Tag: Cuba

MAY: TOO SOFT ON THE BOARDROOM

 

MAY: THE BOARDROOM PUSSY CAT.

One of the reasons for the huge gap that is opening up between the people and the elite across the western world, is bad behaviour by some big businesses.

I always thought we should dismiss the Prime Minister’s initial mission statement about being a government for all as “what they all say” and so it has proved in relation to the Green Paper on Corporate Governance. This was meant to be a signal that ministers were going to grapple with the Philip Green’s of this world and the huge gap between workers on frozen pay and bosses paid 140 times more in some cases.

Instead of workers on boards, they are to have a “voice”. There is little on giving pension scheme members more say, the issue at the heart of the British Home Stores scandal.

Under consideration are pay ratios to show the gap in earnings between Chief Executives and workers, more power for shareholders to vote against bosses pay rises, private firms to be held to the same standards as public companies and a code of practice.

Will any of this be effective in bringing about more corporate business responsibility. The government seem to be in nudging not compelling mood.

THE CHALLENGE OF NUTTALL.

Blue Labour is an organisation that worries about the growing gap between its traditional northern working class base and the liberal (small L) elite who have enthusiastically embraced the social and economic changes of recent years.

They met in Manchester at the weekend to ask questions like “might there be a hermeneutic of continuity reuniting the working class with those that fear its voice?” Now I’m happy to share a Gauloises Disque Bleu (remember them in soft white packets) with any number of intellectuals and discuss the future of socialism. However I think there is a lack of urgency on the centre left and a self indulgent sectarianism between Greens, Liberal Democrats and Corbyn opponents.

While they agonise the new UKIP leader Paul Nuttall says he is going to appeal to Labour voters in the North on the issues of immigration, crime, foreign aid and putting British people at the top of the queue for jobs.

What is the centre left response to that agenda which some will feel has a whiff of racism? Well for one thing what are UKIP going to do about housing, adult social care and the productivity gap? But the centre left do need to make an effective response on the “awkward” issues like immigration. Otherwise those many UKIP second places in wards and constituencies will fall from Labour’s grasp.

ON BALANCE I MOURN CASTRO’S PASSING.

Fidel Castro’s coup in Cuba happened as I began to take an interest in politics. He has been around all my adult life so some thoughts at the time of his passing seem appropriate.

His coup removed a regime that was turning Cuba into a brothel and casino dominated by the United States. Castro wanted American help but instead faced the Bay of Pigs invasion designed to topple him. He therefore embraced the Soviet Union and foolishly allowed them to base missiles on the island which nearly brought about a nuclear war. He was ruthless with opponents and persecuted gays. But, but, but he gave the Cuban people health and education standards rarely matched in the Americas. He also sent troops to confront apartheid South Africa and contributed to its end.

We will all be weighed in the balance and for only a virtuous few will the scale be wildly in their favour.

Follow me at www.jimhancock.co.uk

JFK:TO BE A HERO,DIE YOUNG

THE ASSASSINATION

I was in my school assembly on that fateful Friday when our head teacher told us President Kennedy had been assassinated.

 

The days afterwards introduced me for the first time to the concept of “rolling news”. Schedules on the two TV channels we had in 1963 were ripped up as events in Dallas were relayed to us in fuzzy black and white pictures. American commentators referred to the city’s shopping malls and the Deeley Plaza, features of urban design unknown to me at the time.

 

By the Saturday, with President Johnson installed, we all wondered how would the TV Show “That Was The Week That Was” deal with this? Normally full of irreverent satire, instead the show’s singer, Millicent Martin, donned a black dress to sing “In the Summer Of His Years”.

 

The rolling news coverage had further drama on the Sunday when Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself killed by Jack Ruby who was outraged at Oswald’s action.

 

Whether you believe that last paragraph or join 80% of the American people who now think there was a more sinister explanation of the events in Dallas is up to you. I don’t want to detain you with all the conspiracy theories that have everyone from the CIA and Lyndon Johnson to the military and the mob wanting Kennedy dead. Suffice to say that when the Warren Commission reported in 1964 that Oswald had acted alone, most Americans believed it. The came Vietnam and Watergate which eroded confidence in U.S institutions and allowed the conspiracy theorists to be believed.

 

THE RECORD

 

My school friends and I were genuinely distressed at the news from Dallas. I suppose it was partly a teenage realisation that bad, violent things were going to happen in our lives just as they had in our parents. It was also because we genuinely admired this cool President and his glamorous wife. The ending of the Presidency of dowdy Dwight Eisenhower and the inauguration of Jack Kennedy with that declaration “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”, seemed to chime with the arrival of the Beatles and the swinging sixties. Our generation had arrived and Jack Kennedy was our champion.

 

But what if he had lived? It is likely he would have got a second term and left office in 1969. Would his bright progressive image have remained untarnished? Probably not. The big question here is Vietnam. Even during Kennedy’s thousand days, the number of American “advisors” in South Vietnam was growing. The communist regime in North Vietnam had responded. Some believe that Kennedy wanted to get out of Vietnam and would have done so after re-election. But this was a man of the cold War era. He had tried to invade Cuba and then faced down the Soviet Union over the deployment of nuclear weapons on that island.

 

If he had followed the course of his successor and heavily committed American ground forces, he might have left office with the voices of protest ringing in his ears “Hey, hey JFK (not LBJ) how many kids have you killed today?”

 

There is also the issue of civil rights. It is a legislative fact that it was Johnson not Kennedy that swept away the last vestiges of segregation in the American South. Kennedy soft peddled on reform believing he needed the support of southern Democrats, many of whom were hostile to desegregation. As it was LBJ faced major race riots in Los Angeles in 1965. Could things have been worse with a second term Kennedy administration unwilling to accede to the demand for black rights?

 

The events in Dallas fifty years ago prevent us answering these questions.