Author Archives: Ellen Hawley

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About Ellen Hawley

Fiction writer and blogger, living in Cornwall.

Why a Member of Parliament can’t resign, and how they do it anyway

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Since we’ve seen a handful of MPs resign from the House of Commons lately, this might be a nice time to talk about what an MP has to do to escape MPdom. Because like everything else in Britain, it’s wrapped up in tradition and more complicated than you’d think.

Officially speaking, MPs can’t resign. A 1624 law locks them into their jobs unless they’re expelled, disqualified, or dead. Since relatively few politicians are willing to squeeze their feet into those uncomfortable shoes–I’m not a politician, but the dead part would make me hesitate–and since over the course of a long and complicated history some MPs were deeply committed to getting out of the job, a workaround was invented: they can be appointed to one of two “paid offices of the Crown. These are the Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds and the Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead.” 

The small print says that accepting either position disqualifies them as MPs. So without dying or being expelled, they get to push open the fire exit without setting off alarms. Neither position is paid, but they do become the recipients of a shitload of capital letters. 

Irrelevant photo: roses in a nearby town.

What does a former MP have to do if they’re  appointed to one of those positions?

Nothing. The jobs are long past their best-before date and have been kept alive only to allow MPs an exit that doesn’t involve death, expulsion, or uncomfortable shoes, although MPs–especially those of the female variety–are free to wear uncomfortable shoes if they so choose. I disapprove, but hey, who asks me? They’re not my feet.

 

What are the Chiltern Hundreds?

The hundreds are divisions of government and taxation–or at least they were back in the Anglo-Saxon long ago. In terms of size they stand somewhere between a village and a shire.

What’s a shire? 

It’s the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of a county.

The Britannica says the hundred was probably an Anglo-Saxon area of a hundred hides, with a hide being the amount of land it took to support a family. Each hundred would have a court to settle  criminal cases and disputes between neighbors. Originally, everyone who lived within the hundred would be expected to attend, but gradually they came under the control of the lords. By the time you get into the medieval period, if a crime was committed, the hundreds were collectively responsible unless they could cough up the perpetrator, or someone who’d pass for the perpetrator.

The hundreds weren’t formally abolished until 1894, although by then they’d pretty well lost all relevance.

 

A bit more history

I’m not clear on whether the 1624 resolution established the rule against resignation or built an escape hatch. Parliament’s website seems to be arguing both sides. On the one hand, it says many MPs saw serving in Parliament as an obligation, not an honor or opportunity to be chased after. So members weren’t encouraged to step down. On the other hand, Parliament didn’t usually stay in session for more than a few weeks, so ”a procedure for resignation was hardly necessary.”

Take your pick. 

It goes on to say that if an MP accepted a paid office from the crown, he (and at this point he would’ve been a he) could no longer be expected “to scrutinise the actions of the Crown or the Crown’s government,” so he’d have to step down.

Did I say “step down”? It was nothing so gentle: “All Offenders herein shall be expelled this House.”

So take that, you offenders.

Once upon a time, lots of crown stewardships roamed the land and could be used this way. They paid actual money and had actual responsibilities. Only two survive and they exist only as a back door out of the House of Commons. You can think of them as a nearly extinct species. They only surviving pair are preserved in the zoo that is the Parliament.  

 

Are there any other ways out of the job?

Yup, and although some are appealing and some are not. An MP can bail out of Commons:

  • By becoming a member of the House of Lords. 
    • A couple of the MPs who left with Boris Johnson were hoping for that promotion, and when their names were crossed off the list felt–okay, I’m speculating here, but it looks to the casual observer like they felt cheated. Here they’d been expecting a job that pays £332 plus travel expenses and access to subsidized restaurants on any day they show up, plus the occasional loan of an ermine robe, and then they’re told they didn’t get the job? Hey, that’s hard on the old ego. https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/how-do-house-of-lords-expenses-work/ 
  • By becoming a police and crime commissioner or a member of the National Assembly for Wales, the Northern Ireland Assembly, or a non-Commonwealth legislature (except the Houses of the Oireachtas of the Republic of Ireland). 
    • The Houses of the Oireachtas? That’s Ireland’s parliament. Exactly why you can be a member of that and not be disqualified as a British MP is way over my head.
  • By being “sentenced to be imprisoned or detained indefinitely for more than a year in the United Kingdom, Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, or the Republic of Ireland; or if they are convicted of treason.”
    • Sometimes, you know, you’re better off just showing up at the goddamn job you already have, no matter how much you hate it. 
  • By going bankrupt, but only under some circumstances.
    • Please don’t ask which circumstances or why those and not others.  
  • Or, as we’ve seen, by accepting “one of a number of offices which are incompatible with membership of the House of Commons.”

So on the off chance that you wake up some morning and find that against your will and despite all your protestations you’ve been made a Member of Parliament, don’t despair. It doesn’t have to be a life sentence. The Chiltern Hundreds would be happy to act as your host, for however short a time.

How do members of the House of Lords resign? By writing a nice little note to the Clerk of Parliaments and then going out for a cup of tea. Or, of course, they can get their mothers to write the note: “Please accept Lord Supper-Dish’s apologies for withdrawing from the House of Lords. His time is currently occupied helping the police with their inquiries.”

But once the door slams behind the ex-lords, they’ll find that champagne’s more expensive on the mean streets of the real world than it is in the Lords’ subsidized eating and drinking establishments. The transition’s a tough one.

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And having nothing to do with any of that, if you’ve read or will be reading my new novel, A Decent World, it would really help if you’d leave a review on Goodreads of Amazon. Or if you have a blog and want to review it yourself, that’d be great. Anything that makes it visible, from social media to graffiti, helps.

Except possibly the graffiti.

Politics, phones, and pandemics: or, normal life in Britain

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Before we get going, could we have a brief moment of thanks to Britain’s recent governments? Through several recent prime ministers, their ongoing strength has been their ability to give satirists and unofficial wiseacres an endless supply of material.

[   ] 

Are we done being grateful? Good. Let’s get down to business.

Many and many a month ago. Boris Johnson set up a commission to look into how the government had handled the Covid epidemic. 

Why did he do that? Probably because it wouldn’t meet for a long time and wouldn’t report back for an even longer time, and meanwhile it would look like he’d done something, thereby allowing him to tell  those pesky relatives of the pandemic’s dead that he’d taken care of the problem. And also possibly because he was deluded enough to think the commission would give him an A+, or at least if he took the pandemic pass/fail, a passing grade.

Either way, the thing about long times is that eventually even the longest of them will end, and the commission is now in high gear and has demanded the unedited versions of Johnson’s notebooks and WhatsApp messages. Johnson, of course, is no longer prime minister–in fact (see below), since I started writing this, he’s put the lid on the trash can that was his career as an MP and is just some private schmuck of a citizen, like the rest of us–so it was the current government that responded to the demand.

No, the government told the commission, you can’t have the full versions. Too many irrelevancies to trouble your little brains. We’ll sort through them for you and give you edited versions. You’ll like them better. They’re shorter. 

To which the commission replied, Are you fuckin’ kidding us? 

The italics there are to show–in case you managed to wonder–that those aren’t actual quotes. Both sides have been more diplomatic and to have kept sober and serious faces when they said whatever it was they actually said.

Irrelevant photo: A lily. The name starts with a Z, but that’s as close as I can get.

The two sides tossed messages back and forth over the fence a few times until the commission changed tactics and threw over a subpoena and the government went to court to keep the commission–which its own party set up, remember–from getting its hands on what we can only assume is something juicy, since as soon as someone says you can’t see something, every last one of us thinks it’s worth seeing.

Before the courts had a chance to consider the issue, never mind rule on it, though, Johnson offered the commission his phone, complete with its unedited WhatsApp contents. 

Why would he do that? Could it be because he’s not the prime minister anymore and the person who now is helped trigger his downfall? 

Is anyone really that petty?

You bet your overworked word processing program that some-unspecified-one is.  

