2013年2月27日 星期三

A Hint of Horse Meat Has a Nation Squirming More Than Its Neighbors




為什麼英國人對馬肉如此敏感？

ALAN COWELL 報道 2013年02月27日
Johannes Cleris/European Pressphoto Agency
瑞典的一幅宜家廣告海報。

倫敦——英國人通常可以藉助莎士比亞，為當前的困境找到相應的文學描寫。但是很奇怪，英國人有句耳熟能詳的台詞，用在今天卻偏偏很不恰當。
1485年，在博斯沃斯平原的戰場上，即將戰敗的理查三世(Richard III)喊道，“一匹馬，一匹馬，我的王國換一匹馬！”但現在，似乎英國人最不想要的就是馬，至少不想在標明了是別的肉類的食品裡面吃出馬肉。
幾周來，英國密切關注一場波及全歐洲的醜聞：一些家喻戶曉的品牌出售的肉類加工品，包裝上寫着純牛肉，卻檢測出了馬的DNA。這些食品中包括波隆那 意大利麵、千層面和漢堡包。電視紀錄片對此展開了調查，報紙頭條大肆宣揚此事，博客作者為此撰文，Twitter用戶紛紛轉發這條消息。
但似乎無人能夠解釋清楚，為何食物中出現一點點馬肉，英國的消費者和食客就如此擔憂，而他們的鄰居，法國、荷蘭等其他歐洲國家民眾都能心平氣和地吃馬肉呢？
善於反思的英國人挖掘了一系列原因。例如，根據英國古老的禁忌，不可食用被人類視為寵物、夥伴、及體育和戰爭英雄的動物。又例如，此事是諸多欺騙公眾行為的又一個案例。
亞歷山大·路西·史密斯(Alexander Lucie-Smith)牧師在《天主教先驅報》(The Catholic Herald)上撰文稱，“這不是馬肉醜聞，這是商品標籤醜聞”，此事令人質疑，“我們還能相信商品標籤上的任何信息嗎？”
近期的瘋牛病和口蹄疫動搖了人們對英國畜群的信心。對這兩種疫病的記憶，可以部分地回答這個問題。一項學術研究甚至將厭食馬肉的傳統追溯到八世紀。當時，教皇格里高利三世(Pope Gregory III)試圖迫使新皈依的盎格魯-撒克遜人擯棄吃馬肉這種異教習俗。
此番的喧囂也反映了一些消費者的不安。他們認為自己遭受了雙重愚弄。由於經濟緊縮，他們被迫購買便宜的成品食物。然而，出售這些食品的連鎖企業，卻 又被那些追求暴富、偷偷摸摸的供應商，甚至是犯罪團伙操縱。而且，該醜聞也令人想起英國根深蒂固的等級差異。富人買得起屠戶手中昂貴的鮮切肉。他們嘲笑買 不起鮮肉的大眾。
馬肉比牛肉便宜得多。而且，調查還發現了一條缺乏監管的地下產業鏈，一直延伸到羅馬尼亞和墨西哥，根本不知道是在哪個環節把馬肉混入了牛肉製品，英國人悠久的喜愛牛肉的傳統被利用了。
早在15世紀，法國騎兵統帥就這樣分析英國人：“給他們一頓牛肉大餐和鋼鐵，他們就會像狼一樣大吃，像魔鬼一樣戰鬥。”是的，這句話也出自莎士比亞，這次是《亨利五世》(Henry V)。
法國人戲稱英國人為“燒牛肉”(les rosbifs)，這不是沒有道理的，這也表現出法國人對英國飲食完全嗤之以鼻的態度。
據說，法國人是在1807年埃勞戰役(Battle of Eylau)中為自己的飲食習慣找到了依據。這有可能只是傳說，但據說當時拿破崙大軍的軍醫長巴龍·多米尼克-讓·拉雷(Baron Dominique-Jean Larrey)下令飢餓的士兵吃戰死的馬肉，讓愛吃馬肉成了法國人的神聖傳統。
直到今天，在巴黎一個我經常去的地方，一家賣馬肉的屠戶還在一周兩次的街邊集市上驕傲地擺攤營業，她旁邊有賣海鮮、熟布里奶酪、烤雞、鵝肝醬還有用剁碎的豬腸做餡的法國香腸的攤位。用豬下水做香腸，這對一些人來說恐怕就像馬肉對英國人一樣地奇怪。
換句話說，飲食決定了身份。就像德國教授維克托·B·邁爾-羅霍(Victor B. Meyer-Rochow)在自由歐洲電台(Radio Free Europe)上說的那樣，“我們說馬是這樣一種高貴的動物，所以不能吃馬肉，這樣，我們就抬高了自己，讓我們顯得比那些吃馬肉像吃兔肉一樣的人要優越。”
然而，這件事還傳遞出一個更加灰暗的信息。最近年，關於英國媒體、BBC、國家醫療服務體系(National Health Service)、議會以及政客個人的醜聞不斷被曝光。操控基準利率和不當銷售金融工具的醜聞曝光更是加劇了2008年金融危機以來人們對銀行和銀行家的 信任危機。
的確，《獨立報》(The Independent)前任編輯安德烈亞斯·惠特曼·史密斯(Andreas Whittam Smith)曾在該報上稱，“越深入地審視馬肉醜聞，就越讓人聯想到銀行業危機的根源”——掛着牛頭賣馬肉，不正像打着安全投資的幌子，推銷次級抵押貸款 一樣嗎？
或許，真正顯示了英國人特點的，是一連串與馬有關的冷笑話，說明英國人面對又一次的欺詐行為，還是只能由它去，詐騙得不到解釋，也得不到懲罰，普通人基本沒有選擇，只能阿Q式地自我寬慰，想想那句老話：商品售出，概不負責，買方留心。
其中一個比較好玩的笑話是這樣的：一個漢堡包走進酒吧點杯喝的。侍者說，“我聽不清楚。”漢堡包回答道，“對不起，我嗓子有點啞。”（英文“沙啞”［hoarse］與“馬”同音——譯註）
翻譯：梁英、張亮亮


A Hint of Horse Meat Has a Nation Squirming More Than Its Neighbors

By ALAN COWELL February 27, 2013
LONDON — Seeking literary echoes of current predicaments, Britons can generally rely on Shakespeare. But one line in the national memory has proved curiously inappropriate.

“A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse,” cries Richard III, facing defeat at the Battle of Bosworth Field, in 1485. Yet horses seem to be the last thing Britons want these days, at least in food that is labeled as something else altogether.


For weeks, the land has been seized with a spreading, Europe-wide scandal over discoveries of equine DNA in processed meals sold under household brands packaged as exclusively bovine — spaghetti Bolognese, lasagna and burgers among them. Television documentaries have investigated the phenomenon. Headlines have trumpeted it. Bloggers have blogged. Tweeters have tweeted.

But no one seems able to fully answer the question of why shoppers and diners in Britain are so much more worried about a hint of horse meat than European neighbors in France, the Netherlands and elsewhere who eat their steeds with equanimity.

Soul-searching Britons have invoked factors ranging from an age-old taboo on consuming animals seen as pets, companions or heroes of sport and war, to a sense of one more betrayal in a catalog of broken public trust.

“This is not a horse meat scandal,” said the Rev. Alexander Lucie-Smith, a priest writing in The Catholic Herald. “It is a labeling scandal” that has prompted the question, “Can we trust anything we read on a label?”

Part of the answer lies in recent memory of mad cow and foot-and-mouth disease that shook confidence in the nation’s herds. An academic study even traces the equine aversion to the eighth century, when Pope Gregory III sought to press newly Christianized Anglo-Saxons to abandon their horse-eating, pagan ways.

