2018 in books

As previously, the list no one has been waiting for...

Target- 25
Books read- 22

Pages read- 10,165 (up from last year, so I've read fewer books, but they've been longer!)
Numbers of new books- 22

Fiction/Non-fiction ratio- 5:17 (another dreadful year for fiction)
Longest Book- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke, 1005 pgs.
Shortest Book- The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted, Mark Forsyth, 23 pgs.
Quickest Read- The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted, Mark Forsyth, August 30th 2018
Longest Read- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke, July 4th 2017 - May 15th 2018
Most Read Authors- No repeat reads this year!
Ebooks- No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, Naomi Klein; Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel, Dan Ephron; The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, Rick Perlstein.
Audio books- More of a podcast man this year. Maybe they should get a review too...
Useless Fact- I really am surprised at how many books about one historical city Ken Follett has got in him...

The List

Things Can Only Get Worse?: Twenty Confusing Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter, John O'Farrell

The Anglo-Saxons, James Campbell, Eric John, Patrick Wormald

Bitter Freedom: Ireland in a Revolutionary World, 1918-1923, Maurice Walsh

Race of a Lifetime, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin

It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis

Nothing Venture, Nothing Win, Edmund Hillary

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke

The Ghost, Robert Harris

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, Naomi Klein

A Column of Fire, Ken Follett

Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile's Hidden History, Andy Beckett

Moskva, Jack Grimwood

Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel, Dan Ephron

Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain, Charlotte Higgins

On the Map: Why the World Looks the Way it Does, Simon Garfield

Time and Chance, James Callaghan

The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted, Mark Forsyth

The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, Rick Perlstein

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-56, Anne Applebaum

The Private Lives of the Saints: Power, Passion and Politics in Anglo-Saxon England, Janina Ramirez

Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee, John Bew

The Tigers of the Snow: How One Fateful Climb Made the Sherpas Mountaineering Legends, Jonathan Neale

"Come and go with me to that land": Britain's First Democratic Step

On December 14th, 1918, the country voted. As it did so, it changed, irreversibly. It was the first step on the final stage of change, from the autocratic, imperial power we had been, to the modern representative democracy we are today.

1918 was the first electoral contest in which the property qualification for men was removed, as per the terms of the Representation of the People Act of 1918. Now, all men could vote in the constituency in which they lived, provided they were over 21, or over 19 in the case of those in the armed forces. 5.6 million men were added to the electorate, the largest ever increase. No more would the money or status of the individual voter impact on the act of voting for the government.

More famously, this was the election in which women could vote for the first time.

One of Britain's first female voters, casting her vote a century ago today

Well, not exactly. Before the 1832 Great Reform Act, there had been plenty of female electors. From the Middle Ages until 1832, the franchise was determined by your wealth; any rich enough woman would be enrolled. In practise, the only women with sufficient independent wealth were widows. These early participants in the first pangs of electoral democracy are frustratingly hard to spot in the historical record, but they are there, ghostly echoes of a forgotten world. In a by-election in Elizabethan Aylesbury, comments were made about women doing the voting. Complaints were made when women in Norfolk voted for the Long Parliament in the 1640s. These scraps are all we have of what was clearly a much bigger picture.

But the door was firmly slammed shut by the Great Reform Act; it explicitly restricted the franchise to 'male persons.' Even as that electorate widened to encompass more and more men, it remained sealed off to female voters. And yet, local election rolls from the 1840s onwards show that female voting was very much still alive at parish and municipal elections. The government did eventually pass some concessions. Single rate paying women were allowed to vote in local elections in 1869, and from 1894 this was expanded to cover married women. In 1867, an error by a polling clerk enabled elderly Lily Maxwell, a widowed shop owner, to vote in a parliamentary by-election in Manchester, capturing national attention and sparking many of the early suffrage societies.

What is true is that 1918 marks the first time a significant number of women voted in a British election. Yet the recent slaughter had taken its toll on the country. Were the franchise to have been expanded to encompass all women, they would have constituted the majority of the electorate. As a result, the 1918 Representation of the People Act specified that the only women who could vote were to be over 30and owned or rented property worth more than £5, or was married to someone who did, or was a graduate of a university with a constituency. 8.9 million women were added to the franchise; a remarkable start, but still not quite there.

On this day, at the first point of asking, a female candidate was actually elected to the House of Commons, the self-declared mother of parliaments, taking over 60% of the vote in her constituency. Yet the overwhelming victor in the seat of Dublin St Patrick's did not take her parliamentary seat.

Countess Markievicz, the first woman elected to Parliament, campaigning in a by-election in 1917

This wasn't due to a ignoble protest about women voters by men, or a last minute legal challenge, or a push by the suffrage campaigners to get full equal voting rights. Constance Markievicz didn't take her seat in Parliament because she was in Holloway prison, imprisoned for protesting against wartime conscription. Even had she been a free woman, she had not intention of going to Westminster. This is where the third reason this election is so important becomes clear. The 1918 election marks the beginning of the endgame of British rule over Ireland.

At Easter 1916, a ragtag band from the Irish Republican Brotherhood had staged an uprising across Ireland, in an attempt to use Britain's distraction by the First World War to drive them out of Ireland. The Easter Rising failed miserably, with the tiny numbers of rebels overwhelmed by the full military might of the most powerful empire on Earth, their leaders executed or thrown in prison. The self-proclaimed Irish Republic had lasted less than a week.

By 1918, resentment seethed across Ireland. Resentment at the treatment of the Easter rebels, resentment at London's attempts to impose conscription on the island, resentment at the imminent partition of Ireland along religious and political lines. When the election was called, the Irish Labour party agreed to stand down, to give a clear choice to the people of Ireland- vote for Sinn Fein and independence, or the Unionists to stay with Britain.

The results were wide open to interpretation. Of the 105 Irish seats, Sinn Fein took 73 out of the 105 seats. They took 46.9% of the votes across Ireland, but this amounted to 65% of the vote in the areas on the brink of leaving the UK; although in many areas they ran unopposed, and so no votes were cast in those areas. The Unionists took a quarter of the vote; however, this was mainly based on sweeping the seats in what was to become Northern Ireland- outside of this area, they only took one seat, in south Dublin, and the two seats given to the Irish universities. The old Irish Parliamentary Party, which for forty years had been the dominant voice of Ireland at Westminster, was crushed, holding a mere 6 of its 74 seats; however, it did take a fifth of the votes, and this represented more total votes than ever before, thanks to the expansion of the franchise. Quite what was to be made of this mess was anyone's guess.

Tensions were running high across Ireland

It fell to the MPs of Sinn Fein to make the next move. Those able to do so convened at the Mansion House in Dublin, saying they would boycott the Westminster Parliament, as it had no right to rule them. They called their new assembly the Dáil Éireann, and invited all Irish MPs to attend. The Unionists and moderate nationalists would not come. Only 27 of Sinn Fein's new politicians were free men. When the roll call was conducted, the many missing members were described as é ghlas ag Gallaibh, or 'imprisoned by the foreigners.'