How much does Johnson’s offer mean? It’s hard to say. He had a different phone early in the pandemic, and it’s–um, I’ve lost track of who has it. Johnson? The government? The tooth fairy? Does it matter? It can’t be turned on because of security issues: because the phone number had been publicly available for years, it’s a security risk and can only be turned on in a secure location. Turn it on in the wrong place and children throughout the land will be told, inaccurately, that the tooth fairy does not, in any literal sense, exist.

The government also has Johnson’s notebooks (unless the tooth fairy’s grabbed them too) and isn’t anxious to release the full version of those either.

If Johnson’s willing to turn over his phone, why does our prime minister du jour, Rishi Sunak, have a problem with handing over the rest of it? Well, it sets a precedent, see. The commission might ask for his–that’s Mr. du Jour’s–notes and messages next. Besides, who knows what Johnson said about him? Or anyone and anything else. Johnson’s not known for his discretion. 

The more official argument is that ministers should be able to discuss policy freely, without the fear of being overheard. They need to say–as Johnson did–things like, “Let the bodies pile high in their thousands,” without worrying that they might offend the delicate sensibilities of people whose bodies might end up in those piles.

 

The Sunak part of the picture

It seems fair to guess that Sunak has no problem with the commission unraveling Johnson’s reputation (if he still has one) but doesn’t want his own tangled up with it. Sunak  likes to present himself as having heroically saved the economy during the pandemic. 

“I successfully helped 10 million people protect their jobs and the economy from Covid,” he said, apparently not noticing that he set up that sentence so he needed 10 million people to help him do that.  

Part of Sunak’s heroic effort was the Eat Out to Help Out program, which may well have given the virus a nice bump by tempting unmasked people into public spaces where they could share both appetizers and germs. That one thing (the bump in case numbers) follows another (the program) isn’t proof that the Thing 1 caused Thing 2, but it might make a person look at the possibility that it did. And the commission could just be moved to.

Should he have known at the time that the program was risky? I dunno. I spotted the problem, and I didn’t have his access to epidemiologists. I’m just some damn fool with a computer and an internet connection.

A deep dive into the unedited messages and notes may also show other ways Sunak–along with Johnson and the rest of the government–ignored scientific advice. And may not. At this point, for all we know they could show that the entire government was taken over by shape-shifting lizards bent on the destruction of the planet for reasons that we don’t need to make clear because we’re moving the plot along so fast no one will notice.

I think I stole that lizard thing from a Dr. Who episode, so don’t blame me if it’s not entirely convincing.

 

Johnson’s resignation

Now let’s come back to that MP business: Boris Johnson is not only no longer Britain’s prime minister, he’s no longer a Member of Parliament. He didn’t exactly leave of his own free will–an investigation (different investigation; if investigations were wheels, we could catch any bus we wanted right now)–

Where were we? Johnson saw the report of an investigation into whether he misled parliament about breaking the Covid regulations the rest of the country was expected to follow, and having seen it, he resigned. If he’d waited around, he’d have gotten pushed, so this wasn’t exactly a free choice. 

That will trigger a by-election–a local election to replace him–and that will give Rishi du Jour a pretty sharp headache, because numbers aren’t looking good for the Conservatives just now. 

A couple of Johnson supporters have also resigned as MPs, which will trigger more by-elections, but it’s hardly been a flood. In fact one of them, Schrodinger’s MP–having said she was stepping down with “immediate effect,” which means right this second, you hear me?–hasn’t officially stepped, at least not at the moment I’m writing this. It’s anyone’s guess whether she’ll bail out or not. Stalling like this makes life marginally more difficult for the prime minister, who’d like to clear all those nasty by-elections out of the way at once so he can go about Tthe business of convincing the country that he leads a marginally sane political party.

The tooth fairy was expected to step down but has made no statement as yet.

 

Politicians, government officials, and phones

All this raises the question of why politicians don’t set up their WhatsApp groups to delete messages after seven days, and if that’s a question (it’s not exactly, but let’s not quibble) it’s not one I can answer. Maybe they have an exaggerated sense of their own importance, and therefore of their messages’ importance. And of their phones’ importance, because they hold historic documents, after all. They mustn’t fall into the wrong hands, but heavens to an ice cream sundae, they do have to preserve those messages.

If we’ve established that, I’m about to cheat and tell you the story not of a politician but of an food inspector in India who was taking a selfie at a reservoir (he was on vacation, so he wasn’t doing this wasn’t on government time) and managed to drop his phone in the reservoir. 

It happens. I once dropped mine down the toilet. I wasn’t on a call at the time, so I missed my chance stick my head into the opening and yell, “Can you hear me now?”

The food inspector ordered the reservoir drained. Once enough water to irrigate 1,500 acres of land had been wasted during scorchingly hot weather, he got his phone back. 

It was unusable.

As soon as I’m done here, I’m going to see if he’s eligible to be our next prime minister. He’s in the wrong country, but I’m not sure that rules him out. See, we have this unwritten constitution here in Britain, so who knows what it actually says? 

 

But if we’re talking technology, what about chatbots?

They’re harder to drop down the toilet, being immaterial and all, but they can drop their users down the pan easily enough, which is what happened to a lawyer who asked ChatGPT to help him prepare a case. His client was suing an airline, and the chatbot cited Martinez v. Delta Air Lines, Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines and Varghese v. China Southern Airlines.

Are your sure those cases are real? the lawyer asked.

Oh, yeah, the chatbot said. Absolutely. It even cited a source.

Into the brief they went. 

The airline’s lawyers couldn’t find any trace of the decisions, though, and being on the opposing side they were less willing to take anyone’s word for their existence. 

Not one of them turned out to be real.

 

But back in Britain…

That was in New York, where the improbable happens every day, so let’s go back to Britain, where nothing improbable happens. Except possibly at the Gloucester Cheese Rolling, where this year someone won the race while unconscious. 

The race–actually, it’s a series of races–involves chasing a wheel of cheese down a very (very, very) steep hill. No one catches the cheese or is expected to. Cheeses don’t have any sense of self-preservation and humans aren’t round, so the winner is the first person who reaches the bottom after the cheese.

In this case, the winner tripped, went airborne, hit her head, and rolled out in front of the other runners while unconscious. She woke up in the medical tent, and is now the proud owner of a three-kilo wheel of cheese.

Don’t make fun of her for falling, because almost no one stays on their feet all the way down. The winner of a different race said, “I don’t think you can train for it, can you? It’s just being an idiot.” 

The race dates back to no one’s sure when and local authorities have (sensibly and unpopularly) been trying to shut it down for years. Six people ended up in the hospital this year, which may help you understand why, if a person’s job involves projecting some semblance of responsible judgment, it also involves disapproving. The problem is that the race is an unofficial event, and the organizers are unofficial organizers–well, it just sort of happens. Year after year. Magically. Even the cheese is a volunteer.

Police, fire, and ambulance services don’t attend the event–they’re afraid, I believe, of seeming to support it–but they are on standby.

 

Book banning and word unbanning

You’ve been reading about books being banned from US schools and libraries because someone thinks they’re not appropriate for kids, right? The books that’ve been given the boot include a lot ofL LGBTQ literature, a lot of Black and antiracist literature, and a lot of books about sexuality, grief, loss, poverty, puberty–you know, things kids wouldn’t have a clue about if those books hadn’t shoved their noses right up against the shop window.

How do you fight back against book banning? Well, in 2022 Utah passed a law banning “pornographic and indecent” books from the schools, and now some genius has challenged the Bible as having content inappropriate for young kids. It’s vulgar and violent, apparently. 

One school district has already pulled copies from its shelves.

This should be fun.

*

Meanwhile Apple has unbanned a word that its autocorrect used to change to “duck.” As Craig Federighi, Apple’s software chief explained, “In those moments where you just want to type a ducking word, well, the keyboard will learn it, too.” 

Users could always turn off autocorrect, and they could do it without having to drain the reservoir, but a lot of us, ahem, never get around to it and send out ridiculous texts because we don’t bother to proof them. 

A Guardian letter writer claims that her phone routinely changes angry to seagull, although it’s always let her type fuck as often as she wants. 