For some, the brouhaha reflects unease among consumers who feel double-duped, pressed by economic austerity into buying cheap, ready-made meals while the food chain delivering them is manipulated by shadowy, get-rich-quick suppliers, perhaps even criminal gangs. The scandal, moreover, has conjured Britain’s stubborn class distinctions, with those who can afford pricey butchers’ cuts sneering at the masses who cannot.

Horse meat is much cheaper than beef, and investigators have discovered a murky, often unregulated procession of players stretching from Romania to Mexico, with no clear indication of the point at which it enters the mix of meat sold as beef, exploiting an age-old hankering for Britain’s signature hearty food.
As long ago as the 15th century, the Constable of France — according, yes, to Shakespeare, this time in “Henry V” — analyzed the English character thus: “Give them great meals of beef and iron and steel, they will eat like wolves and fight like devils.”
Not for nothing did the British earn the French sobriquet “les rosbifs,” betokening an overwhelmingly sniffy Gallic perception of British cuisine.
The French, it is said, found their own dietary vindication at the Battle of Eylau, in 1807, when, possibly apocryphally, Baron Dominique-Jean Larrey, the surgeon general of Napoleon’s Grande Armée, ordered starving French troops to eat the flesh of their fallen horses, enshrining the practice of equine epicureanism.
To this day, in an area of Paris that I frequent, the horse-butcher takes her place proudly at the twice-weekly street market alongside vendors of fresh seafood, ripe Brie, roast chicken, foie gras, pâté and fare like Andouillette sausage made of porcine entrails, which seems as alien to some palates as horse meat does to the British.
In other words, food defines identity. As a German professor, Victor B. Meyer-Rochow, told Radio Free Europe, “by saying the horse is such a noble animal and we will not eat this meat, we elevate ourselves above those who treat the horse as if it were just rabbit or something else.”
But there is a much more somber message. In recent years, an unrelenting succession of tawdry scandals has eroded trust in the British press and the BBC, the National Health Service, Parliament and individual politicians. Exposés of the rigging of benchmark interest rates and the mis-selling of financial instruments have compounded the loss of confidence in banks and bankers since the financial crisis of 2008.
Indeed, the former editor Andreas Whittam Smith wrote in The Independent, “The more closely the horse meat scandal is examined, the more it brings to mind the origins of the banking crisis” — for horse meat sold as beef, read subprime mortgages sold as safe investments.
Perhaps what really distinguishes the British, though, has been a crop of horsey and not very funny jokes, suggesting a stoic resignation to yet one more scam that will go unexplained and unpunished, leaving ordinary people little choice but to look for a Monty Pythonesque bright side, and mull the old adage: caveat emptor, let the buyer beware.
A sample — and this is one of the better ones: A burger walks into a bar and asks for a drink. “I can’t hear you,” says the barkeep. “Sorry,” replies the burger. “I’m a little bit horse.”
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2013年2月26日 星期二

《北京街景》“倫敦紐乎斯”的市招



《圖像》圖295所錄1873年9月13日《北京街景》，街上鋪面掛出“倫敦紐乎斯”的市招；


猜:
 The Illustrated London News was the world's first illustrated weekly newspaper; the first issue appeared on Saturday 14 May 1842. It was published weekly until 1971 and then increasingly less frequently until publication ceased in 2003.
Illustrated London News - front page - first edition.jpg
First page of the first edition
Type Weekly (1842–1971)
Monthly (1971–1989)
Bi-monthly (1989–1994)
Twice-yearly (1994–2003)
Format Broadsheet
Owner Illustrated London News Group
Founded 1842
Political alignment Conservative
Ceased publication 2003
Headquarters London, England


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2013年2月25日 星期一

英國失去AAA評級/ The public finances / 多重困境/ Britain This Week

赤字及逆差拖累英國失去AAA評級

LANDON THOMAS Jr. 報道 2013年02月25日

倫敦——周五，穆迪(Moody's)決定降低英國的信用評級，此舉背後的根本原因是一個重要的經濟現實：在降低財政預算赤字、努力吸引外國人購買其出口商品方面，英國已經開始落後於其他歐洲國家，甚至包括那些接受救援的歐元區經濟體。
戴維·卡梅倫(David Cameron)及其領導下的愈發緊張不安的聯合政府，已將減少赤字和債務列為具有決定意的國家要務。12月，位高權重的財政大臣喬治·奧斯本 (George Osborne)警告稱，一項已導致公共部門減少數萬個工作崗位的緊縮計劃將不得不延期一年，到2018年才能終止。但該緊縮計劃也在一定程度上造成了長 期的經濟不景。

周五，穆迪將英國的信用評級下調至Aa1，成為了第一個剝奪該國珍視的AAA投資評級的信用評級機構。穆迪在報告中稱，這一決定所依據的核心因素之一是英國的經濟復蘇太過緩慢。
此後，奧斯本說，穆迪的決定“令人失望”，但他承諾稱，政府不會因降級放棄縮減赤字的計劃。
周五，歐洲委員會(European Commission)發佈了一份不出眾人預料的關於歐盟(European Union)經濟前景的預測報告，報告中的兩個數據突顯了卡梅倫和奧斯本在扭轉英國經濟、改變財政及貿易落後地位等方面所面臨的挑戰。
首先，儘管英國正在執行歐洲時間最長、調子最高的緊縮計劃之一，政府今年的基本赤字——這是衡量一個國家政府支出超過稅收收入數額的最簡單標準—— 仍將佔到國內生產總值（gross domestic product，簡稱GDP）的4.3%。這是迄今為止歐洲出現的最高基本赤字率，在全世界的發達國家中也只低於負債纍纍的日本。
其次，自金融危機開始後，英鎊兌其他主要貨幣的貶值幅度已達到三分之一，儘管如此，英國今年的經常賬戶赤字仍將佔到GDP的3.1%，成為世界上唯一一個經常賬戶赤字較2009年有所上升的發達國家。
經常賬戶赤字是衡量一個國家出口能力的最廣義標準。經常賬戶赤字越高，一個國家就需要借更多的債。在其他因素都一樣的情況下，低幣值將有利於吸引外國人購買本國商品或投資本國資產。德國和中國等出口大國都擁有高額的經常賬戶盈餘。
卡梅倫已經向人們推銷了不受歐元桎梏的彈性貨幣機制的益處，英國甚至可能會就是否繼續維持歐盟成員國身份舉行公投。不過，就連西班牙、希臘和葡萄牙 這樣的歐元區國家也在經常賬戶方面取得了引人注目的改善，儘管三年之前，這些國家被龐大的賬戶赤字逼到了崩潰的邊緣。歐盟委員會甚至認為，西班牙今年有可 能實現經常賬戶盈餘。
英國不斷惡化的持續貿易逆差顯示了英國無力增加出口的困境，儘管政府已經把增加出口作為政策重點。即將就任英格蘭銀行(Bank of England)行長的馬克·J·卡尼(Mark J. Carney)在議會發表第一次演講時指出，自2000年以來，英國在全球出口中的份額已經降低了約50%，降幅居全球20個最大經濟體之首。
英國在減少貿易赤字及提高貿易競爭力方面的表現令人失望，原因之一是金融危機開始後，英國的生產力出現了令人驚異的下滑。
經濟陷入衰退之後，西班牙、葡萄牙和愛爾蘭等國就通過削減勞動力來提高了經濟的競爭力。這樣一來，它們就為本國經濟在衰退結束後實現更加強勁的反彈搭好了舞台。
然而，英國的狀況卻與此相反：儘管經濟增長停滯不前，英國的失業率依然維持在將近8%的較低水平。換句話說，英國要為同樣數量的產品付出更多的勞動力。
上周五，穆迪已經強調指出了英國生產力問題的本質，當時，穆迪表示，英國今年的預計經濟增長率僅為1%，遠低於2%到2.5%的長期經濟增長趨勢。
經濟停滯讓政府削減赤字的行動更加困難，原因是稅入的增長沒有達到預期。奧斯本於去年12月延展了財政緊縮計劃，原因是政府沒能完成自身提出的赤字削減目標之一。
英國的財政緊縮政策既包括增加稅收，也包括削減預算。不過，卡梅倫領導下的政府不願意仿效狀態不佳的歐元區各國的政府，後者大刀闊斧地削減了公務員工資、養老金及其他福利支出。
最近的1月份公共財政數據顯示，主要受社會福利支出的驅動，英國的公共支出仍在上升。在過去十個月里，這些支出已經上升了6%，其中大部分增長來源於養老金支出及失業福利。
美國於2011年8月喪失了AAA評級，法國於2012年11月步其後塵。證券市場對此普遍反應平淡。不過，英國評級降低正值英鎊持續下跌之時。過去兩周，英鎊兌歐元已經下跌了2%以上，兌美元則下跌了近4%。
鑒於對沖基金和其他主要投資人紛紛加大看空英鎊的賭注，債券投資人將更有動力售出手中的債券，如果進一步的降級處於醞釀之中的話，情況就更是如此。
“這樣的局面無法維持，”經濟學家兼企業家約翰·米爾斯(John Mills)說。長期以來，他堅持認為，為了改善英國的貿易地位，英國必須強力促使英鎊貶值。
“英國在全球沒有什麼競爭力，”米爾斯說。“英鎊遲早會出問題，市場將會土崩瓦解。”
翻譯：谷菁璐、張薇

