Back from holiday now, and back to the grind.  Sorry for disappointing my regular reader(s) with the lack of communication from a Breton farmhouse.  By a lake.  In the sun.  Bees buzzing, chaffinches singing, and crops growing in the fields.  Buzzards over the corn fields, herons by the lake, tiny lizards on the second tee of the golf course.  French bread and wine, neighbours bringing round bags of courgettes and cherries.  Somehow, the authorial urge was weakened.  Oh, and I had a summerhouse to paint.

But as soon as you get away from the decencies of personal life, and look at what is happening in the world, the full awfulness of what is happening in our world becomes evident.  Syria is followed by the Ukraine which is followed by Gaza.  Forgive the flippancy, but the only good news is the removal of Michael Gove as Education Minister.

The reaction to Gove’s dismissal has been predictable.  Right wing papers (and Gove’s wife’s tweets – she is, after all, a Daily Mail journalist) have created the image of a martyr, a man who stood for truth and right against the barbarian hordes, who alone wanted to raise educational standards against Marxists and idiots determined to betray our children.  Read, and weep, Chris Woodhead’s column in yesterday’s Sunday Times.  Sacked, we are told, not because his policies were wrong but because he was unpopular with the electorate.

Can we just scan the field here a moment ?  Gove is a proven liar, given to sweeping statements about people he has not met, schools that do not exist or regions he has not visited.  His announcement ending Labour’s Building Schools for the Future was full of inaccuracies.  The Local Government Network called this ‘sloppy’, which is being kind.  There is little evidence that the craze for academies and free schools, taking education away from locally elected representatives and giving them to rich conglomerates, inexperienced parent groups or religious organizations, does anything to raise quality.  A recent UK court case has obliged the DfE to admit that academies do no better than community schools.   In the USA, more charter schools reduce standards than raise them.  What Gove (and, to be fair, his predecessors) have overseen is a massive experiment on British kids, in which obvious truth (some state schools are poor) has been conflated into a palpable nonsense (we must therefore abolish – oops, did I say abolish, I meant radically reform, there, that’s better –  state education).   In a strange way, it is a pity Gove isn’t around as the policies unravel – such as the recent massive fraud at Haberdashers School.  What would have happened to an LEA school which lost £4m to fraud ?  (a) it wouldn’t happen  (b) it would be turned into an academy.

The enthusiasm for educational reform amongst people who know nothing about education – and who condemn those who do as a conspiracy – has been best depicted in this wonderful cartoon.  In reality, of course, Gove has been shot down not by an alien starship, but by his best friend Cameron, who decided that a fragile recovery of the Tory vote would be helped by the removal of a massively unpopular twit.

There has been a recent spat about education in Birmingham, where it appears that Muslim extremists have tried to take over the running of schools by forcing out secular or non-Muslim staff and governors, and replacing them with people who can be relied upon to segregate the sexes in class, avoid any mention of evolution, tell the youngsters that Christians are worthless, adulterers should be stoned, homosexuals lashed, and preach in favour of jihad.  The debate has become diverted by two things – the fact that two of the least appealing Ministers in the current government decided to make this an opportunity to get one up on each other, and the way that schools can fake good for Ofsted inspections.  The schools, of course, deny it all, and are backed up dishonestly by The Guardian, which has the weakest of weak spots about Islamism.  To confuse an already confused situation, (and place the awed listener having to make a choice between Respect and Gove – gee, shit), the answer to Islamic extremism and the lack of curriculum balance is, of course, to turn everything into an academy.