Conscientious Objectors in World War I Britain

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Let’s wriggle into a small, dusty corner of British history and see what someone left behind. In other words, let’s talk about Britain’s (as far as I can establish) first conscientious objectors: the men who refused to serve in the military during World War I. 

But–as usual–we have to take a step back before we go forward. To have conscientious objectors, a country needs a draft–a system of conscription that forces all physically fit men between certain ages into the armed forces. Without that, there’s nothing to object to, conscientiously or otherwise. 

From the information I’ve found, World War I marked the first time Britain introduced universal conscription. The fighting was on an unprecedented scale and it called for an unprecedented number of fighters.  

The war started out with brass bands and a tide of patriotism, working the country into the kind of fever you need to recruit soldiers. Men and boys signed up, and at some point some number of women–it was probably a small number but they’ve been written into history in bold-face type–began handing white feathers to men who looked able-bodied enough to be soldiers but who visibly weren’t to publicly shame them.

Irrelevant photo: campion and stitchwort growing by the roadside

But the number of volunteers wasn’t high enough. The war was turning soldiers into dead bodies on a massive scale: 6% of the adult male population died in the war–12% of serving soldiers. They had to be replaced, so the country introduced a draft.

 

The conscientious objector category

It’s against that background that we take our snapshot of Britain’s conscientious objectors–or COs, since (a) they were often called that and (b) my fingers are convinced conscientious is spelled some other way.  

From the time conscription was introduced (1916, two years after the war started, first for those who care, first for single men between 18 and 40, then for all men, married or otherwise) until the end of the war, 20,000 men applied for CO status, and that tells us two things. The most obvious is that it wasn’t a massive number of people but it wasn’t an insignificant one either, but the more interesting and less obvious thing is that a category had been created. If you either naturally or with some contortion could fit yourself into it, a recognized way had been made for you to refuse military service.

The Military Service Act–the same one that introduced conscription–set up tribunals where men could argue that they shouldn’t be drafted on the grounds of hardship, illness, education, essential work, or–pay attention here, because this is the point–a conscientious objection to military service, which could be religious or more generally moral.

The tribunals included someone from the military along with local men–and we can count on the local members being drawn from the area’s, ahem, important people, because class comes into everything in Britain. And elsewhere, but oh-so-visibly here. So if you showed up to argue that you shouldn’t be drafted, they were the ones who’d decide whether you had a legitimate reason or were just a coward–you know, the kind of lowlife who objected couldn’t see the patriotic joy in climbing out of a trench and running through a hailstorm of bullets. 

Some people’s objection to the war was political, and the act allowed no space for that. You could have a moral or religious objection or you could pick up your damn rifle and go fight.

The panels’ questioning was (no surprise here) often hostile. One CO described his hearing this way:

“They put me through the usual sorts of questions that these tribunals did. They had certain routine questions. A favourite one was, what would you do if your sister was threatened with rape by some German soldier or something like that? And I can’t quite remember what I answered but it was to the effect that that had nothing to do with being a CO against the war. I think that I said that I didn’t know what I would do and that it didn’t matter in the present context in the least what I would do. The thing was this was a protest against the war, that the war was wrong.”

If your argument was accepted, you were shunted off into the Non-Combatant Corps, and my fingers don’t object to the spelling there but it was called the NCC anyway. Let’s save a few of the keystrokes I’ve wasted explaining that and use the acronym. It was created by the same act that established the draft.

If it wasn’t accepted–and most weren’t–you were drafted and had to decide whether to serve or to refuse, leading to tales such as that of a rifleman who refused to load his rifle for target practice and another one who refused to put on his uniform.

 

The NCC

If your argument was accepted and you were shunted into the NCC, you  were expected to accept military discipline. You were also expected to accept acronyms. I can’t tell you any tales about what that was like in Britain, but I met an American World War I CO (he was the brother of an uncle-by-marriage–that’s how old I am) and he was sent to an army camp in the Midwest somewhere. Let’s randomly say Kansas. When he got there, conscientious objectors were rare enough they weren’t sure whether to lock him up (he might be a conscientious objector) or salute him (he might be a commissioned officer). His paperwork didn’t make it clear.

After a few days, unfortunately, they figured it out and the quality of his food went down sharply.

I had to slip that in. I never have found a spot for it before.

In the NCC, you might end up building, cleaning, loading or unloading anything that wasn’t munitions, and you might do it in Britain or where the fighting was. You might carry stretchers–a job that was as dangerous as being in the infantry–or work in the medical tents. You were subject to military discipline.

 

The refuseniks

On the other hand, you might join the hard-core COs and refuse to follow the NCC’s military discipline, in which case you’d be court martialed and end up in prison. 

As an alternative to prison, you could join the Home Office Scheme, which offered imprisoned COs the choice of doing “work of national importance under civil control”–building roads and reservoirs, say. You’d live in a camp, and if you weren’t in the military your life still wasn’t your own. In some camps, you’d be treated decently and in others badly. In one camp, the COs went on strike.

Or you could join the handful of COs who took an absolutist stance. For them, working on a road or a reservoir benefitted the government in wartime and was an acknowledgement that the government had a right to dictate to them. They were court martialed, sometimes repeatedly. Some went on hunger strikes and were force fed. Many were underfed. Seventy-three died of poor treatment either in prison or shortly after their release. And the abuse that COs faced often fell on their families as well.

Just short of 6,000 men were sentenced for resisting military authority. 

 

Legacy of the COs

After the war, some former COs went into politics and a few ended up in Parliament. Others struggled to find work and rebuild their lives. All continued to have acronym-haunted dreams.

A Decent World

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It’s time to announce a new novel.

(Sorry, did you want a regular post? Come back next week.)

A Decent World is the story of  Summer Dawidowitz, who’s spent the past year caring for her grandmother, Josie — a lifelong Communist, a dedicated teacher, and the founder of an organization that tutors schoolchildren. When Josie dies, everything that seemed solid in Summer’s life comes into question. What sort of relationship will she have with the mother who abandoned her? Will she meet with Josie’s brother, who Josie exiled from the family? Does she really want to go back to the non-monogamous household she was part of before she moved in to take care of Josie? And finally, does she still believe a small, committed group of citizens can change the world, and if so, how?

A Decent World is about grief, family, and love. It asks the broadest of questions about the form of society we live in. It will be in UK bookstores from June 15 or can be ordered now, in the UK or abroad, from Waterstones, Swift Press, or–inevitably–those folks I work hard to avoid, Amazon.

 

It’s never the big things: small scandals in British politics

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The real scandals aren’t the ones that bring politicians down. It’s the little ones that get them. The stupid ones. The ones we understand. So Suella Braverman, Britain’s home secretary and my nominee for this year’s Wicked Witch of the West Award, isn’t likely to lose her job over abusive treatment of immigrants and refugees or for cranking the national racism dial a few notches higher. Instead, it’s her handling of a speeding ticket that’s put her job in danger.

Braverman got nailed for speeding last summer, and if you’re not too far over the speed limit the law allows you to take a speed awareness course instead of paying a fine and getting points on your license.

Points? You don’t want those. If you rack up twelve, your license disappears in a puff of smoke, and if you try to drive after that you disappear in a much larger puff of smoke. 

And your car turns into a ham sandwich.

Irrelevant photo: A neighbor’s flowering bush. No idea what it’s called, although more than one person has told me.

Braverman was eligible for the course but didn’t want to rub shoulders with the kind of lowlifes who show up at a speed awareness course. People might confuse her for one of them, and that would have been politically embarrassing. So she allegedly asked civil servants to see if they could arrange a personalized course for her own important self.

They (allegedly) replied with the diplomatic version of, “Fuck, no,” so she asked a political advisor to see what sort of wiggle room could be made for her. When the answer (apparently) was “none,” she paid a fine and got three points on her license instead of taking the course. 

In case you need help with this, three is several points short of twelve, so no smoke and no ham sandwich.

What’s the problem? Ministers aren’t supposed to involve civil servants in their personal lives. Civil servants aren’t there to pick up ministers’ dry cleaning, park their cars, or mediate between them and the speed awareness course people. 