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Remunerative justice

The government wants prisoners to be more productive, before their release as well as after it




IN A hangar at Ranby prison in Nottinghamshire, an inmate is putting reflectors into bulkhead lights for Applied Security Design, a private firm. His pay is a pittance: £7 ($10.70) a week. But he is glad to have the job. “It’s better than sitting in your cell all the time,” he says. “It makes you feel better about yourself.”
In a second workshop prisoners are making furniture for the government and for Amaryllis, another private company. Here, the emphasis is on getting vocational qualifications as well as on the products. A lifer has graduated from dovecotes to dolls’ houses, and hopes to convert his own garage into a workshop when he eventually gets out, as many supposed “lifers” do.

Turning Britain’s prisons into what the coalition government calls “industrious places of productive work” lies at the heart of its plans for penal reform. Work behind bars isn’t new. Like those in many other countries, British prisoners have long been expected to perform chores such as cooking and gardening. From time to time, amid bursts of enthusiasm for prison industries, the authorities have tried to put them on a commercial footing. But overcrowding and outdated facilities have hampered serious work programmes. Only around 10,000 of the 84,000 prisoners in England and Wales are currently employed in industrial workshops. The government wants to double that figure in a decade, and extend working hours from an average of a little over 20 a week to 40. And it aims to lure more private outfits into prisons to set up and run units themselves.
Two factors have persuaded the coalition to embrace prison industries now. The first is stubbornly high reoffending rates, especially among the many ex-cons who are unemployed. According to a survey by the Ministry of Justice, almost three-quarters of prisoners who fail to find jobs and accommodation on release are reconvicted within a year—compared with only two-fifths of those who do. Yet less than 40% of offenders manage to find work after completing custodial or community sentences. Holding down a job inside, in something approaching a real-world workplace, learning good work habits and emerging with an employer’s reference, would make that transition easier, the thinking goes.
Captive markets
The second, related spur is financial. The prison budget is being cut dramatically, mainly by reducing staff and putting administration out to competitive tender. The squeeze makes addressing expensive recidivism an urgent priority. In theory prison industries could turn a modest profit—even if, at the moment, many actually burden the taxpayer, mainly because of the extra security involved. Prisoners’ wages are already docked to provide support for victims of crime; the hope is that more productive employment will boost those contributions, too.
Ranby is one place that needs little encouragement. With almost 1,100 inmates it is one of the biggest “Category C” (moderate-security) male prisons. Under its newish governor, Neil Richards, it is keenly embracing the government’s agenda.
Of its 14 workshops, one already operates around the clock, producing chair parts and light fittings as well as cutlery and plates for the prison service. Ranby plans to upgrade its laundry facilities; it has secured a share of one outside contract and is looking for more. Some 280-300 prisoners are employed full-time in the workshops now. Another 100 will find work in the laundry and 20, to start with, in a new manufacturing venture. Mr Richards hopes to get 500 prisoners working full-time by 2015.
What can Ranby, and other prisons with similar ambitions, offer employers? Its workforce won’t strike and may be less likely to pinch materials. It has plenty of space and some costly machinery already installed. Businesses, for their part, are chary of saying just what they pay to produce in prisons (though the inmates earn little, companies pay a bigger sum to the institution for the space, utilities and security); but the costs are unlikely to be higher than they are for labour at liberty.
True, adapting the prison regime to the demands of commerce can be tricky. Prisons’ main job is holding people securely—but businesses need employees to be available for a normal working week, and to respond flexibly to demand. At Ranby, Mr Richards is trying to oblige, with brief lunchtime breaks in the workplace itself. Firms may also need access for lorries at odd times of the day or night; separate entrances for business traffic might help, too. “Combining security with full-time commercial working is a challenge,” says Paul McDowell, a former governor of Coldingley prison and now head of Nacro, a charity that works with offenders, “but it can definitely be done.”
For some employers, hiring offenders is a moral mission, or a way to demonstrate social responsibility. Timpson, a family-owned shoe-repair chain, runs three training academies and three workshops in prisons, and employs prisoners allowed out during the day on temporary licence. Many are offered permanent jobs after they have served their sentences. The alternative labour pool can also help ease skill shortages. Railtrack, for example, provides long-term jobs to inmates, whom it trains in prison to lay railway tracks.
Evidence from the field supports the government’s finding that jobs help prevent reoffending. National Grid, a power company, leads a scheme involving around 80 firms, which trains offenders allowed out on temporary licence during the final year of their sentence, and employs them on their release. Mary Harris, who runs it, thinks around 2,000 prisoners have been helped over ten years, and that the reconviction rate among those who complete the programme is about 6%.
Not everyone shares the government’s zeal, however. Inmates toil for piddling rates, often at jobs that offer little stimulation or chance for advancement; a protesting group of current and former prisoners calls itself the Campaign Against Prison Slavery. The name echoes criticisms of some such programmes in America, where the use of prisoners to work on farms or make clothing is often decried as exploitative and ineffective.
Giving paid work to offenders when some of the law-abiding jobless are looking for it also raises hackles. Employers and officials insist, not entirely convincingly, that they look only to commission work that would otherwise have been done abroad, or by machines.
Andrew Neilson of the Howard League for Penal Reform, a pressure group that set up a prison industry at Coldingley in 2005 which has since closed, thinks the scheme should be more radical. Businesses should be given far more control over the workplace behind bars. Prisoners should sign contracts, get the minimum wage, pay taxes and enjoy employment rights as far as possible. This would prepare them better for life on the outside, he thinks.
No one knows how far the government will go. But several recent prison privatisations have been aimed in part at encouraging work inside. And the coalition has been more radical in criminal-justice matters than in almost any other. There is no reason to think it will stop here.
From the print edition: Britain

英國的多重困境

英
國 一下子成為了全球焦點。該國政府面對堆積如山的債務束手無策，英國央行(Bank of England)又對居高不下的通貨膨脹“視而不見”，這讓市場日益緊張起來。英鎊跌至1.53美元，今年以來已貶值5.6%，10年期英國國債收益率目 前已經攀升至2012年4月份以來最高水平2.21%。

