Salut!

John Hays RIP: a road well travelled

A phone call from my friend Martin Emmerson, a BBC broadcaster from Sunderland, brought me shocking news of the death of John Hays [above, right], the founder of Hays Travel. John built the UK's biggest independent travel agency chain from the small business he opened in 1980 in spare space at the back of the children's clothing shop owned by his mother in Seaham. John was 71 and a good friend ...  

 

It was up in the East Stand of the Stadium of Light that I first met John Hays.

Have a merry Boris sort of Christmas

 

 

All but cancelled, Christmas Day 2020 is upon us.

Salut! wishes all its readers as happy a festive season as events make possible and prays, or would do it it did pray, for a less troubling 2021.

 

Maybe we should try to find the bright side of grim happenings.

Macron, radicalisation and fighting Islamism without demonising Islam

By and large, Emmanuel Macron (photograph from the Elyseé Palace's official website) strikes me as being the best president France has had in decades.

 

I realise that isn't saying a great deal and certainly see that he has flaws: he can appear arrogant and dismissive of ordinary concerns and is, for such an intelligent man, occasionally clumsy with words. The charge of Islamophobia is absurd but some of his statements, during the recent controversy over the republication of cartoons Muslims find offensive, have been ill-judged. But he generally acts with a firmness, clarity and level of honesty too often lacking among modern political leaders. 

 

It is also important to recognise that the context of his recent declarations is the bloodshed and misery caused by hideous terrorist atrocities, even though it is utterly wrong to blame Muslims as a whole for the horrific crimes of those who claim to be acting in Islam's name. Now, Mr Macron and his government must act with care to demonstrate that their response to extremism is not capable of being misinterpreted. I explore these issues in my latest piece for The National, which the editor kindly permits me to reproduce here ... 

 

Scoop: a reporter's reporter who made his mark unbribed and untwisted

 

 

 

One of the first books about journalism I read was Evelyn Waugh's classic novel, Scoop. And 82 years after it was published, Scoop is back.

This time, the author is not the long-dead Waugh but the much alive Terry Pattinson. Closer to 80 than 70, he not only rattles off a stream of gags and one-liners on Facebook but has found time for a hugely entertaining book charting his rise (or descent?) from the Blaydon Courier to Fleet Street.

From those honourable origins in local paper journalism in the North East of England, he went on to work for the pre-Murdoch Sun, the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror.

 

Charlie Hebdo, Islamist terrorism and the limits of freedom

This week, I have been challenged on my view that while Muslims, or anyone else for that matter, are fully entitled to take offence at something that is written or drawn about them or their faith, taking offence is as far as it is morally acceptable for them to go.

Nothing that has happened in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, in the north-western suburbs of Paris, Nice or other locations where fanatics decide to arm themselves with knives or firearms to commit cowardly attacks on innocents, shakes that belief.

The teacher beheaded for doing a teacher's job. Did pupil/s aid his killer?

Image: Silanoc UPDATE (Thursday Oct 22): two pupils aged 14 and 15, suspected of taking money from the killer, are among seven people 'mis en examen', as close as it gets in French law to being formally charged, with complicity in a terrorist attack. Among the adults are individuals accused of involvement in the online denunciation of Samuel Paty that may have led directly to his murder ...

 

It is not uncommon for me to reproduce here the work I have done for The National and successive editors have kindly given approval. It is less common for me to post straightforward news stories I've written, not least because knowledge about the events such reports cover tends to develop, often rapidly, and what is initially believed to be true sometimes turns out to be less so, or not at all.  The gruesome Islamist murder of a teacher in the Parisian banlieue is a reasonable exception because some of the emerging detail, about how the killer prepared and achieved his despicable mission, should be seen as widely as possible.

I have long believed that among the entirely sensible responses to terrorism should be the immediate arrest of anyone who had contact with the perpetrator/s. Yes, me included if for some reason I'd interviewed or otherwise met him/her/them. Innocents can be excluded quite quickly. This has happened following the Paris attack and what a shame the killer did not survive to see what he brought on his family, friends and associates ...

