A university-educated person is more likely to be pro-European
- 2016年 2月 25日
2016年2月27日 星期六
Private schools educate 7% of the population, but more than half of journalists, actors and judges
Private schools educate 7% of the population, but more than half of journalists, actors and judges
What are Boris Johnson and David Cameron really thinking here? Sean Curran on why Eton counts.
The British prime minister David Cameron and the mayor of London Boris Johnson may not be going the same way over Europe. But they have a lot in common - especially their school. Sean Curran on the special place of Eton in British public life.
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Blue on Blue: Cameron's Tories have turned on each other. What are Boris Johnson and David Cameron really thinking here?
小區拆牆到城市規劃 英國也走過彎路
訪談：小區拆牆到城市規劃 英國也走過彎路
英國華裔城市規劃專家楊威博士對BBC中文網表示，城市規劃以人為本，才有助於安居、易行、商業繁榮和社會和諧。
就中國37年來新頒布的首份城市規劃文件，作為曾應中國住建部邀請、擔任英國外交部和商務投資總署委派的英方首席規劃專家，楊威博士說，這體現了中國城市規劃從粗放到精細的發展模式改變，符合國際城市建設「綠色低碳」的潮流。
她指出，城市包括居民小區、交通道路的設計應該從人的行為習慣和普通人的需求為出發點。同時結合自己的歷史文化，表現出創意和美感。
她說：「人是一個城市的核心，人是商業和社會活動的主體。有方便行人的開放空間，包括小區、道路、公園的城鎮規劃，是最科學的設計，特別是像中國這樣人口眾多而地域有限的城市，更要充分考慮合理利用有限空間資源，道路街區設計方便行人出門，購物，上班，才能方便人們居住、交流來往、活躍商業、增進社會融合與和諧。」
英國曾經失誤
楊威博士指出，英國並非沒有在城市規劃建設上走過彎路，實際上也嘗過規劃中過度考慮機動車發展而得到教訓、導致思想轉變的過程。
她說，上世紀60年代英國交通部發表了一份由規劃設計專家布坎南爵士領銜的研究報告，影響到後來幾十年裏英國和很多歐美國際都市設計規劃思維。
當時英國正處於二戰後的城鎮化和機動化的快速恢復發展期，這份報告提出未來的城市居民將大量擁有私人汽車。雖然這份報告前瞻性地提出了道路分級、環境噪音污染等問題。但是後來一些地方特別是公路設計規劃借鑒這份報告時，把機動車放在設計的核心考慮中，雖然造出更寬闊的公路，但一些地方擁堵、污染等未能避免。
楊威博士說，在實踐中，英國的規劃設計者們認識到了以車為規劃核心忽略人的因素，反而帶來更多的擁堵、污染，城市失去活力，一些地方犯罪率上升。他們因此轉變思想，規劃設計中把方便留給行人而不是開車者。
人為核心
就目前中國民眾就新城市規劃文件中涉及打開封閉小區的產權、安全、交通等問題的爭議，楊威博士表示，具體的問題要具體分析，無法一概而論，但就中國城鎮化中新的城鎮交通道路和小區的設計來說，要避免各種城市病，應該避免過去粗放式發展中貪大的思維，「開發要有獨創性，考慮當地和周邊環境的協調，秉承創新、高效、綠色低碳、開放共享和可持續發展的思維，這就要從行人的角度來考慮開發建設的布局。」
她說：「不論是小區、道路、公園、綠地、商店的設計，都應該考慮到是否方便行人。比如從行為科學上說，一般行人5分鐘步行4百米是一個可持續城市規劃中的一項參考標凖。要去商店、去公園、去地鐵公交站時間太長路途太遠，人就不願意步行而要開車。」
「在過去多年裏中國民眾熱議『中國式過馬路』話題的背後，有個為什麼很多人要橫穿馬路的原因，其中之一是紅綠燈或者過街天橋之間的距離過遠，人自然不願意走很遠按規定過路，從而違反交規。」
楊威博士指出，英國交通法規和城市小區規劃中，有一個「公眾優先」（Public rights of way and accessing land）的條款，很多即使是私人的地產也必須有允許公眾行人、自行車和馬匹通過的道路。
空間交流和安全
她說：「從空間感的建築科學角度說，人和所處的空間有個自然的交流，也就是『圍合感』。過於空曠的空間讓人感覺缺乏安全，不方便通行，人和人之間也不便交流互動。」
「人和人需要視線交流。巨大的廣場，過寬的道路設計不利於司機和行人的視線交流。在人車合用的道路上，因為行人多，汽車必須限速，司機和行人保持視線交流也反而更小心，不僅不會因此增加交通事故頻率，反而有利於交通安全。」
楊威指出，在老齡化日漸增加的中國城鎮，方便行人也更方便老年人。「過去一些小區公園綠地的設計都是先考慮蓋房子，並不方便步行到達的剩餘地方才做成公園綠地，如果不方便，人們就不願出家門跑很遠專門去公園，也就減少了人們的交流，降低了社區活力。」
她指出，小區開發還應該盡量避免社會階層的割裂，房地產商開發大片高檔小區、樹起圍牆除了可能影響公共交通，也自然增加社會心理壓力。「英國在這方面現在也有經驗可以借鑒，比如規定要求在一片區域建築中融合不同大小戶型，規定要有一定的比例的房子專門給教師、護士、警察、社會服務工作者等相對低收入社會群體優惠購買，這樣就方便融合，有利於社會和諧。」