英國承受不起失去海外投資者信任的代價：根據施羅德投資(Schroders)統 計，他們持有的英國國債共計佔到市場總量的30%左右，高於英國保險公司和退休基金的持有比例。英國債務管理局(Debt Management Office)的數據顯示，自2008年開年以來，海外投資者持有的英國國債規模翻了一倍多，於2012年9月份達到3,980億英鎊。鑒於未來三個財政 年度每年國債發行規模都定將高於1,500億英鎊，英國不能放過任何一個買家。

低增長、高通脹是人們擔心的主要問題。在通脹率連續38個 月保持在2%的目標水平上方後，英國央行上週預計未來兩年多時間內通脹率都將居高不下，但排除了採取相關控制措施的可能性。甚至，英國央行2月份政策會議 紀要意外顯示，包括行長默文•金(Mervyn King)在內，有三人投票支持將英國國債購買計劃擴大250億英鎊。

受英國央行的偏寬 鬆言論影響，英鎊兌美元週三下跌了逾1美分，這不難理解；但更加令人擔心的是，儘管購債計劃擴大的可能性增強，但較長期英國國債收益率卻有所上升。市場主 要擔心英鎊匯率的下跌可能進一步推高通脹，這意味著投資者會要求英國國債提供更高的風險回報，因而推動收益率上升。同時，與目前3,750億英鎊的計劃規 模相比，僅增加250億英鎊的購買量似乎力度不大。

此外，去年在剛剛發現不妙的跡象 時，英國財政大臣奧斯本(George Osborne)就放棄了債務目標，而且該國似乎可能丟掉AAA評級。英國用了各種各樣的一次性措施來減少舉債，但稅收情況一直令人失望。英國週三通過拍 賣4G無線頻譜僅籌到了23億英鎊，低於政府預期的35億英鎊。

迄今為止，英國國債需求一直都非常堅挺。但是不要理所當然地以為海外投資 者會堅守陣地，尤其是在10年期英國國債目前實際回報率為負值之際。現在歐元區危機已經有所緩和，投資者對財富這樣縮水的容忍度可能有所下降。對於英國能 否保持其公信力，定於3月20日公佈的2013年預算以及將於7月份就職的新任英國央行行長馬克•卡尼(Mark Carney)所奠定的基調都至關重要。

Richard Barley
（Richard Barley是《股聞天下》欄目作者﹐自1998年以來一直從不同的角度報導歐洲債券市場。）

The public finances

Off target

Despite a good month, George Osborne is far from balancing the budget

JANUARY is always a bumper month for the public purse. Government receipts spike as workers scramble to meet self-assessment tax deadlines, pushing public income far above spending. The month provides a fleeting glimpse of a budget surplus, but it also, by contrast, is a striking reminder of how distant that goal remains.
The latest data, released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on 21st February, showed a January surplus of £15 billion ($23 billion). That allowed £11 billion of borrowing to be repaid, nudging public-sector debt down to £1.16 trillion or 74% of GDP. But over the course of recent years the reverse has been true: spending has been higher than receipts, meaning more borrowing and a growing pile of debt.



The coalition’s austerity plan proposes to close this gap by raising income and cutting spending. Much of the early push focused on taxes: the first budget set out by George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, in June 2010, included a VAT increase and higher capital gains tax. Because the tax changes were front-loaded, they are almost complete: the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), a think-tank, reckons four-fifths have been made. In part, this pace was possible because the aims are modest: to raise receipts from 37% to 38% of GDP and hold them there (see chart).

But even this humble target now looks tough. Income tax has brought in less than expected, as has VAT: consumer spending is held back by flatlining wages. On top of this the sale of 4G spectrum, supposed to raise £3.5 billion, netted just £2.3 billion (see article).

This bad news means that a new income stream, appearing for the first time in January, is very welcome. Since March 2009 the Bank of England has been buying government debt, attempting to stimulate the economy through quantitative easing. Because its holdings are so large the interest it receives is chunky, too (by July 2012, the bank had earned £24 billion on its bond-holdings, which currently stand at £375 billion). This cash will be returned to the government, with a first payment of £3.8 billion, further boosting January’s income. Future payments will help put revenue plans back on track.
But the biggest test of austerity is spending cuts. Here plans are more ambitious: the savings account for 85% of planned deficit reduction, according to the IFS. And they have only just started: only a third of cuts to benefits and a fifth of those to departmental spending will be in place by the end of the financial year. Over the next five years, reductions in benefits, investment and government consumption will deepen year on year, cumulatively cutting expenditure from 42% to 37% of GDP.
It is early days, but the signs are not good. In December, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), a fiscal watchdog, forecast that government departments would make extra cuts allowing a £4.5 billion underspend this year. But this week’s data confirm that spending on public services is actually likely to rise this year, so that forecast now looks optimistic. Overall, Britain looks set to borrow slightly more this year than it did last year. The long road to a balanced budget is getting longer.
From the print edition: Britain
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2013年2月23日 星期六

Southbank Centre

令龍應台驚訝的第1件事，是南岸藝文中心內到處都有小孩，就像是一個社區活動中心，聽了工作簡報後最震撼的是，這個國家級的表演廳，完全沒有高高在上的架子，努力推動藝文工作深入社區，如同社區文化中心。

她說，南岸藝文中心將世界的文化帶到這裡，有空房間時就請附近的民眾來做裝潢，屋頂需要花園時就聘請懂得園藝的流浪漢或殘障者來做，與市民深入互動，這些都令人非常震撼，「我們可以向他們學習及借鏡之處太多了」。

占地21英畝的南岸藝文中心，成立於1951年，位在泰晤士河南岸，附近有英國電影協會（BFI Southbank）、泰特現代美術館（Tate Modern）及莎士比亞全球劇院等知名藝文機構，是英國規模最大的藝文活動據點，每年吸引超過300萬名遊客前往參觀。

Southbank Centre's 21 acre estate, from Waterloo Bridge to the London Eye
 
 Southbank Centre is a complex of artistic venues in London, on the South Bank of the River Thames between County Hall and Waterloo Bridge. It comprises three main buildings (the Royal Festival Hall, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Hayward Gallery), and is Europe’s largest centre for the arts. It attracts more than three million visitors annually. Nearly a thousand paid performances of music, dance and literature are staged at Southbank Centre each year, as well as over 300 free foyer events and an education programme, in and around the performing arts venues. In addition, three to six major art exhibitions are presented at Hayward Gallery yearly, and National Touring Exhibitions reach over 100 venues across the UK.

Contents

Location

Nearby, although not part of Southbank Centre, are the National Theatre and BFI Southbank. This is one of the most popular public spaces in London, part of a pedestrian-friendly stretch of the river extending eastwards from Westminster Bridge, past The London Eye, Southbank Centre, Tate Modern and the new Shakespeare's Globe to the east.
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2013年2月21日 星期四

Whistler's Cheyne Walk House



俄新網RUSNEWS.CN莫斯科2月21日電 倫敦《標准晚報》周三發布消息稱，倫敦肯辛頓-切爾西區政府將于下周審議俄羅斯億萬富翁羅曼·阿布拉莫維奇改建被他買下的英國畫家詹姆斯·惠斯勒故居的計劃。
據報紙消息，該項目已經獲得肯定評價，預計將在周二的區規劃委員會會議上獲得通過。
阿布拉莫維奇希望將這棟17世紀獨棟別墅前的庭院改建為惠斯勒一幅畫上的樣子，用橡樹代替椴樹。他將對主建築內面朝泰晤士河的房間進行修繕，將一棟 房屋隔出，供賓客和服務人員使用。此外，他還計劃拆除車庫，然後在原地建立藝術工作室，擺放阿布拉莫維奇與朋友達里婭·茹科娃收集的繪畫作品。
若項目獲得政府批准，預計改建工作將在三年內完成。
據報紙表示，包括惠斯勒故居在內的整個建築群在改建後的價值將約達1億英鎊。