The flap has only recently emerged into the light of public disapproval, and Rishi Sunak, our prime minister of the moment–we burn through them quickly these days–is having to answer awkward questions, like whether he’ll launch an investigation into what happened. Initially he said things like, “I know she’s expressed regret” and that he’s “availing” himself of the information.

I’m not sure what you do when you avail yourself of information. Is it like when I buy the paper but don’t read it? It’s available on my kitchen table. It’s not available in my brain, but it could be. Easily. 

Braverman’s said things like, “[I’m] content that nothing untoward happened.”

After the requisite amount of dithering, Sunak decided he was also content and the issue didn’t need investigation. So for the moment, officially speaking, nothing untoward happened. Watch this space, though. Watch several other spaces. In one of them, surely, something interesting will happen.

*

Okay, what’s my problem with Braverman?

I’ll refrain from the full-blown documentation my Wicked Witch nomination requires. Sorry. I did include in when I sent in the paperwork, but for the purposes of this blog–well, she’s beyond anything I can be funny about. I will say, though, that she seems to be  positioning herself as the rightest of the right wing candidates for next leader of the Conservative Party.  Political gossips–at least the ones who don’t like her–hold that she’s not known for her competence, but as recent history demonstrates, that doesn’t disqualify her for a top job.  A former and carefully unnamed minister who worked with her provides the best quote: “I don’t often say people are completely useless, but if her desk had not been occupied I wouldn’t have noticed.” 

 

And from the Department of Marie Antoinette Reincarnated comes this

Ann Widdecombe–once a Conservative MP, once (in the full spirit of irony) a Member of the European Parliament for the Brexit Party, and now a member of the post-Brexit creation Reform UK–was asked, on a BBC politics show, what she’d say to people who couldn’t afford the ingredients for a cheese sandwich. 

“Well, then, you don’t do the cheese sandwich,” she said. Compassionately.

She went on to remind us that we had no right to simply expect prices to stay stable and that if wages rose they’d only add to inflation. She didn’t advise people not to eat until prices come down, but it is the logical conclusion.

 

Meanwhile, the Diplomacy Department’s been busy

In a precedent-setting move, Ireland’s taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, showed up at the coronation–that’s the recent coronation, in case I haven’t been clear–bringing along his partner, Matt Barrett. So make that two precedent-setting moves: Ireland shows up at the coronation of a British king and a political leader brings his same-sex partner.

Not content with that, though, Barret–that’s the partner, in case you got lost in the last paragraph–set a precedent of his own, posting throughout the show to the 350 followers on his private Instagram account.

“Holy shit,” he wrote from the car before they got to the abbey, “I think I’m accidentally crowned king of England.”

During the ceremony itself, he posted about Charles’s crown, “Was genuinely half expecting it to shout ‘GRYFFINDOR.’”

About the Right Rev. James Newcome’s title, Clerk of the Closet, he said, “Had this job until my early 20s.” 

Of course, private account or not, it all went public. 

The taoiseach said, ““We’ve spoken about it and it won’t happen again.” 

He has not confiscated Barrett’s phone or grounded him for six months. In fact, his response is refreshingly sane: Barrett’s a “private individual and [whether he apologizes] is obviously up to him.”

Barrett has apologized. Unreservedly. 

 

Lost any luggage lately?

Have you ever wondered how many pieces of luggage the aviation industry lost, delayed, or damaged last year? We’re talking globally here, and the answer is 26 million, or 7.6 bags per 1,000 passengers. That’s not quite double the year before, but it’s close enough for a numerophobe like me. 

Covid’s getting the blame, which works well since it’s in no position to defend itself.

That may explain why James Cleverly, our foreign secretary, chose a private jet for his eight-day tour of the Caribbean and Latin America.

Okay, maybe political honchos all fly private jets. They need room for their briefcases and their aides and their security details. But Cleverly cleverly chose “the creme del la creme of private business jets,” which rents for more than £10,000 per hour and comes with a master suite that includes a queen-size bed, a private toilet, and a shower. Anyone who’s left to suffer in the lounge area at least has a big-screen TV. 

I’m not sure who I’m quoting on that creme de la creme comment. It was unattributed in one of the articles I read, and I know I could’ve stolen the accent marks along with the quotation, but as a writer I have strong feelings about plagiarism. 

In the interest of accuracy, I should mention that a second source lists the cost as £12,000 per hour, including fuel, and that when one source asked the rental company for a cost estimate for a similar trip, it came out at £348,000. 

I’m reasonably sure Cleverly’s luggage, aides, and security entourage were not lost in transit.

Bathrobes, political scandals, and crime: it’s the news from Britain–and elsewhere

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Liz Truss–best known as Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister–was back in the news after the Cabinet Office sent her a £12,000 bill for her use of Chevening house. Chevening’s a grace and favor home, which means it’s owned by the state but used by–well, sometimes the foreign secretary and sometimes the prime minister. If they use it for work, the government pays. If they host friends and family, it’s on their dime. 

Or not their dime. Britain doesn’t have dimes. That’s me going American on you again. They’re expected to foot the bill. Britain does have feet. 

How much hosting can you do for £12,000? By my standards, enough to outlast the time Truss was in office and possibly our time on this earth, but then I’m not prime ministerial material. 

The bill includes £120 for  missing bathrobes and slippers. Much to my disappointment, no one’s saying how many bathrobes and slippers that covers.

Truss disputes parts of the bill. The argument is over the line between a work event and a party (some work events are said to have turned into parties), and between government business and Conservative Party business. No one seems to dispute the missing bathrobes and slippers. Someone must’ve mistaken them for work papers and taken them to the office.

Why is this worth mentioning? Because the real scandals are never the ones that hold our attention. They’re too damn hard to follow. Stealing government bathrobes, though? We all know someone who’s packed up motel towels and taken them home, right?

Irrelevant photo: A poppy about to open.

Meanwhile, in France

France’s version of the silly scandal is that the economy minister has published a novel with a sex scene that’s sometimes described as steamy and sometimes as toe-curling. I’ll confess to not having gone looking for the full scene. The sentence-long snippets I’ve seen are enough to put me off, and I’ll spare you even those. Apply to Lord Google yourself if you’re really interested. He may decide you’re tough enough to survive them with your interest in sex intact.

People would have made fun of the book anyway, but since its publication coincided with a political meltdown over raising the retirement age, a lot of people thought he should maybe be spending his time thinking about the economy, and they’re furious. 

He, on the other hand, says it’s all part of keeping a decent work/life balance.

They, on the other hand, think retiring at the age they expected is part of a decent work/life balance. 

 

Getting to the roots of crime

In an effort to stamp out crime, Romford, in east London, has banned hoods, motorcycle helmets, and ski masks, although to be fair you can have a hood hanging down your back, you just can’t pull it up over your head. You can probably put your ski mask over your hand and pretend it’s a sock puppet or carry a motorcycle helmet like a birthday cake and sing “Happy Birthday.” You just can’t have them on your head.

 

Getting to the royalties of crime

And just when I think I haven’t found enough odd stories to make up a post, I stumble over this: A Utah widow who, after her husband’s death, wrote a kids’ book on grief is now suspected of having poisoned him.

Guys, I’ve struggled through long stretches of writer’s block, so I know what it’s like to feel you’ve run out of anything to say, but this is not the solution.

 

What is art?

A South Korean student went to a museum displaying an art installation by Maurizio Cattelan and ate it. 

Not the museum. He ate the art installation, which was a banana duct-taped to a wall. Then he taped the peel back on the wall.

Why? He told museum officials that he’d skipped breakfast and was hungry, but he told a broadcaster that “Damaging a work modern art could also be artwork.”

What the hell, the banana’s replaced every few days anyway. When the artist was told about the incident, he said, “No problem.”

The banana–okay, the banana and the duct tape, or the concept, or maybe that’s the artwork. Anyway, whatever you want to call it, it’s sold twice now, each sale being called an edition, once for $120,000 and once for $150,000. For that, I assume you get a banana, a piece of silvery duct tape, and permission to tape it to a wall.

