Local by-elections: LGA First News

While I thought that the turnout in our Arbury Ward Nuneaton election was low at 17%, of the 13 by-elections listed in the above, 3 others had lower turnouts.  Manchester: Ancoats and Clayton (Lab hold) 11%, Liverpool: Riverside (Lab hold) 12% and Chelmsford: South-Woodham-Elmwood (SWF gain from Con) 14%.

Of the others, only Bracknell Forest: Winkfield and Cranborne (Con hold) at 27% was over 25%.

Maybe it's the time of year?  Certainly here in Nuneaton, the siting of polling booths in one district didn't help.

Finally, unfortunately, only we in the Arbury Ward Nuneaton were able to record a con gain.  Thank you team and voters!

NBBC Council Wednesday 11 December 2013

Question by Cllr Jeff Morgan

"Does Cllr Harvey now accept, following our Conservative by-election victory in the Arbury Ward, that the residents of Arbury and Nuneaton more widely through our petitions, feel deeply let down by Labour with regard to the flawed Borough Plan and are rejecting it, by letting their votes do the talking?"

To which Cllr Harvey graciously welcomed me to Council, congratulated me on asking a question on my first Council, but then proceeded to attempt to pour cold water over our victory (narrow margin, low turnout, no need for an election with only 6 months to go etc). 

Unfortunately the Mayor (Lab, Cllr Bob Copland) did not allow any supplementaries so I was unable to come back on those points.

BTW as they say in txt spk, Labour are artfully trying to paint us Conservatives into a corner regarding the very upstream issue of replacing the county's district councils in favour of one unitary. We tabled an amendment to his motion, seeking more information before going further, but that was lost and then the motion was passed with the usual majority.  Cllr Harvey forced a recorded vote, seeking to portray us as being  in favour of abolishing Nuneaton and Bedworth borough Council. 

 Our position is not that we want to abolish our local council, but that much more information is needed about  the discussions Cllr Seccombe is going to have and their outcome.  We remain committed to a system of governance which is as local as effectively possible for the people of Nuneaton and Bedworth, bearing in mind the overall burden to council tax payers.  We could be talking about savings of £100ks here, but until such time as we can see what we’re voting for, we reserve our position

Don McCullin

“Imagine.........Don McCullin” BBC One 10.35pm Tuesday 2 July 2013.

Sundays didn’t used to be Sundays without “The Sunday Times.”  The paper was de rigueur throughout the sixties and seventies and the magazine was something one always looked forward to and opened first.  Under the editorship of Harold Evans, the Insight Team always carried investigative stories of the highest journalistic quality and the magazine had the iconic images of the age.  As a student in the sixties, the paper always seemed to be around, usually strewn around on the floor along with Saturday night’s beer bottles.

They say about this period, that if you can remember it, you weren’t actually there.  I was and wasn’t in a funny way.  I had a habit of just missing where the action was.  I missed The Stones in Hyde Park by one day.......got it wrong man. I missed the Grosvenor Square demos and got to Paris too late, but one man who really was there throughout the sixties and seventies, who saw it all and too much of it was the photographer Don McCullin.

Born in a very tough area of London, Don McCullin became, almost by chance, the pre-eminent war photojournalist of his day. The Greek/Turkish conflict in Cyprus, the Vietnam War, Biafra, Northern Ireland, the appalling killings in The Lebanon by Christians and Muslims, all were harrowingly recorded through his lens. The outstanding film by Jacqui and Don Collins shown last night in the “Imagine....” series by Alan Yentob gave a moving and disturbing account of his life in the killing fields and the emotional effect this has had on him.  He is a man who seldom smiles: you feel his humour has gone, drained away by the inhumanity he has witnessed.

What always amazes me about his photographs is that somehow, despite the grim nature of the subjects, the bodies and the suffering and the speed of the action, his composition is remarkable.  The famous photo of the Cypriot woman in tears with her arms outstretched after yet another killing is a masterpiece of lines, angles and balance.  Sometimes he is honest enough to admit that his art is fortuitous, as with the photograph of the charging troops in the streets of Londonderry, where he just happened to capture a terrified woman too, cowering in a doorway.  How did he do it?  That’s what I want to know.  Armed with nothing more than a 35mm Nikon SLR and a few rolls of black and white film, he produced staggering images of contrast, composition, detail and emotion.  It’s hard to talk about aesthetics when looking at mangled bodies yet somehow this man created art from scenes of hell and he constantly worried about the morality of his presence as a spectator before such suffering.

We do not see this sort of action photojournalism any more.  Maybe it’s the influence of television which has swamped the still image; maybe it’s the economics of newspapers, locked into revenue battles with declining readerships.  I thought it was revealing that after Rupert Murdoch bought “The Sunday Times” and sacked Harold Evans, the work dried up for McCullin.  Indeed under the editorship of Andrew Neil, he was not sent to cover The Falklands’ War in 1982.  The magazine had become too fearful of losing advertising to carry photos of dying, starving children from around the world.

