My Log 668 Dec 5 2018: Chronicles from my Tenth Decade: 104 Surprising cross-party politeness in British Parliament debate about Brexit; it brings back memories of 60 years ago when I was a reporter

I spent several hours yesterday, and again this morning, in watching the proceedings of the House of Commons in Britain, the so-called Mother of Parliaments, as they embarked on the five-day debate during which they will presumably decide on the fate of the deal to leave the European Union that Prime Minister Theresa May has put before them. I was able to watch so much of it because The Guardian newspaper has obligingly been running the debates live on its web site.

Watching it all took me back to that time almost 60 years ago ---- never! It can’t be that long ago, surely ---- when, as a correspondent in London for The Montreal Star  I conceived it to be one of my duties to cover  debates in that institution given over to deliberation and decision-making. I was never ordered by my employer to do that. They were buying news services from most of the great London newspapers, as well as from the news agencies, so they would have been completely covered for any news arising from that source in an emergency, whether I wrote anything or not. Rather, I got into the habit of paying attention by going at least twice a week to listen to Prime Minister’s Question Period, and if the House was on a subject that interested me, I would stay to hear at least the leading speeches given from both sides. Another part of my duties was to write  what might now be considered investigative journalism on subjects of unusual interest, and I quickly discovered that in doing such research, one of the simplest ways  to get information about, for example,  British liquor licensing laws, land ownership in Britain, the continuing elevated status and wealth  of the noble families in spite of the attempts by previous Labour governments to curtail their powers, or some other similarly esoteric subject, was to consult the  Hansard accounts of the most recent debates held in Parliament. The statements made by the government and opposition spokespersons, plus the inevitable speech from some backbencher who always turned out to have an absolute mastery of the subject, whatever it might be, usually provided an unrivalled overview of any subject you might like to name. For me, such a method --- which, readers may remember, was very similar to the methods of research undertaken by the famous radical reporter of American politics, I.F.Stone, a man who always read the published information wherever it was to be found, something that most reporters neglected to do ---- had the added advantage that it also revealed the high level of British political oratory and wit. (For example, I came across the statement of one Conservative member who said, during a debate on licensing hours,  that “The British pub is an institution that has declined into a state of sordid neglect which I personally find immensely  agreeable”).

Of course at that time, the traditional formalities of Parliament were kind of amusing, and as I began to watch yesterday I was expecting there to have been quite a few changes. In those days, approval was expressed by hanging the hands on he desks, accompanied by a guttural rumble of approval. Clapping was not allowed although later I believe it was encouraged at least in the Canadian Parliament.. Yesterday a woman MP got up and pleaded for a change in what appear to be the enduring formalities because, she said, she deplored that when some young person  had been praised for some praiseworthy action the day before, MPs were not able to express their approval with applause. Mr. Speaker, John Bercow, explained that he allowed  applause if it came as a spontaneous reaction to some item of interest, especially if it was  not party-oriented in nature, and was not being used simply as an item of inter-arty animus.

I noticed that Mr,Bercow had made the considerable change that he no longer wears the heavy white wig that was customary for all Speakers before him: I looked up this Bercow, a very amusing fellow to judge by the way he carried himself in the Speaker’s chair, and discovered he was Conservative member who started his political life as a rabid right-wing agitator, strongly against modern social customs such as same-sex marriage, yet a man who had been  turned by experience into  such a liberal in his attitudes that he had for quite a long time been considered likely to defect to the Labour party. He had been elected Speaker on three occasions, the only man ever to have been so honoured, but in the process he had earned such obloquy from his won party that his two most recent elections had been achieved more from opposition votes than from the support of his own party.

What struck me yesterday as the five-days of debate got under way was the extreme politeness with which members addressed one another. Years ago it had been forbidden for any member’s name to be mentioned, so that members had to be addressed, or referred to as “the Rt. Honourable Gentleman,”,  or “the Honourable member for Hampstead and Kilburn”,  which left casual observers always wondering who was the particular person speaking, and from whence had he or sprung.

I don’t know whether the excessive politeness with which speakers yesterday gave way to interruptions from honourable members from  all sides of hte House  was exceptional because of the solemnity of the occasion, but it did seem that each speaker was limited to eight minutes.