Their next move was just as bold. The Dail declared that, rather than having been crushed and buried in 1916, the self-declared independent Irish Republic was very much alive, now with a mandate from the people of Ireland. On the face of it, this was suicide. Every attempt by Ireland to sever the union unilaterally had failed, including one barely two years before. Only one part of the British Empire had ever succeeded in leaving British control by force of arms. And Ireland was nowhere near as powerful as the Thirteen Colonies of British America had been in 1776.

The words of the Dail could have ended up being an empty declaration, lost in the tides of history. But on the same day the Dail announced independence, remnants of the Irish Volunteers attacked a Royal Irish Constabulary wagon bringing explosives to a quarry in County Tipperary. In the shootout, two RIC officers were killed. The Irish Volunteers hadn't aimed to coordinate their actions with the Dail. But the Volunteers now saw themselves as the army of the Irish Republic, and with shots fired they set about attempting to achieve a military victory against Britain by force of arms.

The 1918 election did not yet see Britain become a perfect democracy. Although virtually all adult men could vote, the exclusion of 57% of women, and continued irregularities such as business voting and the university constituencies meant that it wasn't there yet. And the election in Ireland plunged one part of the United Kingdom into a vicious civil war, which had consequences lasting well into the 21st century.

And yet, this was the first election in British history which was something approaching democratic. In the previous elections of 1910, 7.6 million people had been able to vote. In 1918, the total possible number of voters was 21.4 million. And 1918 transformed the political landscape forever. David Lloyd George, the popular wartime leader, split the Liberal Party. His supporters continued in government with the Conservatives. The Liberals who didn't follow him into this unholy alliance were crushed at the polls. But Lloyd George's supporters were only saved by their pact with the Tories. Although they came fourth in terms of seats, the second placed party in terms of the vote share, with a fifth of the voters supporting them, was the Labour Party. As the Liberal star waned, the Labour star waxed. The modern political landscape, recognisable to us today, was being born.

I got a brother in that land

I got a brother in that land

I got a brother in that land

Where I'm bound

Where I'm bound

I got a sister in that land

I got a sister in that land 

I got a sister in that land

Where I'm bound

Where I'm bound

Come and go with me to that land

Come and go with me to that land

Come and go with me to that land

Where I'm bound

To Germany, by Charles Sorley

You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,

And no man claimed the conquest of your land.

But gropers both through fields of thought confined

We stumble and we do not understand.

You only saw your future bigly planned,

And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,

And in each other's dearest ways we stand,

And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.

When it is peace, then we may view again

With new-won eyes each other's truer form

And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm

We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,

When it is peace. But until peace, the storm

The darkness and the thunder and the rain.

To Germany, by Charles Sorley. Killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915, aged 20

Lieutenant Arkwright of the 9th Hussars, washing in the grounds of a chateau, September 5th 1914. During last few days, the British Army had retreated several hundred miles, from Mons in Belgium to the outskirts of Paris. Across 1914, the all-volunteer, pre-war professional British Expeditionary Force suffered 90,000 casualties, which was greater than the number of soldiers originally sent.

Men of the 1st Lancashire Fusiliers, some time before 7am on July 1st 1916, preparing to attack Beaumont Hamel. The Battle of the Somme was when Britain's volunteer armies were first used in large numbers, and 18,000 soldiers were killed on that first day.

Soldiers and civilians in Birmingham, celebrating the announcement of the Armistice, November 11th 1918.

'A Voice Crying Out in the Wilderness:' Why Jeremy Corbyn Isn't the John the Baptist of Foreign Affairs

Saturday saw 700,000 people march in central London in a (vain, in my opinion) attempt to stop Brexit. This issue is the single greatest facing the UK. At best, it has the capacity to produce economic and social turmoil. At worst, it is almost beyond our ability to comprehend how bad it will be.

Was the Leader of Her Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition there to throw his weight behind the campaign to save us from ourselves? He was not. Instead, Jeremy Corbyn was in Geneva, marking 20 years since the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London, on charges of human rights abuses.

This year, I read the excellent Pinochet in Piccadilly, which examined the historic ties between Britain and Chile. From 19th century economic imperialism, to the student Jack Straw visiting the Allende government, the coup that had Allende killed, Pinochet's outriders of Thatcherism using Chile as their economic test lab, and finally Pinochet's fate being argued out in the House of Lords, the ties between Britain and Chile run deep, especially where Pinochet is concerned.

This book was written in the year 2000, two years after Pinochet's arrest in London. It was still fresh from the events. And yet Jeremy Corbyn doesn't make a single appearance. Many of the participants were interviewed, including the Chilean exiles who staged a vigil outside the House of Lords while Pinochet's fate was debated. Not a single sign of the MP for Islington North. That is not to say that Corbyn was not involved in the anti-Pinochet struggle. It was a popular left wing position after the coup, and until Pinochet was dragged from power. It is widely regarded as the issue that ignited Corbyn's passion for foreign affairs. But his position and role were so unremarkable that a book about the subject, written at the time, failed to mention him.

Corbyn campaigning against Pinochet

This Corbyn trend is not unique to Britain and Chile. Since being unexpectedly catapulted from utter obscurity to the leadership of the UK's largest leftist political force in 2015, there has been a big push on Corbyn's image. His years of engagement in various foreign affairs issues of the later 20th century have been held up as a virtue, which they undoubtedly are. However, as many of these events recede beyond memory for most people, there is a danger that the myth of Jeremy Corbyn will distort his part in these events.

Nowhere is this clearer than with regards to the Northern Irish Troubles. Corbyn and John McDonnell were long time supporters of a United Ireland and Sinn Fein, and by extension at that time the IRA. Whenever this is now raised, the response is to say that it was because they were exploring every possible avenue to bring about peace and stop the appalling sectarian carnage that engulfed Northern Ireland in the later 20th century.

Which again would be grand if anyone could point to a single moment where their actions had some influence. Corbyn voted against the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, the first (and as it turned out, faltering) step on the road to peace. Neither of them played any role in the Good Friday Agreement, or the torturous process afterwards by which the IRA was persuaded to disarm, nor the unionist parties persuaded to share power with those who had until recently been murderers. John McDonnell's claims he was trying to persuade the IRA to disarm in 2000 especially fly in the face of this timeline. Any history book on the Troubles doesn't contain their names at all.

Signing of the Good Friday Agreement, April 1998. Definitely no Corbyn or McDonnell there...

The same goes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The summer was dominated by stories about Corbyn's links to the various Palestinian groups fighting the Israeli government. And yes, Corbyn is a long term supporter of the Palestinian cause. In this, he was ahead of the curve, as Israel has traditionally had a lot of support from within the UK Labour party. Only with the savage war in Lebanon during the 1980s, and as occupation began to take its toll, did this start to shift within the Western left. But his claims to have been at the PLO cemetery in Tunisia to promote peace are laughable. When the final analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is written, his contribution won't even merit a footnote within a footnote.

Signing of the Oslo Accords, 1993. I doubt there's a single Briton there, let alone backbench Labour MPs...

