I'm sure I'll trot off there to see this cinematic maserpiece:
As I write, Facebook, Twitter, an online petition and the letters page of The Guardian are alive with calls to save the UKFC. Am I disappointed by the end of the UK film council? No, because it represents exactly the sort of cuts that should be made.
To understand last week’s move, you need to know that last August Labour culture minister Sion Simon proposed a merger of the UKFC with the British Film Institute, the country’s other big film body, which manages the National Film Archive, runs BFI Southbank and organises the London Film Festival. The plan (despite Labour's shrieks of disgust this week) was to cut costs and prevent overlap. Neither did it help relations that the UKFC’s execs were on far higher salaries compared to those doing similar jobs at the BFI, but were to be the ones who were to be kept.
The BFI were horrified. They were going to be subsumed into an ugly New Labour quango, which was obsessed with pumping lottery money projects like Harry Potter and then claiming it as a "British Triumph". To claim the Harry Potter film franchise is a British Triumph is akin to claiming Monopoly is just like real bond trading. It looks sort of like it on the surface, but really is nothing of the sort. All the money, all the profit, flowed back to the USA.
People are talking about £15 million pounds being removed from UK film funding - that's not correct. The £15 million figure was amount of Lottery funds disbursed by the UKFC - minus the £6 million plus combined staffing cost of the 75 people who work for the UKFC.
The lottery money - which was often blown on shit films like 'Sex Lives of the Potato Men', 'Lesbian Vampire Killers' and 'The Parole Officer' is still there. It's just now in the hands of the eminently more reliable BFI - who have a far better track record than the UKFC - ‘Dog Soldiers’, '28 days later' & ‘Slumdog Millionaire' all started with BFI seed money.
Certainly, the UKFC did have a hand in some good films - notably 'Hunger' - but for the record, its last disbursement was for two street dance films in 3d, both of which utterly bombed at the box office. Of course, Hunger bombed at the box office in comparison to Harry Potter too, but it had the saving grace of being artistically brilliant.
So, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the UKFC were not. The french new wave, the UKFC was not. UK film funding has not dropped; we fired £6 million pounds worth of bureaucrats. This is no reason to weep. We need to take this sort of action across all the areas of the budget.
On this topic, the treasury recently set up a website, by which you could suggest ideas for cuts that the government hadn't thought of. Nice idea, but predictably, it had to be removed, as it swiftly filled up with lunatic racist rants - as anyone who has ever posted a youtube video or read the brilliant Speak your Branes would have been able to explain.
In the absence of the website, some of the things I'd like to see cut are:
Civil Service Pay
The Civil service is ludicrously bloated. There are 525,000 of them, out of 6 million public sector employees. Civil servants are on incremental pay scales, which rise automatically. They need a pay freeze. Now. If it was down to me, I'd also impose a 15% salary cut on all civil service salaries over £25,000, with some sort of phase in at the margin.
On top of that, there are hundreds of civil servants languishing in non-jobs, because they are too expensive to make redundant. Why? Because of the crippling cost of making them redundant. Civil servants have one of the most lucrative redundancy deals in the country, a system which Labour tried but failed to scrap. The terms of their redundancy deal is extraordinarily generous, with many civil servants eligible to receive about six years’ pay if they are made compulsorily redundant.
For example, a 46 year old earning £40,000 who had been a civil servant for 25 years could enjoy a cash payment of about 6.2 years’ salary on retirement, or around £300,000.
We literally can't afford to sack them, but cutting this to an (eminently fair) one year's salary as redundancy payment would save 6 Billion pounds over 10 years. If the unions strike, will the public support them in claiming this outrageous gilded perk? I doubt it.
Second, the civil service offers a pretty ridiculous pension scheme. Contributions to the premium scheme are only 3.5%, but the employer (us) is charged another 22% on top - and we have to maintain that pension, index linked, until death. We should renegotiate their contracts, making it clear they can quit now, or accept a deal which is fair to the country.
No Tax cuts
There are some taxes I loathe. Inheritance tax in particular. Sadly, the truth is, we can't really afford any tax cuts until the titanic deficit is cleared. Don't worry, in 2015 I'll start banging on about why it's unfair.
Means test all Benefits
Means test all benefits, especially child benefit. There's a whole plethora of universal benefits like this - for example, a couple of my friends who are reasonably well off recently had a baby, and the government sent them child toothbrushes and a teddy bear - plus they claim the £20 a week in child benefit.
This is a couple who aren't short a bob or two - he's an oil engineer and she's an oncologist. There is absolutely no way that people earning £100,000 a year should be entitled to free toothbrushes, teddies or cheques. This isn't an isolated case - other deeply middle class friends get child benefit, and I see no reason that the state should subsidise people buying Glyndebourne tickets (or whatever else they spend the money on).
Benefits are meant as a safety net, not a perk you get for citizenship.
Pensions
Equally, there's no way people with over £300,000 in assets should get the old age pension - why not means test it? Secondly, why don't we raise the retirement age to 70 for people currently 30 or under? All of us are of the "screwed generation" who had to pay to go to university - this has inculcated in us a feeling that we cannot rely on the state. We will have forty years to prepare for retirement. The saving from pushing our pension entitlement back would be tremendous - billions and billions of pounds.
Citizen allowance
There are 55 benefits for being out of work or on low income at the moment. ESA, JSA, New Deal, LCA, Income Support, ALA, Incapacity benefit, tax credits, housing benefit. Every single one has an office of bloodsuckers assessing claims, while picking their nose on the telephone.
Why not replace all these benefits with a single welfare payment to all unemployed people (pensioners, the sick, the incapable, the lazy - everyone), regardless of why they are unemployed? It would let us get rid of literally thousands of assessors and would have the tremendous advantage of greatly simplifying the benefits system, making access to it easier for those in need.
This was actually one of the quite a few parts of the Green manifesto I really liked, but more on that some other day...
Defence Cuts
Something has to give. We aren't a great power anymore. If we want nuclear arms, conventional weapons will have to go. If we want to maintain a decent conventional airforce, army and navy, our ocean-going holocaust delivery systems are going to have to be scaled back or cut altogether.
Another discussion for another blog post I think.
Centralisation of all Services for all Local Authority Back Offices
This isn't a very sexy cut. There aren't any movies with machine guns or aircraft carriers or middle class people using benefits to buy champagne & opera tickets. But it is vital.
Every local & county council up and down the country has rooms and rooms full of worthless pen pushers in Billing departments, Accounting departments, IT departments, HR departments & Procurement Services.
These are broad areas whereby each local authority manages the services independently (read:badly) and where the jobs are the same but managed locally by local authorities within local budgets. I can't see any reason why most of the above cannot be centralised. In particular, centralised procurement on major contracts would yield huge savings.
Conclusion
These cuts are probably further than the coalition will go - but they should be pushing this far.
These cuts are relatively painless; which will be crucial for maintaining the mandate of the electorate. To maintain support, the coalition has to cut the deficit, while not letting the axe fall on the weakest in society. We have to maintain the NHS; we can't let benefits fall too far.
In short, don't be distracted by all the noise around the UK Film Council - it was a room full of bureaucrats. More of those need to go.