低碳綠色
Reuters
楊威博士指出，設計規劃方便行人自然會減少機動車需求，引導低碳綠色可持續發展的環境。
現在，楊威博士創立的楊威及合伙人（一體化總體規劃）事務所經常會給一些英國和中國的城市和城鎮地方政府提供培訓和設計諮詢。
2014年，在規劃建設可持續發展田園城鎮的英國經濟學獎大賽中，該事務所聯合其它英國設計規劃機構提交的《關於21世紀田園城市規劃的研究》報告從全球279項申請中脫穎而出，獲得嘉獎，在英國各界反響熱烈。
就中國未來的城鎮化進程，楊威博士表示，相信在今後5到10年裏就會看到中國規劃風氣的改變，以及由此帶來的城鎮發展新氣象。
（責編：歐陽成）
2016年2月23日 星期二
Kingdom of Mercia
| Kingdom of Mercia | ||||||
| Miercna rīce Merciorum regnum | ||||||
| Independent kingdom (527–879) Client state of Wessex (c. 879–918) | ||||||
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The Kingdom of Mercia (thick line) and the kingdom's extent during the Mercian Supremacy(green shading)
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| Capital | Tamworth | |||||
| Languages | Old English, Latin | |||||
| Religion | Paganism, Christianity | |||||
| Government | Absolute monarchy | |||||
| Monarch | ||||||
| • | 527–? | Icel (first) | ||||
| • | c. 626–655 | Penda | ||||
| • | 716–757 | Ethelbald | ||||
| • | 757–796 | Offa | ||||
| • | c. 881–911 | Ethelred | ||||
| • | 918 | Ælfwynn (last) | ||||
彭達恃兵威壓服了威塞克斯王國和東盎格利亞王國，稱霸杭伯河以南的英格蘭地區，開創了「麥西亞霸權」。彭達死後，麥西亞一度衰弱，直到國王伍爾夫希爾接受基督教信仰之後，國勢才漸得昌盛。到公元8世紀，國王埃塞爾博爾德當國之時，整個南英格蘭都是麥西亞王國的統治範圍。
公元757年，奧法繼位。他直接統治東盎格利亞、肯特和薩塞克斯地區，而威塞克斯和諾森布里亞則是他的附庸國。奧法在王國西部建立了奧法堤，使西部地區不再受威爾斯人侵擾。奧法死後，麥西亞的霸權漸漸落到威塞克斯王國手中。9世紀初，威塞克斯國王埃格伯特用兵迫使麥西亞承認了威塞克斯的宗主地位。公元874年，麥西亞向大舉侵來的維京人投降。886年，麥西亞的東部地區因威塞克斯和丹麥人的和約，歸屬丹麥法區；西部地區則由威塞克斯的阿爾弗雷德大帝控制。麥西亞的獨立歷史至此宣告結束，儘管它在作為威塞克斯王國的一個附庸國時，曾經有過一位傑出的女領主埃塞爾弗萊德（阿爾弗雷德大帝之女）。她在丈夫死後，竭力幫助弟弟威塞克斯國王長者愛德華對抗丹麥人。
Recently discovered in Oxfordshire, part of this rare Viking hoard will be on temporary display in the Citi Money Gallery. Buried in the 870s in Watlington, Oxfordshire, this hoard includes 186 rare coins of King Alfred of Wessex and King Ceolwulf II of Mercia as well as Viking jewellery. The hoard comes from a key moment in English history and has the potential to provide important new informationhttp://ow.ly/YEZs0
英國禁止公部門抵制以色列
【世界台】英國禁止公部門抵制以色列
2016/02/22
文 / 周盈成
頂禮拜三，英國的內閣辦公室大臣Matthew Hancock訪問以色列，仝時陣公佈新的規定，講根據世界貿易組織（WTO）的政府採購協定，身為簽署國的英國著平等對待其他的簽署國，任何的政府採購，若是歧視以色列的供應商，就是違反協定。
政府的聲明講，公部門對以色列商品的抵制「無適當」，超出政府對外的正式佮合法制裁，而且會激化反猶主義。今後違反新規定的機關團體會受著重罰。
以色列對英國的新規定表示歡迎。另外一方面，BDS運動堅持抵制行動合法。
BDS運動佇聲明內底講，英國現行的公共合約法是根據歐盟法律，允准排除有犯「 重大不正行為」的公司參與投標。所以BDS建議支持者，抵制有牽涉著以色列違反人權行為的公司，毋是因為遮的公司設佇以色列才共抵制。
文章講，英國政府的這步，無定是受著美國的壓力，這是反背巴勒斯坦人民。共針對非法政府行動的合法抗議消音，是失德的外交政策。
2005年，巴勒斯坦的團體發起訴求抵制、撤資、制裁的BDS運動，對以色列施壓，佇世界得著濟濟支持。英國嘛有一寡地方政府加入，拒買以色列的產品，尤其是佔領區約旦河西岸生產的。In認為這是一種道德責任。圖片取自：Takver – Israel – Boycott, divest, sanction，創用cc授權
Women to get £3,000 'birth budgets' in England