 

What is crime?

In Old Bridge, New Jersey, someone dumped more than 500 pounds of unboxed pasta in the woods. Or since it’s important to get the facts right, more than 500 pounds of ziti, spaghetti, and other noodles.

The township doesn’t have a bulk trash pickup–you have to pay to get big items hauled away and not everyone can afford to. Local people say they know who did it but aren’t saying. It’s a sensitive situation, and I guess it’s worth saying that it’s not an art installation.

The coronation bling: what does it all mean?

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Now that those of us who live in Britain can once again turn on the news without fear of getting mugged by coronation news, let’s sneak into the space that’s opened up and review a bit of the bling that’s been put back in storage.

But before we do, I have to remind you–I believe it’s a legal requirement–that every bit of that bling signifies something. The king’s scepter? It signifies his temporal power (such as it is). The orb? That symbolizes that his power’s derived from god. If you doubt that, feel free to ask either the king or god, whichever one you figure is more likely to give you an answer.

Sadly, explaining what things signify goes against all my writerly instincts, which insist that if symbols work at all, they’ll explain their own damn selves. So my explanations will be, at best, sporadic.

Yes, the headline was just a touch misleading. I should be ashamed.

The Photo of Irrelevance

 

The stone

The Stone of Scone, also known as the Stone of Destiny, making it sound like a prop from an Indiana Jones movie, isn’t what you’d call bling. It’s roughly carved sandstone and the size of three pillows piled on top of each other. It weighs 152 kilos. That’s 335 pounds, or 23 stones.

A stone? As an out-of-fashion way to measure weight. One stone equals 14 pounds, and it does seem sensible to measure the weight of a stone in stones, even if it makes for confusing sentences.

The Stone of Scone was seized from Scotland in 1296, back when England and Scotland were two separate countries with two separate monarchs and an enduring habit of going to war with each other. It was a symbol of the Scottish monarchy, which is one reason the English wanted it. The other reasons were: 

2) That legend connected it back to the biblical Jacob of Jacob’s ladder, who was supposed to have used it for an extremely uncomfortable pillow. People took that stuff seriously back then. 

3) That taking it really pissed off the Scots and gave the English bragging rights.

The earliest written record connecting a Scottish king to the stone comes from 1249, when Alexander III was kinged at Scone Palace, which was not a cafe serving tea and baked goods but a palace with, um, you know, a stone. An important stone. Legend and poetry trace it back further but we’ll move on, reminding ourselves as we go that the English hauled this 23-stone stone south at a time before railroads had been invented and possibly before the wheel had been.That’s how badly they wanted it.

The English then proceeded to crown their own kings on it. Edward I (1239 – 1307) was so pleased with the thing that he had a coronation chair built to hold it, and 26 monarchs have put their kingly butts on it while being crowned. Everyone took it seriously enough that during World War II it was buried for safekeeping. Because if the Nazis took over the country, at least they wouldn’t get their hands on the stone, right? Just imagine if they had. All those 1950s World War II movies would’ve had the Nazis talking with Scottish accents instead of German ones.

In the 1950s, four Scottish students stole it, breaking it in the process. Or else, they discovered that the Suffragettes had already broken it when they bombed the chair in 1914. Either way, the students ran off with both pieces. Or not exactly ran. Even in two pieces, it was still a hefty hunk of rock. They hid them in odd places–a garage; a factory, a hole in the ground (it’s a stone; who’d notice it?)–before finally getting it to Scotland, where it stayed briefly before (the point having been made) it was returned to England. The students were never prosecuted.

In 1996, England gave it back to Scotland, which means it had to be hauled south again for Charles’s coronation.  

So that’s 335 pounds of sandstone being schlepped north and south so it can sit under a chair for a few days, looking like the lump it is, while people run all around it wearing fancy costumes.

Maybe you have to be British for that to make sense to you.

 

The swords

You need five swords to be kinged, apparently. The sword of offering, the sword of temporal justice, the sword of spiritual justice, the sword of mercy, and the sword of state, which was originally one of two swords but somewhere along the line the other one was covered with a cloak of invisibility and no one’s seen it since.

One sword gets blessed by a bishop and given to the newly minted king, who lays it on an altar then buys it back for 50 shillings, which no one uses anymore so they’ve substituted newly minted 50-pence coins. I don’t know if the king has to cough those up himself or if someone hands him the money the way a parent slips a kid some money in a candy store so they can think they’re paying for their own candy. 

Each of those moves symbolizes something, but you have to keep a straight face to explain it all, so I won’t try.

 

The bracelets

The bracelets of sincerity and wisdom have been around so long that no one knows quite what they’re supposed to do–other than make you sincere and wise, of course. Didn’t Wonder Woman’s deflect bullets? I can’t help wondering if anyone’s tried using them that way. 

Anyhow, since no one’s sure what their powers are, they’re given to the king, who “acknowledges” them, then they’re put back on the altar. He doesn’t wear them.

Back in the dark ages, when I was in my teens, women were expected to wear lipstick and– 

This is relevant, so stay with me. 

–women were expected to wear lipstick and I spent some time trying to figure out what to do with the stuff and ended up doing more or less the same thing as the king does with the bracelets: I acknowledged the Lipstick of Adulthood by smearing some on my lips, then looking in the mirror, deciding it was ridiculous, and rubbing it off. Since we didn’t have an altar, I put it back in the medicine cabinet and went out into the world a quick smear closer to adulthood and with no one any the wiser. 

 

The glove

Yes, singular. The king has one coronation glove. He puts it on, then he takes it off. That makes it a bit like the Lipstick of Adulthood, only more expensive. Much more expensive. It symbolizes that the king thought it might be cold in the church and then decided it wasn’t. 

 

The gold spurs

Once upon a time, they were buckled onto the king’s legs. I’d have though ankles, but what do I know? The article says legs. Anyway, these days they’re only tapped against his ankles. They symbolize that in a ceremony this long, it might be wise to make sure the main character stays awake.

 

The crown

English kings before the Norman conquest might (it’s unclear) have settled for a relatively simple ceremony and a blinged-up helmet instead of a crown, but as a usurper William the Conqueror had a point to make–I’m your legitimate king, not some nobody who arrived in a small boat–so he went all out with both his crown and his coronation ceremony. So much so that the ceremony included having the people in attendance call out in unison that they accepted him as their king, and they were noisy enough that they spooked the soldiers Will had left outside, who did what any group of sober, armed men would do in that situation and set fire to the place. William stuck around long enough to get the holy oil poured on his head, giving the church’s seal of approval to his hairstyle, as the church went up in flames around him.

Since he didn’t end up getting deep-fried, the business with the oil is still with us. It now has its own special spoon. 

It would take J.K. Rowling to make this stuff up. 

The front and back of the current crown look so much alike that one of the past kings–I’ve lost track of which–was never sure he had it on right. And if he’d gotten it wrong, all the other kids would’ve made fun of him.

 

Gold Stick in Waiting

The tradition of the Gold Stick in Waiting dates back to Henry VIII. There really is a gold stick involved, but as soon as we introduce capital letters we’re not talking about the stick itself but about the bodyguard who rides behind the royal coach after the coronation, carrying a gold-tipped stick with which to protect the monarch from, um, bling-phobic assassins and whatever else you can ward off with a gold-tipped stick. I’ll experiment with one someday. 

Anyone got a gold-tipped stick I can borrow? 

For the recent coronation, the role went to the king’s 72-year-old sister, who’s almost as fearsome (and almost as old) as I am.

The article I stole this from thought it had to mention that the role’s now symbolic, but honestly, I’d guessed that already.

 

Other stuff

Over the centuries, no coronation’s been complete unless someone added a new bit of ceremony. Let’s settle for talking about just one: Medieval kings prepared for their coronation by bathing. That must’ve been unusual enough to get a mention. So iIn 1399, when someone introduced the idea of turning a few marginally normal humans into knights on the eve of the coronation, it only made sense to call them Knights of the Bath.

