2013-06-19T20:03:50-04:00 Michael Buerk http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=michael-buerk Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Michael Buerk Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1763403 2012-08-10T19:00:00-04:00 2012-10-10T05:12:15-04:00

Michael Buerk http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-buerk/
Half Britain's medallists at Beijing went to private schools. Our gold medallists this time started with the rowers Helen Glover and Heather Stanning (Millfield and Gordonstoun, respectively), the shooter, Peter Wilson (Millfield again) and Sir Chris Hoy (George Watson's, Edinburgh). "Wholly unacceptable", trumpeted the chairman of the British Olympic Association, Lord Moynihan (Monmouth, in case you wondered).."one of the worst statistics in British sport". Sentiments echoed by the Prime Minister (Eton, of course).

There are two things to be said about this. First, it's not just the private sector's better facilities or the insane sale of state school playing fields. State schoolchildren have been crippled by the anti-competitive ethos - nobody can win, because nobody must be allowed to lose - not to mention state school teachers' famous reluctance to do more than they think they're paid for. (Private schoolchildren spend twice as much time playing sport than state schoolchildren).

The second is that it doesn't matter. Sport's a sideshow, a distraction.

What's really important is how the privately educated are tightening their hold on most of the commanding heights of British life. Social mobility hasn't just seized up, it's gone into reverse.

The Education Secretary, Michael Gove - Robert Gordon's Institute (scholarship, though, and as the adopted son of an Aberdeen fish merchant he's more Moses basket than top drawer) - pointed out that not only are most of the cabinet privately educated, but so are many of many of Labour's senior figures - Ed Balls, Harriet Harman, for instance. A third of the House of Commons went to independent schools.

Only 7% of our children go to these schools but 88% of our senior judges came from them, along with half the country's barristers. This proportion is rising. For instance, in 1988, 59% of the partners at Britain' five biggest law firms were privately educated; now it's 71%. The same is true of most of the professions. A third of students studying to be doctors and dentists now come from the independent sector. The arts are dominated by them - theatre, cinema, even pop music. Comics - McIntyre, Baddiel, Ianucci, Armstrong, Mitchell. The BBC is a private school old boys and girls' association. Most of our newspapers are edited by them - even the Daily Mirror and that scourge of privilege, the Guardian, which has been edited by public schoolboys for the last 60 years.

This is not, or not just, entrenched privilege. As a broad generalisation, private schools have better qualified teachers, smaller classes ( half the size, on average) and a more disciplined, achieving ethos. They certainly get better results. More straight As at A level than all the comprehensives put together. Often in harder subjects, too.

Gerrymandering the system to push less achieving state schoolchildren ahead of their more successful private school counterparts is not the answer. Levelling up is.

Grammar schools gave poorer, bright children unlimited opportunities and changed the face of British society. For more than 30 years, 10 Downing Street was occupied by people who went to state schools, Harold Wilson to John Major. The few grammar schools that remain do as well as the best private schools.

Selection works for bright children. It surely could be done more flexibly than the once-and-for-all 11+. Perhaps it's simply not possible to provide a different education for the less academic that is equally worthwhile and pushes them to realize their potential - though other countries seem to do it.

Things are changing in the existing state system, but not fast or far enough. Their lack of ambition betrays our children, particularly the cleverest. A recent survey found that less than half the teachers in state secondary schools would advise their brightest pupils to try for Oxford or Cambridge; a tragedy to haunt us long after the Olympic triumphs are forgotten.





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Michael Buerk http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-buerk/
We're deluded to think the ancient games were some sort of heroic contest that spread purity and peace. The athletes were professional, often cheats, the sponsors bribed their way to glory and the Greek city states were perpetually fighting each other.

The Olympics were reinvented by a French baron who, initially at least, hoped sport would make his countrymen, who had just been humiliated in the Franco-Prussian war, better able to fight. He later became an enthusiast for Hitler, as were the other two men who've dominated the Olympic movement, the American anti-Semite, Avery Brundage, and Juan Antonio Samaranch, a card-carrying fascist who was one of Franco's right-hand men. Incidentally, the Olympic torch we have clapped round Britain was first used by Goebbels to glorify the Third Reich.

The Olympic ideal is enshrined in an organising committee as self-serving and historically corrupt as any in world sport...and, believe me, that is a fierce competition. They demand the Zil lanes and the best seats which they are, apparently, too busy being lushed up to use.

The opening ceremony was a triumph of delusions. It was brilliant, spectacular, and - in every sense - fantastic. Merrie England as a pre-lapsarian idyll was fantasy, the industrial revolution as mere despoliation, rather than the birthplace of modernity, was, let's say, one-sided, and the glorification of the NHS surely inexplicable to foreigners with demonstrably better health care.