Roman Abramovich gets go-ahead for £100m super-home overlooking Thames

20 February 2013
Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich is set to realise a three-year dream to renovate a historic property overlooking the Thames — including a new art studio to show off his priceless collection.
The 17th century building was once home to artist James Whistler. Now the Russian billionaire, 46, promises to transform its front garden to resemble one of Whistler’s paintings of the Thames embankment at night.
Kensington and Chelsea council is poised to grant approval next week for a £10 million scheme to restore three linked Cheyne Walk properties into a super-home that could be worth up to £100 million.
The project, which began in November 2010, has sparked concerns from a number of neighbours who fear they will suffer a loss of light and views and have their homes put at risk by plans to excavate a two-storey basement.
According to plans drawn up by architects 6a, Mr Abramovich wants to transform the Grade II-listed property into a “beautiful and meaningful contemporary home”.
The proposal would see a garage block demolished and replaced with a “bespoke” art studio “with a particular focus on the quality of light and display of artworks” for the collection of priceless modern paintings he has amassed with partner Dasha Zhukova, 31.
One property would be separated from the main home to create a “secondary building for staff and guests”. Grand drawing rooms overlooking the Thames would be restored in the main house, with oaks replacing the lime trees in its front garden. The main property has access via a private side road. Work is unlikely to be finished for three years, during which time the couple and their son Aaron, three, will be able to remain in his Kensington Palace Gardens house. Neighbours were today split on the likely disruption. One, who asked not to be named, said: “Abramovich’s people have worked hard to keep us content, as there were serious concerns when plans were submitted.
“We were worried about noise and the effect of the big basement but they have made some compromises. We look forward to welcoming his family to the area.”
But another said: “This is probably bad news for all of us.”

Cheyne Walk is one of London’s most expensive streets. Residents include Sir Mick Jagger.
A report by the council’s executive director of planning said the basement would not harm the “special architectural and historical interest” of the two surviving houses, dating back to one built in 1521 by Sir Thomas More.

The planning committee will meet next Tuesday to decide the plans, recommended for approval by officers.
Mr Abramovich’s spokesman in Moscow declined to comment.



Cheyne Walk - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The Other Kensington: Roman Abramovich's £100m Cheyne Walk House to get Green Light

By Umberto Bacchi
The Other Kensington: Roman Abramovich's £100m Cheyne Walk House to get Green Light
Kensington and Chelsea council is poised to give the green light to a £10m plan by Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich to turn an historic property overlooking the Thames into his London home.
Abramovich put forward a project to renovate three linked properties in London's high-end Cheyne Walk in April 2012, but concerns raised by neighbours and council members delayed things.
After amendments to the plan were made, the council will give the go-ahead, the London Evening Standard reported.
One of the Grade II-listed period properties to be transformed is a 1670s building that was once home to artist James Whistler and later to late Tory minister Paul Channon. A second house in the block was built in 1521 by Sir Thomas More.
Work is expected to last three years. At the end of that time, the 46-year-old Russian billionaire intends to move in with his 31-year-old partner Dasha Zhukova, his son Aaron, three, and his massive collection of modern paintings.
Abramovich's priceless artworks will play a prominent role in the structure of the new house. According to the proposals, a garage block will be torn down and replaced with a "bespoke [gallery] with a particular focus on the quality of light and display of artworks".
Drawings of the project also include a separated building to serve as a guest house.
The Russian magnate currently lives two miles away in Kensington Palace Gardens.
Renovation completed, it has been esteemed the new property will be worth up to £100m.
READ: The Other Kensington: £1 for a House In Liverpool's New Labour Wasteland
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2013年2月20日 星期三

Lord Berners

 「……讀完整本書，最教我難過的是他寫北大和寫他的戰友們的字字句句。……成長太沉重太荒謬了: 英國一位Lord Berners老了回母校去懷一懷舊，看到的竟是一張張傻笑的臉。他心裡納悶，走出來一問，他的學校老早改成一所精神病院了。」 ----董橋《小風景‧給王丹新書寫的序》香港:牛津大學出版社，2003，頁17-9

  姑不論其他，從Wikipedia 給Lord Berners 的簡介，就知道他是妙人。


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners[1] (18 September 1883 – 19 April 1950), also known as Gerald Tyrwhitt, was a British composer of classical music, novelist, painter and aesthete. He is usually referred to as Lord Berners.

Contents

Life

Berners was born in Apley Hall, Shropshire, in 1883.
His father, a naval officer, was rarely home. He was raised by a grandmother who was extremely religious and self-righteous, and a mother who had little intellect and many prejudices. His mother ignored his musical interests and instead focused on developing his masculinity, a trait Berners found to be inherently unnatural.
The eccentricities Berners displayed started early in life. Once, upon hearing that you could teach a dog to swim by throwing him into water, the young Gerald promptly decided that by throwing his mother's dog out the window, he could teach it to fly. The dog was unharmed, though the act earned Berners a beating.
After devising several inappropriate booby traps, Berners was sent off to a boarding school in Cheam at the age of nine. It was here that he would first explore his homosexuality; for a short time, he was romantically involved with an older student. The relationship was abruptly ended after Berners accidentally vomited on the other boy.
After he left prep school, Gerald continued his education at Eton College. Later, in his autobiographies, Berners would reflect on his experiences at Eton, claiming that he had learned nothing while there, and that the school was more concerned with shaping the young men's characters than supplying them with an education.
As well as being a talented musician, Berners was a skilled artist and writer. He appears in many books and biographies of the period, notably portrayed as Lord Merlin in Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love. He was a friend of the Mitford family and close to Diana Guinness.
Berners was notorious for his eccentricity,[2] dyeing pigeons at his house in Faringdon in vibrant colours and at one point having a giraffe as a pet and tea companion. His Rolls-Royce automobile contained a small clavichord keyboard which could be stored beneath the front seat. At his house he had a 100-foot viewing tower constructed, a notice at the entrance reading: "Members of the Public committing suicide from this tower do so at their own risk".[citation needed]
He was also subject throughout his life to periods of depression. These became more pronounced when Berners, who had lived in Rome from 1939 to 1945, found himself somewhat out of favour after his return to England.
He died in 1950 at Faringdon House, bequeathing his estate to his companion Robert ('Mad Boy') Heber Percy, who lived at Faringdon until his own death in 1987.
His epitaph on his gravestone reads:
"Here lies Lord Berners
One of the learners
His great love of learning
May earn him a burning
But, Praise the Lord!
He seldom was bored".

Music

Main article: List of compositions by Lord Berners
Berners' musical works included Trois morceaux, Fantasie espagnole (1919), Fugue in C minor (1924), and several ballets, including The Triumph of Neptune (1926) (based on a story by Sacheverell Sitwell) and Luna Park (1930). In later years he composed several songs and film scores, notably for the 1947 film Nicholas Nickleby.
His friends included the composers Constant Lambert and William Walton and he worked with Frederick Ashton. Walton dedicated Belshazzar's Feast to Berners, and Lambert wrote a Caprice péruvien for orchestra, on themes from Lord Berners' Le carrosse du St Sacrement.