I was particularly struck by the silky eloquence of women members who spoke. One after the other, be they former journalists or barristers, accountants, doctors or what have you,  one member after another rose to deliver a masterly, coherent statement of his or her beliefs. For example, the first speaker I heard was the Rt.Honourable Margaret Beckett, an 11-year Cabinet member in various Labour administrations, whose demolition of Ms. May’s negotiated deal left no doubt as to its deficiencies. She was followed from the other side of the House by an brisk, active-looking woman called Anna Soubry, who astonished me by saying her speech could be shorter than she had supposed because she completely agreed with the argument just heard from the last speaker. That these two women were on opposite sides of the House seemed to matter little, and when I looked her up I found she was another member who had gained a reputation for free-thinking, independence of mind, and sound judgment.

After listening for several hours, I have heard only two members say they were prepared to support Mrs, May’s deal, which she had insisted was the only possible deal to be expected from he EU, and the alternative of which could be only a no-deal exit with all the dangers it posed.

I turned it on this morning, in time to hear a few routine subjects being discussed before getting back on to the Brexit negotiations. First, a handsome young woman spoke eloquently, without any reference to a single note, in favour of her private member’s bill designed to prevent asylum seekers from being held in indefinite detention, as was the practise. Only  refugees were treated in his way, she said, criminals having to be released after 28 days if no charges had been laid.  She said her family had arrived in 1977 as refugees, and she was so extremely proud to represent her constituency which had a notable record for accepting immigrants, as well as refugees. She apologized for “my very long speech,”, was warmly applauded with that guttural expression of approval that is heard only in the House of Commons, I believe, and was commended by Mr. Speaker Bercow for having completed her remarks within the ten minutes which were allotted to them, so she had no reason to apologize on that account. Then he called, who will present the bill, and the young woman stepped down into the corridor between the two sides, and as she did so the Speaker called dramatically, “Tulip… something or other” I did not hear.  The young woman took up her position at the far end of the House,  bowed to Mr. Speaker, advanced halfway along towards him, stopped and bowed again, and upon reaching the bench, bowed a third time and handed in her bill for consideration. Mr. Speaker asked which date had been fixed for its consideration, she said January 29, 2019, and he called for a vote.  “I think the ayes have it. The ayes have it,” he intoned in the traditional form.  He then delivered a little homily in which he called upon any member who had spoken in the debate during the day to turn up when the summing up speeches are delivered by both sides. He had observed yesterday that certain members who had spoken had apparently had other things to do than to listen to a summing up of the day’s proceedings, and he wanted to ask that for the rest of the debate until the vote on Tuesday, he expected everyone who had spoken to be in the House for the day’s summing up.

I had time to look up Google for any British MP who might be called Tulip, and sure enough, up came the name of Tulip Saddiq, the member since 2015 for Hampstead and Kilburn. And an exceptionally active member she had been having spoken in Parliament 216 times,  having asked 950 questions of the government, and having written more than 500 letters to Ministers. So evidently more to this honourable member than just her good looks and her silky eloquence.

Mr. Speaker then called on the government spokesman for the day,  the Home Secretary Sayid Javid. I could not help but contrast this man, son of another immigrant with the Home Secretary of Harold Macmillan’s government,  Rab Butler, the essence of plodding British  solemnity.  Mr. Javid yielded to honourable members so often he almost found it difficult to make his points.

Mrs May suffered defeats in three votes taken on this first day of debate: one was to find the government in contempt of Parliament for refusing to give members the full legal opinion they had deceived from the Attorney-general; the second was in an amendment proposed by one of her own members, Dominic Grieve, establishing that in the event of a defeat for Mrs. May’s motion on Tuesday, the House of Commons would be permitted to  follow alternative options; and that the members voted down a government compromise which would have referred the dispute about contempt of Parliament to parliament’s privileges committee, that would not have had time to vote on it until after next Tuesday’s definitive vote.

So Mrs.May is off to a rocky start, but the argument now is that enough Brexit-favouring Conservative members might realize from the figures so far provided that a no-deal might be the only result of their defeating Mrs.May’s deal, and possibly with that realization could swing behind her at the last minute.

We will wait and see.