These days McCullin at 75 seems to be in rehab.  He is purging his soul of his nightmares by shooting the English landscape, still on film and still in black and white though.

The Winter’s Tale. Propellor: The Belgrade Theatre Coventry 4 May 2012.

 “A sad tale’s best for winter: I have one of sprites and goblins. “ (Mamillius Act 2, 1).

Written around 1610, towards the end of Shakespeare’s life, The Winter’s Tale is one of a group of so-called romances, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. It is not a play with which I was at all familiar except for the famous “exit pursued by a bear” which I had wrongly associated with Autolycus and not, as every school boy knows, Antigonus. (The fact that they don’t......the schoolboys that is.....is a subject for a different blog....but I digress.)
So, I brought a mind and heart as free of prejudice as is possible in my case to the production by the all-male group Propellor at our local theatre last Friday night. They’re also touring with Henry V.

It was a great night in the theatre. The second part in particular explodes into a riot of music, farce magic, hilarious nudity, all of which was utterly Shakespearean in spirit and the handling of the coup de theatre at the end was wonderful in its dramatic handling. The audience, with a good percentage of school children, loved it. It is a crazy old play though. To say the plot is ramshackled is an understatement and if you’re looking for a neat unity of time place and space, this isn’t it. Time himself appears as a character to explain that we are moving on sixteen years at one point, a character is eaten by a bear on a wild coastal part of Bohemia, a baby is abandoned and miraculously found by a poor shepherd and then wooed years later by, fancy that, a prince who is the son of her father’s erstwhile best friend.....before they had a terrible falling out that is. Oh and yes, the dead are resurrected.

However, when you see it performed, with the vigour and enthusiasm provided by Propellor, these things don’t matter so much because you are borne along by the artifice of it all: your disbelief willingly suspended and, particularly in the scenes of farce, you get some feel of how Shakespearean audiences would have responded, laughed and jeered too. Reading it is a very different experience to seeing it performed, as it should be. Men playing women ought not to be a problem for a modern audience and indeed in the scenes of dance, music and comedy it really isn’t. But, the casting of the towering Vince Leigh as Paulina looming above the male retinue, her King Leontes (Robert Hands) and her husband Antigonus (Dugald Bruce-Lockhart) stretches our credulity. Paulina is a key character, delivering some crucial lines of warning and counsel to the insanely jealous Leontes. She presents his rejected baby daughter to him desperately trying to muster all her womanly resources but one is simply unable to see the character as female.

 Nevertheless, there is so much to be admired. Tony Bell as Autolycus the scoundrel, now Fagin, now Gary Glitter, now Roxy Music, now Ian Dury is tremendous and there are some solid performances from Robert Hands and John Dougall as the Old Shepherd.

If you get a chance do go and see it. It’s on tour with Norwich, Plymouth and Hampstead all coming up. Who knows, it might even make the West End.

The Footballing Perfect Tense

Anyone with an ear for language will have noticed a tendency over the last few years for a strange new English usage to creep into sports' commentary, more specifically football commentary.

Often managers and presenters will say things like "He's come her and done well.....he's crossed the ball and given them problems" instead of the standard form "He came here....he did well, he crossed the ball etc." Just listen next time you here football being discussed. This phenomenon is part of the discussion in Michael Rosen's recent Word of Mouth on BBC Radio 4

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qtnz

and it's worth a listen.

For me the English academic in a French university, was closest to identfying the trait linguistically and culturally, but he missed the point that it is heard not just by players, many of whom have little in the way of formal education, but managers and even presenters. What's wrong with the past definite? There was an interesting attempt to rationalise its use as a past in the present description as a player comments live on a recording of his play obviously in the past. Plausible, but the usage started with presenters and managers commenting live.

I've not yet heard it in the rugby arena, but I think I did hear it during a cricket commentary. If anyone hears examples of this in other sports......curling......Graeco-Roman wrestling.....badminton.....I would love to know.

The Eagle (of The Ninth)

It is said that this film’s title was changed to simply “The Eagle” to avoid confusing American audiences into thinking it was about golf. Any misapprehensions one might have about the film’s subject matter are soon dispelled as a boat of Roman soldiers is seen being paddled stealthily along a tree-lined river in Britain in the second century AD. I suppose they could just have been looking for a lost ball.

When I heard that this film, directed by the Scot Kevin Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland”, “Touching the Void”...) was based upon Rosemary Sutcliff’s popular teenage fiction classic “The Eagle of the Ninth” (1954) and furthermore starred Jamie Bell (Billy Elliott) and the incomparable Donald Sutherland, I was keen to see it. Disappointment set in almost immediately. The film is exquisitely shot against impressive locations, the production values are very high, the Roman villas, forts, costumes and the wonderfully wild Britons are extremely convincing, the music score evocative until the end when the Gaelic pipes begin to grate, but most of the acting and script are truly dreadful.