The clue to all this is to be found in two words – “Muslim children”.  You may have though kids were kids, and a five-year old trotting off to school with their back-pack and sandwiches has yet to form defined religious views.  How wrong you are.  The Jesuits may have asked to be given the child until he was seven, but our ‘faith schools’ like to start a little earlier.  All this has happened just as we have disempowered local authorities, so that we end up in the truly medieval position where the education service is run by the local bishop, rabbi or imam rather than elected representatives of the community.  One Jewish school gets a good report even though their kids are denied access to the internet or telephone (leaving the kids, according to Catherine Bennett, “with the familiarity with modern British life of a Martian”).  And there is a pile of evidence that religious schools select their entry on academic or social grounds.  This is the way that they maintain the fiction that religious schools are good schools with which we would be foolish to interfere.

Be aware, or course, that the local imam, rabbi or bishop do not pay to run these schools – that is, of course, down to the taxpayer, about 5% of whom attend religious observances each week, and about half of who do not believe in any conventional God.  I admit to being tone-deaf to ‘spirituality’, and reacted to reading the “God Delusion” with a sense of relief, punching the air that someone had the guts (and intellectual sharpness) to sink all the religious guff we have to tolerate.  I don’t think kids should have to endure religious instruction at all.  But even a thoughtful Jew, Muslim or Christian would be stretched to find a reason why someone else should pay for indoctrination in their faith.  My view is that

• All state funded schools should be secular
• If parents want kids to attend distinctive religious sessions, they should fund those outside the national curriculum. Parents should have to attend themselves, and the kids should be free to say no.

Not only does this solve the Birmingham situation “at a stroke”,  I think that’s pretty bloody moderate.  I line up with the crossword setter who realised that “faith school” was an anagram of “foolish chat”.

A brief comment about the astonishing news – leaked from Private Eye – that the Telegraph has sacked Clive James as its TV reviewer because he doesn’t offer ‘value for money’.

Where to start ?  Clive James is the best TV reviewer this country has ever had.  People of my generation will recall his work for the Observer, which was an extraordinary mixture of wit and judgement.  We remember the weepingly funny demolition jobs – such as the inability of BBC commentators to pronounce Wimbledon – but we also remember the great mixture of compassion and justice he brought to his writing.  His assessments of political and social issues were always on the button, not just in terms of right and wrong but also in scale, which is often as important. The anthologies – “Glued to the Box”, “The Crystal Bucket” and “Visions Before Midnight” – are still enormously readable.

But he is much, much more than that.  His literary criticism is profound without being pretentious, the essays will last a long time.  “The Dreaming Swimmer”, “From The Land Of Shadows”,  “Even As We Speak”.  If you can’t get them via the normal non-tax paying channels, try a second hand bookshop.  The poetry is wonderful – see “The Book Of My Enemy”, which is still in print.  You can catch up with recent, enormously sad, verse on the New Statesman web-site.  He published a translation of Dante’s “Divine Comedy”.  “Fame In The Twentieth Century” is as good a discourse on celebrity as you’ll get.  His web-site is a thing of wonder and delight.  There is some forgettable stuff, like the rambling narrative poems – I never liked “Peregrine Prykke” as much as some, but that may be a blindness caused by my aversion to things Oxbridge.

I have a particular weakness for the wonderful songs he wrote with Pete Atkin in the 1970s. I saw them first on a wet night in Middlesbrough in the mid 1970s and have been an addict ever since. The songs are on a playlist in my I-pod, and my favourites change regularly.  “Laughing Boy”, “Beware of the Beautiful Stranger”, “Time and Time Again”, “Girl On A Train”, “Wristwatch for a Drummer”, varying from laugh-out-loud funny to poignant and romantic. Spend an evening on YouTube just drinking them in.

But the true appallingness of the Telegraph management’s decision is that Clive James is dying of leukaemia. This is not a state secret – he makes no pretence that he is not approaching his end.  I wrote a while ago about obituaries being the real celebrity magazine. I wish Clive James a long and painless life, and a swift and merciful end when it comes. And I hope when he dies he will gain more listeners and readers and fans, and will be marked as a person whose intelligence and honesty greatly added to British civilisation.

