Margaret Thatcher

As a person who grew up in a Yorkshire mining region in the 1980s my natural inclination is to hate Thatcherism because of the misery it caused for me personally and for many many others. However, the recent spate of programmes on TV has made me rethink. Here are one two interesting articles that offer opposing views.

The balance seems to be that although she made some calamitous mistakes and our entry into the Falklands war looks like downright evil political opportunism with hindsight, her economic and social reforms were a bitter pill that did transform the country into a lean mean modern machine. This is why New Labour didn't drop any of her major policies. It is also why in the space of one generation I went from being destined to work in a coal mine to taking a place at University and earning a PhD.

New Orleans vs Sichuan

The chinese government, with its appaling human rights record, has done more to help the victims of the Sichuan earthquake than the US government did to help the victims of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. It might be that the Olympics and the world spotlight have forced China to act but the fact that China has acted so swiftly and that New Orleans is still in pieces should surely put Bush to shame. But it doesn't seem to have.

The Lie

Bush claims there should be no emission restrictions because China and India would reject the idea outright.

But China and India accept mandatory cuts, they just disagree with everyone else how the system should work.

Lonely Planet

The US government used the 'Lonely Planet' tourist guidebook as a source of information prior to the invasion of Iraq. That's right, the average browser in WH Smith would be as well informed as the US armed forces and intelligence. I suppose the soldiers would know where the best pubs and restaurants were but as for roads and water supplies.... they weren't exactly covered.

It reminds me of the episode of Red Dwarf where the computer Holly thinks the crew are losing faith in him so he tricks them into thinking he gets his information about space from the Ladybird Book of Space. And then along comes the backup computer Queeg who is much more efficient but ultimately makes the life of the crew harder so they want Holly back. I guess the moral of the story is people are prepared to accept second best as long as it makes things easier for them.

US foreign policy

"We have to fight the terrorists over there, so we don't have to fight them over here" George Bush

That's right. If you have to make an omelette it might as well be with Iraqi eggs. The defence of the success of the the troop surge in the US congress has pretty much said 'it's bad for Iraqis but it's the best thing for the safety of US citizens'. On the radio yesterday a former US diplomat was asked why they support Pakistani military dictator Colonel Musharraf. His answer was that the safety of US citizens was more important than the democratic rights of the Pakistani people. Cue the longest pause ever heard on the pm programme as presenter Eddie Mair was shocked into silence by the abrupt answer.

India and Pakistan

Why is everyone in the UK media making such a fuss of the 60th anniversary of the independence of India and Pakistan? I don't remember the more prestigious 50th anniversary celebrations receiving this much coverage. I hope that the fact that India is now considered a 'superpower' hasn't got anything to do with it. Sucking up to a country when they get rich is bad enough but to then point out in every media report how many severely poor people in India aren't getting a share of that new wealth amounts to jealous sniping.

Virginia Tech

I'm amazed at how debate about gun control has been stifled in the US. A person with known mental problems was able to get a gun by simply ticking a box to declare he had no mental problems. Is it not one sign of mental illness that a person thinks they are sound and everyone else has a problem? The guy who sold him the gun said that if the students had been armed they would have been able to defend themselves. Can you imagine a world where a campus of 25'000 students each carry a gun like this? It's very simple; make guns freely available and people who are unhinged will make use of them and we will continue to see terrible events like Columbine, Virginia Tech, the Amish village and so on. Thank the stars guns are not so freely available in the UK outside of some small pockets of big city criminality.

Slave Trade Reparations

There has been some call this week for reparations to be paid to those whose ancestors suffered during the slave trade. This is an admirable sentiment but it changes nothing. The most we can do is to freely admit to what our ancestors did in order to build the British Empire and make sure we never do anything like this again. Handing out cash will not help. And anyway, the slave trade existed before British involvement. African kings were involved in the capture and sale of their own people. Should poor African nations be forced to pay reparations also?