 

Oradour-sur-Glane: a 'completely normal' Nazi massacre

By the early evening of Saturday June 10, 1944, the bold fighting men of a Waffen SS unit were able to start relaxing after their day's work.

No fewer than 642 French civilians had been slaughtered in Oradour-sur-Glane, a village set in lush Limousin countryside. The victims included 247 women and 205 children, among them little Désirée Machefer (pictured above), who were herded into the parish church and either burned alive or shot - or both.

Job done, the Germans must have been thinking as they embarked on a night of celebration, singing heartily and sinking copious amounts of plundered wine from the remaining houses not already set on fire. Those buildings could await their turn next morning when the hungover Nazi soldiers would complete the task of turning a bustling village into a charred and ghostly testament to a monstrous war crime.

In the 50 years I have been visiting and, at times, living in France, I have often thought of going to Oradour to pay my own insignificant respects to the martyred village. Only this month, breaking a long journey from the Mediterranean coast to London, did I finally get round to it.

I have nothing much new to say about the massacre. What happened that day - at the end of a week in which Allied forces landed on Normandy beaches and, so much more mundanely, my mother had her 30th birthday - is an essential part of the history of warfare in general and the Second World War in particular and is therefore well documented.

Of the officers responsible for the slaughter, one (Gen Heinz Lammerding, who had also ordered the hanging of 99 Resistants the day before 113km away in Tulle), avoided trial altogether, except in absence, and resumed a prosperous business career in Dusseldof. Another, Major Adolf Dickmann, described as a bloodthirsty drunkard, was killed in action in Normandy later the same month. 

And, as a rare survivor, Robert Hébras, recalls in his slim volume, 10 June 1944: The Tragedy Hour by Hour, a third, Lt Heinz Barth, finally brought to trial in East Germany in 1983, insisted it was a completely normal act.

No, he is said in other accounts to have added, he had no regrets; "in wartime, one acts harshly and with means available".

He was jailed for life but released after 14 years, on account of age, health and having finally "expressed remorse", and lived for a further 10 years.

There are, of course, people of the far right in France, Britain, Germany, the United States and elsewhere who struggle to find fault with the Nazis and their evil acts, to the point in some cases of feeling the wrong side won the war. They occasionally pop up in Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National despite her attempts to detoxify its rotten image; her father, Jean-Marie, founder of the party as the Front National, has infamously dismissed the Nazi occupation as relatively benign and the death camps as a mere detail of war.

In August, one or more persons preceded my own visit to the impressive memorial centre adjacent to the preserved remnants of the old village, now a neighbour of the new Oradour that has developed since the war. But the mission not to pay homage.

He, she or they proceeded to daub the exterior wall, changing the word "martyr" to "menteur" - liar - and asking when the real "truth" would be told*, adding for good measure the name of a much-convicted Nazi apologist, Vincent Reynouard. 

We do not know yet who was responsible. It could ,in theory, have been the work of anti-Nazis but why would anyone see a need to demonise demons? 

To be fair, Mme Le Pen was among those quick to condemn the desecration.

Beneath grey skies and amid incessant rain, my wife and I walked, mostly in silence as requested, around the blackened streets.

Signs denote where once could be found schools, the baker's shop, a Renault garage, several cafes with some also offering hairdressing, a couturier, a dentist's surgery, the workshops of the blacksmith and wheelwright and so on.

Almost at the end of the walk, but before heading for the cemetery, we arrived at the shell of the church and wandered inside in awe, noting the confessional box where two children were found shot dead after surviving the fire, the altar and a plaque commemorating Oradour's 1914-18 war dead.

My consoeur Anna Pukas James, writing at Facebook after I had posted photographs and the two videos seen below, recalled her own visit a few years ago: "A haunting - and haunted - place." Dave Eyre, another Facebook friend, said it was "most moving places I have ever visited".