The sport, itself, started with the traditional collapse of Great British Hopes. The football team capped half a century of national non-achievement by failing to beat Senegal, a ramshackle corner of Africa where most people can't afford a football. The British team's captain, an elderly Welshman, sportingly refused to sing the national anthem. The British cyclist who couldn't lose promptly did with equal ill-grace. The main BBC News devoted nearly all the programme to the Olympics everybody had already seen after we scrambled a bronze. The days when Britain won more medals than every other country put together - and, for that matter, when the BBC understood that news was more than what people were talking about in the pub - are long gone.
The games weren't under budget. Even the officially acknowledged £9 billion plus is four times the figure we were given when we were sold the idea.

They won't bring significant economic benefits; no recent games have. The Olympic visitors are far less numerous than the regular tourists we've frightened away. Central London's a ghost town. One and a half million Londoners aren't coming into work. Big stores say they've lost 70% of their business. The Olympic village has already been sold at a reported loss to the taxpayer of £275 million.

The games won't make us healthier, or more sporty. We're the most obese nation in Europe and getting worse, thanks in no small measure to the Olympics sponsors, by the way. Academic studies show "mega events" have no net impact at all. We used to be good at running in circles and chucking things. But now state schools have flogged off their playing fields and state teachers can't stand winners because they don't want anybody to lose, we're left with the fringe sports only private schools can afford to play.

But, you know what? It's time to get off the fence. I am learning to love the games...first the collective experience, standing in warm and wonderful crowds, high fiving the motor cycle cops who've been grandstanding shamelessly - never have the filth been so feted.

The opening ceremony was a glorious, and totally accurate, celebration of our national self-delusion. If we can't be powerful, or successful, we can at least be eccentric and show off.

I even like the sport. Beach volleyball, of course - Health and Efficiency at Horse Guards. Irresistible. But also the highly technical, obsessive stuff, triple inward pikes and so on. I look at those gymnasts and, instead of thinking how sad you have to be spending every waking moment swiveling on a bit of overstuffed furniture, I think: magnificent! Gold medals - at last! Perhaps I need counselling.

The cynic in me is not dead, but on a fortnight's holiday. Second thoughts: make that a week.





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Michael Buerk http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-buerk/
President Obama promised that - I quote - "out of this darkness a brighter day will come" - it won't, of course, because he won't do anything about guns and the culture of his society, like ours, is becoming ever more infantile.

The Colorado killer was an unstable loner - even his parents thought he was seriously weird - yet he was able legally to buy a semi-automatic assault rifle, two pistols and a pump action shotgun, not to mention 6000 rounds of ammunition, poison gas and explosives.

America's love affair with the gun is inexplicable. The second amendment to the constitution, establishing the citizen's right to bear arms, was drafted when Americans needed muskets to fight off redcoats, and go hunting buffalo. They're now the world's only superpower, the redcoats' successors would have trouble invading the Isle of Wight and most Americans do their hunting in MacDonalds. Yet half the population lives in a household with a gun.

Children and madmen love guns for the same reason - they make the weak feel strong. The gun's transformative power gives the inadequate the drop on those he fears and envies. It is a magic wand for immature saddos. In a properly run country, wanting a gun would automatically disqualify you from ever owning one.

So much, so obvious. What about Batman? How much is he to blame? The Denver mass murderer dressed up as the Joker and replayed one of his celluloid crimes. It would be easy, too easy, to talk about copy-cat killings and get all facile and righteous. Anyway, it's worse than that.

When did kid's comics become the staple fare of supposedly adult entertainment? Okay, the 'superhero' (pause to register the meaningless linguistic inflation that reduces mere heroes to the ranks) has production values, a little ambiguity and the odd wry aside. But the superhero movies are infantile in the sense that life is reduced to an elemental battle between good and evil, when reality is nothing of the sort. Those we regard as most evil - those who administered the Holocaust, or Apartheid,for instance, maybe even these mad mass murderers, thought their objectives were noble, even if their methods were regrettable.

What's the difference between them and the Superhero's vigilantism... which is all about fighting criminals by submitting them to endless violence at the hands of men in masks. Batman's director says his work is an exploration of ends justifying means - Himmler would probably have said the same.

It's not just a matter of all this cosmic kick-ass desensitising our moral judgement. Superheroes rehash old myths that lure us into dangerous simplicities. They have a journey - child of privilege, born to distinguished parents. The parents somehow have to abandon him, he is saved by a surrogate carer.. then he grows up, discovers his origins and finds his purpose. Sounds familiar? Not just Batman and Superman, but Tarzan, Hercules, Oedipus, Moses -and, well, Jesus.

It's time we grew up and started to look at the world through adult eyes. We don't need guns, or superheroes, or, for that matter, God.

As the Batman credits say: We don't get the hero we need; we get the hero we deserve.