Literature

Berners wrote several autobiographical works and some novels, mostly of a humorous nature. His autobiographies First Childhood (1934) and A Distant Prospect (1945) are both witty and affectionate.
Berners obtained some notoriety for his roman à clef The Girls of Radcliff Hall (punning on the name of the famous lesbian writer), published under the pseudonym "Adela Quebec",[2][3][4] in which he depicts himself and his circle of friends, such as Cecil Beaton and Oliver Messel, as members of a girls school. This frivolous satire, which was privately published and distributed, had a modish success in the 1930s. The original edition is rare; rumour has it that Beaton was responsible for gathering most of the already scarce copies of the book and destroying them.[5] However, the book was reprinted in 2000.
His other novels, including Romance of a Nose, Count Omega and The Camel are a mixture of whimsy and gentle satire.

Bibliography

Fiction

  • 1936 - The Camel
  • 1937 - The Girls of Radcliff Hall 「ラドクリフ・ホールの少女」
  • 1941 - Far From the Madding War
  • 1941 - Count Omega
  • 1941 - Percy Wallingford and Mr. Pidger
  • 1941 - The Romance of the Nose「鼻のロマンス」「ラクダ」

Non-fiction

  • 1922 - Lord Berners
  • 1934 - First Childhood自伝の「第一の幼年期」（1934）と「遠景」（1945）はユーモラスで優しさに満ちており
  • 1945 - A Distant Prospect
  •  
  •  

    Amazon.com Review

    Wellington claimed that the Battle of Waterloo was "won on the playing fields of Eton." For Gerald Tyrwhitt, the 14th Baron Berners, however, a war was fought on those self-same fields. Born in 1883, Berners grew up in the twilight years of the Victorian Age, a time when the scions of gentry were expected to excel at sports, marry advantageously, and settle into a quiet life of shooting parties and gentleman's clubs. Young Gerald, however, was made of different stuff, preferring art to sport and nurturing an unholy passion for opera. In the first volume of his autobiography, First Childhood, Baron Berners recounts his early years from birth through the end of grammar school. In A Distant Prospect, he takes the reader through the Eton years up to his 16th year--a time composed equally of terror and self-discovery. Berners, who as an adult would garner a reputation for eccentricity, began his career as an oddball youth. It can't have been easy growing up an aesthete and a homosexual in that social class or era, but Berners offers up his life story with both humor and honesty. This coming-of-age tale never strays into mawkish sentimentality, and provides a crystal-clear window into both a vanished era and a remarkable life in the making.

See also

References

  1. ^ Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson at the National Portrait Gallery
  2. ^ a b Mark Amory, Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric, London, 1998 ISBN 978-0-7126-6578-0
  3. ^ Bryony Jones, The music of Lord Berners (1883-1950): the versatile peer, Ashgate Publishing, 2003, ISBN 0-7546-0852-2, pp.9,101,143
  4. ^ Beverly Lyon Clark, Regendering the school story: sassy sissies and tattling tomboys, Routledge, 2001, ISBN 0-415-92891-5, p.143
  5. ^ Florence Tamagne, History of Homosexuality in Europe, 1919-1939, Algora Publishing, 2004, ISBN 0-87586-356-6, p.124
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2013年2月18日 星期一

Obituary: Richard Briers BBC

 

 BBC 還有更多的資訊


Richard Briers, The Good Life star, dies aged 79

 

Obituary: Richard Briers

A look back at the actor's career
Richard Briers, who has died aged 79, was one of Britain's best-loved actors.
Famed for his role as the hapless Tom Good in the 1970s BBC sitcom The Good Life, Briers was an also an accomplished stage actor playing roles such as Shakespeare's King Lear and Chekov's Uncle Vanya.
He also appeared in several films, including a cameo as a bishop in the Spice Girls' 1997 movie Spice World.
Richard David Briers was born in London on 14 January 1934 to parents Benjamin and Morna.
He was inspired by his mother, a music and drama teacher.
Initially brought up in a flat above a cinema, Briers attended Rokeby Prep School in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, leaving at the age of 16 with no qualifications.
He briefly studied electrical engineering but gave it up to become a filing clerk, a job he continued in the RAF when he was called up to do his national service.
The Good Life While serving at RAF Northwood in Hertfordshire, he met actor Brian Murphy (George and Mildred) who introduced him to the dramatic society at London's Borough Polytechnic Institute, now the South Bank University.
Briers starred in a number of productions after catching the acting bug and, taking advice from his father's cousin, the comic actor Terry-Thomas, went on to study at Rada for two years.
He was in a class with Peter O'Toole and Albert Finney, "who didn't need any lessons at all," he later recalled.
"I was painstakingly slow in my progress in comparison with them," he added. "I knew nothing about acting, I had to be taught everything."
Briers credited Rada director John Fernald with nurturing his talent. "He had a great confidence in me which allowed me to relax," he told the Guardian in 2008.
The young actor soon won a scholarship with the Liverpool Playhouse, where he met Ann Davies, the stage manager for the company and herself an actress. The pair were married within six months.
Richard Briers & Prunella Scales With Prunella Scales in Marriage Lines
Briers made his West End debut in Gilt and Gingerbread at the Duke of York's Theatre in 1959 and two years later he got his big break in TV after landing the lead role in Marriage Lines alongside Prunella Scales.
He went on to star in Brothers in Law, and appeared in several other popular television programmes, including the Morecambe & Wise Show and Dixon of Dock Green.
Distinctive voice In 1975 Briers was cast in the lead role for new BBC sitcom The Good Life - the part that would make him a household name.
The part had been specifically written for him by the scriptwriters, John Esmonde and Bob Larbey.
His character, Tom Good, decided to give up his steady office job on his 40th birthday and become self-sufficient.
Cast of The Good Life The Good Life became one of TV's favourite sitcoms
He and wife Barbara (Felicity Kendall) continued to live at their plush home in the Surrey commuter belt of Surbiton, but to the horror of their well-heeled neighbours Margo and Jerry (Penelope Keith and Paul Eddington) they turned their garden into an allotment where they kept livestock, and started making their own clothes.
"I actually didn't think the series was going to be successful when I first read the script," he said last year. "I worried that it was all a bit mundane and middle class.
"But the moment that my character, Tom Good, leaves his job as a draughtsman for a company that makes plastic toys for cereal packets and attempts to live off the land in Surbiton, he becomes much more interesting."
The series, which came ninth in a 2004 poll to find Britain's best loved sitcoms, was hugely successful, with the last episode filmed in front of the Queen in 1978.
It was often repeated over the years prompting Briers to quip that people still expected him to look the same 25 years on when in fact "I'm an old git with white hair".
Serious roles His distinctive voice was heard in a number of productions.

“Start Quote

It's lovely to get a laugh. It's the best thing in the world.”
Richard Briers
He was the narrator on the popular 1970s children's TV series, Roobarb & Custard and was the voice of the rabbit Fiver in the animated film of Watership Down.
He was a frequent voice on radio where he played Dr Simon Sparrow in BBC Radio 4's adaptations of Richard Gordon's comic novels Doctor in the House and Doctor a Large.
He also made a number of appearances as Bertie Wooster in radio dramatisations of PG Wodehouse's Jeeves books.
Richard Briers in Monarch of the Glen He played the Laird of Glenbogle in Monarch of the Glen
He appeared in a number of commercials, including voicing the griffin in advertisements for Midland Bank, now part of HSBC.
Briers went on to star as the obsessive Martin Bryce in Ever Decreasing Circles, again written for him by Esmonde and Larbey.
In 1987, hankering for more serious roles, he joined Kenneth Branagh's Renaissance Theatre Company where he took on a number of stage roles and appeared in Branagh's films of Henry V and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
In Frankenstein, he played alongside Robert De Niro, whose acting techniques were in stark contrast Briers' own, no-nonsense style.
"I'd learn the lines and say them, hopefully at the right time," he told BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs.
But in one scene, Briers' character had to call De Niro, playing Frankenstein's monster, into a room.
"I said, 'I know you are there, come in, come in' - but nothing happened.
"Branagh was behind me saying, 'don't be a fool, you've got to make him come in. He's not like you. You've got to make him feel he must come in.'"
"I said, 'I've read the script. I say 'come in' and he comes in."
In 2000, he was catapulted back into the TV spotlight when he played Hector Macdonald, the ageing patriarch in Monarch of the Glen.
In recent years he had roles in Extras, New Tricks and Holby City and in 2012 he appeared in film comedy Cockneys and Zombies, where he was a resident in a home under threat from a zombie apocalypse.
He was appointed OBE in 1989 and CBE in 2003.
As he got older he seemed to relish his new persona as a grumpy old man, particularly when it came to comedy.
"They simply don't write funny stuff anymore," he once said. "A lot of it is very depressing. Or violent. Or both."
Earlier this year, the actor revealed his struggle with the lung disease emphysema - caused, he said, by a 50-year smoking habit.
"I get very breathless, which is a pain in the backside," he told the Daily Mail.
"I haven't even got the strength to garden any more. Trying to get upstairs - oh God, it's ridiculous.
"The ciggies got me. I didn't think it would go quite as badly as it has. It's a bugger, but there it is. I used to love smoking."
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2013年2月10日 星期日