Surely Corbyn's one area of foreign policy success must be South Africa. After all, there is this photo, which did the rounds last year:

I'm not going to repeat much of the analysis of this, which can be seen here. But Corbyn was not a lone voice in the 1980s in opposing apartheid. Since Harold Macmillan had told the apartheid parliament in 1960 that the 'winds of change' were blowing through Africa, opposition to the racial state had been formal British policy, backed up by widespread global support. The African National Congress, the party of Nelson Mandela, was based in London from 1978 until 1994; the South African government had to resort to sending spies to plant bombs in the offices to try and get at them, as they had no help from the British government in moving against what was labelled a terrorist organisation. The rally that this picture was taken at was organised by a Trotskyite fringe group, and was not supported by the main British anti-apartheid groups. Two other Labour MPs were arrested. Aligned with the right side of history? Corbyn certainly was. A lone voice standing up bravely against apartheid? Not really.

Perhaps where Corbyn can legitimately claim to have been a trailblazer is the war in Iraq. As the world watched with baited breath, tens of millions around the globe used 15th February 2003 to march against the war. Corbyn did give a speech at the million strong march in London, under the banner of the Stop the War Coalition. You can see it here.

The poor quality of the few pictures of Corbyn at the rally probably tells you more than any words I can spill on the subject

If you look at the BBC news report from the day, they list a huge litany of speakers. Charles Kennedy, as the leader of the Liberal Democrats, the largest UK-wide political party to come out against the war. Jesse Jackson, Tariq Ali, Mo Mowlam, Ken Livingstone, Vanessa Redgrave, Bianca Jagger, Tony Benn, Harold Pinter- all are noted for their contribution. Corbyn is not.

This is the politician that did most to articulate the anti-war case in 2003.

Blair refused to bow to public pressure. But he still had to face the House of Commons, in a moment of high political drama. Labour was deeply divided on the issue. Junior ministers resigned, and Robin Cook delivered one of the finest speeches in modern Parliamentary history in resigning from the Cabinet to vote against the war. No one could be quite sure how events would play out.

Cook's resignation speech- Look who picked a good spot behind him!

When MPs voted, Blair had his majority. 412 MPs voted to support the war in Iraq, as against 149 against, and 94 abstentions. But this belied the Labour splits. Only 254 Labour MPs had voted with their own Prime Minister; 84 of them voted no outright, and a further 69 abstained. Blair had been saved by the Conservatives, UUP and DUP. Yes, Corbyn had done the right thing. But he was not a leading light, nor was he alone in voting against the war. In that, he was joined by 83 other Labour MPs, 52 Liberal Democrats, 9 Scottish and Welsh nationalists, two Conservatives, 1 SDLP and 1 independent MP.

While on many of these issues, Corbyn was indeed on the right side of history, he was not alone, nor a driver of events. Most importantly, when the history books are written, he will at best be a footnote in these events. The role his supporters wish to ascribe him, as the John the Baptist of foreign affairs, the long voice crying out in the wilderness, heralding better things to come, is simply not true.

"I believe there are certain things that are not at issue at all. ... And that is his character": Why we are still living in 1991, Part II.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece showing how the world of 1991 was still very much with us today. And if you ignore the bit where I confidently predicted a second Clinton would sit in the Oval Office, the comparisons between 1991 and the late 2010s hold up reasonably well.

This week, the US political scene has witnessed the spectacle of a presidential nominee to the Supreme Court being accused of sexual misconduct, the brave testimony of his accuser, and a combative response of the potential justice.. The parallels to 1991 apparently aren't done yet. 

In the summer of that year, the first African American Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall, was retiring. In his place, George HW Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, another African American, who had been an official in the Reagan and Bush administrations, as well as a federal judge. Yet Thomas provoked panic and fear amongst those on the left. He was a strident conservative, and many liberals promised they would fight his nomination in the last ditch. The battle lines were drawn for his confirmation hearings.

Hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee were not to be treated lightly. It was only four years since the same committee, headed by the same senator, a Joe Biden of Delaware, had sunk the nomination of Robert Bork. Bork had been chosen by Reagan for his impeccable conservative credentials. Yet during his hearings Bork floundered, as his conservative views came under attack for being too extreme, as did his role in the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, when Bork had been the highest ranking Justice Department official to survive Richard Nixon's cull, the one who had fired the Watergate special prosecutor for Nixon. Bork was rejected by the committee, and later voted down by the full senate.

Despite the concerns over Thomas' views, and the power of the hearings, during the autumn of 1991 his nomination wound its way through the hearings. Towards the end of the process, a bomb was detonated under this orderly process. The media leaked that the FBI background checks on Thomas had thrown up reports that Thomas had made unwanted, sexually inappropriate remarks to a colleague, Anita Hill. Hill, now a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, was called before the committee to give evidence. What evidence she gave. The US public were treated to comments about the size of Thomas' penis, comments about pubic hair, about how long Thomas could last in bed, about Thomas' favourite porn stars.

But Thomas wasn't going down without a fight. In his own testimony, he denied everything, and claimed he was the subject of a "lynching." As a black man, the language was emotional, and designed to hit home.

It did the trick, but barely. The Judiciary Committee sent Thomas' name to the full Senate without a recommendation to accept or reject, a very rare move. Thomas was confirmed by the full Senate with 52 votes to 48, and not along party lines either. Some Democrats supported Thomas, while some Republicans tried to stop him taking office. But take office he did.

It is easy to see the parallels between the two events. In both 1991 and 2018, an extremely conservative choice to sit on the US Supreme Court fired up opposition to his confirmation. Liberal activists and interest groups draw a line in the sand. As the hearings come to a close, allegations of sexual misconduct emerge. They culminate in a dramatic showdown before the Senate, with accuser and defender both fighting for their lives and pouring out their souls.

However, there are two major differences between the hearings of 1991, and the hearings of 2018. Firstly, in 1991, Hill was questioned by the full committee. The optics, and the message they sent, were awful. An all male, all white, mainly elderly, committee, fired questions at the young black woman in front of them, some of them questions of an extremely explicit nature. The outrage at how Hill was treated bled into the 1992 general election. Bush was not re-elected, and a record number of women were swept into office. The Republican party have clearly taken this message on board. The mixed gender, mixed racial Democratic team on the 2018 Judiciary Committee posed their own questions to Brett Kavanaugh's accuser. The all male, all white Republicans of 2018 picked a female prosecutor to field their questions. They do not want to pour oil on the flames of an already difficult election year.

Secondly, in 1991, Anita Hill's lone voice was not enough to stop Clarence Thomas making it onto the Supreme Court. Thomas narrowly survived the process, and remains on the Court to this day, as the longest serving current justice. One reason the Bush White House stuck with Thomas was that opinion polls showed the vast majority of people believed his denials over Anita Hill's claims of sexual harrassment. In 2018, although the process has not yet reached its endgame, Kavanaugh's chances of ending up a Justice of the Supreme Court look less good than Thomas' did at this stage. Because millions of people believe Dr Christine Blasey Ford, his accuser.

I believe her. And you should too. We owe it to the people of 2018 to show that we are not really still living in 1991.