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Michael Buerk http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-buerk/
Faced with the prospect of being sued over atrocities said to have been committed in the last days of Empire, the Foreign Office turned to an obscure judgement over fishing licences around the island of South Georgia, to try to prove that responsibility for the acts of colonial governments passed to the new government at independence, rather than staying with the former Imperial power. It was shameful and the judge rightly threw it out.

So, three frail and elderly Kenyans appeared this week in the High Court, with Britain's colonial reputation on trial.

They claim to have been tortured - one says he was castrated - during the campaign against the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s.

The Mau Mau, it must be said, were vile. After swearing to magical oaths, they butchered children, they tortured, mutilated and murdered - mostly Africans - who would not join their movement. The Kenyan government now calls them heroes, and has a national day in October to honour them, which is a despicable re-writing of history.

But the British response to the uprising was also brutal, driven by the atavistic fears of the settlers in the so-called White Highlands, commonly regarded as the most snobbish and racist in the Empire.

Tens of thousands of Kenyans were sent to detention camps where many were subjected to torture and extreme violence. Much of this seems to have been covered up. The (Kenyan) Attorney General at the time minuted: "If we're going to sin, we must sin quietly".

Even now, the Foreign Office is trying to stop the case, arguing it happened so long ago there isn't the evidence, or surviving witnesses, for a fair trial.

Unfortunately for them, truckloads of official documents from that era have recently been uncovered. (They had been secretly stored in a government-owned manor house near Milton Keynes.)

Historians who've seen some of them say they detail systematic abuses that seem to have been known, and tacitly approved, at the highest level in London.

As a child of empire, and a long-time foreign correspondent in Africa, my first instinct is to say - hang on a minute...this is a continent where two million people have been murdered by their own governments since Independence. A continent where colonialism, for all the faults we see so clearly now, was often a brief interval of peace and efficient government, between long periods of cruel and incompetent dictatorship. Where many Africans are still actually worse off than their parents and grandparents who lived under British rule. Kenya, in particular, is one of the most corrupt countries on earth with more to worry about than a 60-year-old dirty war against murderous terrorists.

But this is moral relativism of the worst kind. We can't lecture others about human rights and try to escape responsibility for our abuse of them. It's wrong to be so ashamed of our imperial past. But it would be worse to deny justice to its innocent victims.



You can find more of my content at: The Fifth Column]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1668225 2012-07-13T19:00:00-04:00 2012-09-12T05:12:11-04:00

Michael Buerk http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-buerk/
At what point in the history of the last hundred years did the stiff upper lip start to quiver; Did it stop being shameful for a grown man to burst into tears just because he came second in a game? Did it become possible for a serial runner-up to become 'champion of our hearts' not with a bang, but a whimper?

The television commentator with an inappropriateness that was almost sublime, quoted Rudyard Kipling's wonderful hymn to phlegm If. You know - "If you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat these two imposters just the same" - and there was Murray, weeping.

Shortly after Kipling wrote that poem, in 1908, London staged the Olympic games. (I know because they were held in the White City stadium in Shepherds Bush, now, in a metaphor for national decline a media centre. Round the back, though, is a plaque recording the medal winners.)

Great Britain (we've dropped the Great these days, have you noticed?) won more medals than all the other countries combined. Three times as many as the next most successful nation, the United States. They were the whiners then, refusing to dip their flag to Edward the Seventh, lodging official protests every day. And losing.

Their tug-of-war team was yanked off its feet by a squad of Liverpool bobbies who accepted gold with just a gruff handshake. Several of the marathon runners almost died - they ran in sweltering heat and refreshed themselves with brandy, champagne and - I kid you not - rat poison. They panted, but did not sob, and went home on the bus. Britain's greatest Olympic swimmer - three golds in 1908 - spent the rest of his days as a penniless attendant at the local baths, without complaint. For many of Britain's medallists, their last competitive event was to be the Somme. Their widows would have cried, I am sure, but they wouldn't be seen dead doing so.

It's sad that the effortless supremacy of Britain at the apex of its fortunes should have been so reduced that it hasn't won a men's tennis championship for three generations, or a major football competition for nearly half a century. Sadder still that the Corinthian ideal should have been so comprehensively buried. The organiser of the 1908 games was a rowing and running double blue, an Olympic fencer, who swam Niagara twice and climbed the Matterhorn three times; was an MP at 25, and the finest public speaker of his generation. We have John Terry.

Saddest of all is the death of reticence. Self control used to be considered a virtue, now it is regarded as dysfunctional. If we don't display our feelings, we obviously don't have any. They must be trotted out for the gratification of the mob who feel belittled by achievement, excluded by dignity.

Keith Miller, the Australian test cricketer, who'd been a fighter pilot in the second World War, summed it up, coarsely but brilliantly.

At a tense stage of a postwar Ashes series an Australian reporter asked him: "Are you feeling the pressure, Keith?"