My Log 667 Dec 2 2018: Chronicles from my Tenth Decade: 103; Just for a change of pace, see if you like this one

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Here are two pages from an 880-word novel I have embarked on reading:

“ ‘These, young ladies,’ said Mrs. Pardiggle, with great volubility, after the first salutations, ‘are my five boys. You may have seen their names in a printed subscription list (perhaps more than one) in the possession of our esteemed friend, Mr. Jarndyce.  Egbert, my eldest (twelve), is the boy who sent out his pocket-money, to the amount of five-and-threepence to the Tockahoopo Indians. Oswald, my second (ten-and-a- half), is the child who contributed two-and-ninepence to the Great National Smithers Testimonial. Francis, my third (nine), one-and-sixpence-halfpenny; Felix,  fourth (seven) eightpence to the Superannuated Widows; Alfred, my youngest (five), has voluntarily enrolled himself in the Infant Bonds of Joy and is pledged never through life, to use tobacco in any form.’

“We had never seen such dissatisfied children. It was not merely that they were weazened and shrivelled --- though they were certainly thattoo --- but they  looked absolutely ferocious with discontent. At the mention of the Tockahoopo Indians, I could really have supposed Egbert to be one of the  most baleful members of that tribe,  he gave me such a savage frown. The face of each child, as the amount of his contribution was mentioned, darkened in a peculiarly vindictive manner, but his was by far the worst. I must except, however, the little recruit into the Infant Bonds of Joy, who was stolidly and evenly miserable.

“ ‘You have been visiting, I understand,’ said Mrs. Pardiggle, ‘at Mrs. Jellyby’s?’

We said, yes, we had passed one night there.

“ ‘Mrs. Jellyby,’ pursued the lady, always speaking in the  same demonstrative, loud, hard tone so that her voice impressed my fancy as if it had a sort of spectacles on too --- and I may here take the opportunity of remarking that her spectacles were made the less engaging by her eyes being what Ada called ‘choking eyes,’ meaning very prominent: ‘Mrs. Jellyby is a benefactor to society and deserves a helping hand. My boys have contributed to the African project --- Egbert, one-and-six, being the entire allowance of nine weeks; Oswald, one-and-a-penny-halfpenny, being the same; the rest, according to their little means. Nevertheless I do not go with Mrs. Jellyby in her treatment of her young family. It has been noticed. It has been observed that her young family are excluded from participation in the objects to which she is devoted. She may be right, she may be wrong; but, right or wrong, this is not my course with my young family. I take them everywhere.’

"I was afterwards convinced (and so was Ada) that from the ill-conditioned eldest child, these words extorted a sharp yell. He turned it off into a yawn, but it began as a yell.

“ ‘They attend Matins with me (very prettily done), at half-past six o’clock in the morning all the year round, including, of course, the depths of winter,’ said Mrs. Pardiggle rapidly, ‘and they are with me during the revolving duties of the day. I am a School lady, I am a Visiting lady, I am a Reading lady, I am a Distributing lady; I am on the local Linen Box Committee, and many general Committees; and my canvassing alone is very extensive --- perhaps no one’s more so. But they are my companions everywhere; and by these means they acquire that knowledge of the poor, and that capacity of doing charitable business in general, in short that taste for the sort of thing --- which will render them in after life a service to their neighbours, and a satisfaction to themselves. My young family are not frivolous; they expend the entire amount of their allowance in subscriptions, under my direction; and they have attended as many public meetings, and listened to as many lectures, orations, and discussions, as generally fall to the lot of few grown people. Alfred (five), who, as I mentioned, has of his own election joined the Infant Bonds of Joy, was one of the very few children who manifested consciousness on that occasion, after a fervid address of two hours from the chairman of the evening.’

“Alfred glowered at us as if he never could, or would, forgive the injury of that night.

“ ‘You may have observed, Miss Summerson,’ said Mrs. Pardiggle, ‘in some of the lists to which I have referred in the possession of our esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce, that the names of my young family are concluded with the name of O.A.Pardiggle, F.R.S.,one pound. That is their father. We usually observe the same routine. I put down my mite first; then my young family enrol their contributions, according to their ages and their little means; and then Mr. Pardiggle brings up the rear. Mr Pardiggle is happy to throw in his limited donation, under my direction, and thus things are made not only pleasant to ourselves, but, we trust, improving to others.’ ”

