Category: Britain

Weekend Film Recommendation: Locke

On a good day, it takes a little over two hours to drive the M40 from Birmingham all the way to London. If you’re speeding to meet an emergency, you can make it in just over an hour and half. This weekend’s film recommendation, Steven Knight’s Locke, unfolds in real-time, as the eponymous main character Ivan Locke completes the journey along the M40 before the credits roll by the 85th minute.

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Tom Hardy plays Ivan Locke, who steps from the construction site where he works into his BMW in the late evening as the film begins. This is the only time we will see Locke outside of his car for the duration of the film, and it is the only time we will see him in the same frame as another human face. Locke is one of those films that wrings a literary conceit as dry as it will allow: It doesn’t take long before the audience cottons on to the fact that this film will end before Locke reaches London, and there will be no reprieve from the eight or so different angles from which we’ll view his face behind the steering wheel. The only other voices we hear are disembodied, played through the speaker of his car’s Bluetooth. Locke is alone. Continue reading “Weekend Film Recommendation: Locke”

Reading the Scottish Election Results

The 2016 UK elections provided some insight into the evolution of Scottish politics, which is important in itself and also because of how it may determine two other critical matters (1) Whether the UK breaks apart and (2) Which party governs Britain if it does in fact stay in one piece.

The chart displays the major party results for each election since the Scottish Parliament was devolved under PM Tony Blair. The pattern is as plain as a pikestaff: the Scottish Nationalists have grown mighty and the Labour Party has withered.

Scotland

The British Labour Party was originally a Scottish creation, and Scotland used to be a Labour preserve both in the Scottish elections and nationally. But yesterday’s results were another in a series of disasters for Scottish Labour. Continue reading “Reading the Scottish Election Results”

Farewell, Orpington Man

I was sad to read of the passing of Lord Avebury, the central figure in a night that rocked British politics over a half century ago when he was known as Eric Lubbock:

I had the pleasure to work with Lord Avebury (Lubbock adopted his hereditary title after he left the House of Commons) on a Parliamentary bill and he had the same delightful, impish smile today as he displayed in the newsreel.

A great deal of political analysis was inspired by Lubbock’s upset victory, with many sociological theories put forth about the emergence of a new kind of suburban voter (The “Orpington Man”) who would leave the Tory party of MacMillan and make the Liberals dominant once more. None of these theories panned out for the Liberals, so perhaps Lord Avebury’s simpler explanation for his Orpington triumph is closer to the truth:

It was bitterly cold during the March of 1962, and the Conservative candidate spent most of the campaign sitting in a heated caravan, which didn’t go down too well on the doorstep. In contrast, we were out in all weathers.

Weekend Film Recommendation: Four Lions

In the eight years since Richard Reid’s failure, the Underwear Bomber learned no more than to move the explosives from his feet to his groin. I still remember the fun comics had with the sheer incompetence of the plot. There’s always been an odd suspicion about just how skilled at their craft terrorists need to be to get the job done, and that suspicion forms the very heart of this weekend’s movie recommendation. In Chris Morris’ black comedy Four Lions, the picture is clear: terrorists these days must not have a brain cell between them. Continue reading “Weekend Film Recommendation: Four Lions”

Weekend Film Recommendation: The Office Christmas Special

No Christmas would be complete without a themed RBC movie review – but this season, instead of the usual film recommendation, we’re going with a straight-to-telly BBC Special. It’s the beautiful, bittersweet, and downright painful final send-off to the UK version of The Office. To enjoy the Christmas special it’ll be fine if you haven’t watched the first two seasons (even though you must have been living under a rock). But everything about this powerful ending to the show plays with the investment an audience has made with each of the characters—whether out of sympathy or pity.

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Continue reading “Weekend Film Recommendation: The Office Christmas Special”

Weekend Film Recommendation: Under the Skin

It’s October again, which means that we’re kicking off another month of horror-themed movies here at RBC! The first in the series is a new interpretation on the alien femme fatale story, in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin.