As for us, it was a bleak reminder, not of collective German guilt but of man's capacity for inhumanity to his fellow man, woman and child. not a death factory in the sense that Auschwitz was but, because of the calculated destruction in a single day of a large village and all or most who inhabited it, even more disturbing.

I am glad I went but, even 76 years on from the awful event, aware that I shall never forget what I saw there.

 

 

 

 

* A German version of the 'truth' of the tragedy of Oradour appears at this link and purports to show that the church was set on fire when explosives stored there were detonated by a civilian, possibly a Maquis Resistant and possibly not even French but intent on heaping blame on wholly innocent Nazis (save for the admitted murder of men in Oradour they failed to separate from activists). I am unaware of any evidence that any trace of Resistance or Maquis arms and explosives was found in the village)

Charlie Hebdo: the gathering tensions in France behind a barbaric new attack

Try as I might, I could not persuade Maitre Lucie Simon, the lawyer for 'Youssef', the hero of the latest attack on Charlie Hebdo, to talk at any length to me, let alone put me in touch with her client.

 

His actions merited a wider world audience. Me Simon put the phone down (later explaining that she had tried three times being doing so to make it clear she did not wish to speak to me). Happy to report we're friends again - 'don't take it personally,' she tells me ... and after a lifetime of having uncommunicative people slam the phone down, I don't.

 

This is likely to be my last piece for The National from France before my big return to quarantine in the UK next week. When I say I cannot wait to be back, I mean back in France in early 2021 if our government of clowns (copyright Joe Biden) hasn't destroyed all foreign travel by then ...

 

A 25-year-old Pakistani immigrant has been charged with the attempted murder of two journalists stabbed outside the former offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo in an attack underlining a rising terrorism threat in France.

Prosecutors say Zaheer Hassan Mahmoud, who initially claimed to be 18 and to have arrived in France as a minor, admits carrying out the attack after being enraged by the magazine’s republication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.

He allegedly made two reconnaissance visits in the days leading up to last Friday's attack in Paris but had no idea Charlie Hebdo had moved premises after the 2015 massacre of 12 people, including journalists, cartoonists and a Muslim police officer.

Woodbines, Shildon Tunnel and a boy's first kiss

This glorious image was the work of a North News and Pix photographer to accompany a report of mine about a campaign to save the Bishop Auckland-Darlington branch line 

This splendid essay by my friend Bill Taylor first appeared at my tiny site Salut! North, highlights from which I am slowly transferring here before its overdue closure. Bill, writing as long ago has 2011, gets as high as the lights go  ...

I’ve never been one to flog a dead horse (actually, that’s not at all true) but trying to breathe life into a dead blog is a different matter [Bill was referring to the neglected date of Salut! North - Ed].

And it’s probably appropriate that this attempted Kiss of Life involves a real-life kiss… no yearning after an unattainable girl in a bus shelter for me.

It’s also mostly set in Shildon, Colin’s hometown, rather than my own, Bishop Auckland, a good three miles away. Strange how great a distance that seems when you’re 14 years old.

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Which is how old I was when, for some inexplicable reason, my friend Peter and I decided to attend a performance of the school play at Bishop Auckland Grammar School. This would be two years before we were both invited not to return and only a year before Colin was to be kicked out.

Anyway, off we went and a pretty dull production it was, too. She Stoops to Conquer, as I recall. The headmaster, Dennis Weatherly – remembered more fondly by some old pupils than others – had heard me read for the part of Tony Lumpkin (the low comedian, for anyone unfamiliar with the play) and remarked sourly that giving it to me would be the most blatant typecasting he’d ever seen.

Come the intermission and we were out in the yard. I was looking around for a suitably remote corner to smoke one of the fourpenny Woodbines that the evil couple in the shop across the street sold singly to impecunious children. And then I was going to suggest we cut our losses, have a quicky froffy coffee in Rossi’s, the local hangout, and go home.

Peter, who I’ll admit was a bit more precocious than I, had other ideas.