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Well, I hope I may assume that most of my 22 readers will have spotted from the first lines that the author in question is Charles Dickens, and that the book these passages are extracted from is Bleak House, widely acknowledged to be his greatest novel. I am always so amazed by Dickens’s almost inhuman literary energy, the way he can pile memorable, indeed unforgettable, characters one on top of the other as he proceeds with his convoluted stories, that I suddenly thought most of you would enjoy this famous passage about Mrs. Pardiggle and the Infant Bonds of Joy, scowling and grimacing at her coattails, as I myself have enjoyed it. And what about poor Mr. Pardiggle, a template for the dominated husband, evidently having no say in the upbringing of his young family, but confined to  making his charitable contributions “under my direction,” as Mrs. Pardiggle says. It is many years since I first read Bleak House or any other of Dickens’s novels,  for that matter, and I confess that in the age of Twitter and its limit of 240 printed  characters, they may seem to drag from time to time as he indulges himself in some long-winded description of a room and its furnishings. But already in the first 100 pages of this book we have been introduced to Mrs Jellyby’s young family by first meeting a child --- “one of the dirtiest little unfortunates I ever saw,” says Miss Summerson, with his head stuck between two iron railings, crying loudly as a milkman and a beadle try to  drag him back by the legs, “under a general impression that his skull was compressible by those means.”  Mrs Jellyby, whose eyes had “a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off as if they could see nothing nearer than Africa,” was so occupied with sending off 200 circulars a week in support of the Borrioboola-Gha tribe that she didn't have time even to realize that her own children were living in indescribable filth.

I confess I often find myself muttering phrases that come directly from Dickens as I go about my nowadays more or less solitary life. Phrases like, “Barkis is willin’,” from a coachdriver in David Copperfield, or “It’s bein’ so jolly as keeps me goin’,”  from Mark Tapley, a character whose relentless jolliness kept Martin Chuzzlewit afloat even when things turned against him in America and he found the Florida land he had speculated in was almost under water. Or “I will never desert Mr. Micawber," from, of course, Mrs. Micawber,  And then there is Mr. Micawber’s  classic advice to young people, "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. “

That’s a bit of folksy wisdom that I have always tried to live by. 

My Log 666 Dec 1 2018: Chronicles from my Tenth Decade: 102; Capitalism, of all systems of government, seems to lack any feeling for people and their problems; unconscionable recent events seem to prove it hasn’t changed

The last few weeks have not been stellar for the great religious project of North America --- Capitalism.

 First there has been the unconscionable decision to close the General Motors plant in Oakville, Ontario, with a flick of a wrist giving the old heave-ho to thousands of people who had invested their lives in the  factory. It isn’t news that companies don’t care tuppence for the people who work for them.  In the 1970s I did some research for a series of films about occupational health, and it took me only a week or two to discover that companies had known they were killing their workers ever since the early 1300s, and had never given a fig for them until forced to by activist unions in the 1960s or thereabouts. A quote springs to mind, from Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times, in which a Mr.Thomas Gradgrind, a stony-hearted school superintendent dedicated to teaching his pupils hard facts, and to hell with emotions and feelings, says : “You see that smoke, sir….that is meat and drink to us.”

That was written in 1854, when the Industrial Revolution, which started in Britain (and Germany, which seldom gets credit for being in the advance guard of industrialization), was well under way, but it has been the watchword of factory owners and their supporters ever since. In modern times businessmen have been drawn kicking and screaming to limit the number of their workers they are killing through  neglect of safety measures. And as I discovered while making those films, that neglect can take many forms. I visited Elliot Lake in the middle-north of Ontario, the centre of Canada’s first uranium mining enterprises, where, long after the mines were closed, a vast lake of radio-active detritus was left to do its dirty work. Similarly, while working on another project, I went to Jamaica where at one point North American aluminium companies, including Canada’s Alcan, owned some 14 per cent of the whole island, and where, in just the same way as in Elliot Lake, the companies left behind them vast lakes of polluting detritus from their mining operations as they dug out the bauxite to be shipped to the Lac St Jean district of Quebec, where it was turned into, first, alumina, and then into aluminium.

As part of the same series of films I went to Sudbury, Ontario, home of Inco, the nickel mining giant, a town that had a committee of more than 200 widows of miners who had died horrible deaths from being poisoned by industrial gases that they were forced to work in, in a plant that had mercifully been closed years before, leaving only the widows behind to grieve.  One middle-aged woman, a  German-born widow, said to me: “I know in murder someone has to be sentenced….But who do I sentence now?” a quote I used as the title to one of the films.  She had shown us a picture of her husband on his deathbed: a wisened shell of a man,  gasping for his last breaths, whom no one would have recognized as the strong young man he had once been. I also managed to persuade  Stelco, the steel company in Hamilton, Ontario,  to permit us to film men working atop the coke ovens, unprotected in any way from the poison gases emanating all around them.