Whilst in France, you notice the way that streets and squares celebrate the public life of the country.  It would be difficult for the UK to have an equivalent of Place De La Republique (Yes, I know we have Parliament Square, but that’s because it runs by the Houses of Parliament – what else ?  Monarchy Square, anyone ?), but we could celebrate Magna Carta, the Great Reform Bill or Women’s Franchise, couldn’t we.  Other countries also have streets and avenues named after significant dates, such as Rue Mai 8, which I take to be VE Day.  In truth, I rarely know what the date actually commemorate.  Just as well sometimes – I looked up the date on a street in Ploermel, our local Breton town, and found it referred to a heavy bombing raid by the Allies just after D-Day that killed scores of local people.  The French also celebrate the military men who liberated them – the streets south out of Ploermel, off the inevitable Avenue General de Gaulle, are named for Leclerc, Giraud and DuBreton – and there’s even a street for Lieutenant Le Vigouroux, a hero of Dien Bien Phu.  We may offer Help For Heroes, but we rarely name streets after them.

There are also a host of streets named after authors – and Zola, Anatole France, Dumas and Voltaire get Metro stations.  So does Picasso, actually.  The French also name streets and places after politicians – or, being dead, perhaps we should call them statesmen.  The Pompidou Centre.  Every town has a Rue Gambetta, or Rue Adolphe Thiers or Jean Jaurès.  We just don’t.  Even the greats, like Wellington and Nelson get a pretty miserable deal.  Earl Grey gets a column in Newcastle, and so he should (for ending rotten boroughs, not the twee tea).  Apart from that, well, there is the odd Bevan Road on a distant housing estate, I guess, the occasional sporting hero (Derek Dooley Way leads into Sheffield, as Clive Sullivan Way leads into Hull) and I know Alan Turing has a by-pass in Manchester.  But go through Prime Ministers and think of anything bearing their name.  Peel, Disraeli, Lloyd George ?  Even Churchill, that perennial contender for greatest Briton, has little named after him. You wouldn’t, I guess, look for Alec Home or John Major to sponsor a new boulevard, and Blair is too living and Thatcher too controversial but surely Macmillan deserves something ?  What about people who built a more equal society, who spread the vote or introduced pensions – Francis Place, Emmeline Pankhurst, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Rochdale Pioneers ?  Keir Hardie, our own Jean Jaurès ?  Scientists like Darwin and Newton get on the currency but not on the high street. Rutherford or Maxwell get nowt, Cavendish a back street in Clapham. Cromwell gave his name to an army tank, Drake gets a pretty cruddy shopping centre in Plymouth, Gladstone a doctor’s bag.  Elgar ?  Holst ?  Painters do a bit better.  Constable gets Constable Country and Turner has a gallery in Margate and a wing at the Tate, but that’s because his paintings are there. After that, you’re down to the Woolwich Ferries being named after Vera Lynn and Ernest Bevin.

My proposal – that we name some major infrastructure projects after great people.  Any new London Airport could become London Churchill Airport.  The new Cross Rail needs a name – what’s wrong with Attlee ?  He did more for the country than Queen Victoria, after whom everything from stations to sponge cakes are named.  Look at dull tube stations and find a local hero to honour: there are more tube stations named after pubs than after people, because not a single one is named after anyone. Think of great Londoners – Pepys, Defoe, Bobby Moore, Chaucer, Herbert Morrison, Marie Lloyd, Keats, Faraday, Hogarth – that could be noted.  And why not the occasional date to remember, if only to help kids through Gove’s fact based history curriculum ? The passing of the Factory Acts, the first women’s votes, and yes, even May 8^th and November 11^th.

A couple of weeks in the south of France has many attractions – the architecture, landscape, the wine, the weather, the food, and, yes, the people.  Have the French made a decision to be less ratty and exploitative in recent years ? Seems so to me; we met some charming and lively people, including one couple who invited us to their home in St Raphael on the basis of a cordial lunchtime conversation.