Somehow we found ourselves talking to two…. girls. I didn’t talk much to girls in those days; I still regarded them as little more than boys who went backwards when you danced with them (a female teacher once tried briefly to instill the foxtrot into us) and giggled nastily in class when you hadn’t done your geometry homework and were knocked out of your seat by a blow across the head with all the exercise books Cosher Ibbotson had collected. That’s one reason I always sat at the front with the swots. It was far less painful.

Seeing these two, whom I knew only vaguely, out of uniform and into makeup – inexpertly applied, I’m sure, but your average 14-year-old boy doesn’t need much to stir his concupiscence – came as a surprise.

What was an even greater surprise was to hear one say, “If I’m with Pete (much cooler than Peter), you must be with him.”

Back into the play we went and, sure enough, his was sitting next to him and mine – her name was Margaret – was sitting next to me. After an agonising “should I or shouldn’t I” 20 minutes, I took her hand. And far from wrenching her fingers free, she put her head on my shoulder! At a school play!! In the assembly/dining hall!!

We didn’t wait for the end. Margaret whispered that she and her friend had to go and did I want to see her home to Shildon?

With the unheld hand, I did a quick count of the change in my pocket. Just enough for two bus fares to Shildon and one back to Bishop. So, yes, I did indeed want to see her home.

We got off the bus before Peter and his paramour and Margaret led me along a footpath by the railway line.

“This is as far as you can come,” she said, leaning disquietingly up against me. “Otherwise my dad might see you.”

Her eyes were half-closed and her lips were pursed. I leaned towards her, wafted in on her perfume, and murmured, quite intoxicated: “Is that the entrance to Shildon tunnel?”

I was still young enough to be interested in trains. And how often, en route to the metropolitan delights of Darlington, had I travelled through this very burrow. To be standing at one end of it… only one thing remained to consummate my delight. Margaret read my mind.

“You’d have to wait all night,” she said. “The last train’s gone.”

She seized me by the shoulders and applied her lips to mine. And, believe it or not, I quite forgot the tunnel and trains and railway lines. Your first kiss will do that.

It wasn’t Margaret’s first, as I discovered 20 minutes later when she came up for air and said, “You’d better go or you’ll miss the last bus.”

I said I’d see her in school next day and she shook her head.

“I wouldn’t say anything if I was you,” she said. “If Stu-y finds out, he’ll kill you.”

Stu-y? She nodded and named one of the school hard-knocks (as we called them), a strapping young thug with a tendency to punch and kick first and not bother asking questions.

“He’s my boyfriend. So be careful.”

I don’t think Margaret and I ever spoke again. I did catch her once looking at me from a distance with what seemed like a speculative eye. I turned away, in case Stu-y was looking, and speculating, too.

I don’t suppose she’s with him any longer. Hard to think that we’re all 63 now. Truth to tell, I’ve forgotten what that first kiss felt like.

But I’ve never forgotten the thrill that went through me when I first beheld the tunnel.

Snatches of the inside story of De Gaulle's Non. A thinking Leaver's essay

Bob Cowan is an exceptional journalist. We worked together at The Daily Telegraph and in Abu Dhabi. He proves my own point that not all Brexiters are essentially dim, foreigner-hating Little Englanders oblivious to the economic and social damage they're inflicting.

This is a powerful defence of Leave. I cannot challenge his specific examples of supposed EU malfaisance but certainly feel Bob takes an implausibly optimistic view of the coming turmoil, the UK's alternative trade prospects and Brexit's appalling social impact. He does not defend or even mention the Government's shameful willingness to break international law.

But that is neither here nor there; I invited replies from Leavers to a Facebook comment I posted and this is Bob's well-argued response, accompanied by delicious references to the French side of Bob's family and its understanding of the De Gaulle outlook on Britain and Europe.

The beers will be on him if lockdown allows once I am back in Brexit-blighted Blighty and done with the Boris quarantine ...

