'Nother Solent

The sun shines

and your humble servant bloggeth not. Or not much anyway. Maybe I should garden more often. Scott Burgess left off the blogging for a while to tend the Burgess plot and look at him now: riding high. Galloway, A L Kennedy, Allende - it's all there.

This article by Nkululeko Khumalo from the South African business magazine Business Day is rather heavy on the economist-speak. Read it anyway. One large factor keeping Africa down is this:

Delays at African customs are on average longer than in the rest of the world: 12 days in sub-Saharan Africa, compared with seven and five-and-a-half days in Latin America and in central and east Asia respectively.

Opaque border-crossing procedures add costs to traders who have to find the proper information, fill in the numerous forms and bribe officials to speed up clearance. As these expenses do not vary according to the value or the volume of sales, they increase operational costs per unit and put African firms in a much weaker position than international firms.

There is an epic to be written about African lorry drivers. The distances they cross, the ingenuity they must employ and the risks they take to get their cargoes delivered are all on a tremendous scale. The epic would involve tragedy: many of them have AIDS and have carried the disease with them.

(Via Alex Singleton's mail digest from the Globalisation Institute.)

Better to have been left in ignorance

as to what Yasmin Alibhai-Brown said on Monday. Let that not diminish my gratitude to the nice person who responded to my shameless hints of yesterday by supplying the text, but, heavens, this is one of Yasmin's dopiest.

The bigger politics is what concerns us activists much more than the race and/or gender profile of an MP. And so to the Tories. The election ushers in the first 'black' Tory MP, Adam Afriye (half Ghanaian and half English)

Unless he has joint Ghanaian-British nationality he is all English.

and Shailash Vara, the Ugandan Asian who has done time as deputy chairman for a party which has always repudiated equality and diversity policies and produced a string of racist politicians, including Winston Churchill.

You mean she didn't want to talk about early socialist white supremacists after all?

So is this the nasty party shedding its repulsive past? Not a bit of it. These results, for me, are a damning manifestation of the splintering of the anti-racist struggle, a triumph of uncle Tomism and worse.

Here is what Clive Davis (whose blog I discovered via Stephen Pollard) said about that:

"Uncle Tom" is the laziest insult in the book. How does Yasmin know that black and Asian conservatives "assimilate into the political establishment without a backward glance at their origins"? Isn't it just possible that their ideas are based on hard experience rather than an eagerness to get a seat at the top table? Has she ever considered the possibility that it's much easier to follow the right-on crowd rather than take the path of somebody like Shelby Steele, a writer who has been subjected to no end of personal attacks simply for questioning America's post-Civil Rights orthodoxies?

Ms Alibhai-Brown continues:

To witness the son of illegal Jewish immigrants strategically mobilising mob instincts against immigrants was bad enough. To then have the sons of an African and a Ugandan Asian reiterate these obscene prejudices made me suicidal. They say it isn't racist to control immigration. They know how a racist stench rises when they flash such statements across the land. The victors deserve to be despised by egalitarians and people who believe in human rights, just as Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice are by millions of Americans of colour.

I agree with her view that it's what a politician does that counts, not his or her colour. The rest of the argument scarcely deserves the name. I am undecided on immigration, but even in my most libertarian phases I don't convince myself that someone saying it is not racist to control immigration is responsible for the racist thoughts that third parties may have when they hear this statement. There are probably people who think racist thoughts whenever they hear Yasmin Alibhai-Brown argue for some of her beliefs. She would not feel she had to remain silent to keep them from sin.

Diversity policies in history.

Laban Tall - he pays a quid so you don't have to - has a splendid quote from an article Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has penned for the Independent. Referring, I think, to the Conservative Party, she speaks of:

"A party which has always repudiated equality and diversity policies...

Too right, sister. It is fact too little known that John Stuart, the Third Earl of Bute, generally reckoned to be the first Tory prime minister, would not countenance sex-change operations on the NHS.

...and produced a string of racist politicians, including Winston Churchill"

Hey, Churchill wasn't so bad. The English Democrats* website provides a page of quotes from his memos cited in the first volume of his History of the Second World War. Here is one:

There must be no discrimination on grounds of race or colour [In the employment of Indians or Colonial natives in the Royal Navy]. In practice much inconvenience would arrive if this theoretical equality had many examples. Each case must be judged on its merits, from the point of view of smooth administration. I cannot see any objection to Indians serving on H.M. ships where they are qualified and needed, or, if their virtues so deserve, rising to Admirals of the Fleet. But not too many of them, please.

One can read that either way. Whether you say that Churchill allowed his principled stand in favour of racial equality to be subordinated to the prejudices of the majority, or to winning the war, it is unarguable both that he made it and that he saw it as a secondary issue. Frankly I don't think Churchill's contemporaries on the left would have done much better: two incompatible tracks have always run in parallel in the British Labour movement; internationalism, and a belief in "British jobs for British workers." And simple protectionism wasn't the half of it. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century ideas could be discussed at Fabian Society meetings by some of the intellectual leading lights of socialism that would get you turfed out of the BNP nowadays. The Webbs, Wells, Shaw, Ruskin and Havelock Ellis all came out with some unlovely sentiments on the subject of eugenics and race.

Will Ms Alibhai-Brown mention any of this? I might even bestir myself to buy an actual paper copy of the Indy to see.

*in extra large print for older readers.

UPDATE: I am too late. The article was in yesterday's paper. The bit they do let you see tantalisingly suggests either that the general thrust of the rest was to denounce anti-semitism, and I have to say that she is on the side of good on that topic, or that Galloway defeating Oona King is somehow a good thing for race relations. Since I have an objection on principle (the principle that my money is better spent elsewhere) to paying for the Independent's "premium content", I shall never know which.

Several media sources and major bloggers

have asked for help in publicising the Time Traveler Convention. I am happy to oblige. The Convention was held on May 7, but, as JEM says, "if you're a time traveller so what? It's never too late, is it?"

Well, it may be. Persons planning to depart for the convention in 2065, ten years after the launch of the Sony Timeboy (they were waiting until the price came down), and then to catch up with themselves a second time on one of those iPod timeshuffles given away free with Weetabix in 2070 ought to be aware of the Blinovitch Limitation Effect.

He ablutes once more.

"This creepy collection

of local government officers, geography teachers and assorted smelly cranks combine the hungry opportunism of a trap-door spider with the prim, bossy condescension of an Edwardian school ma’am, only without the good looks of the former or the moral fibre of the latter."

- David Carr on the Liberal Democrats. He's scarcely kinder to the Tories:

Deep down in their hearts, Conservative MPs just want a very quiet life, a reasonable stipend and a researcher-cum-catamite. All this nasty politics stuff just gives them a headache.

And on Labour's handling of the economy:

Sometimes a village is inundated by a man-made reservoir. Often, though, that is not the last that anyone has seen of it. In the hot summer months, when the water level drops, a rotting church steeple can be seen poking up accusingly above the water line. If the level drops further, then the roofs of ruined buildings which one housed a thriving community become visible too, reminding everyone of the price that was paid for the reservoir.

Economies are rather like that.