The English are
the most civilised
of all the races
John Cameron
Havel and Klaus
John Cameron
A response to the claim that John Cameron confused Havel and Klaus in his recent column on global warming
Václav Havel and Václav Klaus were such rivals there was a tendency to exaggerate the differences between them on policy issues such as the euro and global warming.
Klaus studied ‘the economics of foreign trade’ at Prague University and international finance as a post-graduate student at Cornell University in the United States. From the very first he was opposed to the political extension of the EU and called for such aspirations to be scrapped and a return made to the original idea of a free trade area.
He could not understand why having just escaped the dead hand of Soviet communism the Czechs should be so keen to subject themselves to the dead hand of Brussels. In a similar vein he opposed the global-warming activists whose tactics reminded him of ‘Soviet communism’s methods, practices and prevention of counter-arguments’.
As an economist he was especially critical of the ‘deeply flawed’ Stern report on the cost of global warming based on what he termed ‘a gross cherry picking of doubtful facts’.
Havel on the other hand was a playwright, essayist and poet, a politician by force of circumstances and a close friend of Milan Horácek, founder of the German Greens. It was therefore easy to portray him as a rabid cheer-leader for the eurozone and global warming yet though he was clearly an environmentalist he also exercised some caution.
As grave doubts started to surface after he left office about both euro-economics and climate-science he grew increasingly uneasy about the huge sacrifices being demanded.
In later speeches he would say:
‘The end of the world has been anticipated so many times in the past but it has not happened and it is not going to happen this time either. The effects of possible climate change are obscure and hard to estimate because our planet has never been in a state of balance but has evolved over billions of years. I think it highly unlikely such a complex phenomenon problem can be solved by a single branch of science or that change is driven by a single one of the many factors involved.
Observations must be analysed with an open mind, ideological obsession must be resisted and wide discussion encouraged rather than prevented by claims that the debate is over’.
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The English are
the most civilised
of all the races
Iain Macmillan
I
There has been quite a lot of comment about racism these days in the newspapers and on the radio. Not sure about TV, since I rarely watch it. Most of it relates to people who are ‘non-white’. This extraordinary euphemism has sidled into our language in order that we may avoid any possible contravention of the Race Relations Act. But some of the remarks complained of relate to English people. There was a chat show on Scottish radio just the other day when people exchanged views as to whether they had experience of disparaging remarks about the English, or ‘being’ English.
It’s all a bit silly of course; at least it seems so to one who served in the armed forces shoulder to shoulder with Geordies and Cockneys and the like. Some of it is intended to be good-natured, but some of it is downright chilling. ‘Please God, let the English get beat’. One of my own family once told me she regarded the English as ‘foreigners’.
My own immediate forebears were a mixture of English, Scottish and Irish – like so many of us. I am proud of the fact that my grandmother was English. I like to think that this tinge of English blood serves to temper my otherwise Celtic ancestry with some leavening of common humanity.
The reason is – and I don’t necessarily expect you to agree with me about this – but I regard the English as the most civilised of all the races. The Germans may be the most industrious; the French the most discriminating; the Italians the most artistic – I leave you to complete the list, or compile your own – but the English, in my view, are the most civilised. Why do I advance this extraordinary, even extravagant claim? Well, I invite you to consider some of the outstanding characteristics of our English cousins.
First, they invented fair play – witness parliamentary democracy, the jury system and cricket. Second, they have produced more, and better lyrical poets than anyone else; and poetry, as every schoolboy knows, is the highest of the art forms. Third, they have the unique ability to laugh at themselves. If you still doubt the validity of my claim then I challenge you to cite any other nation that has allowed its empire, the greatest the world has ever known, to dissolve peacefully and without recrimination, and be replaced by a Commonwealth of Nations.
II
A friend of mine has just loaned me one of her CDs. I say ‘loaned’ because she wants it back, and I don’t blame her. It’s called ‘Words for you’. I know it’s not a very good title, but it has been produced to assist a charity called ‘I Can’, which helps children with speech problems, so we mustn’t quibble. It’s an anthology of poems read by people like Joanna Lumley, Geoffrey Palmer, Martin Shaw, Alison Steadman and Lindsay Duncan with an appropriate yet non-intrusive musical background. Very pleasant to listen to. You can make out every word, which is more than you can say for some of our modern-day actors.
Some of the poems are very familiar. Too familiar, some might say – Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ and Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’, for example. And yet, when you hear these poems read by such gifted people, they still give you pleasure. But some of the others are refreshingly different, such as D H Lawrence’s ‘On the Balcony’ and Elizabeth Jennings’s ‘One Flesh’. One of my favourites – one of my old favourites, I should say – is Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’. You will know it, I’m sure.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
‘The curse is come upon me!’ cried
The Lady of Shalott.
It’s a marvellously dramatic ballad. But does anyone read the old ballads nowadays – ‘Sir Patrick Spens’, ‘Thomas Rymer’, or even Walter Scott’s ‘Young Lochinvar’? I doubt it. Do school children still read poetry? In my day we were required to memorise whole chunks of poetry, and to recite them before the class. The result was that we became familiar with the best of English, and Scottish, verse. I can still recite most of the soliloquies of ‘Hamlet’ and some of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and lines and lines from the other plays. Words and phrases that have enriched our language, not least from the Authorised Version.
It will be urged against me that this was mere learning ‘by rote’, parrot fashion; whereas the purpose of modern teaching is to explore the inner meaning, and thus enable students to express themselves more clearly, more confidently. Aye, maybe so. Though I doubt there’s much sign of it. But then I’m an old fuddy-duddy. Still, I like to think I’m an educated fuddy-duddy.
III
I was born and raised in Oban and went to school there – Oban High School. But mine was a very different environment from that described in two remarkable books I have been reading about life in the Highlands of Scotland. The first is called ‘A School in South Uist’, and is about a young Englishman called F G Rea (we never learn his first name) who went to South Uist in 1890 to take charge of a school there. Conditions were unbelievably primitive. No electricity of course, only peat fires and oil lamps. You had to walk for miles, since there was no transport except for a very occasional horse and trap, or a boat.
Mr Rea had charge of over 100 children of all ages, none of whom spoke English, and he had no Gaelic. Fortunately there were two young infant mistresses who spoke English quite well, and eventually some at least of his pupils learned to converse in English, although to the end they regarded this as a foreign language.
Rea loved every minute of his many years there, despite the loneliness, the hardships and the weather. He describes the people and the scenery in such terms that you begin to understand their irresistible attraction for him. One of his former pupils writes of him that his ability to adapt to difficult conditions was the secret of his success, and that he was remembered as ‘a beloved teacher and a wonderful personality’.
The other book could scarcely be more different. In ‘A Highland Childhood’ Donald Sutherland describes the life of a child in Oban in the early part of the 20th century. Unlike Mr Rea, and unlike me, Donald Sutherland was the child of wealthy parents. His father shot with the King, using a pair of shotguns made to measure by Purdey. Their friends and neighbours appeared to consist entirely of titled personages, and young Sutherland spent his boyhood days fishing for salmon and shooting grouse.
And yet, like Rea, his abiding memory is of the country itself, its beauty, and its fascination. Although born into a very different class, he writes of the common people he came in touch with as friends with whom he had a common bond.
We’re lucky, people like us, to live in such a country as Scotland.
Or England, of course.
Iain Macmillan is a former sheriff and former president of the Law
Society
of Scotland. His autobiography ‘I Had it From my Father’
was published recently
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