(To help me write this, I drew on this excellent article from the New York Times. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/us/politics/anita-hill-kavanaugh-hearings.html

What struck me was how some of the senators who questioned Hill in 1991 are *still* in the same roles, and have apparently learnt nothing...)

"Financial Armageddon"

What would financial Armageddon look like?

It probably says a lot that I can clearly remember this article, a full decade on, down to being able to remember the title, and some of the lines. It really did look like Armageddon at the time. In the autumn of 2008, the Western capitalist model of the world was staring into the abyss, and no one could be quite sure we wouldn't go crashing down into it.

I couldn't explain what caused it. I'm not sure, even now, anyone could explain for certain the causes, without either being very biased, or so technical no one understood them. But, with a handful of exceptions, most people did not know what was coming. Until the end of 2008, there had been gathering storm clouds, but most of it was hidden from full view. In late 2007, there'd been a run on Northern Rock, and the government had been forced to nationalise it. In the United States, there were serious concerns over the state of the mortgage market. But for most people, these were concerns in a far away land, that of economics, that none of them really understood.

Until on September 15th, 2008, the US investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. It wasn't a bank in the sense most people understood. They had no branches, no current accounts of individuals. Instead, they dealt with the money of companies, taking it and investing it in other things, to look for a return. During the 1990s and 2000s, many banks had done this more and more. The lines between 'high street' banks and 'investment' banks was increasingly blurred. More worryingly, no one really knew where all this money, and associated debt, actually was. When Lehman Brothers, one of the oldest and most venerable names in world finance, applied for bankruptcy protection, this sent shockwaves around the system. Someone had owned up to how bad this situation was. The image of bankers, the new frontier of the 21st century economy, emptying their offices in cardboard boxes, showed how the mighty had fallen.

What made it worse was the Bush administration. Saddled as we are now with Trump, it is hard to think back on how awful Bush was. In the dying days of his presidency, Bush had found himself having to hand out money to mortgage lenders and banks. In September 2008, he decided enough was enough. His administration wouldn't get Lehman Brothers out of the hole they had fallen in to. They would be allowed to collapse.

Big mistake. This turned alarm into a full blown panic. Around the world, banks stopped lending money, as they were afraid of getting themselves into more and more debt. People and companies who had put their money into these labyrinthine schemes began to withdraw it, afraid it would all be lost. With the money supply freezing up, ordinary businesses found themselves out of money too.

In an intertwined global financial economy, the contagion and chaos in the USA spread around the world like wildfire. In the UK, the banks of the City of London found themselves buffeted by the same storms. But the UK's banks were slightly different. The same banks dabbling in international investment schemes were those that people held their money in. If they went down, all hell would break loose. Alistair Darling, the then Chancellor, has since said he was afraid of a breakdown of law and order if the most exposed bank, RBS (containing Natwest and Ulster Bank), closed.

The Bush administration realised it had made a grave error. In the parlance of the time, they had tried to show that no one was 'too big to fail.' And they'd turned a problem into a crisis. As September faded into October, the US Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, devised a plan to put up $700 billion, to 'hoover up' the debt that no one really knew who owned it. The US House of Representatives voted the plan down, wiping billions off of the world stock markets. Days later, they accepted a modified version of Paulson's plan. But the world money markets failed to respond. The money supply was still jammed.

Enter the unlikely hero of the hour. 

Since then, Gordon Brown has got a lot of bad press. He was not a telegenic politician, and inspired loathing and contempt in many. But he had the best economic brain in the land, and this was his hour. Between Brown and Darling, they unveiled a plan which did two things. Like in the USA, it would take the worthless debt out of the banks' hands. But it would also see the UK government take shares in banks in danger of collapse. In effect, those banks would be backed by the full weight of the UK economy. This worked. The pressure on them eased. In the USA, Paulson used his new powers to copy Brown's plan. As 2008 turned into 2009, the immediate crisis passed. In late 2008, Gordon Brown slipped up at Prime Minister's Questions. He meant to say the government had saved the banks; he accidentally said saved the world. The Tories opposite mocked him mercilessly. But he was right.

All of us have lived with the consequences since. In the short term, the lack of money available for companies and businesses led to a deep, painful recession, the worst in living memory. The £500 billion that Brown and Darling poured into the UK financial markets left the government in massive debt. When Labour went down to electoral defeat in 2010, the new Coalition government made it a priority to pay those debts back, which it did by sharply cutting spending on other government services. In the UK, this double whammy of deep recession and government cutbacks has led to what many have termed a 'lost decade.' My generation, those of us who came into the workforce during this lost decade, will live with the impact of the autumn of 2008 forever, as it forecast we will never catch up with our parents, or those below us, in terms of lost earnings.

But it is the psychological impact that has lingered most. At the time, there was outrage that the greed of investment bankers had taken us to edge of the precipice, peered over, and nearly taken the entire Western world with them. 'Banker bashing' became an accepted part of life, and it became toxic to say that you worked in the City of London, or on Wall Street. But those responsible were not held to account, save in some minor and token ways. The decade of low growth and austerity that followed wouldn't have been solved by jailing some City of London executives. But the notion did take hold that those at the top had wreaked havoc, and had been allowed to get away with it. It was believed that the notion, of those in far away places living it up at the expense of those struggling to get by, would benefit political parties of the left. Instead, it is the populist right that has seized the narrative and run with it. It is just possible, in the images of tumbling market and bankers losing their jobs, to see the shadows of Donald Trump, Brexit, and any number of backlash screams, coming to being in the background.

What I can clearly remember was how it felt. I was 18, in the last few weeks before I headed off to university, and the entire world seemed to be falling in. I followed the story avidly. It was my first introduction to economics, American politics, and the first clear difference in UK politics I was aware of. It was also the first truly global historic event that I had ever lived through. It shaped my outlook on how the world should, and could, be run. I will always remain a child of 2008.

Prague in the Spring Time

For many Czechoslovaks, it was the noise that alerted them. As day broke on August 21st 1968, they were woken by loud, rumbling noises in the streets. At first, many assumed they were hearing a large vehicle go past. But then it continued. Those brave enough to peer outside soon found out the truth. The country's worst nightmare had come true. The Soviet Union had invaded Czechoslovakia.

The 1960s was the height of the Cold War. That meant that the countries in Eastern Europe languished under Soviet domination, and had done since they were overrun by the Red Army in the dying days of the Second World War. The Yalta and Potsdam agreements, signed between the victorious Allies, had committed the USSR to holding free and fair elections in the countries it had invaded. But no country led by Joseph Stalin was going to allow that. The regimes in these countries imposed one-party communist rule, and were to all intents and purposes Soviet puppet regimes. Dissent was ruthlessly crushed, with the full apparatus of secret police and stifling authoritarianism imported directly from the Soviet Union.

Only two countries had dared to break the mould. In the late 1940s, the leader of Yugoslavia, Tito, made it clear that he was willing to accept American money to rebuild his country. This lead to Yugoslavia leaving the Soviet sphere of influence, and forging its own middle way between the East and the West. In reality, the communist world probably wasn't big enough for the dominant personalities of Tito and Stalin. In Hungary in 1956, a new leader, Nagy, attempted to dismantle the communist system, and take Hungary out of the Warsaw Pact. This brief flowering of freedom had been swiftly crushed by Soviet forces, and Nagy was brought to Moscow as a prisoner and executed. Since then, political and cultural freedom behind the Iron Curtain was vastly curtailed.