What is striking, though, is the spread of Franglais.  By that, I don’t mean the willingness of French people to speak standard English, though that is markedly increasing.  When I went to France as a kid, it seemed that even French people who spoke decent foreign languages refused to do so, as if it were a slight on the national honour.  Now, the position is sometimes reversed. Speaking decent French is always appreciated (yes, someone did ask what region I came from, purr, purr), but elsewhere it can be difficult to stop French people speaking English, even when you want them to.  And it’s not quite like Holland or Germany or Austria, where someone with perfect English is genuinely helpful.  The French may be more willing, but their competence hasn’t yet reached those Saxon levels.  And a waiter who persists in speaking a brand of English that is markedly worse than my French has the potential to be very irritating.

I can see the attraction of English.  It is the language of business – we spoke to a couple of people who said that English was the language of their workplace in a multinational company.  Science is conducted in English. At my old grammar school in the 1950s, boys studying chemistry were encouraged to learn German as that was the language of academic discourse, but it isn’t any more.  English is also cool: the language of Hollywood, Youtube, Tiktok, and pop music.  In England, kids can regard learning a foreign language as a bit of a bind. But if it were the language of the most beautiful actresses, the hippest pop singers ?

But my topic for today is not French proper, but Franglais, that lovely mixed-up use of Anglicisms within French that is increasing so markedly.  The BBC recently collected some anecdotes, and I am going to add a few more.  There is a huge amount of Franglais which I think comes from the search for cool.  In fact, “cool” is one of the preferred words of the new usage – even “hypercool”.  A casual clothes shop was titled “Jean’s Lovers” (the misplaced apostrophe is as common in French high streets as British ones, I am afraid).  The pet shop is “Animal City”, the fitness club is, well, “Fitness Club” or “Body Minute”.  On a Camargue beach, a bar called “Palm Beach” (perhaps Palm Beach has a posh bar called “La Camargue”).  The employment agency was called “Start People”, and it ran a young people’s career fair called “Jobs d’Ete”.  While we are on the topic of modern business enterprise, you will be pleased to learn a female entrepreneur is a “startupeuse”, and a social network influencer “un tiktokeur”.  A YouTube discussion of office life in France included a reference to a work colleague who was “un bullshitteur”.  Sex toys are, inevitably, “Sex Toys”.  Sometimes French and English are brought together with an ear-splitting thud, as in “sandwicherie”. A table tennis player is a “pingpongiste”.  Shops have English signage – I was surprised to see how often “Sorry, We Are Closed” was hung on doors well out of tourist areas.  And the observation made after the London Olympics – that the Union Jack is a popular youth emblem – certainly seems to be true, with UK jeans and bags, T-shirts and shorts. It’s even survived Brexit.

The products are also being frangled.  Timberland and Levis, Subway and Macdonalds are, of course, international and to be expected, but maybe not a fried chicken outlet that advertises the great deals available from “Nos Buckets”.  “Tee-shirt” is universal – indeed, the ones I bought at Monoprix were labelled “modern fit”.  As everywhere in the world, they are covered with garbled English that seems to owe more to Japan or Hong Kong than Paris or even the West Coast – the bizarre linguistic backwater my daughter calls “Los Angeles Sportboy”.  I had to write down one T-short message I saw – “Global Yard Someone Must Fly On Face Of Mind”, and another, “East London Make Me Thirsty”.  Surely you can’t design textiles whilst being out of your head on hallucinogens ?  The use of Anglo Saxon elsewhere seemed not to know which areas are cool and which are tatty.  I saw a man with a “Newham” T-shirt, named presumably after the poorest borough of London.  “Chesterfield” is a pleasant enough northern town, but needs more than a wonky steeple to justify the elegant and expensive clothes named after it.  And what to make of “Finsbury”, a clothes shop in that most snooty of avenues, the Cours Mirabeau in Aix ? Was it the association with Dolly Kray or Arthur Mullard that offered something trés chic ?  In a more down-market location, underpants on the market were presented in two styles – respectable boxers were “Business” whilst those offering a more racy fit were titled “Trendy”.

