Thursday, January 27, 2005
Some do not remember, others cannot forget
Link
See BBC NEWS | World | Europe | World marks Auschwitz liberation
My next door neighbour was an Auschwitz survivor. His name was Abraham, and in the camp he was put on the night shift of forced labour. He survived - he said - because the guards were too tired to beat the prisoners. At one point he was so hungry that he climbed a refuse pile to steal a rotten apple. The punishment beating he was given for this crime was so severe that he suffered from back problems until the day he died.
Abraham was one of the lucky ones. He survived. Every other member of his family was killed.
It's easy for we who were born years later to think of Auschwitz as something very distant. From time to time people even express irritation about Jews 'banging on about the Holocaust'.
Perhaps it would be time to forget if we had -- as a world -- learned the lesson of history. But we have not. After the Holocaust there were the Gulags. The Killing Fields of Cambodia. Rwanda. Kosovo. Darfur. In hope, we still sometimes look back to the Holocaust and say 'never again'. But it would be truer to say 'never before'. Because the Holocaust did not end something, it began it.
We may have a UN convention on genocide, but we have not eradicated it. If anything we have institutionalised it. 'Ethnic Cleansing' has entered our language.
My friend Abraham died ten years ago. Like all those who endured such things, he could not forget.
As long as such endure, we must not forget either.
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Competing on price: why the Tory election strategy is programmed to fail
Link
See BBC NEWS | Politics | Howard dismisses Tory tax fears
35 billion pound cutbacks, to produce a 4 billion pound tax cut?
Some of us are left asking a simple question: why? Britain is at its most prosperous ever. True, we don't rule half the world as we once did, and we are no longer the economic powerhouse that we once were, but in terms of disposable income, and what that income will buy, we are in the best position we have ever been. True -- as an Early Modern Politics professor pointed out to me on Saturday -- food, transport, fuel and the like are proportionately more expensive than they once were. But even with these subtracted, what is left buys better cars, better televisions, faster computers, and cheaper fridges, freezers, cookers and heaters. Books are down in price, and the internet has opened up vast worlds of online knowledge (and online misinformation) that were previously the preserve of the university library.
Of course, Gordon Brown cannot take the credit for these things. Part of the underlying growth came from the policies of Kenneth Clarke. A large part comes from the stability brought about by having an independent Bank of England setting interest rates -- a policy Brown lifted straight from the Lib-Dem manifesto in 1997 (it seems to have been omitted from Labour's). Tories, of course, would claim that the whole thing is merely the result of the reforms that Thatcher brought in. But this is all daftness and moonshine -- the entire Western world is in a prolonged upward spiral in standards of living which has been proceeding in cycles since the Second World War. Until 1989 we laughed at Eastern Europe with its austere, joyless anti-materialism, forgetting that the Warsaw pact had really done nothing other than maintain the standard of living which it inherited at the end of the war.
So why, when we have -- realistically -- more than we ever have had before, are the Tories making so much of a tax cut. 4 billion pounds may sound like a lot, but divided by 53 million people, it comes out at 75 quid each, per year. Of course, those with higher earnings will get back proportionately more. But, then, the value of a 75 pound rebate is far less to them. If anybody is really desperate to get 75 pounds back off the taxman, they really don't need to do much more than pay more careful attention to their tax return and make sure they really are claiming for everything they can claim for.
It's not about the 75 pounds. Any more than the fact that apples may cost 2p less in Asda this month than in Sainsbury's (or is it the other way around?) It's about competing on price.
But any industry analyst will tell you that competing on price is the last thing you would want to do. Premium brands don't compete on price, they compete on features. Market leaders compete on innovation. Prestige marques compete on the swank value. Companies like Bosch compete on reliability. Dyson competes on suction. And good old Ronseal competes on honest product descriptions.
You only compete on price when there is nothing else left to differentiate your products.
Tories -- Labour. If it's a price war they're after, the customer should start looking around for an alternative product.
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
The Tsunami brings us all to face ourselves
Link
Today we share three minutes of silence. At 12.00 in Britain. At 11.00 in Europe. We will share a common moment of respect, of memory, of reflection.
This is a disaster unlike others. Vast in scale, an enormous human catastrophe. Television, the internet and world travel bring it very close to us. For many of us, friends lost their lives, or saved them but lost friends and colleagues.
The enormous public move to donate to disaster relief reflects well on us. The undignified spectacle of governments clambering over each other to prove that they led the way in relief does not.
But even our public compassion raises questions. Why do we not respond in this way to the AIDS disaster in Africa? Why do we not respond in this way to civil war in Sudan, or in Congo? Why -- as a nation -- are we promoting heartless policies towards asylum seekers, presuming them guilty unless they can prove that they are innocent?
In those three minutes, we will be brought face to face with ourselves.
Previous news
 Â