"Look, Mate", Miller replied, " A Messerschmit up the arse is pressure, this is just an effing game, all right?"

No Longer. It's enough to make you weep.



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Michael Buerk http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-buerk/ Fifty Shades of Grey, a poorly written, passingly pornographic novel that has become the fastest selling book of all time. Its puerile plot and kinky sex has sold 10 million paperbacks in America, a million E-books on Amazon; Hollywood stars are fighting to appear in the movie. The author, a British woman going under the name of E.L. James, is a squillionaire having already outpaced J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown (an even worse writer), the Koran and the Bible.

It's invented a literary genre, 'Mummy Porn'. The women who buy it are predominantly in their 30s and 40s. An entire female generation seems swept up in a story of a young virgin submitting to lots - and lots - of sado-masochistic sex at the hands, and the instruments, indeed, of a post-modern Marquis de Sade.

Feminists are beside themselves trying to explain how this could happen; how women, the powerful, independent women of the 21st Century, should be so fascinated by female powerlessness and subjugation. One suggestion - that the fantasy of submission is a welcome escape for women who are now taking care of everybody else ("the relentless responsibility of the modern woman's life", as Newsweek put it) - lit the blue touchpaper of feminist sensibilities. Another - that women have always loved porn (or, in these non-judgemental times, 'erotica') and E-books, Kindles and so on mean they can do so without others noticing, has also had short shrift.

There must be more to it, and, of course there is. Even I, a bewildered, elderly male whose notions of pornography involve strapping girls with beach balls, dimly discerns it.

Take the characters. The anti-hero, the whip wielder, is hardly Sir Jasper. He's an Adonis, we're told over and over again, who's a piano prodigy and wine connoisseur who's made his billions out of renewable energy - ha! - and is desperate to feed the Third World, right on! Sure, he knocks her about, but rubs in baby oil afterwards. New monster or what?

The tiresome virgin (you don't have to be a sadist to have the urge to slap her) is actually in control... negotiating the details of her degradation, even drawing up a contract to define their sexual terms of trade.

Her monster has it all. He's solicitous, caring and only cruel because he is damaged. So he's needy, as well as filthy rich. He's a project and you just know the virgin will change him into the tractable family man all the readers of the book are, apparently, trying to escape from. It's tripe, but it skewers that particularly paradox more neatly than Shakespeare.

But what does it really tell us? That the threshold of what shocks and/or excites us has risen immeasurably in less than a generation. That the arguments over the middle ground of pornography are simplistic. Objectifying women? Doesn't all fiction objectify people? Women are not necessarily victims, on or off the page.

Most of all, that women may be mistresses of the universe but their literary taste is no better than men's.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1642466 2012-07-04T19:00:00-04:00 2012-09-03T05:12:07-04:00

Michael Buerk http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-buerk/
At the UN, in the breaks of the latest G20 summit, every time she opens her mouth it seems, she's been accusing Britain of naked colonialism, demanding we hand the islands, and the 3000 British citizens who live there, over to her.

Colonialism - that's rich, coming from a country of European immigrants whose national policy has been to wipe out all trace of the people they snatched it from.

I spent three months there during the Falklands War. Lovely food. Strange there are no black or brown people.

Argentina's 97% white, according the census. Wonder what happened to the Indian tribes who once flourished on the Pampas? Well, what do you know; they were deliberately exterminated in a series of genocidal military operations in the 19th century.

Wonder what happened to those strange little folk Darwin found down in Tierra del Fuego? "Short, round, oily creatures, four feet fully grown, mostly stark naked despite the intense cold, with a curious talent for mimicry", was how he described them. Not any more. They were declared vermin and a pound was paid for every decapitated head.

Wonder what happened to all those black African slaves - more than a third of Argentina's population at one time? Let me tell you. Thousands upon thousands of black men were forcibly recruited into the army, packed into the front line, deliberately used as cannon fodder in bloody campaigns against the natives and the neighbours. The black women and children either succumbed to disease or were simply assimilated into the floods of Italian and Spanish incomers.

Blanqueamiento -"white washing" was official policy for generations. The blatantly racist constitution has only recently been relaxed.

Result: Argentina is so white that the most prominent of the handful of blacks was arrested at the airport because officials just assumed her Argentine passport must be false.

Don't get me wrong, I love the place and the people. They're brilliant at life but disastrous at government. They invented the Tango and thought politics should be broadly similar: a substitute for sex, performed on the streets, brainless, showy, exciting and doomed. That's how they've ended up being ruled by a succession of self-glorifying Ruritanian birdbrains and their molls.

Inevitably, it all goes horribly wrong at regular intervals and they have to find a way of distracting the mob on the street.

Mrs Kirchner stands high above that mob on the balcony of the Casa Rosada when she accuses us of the evils of imperialism.

But the moral high ground, believe me, it isn't.]]>