To chose anything anything from one-to-one midwifery or home births to birthing pools & hypnotherapy.
2016年2月22日 星期一
Boris Johnson exclusive: There is only one way to get the change we want – vote to leave the EU
Boris Johnson exclusive: There is only one way to get the change we want – vote to leave the EU
David Cameron has done his very best, but a vote to Remain will be taken in Brussels as a green light for the further erosion of democracy
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/eureferendum/12167643/
中文翻譯：https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=696762427130811&id=233698246770567&substory_index=0
I am a European. I lived many years in Brussels. I rather love the old place. And so I resent the way we continually confuse Europe – the home of the greatest and richest culture in the world, to which Britain is and will be an eternal contributor – with the political project of the European Union. It is, therefore, vital to stress that there is nothing necessarily anti-European or xenophobic in wanting to vote Leave on June 23.
And it is important to remember: it isn’t we in this country who have changed. It is the European Union. In the 28 years since I first started writing for this paper about the Common Market – as it was then still known – the project has morphed and grown in such a way as to be unrecognisable, rather as the vast new Euro palaces of glass and steel now lour over the little cobbled streets in the heart of the Belgian capital.
When I went to Brussels in 1989, I found well-meaning officials (many of them British) trying to break down barriers to trade with a new procedure – agreed by Margaret Thatcher – called Qualified Majority Voting. The efforts at harmonisation were occasionally comical, and I informed readers about euro-condoms and the great war against the British prawn cocktail flavour crisp. And then came German reunification, and the panicked efforts of Delors, Kohl and Mitterrand to “lock” Germany into Europe with the euro; and since then the pace of integration has never really slackened.
As new countries have joined, we have seen a hurried expansion in the areas for Qualified Majority Voting, so that Britain can be overruled more and more often (as has happened in the past five years). We have had not just the Maastricht Treaty, but Amsterdam, Nice, Lisbon, every one of them representing an extension of EU authority and a centralisation in Brussels. According to the House of Commons library, anything between 15 and 50 per cent of UK legislation now comes from the EU; and remember that this type of legislation is very special.