I loved the use of verbs that have leapt the Channel – or maybe the Atlantic.  A tough old sailor in a TV drama was told “vous bluffez !” when he announced an outrageous plan (to built a development of “mobile homes” in parkland, as it happens).  Signs at Marseille Airport tell security staff that they must “badgez” to get past an electronic gate.  Cosmetics (and none are more dishonest that French cosmetics – slimming cream, indeed – sold, inevitably, at “Beauty City”) assure you of an anti-age effect – “lifting”.  Invented words are common – what we would call a makeover is “relooking”.  A bar that offered sport on satellite TV advertised “Foot On Streaming”.  At least, I think that’s what it was.  A pop group advertised a concert that was “Best Off”. You can see what they mean, but the title opens a hostage to fortune.

Elsewhere the right words are used, but sometimes to replace perfectly good French ones.  “Ticket” seems to have replaced “billet” in concerts and public transport.  TV and celebrity magazines always refer to “stars” now, not “vedettes”.  Magazines are called ”So Foot” (football, like our Four Four Two), The Good Life, Men’s Health, Man and so on.  (Whilst we have, you may point out, “Marie Claire” and “Vogue” – showing the international trade in cool. We have buffets, the French have snack-bars). Sometimes the right words are used in the wrong place – such as offering ‘brunch’ all day long.

One aspect that pleased me was that English nowadays seems to be less of a language for yobs.  It used to be that graffiti – which, like dog-shit, is much worse in France than in the UK – was written in English.  It was usually English broken enough for a native speaker to know that it wasn’t being done by visitors, but I have always hoped that the locals knew that.  As I said, it’s less common than it was, though monsieur “Barsick” who left his tag all over Bandol hasn’t helped.  But English, in either its regular format or its handsome but illegitimate frangled child is absolutely everywhere.  I have decided to launch “Perry’s Law”, which states “It is not possible to stand or sit anywhere in urban France without seeing some example of the English language”.  I tested in rigorously during my stay, and only came close to failure twice.  The first time, I was saved by a flyer for a Rock’n’Soul concert stuck to a lamppost, the second time by a big guy overlooking the Arles Bull-Run in a denim shirt that advertised “Original Workmanship”.

Footnote:  None of the above reflects on the success of French companies, by the way, which appear to be a major beneficiary of out-sourcing the UK public sector, whether it’s owning our gas and electric utilities, running assessments on the long term unemployed or picking up our domestic rubbish.  I have a linguistic clue as to why that might be.  When a manager is interviewed on an issue in a French news bulletin, he is called le or la “responsable”.  This seems to me to be a rather better way to refer to someone pulling a big salary to make sure things go OK than calling them a bloody “Chief Executive”

People are sometimes interested in the derivation and origins of their surnames, even though (given patronymic lineage) it relates to some very minor portion of their heritage.  Your father provides a half of your current DNA, but he got half from his mother, and so on.  As you go back in time, your family linkages spread and spread, which explains why newspapers can prove that Prince Henry’s latest squeeze is in fact ‘distantly’ related to him.  A TV quiz question once asked who was related to King Alfred, and the answer was that, going back that far, almost everybody is.

I had a look at a list of surnames recently.  My puzzle is about patronymic names, and why they are not related to the frequency of male first names.  There are plenty of surnames which do, of course, reflect common names.  Johnson, Harrison, Davidson, Nicholson, Wilson/Williamson and so on.  Dixon and Nixon I guess are re-spellings of Dick and Nick’s progeny.  But others seem out of kilter.  Take the evangelists’ names, presumably reasonably popular in the late Middle Ages when surnames were becoming common.  Johnson, yes, and some Matthewsons even though it is not a very common name: but I have never heard of a Markson or Lukeson in my life.  Jameson seems to rarer than it should be, given the frequency of the name.  Why has Thompson acquired a ‘p’ ? Nicknames and shortenings I can understand, but why is Jackson common, whereas Bilson is rare ?  I imagine the Clarksons came from people who worked as the town clerk, but what was the first name of the father of the first Lawson or Hudson, Simpson or Patterson ? And Gibson ?  Was that Gilbert – which would make you wonder at the shortage of Gilsons – or is a gib some medieval job description ?