But then along came Czechoslovakia in 1968. In January of that year, Alexander Dubcek became leader of the country, and introduced a package of mild reforms. The idea was to allow a measure of democratisation, free speech, and cultural expression, whilst simultaneously allowing the Czechoslovak communist party to hold on to power. Dubcek called these reforms 'socialism with a human face.' The cultural output, and the noisy free press, that emerged from under the shadow of repression was known as the Prague Spring.

The leadership of the USSR was not amused. Despite Dubcek's assurances of his commitment to communism and the Warsaw Pact, they saw this as the first chink in the armour of the Eastern Bloc. Having failed to dissuade Dubcek, at midnight on 21st August 1968 armies from the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia and deposed the Dubcek government. Despite Dubcek's call for no resistance, there were widespread protests against the Soviet invasion, and thousands confronted the Soviet forces on the streets. This so spooked the Soviets that they refrained from formally removing Dubcek until the following year. Protests continued, and in January 1969 Czech student Jan Palach burned himself to death in Wenceslas Square in Prague. Thousands attended his funeral.

Yet the damage was done, and there was no going back. Dubcek was removed, a new leader installed, the secret police resumed their activities, protests ebbed, and authoritarianism once again returned to Czechoslovakia.

This was a severe test for the Western alliance. The Truman Doctrine had committed the USA to supporting any people or government attempting to throw off communism. In 1956, the Suez Crisis had prevented a unified, credible response to the invasion of Hungary. Surely, this was the West's time?

But it failed. It was only six years since the world had teetered on the brink of nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and there was no appetite for another showdown with the USSR. Even had it wanted to, the USA was in no position to respond. It was already bogged down in an anti-communist war in Vietnam, and the full scale of the quagmire was becoming apparent, with public support for the war in free fall, and massive protests starting to be seen. The US was also in the middle of a political crisis; the 1968 election was threatening to tear the country apart. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had died at the hands of assassins' bullets, the President had been forced to abandon his re-election bid, the Democratic Party was engulfed in a civil war, race riots were rocking the largest cities, and the spectre of racist George Wallace and the hardliner Richard Nixon hung over the electorate. With the leader of the Atlantic Alliance consumed by crisis, the rest of the West hung back. The Czechoslovaks were on their own.

The long term consequences of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia were huge. It created the Brezhnev Doctrine, whereby the USSR said that any attempt to leave the Eastern Bloc would be met with force by the Warsaw Pact. Across the Eastern bloc, many communists who agreed with Dubcek and wanted reform, and those who wished to see communism done away with entirely, were cowed into silence by fear that the USSR would come crashing down on them. For now, it looked as if the Soviet Union's hegemony over Easter Europe was complete.

But the crushing of the Prague Spring also showed that armed force was all that would keep the communist regimes in place. There hadn't been many Czechoslovaks committed to stopping Dubcek. The idea that communism was a force for human good and progress was shattered. The invasion also drove many left wingers in the West away from support for the communist regimes. Since the 1920s, there had been many Western communists who had either pretended that the hard edge of the Soviet system was capitalist propaganda, or acknowledged its repression by saying that a few eggs would needed to be broken in the making of the omelette of the worker's paradise. But now the USSR was clearly shown as the authoritarian dictatorship the Soviet people already knew it to be. In both East and West, support for communism began to slide.

Lastly, but perhaps most significantly, an entire generation of Czechoslovak activists was inspired by the brief period of freedom they had enjoyed. They hoped that, one day, they could reprise their moment in the sun. They were the ones who would, two decades later, take the lead in tearing down the communist regime in the Velvet Revolution.

Czechoslovak citizens confronting the Soviet soldiers in Prague

(For more photos showing the Soviet invasion, only published this week, follow this link.)

Slaying the Giant: 70 Years of the NHS

It shall be the duty of the Minister of Health... to promote the establishment in England and Wales of a comprehensive health service designed to secure improvements in the physical and mental health of the people of England and Wales and the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illness...

The services so provided shall be free of charge

So reads the first two clauses of the National Health Service Act of 1946. 18 months after being given Royal Assent, the law came into force. On the 5th July 1948, the British National Health Service was born.

How great a leap of progress this was can be seen from the uptake of the new service. People presented themselves at hospitals, doctors, dentists, and opticians, many for the first time in their lives. Doctors were shocked at what they saw, appalled at the ill health of the nation. Many people had endured decades of chronic pain, living with conditions not expected to be seen in a modern democracy. Before 1948, disease and pain had been balanced by the shadow of the cost of seeking treatment. The ragtag of insurance schemes, benevolent funds, and company insurance schemes didn't even begin to cover everyone. For millions, they suffered in silence and in the shadows. But now, with the fear of not being able to afford it gone, things were different. The NHS had sent those old fears packing, forever.

It is often said to be Labour's greatest achievement. From the ashes of a difficult war and cripplingly expensive victory, Clement Attlee and his government had taken a huge step towards slaying Disease, one of the Five Giants laid out in the Beveridge Report of 1942. It was to be a pillar of the New Jerusalem they were building.

In reality, it was more complicated than that. Nye Bevan, the strident left-winger appointed as Minister of Health, cut deal after deal with deeply sceptical, conservative, medical practitioners to get the new NHS off the ground. "I stuffed their mouths with gold," he is reputed to have boasted afterwards about the consultants. And the entirely free nature of the service didn't last long. Charges were brought in the early 1950s, to pay for Britain's involvement in the Korean War. Although they were abolished in 1965, they returned after devaluation in 1968, never to be rid of again. And since the day the NHS launched, there have been arguments over the cost, waste, management, organisation, and level of private involvement. And the rumours that it is to be abolished have always swirled, never far from the surface.

Yet despite all this, the NHS is one of Britain's proudest achievements. It was the first truly universal healthcare system established anywhere in the world. It is the largest free at the point of use healthcare system anywhere in the world. It is one of the world's largest employers, and at the forefront of medical progress. 

Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher's Chancellor, once said of the NHS that it was the closest thing the people of England have to a religion. For once, I reckon he's right.

Nye Bevan, speaking to patients on the first day of the NHS, 5th July 1948

The Wit and Wisdom of... Bobby Kennedy, Mk III

Each nation has different obstacles and different goals, shaped by the vagaries of history and of experience. Yet as I talk to young people around the world, I am impressed not by the diversity but by the closeness of their goals, their desires and their concerns and their hope for the future. There is discrimination in New York, the racial inequality of apartheid in South Africa, and serfdom in the mountains of Peru. People starve to death in the streets of India; a former Prime Minister is summarily executed in the Congo; intellectuals go to jail in Russia, and thousands are slaughtered in Indonesia; wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere in the world.