Marcus Flavius Aquila (get it?) played by Channing Tatum, a young Roman centurion arrives in Britain in 120 AD for his first command, but with the real intention of rescuing the Eagle, the standard of the ninth legion, which his father commanded and was lost in battle with the Ancient Britons. Aquila’s father was killed in that battle and his son’s mission is to find the emblem and bring it back to civilisation thus restoring the honour of the family name. Severely but gloriously wounded in battle, whilst recuperating, he saves the life of a British slave Esca (Jamie Bell) and the debt of honour thus incurred obliges Esca to serve Aquila and help him in his quest beyond the boundaries of civilisation (aka Hadrian’s Wall) to find the Eagle and rescue it from the clutches of the picturesque Seal People (Picts?) in the Highlands. After many adventures, meeting up with an ex-Roman legionary gone native and AWOL, capture by the Seal People and an interesting role reversal when to avoid death Aquila has to appear to be Esca’s slave, they miraculously find the Eagle and in the face of extreme hardship, bring it back to Roman Britain and glory.
It may be a personal failing of mine, but having Roman soldiers played by American actors was an immediate turn-off. Listening to the Kevin Macdonald on BBC radio, it is clear that this was a deliberate central conceit, thus drawing parallels between the Roman Empire and its modern American counterpart (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan) and through showing the Britons as slaves, inverting the later historical emergence of the British Empire. While watching the film I was aware of the lack of any female character, but took it to be part of the boys’ own era of adventure story-telling that Sutcliff’s novel came from in the 1950s. But no, apparently there is an overlay of homo-eroticism in the relationship between Aquila and Esca. That interpretation completely eluded me I have to admit.

There are good bits: the Seal people, having been described as the most barbarous of savages are shown to have a settled, ordered village and family life – that is until the Prince slits the throat of his little son for betraying them. Also we are invited to reflect upon the savagery which the Romans themselves inflicted upon the indigenous peoples. These points are well made, but with its obvious and deliberate American overlay which makes one think of “The Deer Hunter,” “ Apocalypse Now,” even “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” the film fails to convince. It is severely hindered by a poor script full of banalities key points unexplained and some very wooden acting by Mr Tatum.

Overall I was glad when it finished and the ending, with the two protagonists walking away considering their next move makes one squirm and groan inwardly “not a sequel surely....”

England v France

When responding to a journalist asking about the comments by Marc Lièvremont, the French rugby coach in the week prior to the recent England v France Six Nations’ Championship match at Twickenham that his team and all the Six Nations sides hated England, Martin Johnson England’s coach said “There’s history to this.” Too right there is.

From the opening fixture in this long-running battle (which we the English lost comprehensively in 1066) hostilities have raged on and off for a thousand years. Let us not be fooled by the fact that we haven’t engaged our traditional enemy in warfare since 1815 nor by the anomalous twentieth century wars against Germany; France is and always has been our “bête noire.” I wonder if the French have a word for that………

As any good student of history knows, the destinies of England and that of France have been inextricably intertwined since the Norman Conquest. Under Angevin Plantagenet rule, England and vast swathes of modern France were administered by the same monarchs. Under Henry II (anyone remember Peter O’Toole and Catherine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter?) Angevin lands stretched from Ireland and the border with Scotland south across France as far as the Pyrenees; The Royal Demesne of France being restricted to Paris and the east of the country. Years of warfare with successive French Kings continued as the English monarchs took on a more distinctively nationalistic character and despite notable triumphs at Agincourt during the hundred years’ war in 1415 when English archers defeated numerically superior French forces, our lands in France were gradually reduced until 1558 under Mary Tudor when Calais was lost after 211 years of rule. Wars continued regularly throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries until Wellington finally put paid to Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815.

When facing a common foe, we and the French have proved uneasy and ineffective allies. Jealousy and bitter rivalry characterised relations between Philip II and Richard the Lionheart during the third crusade in 1191 when the French withdrew after making little real contribution. After the Crimean War 1855-7, the interdict on Russia having a military presence in the Black Sea was undone by Napoleon III urged on by Bismarck. In the twentieth century we twice fought in France and twice helped rid them of occupying Germans. In return, de Gaulle blocked Britain’s first and second applications to join the Common Market in 1963 and 1967. Since then, French support for NATO and joint-US action in Iraq and Afghanistan has been distinctly lukewarm.

We are different: temperamentally; politically; economically and culturally. We have different ways of looking at the world and very different interests and yet our geographical proximity and shared history has provided a common thread. Voltaire was impressed by English liberties and English nineteenth century writers have admired French literature, particularly Balzac. But when it comes to serious things like rugby, foreign policy and war, it’s les rosbifs vs the frogs.

Since we’ve stopped fighting them on the battle field, few things give an Englishman more pleasure than beating them at rugby. England 17 France 9 February 26 Twickenham. Mind you, they will be a hard side to beat on neutral territory in New Zealand come the World Cup.