The president arrived last night and is going through the ritual parade down the Mall today. The British Union flag cheek by jowl with the Communist Chinese flag. Interesting. Very colourful. An image of political realism?
Protestors lurk in the Royal parks!
There are plenty of people today barely making ends meet, and there is a huge mass of refugees suddenly penniless on the border of Europe, while at the same time, there is an ever-expanding waistline of “fat cat” executives often controlling the very charities who say they are helping to ease the misery they themselves seem to defy. I hope there is not a whiff of jealousy or envy here (is there a difference?) but while I was sketching our two cats this morning and at the same time, thinking of a couple of lectures I have to write, I found myself wondering about the recent fiasco involving “Save the Children” and the distasteful posting of a scurrilous manga cartoon. The campaign to replace that image and to help is well-underway with the hashtag “Yeswhynot”. I contributed a picture of a cat towards this effort.
I worry that one of my cats is slightly overweight.
It’s cats all round at the moment…
So, I checked the internet, and I was staggered to find that the chief executive, Justin forsyth (an ex-Oxfam man, but also a former labour planner for Tony Blair in No 10) earns £163,000 a year- that is, to put it in persepective, about £20,000 more than David Cameron. Anabel Hoult apparently exceeded her boss in a mix of take-home pay and pensions. I have just started to follow Charlie Elphicke on twitter and he describes this bonus culture as “inappropriate and objectionable.”
There is no doubt these executives can defend their exorbitant salaries, and Forsyth in particular took over at a time of crisis for the charity and while it was going through a nasty merger with merlin, and having drawn him quickly, I must add, he has an engaging smile- but still- it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
As for “fat cats”- the dictionary tells me they would be people with a political bent and lots of money. I do not encourage you to do the maths but, well, miaow!
Two giants of British Politics have died- Denis Healey and Geoffrey Howe, both linked by the resignation speech that probably brought down Lady thatcher and that Mr Healey said was like being savaged by a dead sheep.
Here is footage of me drawing this picture
My attention was drawn today to a Japanese manga image which had been described as “Racist”. I thought initially it was no more racist than something by the brilliant artist Joe Sacco, though the manga picture is based on a young girl who is clearly not smiling in the original photo. There is, though, a hint of a smirk in the manga. I assumed this was style or something.
The original image is at the bottom of this blog
Later, I saw an article about this which translated the Japanese text and I was appalled. So much so that I have re-drawn the image and added my own text here:
The image is based on a photograph of a girl called Judi, aged 6. I have tried to preserve some of the manga style. I hope what I have drawn is sympathetic to the original. This is a very young girl in a tent city. She is there because her family wanted to get her out of the war-zone. This is not her choice. She should command our sympathy, pity, and respect. She does not deserve the ridicule dished out by Ms Hasumi.
In Glasgow, the Scottish MP Humza Yousaf regularly talks about welcoming Refugees.
It seems to me that this is our moral duty and our responsibility as a civilized country. More than that, we must ensure that the Referendum on the EU does not get bogged down, as was the last election, by a debate on immigration. The refugee crisis is set to continue for many years whether we are in or out of Europe and we will miss the opportunity to effect major change and reform in Brussels, or indeed to quit the EU project and forge alliances across Europe independently. 1) We cannot allow racists and bigots to hijack the debate. 2) we need to lead the way in promoting a proper response to the victims of war. 3) our doors must always be open to people in need.
This is what the original advert said in Japanese apparently:
“I want to live a safe and clean life, eat gourmet food, go out, wear pretty things, and live a luxurious life… all at the expense of someone else,” reads the text on the illustration above. “I have an idea. I’ll become a refugee.”
The artist, Toshiko Hasumi removed the picture after a campaign by a Change.org. It is the text that really causes offence here, rather than the image. But once the text is clear, the image itself takes on a new identity- the girl is too aware, she smirks too much. It is deeply disrespectful.
“But I will not apologize no matter what,” she said. “Because unlike in Japan, you’re destined to lose in a court battle overseas once you’ve admitted to your fault.” She went on to say that the image was an attack on economic migrants who are “pursing a safer, more comfortable life in a foreign land under the guise of pitiable asylum seekers.”