These are different evils, but they are the common works of man. They reflect the imperfections of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, the defectiveness of our sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellows; they mark the limit of our ability to use knowledge for the well-being of our fellow human beings throughout the world. And therefore they call upon common qualities of conscience and indignation, a shared determination to wipe away the unnecessary sufferings of our fellow human beings at home and around the world.

It is these qualities which make of our youth today the only true international community. More than this, I think that we could agree on what kind of a world we would all want to build. It would be a world of independent nations, moving toward international community, each of which protected and respected the basic human freedoms. It would be a world which demanded of each government that it accept its responsibility to ensure social justice. It would be a world of constantly accelerating economic progress -- not material welfare as an end in/of itself, but as a means to liberate the capacity of every human being to pursue his talents and to pursue his hopes. It would, in short, be a world that we would all be proud to have built.

Robert F Kennedy, giving the day of affirmation address at Cape Town University, 6th June 1966. Two years later to the day, he was gunned down in a hotel kitchen in California, while battling for the 1968 Democratic Party nomination for President.

Bobby Kennedy, announcing his victory in the California Primary. Minutes later, he was shot and killed.

Michael Gove, J'accuse

Michael Gove.

Now you've recovered a bit, let me apologise for giving you the nightmarish reminder of his existence. Unfortunately, this post is about him.

More directly, it is about how the ticking time bomb he built into the education system have begun to detonate.

Amazing as it seems, Gove actually ceased to be Education Secretary back in 2014. Since then, he has been Conservative Chief Whip (remember the time he got locked in the toilet?!), Justice Secretary, and is currently in charge of the department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Along the way, he helped to put a bomb under the political stability of the country by campaigning for Brexit, decried the existence of experts, and even launched a long shot bid for the premiership, which luckily failed, and even more luckily stopped the country being lumbered with Boris Johnson as the Prime Minister.

But it is for his time in charge of Britain's schools that he will be most remembered. And his education legacy is only now coming home to roost. For every major subject other than English and maths, 2018 marks the rolling out of the new GCSEs. These were revamped, largely due to concerns over 'dumbing down' (politically motivated criticisms, rather than being based on any actual evidence). There has been a reduction in modular assessment, and the focus is now on big exams at the end of two years. Coursework, or controlled assessment (research projects done under exam conditions) have been abolished for everything apart from where it was clearly essential, like art and technology.

I really don't want to get into the merits of the old GCSE vs the new, and how GCSEs compare to the systems that came before them. They're complex issues, and I'm not sure what my view on that debate is.

What I do have very strong views on are the new GCSEs. In particular, the pressure they are putting on teenagers up and down the country. And I know this because I see it, every working day. The looks on the faces of children that haven't slept properly in weeks. Who are still being dragged into school and sat through revision lessons, often long after the end of the school day, because there is so much to get them to remember. The looks of people who have to commit pages of mathematical and scientific formulae to heart, as well as twenty poems, a novel or two, and have a level of knowledge of English grammar that is just mind boggling. And that's just the core subjects of English, maths and science.

Let's take the subject I know best, history. Before this year, the history GCSE consisted of three elements; a piece of coursework, and two exams. This year, it is four elements, which doesn't sound like too bad an increase. But all four elements are now examined, in two exams of 1 hour 45 minutes each. Students in the GCSE history exams next week are getting four booklets of paper for one exam. Do you remember those exam desks?! They couldn't even fit one sheet of paper on!

And that's before we get to the content. I often look at the specification for history and wonder if I would be able to get a grade 9. And I have two history degrees and a number of years experience teaching students.

If this exam system was preparing people for the world of work, that'd be fine. If it was promoting a love of learning, and increasing genuine passion for these subjects, fine. It is achieving none of these things. No wonder exam related stress and anxiety are reaching unprecedented levels. The behaviour of the Y11s at my school has nosedived. It really is easy to see why.

I sat GCSEs in 2005 and 2006 (thanks French for complicating that.) They were not easy. I remember them being incredibly tough and stressful. And they had nothing on what these poor young people are going through. Anyone who smugly thinks 'well, they're just moaning/snowflakes/I did it and it did me no harm' should be forced to undergo the entire new GCSE experience and see how they'd cope. I don't think it would be pretty.

2018 will be the first of many years of stress and anxiety far beyond anything seen before in education, and far beyond what any child should have to endure.

And it can all be laid at the door of one man.

Thanks, Michael Gove. You are generating misery for no readily apparent gain. I hope you're really happy.

In Defence of Edward Heath

One story has dominated the news this week, the almighty cock up made by recent governments over the handling of records belonging to immigrants to Britain during the late 20th century. Named after the infamous ship that carried one of the first major groups of immigrants to post-war Britain, the Empire Windrush, the legal position around the Windrush generation is simple- when they arrived in the United Kingdom, they were citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies, and had the right to move to the United Kingdom, live and work here. Britain was affectionately known as 'the Mother Country,' and thousands of people all around the world looked up to us, and chose to move and help us in our times of hardship after the Second World War. So leave it to the UK to manage to get into a tangle about whether or not now, some 65 plus years later, the people who moved here should be allowed to stay.

Today also marks a linked, particularly repulsive anniversary, 50 years since Enoch Powell, former youngest professor in the British Empire, former youngest Brigadier in the British army, and now a senior Conservative politician, rose to his feet in Birmingham's Midland Hotel, and gave a speech. His speech was a broadside against the Labour government's Race Relations Bill then working its way through the Commons. Powell cited examples of terrified white constituents in Wolverhampton, isolated in their schools and on their streets. To continue with immigration at this level, Powell argued, was proof we were "mad, literally mad, as a nation." "It is like watching a nation, busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre." Although his final line was delivered in Latin, it was a chilling image which gave the speech the name by which it is known: "I am filled with much foreboding. Like the Roman, I see the Tiber foaming with much blood."

The impact of the Rivers of Blood speech was immediate and dramatic. Thousands of London dockers, Labour supporters to the core, marched on Parliament, chanting Powell's name and offering him support. Telegrams and letters poured into politicians and newspapers across Britain, the vast majority of them in support of the views Powell had expressed. In years to come, the phrase 'Enoch was right' was adopted by the far-right, and it was effective. Clearly, there was a powerful groundswell of support for Powell's ideas. When he backed the Conservatives in 1970, and Labour in 1974, support in opinion polls and at the ballot box noticeably shifted.

This post is in defence of a man I wrote my undergraduate thesis about. Edward Heath was the leader of the Conservative party from 1965-1975, and Prime Minister from 1970-1974. History has not been kind to him. He was a pretty poor leader of the Conservative party, and his election win in 1970 was a total shock to everyone apart from himself. He was not easy to get on with, and inspired loathing amongst his many critics. In office, he presided over economic turbulence, with widespread strikes, pay and price freezes, and the drastic imposition of the Three Day Week in 1974, arguably the nadir of post-war British history. Heath also struggled to deal with the total collapse of order in Northern Ireland, with sectarian carnage and the horrific events of Bloody Sunday. Even his one definitive achievement, taking Britain into the European Economic Community, now lies in tatters. When Heath lost his third of four elections in late 1974, his detractors were circling. To finish him off, they persuaded his Education minister to challenge him for the leadership of the Conservatives, even though she was a fairly dreadful candidate herself. But she did better than anyone expected, and so Heath was ousted by a Mrs Margaret Thatcher. And so the world turned.