My own name – Perry – could have various derivations, but the most common explanation is that it is part of the Pirie, Parry, Pendry bunch, who were sons of a Welshman called Henry or Harry. Ap is the Welsh for “son of” – like the Scottish Mac, and Irish O’ – hence ap Harry, ap Henry and so on.  That’s also where Pritchard, Powell and Prodger came from, and even the Upjohns and Uprichards.

Sexism rears its head here. As elsewhere.  Why don’t we have the ‘daughter’ suffix the way that Icelanders do ? Even matronymics seem rare, though one would have thought, given the death rates in old England, they might have been more common.  There are, after all, some Widdowsons around.  I guess Nelson is the most common matronymic, and there is another with a nautical flavour in Anson.  There’s Megson, too.  And was Mr Allison the son of Alice ?  I have come across the odd Margerison and Elizabethson in my time.  But no Maryson, even though Mary was the most common female name for centuries.

And occupational names.  Why are there so many more Taylors than Farmers ? More Butlers than Weavers ? How come Fletcher is the 156^th most common name, whereas Archer is down at 539 (and Bowman further down) – wouldn’t you think it was the other way around ?

Anyway, views welcome, or just log into the various lists and have a play for yourself.  There is also a website where you can see the parts of the country that different surnames are found.  Why are there so many Ronsons by the seaside ?  Why has Middlesbrough got a peak of Cornish names (answer – the iron mines there opened just as Cornish mines were closing) ?  But remember, none of it matters.  Your surname is a minor speck of your past, and what matters is what you do in the present.

There is much to be said about the current cult of celebrity. The expansion of digital media, especially TV channels, creates the need for content, and ‘reality TV’ is one of the easiest ways to generate content.  Think of it – no actors or scriptwriters to pay, no plot to develop, no copyright fees to meet, no need to negotiate fees with sporting authorities.  No need either (breathe it low) for talent.  And reality TV creates its own material for the future: the media version of a perpetual motion machine.  You can put your celebrity onto a panel show, or a cookery show, or a quiz;  have a series of what XXX did next, or audition even more obscure people who want to be XXX’s personal assistant or publicist.  And when the celebrity fouls up, drink, drugs or divorce, they create copy for the tabloids: they are ‘troubled XXX’.  And when they die, they become ‘tragic XXX’.

The point is that celebrities as currently defined are mediocrities. That is what they are.  If they have a minor talent, it is truly minor – they might be politicians who didn’t make it, or musicians who didn’t make it, or actors who didn’t make it.  My wife contrasts celebrities with stars, and that establishes the true nature of current celebrity – in soccer terms, it’s the Premier League v. Johnson Paints Trophy.

So where, you ask me, can I find true human worth at the moment ?  I will tell you.  The obituaries.  Look at recent copies of the Times.  A distinguished naturalist, a life dedicated to preserving snow leopards and cranes.  Mickey Rooney, the generator of mountains of mirth and good fun.  Decorated soldier, wounded in Normandy, goes on to become High Court judge.  The musician who wrote “Guitar Boogie”.  Psychiatrist who worked in Brixton prison.  Relative of Barack Obama who campaigned for the rights of illegal immigrants.  The author of “The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole”.  Ok, you’ll find newsworthy people who maybe aren’t historic figures – Peaches Geldof – and those who are but you wish they weren’t – a ‘ruthless’ Chechen warlord.  But generally speaking the obits are generally a surer guide to the contribution made to the universe than anywhere else in the media.  The blessings of the smart-phone mean I can be like Mark Twain: go straight to them when I wake up, and as soon as I realise I’m not in them, I can get on with the day.