The photographer said it was a “shameful misrepresentation of the plight of the Syrian people” and that he was “Shocked + deeply saddened anyone would choose to use an image of an innocent child to express such perverse prejudice,”
Japan will not accept Syrian refugees but has pledged $810 million to aid refugees from Syria and Iraq. Of 5000 asylum seekers who applied last year, Japan accepted 11. This is a start and I know many of my Japanese friends are keen to see more done to help in the crisis. Also, of course, Japan is right to support the countries most affected.
Toshiko Hasumi, however, has a record of questionable behaviour and has apparently written fairly negatively about Korean women who came to Japan especially during the 2nd World war.
Thank God there has been outrage about this in Japan!
I have been speaking to other people who have, like me, been inspired to draw their own tribute to the Syrian girl featured in the original photograph and to post a more uplifting message. Here is a drawing by Kumiko Higashi courtyesy of Takahiro Katsumi:
Here is the english translation:
Wanna let them live safely?
Wanna let them live clean?
Wanna let them dine with their family?
Wanna let them play in schools?
Wanna let them play with their friends?
Wanna let them sleep in places without gunfires?
Wanna let them live in peace without fear of death?
… ALL BY YOUR CONSCIENTIOUS CHOICE?
I GOT IT, HELP A REFUGEE!
—
Should anyone BE a refugee? No. Should anyone HELP a refugee? Yes! Why not? There are many ways to help. #YesWhyNot http://t.co/Cy7JIy3szY Illustration by 東 久美子
This is a POSITIVE COUNTERACTION against the hateful campaign launched by the right-wing manga artist Hasumi Toshiko supporting the Abe Administratin that allow hateful expression go unbound. Why not spread good will instead of hate or animosity? Yes, why not?
Also, here is a version of my picture translated into Japanese:
This is a rather sad story. Monsignor Krzysztof Olaf Charamsa came out yesterday on the news as a gay priest and within hours the catholic church was confirming that he had been sacked both in the Vatican (working at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) and in his universities (the Gregorian and the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum) for precisely this. His role as a priest is also now under review. This is very speedy from a Church that historically takes its time, and it seems to fly in the face of Francis’s own most famous comment in 2013 “Who are we to judge” when he was in fact talking precisely about the prevalence of gay priests in the Vatican. Well, judgement has been pretty swift and brutal. How about that for Papal irony.
This is what the Monsignor said yesterday:
“My decision of ‘coming out’ is a very personal decision in the homophobic world of the Catholic Church. It has been very difficult and very hard. I ask that you keep in mind this reality that is difficult to understand for anyone who has not lived through an identical passage in their own life,” Charamsa told reporters.
“The timing is not intended to pressurize anyone, but maybe a good pressure, in fact a Christian participation, a Christian voice that wants to bring to the synod the response of the homosexual believers to the questioning of Pope Francis.”
Just for the record, I rather like Pope Francis. Among other things, he is great friends with one of the more progressive Rabbis, Rabbi Skorka, and he projects a very positive image.
When the Pope made his comments on the Plane, he was actually responding to a question about Monsignor Ricca who Francis had appointed to be Institute for the Works of Religion and who had a fairly squalid relationship with a man called Patrick Haari in Uraguay before being summoned back to Rome.
Here is what the New York Times wrote back then:
ROME — For generations, homosexuality has largely been a taboo topic for the Vatican, ignored altogether or treated as “an intrinsic moral evil,” in the words of the previous pope.
In that context, brief remarks by Pope Francis suggesting that he would not judge priests for their sexual orientation, made aboard the papal airplane on the way back from his first foreign trip, to Brazil, resonated through the church. Never veering from church doctrine opposing homosexuality, Francis did strike a more compassionate tone than that of his predecessors, some of whom had largely avoided even saying the more colloquial “gay.”
“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Francis told reporters, speaking in Italian but using the English word “gay.”
….