And yet, Heath deserves credit for two actions , one linked to Powell, one linked to a handling of immigration from the Commonwealth.

When Heath heard what Powell had said in April 1968, he acted instantly. Even though it was fast becoming apparent that Powell's position was immensely popular, Heath moved fast. Before the weekend was over, he had sacked Powell from the front bench of the Conservative party, by phone. The two men never spoke again.

This sent a powerful message to all those itching to follow in Powell's footsteps. Overt racism was a death knell for your career. Powell never held senior office again, eventually leaving the Conservative party, joining the Ulster Unionists, before being ousted from Parliament in 1987. Sacking Powell didn't stop racism in Britain. It didn't even stop racialist coding in British public life. And the ugly genie of racism seems to have been more fully let out of the bottle in recent years. But Heath did draw a line in the sand; overt, crude racism had no place in mainstream British politics.

Heath's other action to be praised for puts this, and indeed most subsequent, governments to shame. In 1972, Uganda's despotic and unhinged leader, Idi Amin, suddenly announced that the substantial Indian population of Uganda had 90 days to leave. Uganda was already a country wracked by violence, and this was seen as a removal of protection for the Ugandan Asians. The Ugandan Asian community numbered around 60,000 people, and it had originated in the days of the British control of Uganda, when they had been forcibly moved there by British colonial administrators. Amin was looking to expropriate the wealth of the Ugandan Asians to enrich himself and his supporters. As Uganda had been a part of the British Empire, most of these Ugandan Asians held British passports, much like the Windrush migrants.

In 1967, a similar situation had arisen in Kenya. In response, the Labour government of Harold Wilson had retroactively changed the law governing citizenship, effectively stripping the Kenyan Asians of their British passports and preventing them from fleeing to the UK. And Heath's government had tightened immigration controls only the year before. Many Conservative backbenchers were off the opinion that Britain had no obligation to these people, and shouldn't take them in, no matter how dire their predicament.

However, after failing to reason with Amin, Heath's government ignored the critics, and the precedent set by Labour in 1967, and agreed to take all those Ugandan Asians who were citizens of the UK and Colonies. Some 30,000 people upped and moved to the UK. Heath persisted with this policy in the face of ferocious opposition, much of it in the name of Powell and his message. It was a courageous policy, and one governments since should look on with a certain amount of shame that they have never made such a bold move to help those in need.

So, on this 50th anniversary of the Rivers of Blood speech, and as the government currently makes an absolute hash out of the issue of whether people who moved here when they were British citizens should be allowed to stay, it is worth remembering the example of Edward Heath. Racialism is beyond the pale. And Britain should help out those in need.

The Hand of History

The deadline was midnight at Friday 10th April, 1998. It came and went. The news crews huddled outside had nothing to report. Inside, the meetings carried on through the night. Exhausted delegates made push after push after push to reach a deal. But many did not believe they would achieve anything, and waiting in the wings were the naysayers, and the men in balaclavas itching to return to violence.

It really is hard to recreate the mindset of the Troubles. The war waged by the IRA against the RUC, the army, and the intelligence services, and the deaths and injuries amongst innocent bystanders that stemmed from this attempt to drive Britain from Norther Ireland, was bad enough. But even worse are the nakedly sectarian murders carried out by both republican and loyalist paramilitaries, in which people were killed simply because of who they were, or who others believed them to be.

By 1998, this cycle of horror had continued for just over thirty years. The descent of the province into anarchy from the mid-60s onwards had cost the lives of around 3500 people by 1998. Nearly 50,000 had received life changing injuries. Hundreds of thousands were left with deep psychological scars.  Miscarriages of justice occurred, with innocent people imprisoned as killers continued to roam the streets. The British and Irish police and intelligence services buckled under the pressure of keeping the peace, with elements within both police forces aiding those who were breaking the law and taking innocent lives. The political failure to even come close to solving the problem was absolute. Those elected to represent the people of Northern Ireland were barely able to share a room with those they saw as their eternal opponents.

The years were littered with failed initiatives to try and bring an end to the carnage. The Stormont parliament had failed to reform itself quickly enough, and so had been abolished. The Sunningdale Agreement, a ray of false power sharing sunshine from the early 1970s, had been brought down by a Unionist general strike. The assembly of the 1980s had been a non starter. For many, 1988 seemed to be the pit of despair. Three IRA members were shot dead by the SAS in Gibraltar. At their funerals, a loyalist gunman opened fire on the mourners. At their funerals, two British soldiers were dragged from their cars, beaten and shot. Even the act of burying the dead was now an opportunity to wreak sectarian havoc. A picture of a Catholic priest kneeling over the soldiers, administering the last rites, was beamed around the world, epitomising the abyss into which Northern Ireland had sunk.

But in the pocket of Father Alec Reid was a letter, now soaked in the blood of the dying. It was from Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA. At the time, Adams was seen as so dangerous, so vile, that his voice was not allowed to even be heard by the British people, to deprive him of the "oxygen of publicity," as Margaret Thatcher put it. The letter was being sent to John Hume, the leader of the nationalist political party, the SDLP, and a long time advocate for peaceful change in Northern Ireland. Two less likely allies couldn't be imagined. But, thanks to the work of Father Alec Reid, the two men were corresponding. The letter set out the position of Sinn Fein for an end to the 'armed struggle,' and asked the SDLP leader for his take on them.

From this letter flowed everything else that follows, commonly called the peace process. It was complex, painful, and littered with false starts. The tale of how that letter leads to Stormont on Good Friday of 1998 is too long, too confusing to be told here. The IRA and loyalist paramilitaries went on and off ceasefire. Governments in both Britain and Ireland came and went. Talks started, stopped, restarted, and stalled. 

Even as 1998 dawned, the prospects for a deal seemed slim. Both Sinn Fein and the loyalist political parties were suspended from the talks after the IRA and UDA continued to murder. The reluctance of the loyalist paramilitaries to enter talks was only overcome when Mo Mowlam, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, went into the notorious Maze prison to negotiate directly with the imprisoned leadership of the paramilitaries.

Which brings us to that hectic round of talks in 1998. The US senator chairing the talks, George Mitchell, set a deadline of midnight on Friday 10th April for a resolution. At half past midnight on Tuesday 7th, Mitchell presented what he thought was the final draft. The unionists rejected it. This triggered an unprecedented flurry of activity. Both Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, the British and Irish prime ministers, dropped everything that they were doing and headed to Belfast, throwing themselves into the talks. Blair managed to break a promise in the same sentence he made it, vowing no soundbites before launching into one.

In Washington, Bill Clinton was on and off the phone non-stop. Round the clock meant round the clock- some of the most senior politicians in Britain and Ireland slept on their office floors for two days. At one stage, a row broke out over whether Ulster Scots was a Celtic language. Only quick intervention stopped that derailing the deal.

