BURKHA AND HER

“DEATH”, STATED SHELLEY, IN PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, “IS THE VEIL which those who live call life: They sleep, and it is lifted.” If even a rum chap like Percy Bysshe Shelley, occasionally nicknamed “Mad” at Eton, “Atheist” at Oxford and “Blaspheming” in London, all before he was mysteriously drowned in Italy and then had his body burned on the beach, could see the connection between death and the veil, then one imagines that nowadays he would be supporting prim and proper Nicolas Sarkozy in his crusade against the inevitable rise of Islam to take control of Europe by banning the Burkha and forcing Muslim women to stay indoors while their menfolk learn to do the shopping.

EVEN SO, IT SURPRISES ME TO SEE that the issue of the week in British “politics” has to do with whether women should be allowed to wear veils or not when they are going about their business, whatever that may be, in the course of the day. It is perhaps a sign of the dullness surrounding our coalition government that such a debate can manage to grab headlines for so long in most of our papers

HOWEVER, JUST WHEN MOST OF US HAVE more or less become used to the idea that, beyond the squirming of the Camelegg, there is not much exciting going on in the Coalition Government by way of interesting politicians, step forward millionaire politician Caroline Spelman (pictured above), Coalition Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and sometime foot-in-it spokesperson for the Conservatives on whatever journalists deem it fair game to tempt her with. On television this morning she compared the “right” to wear the Burkha with women’s rights to decide what to wear. She tells us that when she gets up in the morning she feels “empowered” by being able to “stand in front of the mirror” and choose what to wear. She also states that “taking away the right” to wear the Burkha would be taking away “freedom” for all those women who respect their own individuality and "know" what they "like to wear".

WELL BELL-ENDED

THICK-SKINNED JOSEPH “SEPP” BLATTER (pictured above), the unelected President of FIFA, the governing body of the world’s most popular sport, and thus one of the most powerful men in the world, has never been a stranger to allegations of corruption, bribery, shady underhand property deals and match fixing. In this sense at least, he has followed firmly in the footsteps of Jean-Marie “João” Havelange, president of FIFA for 24 years until more or less forced to retire after the publication in England of Andrew Jennings’ book Foul! The Secret World of FIFA: Bribes, Vote-Rigging and Ticket Scandals (Harper Collins).

SO POWERFUL ARE BLATTER AND HAVELANGE, who was simultaneously head of FIFA and of the International Olympic Committee, that one wonders why someone has not decided to have Jennings “taken out”, as Mafia-type people might say. Not, of course, that Havelange or Blatter should be considered in the same league as “Mafia-type people”; Havelange was keen to point out, as is Blatter today, that “love of sport” was always the driving force behind his “unpaid” consultancy and presidential work, and that becoming a multi-millionaire was a natural result of such genuine “big love”.

BLATTER’S LOVE HAS BEEN JUST AS LIBERALLY SPREAD over the ground, resulting in nearly 50 honours, awards, prizes, trophies, doctorates, honorary citizenships, knighthoods and now the Order of the Companions of Oliver Tambo, the highest award granted by South Africa to foreigners, for services to the country in managing to bring the Soccer World Cup circus to provide a little light relief to the squalor, debauchery and general unbridled street thuggery that is today’s South Africa.

BLATTER’S MANY INTERESTS, HOWEVER, have apparently not included making sure that the right team wins the game, which, in many people’s opinion, is why France was allowed to defeat the Republic of Ireland in the qualifying games and why the England “goal that never was” resulted in his beaming smile during the media conference afterwards, almost as wide as his smile at half time when AC Milan were beating Liverpool FC three-nil five years ago.

DESPITE NOT BEING WIDELY USED in English, particularly as a verb, “bellend” [penis], and “to bellend” [to wipe one's or someone else’s penis on something or someone] are extremely common in Liverpool, which by no means proves that it was an English football fan, and certainly not one from Liverpool, who went on to the Wikipedia entry about Mr Blatter and changed his name to Joseph Bellend Blatter, which was subsequently used by the South African government official site in order to announce the Oliver Tambo honour.

BY A CURIOUS COINCIDENCE, DESPITE the rarity of use of the term, the current issue of Private Eye magazine also has a short chronicle explaining how to “bell-end” someone and/ or something on page 16.