I saw your Facebook post about Leavers staying mute and was more than a little provoked (and didn’t think it fair for your legions of followers to have to read an overlengthy diatribe on your pages).

So… my reasons for twice voting Leave. They fall into two distinct arguments, neither of which has anything to do with immigration. Most people – and certainly every Brexiteer I have spoken to in London – understand that in the era of international flights costing so little, the mass movement of people is now a fact of everyday life. All Brexit will do is change the nationalities of the immigrants not alter their numbers.

Before explaining my reasoning for believing we should never have joined the EEC, as it was, a little personal history.

One of my uncles was a senior French general and member of De Gaulle’s war cabinet. He was sacked for granting the Americans two airbases in Equatorial French Africa, despite the fact that this “treachery” had been an attempt to persuade Roosevelt to back De Gaulle rather than Giraud, whom the Yanks preferred.

The General must have felt some post-war remorse because on his return to power with the Fifth republic he appointed another of the family to his cabinet (minister for mines, if I remember rightly).

The point of all this is that I earwigged a conversation between my father and my cousin shortly after De Gaulle’s infamous Non. He explained that while ostensibly it was to do with the Common Agricultural Policy (De Gaulle could see that Britain’s joining would threaten not only French agriculture but its highly subsidised rural economy), the more fundamental reason was to do with national outlook.

France and Germany had created a mutually beneficial alliance that allowed each to dominate its own preferred spheres inside a 20th century version of Napoleon’s Fortress Europe: Germany industrial and economic; France cultural and diplomatic.

Britain not only threatened those spheres, De Gaulle thought, but had historically always been opposed to all notions of Fortress Europe. In short, we looked outwards to the world. The Six looked inwards. Britain and Europe, in De Gaulle’s view, were completely incompatible. And he couldn’t stand Anglo-Saxons anyway!

Even as a kid, I thought his reasoning was probably right.  Continental countries necessarily must closely watch their borders and their neighbours. Island Britain, by contrast, has always been looking to the horizon for trading opportunities.  So a fundamental group of reasons for opposing the EEC and its successors has been their trade policies.

I believe in free trade, Europe does not. I don’t accept that because Brazil grows coffee beans for a fraction of the price that they can be grown in Britain (or anywhere else in Europe, come to that) they should have tariffs slapped on them. But they do. 

I think it verging on the criminal that Europe should apply both subsidies and tariffs on items such as sugar-beet. The consequence has been that tens of thousands of small farmers across Africa and the Third World who once grew cane for the export market have had any opportunity for betterment taken from them.

And not just sugar.  It’s almost impossible to tour East Africa without seeing broken down mills and factories on the fringes of every town. All closed as a consequence of European tariffs. And to rub salt into their wounds, they then find themselves receiving as “food aid” the stuff they used to grow and sell.

It’s the same for pretty well every commodity, whether agricultural, industrial or commercial.  Hardly surprising, then, that the EU has so few trade agreements with our competitors on the world markets. I could bang on endlessly about the iniquitous trade policies of Europe. But the absolutely fundamental reason for my desire to be free of the EU is its wretchedly undemocratic constitution.

As you know, it is the only governmental system on the planet that has four main branches.

There is the European Council, which is supposedly the supreme executive authority. However as it is composed of the heads of government of the member states, the amount of time they give to running the EU is limited to the extent of being virtually non-existent. Then there is the European Parliament. The only actual democratic bit of the whole set up. But its powers of scrutiny, of veto, of even formulating and implementing legislation are highly restricted. There is the judiciary, the European Court, consisting of one judge from every member state. OK, I guess, when it comes to sorting out administrative disputes but hardly conducive to establishing a corpus, an identity or a unique tradition of jurisprudence.