A woman on BBC news this morning seemed to suggest that all modern social ills and deprivations that the black community suffer can be directly traced back to the legacy of the status of black people as being slaves. That is cod socialism. This lady must be doing an A-Level in sociology at evening school. Kids in London are not shooting and stabbing each other because they still feel social pressure from the slave trade. The idea of reparations is just like the idea of official pardons for those shot at dawn for cowardice during the first world war. It doesn't change anything or make it better for anyone. Those shot at dawn should stay labelled as cowards to make us feel eternally guilty for the horrible things done in our name over the years, from the World Wars to the days of empire building and concentration camps and genocide in Africa and back further to the days of slavery and conquest.

History Lesson

An American chap was causing a fuss on the train this morning because his seat reservation had gone wrong. He asked the steward if they could help him out and said 'come on, I'm an American, we saved you in World War II'. Whoa there! Hang on. The US did help us with food during the war and they sacrificed many lives in the Normandy landings and thereafter. But WWII was won by the Russians. 80% of the German troops were engaged fighting the Russians. The Russians sustained such heavy losses because a few years earlier, in a fit of paranoia, Stalin had shot all of his top generals leaving his army with no top level experience. The main reason the US helped out in Europe was to make sure that the Russians didn't seize all of Europe after the war.

The other main reason the US entered the war was because of Japan, a growing economic rival in the Pacific. This is why the Americans needlessly bombed the hell out of many non-strategic Japanese cities: they simply wanted to set the Japanese economy back by a few decades (the later Japanese recovery was rightly dubbed the 'Japanese economic miracle'). And of course we have the atomic bomb, dropped to ruin a few cities and show the Russians that the US had the bomb. The first Uranium bomb was dropped even though the American generals knew that there were US prisoners of war in the drop zone. The second Plutonium bomb was dropped even though the US knew the Japanese were to surrender and it was done purely to test the technology. So, yes, the US helped the UK during WWII but the motives were not so altruistic.

Meet the Russian People

I know a lot about US culture and history, good and bad. TV, the cold war and American economic dominance have given me a sense of the good and history books like Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and anti US policy protests by people like Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore have corrected the idyllic propaganda.

On the other hand I know nothing of the positives in Russian culture. Cold War propaganda and George Orwell's 1984 have left an impression of a totalitarian hell in which millions were slaughtered in Communist purges and in the death camps in Siberia. In modern times Russia is portrayed as a mafia ridden corrupt mess headed by a former KGB madman in which state assets were stolen by the oligarchs and the resulting country is left in a poor and crumbling state with whole cities blighted by AIDS and drug addiction.

I need to learn more. I want to know about some of the positives in Russian life now and then. What do/did people enjoy watching on TV? What literature/music encapsulates the Russian spirit? What good things happened behind the Iron Curtain? I am not prepared to let international politics blight my opinion of the people within a nation that has suffered more than most.

Random anecdotes from The New Shostakovich by Ian MacDonald.

'... in the interval between speeches by Stalin at a conference in the Kremlin during the forties, delegates were offered buckets of salt water to bathe their hands, swollen by hours of clapping.'

'Wife-beating was so thoroughly institutionalised in pre-Revolutionary Russia that a husband who refrained from it was thought abnormal. An old manual of etiquette published in Moscow included instructions to husbands on how to whip their wives 'courteously, lovingly' so as not to blind or deafen them.'

Epic tome

My fiancee insists that she does not take a long time to get ready in a morning. I admit, she is not an especially vain lady but in an effort to convince her of the cumulative time I have adopted a weapon; a one thousand page biography of Winston Churchill. I have been chipping away at this book, a few pages at a time, whilst she does her hair and makeup. I'm making good progress. The other day I managed to get all the way through the Tehran conference in one sitting. Anyway, the book is excellent, my time is being well spent and my lady can take her time to prepare for the day ahead.

New series of Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipe starts tonight BBC4 at 10pm.