PRIDE AND RACIAL AND SOCIAL PREJUDICE

“Perhaps after all it is possible to read too many novels” (Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey)


EITHER MY GOOD LADY WIFE or her friends, or one or two of the more girlie girls among my students, occasionally see fit to remind me that Jane Austen wrote, in their opinion, the most important and relevant novel of all times when she thrust a foolhardy, headstrong, feisty, air-headed young lady into the path of a sensible, calm, collected and organized gentleman called Mr Darcy. I have no idea why my wife should find acquaintance of herself in the shoes of this ringlet-ridden fritterer, and much less why any of my students should do so, when they would be better afforded to deal with the more productive and sensible aspects of their reality.

BUT IN CONSEQUENCE OF THESE DESIGNS I have once again, today, been subjected by my wife to another attempt to endear me to Miss Austen by this afternoon having me watch all four hour-long episodes of “Lost in Austen”, the ITV series in which a modern young lady finds herself hurled back into the time of and the narrative construction of Pride and Prejudice, a plot device development which necessitates comparison between our two epochs.

WHETHER OR NOT I CRIED AT THE END is neither here nor there, but I was struck by the fact that today, under our Conservative/Coalition government, our society is remarkably similar to that described and descried by the good Miss Austen.

MR DARCY THERE MAY NOT BE in Davy Cameron’s government, but candidates for the lily-livered fop Mr Bingley abound in the LibDems, starting with the mis-married Nick Clegg; the Bennets senior find their suitors in Vince Cable, the real finance minister, and Theresa May, the Home Secretary, one aloof and generally fed up with his lot, watching his fortunes be wasted by idiots, and the other unable to put order in her own household, hoping that someone from “abroad” (see the use of the word in the novel) could come along and save her from ruin.

WITH THE CONSERVATIVES, OF COURSE, there is always a Lady Catherine de Burgh skulking in the wings in the figure of Mrs Thatcher, a name suited to Austen if ever there was one. But what saves Pride and Prejudice is Elizabeth, with her outspoken approach to almost everything around her. There is no one in the government of this type at the moment; indeed, the government and the parliament have the lowest ratios of women for some time. And the only figure on the horizon likely to “shake things up”, as she herself states, is Diane Abbot, but she has as much chance as doing well in life nowadays as a Black woman in Jane Austen’s days.

CAMERON DEARS

IN WHAT CAN BE SEEN AS AN ATTEMPT to fuse our sexuality into one amorphous mass, much as the Conservatives have done with our politics in their “marriage” to the LibDems, themselves a mongrel mish-mash of Labour, Social Democrats and Liberals, we now have “Dangerous” Dave Cameron allowing his troops to contemplate voting to approve the idea of marriage between people of the same sex.

CAMERON HAS RECENTLY been keen to point out that Britain is NOT one of the two or three places in the world where homosexual marriage is permitted, yet LibDem MP Hippie-Dippie Lynne Choona Featherstone (pictured above), the equalities minister and one of the exciting young girlies that the Conservatives have to accept in this coalition, said the government was considering allowing same-sex couples to include key religious elements in civil partnership ceremonies, despite opposition from the Church of England, effectively making it possible for “marriage” to take place in a pseudo-religious environment.

FEATHERSTONE WILL NOT BE FORCED TO STAND DOWN on the matter, insisting on the rights of these “same-sex couples” to be married in a religious atmosphere. She is not quite so forgiving, however, in relation to those heterosexual men or lesbians who buy The Sun or The Daily Sport (“guaranteed 26 nipples a day”) and enjoy looking at semi-naked girls, stating that she would, were she ever promoted to a proper ministerial post, like to ban naked breasts in national newspapers, if not banning the newspapers themselves.

SOMEONE OUGHT TO HAVE A QUIET WORD in Cameron’s ear; although it is true that politically the LibDems have basically signed their own death warrants by forming this coalition with the big boys in the Conservative Party, the Tories are not doing themselves any favours by putting up with the nonsense the LibDems believe in. Banning The Sun and/or The Daily Sport, both of which are the preferred newspapers of the backbone of Conservative support, would be tantamount to banning the Conservative party itself. And then, to use the language of the editor of the Sport, Pam McVitie, a childhood friend of mine, who in the government would look and feel a right tit?