Quality | 2008.10.24
Hugh Muir's diary
"Our failure to resource the asylum processes has caused untold human misery," said Phil Woolas, the immigration minister. And he\'s right. But might the problems go beyond money? Could some of it be attitudinal? Take recent events at Yarl\'s Wood detention centre, where officials have been breaking their own rules by depriving asylum-seekers of a book advising them of their rights. The guide, which collates publicly available information on legal, medical and relevant human rights issues, has been confiscated from at least two who wanted to challenge their detentions. One, Mercy Wanjiku, from Kenya, had hers taken away last Tuesday, which somewhat hampered her attempt to meet an appeal deadline on Friday. She didn\'t see it again until Thursday, by which time the Black Women\'s Rape Action Project had reported the confiscation to the police, saying the confiscation amounted to theft. Officials tell us these were isolated incidents and that a contractor is culpable; but all things being equal, Ms Wanjiku will be on a plane tomorrow. As if the odds weren\'t stacked enough.
• So in the course of a jolly to Corfu, George Osborne failed to spend as much quality time with Rupert Murdoch as he intended, ignited a row over what he did or didn\'t say to Oleg Deripaska - and now he may have trashed his relationship with the Rothchilds, one of the best-connected families in the world and donors of note to the Tory party. What a star. What a trip.
• But enough jollity: there is something very wrong in the world of Melanie Phillips. This is her lament on spectator.co.uk . "You have to pinch yourself - a Marxisant radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters, is on the verge of becoming President of the United States. And apparently it\'s considered impolite to say so." Luckily, she said it.
• What are we to make of revelations that special branch opened a file in 1968 on the poet Adrian Mitchell? A previously classified report on a Youth CND demonstration against the Vietnam war records that "Adrian Mitchell recited one of his poems, the meaning of which was largely unintelligible." Other material suggests there was further reporting. Some references are redacted even now. Mitchell tells us that he probably excited interest after attending a Communist party wine and cheese party for peace at Oxford. "I wasn\'t a communist, but I like wine," he says. "And cheese. And peace."
• But then many have spent the year trying to make sense of 1968. This month, at a seminar, the University of Salford will try. "We are still waiting for the political nomination of these opaque events to be completed," the blurb says. "But we are not merely waiting; we are eager to come to grips with this excess and therefore to pursue the related tasks of politically unfolding its consequences and philosophically operating its contemporary articulation with ruptures produced elsewhere and thinking the re-emergence of new possibles and thus the very possibility of a true politics." Who wrote this? Sarah Palin?
• Finally, as the world cries out for an economic summit along the lines of that so famously staged at Bretton Woods in 1944, we pay tribute not to Keynes, for everyone does that, but to Jean Gregory, his personal assistant, whose shorthand notes of the great man\'s pronouncements played a pivotal role in the success of this historic event. Now 89, she is loth to make too much of her role, but her son Ben tells us that "as Lord Keynes spoke so quietly, most of his input was probably read from her typing later". Without it, there\'s no telling how the industrialised world would have coped. She says that the in-joke at the conference was the cry, "Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your Keynes", which is hardly a showstopper but it was of its time, and helped put the world back on track. We could say the same of Jean.
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