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Monthly Archives: July 2018

“Frankreich ist Weltmeister”, says Der Spiegel. But it’s only football

16/07/2018 22:12 / Leave a comment

OK, I’m boring. And this is the last time I will say this: football won’t change the world. But don’t criticise me for being depressed when, after 20 years, the lesson is not learnt and the same garbage is talked – and it’s being talked by the very people who propagated it last time. Tonight the French Ambassador to the UK proclaimed that the new word is “diversity”, France is now a “diverse” country like its football team and, following the example of its football team, is unified in its diversity. It’s a new reality, a new beginning.
    Exactly 20 years ago, after France won the World Cup in 1998, the buzzword was one that had only been used before to criticise “the Anglo-Saxons” but was now used to describe the new France that had emerged from a football match: “multicultural”. It didn’t last. It couldn’t last. The French Republic never did “multicultural”. It can’t do it without a massive political and cultural shift, amounting to a revolution, in its Republican psyche. If you come to live in France from elsewhere you are told to forget your former culture and “assimilate”, Frenchify yourself. Unify = Frenchify. As a result Mehmet, a French Kurd, told me in 2000, “We’re not really talking about integration, we’re talking more about … assimilation. There’d be a problem going back [to Kurdistan] for many people, a problem of readapting. In fact, some people are ashamed of their Kurdish origins.” His friend Rusen agreed: “Assimilation, adaptation, these are what we have to work with.” So a couple of years after France’s great “multicultural” moment, the fascist Front National came second in the first round of the presidential elections.
    And now? Just under 20 years after French-Algerian Zinedine Zidane scored the winning goal for France in 1998, Emmanuel Macron, seeking election as France’s new president, let fall his opinion that women of African origin in France had too many children. So here we go again and  I doubt if “diversity” will last as long as a couple of years. But back then, although the Front National won the first round of the presidentials, they lost the election decisively at the second round. Today, however, we live in different times: we face a fierce political battle with an internationally resurgent far right, whether it’s in the shape of Trump, Bannon, the Front National, the Italian Interior Minister, the far right of the Tory Party or the disturbing and disturbed Tommy Robinson. Until we’re fully engaged with that, no amount of football will change the world.

Happy birthday NHS – and we should remember it was a difficult birth

04/07/2018 18:36 / Leave a comment

Polly Toynbee reminded us in yesterday’s Guardian to beware of Tory claims to love the NHS:

The Tories voted 22 times against the creation of the NHS, warning it was “Hitlerian” and it would “sap the very foundations on which our national character has been built. It is another link in the chain that is binding us all to the machine of state.” The British Medical Association, then mostly Tory doctors, said it was “a dagger blow to personal freedom” that would “enslave the medical profession”. Ever since, a strong core of the Tory party has kept calling for NHS “reform” that would end its founding principles. Their newspapers and thinktanks bristle with bright ideas for top-up fees or personal insurance. It’s insufferable to them that the state, not the market, should run such a mighty enterprise efficiently, even when underfunded.

No one should let the NHS birthday celebrations go by without reading Michael Foot’s account of the founding of the NHS. It’s in Foot’s biography of its founder, Aneurin Bevan. It is now in a single volume but was originally published in two vast tomes somehow befitting the image of the founder himself. The account is in Chapter 12 of the single volume.[1]

At the beginning of the chapter Foot tells how, at the Annual Meeting of the British Medical Association (BMA) on the day after the 1945 general election, delegates cheered when they heard that Sir William Beveridge had lost his seat as Liberal MP for Berwick. The famous Beveridge Report during the Second World War had proposed a welfare state, including a national health service. The BMA were delighted to see him go. But they didn’t cheer when they realised Labour had won the election. Foot wrote:

… the doctors felt themselves impelled across strange frontiers into an unknown land. “I have spent a lot of time,” said one eminent Harley Street surgeon, “seeing doctors with bleeding duodenal ulcers caused by worry about being under the State.” The scene illustrated the collective neurosis afflicting the most articulate section of the British Medical Association even before it was confronted with the apparition of Aneurin Bevan at the Ministry of Health.

 

So remember, the child had enemies even before it was born. It still has.

 

Polly Toynbee’s article:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/03/nhs-religion-tories-health-service

 

[1] Foot, M. (1999), Aneurin Bevan, Indigo, London, pp. 286-361.