Lavengro in Spain

Not giving offence

This letter appears in today’s Independent:

I was surprised when Clare Short referred twice on Radio 4's Front Row (2 April) to "mongols". The presenter coughed and said he believed the preferred term was Down's syndrome. Clare Short gave a dismissive apology. Had Ms Short used a derogatory term to refer to people of a different racial background, she would have been slated. What does this say about our attitude to people with learning difficulties?

Sue Turner, Nottingham

Well yes, but what does it say about ‘our’ attitude to nomadic people who hail from the plains of East and Central Asia?

The foreigners are doomed!

	They’re all doomed! DOOMED!

The Independent’s relentlessly Eurosceptic economics correspondent Hamish McRae foresees, in the best Scottish tradition, gloom and doom for southern (i.e. Catholic) Europe. He worries about the million or so people that the UK ‘has living’ in Spain, as if all of us were not workers and permanent residents but expatriate retirees, are just here for the cheap fags and booze and willing to return if things get tough. And he reassures us that ‘we’, by which he apparently means the British state, are preparing to help those million people if the foreigners screw up completely and Spanish cash machines run out of money. Such is the nature of a self-fulfilling prophecy that this panic will be monged and wildly overvalued by the City of London and disaster in the Mediterranean will be provoked – deliberately or not according to your point of view.

He also says:

If you were abroad over Easter and noticed the exchange rate, you may have been surprised to see that sterling is not as weak as it has been of late. The pound yesterday was at its highest since mid-February 2011. The rise has been particularly against the euro…

It is (deliberately?) unclear what he means by ‘of late’. If he means the last three months he is demonstrably wrong. The sterling/euro exchange rate for the last 12 months has been this:

In early July last year sterling reached a low point of €1.1136 and the other day it reached a high of €1.2060, which is lower than the high point of €1.2079 reached in early January.

At that lowest rate last July, a cup of coffee or a beer that costs 2 euros would have changed from £1.80 to £1.66, a 15-euro lunch would cost £13.47 instead of £12.48 and a dinner for 50 euros would be £44.90 against £41.46. That, remember, is taking the lowest dip on the 1-year graph and its second-highest point, and is using the interbank rate. By the time banks have had their share the effect on the total budget of a weekend away is hardly severe. Certainly my British friends who were here last weekend didn’t mention any particular problem.

La fea web de El País

Hasta hace poco la web de El País estaba libre de publicidad para los suscriptores de la versión impresa. Pero con la renovación y actualización de la web del diario se ha abandonado este principio y los suscriptores, que ya pagan pare ver la publicidad en la versión impresa somos atacados en la web con lo feo y las molestias de la publicidad. He escrito al servicio al cliente de El País/Prisa:

¿Realmente no hay manera de quitar la fea publicidad en la nueva web de El País? Soy suscriptor desde muchos años de la versión impresa, pero si la cosa sigue así, me plantearé la conveniencia de seguir pagando la suscripción sin recibir ningún beneficio en la web.

A ver qué pasa.

Along the gutter and down the drain

Seldom has the expression Good riddance to bad rubbish been more literally true than with the closure of the News of the World. It is too much to say that that newspaper itself was responsible for me leaving the country, but when I decided at the age of 25 that my destined career was to be an EFL teacher outside the UK (and there was no shortage of jobs for such people in the country), the smug superiority in morals (private and public) and the holier-than-thou prurience (private and public) that prevailed in the UK were most definitely things that I was extremely glad to get away from. And though it was 1978 when I finally left to live abroad permanently, the same applied in the pre-Murdoch days in which I grew up. This is about the Profumo scandal (1963).

04 Editor Of Sunday News

 

Writing the script

If it’s Greece, it must be a drama – a tragedy for preference. Such is the tramline thinking of the British media.

Adrian Hamilton says in the Independent:

the Greek parliament has voted to pass the "crucial" budget cuts, albeit with the narrowest of majorities

and a Guardian editorial tells us that

the package was voted through by a wafer-thin majority

In fact the voting was 155 yes, 138 no, 5 abstentions.

Admittedly the outcome of the vote was uncertain. One deputy was expelled from the government party for saying he would vote against. That left them with 154, still a majority of the 300 seats in the Greek parliament. So it seems that one opposition member voted with the government. But anyway, a majority of 17 out of 300 is obviously not ‘the narrowest of majorities’ (which would be a majority of one, Mr Hamilton), nor can it reasonably be described as ‘wafer-thin’.

‘Media give false impression of demo’ – Independent

In its leader about the demonstration in London the Independent says (my emphasis):

Pictures of injured police and masked youths smashing windows and cash-points … could not but taint the day of protest as a whole. It is no wonder that trade-union leaders moved quickly yesterday to insist that the actions of a few hundred people should not be allowed to detract from the main message of the official protest. But this is, to an extent, what happened; the force of the pictures made that inevitable.

That may very well be true but it leaves a big question mark hanging in the air: Where did such forceful pictures come from and how did people come to see them? The answer of course is that they were published in the media. So the Independent is clearly admitting that people inevitably have an inaccurate, distorted impression of what happened on Saturday because they believed what they saw in the media. These pictures for example are from the Independent itself:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is really saddening, but not at all surprising, is that the Independent seems utterly unaware of the irony of what it is saying.