And then the European Commission. An executive and a civil service combined into one. It formulates policy and implements it. It is the only body that can propose legislation. Not only that, it also polices itself (or rather doesn’t: the accounts haven’t been signed off since 1994). With one exception it is entirely unelected and recruits its officials largely from its own educational institutions.  The only “election” is of the President, who is nominated by the Council and approved by ballot of the Parliament. Its one abiding philosophy is the perpetuation of the EU and its government system leading (it hopes) ultimately to a United States of Europe, despite the fact that the people of Europe when polled have consistently said they don’t want such a thing.  If such a constitution had ever been attempted here, or in the US, or any other of the anglosphere nations, it would have led ultimately to civil war. We don’t like being told what to do by unelected officials. We like to hold governments to account. We loathe secret agendas.

Enough of the negative (though if you wanted more, I could go on… and on… and on).

What about the positives of the EU? What are we giving up? Well, there’s the freedom to live and work in any member state. Which, to my mind, is about the only real benefit we shall have tjo forgo. Once we are properly out, Brits wanting to live and work abroad will probably have to get work permits and, depending on the country, residential visas too. A pain in the bum, I admit, but we’ve all done it. And you certainly – and quickly – learn how a country works by dealing with its internal bureaucracy.

What else? I can’t see travel being affected much. I visited France, Germany and Italy before we joined, and again afterwards. I don’t recall there being any difference at arrival. The only time I can remember crossing a border and not having to show a passport was driving from Ostend to Amsterdam.

Are we suddenly going to lose all our rights built up over the centuries? No. Are our courts going to disappear? No. What are we going to lose? I don’t know. Maybe the EU at some future date will implement a piece of legislation that makes its citizens’ lives that bit easier or more pleasant. What’s to stop us following suit? Absolutely nothing. And vice-versa, of course.

Obviously there is going to be a degree of turmoil over trade next year, and there are bound to be hand-wringing headlines, but how much impact and for how long? I wouldn’t have thought a great deal. With so much depending on moving commodities between nations, it’s in everyone’s interests – particularly big business's – to smooth it out as quickly and efficiently as possible.

I guess there’s a good chance that Ulster might be persuaded that it’s really part of the island of Ireland after all and form some kind of Irish federation with the south. But would that really be such a bad thing? It would solve a lot of problems...

The greatest risk, I would have thought, would be to the EU itself. If we thrive and demonstrate that to be successful in a globally-connected world you don’t need all the restrictions that are the hallmark of the EU, that could be quite a lure for the less-committed nations. Who knows, it might even force a re-think of how a European Union should be constituted and run. Maybe we could even be asked to re-join the reformed Europe!

• Bob Cowan is a former Evening Standard, Times and Telegraph journalist now retired and living in East London, where he was born and brought up.

Stand up and be counted of you're a thinking Leaver (I never claimed they didn't exist)

Well Liz Truss has already delivered (not very convincingly), just four years+ since the referendum and Leavers' promises of new trade deals galore and an easy agreement with the EU. Perhaps Private Eye's brilliant cover sums up their hopes

 

A friend remarked a little while ago that Salut! seemed to be a forum for thoughtful, reasoned debate free of the sheer nastiness that detracts from the obvious values of social media. Well, sometimes maybe. Most of the time we struggle to attract readers, let alone ones willing to debate. But we keep going, in part because every so often interest explodes, bringing in hundreds of visitors and loads of interesting comments.

 

At Facebook,  where it's easier to stimulate discussion, I posted what you see below. For the record, I never - except in banter - allege that all Leave voters were thick, selfish, leaning (or worse) towards the far right and, if not simply racist, xenophobic by nature. What I do claim is that if you remove the pro-Brexit  votes of those fitting all or part of that description, Remain would have won.

 

What I repeat here is very short and will be followed by a much more substantial pro-Leave analysis from a valued former colleague with whom I naturally disagree but who fits no part of the description above of another sort of Brexiter.

 

There are other points of view and dozens of people took the trouble to respond. See them all at this Facebook link; I may get round to reproducing a selection in Comments at the follow-up piece mentioned in the last paragraph. As for those seeing this for the first time, why not get involved, here or at https://www.francesalut.com/2020/09/stand-up-and-be-counted-if-youre-a-thinking-leaver-2.html ?...