Francis did not dodge a single question, even thanking the person who prompted his comments on homosexuality, asking about Italian news reports of a “gay lobby” inside the Vatican, with clerics blackmailing one another with information about sexual missteps.
“So much is written about the gay lobby. I have yet to find on a Vatican identity card the word ‘gay,’ ” Francis said, chuckling. “They say there are some gay people here. I think that when we encounter a gay person, we must make the distinction between the fact of a person being gay and the fact of a lobby, because lobbies are not good.”An article in the Italian weekly L’Espresso this month alleged that one of the advisers that Francis had appointed to look into the Vatican Bank, Msgr. Battista Ricca, had been accused of having gay trysts when he was a Vatican diplomat in Uruguay. The pope told reporters that nothing in the documentation he had seen substantiated the reports.
He added that such a lobby would be an issue, but that he did not have anything against gay people and that their sins should be forgiven like those of all Catholics. Francis said that homosexuals should be treated with dignity, and that no one should be subjected to blackmail or pressure because of sexual orientation.
“The problem isn’t having this orientation. The problem is making a lobby,” he said.
and the BBC on the same issue:
Pope Benedict XVI signed a document in 2005 that said men with deep-rooted homosexual tendencies should not be priests.
But Pope Francis said gay clergymen should be forgiven and their sins forgotten.
“The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains this very well,” Pope Francis said in a wide-ranging 80-minute long interview with Vatican journalists.
“It says they should not be marginalised because of this but that they must be integrated into society.”
But he condemned what he described as lobbying by gay people.
“The problem is not having this orientation,” he said. “We must be brothers. The problem is lobbying by this orientation, or lobbies of greedy people, political lobbies, Masonic lobbies, so many lobbies. This is the worse problem.”
In the light of the refusal by the Vatican to recognise the appointment by France of Laurent Stefanini, it suggests that there is a wide chasm between what the Pope says and what he does, or what is done in his name. Vatican Spokesman Federico Lomardi said,
“The decision to make such a pointed statement on the eve of the opening of the Synod appears very serious and irresponsible, since it aims to subject the Synod assembly to undue media pressure. Monsignor Charamsa will certainly be unable to continue to carry out his previous work in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the faith and the Pontifical universities, while the other aspects of his situation shall remain the [responsibility] of his diocesean Ordinary.”
I got asked by the Conservatives to do some animation for the “better off out” campaign.
After the last election, I must admit to being cautious about my position on Europe, and I think it is very difficult to get this across to the public as I fear my own position is probably one shared by many people in the party. Specifically, I worry about excessive and crippling bureaucracy as well as the attacks on Greece by Germany and others that frankly undermine her sovereignty- it does not matter what Greece did to provoke such a response. The fact is that the European project should also guarantee our own individual national sovereignties, even as we move towards greater union, politically and economically. The Captain cod image seems to me to target one of these bureaucratic issues head on, and I have a third video planned where I hope I will be able to refer to Greece’s plight in some way.
While I can imagine a Brexit, I think the practicalities of following that path are worrying and the much better solution is an undertaking to reform the whole European project. This means, though, that we need to be prepared for any eventuality and we need a more robust argument. If the whole thing is catapulted into a discussion of migration, then we have missed the point. The migration issue will affect us whether we are in or out of Europe whatever those in UKIP claim. But more than that, the migration crisis of today will be gone in five years time, while the Europe question will still be important. We were side-tracked at the last election and the agenda was set largely by UKIP’s diet of racism and resentment. We have to control the argument and the discussion now.
Here is the link to the making of Captain Cod
here is the film, link:
some preparatory images
the captain cod film:
a few more preparatory sketches
Britty Brexit:
a picture of Max Miller, one of my heroes, not so much for the naughtiness of his subject matter and innuendo, but for the immediacy of his delivery. We can still all learn from what he did and his influence is seen directly in the work of Frankie Howerd, Larry Grayson and Julian Clary.
You will see all the music hall connections of course and meanwhile I am ploughing on with the project to animate “Burlington Bertie” and “the Night I appeared as Macbeth”, both songs by William Hargreaves from the heyday of the Music Hall. Check my music hall lecture here. Part 2 is on the way.