Settle down in back. It’s not that funny.

Okay, it is that funny but put away the rubber ducks, please. 

 

Money and protest

How much did the coronation cost this time around? A thousand civil servants are still punching numbers into their computers and palace officials are looking embarrassed and saying some of the published estimates are “more fanciful than others,” but Lord Google informs me that it’s in the neighborhood of £100 million.

Or by another Lord Google estimate, between £50 million and £100 million. Or by the estimate a friend mentioned this afternoon, £150 million.

Whatever the figure is, it’s been paid out of taxes. 

Fifty-two anti-monarchist protestors were arrested along the coronation route under a newly passed law that criminalizes not just causing a public nuisance but being prepared to cause one. Or fixin’ to get ready to harbor the intent to be prepared to cause one. The police have since “expressed regret” about six of those arrests. One of the six, a leader of the anti-monarchy group Republic, said he’d spent months working out legal tactics with the police only to be arrested on the day. He’s not in the mood to  accept an apology, which is good because he hasn’t exactly gotten one.

 

Souvenirs

If you’ve read all that and still a little something to remember the mayhem by, what’s available? The Guardian’s list of souvenirs includes a lifesize cutout of the king that sells for £36.99. You never know when you might need one, but you don’t have to settle for that if it doesn’t match your lifestyle. Heinz made some commemorative ketchup. The recipe’s the same-ol’, same-ol’, but the packaging’s different. Hug (they make pet food) came up with a special dog food. Our dog’s not a royalist, so we didn’t buy any. 

Celebrations (they make candy) made a bust of the king out of their very own chocolates. It weighs 23 kilos, or 3.6 inedible stones, and (sorry) you can’t buy it. They only made one. It’s pretty strange looking but better than the beauty-queen busts the Minnesota State Fair carves out of butter. 

I’m not sure what they’ll do with it now the coronation’s over. Would it be disrespectful to eat it? Is there a respectful way to throw it out?

You can also buy the more pedestrian mugs, tea towels, plates, paperweights, and teddy bears. Or flags or–well, whatever someone can find a way to slap a crown or a face on, it’s for sale. Remember kids, today’s cheesy souvenir is tomorrow’s treasured keepsake. Or next week’s landfill. 

British politics: how all-party parliamentary groups work

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I’ll never completely understand British politics, but that’s okay because no one else does either. If you doubt that, just look at Britain’s politicians these days. They haven’t a clue. So I’m going to section off a small corner of British politics and explain it to you–and to myself as I work my way through it: Welcome, my friends, to the corner labeled all-party parliamentary groups, known to admirers and detractors alike as APPGs, which makes them sound vaguely like something motorized and hazardous.

They’re neither, but if you feel safer wearing a crash helmet, no one here will make fun of you for it. At least not while you’re listening. 

Irrelevant photo: A neighbor’s tulips.

How do APPGs work?

The positive side of APPGs is that they give Members of Parliament and of the House of Lords who share an interest in–oh, let’s say crash helmets a chance to get together and discuss the topic informally. Because they cross party lines, they have at least the potential to calm political rivalries, allowing some actual thought to go on. Members–at least in theory–can listen to evidence and consider the shape of a problem and maybe even find a solution or two. They can bring in experts, campaigners, interested parties, lobbyists, and anyone else who seems relevant. 

As Parliament’s website explains, APPGs have “no official status within Parliament. They are run by and for Members of the Commons and Lords, though many choose to involve individuals and organisations from outside Parliament in their administration and activities.”  

Pay attention to the phrase about involving individuals and organizations from outside Parliament. We’ll come back to it in a minute. In the meantime, let’s look at the APPG for London as an example of how they work. Its goal is to “strengthen the capital’s voice in Parliament.” And, as it happens, “London Councils [‘the collective of local government in London‘] provide the secretariat to the group.” If I understand that correctly, it means London Councils do the work that keeps the hands of the APPG clock circling the dial. All the MPs and Lords have to do is–well, as much or as little as they want. Show up. Talk. Drink tea. I’m not sure and I’m starting to make things up so let’s cut away before I visibly make a fool of myself.

Members of the APPG could, of course, dig deeply into the numbers, read conflicting interpretations of them, meet ordinary people who live in London, become experts on the subject, and generally impress the hell out of us. But it’s not required. They could also sit back and let the secretariat discreetly set the group’s agenda and direction.

 

The line between registered and unregistered groups

There are also unregistered groups that don’t meet the qualifications for an APPG. They don’t get to use Parliament’s nifty little logo on their publications and letters and they can’t use the words all-party or parliamentary in their names. They also can’t use the words and, but, it, or the in their correspondence. They have a lower priority when booking rooms.

Groups that do make the cut have to register themselves, meet, and follow the rules. They make boring reading but, sadly, they do matter.   

 

Why would anyone object to APPGs?

We-e-ell, because of that business of an outside group providing the clockwork that makes the hands move.

Sorry, did that metaphor get too weird? Because APPGs are an entry point for lobbyists, official and unofficial. Let’s say you’re the Crash Helmet Manufacturers’ Association. Or the Crash Helmets Are Dangerous and Anti-Democratic Advocacy Group. You’ll want to provide all the help you can to the APPG that’s talking about crash helmets. You can offer to supply secretarial services or researchers. You can give the group money or buy tangible stuff or services on its behalf. For all I know, you can bring it ice cream. You can find–and pay–experts who will supply the committee with your position, all neatly wrapped up with an impressive bow, and they can hand the members–who for the most part aren’t experts, remember–with arguments, sound bites, justifications, and all the facts that fit your position.

When Parliament’s website explains what services you as an outside group can provide, it doesn’t mention ice cream but does list office cleaning, publishing reports, and web support. If there are limits to how involved an outsider group can get, I haven’t found them. 

Outsider groups can also pay for “overseas visits, hospitality, event or travel tickets, receptions or other events, clothing, jewellery or discount cards, loans or discounts.”

I don’t know about you, but I can see where clothing, jewelry, and loans are essential when you’re learning about crash helmets. And as long as it’s all declared, it’s kosher.

If an individual volunteers their services? That doesn’t have to be declared. 

MPs and Lords also have to register the individual gifts–trips, accommodation, jewelery, whatever–that they received because they’re group members. Again, once that’s done, it’s kosher.

Any organization acting as an APPG’s secretariat will have to do some disclosing of its own, including its clients and major donors. That koshers everything. But whether a group runs an APPG or plays a smaller role, it still gets access to MPs and Lords, and it gets the prestige that being associated with Parliament lends it. 

 

Let’s run through a few examples

The cryptocurrency company Phoenix Community Capital sponsored one APPG and its co-founder spoke at an event put together by another one. The company’s online promotion pumped up its links to Parliament and to the APPGs.

Then in September 2022, it seemed to disappear. Its website went offline and investors couldn’t get at their money, no matter how much they pounded on their computers and yelled. In February, according to an article, “Some of the firm’s assets and its name appear to have been sold to a new company run by an individual called ‘Dan’, who has told investors it has no obligation towards them, but that it would still try to make them some returns. . . .

“Phoenix Community Capital . . . gave £5,000 last year to the APPG on blockchain – the technology behind cryptocurrencies but which also has other uses.

“The company appeared on the APPG’s website as one of its corporate ‘partners.’ The group is co-chaired by Martin Docherty-Hughes, a Scottish National party MP who said he had no contact with, or knowledge of, Phoenix.”

Between 2019 and 2021, an APPG promoting medical interventions into obesity got from £178,500 to £183,000 from three private healthcare companies that make their money from surgery and other treatments for obesity. The APPG used the money to pay for a lobbyist to run the APPG’s secretariat. The lobbyist wrote on the APPG website that the group promoted “a shift away from the ‘move more, eat less’ mentality prevalent in obesity thinking and better utilisation of treatment for obesity and access to services.” 

If you’re tempted to shrug that off as nothing more than noise, it also says the APPG “had direct input into the government’s obesity strategy published in July 2020 through meeting with No 10 officials and the development of a top 10 policy wishlist.”