The action begins with a motorcyclist bringing a lifeless woman to the back of his van. There, his accomplice, a naked woman played by Scarlett Johansson, takes the victim’s clothes for herself. Already five minutes in to the film, and very little has been explained yet, nor will it for much of what follows. Instead, viewers have to divine who the characters are, and what their motivations may be, based on the smallest fragments of information.

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So, when the woman starts driving the van around the streets of Glasgow with the intent to seduce men and bring them back to her home, we believe we may have a grasp on what she’s about. We’d be wrong. Once inside her home, we learn that its interior is nothing but a pool of immaculate black oil, into which the woman’s suitors descend and are consumed during their pursuit of her. It’s not clear what happens to the men once they are submerged in the oil until half way through the film. By that point, the woman has amassed a sufficient number of victims that one of them notices another suspended in the mysterious black fluid. Upon reaching out to his fellow captive, he finds that the other man disappears into nothingness, leaving only skin behind.

Consequently, much of the first half of the film is devoted to trying to decipher who this protagonist is, what’s happening to the men she seduces, and why she’s doing it. Answers to any of these questions remain elusive. Therefore, you might just settle on thinking of her as an alien simply to make things easier on yourself. Yet one of the remarkable successes of Under the Skin is that we learn to invest in and sympathize with her all the same, despite all this not-knowing. Continue reading “Weekend Film Recommendation: Under the Skin”

The Secret World of David Copperfield

Rooks Here is a good trivia question for bibliophiles: What is the full title of Charles Dickens’ classic novel David Copperfield? The answer, believe it or not, is “David Copperfield: The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (which he never meant to publish on any account)”.

An even lesser known fact is that there is an actual place called Blunderstone Rookery. It’s located about 60 miles southeast of London, and the carefully selected rooks that are raised there have won many prizes from British birders over the years. I strongly recommend it as an offbeat, sadly overlooked, tourist spot for Dickens fans, not only for the extraordinary number of birds but also for the library at Blunderstone House, which has an astonishing collection of old Dickens editions.

article-2205444-1516AED9000005DC-681_964x651 I myself am a collector of such editions, and over the years have gotten to know Blunderstone’s librarian, Dr. Arnold Humber, a retired Oxford Don who divides his time between producing some of the nation’s best birds and collecting old books. Dr. Humber is also a voracious consumer of modern literature, and I rely on him to tell me what on the current best seller list is worth my time. Indeed, every time I see him I always ask the same question:

Have you bred any good rooks lately?

Negative Achievements in Politics

John Adams, Master of Inaction
John Adams, Master of Inaction
In recent years, the British economy has been the jobs engine of Europe, enjoying falling unemployment, rising wages and good growth. No doubt many politicians will claim credit based on what they did, but I wonder if any credit will go to someone who helped by not doing something.

I speak of Gordon Brown, who refused Tony Blair’s wishes to join the Euro. No matter what British politicians had done since, it’s hard to see how Britain would currently have half the Eurozone’s unemployment rate if Blair had prevailed. By declining to take action on the Euro, Brown aided his country to a greater extent than he did with many of the policies he actually implemented.

But we don’t generally credit politicians for things they didn’t do, even when their inactions had more benefits than their actions. How many people when listing the achievements of President John Adams would for example mention his not launching a full-scale war with France over the XYZ affair? Yet he might have saved our nascent republic in the not doing so.

It’s not cognitively easy for voters to deal with counter-factuals, and the hero’s narrative that the media loves only works when the hero changed history through some great deed rather than standing pat. That’s probably a bad set of incentives for legacy-hungry politicians because sometimes the advice from the theater holds: Don’t just do something, stand there.

Disseminating Sobriety Monitoring of Alcohol-Involved Offenders in the U.K.

I have collaborated for a number of years with the London Mayor’s Office to expand swift, certain and fair approaches to criminal justice supervision. Our team worked with Parliament to pass a law in 2012 that allow judges to mandate sobriety for alcohol-involved criminal offenders on community supervision. That law allowed us to mount a pilot in South London which has produced encouraging results: Monitored offenders, who wore a bracelet that could detect their alcohol use, were 50% more likely to complete supervision successfully than offenders receiving typical supervision.