There are similar horror stories all around the country. In St Lawrence, Newfoundland, mining for fluorspar, a substance used in the manufacture of aluminium, glass and other materials, began in the 1930s,  but it was not until the 1960s that anything was done about the terrible conditions in which they had to work underground. Dry dust from the mining operations infected their lungs, and in addition, natural radon gasses, capable of causing radiation, had a devastating effect on the workers. Eventually, before the mines were closed in the 1970s, some 200 miners died of these various diseases. St. Lawrence had become a village with a cemetery full of victims.

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One might argue that these were all in the past, although the flash decision to close the Oakville plant, after billions of public dollars had been granted to the company to develop and keep the factory open,  indicates that the feeling of companies about their workers has not changed.

Another similar event has been in the news lately: that is the revelation that western Canada is riddled with tens of thousands of abandoned, uncapped, or inactive oil and gas wells that have, in thousands of cases, simply been abandoned uncapped by their former owners to continue to do their dirty polluting work all around them.  The cost of remedial work, which should rightly have been charged to the mining companies, is now estimated to be measured in billions of dollars.

This is a cost that has always been left out of calculations of the real costs of mining, drilling or extracting minerals from the ground.    In some places, the contracts signed have required that this work be done, but these provisions have never been enforced. The numbers of wells mentioned in recent news items are truly staggering. Here are two recent news items, the first from the Western Producer weekly:

“The news ha(s) just broken that Calgary-based Sequoia Resources Corp. had ceased operations. Its demise, if it occurs, would add at least another 2,300 oil and gas wells and possibly as many as 4,000 to the list of energy infrastructure sites on Alberta farm and ranch land that will require reclamation.

“The trouble is that Sequoia, like many other energy companies that have entered receivership or gone bankrupt in recent years, cannot cover the cost of that reclamation.  It’s estimated that more than 155,000 Alberta energy wells have no economic potential and will eventually require reclamation.”

 The second from CBC:

“Alberta's recent economic downturn has pushed several oil companies into bankruptcy. In the past five years, the number of such wells without a financially accountable owner has grown from fewer than 100 to 3,200.

“In all, the province has about 155,000 oil wells that aren't producing but have yet to be fully remediated, the study found — and cleaning those up could cost an estimated $8 billion.

“In Alberta, industry is responsible for funding the cleanup of wells left behind by bankrupt energy companies. However, public money has also been used. Alberta offered a $235-million loan to the energy industry to clean up old wells, with the interest being paid by $30 million from the federal budget.” 

This describes  a template for a government that is not fulfilling its responsibility to its taxpayers, and now this same government of Alberta is bleating about being abandoned by the federal government because they are not able to ship their Tar Sands bitumen to tide water so that it can be transformed into oil, and go on destroying the Earth. It is a well-known thing that  modern governments are held safely in the pockets of major industrialists, but our populations have been so worked upon by highly financed publicity and advertising industries that people have come to take such irresponsibility more or less for granted.

Years ago I used to make it a habit of remarking on my blog from time to time that at least two prominent members of the Liberal government, John Manley and Anne McLellan, were unfit to hold public office. Manley was minister for Industry and Consumer and Corporate Affairs, and it was well-known that when the Competitions Act was being reworked, he handed over responsibility for that to the corporate sector, thus abdicating the responsibility he owed to his voters.  Ms. McLellan was minister for natural resources, and by every evidence I could find, she was comfortably ensconsed in the pockets of the major corporations.

Was I the only person to be outraged by this?  Manley has gone on to his just reward as CEO of the Business Council of Canada, and is also a member of David Rockefeller’s infamous Trilateral Commission, the resting place for Capitalism’s movers and shakers. And Anne McLellan  has also retired into university chancellorship in her post-election life.

While I am about it, although this example is from a different country, there was an item illustrating the monstrously skewed priorities of the Capitalist system when a little machine that had been sent off to visit Mars seven months ago finally landed. It was described as a billion dollar enterprise and since it was the eighth such mission since the probes to Mars began in 1971, one can believe that several billions of dollars have been spent on what must seem to many people to be an entirely peripheral enterprise. When an estimated 40 million people in the United States are suffering from severe poverty, this certainly seems a strange way to spend scarce resources --- to penetrate seven feet beneath the surface of Mars. Whoopee!