Plural Identities

I'm taking my boats to another pond!

I wonder if the BATNA (best alternative to negotiated agreement) blackmail tactic from non-doms that they will leave the UK if the government's tax plans are implemented (apparently Greek shipping families are the latest to threaten to take their toys elsewere) is not having quite the desired impact on the government.  Maybe (insert appropriate cliched adjective - dour, son of the manse, puritan) Gordon Brown and any residual socialist feeling in the Cabinet means that they would quite welcome the departure of conspicuously consuming, property price inflating squillionaires.  There is no doubt that the non-doms have pushed the top end of the London property market to weird levels (and as one Old Money Brit living in Holland Park described to me, spending money in mind boggling ways - digging below their Regency houses to build cinemas and swimming pools) which has an unhelpful knock on effect (a 1 bedroom flat in the East End that I bought as a first time buyer in 1988 for £60,000, at the height of that property boom apparently sold for £285,000 last year).  And this and the flash spending (see the Financial Times, How to Spend It magazine for inexplicably award winning stomach churning silliness) surely has a divisive effect on society.   I know it's not very New Labour to be against wealth creation, and Gordon Brown has apparently managed to say New Labour without washing his mouth out afterwards at a Cabinet meeting... but...

Superannuated cult dudes

I went to my third or maybe even fourth Robyn Hitchcock concert last week - this is more due to my husband's devotion to 'Sir' Robyn than mine. RH was looking older, more hunched, than we expected, but the eccentric English melodic melancholy was still going strong.  He sings of "heading for paradise, or Basingstoke or Reading" on "I Often Dream of Trains" - the concert is apparently "the director's cut" of this album.

His commentary between songs is as much part of the performance as the songs.  At one point, he rather ruined my admiration of his surreal and unpredictable meanderings by launching into a tirade about how he couldn't believe he once voted for Blair and how as a person who doesn't believe in anything, he views with suspicion anyone who does, as they cause so much harm in the world.  Well I'm an atheist too, but I really disagree with this "they're all as bad as each other" Bin Laden=Blair assertion.
Not only are Blair's Christian beliefs absolutely preferable to the Taliban's or Al Qaeda's, but the means, above all the means are so different. Blair sought to liberate, and not deliberately to kill massed civilians through terrorist acts.

In England we have battered the Christian church into something we can live with, even positively love aspects of (I would rather like to have Faure's Requiem and maybe "My Song is Love Unknown" at my atheist funeral, I'm afraid).  I agree with Daniel Finkelstein's gentle, mild article on this.

Which brings us unavoidably to the Archbish (I really don't understand why Mrs Archbish doesn't sneak up and attack those eyebrows with nail scissors when he's unawares), blogged to death already.  I thought "better read the whole speech, before commenting" but thankfully Tom at Freemania already has and it turns out the Archbish has probably been reading Amartya Sen too (“our social identities are not constituted by one exclusive set of relations or mode of belonging") and seems to have come to some rather odd conclusions, namely that secular governments should not monopolise definitions of political and public identity, so therefore plural jurisdictions should be allowed.  As Tom says, he has slid from social identities to public and political identities and then on to citizenship.  And of course that is precisely the problem with Sharia law, particularly as presently promoted by Islamists,(from my reading of Terrorism and Liberalism), which is that it too says there can be no distinction between private and public identities - good Muslims must express their faith in every aspect of their life.  Once you say Sharia law is accepted, there is no way certain Muslims will accept an "alongside with" English Common Law.  Muslims who don't agree will be bullied into accepting the judgement of Sharia courts, more than they are already being bullied.

My grandfather II

Further to my mother's obituary, a couple of things to add, related to the theme of this blog:

He kept his Danish citizenship, despite living in the UK for the final 40 years of his life, and could never pronounce "squirrel" properly.

At his funeral, a couple of his (Jewish) friends who had not known until then about his underground activities in Denmark, having heard my mother's speech then kindly invited her and her sisters to their synagogue the next day, where they said prayers of thanks to my grandfather.

Instead of naming individuals as with most other countries,  at Yad Vashem's The Righteous Amongst Nations, the entire Danish nation is mentioned.

My grandfather

My mother's obituary of my grandfather appeared in The Guardian's Other Lives today.

        

In autumn 1956 my father, Svend Bock, who has died aged 96, was the Scandinavian Airlines System representative in Cairo. The Suez crisis was unfolding, leaving hundreds of British nationals stranded in Egypt. "At some risk to his own safety," as foreign secretary Selwyn Lloyd subsequently stated in a FO letter, Svend, a Danish citizen, had been "indefatigable in his efforts to assist British residents," surreptitiously organising exit visas - and funding.

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It was not the most significant occasion on which Svend had offered vital assistance. He had begun working with Danish Airlines, in Copenhagen, in the late 1930s and, following the Nazi invasion of Denmark in 1940, he had joined the resistance - where his knowledge of aircraft movements proved useful. And with Mary, his Welsh wife, Svend was in the network smuggling Danish Jews to Sweden. Some of those fugitives became lifelong friends.

Born in Copenhagen, Svend was the youngest of six children of an exuberantly talented Danish writer and humorist, and a beautiful mother whose accidental death when he was six shattered his family. Svend, who was clever and adept at languages, was to end his education early, and then joined Scandinavia's biggest duvet and pillow manufacturer.

That job took him, in his mid-20s, to work in London where, at the English-Speaking Union he met Mary Davies playing ping pong. They married in 1938, honeymooned in Berlin, and went on to Copenhagen - soon followed by the Wehrmacht.

In 1946 Svend arrived in Warsaw to set up a Poland-Scandinavia air route. He never forgot that devastated city, where his hotel was one of the few buildings left standing, and where he pulled his bed into the middle of his room to avoid the bedbugs swarming the walls. The iron curtain was descending, that venture was aborted and by the late 1940s Svend was with SAS in Prestwick, Scotland, which, in that pre-jet era was a transatlantic air hub.

Those were his happiest times, his young family was settled in the tranquil seaside town, and at the airport the likes of Nobel prizewinner William Faulkner, Swedish opera singer Jussi Björling and Elizabeth Taylor passed through. Many shared Svend's fondness for whisky, and his job also entailed getting the celebrities back in the air in reasonably sober states. Nobel committees and European opera houses had much to thank him for.

In 1953 came Cairo. We all loved the life: bazaars, desert picnics, excursions to the pyramids and embassy parties. Then came 1956. Two years later we moved to Milan where, I think, his interests in opera and art rekindled - this led in retirement to his graduation with an Open University arts degree.

Later, leaving SAS, he settled in London and finally in Richmond, Surrey. We three daughters had scattered to three continents, and our parents' flat became a Heathrow annexe. "Make yourself at home," one of Svend's favourite phrases, was still repeated when we spent last Christmas with him.

Caring for our mother in her long illness, he discovered other talents. After her death Svend continued to visit St John's Hospital, in Twickenham, working with those suffering from Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease, making tea, relieving their carers. At one point he was chauffeuring and tea-partying at least half-a-dozen elderly ladies.

It was, as Cyril Marshall, a friend of his ever since Egyptian days remarked, a privilege to have known a man who was a natural gentleman. And laughter was in Svend's lifeblood.

He is survived by we three daughters, Clair, Nina and Joanna, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

I'm OK you're so so

Hmmm, I can't discern any cultural trends to explain this, so it must just be to do with the relative state of each country's economy or any of the other factors Tom at Freemania rightly lists.  "I'm all right Jack" is quite an English sentiment it seems to me, though...