On Glasgow and Edinburgh


BOOKSHELF
February 8, 2013, 1:45 p.m. ET
Northern Approaches
Though only 44 miles apart, Glasgow and Edinburgh are stubbornly separate worlds.

By JAMES CAMPBELL
Only 44 miles separates Glasgow, on the west coast of Scotland, and Edinburgh, on the country's eastern side. But Robert Crawford recommends the traveler to fly "westward from Glasgow Airport over the Atlantic, crossing North America, the Northern Pacific, Asia and continental Europe, before descending . . . on the eastern seaboard of Scotland and then landing at Edinburgh Airport." For the country's largest metropolis—Glasgow was once the "second city of the Empire"—and its capital are a world apart. In culture, character and political tendency, they are independent city-states in a single nation.

On Glasgow and Edinburgh

By Robert Crawford
Harvard, 345 pages, $35
Enlarge Image
image

Ruaridh Stewart/Zuma Press/Corbis
Rooftops in Edinburgh, looking toward Castle Rock (at left).

As a native of one and the adopted son of the other, I endorse Mr. Crawford's suggestion. Having been born and brought up in Glasgow, before studying in Edinburgh, I feel an attachment to both places. But visits to the capital in my youth were like foreign travel. People in Edinburgh spoke differently, for one thing, using words like "ken" for know ("Ah d'a ken"—I don't know) and "boy" for men of all ages. Arriving at university, however, I felt that I had come to a wonderland. The Edinburgh skyline, dominated by the rearing mass of Castle Rock, with its floodlit crenelated walls and gardens at the base (forming one side of the city's main street), has never been stamped on by urban planners—as Glasgow's Victorian splendor has been. Looking toward the Castle from the neoclassical New Town (18th-19th centuries), with the waters of the Firth of Forth to your back, you are beguiled by the same spectacle that touched Sir Walter Scott 200 years ago.

Glasgow, Mr. Crawford suggests, relies on its outgoing personality to make up for what it lacks in beauty. Edinburgh talks about itself to itself; Glasgow talks to the world. Among the many pleasures of "On Glasgow and Edinburgh" is the author's unwillingness to promote one over the other. (Mr. Crawford was born in a small town near Glasgow.) Edinburgh is the older city; Glasgow has the older university. Edinburgh is the capital, but until the 1960s Glasgow was twice its size. Edinburgh's "national" sport is rugby; Glasgow's soccer. Edinburgh is a city of the arts and humanities, Glasgow of heavy industry. (Though Glasgow was home to the two greatest Scottish architects of modern times—Alexander "Greek" Thomson and Charles Rennie Mackintosh.) James Watt refined the steam engine in the west, while David Hume and Adam Smith discussed economics and causation (and dangerous atheism) in the east. "Only people from Edinburgh could dwell in a universe without Glaswegians," Mr. Crawford writes; "only Glaswegians could live on an Edinburgh-less planet. Everyone else may enjoy this pair of stubborn cities; no one can understand Scotland without paying attention to both."
Mr. Crawford allots each city roughly 130 pages and some 30 well-chosen illustrations, while an introduction amiably sets out the rivalry through time. A poet, an academic and the author of a recent biography of Robert Burns, Mr. Crawford offers not just an information-packed history but a guidebook, providing inside views of museums and a tour of Glasgow University (where the author studied), as well as a torrent of detail about buildings, neighborhoods, civic sculptures and so on. To this end, he resists straightforward opinionating, but his politics—Scottish-nationalist, left-wing and unwaveringly "correct" in matters of gender—are in plain view throughout. This leads to some radical-chic complaints.

Writing about John Maclean (1879-1923), for example, who was appointed "Consul for Soviet Affairs" in Britain after the Russian Revolution and strove to impose "Celtic communism" on Scotland, Mr. Crawford notes that he is unrepresented "among the statues in George Square[,] Glasgow's most iconic civic site." He invokes the support of the Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean (1911-96), a saintly figure in modern Scotland though few today can read his work in its original language, who "called his namesake simply . . . 'great John Maclean.' " Mr. Crawford doesn't say so ("On Glasgow and Edinburgh" lacks footnotes), but the tribute was probably uttered at about the time that great Sorley MacLean was writing poems in praise of great Joseph Stalin.

The novelist John Buchan, on the other hand, is fingered here as "the Glasgow-educated imperialist," only a handshake away from that "clique of imperialist, capitalist bosses" always eager to exploit shipyard workers and others. The tendency leads the author into clunking phrases such as "around the time of World War I, both capitalism and imperialism were fiercely interrogated" and repeated remarks about Glasgow's "resolutely masculinist" identity.
On the whole, however, Mr. Crawford's tone is nicely judged. About the Gorbals, the notorious district just south of Glasgow's River Clyde, once home to prosperous (imperialist) tobacco lords but later a byword for criminality, he writes:

What turned the Gorbals into a slum was partly the migration of the better-off to garden suburbs, leaving behind the prototypes of the Gorbals Die Hards [ruffians from Buchan's novel "Huntingtower"]. Tenements per se were not to blame. Indeed, with their common stairs and weel-kent (well-known) neighbors, some even came to be romanticized for promoting community spirit.
That is astute, except that there was nothing romantic about it. The community spirit was a function of people related by blood and marriage living upstairs and downstairs from—if not in the same room as—one another, sharing problems, endless cups of tea, the odd hauf-bo'tle (whisky) and an outdoor toilet (the "cludgie on the stair"). It was swept away in the slum-clearance programs of the 1960s. What replaced it—cheaply built, badly designed high-rises on desolate urban plains—has itself already been demolished, leaving a sorry patch of something less than desert. Was it all worthwhile? Probably yes, though for anyone familiar with the virtues as well as the vices of the old Gorbals the answer is hard to yield.
A bizarre survivor is the Citizens Theatre, in the heart of Gorbals Street, where many a young littérateur thrilled to productions of Beckett and Brecht, produced with panache by a world-class theatrical team in the 1970s and '80s. Most Gorbals Die-Hards did not feel the thrill, though, and you could be called a "pouf" (homosexual) and threatened with untheatrical violence just for watching a play. That pestilence, fortunately, has been largely swept away.
Politically, Scotland is a livelier place today than it has been for centuries. A referendum will be held in 2014 to determine whether a majority wishes to secede definitively from England. The country's intellectuals are broadly in favor, Mr. Crawford among them, but they must remember the strange paradox of Scotland's genius: that the country's greatest era, the 18th-century Enlightenment, came into being just as its original parliament expired. How could this counterintuitive evolution occur? One answer is that an independent creative spirit had been wedded to a prosperous, practical neighbor (England), creating favorable circumstances for the likes of Hume and Smith to thrive, together with scores of others. A wide horizon is a force for good.

