Martin-Baker Day

Today is the 56th anniversary of my successful employment of the excellent Martin-Baker apparatus to escape from a doomed Jet Provost aircraft and subsequent descent to earth, albeit in a very ungainly way, in an Irvin parachute. This escape enabled me to enjoy a joyful 33 year subsequent career as an Royal Air Force pilot.  I see from the website today that the current tally of lives saved is 7632.  I was number 664 - doesn't time fly?

A Farewell to Arts

 

Dire predictions for the future of the arts industry abound.  In the Telegraph today, Dominic Cavendish claims that the Chancellor’s latest Covid Measures to help viable businesses means that he has just told an entire industry to get another job.  Theatre workers, Cavendish laments, will be left with three choices – howl in despair, quit the sector or both.  This is particularly disappointing to me because I am fond of the arts in general and live theatre in particular.  That said, I was startled recently when an interviewee chosen by the BBC told us that the arts industry had an important role to play in promoting and engineering social change.  No examples were offered but I am pretty sure we could predict what would be on the Arts Council’s mind.  I have to admit, I prickled at this pompous presumption since I believe, perhaps in an out of fashion way, that the arts are meant to stimulate and entertain their patrons rather than break new ground with woke indoctrinations for all manner of minority inequalities.  I’d go further and say that I don’t much like the idea of paying artists from public subsidy if they neither stimulate nor entertain in the first place.  So to those artists who see their role as social messiahs, farewell.  I hope there will be a suitable Government training scheme, leading to a viable job, available for you in due course.

Time For Some Instinctive Leadership?

 

It seems as though the Government approach to the Covid Pandemic is to stalk the problem using every conceivable cover.  A letter in the Telegraph today from Mark Raynor, posing the question, “what’s the verdict: too much, too little, too late, too soon?” He then says, “there’s a professor out there somewhere who will support any position you wish to take.”

A reasonable observation, I’m sure you will agree.  But who was it once said that he had had enough of experts: experts who cannot stomach the possibility of a chance event and who procrastinate and hedge their bets in order to preserve their intellectual reputation at all costs.  Stephen Bayley, writing in Standpoint about intellectuals, references Einstein who believed that intellectuals merely solve problems whilst geniuses are able to avoid them in the first place.  Perhaps now is the time after so many announcements and counter announcements on Covid for the other side of the coin, some instinctive leadership? I remember in a VC10 air-to-air refuelling tanker almost towing a fuel-leaking Jaguar towards Scotland, observing the total fuel gauge depleting at an alarming rate and saying to the Navigator, “ how long can I continue heading East before turning round and landing at my diversion in Iceland with the minimum permissible fuel?”  “Hang on,” he said, “I'll tell you exactly in a couple of minutes.”  “No,” I said, “tell me approximately now!”

Online Protection

 

I enjoy reading book reviews.  Private Eye is always entertainingly bitter and those in the Spectator often reveal quite a lot about the reviewer.  A review in the Spectator recently caught my eye: “Going Dark – The Secret Social Lives of Extremists,” by Julia Ebner.  Naturally interested in the way the internet is developing and encouraged by a positive review, I ordered the book from the Library.  Indeed, I was not discouraged that Julia Ebner writes in the Guardian and interests herself with militant responses to Brexit, according to the dust cover.  Ebner’s aim is to make the “social dimension of digital extremist movements visible,”  and then launches herself into an account of all that is terrible on the internet and her adventures in infiltrating the groups and sites involved in extremists movements.  So much for the introduction but what follows is a jargon fest account, written in the present tense, of her journey which would infuriate anyone expecting a coherent narrative.  Oh well, I thought, since I had borrowed the book I may as well read the conclusion and see if there were any recommendations for the future.  Sure enough, there were “Ten Predictions for 2025.”  Here is my precis of the revelations:

·        Online groups will spread themselves more thinly making them more difficult to track

·        Terrorists will learn from other terrorists and copy their techniques

·        People will continue to be aggrieved

·        Totalitarian States will continue to oppress minorities

·        Far right groups may turn violent

·        More types of terrorism and more terrorists may emerge

·        Terrorists might use drones

·        Terrorism may rise along with our sea levels (this was my personal favourite from Hope Not Hate)

·        More people will tell lies on the internet and try to undermine rivals (“Shitposting," “Trolling,” and “Flaming” apparently)

Eagerly, I turned to “Ten Solutions for 2020” but was disappointed.  There were a few suggestions technical techniques, all of which required someone to form a consensus and do something.  This sounds OK until one asks who are these people who should protect our lives and what will they allow or not allow us to think? There was even the bizarre suggestion to mobilise “Arts Against Anger” – more Gary Lineker perhaps? The one suggestion, it seemed to me, that had merit was “Education Against Extremism.  Ebner argues for more digital literacy programmes to provide protection for young and old alike.  There seems no doubt that this would help, even at a practical level of preventing vulnerable people becoming victims of nasty online scams.  But so-called digital literacy will be insufficient without the fundamental knowledge  together with the effective intelligence and critical reasoning power that our education system should be nurturing in young people. If we want to protect the young from harm on the internet, then we should start by looking at their basic education at school and university.