The Guardian and the real world

Guardianistas invent and inhabit a world that suits their ideological view of how it ought to be, and then they pretend that it is reality. This is from a letter in today’s Guardian:

Interesting to note how the municipally owned airports such as Manchester and Liverpool have coped with the big freeze, while Heathrow has excelled itself as an example of our superbly run private sector. Relying on the Salvation Army to provide assistance to those waiting seems to illustrate perfectly the Tory recipe for the country's future – let people lap up a little charity while big business preoccupies itself with ludicrous bonuses for incompetent managers.

John Strongman, Manchester 

In fact Liverpool airport was privatised in 1990. Moreover, John Strongman from Manchester really should be aware that Liverpool’s position near the coast gives it a climate that is usually several degrees warmer than the inland area, and that it is by no means unusual for the weather in Liverpool to be considerably better than in the south-east of England. The same is also true to a certain extent of Manchester – apart from the incessant rain there of course. Extremely low temperatures have been recorded there recently but that is most unusual, as is snow in Merseyside.

Mr Strongman might also like to know that I am sitting in Barcelona having had a flight to Liverpool cancelled twice last weekend. I am scheduled to fly tomorrow. As far as I can make out, the problems were in part due to the closure of Liverpool airport for a time. My return flight to Barcelona after last Christmas was cancelled because of bad weather at Liverpool airport, as was a flight to Liverpool just before Christmas 2001 or 2002.

El País y yo / El País and me

 English text below.

En El País de hoy la Defensora del Lector dice:

La publicación simultánea del contenido de los documentos facilitados por Wikileaks … ha abierto un gran debate que no ha dejado indiferentes a los lectores de este diario. Algunos de ellos, como Peter Harvey, para expresar su total oposición a la publicación de estos documentos.

Es cierto que tengo muchas dudas sobre lo que veo como un circo mediático montado para aumentar el poder de los medios más que descubrir los fallos de la diplomacia norteamericana (y sólo la norteamericana), y que estoy escéptico del valor de la información publicada, de la cual mucha no puede sorprender a ningún observador de la escena internacional que tenga el cinismo adecuado sobre ella. Pero el correo que envié al diario no dijo nada de este tema. Rezaba textualmente:

Tras el ejemplo de transparencia ofrecido por Wikileaks, espero ver, a partir de ahora, toda la correspondencia interna de El País colgada en elpais.es para que sus lectores puedan ver como se confeccione el periódico.

En el caso contrario, tendré que suponer que todo este montaje es un ejercicio de voyeurismo, sin base alguna en la gestión coherente de la información.

Y este aspecto del asunto queda ignorado totalmente por Sra. Milagros Pérez Oliva.

 

* * * * *

 

In today’s El País the reader’s editor says (Spanish):

The simultaneous publication of the contents of the documents provided by Wikileaks … has opened up a great debate that has not left the paper’s readers indifferent. Some of them, like Peter Harvey, have expressed their total opposition to the publication of these documents.

It is true that I have many doubts about what I see as a media circus set up to increase the power of the media rather than to lay bare the failings of US (and only US) diplomacy, and that I am sceptical of the value of the published information, much of which cannot be surprising to any observer of the international scene who is properly cynical of it. But the mail that I sent to the paper said nothing about that. It ran as follows:

Following the example of transparency offered by Wikileaks, I expect to see in future all the the internal correspondence of El País posted on elpais.es so that your readers can see how the paper is put together.

Otherwise I will have to suppose that this whole set-up is an exercise in voyeurism, with no basis in the coherent handling of information.

And this aspect of the matter has been totally ignored by Ms Milagros Pérez Oliva.

 

Oh, the Grauniad!

Janet Todd in today’s Guardian (my emphasis):

In a report about Jane Austen, the Oxford professor Kathryn Sutherland is quoted as saying that "much of the credit for her elegant prose must go to publisher's reader and editor William Gifford" (Dashing Austen was not such a stylish writer, 23 October). Sutherland's story of the diminished female author and stylish male editor has been on the Today programme and in every national newspaper; it has circled the globe with headlines such as "Jane Austen's ghostwriter" and "Jane Austen: ¿una 'impostora'?".

Up to a point, Lord Copper.

A Google News search for "Jane Austen's ghostwriter" produces just one hit – which happens to be for this very article.

International interest from the Spanish-speaking media? A similar search for "Jane Austen: ¿una 'impostora'?" also produces just one result, which happens to be from the BBC’s Spanish service BBC Mundo.

The Independent still doesn’t like France

A tale of two cultures. While a sober, relaxed British middle class man reacts to the cuts by making tea in a kitchen with sunlight streaming through the window and his adoring cat looking up at him, a Frenchman with hunched shoulders reacts by making a Molotov cocktail in his poorly-lit kitchen overshadowed by his neighbours, with an empty wine glass and even a lighted cigarette close by (that’s how stupid he is). Such is the implication in this cartoon from today’s Independent. It is difficult to imagine such a crude stereotype of any non-European racial group coupled with an implication of white British superiority being printed in a newspaper that prides itself on its liberalism.

A search of Le Monde shows just one reference to a Molotov cocktail in recent days:

A Montpellier, un lycée a été la cible de jets de cocktails Molotov, provoquant 200 000 euros de dégâts, selon la région. (In Montpellier Molotov cocktails were thrown at a secondary school causing 200,000 euros worth of damage according to the regional authorities.)

That is most certainly to be regretted but one incident is hardly a basis for a cultural or racial stereotype. However, as I have mentioned before, the Independent has form for this kind of thing.