The Mirror Crack'd

Transparency International has just published its Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) of 180 countries and it makes uncomfortable reading. The CPI ranks the 180 countries and territories around the globe by their perceived levels of public sector corruption, scoring on a scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). The UK has slipped a couple of points and now ranks 20th, alongside Austria and France. It will probably come as no surprise that Denmark ranks 1st and Somalia 180th but the fact that the UK has fallen from 18th to 20th place is a worrying trend. Given that 2024 is a massive year for elections around the globe, with four billion of the its population, in over fifty countries, due to go to the polls, it is more-than-ever important that the highest levels of probity and transparency can be evidenced to show that elections are both free and fair. Well, we can but dream. When even the world's allegedly oldest democracy, the USA, seemingly can't hold a Presidential ele

The Canarian Murga competition 2024 held in Santa Cruz de Tenerife was won last night by Los Bambones from San Cristóbal de La Laguna. What's he on about?, I hear you ask. Well, Murga is a choral artform perfected in the Canary Islands, and particularly Tenerife and Gran Canaria, where choirs of at least twenty, often wearing clown costumes with painted faces, sing tight harmonies acapella-style, acompanied only by percussion and kazoos. What they sing about is the interesting thing as the subject matter is highly political and satirical, providing a scathing commentary on contemporary issues by sending up politicians and calling out corruption and general idiocy in public life. As such, it is hugely popular and seems to occupy the public space which in the UK used to be taken by Spitting Image and today by Have I Got News For You and Mock the Week on TV and Dead Ringers on Radio.4. It is closely linked to Carnaval in Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, althou

General Sir Patrick Sanders, head of the British Army, is not alone in issuing a national call to prepare for a major conflict in Europe, proposing a "citizen army".   Boris Pistorius, Germany’s defence minister has called for a “serious national debate” about the future of the country’s military preparedness and Admiral Rob Bauer, head of NATO's military committee, said countries needed to be alert "and expect the unexpected". Grant Shapps, the UK's defence secretary, has also warned of the need to be prepared for war, saying, ominously, that the country was moving from a "post-war to a pre-war world". I imagine many of us will have worked this one out for ourselves but possibly stopped short of thinking through the practical implications of it, which are indeed alarming. Many of us who lived through the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall are perhaps still clinging to the heady memory of the so-called 'peace dividend', when we he

In Israel it has long been the case that 18 year-olds are conscripted into the Israel Defence Force (IDF) to undertake their National Service. Tal Mitnick, though, is the youngest Israeli to conscientiously object and face the consequences. Conscientious objection to conscription was not uncommon in Israel before the mass attack by Hamas on its territory from the Gaza Strip on 7 October last, but since then it has become much more difficult to sustain. For a nation that feels itself beleaguered on all sides in its region, and subject to antisemitism abroad, it is always liable to be seen as a form of betrayal. For an 18 year-old fresh out of school, therefore, it requires a particularly strong conviction and a powerful moral courage to buck the trend at this time by refusing to conform.  But that is precisely what Tal Mitnick has done, and undergone an unusually harsh 30-day prison sentence as a result, whereas a 10-day token sentence is (or was) the norm. He has pledged to refuse his

Yesterday evening I listened to the Sunday Feature on BBC Radio 3 with the intriguing title: Bayard Rustin - Activism and Early Music. On so many levels it was a 'who knew?' moment. Obviously not me, even though Early Music has been an interest of mine since I joined a consort of singers in 1969 when the Early Music Revival was really beginning to take off. My political activism also began at around the same time (well, it was the late '60s) but I never saw those two interests as being in any way linked until listening to tonight's radio broadcast. After fifty-five years I guess one could justifiably call that a revelation or epiphany. Bayard Rustin was, in so many ways, a formidable figure and if this radio programme helps promote his achievements to a more niche audience it will be a job well done. It will complement a docu-drama film, Rustin , which was released last year on Netflix to favourable reviews and will have introduced him to a wider audience. It had not,

This slogan is a trope for denial of the right of the modern state of Israel to exist. Its use implies support for reclaiming for Palestinian Arabs the lands extending from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, formerly occupied by them but lost at the 'Nakba' or 'Catastrophe' of 1948 that saw them displaced from their historic homeland to create the post-war state of Israel. Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has now renounced the so-called 'two state solution', espoused by the United States and United Nations as the answer to the problem of co-existence of the two communities in territory currently comprising Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This effectively flips the slogan in favour of the Israelis. The beleaguered White House national security adviser, John Kirby, told reporters onboard Air Force One after Netanyahu’s controvdrsial speech "there will be a post-conflict Gaza, no reoccupation of Gaza”. But this is dangerously ambiguous

As if coming from Bethnal Green, home of the eponymous threshold on Paradise Row, to the Canary Islands weren't culture shock enough, it was a surprise on arrival to encounter Las Kellys Association. When visiting the Islands I'm lucky to be able to stay in an old house ( casa antigua ) up in the hills belonging to my Canarian family. This being the case I've never had to rely on hotels or apartments here and consequently have never experienced first hand the work of  las que limpian  (those who clean) - chambermaids in the English of my generation, now housekeeping or hospitality workers. However, I've never been in any doubt, after experiencing hotel stays elsewhere, that these women work extremely hard and are probably grievously exploited by their employers. Thus it was that I found myself yesterday on a Kellys' manifestación (rally) in Las Américas, that epicentre of package holidays in Tenerife, joining a group of righteously angry women in saying "enough

It says something about the state of affairs in modern Britain that it takes a TV docu-drama to force to the forefront of public consciousness a scandal which has remained unregarded and unresolved for decades. Quite what it says I'm not entirely sure - nothing very good I suspect - but ITV's recently-aired four-part mini-series, Mr Bates vs the Post Office , certainly hit the mark in stirring the nation's conscience and making the long-running saga of Fujitsu's malfunctioning Horizon accounting software a cause célèbre. In a properly functioning democracy it shouldn't have taken a TV dramatisation to succeed where various parliamentary and ministerial enquiries have failed over a twenty-year period to bring a monstrous injustice to a satisfactory conclusion. The fact that it did is both an indictment of our democratic system and a vindication of our free media working at its best. In this case, truth really is stranger than fiction but there are other outstanding i

This line from a stanza of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam popped into my head this morning as I was reading a charming interview in The Guardian with imprisoned climate protester, Morgan Trowland, now released on licence. After all the doomscrolling of 2023, to which I admit I've contributed more than my fair share, it really did indeed seem bootless to repeat how time is slipping underneath our feet. We should all be well aware by now of the existential threats facing the planet in the Anthropocene Era. Sadly, though, many are still unaware or in denial and our politicians are only too happy to encourage and sustain such wilful ignorance.  But, back to Morgan. He told Guardian journalist, Damien Gayle, of his reliance on poetry to get him through his incarceration and of the philosophy course he took while in prison which helped him validate his decision to take the action (scaling the Dartford Bridge) which brought traffic to a halt for forty hours and caused massive logistical and