That kind of implies that its involvement matters.

The secretariat of the APPG on sustainable aviation is run by an alliance of airlines and airports. And the net zero APPG? From the goodness of their hearts, energy companies donated tens of thousands of pounds in the past year for the consultancy running it. 

Since 2018, the private sector spent more than £12 million on APPGs. (There are 755 of them–or were in February, anyway. They seem to be breeding like stray socks in a drawer. In other words, the number’s grown substantially in recent years.) Charities (if you’re from the US, that means nonprofits) and unions also coughed up money to support them. 

The chair of the Commons standards committee sees APPGs as enough of a problem that he made a public call for parliamentary authorities to be given the power to shut down the groups when there’s a  clear conflict of interest.

“When lobbying firms are effectively driving an APPG in the interests of their clients,” he wrote, “we should not only know who those clients are, but we should be able to close the group down where there is a clear conflict of interest. . . . It feels as if every MP wants their own APPG, and every lobbying company sees an APPG as an ideal way of making a quick buck out of a trade or industry body.”

How do we end this pesky inflationary spiral? 

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If you believe the British government, you end the inflation by making sure people’s pay doesn’t go up. Rising profits, though? They’re not a problem. 

That helps explain why so much of Britain has been on strike lately. The headline-grabbing issue is that pay’s fallen behind inflation, and sometimes it’s been doing that for years, but look past the headlines and you’ll find working conditions and the government giving so little money to schools and the health service that they’re falling apart–sometimes figuratively and sometimes literally. 

Between June and December of 2022 (sorry–that’s the most recent set of numbers I could find), 2,472 million working days were lost to strikes. It’s probably enough to know we’re dealing with a large number.

Why didn’t the Office for National Statistics roll over from millions to billions? Interesting tale and we’ll get to it in a minute. But first, since most of the strikers are in roles linked to government funding, the government’s been trying a tough-guy response, swearing they can’t afford more money and that even if they could–didn’t they already tell us it would be inflationary to raise pay? They have our best interests at heart.

And it’s a this point that the Bank of England’s chief economist, Huw Pill, waded into the conversation, advising us all that British households and businesses “need to accept” that they’re poorer. Stop trying to get pay increases, he says. All they do is push prices higher. 

“We’re all worse off,” he says, “and we all have to take our share.”

Our share? How much, then, does Mr. Pill get paid? Um, for his first five months and 24 days, he made £88,000, which would put his yearly salary at £180,000. Compare that to Britain’s median pay in 2022 of £33,000. If (as April Munday points out in a comment–thanks, April) they work 40 hours a week and 52 weeks a year, but most people on minimum wage are on zero hours contracts, so they have no guarantee of a full week and no idea what they’ll bring home at the end of the week.  

Median? That’s the version of average that means half the people country earned more and the other half earned less.    

How much do you make if you’re working for minimum wage? We’ll be reckless and take the highest minimum wage, because it’s okay to pay younger people and apprentices less since, um, don’t worry about it, it just is. On that higher minimum wage, you’re making £21,673.60 per year. (Lord Google failed me and I had to do my own math there, so the numbers may be off a bit, but if we’re not within spitting distance of the right answer, we’re at least close enough to throw an eraser.)

With those numbers in our pockets, I’ll offer a bit of advice for public figures, who (as should be obvious by now) hang on my every word: if inflation means you had to cut back on smoked salmon, you’d be wise not to give advice to people who had to cut back on heating and food. Do it in public and it’s embarrassing. Do it at close quarters and you’re likely to get hurt. 

 

So what’s that business about a billion?

The world–messy place that it is–has two ideas of what a billion means. 

The word was introduced in the sixteenth century and it equaled a million to the second power, or a million millions–or as we’d say in the mathematical circles I’m at home in, a shitload of whatever you’re counting. 

A trillion and a quadrillion were a million to the third and fourth powers, which equals a superbig shitload.

Then at some point French arithmeticians (hands up anyone who knew arithmeticians existed) changed the meaning of a billion to a thousand millions, because it’s a long walk from a million to a million millions and a person might like to stop someplace along the way and have a drink. 

The US latched onto the new standard. Britain, however–following its habit of being sniffy about anything French–didn’t. What the rest of the world did I’m not sure. I’m dealing with numbers here. That means the ground’s unstable and I’m hesitant to go any deeper into the bog. 

Then, starting in 1951, Britain began to follow the US usage, but because Britain loves complicated measuring systems,both definitions of a billion are still in use.

Meanwhile, in 1948 the French reverted to the earlier, higher meaning of a billion. What I learned to call a billion, they call a milliard. You have to add three extra zeroes before you get a billion. Add three more and you get a billiard, which is not a game with colored balls and cue sticks but a very large number.

You’re welcome, and if you’re thoroughly confused now, my job is done and I’ll move on.

 

Parrots

Research in Glasgow (and elsewhere, but I’m looking for a British connection) has shown that pet parrots felt less isolated when they could make video calls to other parrots. They were more likely to preen, sing, and play. 

How did they make calls? They were given tablets and a bell, or at least their humans were. They’d ring the bell, their person would turn on the tablet and pictures of other parrots would appear. They’d select a parrot to visit with and the human would make the call for them.

No, I didn’t make any of that up. 

Some birds would sing together, try to groom each other, or sleep next to each other. Parrots are sociable creatures who live in flocks. They’re not meant to live on their own.

Some of them have been asking for a blue tick.

 

Aphids

The Royal Horticultural Society is asking British gardeners to look for rare giant willow aphids and send photos if they find them. Scientists are hoping to learn more about their lifecycle and what plants (other than willows) they like.

How do you spot them? They’re 6 mm long–something like a quarter of an inch–and have shark-like fins. Or fin: one each. 

Can most of us see a shark-like fin on a 6 mm insect? Mmm, maybe not. But colonies were recently found on quince trees, causing great excitement among a fairly rarified set of people. 

Sorry. I shouldn’t make fun of other people’s interests. This could be important. It could save the world. Something needs to. 

If you spot one, they’d love you to send a photo. 

 

A bit more about invertebrates

Researchers have found that worms soaked in cannabinoids get the munchies, just like people who’ve soaked themselves in cannabis. The study has all sorts of important implications but it’s more fun if we don’t go into them and leave it sounding like they researched this on a whim.

The researchers are not reported to have enjoyed their experiments, but I like to think they did anyway.

 

How to steal 2 million dimes

If you ever thought you had a bad day at work, a group of guys broke into a truck in Philadelphia, thinking they’d get something useful like–oh, I don’t know, TVs, maybe, or alcohol, or toilet paper–and ended up with four and a half tons of dimes.

A dime? That’s a US coin worth ten cents–a tenth of a dollar. It’s from a Latin word for a tenth, decimus, and made its way to the US from the French disme, introduced in the 1500s, when France first thought of dividing money into tenths.

A belated thanks to the good folk who came up with that idea. Ten is one of the few numbers I can reliably multiply and divide by. One also works. And two isn’t bad.

But back to our story: The problem isn’t that dimes aren’t money. The problem is that you need a lot of them before you can buy anything these days. It’s not like it was in 1776, when I was a kid and having a dime meant you could buy the big candy bar instead of the small one.

Four and a half tons of dimes is worth $750,000. Or maybe it’s worth the $200,000 the thieves got away with, because they had to leave a lot of the loot behind. The article I’m working from is ambiguous on that ever-so-important point and I don’t have enough on hand to weigh. Sorry. There are limits to how much research I’ll do for this blog.

They ended up scattering dimes all over the parking lot and the cleanup took hours. Which says not many people were around to help out by pocketing a handful or three. The truck was broken into overnight and the theft was discovered at 6 a.m.

It’s standard practice for truck drivers to pick up a load and park someplace overnight so they can get some sleep before they start their run. Even truck drivers need to sleep. It’s also become standard practice to break into parked trucks and see what’s available. 

How are the thieves going to spend 2 million dimes when half the city will be watching for people with wheelbarrows full of shiny coins? It’s a problem. Plug a lot of parking meters?

