UK News
Insights from the UK and beyond
from John Lloyd:
The nuance behind the iron
There’s no time more apt for murmuring the ending of Brutus’s speech in Julius Caesar than the week of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral: “The evil men do lives after them/the good is oft interred with their bones.” No time better, either, to add that the “evil” that, in this case one woman, did is little examined by her detractors, who prefer to stick to a diabolical version of her 12-year rule.
Margaret Thatcher (narrowly) won the 1979 election because the Labour government of the 1970s, under Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, had unsuccessfully tried to make a contract with the trade unions. In such a contract, pay would have been calibrated to productivity, and increases would be low in order to bring down high rates of inflation and to keep up investment in the socialized education, health and welfare institutions that disproportionately benefited the lower classes. It was the kind of social deal that the Germans and the Scandinavians had and still – in part – have: one that produces economies that, not by chance, have escaped the worst of the economic buffeting of the past five years.
But the attempt failed. The turn of 1978-79 was called the "Winter of Discontent" – another Shakespearean tag, this time from Richard III. Power failed; transport was constantly disrupted; hospitals and ambulance services closed. Most memorably, some gravediggers in Liverpool struck, and bodies piled up in a factory. All that Labour had held out as its usefulness to the nation – the ability to bring organized workers into a lasting, productive and stable agreement – was shattered. The party lost, but so did working men and women.
Thus, Britain’s large problems were given the free market, rather than the social democratic, treatment. That meant withdrawal of subsidies and widespread closures and unemployment. That was the prompt for much of the bitterness toward Hatcher, since not just jobs were lost but whole communities were rendered rudderless. Yet a victorious war against Argentina for possession of the Falklands, and a chaotic Labour Party, which had lurched to the left, saved Thatcher – and let her grow in stature, as the economy improved, and flourished.
from The Great Debate:
Thatcher: Master of the ‘unexpecteds’
The passing of Margaret Thatcher comes at a time when the great theme that shaped her years as Britain’s prime minister – the frontier between government and the private sector – is again the focus of serious public debate. Her historic achievement was to widen the frontiers of the “market” and, as she said, to have “rolled back the frontiers of the state.”
There is, however, a pendulum in this relationship between government and private sector. The role of government in the economy has expanded greatly since the 2008 financial collapse, along with government debt. So we will likely again see a struggle to rebalance the respective realms of state and market. And it will again be a battle.
from John Lloyd:
A free press without total freedom
Journalism gyrates dizzily between the dolorous grind of falling revenue and the Internet’s vast opportunities of a limitless knowledge and creation engine. On the revenue front, no news is good. The just-published Pew Center’s “State of the US News Media” opens with the bleak statement that “a continued erosion of news reporting resources converged with growing opportunities for those in politics, government agencies, companies and others to take their messages directly to the public.” Not only, that is, is the trade shrinking, but those who once depended on its gatekeepers have found their own ways to visibility.
Journalists’ task, as large as any they have collectively faced in 400 years of their trade’s existence, is to find a way to continue the journalism that societies most need and citizens are least willing to pay for: detailed, skeptical, truthful, fair, investigatory writing and broadcasting. It’s a big ask. The British are in the process of not answering it. They are staging a sideshow: not an unimportant one, but in a minor key all the same.
from John Lloyd:
A yacht not fit for a queen
Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of Her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith … is in want of a yacht.
She had one, the Royal Yacht Britannia, which she loved very much. When the Labour government of Tony Blair said it was too expensive and decommissioned it soon after assuming office in 1997, she was seen to weep at the ceremony. Last year, Blair was reported as saying he regretted the decision, pressed upon him by the then-chancellor, Gordon Brown, and inherited from the previous, Conservative administration. It cost £11 million a year to run, and a necessary refit would have cost some £50 million. So it was put out to the nautical equivalent of pasture. It’s now on show at a dock in Leith, the port of Scotland’s capital, Edinburgh, where it’s in much demand as a venue for “occasions."
Constitution in crisis as tyrannical journalists devour cowed politicians
A sordid tale of excess and brutality, of a world dominated by journalists with their ears to the keyhole, of tyrannical newspapers wielding remarkable power and of a political class not only cowed, but consumed, by that power.
Sound familiar? With two of Britain’s most senior policemen out of a job, the prime minister under pressure for his serenading of News Corp and one of the world’s most powerful press barons, in the form of Rupert Murdoch, summoned to testify to parliament, it would be one way of describing the current state of affairs. 
from FaithWorld:
Heaven is a fairy tale, says British physicist Stephen Hawking
(Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking speaks at Perimeter Institute For Theoretical Physics in Kitchener, Canada, June 20, 2010/Sheryl Nadler)
Heaven is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark, the eminent British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking said in an interview published on Monday. Hawking, 69, was expected to die within a few years of being diagnosed with degenerative motor neurone disease at the age of 21, but became one of the world's most famous scientists with the publication of his 1988 book "A Brief History of Time".
from FaithWorld:
UK Catholics urged to shun meat on Fridays
(Fish and chips in London, 31 July 2010/Javier Vte Rejas)
Britain's Catholics have been urged to make more effort to follow religious custom and abstain from eating meat on Fridays, potentially boosting sales of fish.
Church law required Catholics over the centuries to comply with this abstinence as part of Friday penance, the day set aside for special prayer and fasting to mark the day Jesus died. Traditionally Catholics have opted to eat fish instead, though a combination of new church guidance and changing eating habits has eroded this habit.
from FaithWorld:
Archbishop of Canterbury voices unease over bin Laden killing
(Britain's Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, at Lambeth Palace in London September 17, 2010/Chris Ison)
The Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual head of the 80-million strong Anglican Communion, has said the killing of an unarmed Osama bin Laden left a "very uncomfortable feeling." Rowan Williams said the different versions of events coming out of the White House "have not done a great deal to help here."
Ignore the data, Royal Wedding and sunshine give Britain Plc a Q2 kickstart
A lot of the economic data in recent days has made for pretty grim reading, reinforcing expectations that interest rates will remain at record lows for some months yet.
But a string of bullish updates from British retailers and manufacturers suggest that the second quarter could have got off to a flying start, with fine weather, the Easter holiday and the Royal Wedding all improving the national mood.
from FaithWorld:
Archbishop of Canterbury praises “unpretentious” Kate and William
(Britain's Prince William and his fiancee Kate Middleton in Darwen, northern England April 11, 2011/Adrian Dennis)
The Archbishop of Canterbury, who will marry Prince William and Kate Middleton next week, said on Thursday he had been struck by their wedding preparations, describing the couple as courageous and unpretentious. Rowan Williams, spiritual head of the Church of England, praised the couple's "simplicity" and the way they had dealt with the build-up to next Friday's wedding, which is set to be watched by an estimated two billion people worldwide.
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The Wall