There has been another Scots renaissance in recent years, involving novelists like Alasdair Gray (Glasgow) and Irvine Welsh (Edinburgh) and a group of painters loosely attached to the Glasgow School of Art (designed in the 1890s by Mackintosh). Some of the energy that stirred it is defiance, a desire to say: We can run our own affairs, inscribe our own images. But skeptics are entitled to ask if the "independent Scotland in Europe," as its proponents put it, would be independent in mind and spirit or just in politics. Would it find itself backed into a windy corner of what used to be Great Britain, with the wild North Sea as backdrop?

Mr. Crawford writes approvingly of a rally in Glasgow in 1992, at which "about 40,000 people massed" with a banner that read "Free Scotland." And here we need our guide to act the skeptic. The notion that in 1992 these people were unfree would have aroused a scornful chuckle in Eastern Europe (the Berlin Wall had fallen just three years before) and would have seemed like nonsense to the majority of the protesters' parents, who saw themselves living a "free" dual existence, happily shared between Scotland (always first) and the United Kingdom.
Yet "On Glasgow and Edinburgh" is a thoroughly enjoyable book, all the more so for provoking arguments (the Glaswegian's favorite hobby). Readers familiar with the two cities will enjoy the recitation of familiar history and the frequent occurrence of unfamiliar fact and anecdote. Those who have not (yet) gazed from Castle Street in the New Town to Castle Rock, the high glory of the Old, will read about it and make plans to visit. After Edinburgh, they should fly around the world and arrive at Glasgow and discover Scotland all over again.
—Mr. Campbell is an editor at the Times Literary Supplement in London and the author of "Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin."
 
A version of this article appeared February 9, 2013, on page C8 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Northern Approaches.
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2013年2月8日 星期五

Horsemeat row: Don't dump meat, says food minister

More Horse Meat in Food Stirs Furor in British Isles

By STEPHEN CASTLE and DOUGLAS DALBY 7:40 AM ET
LONDON — The scandal has fueled worries about what has been going into cheaper burgers consumed in millions in British schools, hospitals and prisons.


 the drug phenylbutazone or "bute"
 Phenylbutazone, often referred to as bute, is a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug for the short-term treatment of pain and fever in animals. Wikipedia

Meals on Wheels - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meals_on_Wheels - Cached
Meals on Wheels are programs that deliver meals to individuals at home who are unable to purchase or prepare their own meals. The name is often used ...

Horsemeat row: Don't dump meat, says food minister

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David Heath: "The Food Standards Agency has been working flat out on this issue"

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People should not throw away frozen meat products in the wake of the revelations about horsemeat in Findus lasagne, the food minister has said.
David Heath advised consumers to carry on eating meat unless told otherwise.
The Food Standards Agency has asked UK firms to test all processed beef foods, but said it did not "suspect there is any health issue with frozen food".
Environment Secretary Owen Paterson is to hold a summit with heads of meat retailers and suppliers on Saturday.
Food Minister Mr Heath said the government's advice was "exactly that" of the FSA's.
"The FSA says there is no reason to suppose there is a health risk and therefore the advice is to carry on with normal shopping habits until you are told otherwise," he told the BBC.
But shadow environment secretary Mary Creagh has expressed fears that other contaminated foods may be found.
'Criminal activity' Earlier this week, a third-party French supplier alerted Findus to concerns that the beef lasagne product did not "conform to specification".
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) said Findus had tested the meat in 18 of its beef lasagne products and found 11 meals in which it contained between 60% and 100% horsemeat.
Findus has withdrawn the meals. Comigel, the French supplier, said it had withdrawn all products related to its supplier.

Is it a health risk?

James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News
Horsemeat itself should be no more dangerous than beef and is eaten in many countries around the world.
However, there is concern around a drug given to horses - known as bute (phenylbutazone) - which is dangerous if taken by humans.
Decades ago it was used as a treatment for gout and arthritis, but it caused a serious blood disorder, aplastic anaemia, in rare cases.
While it was banned for human use, it is still used for animals. However, it is not allowed to enter the human food chain.
Findus has been asked to test for bute in its products.
If people have any of the affected meals lurking in their freezer, they are advised to return them to the store they were purchased from.
The FSA said it was "highly likely" criminal activity was to blame for the contamination.
Andy Foster, of the Trading Standards Institute, also said deliberate fraudulent activity, not accidental contamination, could be to blame.
In other developments:
  • Ms Creagh says she has contacted police to pass on information concerning UK companies who are potentially involved in the illegal horsemeat trade
  • The GMB union says all hospitals, schools and meals-on-wheels services should verify that horsemeat has not been served to vulnerable people
  • Trading standards and environmental health bodies say their officers across the UK are on "high alert"
  • Findus says it is "sorry that we have let people down", in a fresh statement
FSA chief executive Catherine Brown told the BBC: "We are demanding that food businesses conduct authenticity tests on all beef products, such as beefburgers, meatballs and lasagne, and provide the results to the FSA."
The FSA's website advises consumers: "There is no reason to suspect that there's any health issue with frozen food in general, and we wouldn't advise people to stop eating it."
UK beef consumption Between fresh and processed, the UK consumes more fresh or frozen beef.
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Peter Kendall, president of the National Farmers' Union, said farmers who had suffered from food scares in the past were "furious" over the horsemeat revelations because they had already "raised their game".
He urged consumers to buy British meat to be sure of what they are eating.
Findus is the latest company to be caught up in the controversy surrounding contamination of meat products, which has affected firms in the UK, Irish Republic, Poland and France.
Last month, Irish food inspectors announced they had found horsemeat in some burgers stocked by a number of UK supermarket chains, including Tesco, Iceland and Lidl.

Analysis

image of Christian Fraser Christian Fraser BBC News, Paris
The French authorities have been slow to react. But today the French Ministry of Agriculture did finally issue a statement. It considers the issue "a matter of criminal fraud" and the authorities will be investigating.
The question - as yet unanswered - is how horsemeat ended up in the beef chain. Was there confusion between the two meats - beef and horse - that were processed in the same plant? Or, as is more likely, was Comigel duped by a third party supplier?
There is also a wider issue for the European authorities. The rules on labelling for meat products are fairly straightforward. But the rules are less clear on the provenance of meat when it comes to the ingredients of processed products. And food analysts are now calling for a review.
Since Comigel also supplies the Benelux, Scandinavian and Eastern Bloc supermarket chains, this is fast becoming a European problem.
Horsemeat may not pose a significant risk to humans but the health of European food processing is very much open to question.
Ms Creagh expressed fears there were further revelations to come from the food industry.
"What we have had over the last four weeks is a constant drip, drip, drip of revelations from the food industry, from the Food Standards Agency, and what I am worried about is that the more they are testing for horse, the more they are finding," Ms Creagh said.
She suggested further guidance was needed on whether people should eat other processed foods labelled as containing beef.
Mr Heath said the FSA was undertaking the "biggest testing of beef products that has ever taken place" in order to offer reassurance.
Prime Minister David Cameron, speaking in Brussels, described the latest revelations as "very shocking" and "completely unacceptable".
A statement from the British Meat Processors Association (BMPA) said it "deplores the latest reported incidents of gross contamination of some processed meat products".
It urged members to review their raw material and ingredients-sourcing procedures.
The supermarket chain Aldi was also advised to withdraw its Today's Special Frozen Beef Lasagne and Today's Special Frozen Spaghetti Bolognese by French supplier Comigel.
An Aldi spokesman said the meals had been withdrawn immediately and it was carrying out its own investigations.

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