Now that the parties are jockeying for position at the starting gates of the next general election, the same old tired arguments are coming from each side, and from the press.  One of the tiredest allegations concerns ‘the politics of envy’.  This is an expression used to describe any attempt to make our society more equal, and has been rolled out by the business editor of the Times this week.

Now then.  I have been in or around progressive politics most of my life .  I was a Labour councillor in the 1970s in Middlesbrough, stayed a member of the Labour Party for most of the Blair years, only giving up when Gordon Brown persisted in his kow-towing to business interests and bankers.  Yep, I actually spotted that one before 2008 crash.  My work has involved meeting community groups, trade unions, and I have always operated in deprived areas – the West Midlands, Teesside, Manchester, industrial Yorkshire, Inner London.  I worked on European programmes to help those affected by the steel closures in Sheffield.  I’ve met some superb people – my ward chairman in Middlesbrough was a portly security guard at a chemical works, humble family grandpa  who revealed to me over a pint one night that he had fought in Spain in the 1930s.  I’ve been involved with policy debates on all sorts of topic and in all sorts of places.  But I have never, on any occasion, thought that the arguments for greater equality, or better public services, or fairer taxation, were motivated by envy.  The very idea that an unemployed steelworker trying to pay his gas bill, or an inner-city Londoner struggling with the rent, are somehow attracted by Richard Branson’s lifestyle, or Philip Green’s behaviour, or the Duke of Westminster’s property portfolio, only has to be stated to be seen to be absurd.

What people on the progressive side of politics want is a society where everyone has a fair deal.  It goes beyond fairness, the idea that our common humanity gives us an obligation to ensure that all our fellow citizens can lead a decent and dignified life.  A more equal society can be shown to be healthier, and happier.  You can even find Nobel Prize-winners like Joseph Stiglitz who would argue that more equality will lead to a more prosperous society, making it easier to end the slump.  None of these arguments is about envy, and those that say it is should sit down and spend some time washing out of their brain the clichés used by the rich to avoid thinking about their responsibility to contribute to common decency.

(p.s. any progressive person who is well off is, of course, a champagne socialist. They get you both ways)

You may have heard of the Curse of Hello.  This describes the way that couples who sell their story (or, worse, pictures of their wedding or the birth of their child) head pretty rapidly for the divorce court.  There is a similar phenomenon in football, where the unfortunates who win the Barclays Manager of The Month award see their team plummet with a batch of poor results.  This is, of course, explicable by simple statistics – wins and losses are not equally distributed, and a series of good results will not go on forever.  Fixture lists also follow matches against a number of poor teams with a clutch of more challenging ones against table-topping opposition.  But the manager-of-the-month curse is still out there in the popular imagination.

I have now discovered an equivalent to the curse of Hello in the public sector, in the shape of the humble 50p piece.  Time was when our coinage was boring – well designed but unchanging – a little like pre-1960s UK stamps.  In recent years we have had coinage that is more ambitious and jazzy,  The 5p and 10p pieces feature only part of the national coat of arms, for example.  The 50p piece, being a bit bigger, can be changed to include tributes to historical events or references to current affairs.  Britannia will sit on her rock on one side, but the other will pay tribute to Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary or feature the sports of the London 2012 Olympics.  However, have you noticed that other commemorative editions celebrate the UK membership of the EU and the signing of the Single European Act (now under threat from Cameron’s referendum) ? The anniversary of the NHS (currently being privatised by Jeremy Hunt) ?  150 years of public libraries (value them whilst you can – they’re being shut in droves because of local government finance cuts) ?  Kew Gardens (Admission fee in 1971 – 1p, today £13.50) ?