Boris Johnson wants to roll the program out across London and the national government wants to expand it throughout the U.K. Terrific. But a word of warning to UK police commissioners and judges who have heard of the pilot and think that slapping a sensor bracelet on an alcohol-involved offender will do the trick (forgive me please for quoting a prior post):

Alcohol-sensing technology is not by itself 24/7 sobriety. The media focuses heavily on the fascinating technology involved in the alcohol-sensing bracelets that offenders will wear. But 24/7 sobriety doesn’t even require the alcohol-sensing bracelets. Indeed, most of its implementation in South Dakota was done via twice a day in person breathalyzation. Detecting alcohol use is essential for 24/7 sobriety to work but the heart of the program is the criminal justice system responding swiftly and certainly when drinking occurs.

Nick Herbert, MP, who helped us get the 24/7 sobriety law passed when he was Minister for Justice and Policing, puts his finger on the principal challenge:

The key principle in disposals like this is certainty: offenders need to know that a breach will result in instant and decisive penalty. Our criminal justice system resists such practice.

What this means for all the innovative judges and policy departments in the U.K. who want to do this is that making this program work will require more than technology. It also requires a systematic effort to start responding rapidly and consistently to infractions (A lot of work at first, but it gets easy quickly as the word on the street spreads that supervision requirements are taken seriously).

If you want to learn more about why this is so and to see the evidence behind these programs, my talk at Policy Exchange is online here.

To Save Westminster

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The glorious Palace of Westminister, home of the British Parliament, is falling apart (remarkable photos here) and simultaneously sinking into the underlying clay-rich earth. An independent report places the cost of repairs at £3.5 Billion. Presuming the planning fallacy holds, the actual costs will be even higher (for example, one wonders if the cost estimate considers the likelihood that digging under the foundation will uncover historical/architectural treasures that have to be preserved).

Matthew Flinders is not interested in restoring the building for the government’s use:

The Palace of Westminster should be a museum, not the institutional heart of British politics.

… it is dark and dank. It is as if it has been designed to be off-putting and impenetrable. It is “Hogwarts on Thames” which is great if you have been brought up in an elite public school environment but bad if you did not. It has that smell — you know the one I mean — the smell of private privilege, of a very male environment, of money and assumptions of “class”. It is not “fit for purpose” and everyone knows it.

Flinders sees an opportunity to redesign politics along with creating a new, differently designed building to house those who practice it:

if we really want to breathe new life into British democracy then the dilapidation of the Palace of Westminster offers huge opportunities. The 2015 General Election is therefore something of a distraction from the more basic issue of how we design for democracy in the twenty-first century. Less MPs but with more resources? Less shouting and more listening? A chamber that can actually seat all of its members? Why not base Parliament outside of London and in one of the new “Northern powerhouses” (Sheffield, Manchester, Newcastle, but definitely not Leeds) that politicians seem suddenly so keen on?…let’s be very un-British in our approach, let’s design for democracy. Let’s do it! Let’s rip it up and start again!

I agree with Flinders that physical spaces shape our behavior, our emotions and how we treat each other. Indeed, that is precisely why I do not want Parliament moved to some antiseptic modern office building in Sheffield. The Palace of Westminster and the spot on which its predecessor structures stood are sacred democratic ground. This is where a land ruled through Divine Right of Monarchs evolved to become one of the world’s leading democratic societies. The building itself does not belong to the politicians inside it but to the British people, and it should therefore be a beautiful, awe-inspiring place worthy of their greatness. And I want their elected officials to walk by the statues, the windows, the crypts and the carvings that convey the weight of history and with it the current generation’s comparatively small role in it (As President Obama says “We just try to get our paragraph right”). To wipe out that history will lead politicians to think that history starts with them, and that’s a perilous concept for democracy.