Tibet

An interesting article on FT.com from Geoff Dyer in Shanghai, which suggests that the EU is at least thinking about being brave about Tibet.

The president of the European Parliament has said that European countries should consider a boycott of the Olympics in Beijing if the Chinese government continues to take a hardline attitude to unrest in Tibet. Hans-Gert Poettering joined a growing list of western politicians calling on China to open talks with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, whom Chinese officials blame for inciting a wave of protests and riots over the last two weeks.

It does not seem that the western politicians include Gordon Brown. He has said that he will meet the Dalai Lama, but that is not really enough. It seems that he has not been able to bring himself to criticize what is happening. His silence will only encourage the Chinese. There is realpolitik, and there is moral cowardice.

Yarner ravens

Below Trendlebere Down, looking over the Bovey valley, is Yarner Wood. Part of the East Dartmoor Woods and Heaths NNR, it is ancient upland oakland, probably pre-1600. More importantly, for us, it is our patch. In spring, pied flycatchers arrive and the tree canopy is alive with small passerines, as well as all three of our native woodpeckers. There is a hide (in late winter the feeders attract a wide variety of tits and finches, as well as nuthatches) and the quiet woodland paths wind through the undercover of bilberry. As well as the birds, on warm summer days we have sat and watched roe deer and butterflies. Good Friday saw us walking up the path from the car park, buffeted by a bitter north wind, and far from sure that we would see any birds at all.

It is too early, and cold, for the pied flycatchers and other summer visitors, and the wind in the tree tops drowned out such bird song as there was. We were hoping to see ravens. The edge of the moor, where Hay Tor plunges into the Bovey valley is a good spot for watching these magical birds. There is a pair that nests somewhere on the ridge, across from the Yarner Wood hide, and we have often seen them above the treeline. This is the time of year to see ravens display, although as Caroline said as we reached the hide, chance would be a fine thing, given the weather. Yet as is so often the case in this part of the world, the weather blows through fast, and sun followed the rain. From the hide we saw one of the ravens, having first heard it: the call is unmistakeable, deep and carrying. As the weather improved we walked outside and almost immediately saw more ravens high in the sky, five in all.

For the next fifteen minutes we stood and watched. Three disappeared below the trees, but a pair remained and their aerial display was breathtaking, including the raven’s piece de resistance, a full barrel roll at speed, wings tucked in. And when this pair had gone, three more in the distant sky resolved themselves into a pair mobbing a large raptor, which through the glasses did not appear a buzzard, and was too large for a sparrowhawk or a kestrel. Although the rule is always go for the obvious (which here would be a buzzard), I think that along with the ravens we were also watching one of the scarcest, and most persecuted, of our hawks, accipiter gentilis, the northern goshawk. There was a report of a goshawk on Trendlebere some two weeks ago. Every day at Yarner has something memorable, but this was more special than most.

Human rights, human dignity and human life

I am not sure which I find more disturbing, the Embryology Bill or the behaviour of Gordon Brown, in indicating that he is prepared to allow his MPs almost (but not quite) a free vote, but only if the mathematics show that the government will win (see the report on BBC News).

“The prime minister is prepared to allow Labour MPs who oppose a controversial embryo bill to vote against pieces of the legislation, the BBC has learned. The votes would be permitted only if they did not threaten the passage of the bill, a government official said.”

The government’s response to the warning from leading Labour MPs that a rebellion is on the cards, is a self-serving mixture of good old-fashioned Stalinism, control-freakery and sucking up to vested interests. I suppose we should expect nothing less of a man who writes about courage but who so clearly lacks it: obsessed by power and its exercise, and convinced that he and his acolytes alone know what is best for us. The arguments paraded are designed to make those who oppose the bill appear as enemies of progress, and unconcerned about our health and welfare. Thus Ben Bradshaw (fast becoming the acceptable face of the Brownite camp):

“This is about using pre-embryonic cells to do research that has the potential to ease the suffering of millions of people in this country. The government has taken a view that this is a good thing.”

We should all, therefore, be reassured? Or should we? For a different view, see Nadine Dorries’ post in Coffee House, The Embryology Bill, cui bono? And the opposition cuts across party lines. In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph this morning, Labour MP Stephen Byers – a former cabinet minister under Tony Blair – said the public would “look on in disbelief” if Mr Brown did not offer a free vote, and (BBC News again) “Welsh Secretary Paul Murphy is reportedly prepared to quit the cabinet rather than vote for the bill.”

Who’s watching you?

Philip Pulman doesn’t like ID cards. In an aside in an interview in The Spectator this week,

Later, the conversation roams unsparingly through officialdom and encroaching regulation (especially in the national curriculum), crass sloganeering and political unspeak (‘Tony Blair was a great bullshitter’), and ID cards: ‘I’d go to jail rather than have an identity card.’

And so say most of us. For a short but excellent take on ID cards, read Grayling’s question in October’s Prospect, Are ID cards either philosophically or pragmatically justifiable? His answer,

Emphatically no. A requirement for every citizen to carry a device that enables the authorities to demand immediate information about them dramatically changes the relationship of individuals to the state, from being private citizens to being numbered conscripts. An ID card or device (technology will rapidly supplant plastic cards because the latter are too easily lost or stolen) is a surveillance instrument, a tracking device, like a car number plate or the kind of tag punched into a cow’s ear.

And to make the point,

The main pushers of an identity surveillance system—the biometric data companies who stand to gain billions—tell us that the iris and fingerprint details that will link you to the computer that stores your address, medical records and so on can be stored on a chip the size of a full stop. This can be implanted in your earlobe, ostensibly to protect against loss or theft, and read by a device similar to a barcode reader. I asked David Miliband what the difference is between this and a number branded on your arm. His furious response was proof that I cut close to a nerve.

Mind the gap?

Yesterday evening at the Business Leaders Forum at Exeter University, and an interesting take on Generation Y by Richard Wyatt-Haines (you can find more on Mind the gap: managing and retaining your graduate entrants on his website). Our table (and it seems much of the audience) was not entirely persuaded. Is Generation Y so very different to the previous one, or the one before that (see my post on Graduate Divas)? My next door neighbour and I (both the same generation) decided that it was not Generation Y that was so different: we thought they were quite like our generation, but the one in between. What is different is the context, how life appears to be, although is what is happening in Tibet as I write so very different to what happened in Hungary in 1956 (I was four) and what happened in Czechoslovakia in 1968 (when I was 16)?