 

How to incubate a rock

A bald eagle called Murphy, who lives in a Missouri bird sanctuary, made it into the news because he got broody and was trying to incubate a rock. He built a nest. He sat on the nest. He waited.

The rock didn’t hatch, but when an eagle’s nest blew down in a storm and only one chick survived, the keepers introduced it to Murphy, who accepted it and before long was shredding up food and feeding it. 

Accepted it? Murphy was smitten. And they all lived happily ever after and are grateful not to be in Florida, where Ron DeSantis would have had them separated for challenging traditional sex roles. Not eagle sex roles–both sexes feed the young, and i think both brood the eggs–but it might confuse the human young so it would need to be edited out of the official story.

Why British history isn’t the story of a white country

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A new BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations has set off (heavy sigh) yet another conversation about whether British history is the story of a white country. 

Why? Because either the show’s casting was color blind, where actors are chosen without regard to their skin color, or because (and my bet’s on this) the directors deliberately placed Black actors in major roles. 

Cue the predictable emails/phone calls/howls of outrage. Cue mentions of wokeness and political correctness. Sadly, I doubt we can cue any repetitions of that glorious confection of manufactured outrage, “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati.” The workerati had too much fun with it and the sleeperati had to retire it. But if you want to do your bit to keep the phrase alive, for £12.99 plus shipping and handling, you can buy a tee shirt announcing your reading and eating preferences.

It comes in a variety of designs, which says (a) it’s popular, (b) someone had too much fun to stop at one, or (c) it wasn’t all that popular and they’ve still got stock left. 

But forget the shirts. The assumption behind the complaints is that having a Black lawyer in a Dickens story is historically inaccurate and can only be explained by someone’s desire to rewrite history into something tofu flavored. 

 

Brief interruption for the sake of complete accuracy

I don’t like tofu. I can eat it–it’s not liver, after all–but I haven’t found a way to enjoy it and I’ve stopped searching for one. I do like the shirts, although I won’t be eating any. I probably won’t be wearing one either. I’ve stopped thinking people want to hear from my clothing.

Irrelevant photo: Cuckoo flowers–also called lady’s smocks, milkmaids, and mayflower. It’s a member of the Brassicaceae family, and yes, it will be on the test.

 

Meanwhile, back at the Complaints Department…

…the question we’re considering is, How likely would it have been in the Victorian (and slightly pre-Victorian) era, which is when Great Expectations takes place, to find a Black lawyer and an Indian law clerk? And would Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter, Estella, be–um, it’s not immediately apparent from watching the series what her ethnicity is. I was going for someplace in Asia (it’s a big continent; surely it has a likely spot somewhere), but it turns out the actor playing her is of Mauritian and Thai heritage. She’s also described as an English-born Australian actor. That last bit isn’t relevant to the flap at hand but does remind us how complicated a person’s background can be. She has brown skin, though, and I’m assuming that does its bit to stir up the complainers.

To answer the question I’ve wandered away from, though: It’s quite accurate. English history is not all white, even if it’s often presented as if it were.

 

Georgian Britain

Let’s start with Georgian Britain, since that’s when Great Expectations begins (it then crosses into the Victorian era without needing to present a passport). The Georgian era ran from 1714 to 1830. Yes, I had to look it up, and I learned that it took four back-to-back Georges to cover that many years. 

At least 5,000 Black people lived in Georgian London, although that’s a minimum estimate, not a complete count. Data is (sorry: are) sparse–not just about Black people in London but about lots of people and things of the era. We have to work with what we’ve got. Many of them arrived as slaves and lived on in Britain as enslaved servants–it was quite the fashion among the upper class to have a Black servant in the household. Many of them escaped, though, disappearing into the general population. We know about them from newspaper ads calling for their capture and return. They’re often identified by the metal collars fastened onto their necks and by their scars.

Slavery within Britain itself was abolished in 1807, although the country continued to accumulate wealth from slavery in its colonies and trading relationships. Anyone who presents history as a simple picture is lying to you or themselves or both. So however ironically, British soil itself was free, and so were the people who stood on it.

Who, then, were these Black Britons? Most were poor and not lawyers in Dickens novels, but then so were most white Britons and you won’t find anyone offering that as an argument against casting a white actor as the lawyer. 

A few did become part of the middle and upper classes. 

How upper is upper?As far as I know, none of them inherited titles, but Queen Victoria  (you don’t get much higher in the class structure than that) had a ward and goddaughter, Sara Forbes Bonetta, who was Yoruba. 

So a Black lawyer? Entirely possible. 

As for the Indian law clerk and Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter, when a country conquers an empire,it will be changed by the countries it conquers. The British Empire didn’t  just bring back money, textiles, tea, spices, opium, and new recipes to break up the same-old same-old of British cooking. People came as well, some by choice and some not. They came to work, to study, to live, to do all the assorted things humans do. Some stayed a while and went home. Others put down roots and became British. Communities formed.

That’s not to say there was no racism. 

 

Racism

British racism was (and, I think, still is) different from the American brand. For one thing, intermarriage wasn’t uncommon in Britain, whereas during large parts of US history it wasn’t just uncommon, it was illegal in many states. I mention that in part because a lot of readers here at Notes are American and also because culturally speaking I’m more American than British. I do know the US isn’t the world’s focal point, but I can’t help using it as mine a lot of the time. 

In the Victorian era, science was dragged in, kicking and screaming, to explain why racism and empire were natural and whites–and especially whites of the British persuasion–were superior to whoever else you had in mind. They measured heads and found that–surprise, surprise–the heads that happened to be shaped like their own had more brain power than anyone else’s, proving that their little twig of the human tree was by far superior to the other little twigs. They catalogued humanity into races, and no matter how many times later scientists have demonstrated that science provides no basis for the divisions, we’re still fighting our way out of that paper bag.

So again, we’re looking at a complicated picture. Racism, yes, but also Black people distributed–however unequally–throughout society.

And for the benefit of American readers, who see the word Black and understand it to mean someone of African heritage, in Britain it often includes Asians, although I think that’s shifting.

The Victorians didn’t invent racism, though. As soon as the country dove into slave-holding and the slave trade, it began to tell itself that the people it was enslaving were a lower grade of human. All the Victorians did was sprinkle a bit of pseudo-scientific glitter over it.

 

Moving backwards

Historians have relatively recently begun tracing Black British history in the Tudor era, picking individuals out of the sparse records that are available, and again the picture isn’t simple. Miranda Kaufman writes about a weaver, a sailor, a porter, travelers, a salvage diver, and an assortment of others. Onyeka Nubia combed through marriage and baptism records and found Black people who often married whites and over several generations disappeared into the gene pool. As he put it when I heard him speak to an almost all-white crowd, “This is not my history [he’s of African extraction]. This is  your history.”

Peter Fryer covers some of the same territory, but he starts with Roman legionnaires. 

Most of the stories they give us are, of necessity, limited. The written records mark  brief moments in people’s lives, then they disappear. But they were here. They lived, they worked, they died. They’ve been written out of British history. If someone writes them back in, it’s an act of restitution, not tofu addiction.

Does racism go back as far as the Tudor era? I’m not sure, but if it does it was probably different from the racism we know today. 

As early as the Elizabethan era (1558-1603, and yes, I had to look it up) we can find Liz issuing two separate orders to expell Black people from Britain because they were eating food that should have gone to her people, and besides, most of them were heathens. Or some of them were heathens. Or, well, never mind, they ate, and getting rid of them was easier than wrestling with inequality and famine.

Except that she didn’t get rid of them. She issued a couple of proclamations and there (give or take a bit of historical running back and forth, which we’ll skip) it ended. You can find the full tale here. 

Does it matter whether Black people were targets because they were Black, because some of them weren’t Christian, or because they were an immigrant community (with some  descendants of immigrants added in)? I’m not sure. None of those positions are comfortable. 

Onyeka Nubia argues that the Tudor era was more open and it wasn’t until later that the contributions of Black Britons were written out of the official history. I’d give you details but I haven’t gotten my hands on his books yet. Expect me to come back to the subject.