Last week, I took a black cab from Baker street to Cornwall Terrace. We went round Regents park, wasting time and money while the actual place I needed was barely 3 minutes walk away. I did not know. I had left my A-Z at home and I had been hoodwinked.
So I have some sympathy for Boris Johnson’s outburst yesterday.
Boris claims that his irritation with a London cabbie was “a gentle attempt at a return service” or rather ”getting the ball back over the net.” Wimbledon metaphors at the start of the season.
If you check the footage that has leaked on to the internet, it is clear that the Mayor of London was having the last word as the cabbie drove away and quite frankly, was unlikely to have been heard. We also do not have the beginning of the exchange. The cabbie himself, so far unnamed, had leant out of the window to castigate Johnson for not standing up to the competing taxi firm UBER – He was making a hand-gesture, but it is too dark to be sure exactly what that gesture was. “You’re one of them, mate,” says the cabbie and then drives off as Johnson vents, “why don’t you fuck off and die (twice) and not in that order”. Johnson then appears to chuckle.
It is the final moments that are both disquieting and disarming in equal measure.
Quite apart from anything else, I wonder why someone was able to film the incident in the first place- or was this a set -up?
While a Boris rant is not an edifying spectacle, it is of a very different order to the angry exchange outside the gates of Number 10 by chief whip Andrew Mitchell, and far, far different to the David Mellor thing a year ago, which was just rank pomposity from a man well-past his prime! However, the inference of “Go and die” remains distasteful, whether meant as a humorous rebuke or not. The final words, “and in that order” make absolutely no sense and suggest that the mayor was fumbling to seize some superior wit, which, for once, escaped. It was after midnight and he was probably tired. This is not Oscar Wilde and not one of Johnson’s better days.
UBER taxi app, a car service accessible to the smart-phone generation, is criticized for not being properly regulated, whose drivers are often uninsured while it is competing directly with both the minicab and black cabbie trade. Boris is, therefore, coming under attack for his perceived support of UBER. Steve MacNamara of the Licenced Taxi Rankers Association said, “TfL recommended last week that UBER’s licence be revoked and it wasn’t and people are starting to ask questions why.”
UBER began 3 years ago, and according to the company, now runs 15000 cars with over 1000 new drivers starting in London every month. At the same time, there has been a 20% drop in applications for the black cabbie licence. That means that less taxis in London are today equipped with or tested in “the knowledge”, the city-wide recognition of streets and sites (which should ensure any cabbie would have known immediately where Cornwall Terrace was). At the same time, the dramatic increase in taxis threatens to add to London’s congestion problems.
The cabbies have mounted a legal challenge to UBER, claiming the use of smartphones to log journeys was dodgy, but they are more concerned, I think, that Boris has not followed the example of Madrid and Paris and banned the company from operating in London altogether. Maybe what is needed now, though, is a challenge to UBER on its own terms- maybe the London cabbie service needs to set up its own smart app, and while it’s at it, maybe it needs to lower its prices and become more competitive.
And as for the swearing? Well, not really the stuff of a Prime Minister in waiting, is it? But Nixon did it (and regularly on tape) and made it to President- But Boris will bounce back. I know him from of old and have every confidence in him.
Here are the earlier versions of the cartoon
This is in response to news that Atena Farghadini faces 12 years in prison for drawing a cartoon that depicts members of the Iranian parliament as various animals- birds, goats, cows, monkeys- it is fairly mild and goes against the spirit of moderation put out by the new Iranian President.
Rumour has it that he is unable to control his own judiciary.
Update: 14 06
In the 1970s, I studied Theology in St Andrews. I then went on to Oxford and did pretty much the same thing there. It is interesting, therefore, to see that the Kirk is now poised to accept gay clergy. I think this is a great step forward but it is also a step I could not possibly have imagined happening back in the 70s. Then, this austere, and rather imposing Church was also quite censorious and puritantical about homosexuality.
animate-tim.com 