Finally, 17 and a half hours late, Mitchell announced a deal was struck. The principle of consent was enshrined, whereby Northern Ireland would remain a part of the UK, as long as most people who live there want it to; on the flip side, it was recognised that it was perfectly legitimate to want a United Ireland. Citizenship of both the UK and the Republic of Ireland was made available to everyone in Northern Ireland. Cultural differences were to be respected and tolerated. A Northern Irish Assembly was to be created, with power shared across the nationalist and unionist communities. A framework of institutions was made across the Irish border, and between Britain and Ireland. The police were to be reformed, and the army would eventually withdraw. The border was to be fully reopened. Prisoners who had committed terrorist crimes were to be released. Crucially, the 'men of violence' were to hand over their weapons, and commit themselves to peaceful means.

At the time, it was obvious that something momentous had been achieved, and the delight of the politicians, and many people in Ireland, was evident. The deal was put to a referendum, both north and south of the border. A copy of the agreement was sent to every household in Northern Ireland, to give everyone the chance to scrutinise the deal. In the Republic, 94% of people voted in favour. In Northern Ireland, 71% backed the deal, on an incredibly high turnout of 81%. In recognition of their roles in securing this remarkable deal, John Hume and David Trimble (the leader of the largest unionist party) were awarded the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize (seen here with Bono, who did not win the prize).

It has not all been plain sailing since. Many in the unionist community were deeply suspicious of the deal, and felt they were giving up part of their British identity, while the nationalists and republicans were being given a blank cheque. Ian Paisley's hardline DUP refused to sign the deal, and campaigned against it. The Ulster Unionist Party split, and was wiped out in the process. On the republican side, many in the IRA were unable to abandon the dream of a United Ireland. The IRA split, with the Real IRA continuing to wage war, most notably in the Omaha bombing of August 1998, the single worst incident of the Troubles. For those who remained committed to a peaceful solution, the arguments over policing, symbols, and giving up weapons nearly derailed the agreement many times. It took until 2007 for a lasting power sharing arrangement to be formed, headed by the unlikely partners of the more hardline Sinn Fein and the DUP. A year ago, deep lingering mistrust pulled the rug from under the Northern Ireland Executive, and it remains suspended. The Brexit vote has thrown the future of the cross-border arrangements into serious doubt.

And yet, for all the difficulties, and a serious lack of reconciliation between the two sides, the Good Friday Agreement marks the moment when the guns stopped. Since 1998, around 150 people have been killed in terrorist related violence in Northern Ireland. That is 150 too many, but a massive improvement on the c.3500 killed before 1998. A serious campaign continues to be waged by dissident republicans, loyalist groups have turned to violent crime, and there are rumours that the Provisional IRA continues to exist somewhere in the shadows. But for the vast majority of people in Northern Ireland, a return to the sectarian carnage that blighted the late 60s, 70s, 80s and early 90s is virtually unthinkable. An entire generation has now grown up and become adults with no memories, no experience of what the Troubles was like. It will take time, possibly generations, and there are many challenges on the road ahead. It won't be easy, and will require a lot of hard work, not just from Northern Irish leaders, but from Britain and Ireland too. But peace is a process. On that April day in 1998, it got a massive push to get the ball rolling. Maybe Tony Blair was right about that hand of history after all.

The Wit and Wisdom of... Charles V

I have done all I could, and I am sorry I could do no better

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of half of Europe, on his abdication of his titles, October 1555.

Put up or shut down

By the end of today, the US government may cease to function.

Cue the wits who will say this happened a year ago, when Donald Trump became president. But it is a serious business. From midnight, US federal employees will be sent home from work, not knowing when they will return. Non essential services run by the federal government, such as museums, national parks, and various levels of administration, will just stop. Athough essential services will continue to run, the government will grind to a halt.

This is not the first time this has happened. When the Congress doesn't agree a budget bill, a shutdown kicks in. These rules, in place since 1979, have resulted in 10 shutdowns. Under Reagan and Bush Senior, these lasted no more than 3 days. Clinton's duel with Newt Gingrich lengethed the shutdowns, to 5 days in 1995, then 21 days from 1995-1996. Obama, in the autumn of 2013, presided over a 17 day shutdown, fuelled by Republican opposition to Obamacare.

A key feature of these shutdowns is the divided nature of the US government. Under Reagan and Obama, their shutdowns were caused in part by the fact that their party only had majorities in the Senate; the opposite party controlled the House. Both Bush Senior and Clinton were at the mercy of the entire Congress being controlled by their opponents; in Clinton's case the Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, was a bitter enemy that exacerbated the problem. The US constitution gives great credence to the 'separation of powers,' where the legislature and the executive balance each other out. Add in the divides of political parties, and it is no wonder gridlock can occur.

As you'd expect, Trump has shattered what comes before. His party holds 51 seats in the Senate, to his opponents' 49, and 238 seats in the House of Representatives, versus 193 Democrats. When he took office, there was a lot of disquiet about the potential power of one political party controlling the presidency and both chambers of Congress. Especially when that party is headed by Donald bloody Trump.

Yet somehow, here we are, hours away from the first shutdown to occur in an era when one political party controls the entire political machinery. And somehow Trump is trying to blame the Democrats. That's like blaming the other team's spectators when your football team loses.

It is a hell of an accomplishment. Just not quite in the way Trump wanted...

Clinton and Gingrich, displaying their loathing in 1995. At least they were on different sides...

2017 in Books

I read some stuff last year. It was all pretty good.

Target- 23

Books read- 24

Numbers of new books- 24

Fiction/Non-fiction ratio- 5:19 (bad year for fiction!)
Longest Book- The Clinton Wars, Sidney Blumenthal, 832 pgs.
Shortest Book- The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving, 19 pgs.
Quickest Read- The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving; May 26th 2017 - May 27th 2017.
Longest Read- Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, Hunter S. Thompson; October 24th 2016 - February 10th 2017.
Most Read Authors- No repeat reads this year!
Ebooks- The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving; Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest, Wade Davis; The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda's Road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright.
Audio books- The Divine Comedy, Dante
Useless Fact- Elizabethan England was not all the golden age it was cracked up to be!

The List

Red Army Faction Blues, Ada Wilson

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, Hunter S. Thompson

The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I, Stephen Alford

Enemy of God, Bernard Cornwell

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving

The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell

The Clinton Wars, Sidney Blumenthal

In Search of the Dark Ages, Michael Wood

The Lion of Comarre & Against the Fall of Night, Arthur C. Clarke

A Time to Dance, A Time to Die; The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518, John Waller

Michael Collins,  Leon Ó Broin

Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts, Christopher de Hamel

Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest, Wade Davis

Britannia Obscura: Mapping Britain's Hidden Landscapes, Joanna Parker

The Blunders of our Governments, Anthony King and Ivor Crewe

American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division, Michael Cohen

The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Very Short Introduction, Martin Bunton

The Making of the English Landscape, W.G. Hoskins

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda's Road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright

The Divine Comedy, Dante

A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, Andrew Chaikin

A Blaze of Autumn Sunshine: The Last Diaries, Tony Benn

The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany, Richard Evans
The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England, Ian Mortimer