So next time you see something being ‘celebrated’ on your coinage – National Parks, Technical Colleges, Public Transport, Social Housing – be afraid.  Be very afraid.

“The biggest crisis in Europe this century” says William Hague, and he may be right.  The economic consequences of 2008 in the Eurozone might run it close in wealth lost – and even lives lost – but whatever you may think of the European Central Bank, it hasn’t got nuclear weapons and hasn’t sent in any paratroops. What is to be done ?

Well, reflection first of all.  We should remember that the word ‘jingoism’ was coined to describe bristling nationalism against Russia on a previous occasion.  Don’t get me wrong – the actions of Russia are plainly out of order.  The issue is – what do we do about it ?  Sending in the US Marines would be, shall we say, ill-advised.  The idea of using economic sanctions is attractive, particularly if we can hit the Russian rich who seem to own homes across most of West London and can buy British visas for what to them must seem small change.  There do seem to be glitches.  Germany imports vast quantities of Russian gas and oil, and has a massive surplus on manufactured exports with Russia: may not be keen on giving up either.  Worse, the weekend papers reported that the City of London is worried that sanctions would interfere with their business as the money laundering capital of the world.  You may imagine, then, how effective will be the measures our city-dominated government is likely to implement.  How far away their morality is from the cotton workers who were prepared to starve rather than weave slave-traded raw materials in the American Civil War.

This next bit will not be popular.  Yanukovich, the ousted President of Ukraine appears to have been a tyrannical plutocrat, using state revenues to enrich his family and build palaces for his own use.  He approved the use of armed troops to shoot at demonstrators.  Not a nice man, we can judge.  However, he was elected.  There are a number of examples recently of elected officials – Egypt, for example – being ousted to Western applause.  We are also getting a head of steam to disapprove of the Venezuelan government, equally elected.  It does seem that our leaders are all in favour of democracy as long as no-one we disagree with gets voted in – or, if they do get voted in, they do nothing of which we might disapprove.  Of course there are problems with defining ‘democracy’ when it puts opposition leaders in jail (Ukraine, Russia), oppresses minorities (Hungary, Uganda) and dominates the press and TV (Italy, anyone ?).  And a leader elected by fiddled votes or intimidation – as in Zimbabwe – is no democrat at all.  But the Ukrainian people were going to have an opportunity in a reasonably well-organised election to dump the guy.  Why do we think they were right to act now ?

I guess because we agree with the views of the activists that Ukraine should build more links with the West, including trade deals with the EU.  But, to drone on again, the elected Ukrainian government considered this issue and decided not to.  I guess it decided not to because to do so would annoy, possibly fatally, relations with an extremely influential and powerful neighbour.  Seems to me – and no-one in the press seems to be saying this, despite it being blindingly obvious – that that was a judgement that has been borne out by the facts.  In an ideal world, all nations would be able to decide policies without any reference to the wealth or military powers of others.  We have not, however, been in such a world for a while. We are all, to a degree, Finlandised. Before you protest, let me remind you of the possibility of corruption in an arms deal that we – in Britain – were not allowed to investigate because it would have offended Saudi Arabia.  And the more mess we get in the Middle East – Syria, Iran, Iraq, Tunisia, Egypt – the more insistent the little voice at the back of my head that reminds me of the cynical old CIA hacks who said this would happen if we rocked the boat, just as us students were on the street advocating social democracy for the world.

I think what I am saying is that power politics hasn’t gone away, and what we must do is try to inject as much ethical conduct as we can without being silly.  This is not an argument for appeasement – genocide, torture, invasion are not acceptable at any point.  However, short of that point, let’s reflect on the old Latin saying – ‘let justice be done even though the heavens fall’.  If your child is starving in a Beirut slum, if Russian storm-troopers take over your local airport, if education is being withdrawn from women, you might feel that whether justice is being done depends very considerably on how much heavens fall, and on whom.