It is unstoppable, and it is irreversible – since it can only be repealed by the EU itself. Ask how much EU legislation the Commission has actually taken back under its various programmes for streamlining bureaucracy. The answer is none. That is why EU law is likened to a ratchet, clicking only forwards. We are seeing a slow and invisible process of legal colonisation, as the EU infiltrates just about every area of public policy. Then – and this is the key point – the EU acquires supremacy in any field that it touches; because it is one of the planks of Britain’s membership, agreed in 1972, that any question involving the EU must go to Luxembourg, to be adjudicated by the European Court of Justice.
It was one thing when that court contented itself with the single market, and ensuring that there was free and fair trade across the EU. We are now way beyond that stage. Under the Lisbon Treaty, the court has taken on the ability to vindicate people’s rights under the 55-clause “Charter of Fundamental Human Rights”, including such peculiar entitlements as the right to found a school, or the right to “pursue a freely chosen occupation” anywhere in the EU, or the right to start a business.
These are not fundamental rights as we normally understand them, and the mind boggles as to how they will be enforced. Tony Blair told us he had an opt-out from this charter.
Alas, that opt-out has not proved legally durable, and there are real fears among British jurists about the activism of the court. The more the EU does, the less room there is for national decision-making. Sometimes these EU rules sound simply ludicrous, like the rule that you can’t recycle a teabag, or that children under eight cannot blow up balloons, or the limits on the power of vacuum cleaners. Sometimes they can be truly infuriating – like the time I discovered, in 2013, that there was nothing we could do to bring in better-designed cab windows for trucks, to stop cyclists being crushed. It had to be done at a European level, and the French were opposed.
Sometimes the public can see all too plainly the impotence of their own elected politicians – as with immigration. That enrages them; not so much the numbers as the lack of control. That is what we mean by loss of sovereignty – the inability of people to kick out, at elections, the men and women who control their lives. We are seeing an alienation of the people from the power they should hold, and I am sure this is contributing to the sense of disengagement, the apathy, the view that politicians are “all the same” and can change nothing, and to the rise of extremist parties.
Democracy matters; and I find it deeply worrying that the Greeks are effectively being told what to do with their budgets and public spending, in spite of huge suffering among the population. And now the EU wants to go further. There is a document floating around Brussels called “The Five Presidents Report”, in which the leaders of the various EU institutions map out ways to save the euro. It all involves more integration: a social union, a political union, a budgetary union. At a time when Brussels should be devolving power, it is hauling more and more towards the centre, and there is no way that Britain can be unaffected.
David Cameron has done his very best, and he has achieved more than many expected. There is some useful language about stopping “ever-closer union” from applying to the UK, about protecting the euro outs from the euro ins, and about competition and deregulation.
David Cameron, Donald Tusk, and Alexis Tsipras at the first day of the EU summit Photo: Caters
There is an excellent forthcoming Bill that will assert the sovereignty of Parliament, the fruit of heroic intellectual labour by Oliver Letwin, which may well exercise a chilling effect on some of the more federalist flights of fancy of the court and the Commission. It is good, and right, but it cannot stop the machine; at best it can put a temporary and occasional spoke in the ratchet.
There is only one way to get the change we need, and that is to vote to go, because all EU history shows that they only really listen to a population when it says No. The fundamental problem remains: that they have an ideal that we do not share. They want to create a truly federal union, e pluribus unum, when most British people do not.
It is time to seek a new relationship, in which we manage to extricate ourselves from most of the supranational elements. We will hear a lot in the coming weeks about the risks of this option; the risk to the economy, the risk to the City of London, and so on; and though those risks cannot be entirely dismissed, I think they are likely to be exaggerated. We have heard this kind of thing before, about the decision to opt out of the euro, and the very opposite turned out to be the case.
I also accept there is a risk that a vote to Leave the EU, as it currently stands, will cause fresh tensions in the union between England and Scotland. On the other hand, most of the evidence I have seen suggests that the Scots will vote on roughly the same lines as the English.
Mayor of London Boris Johnson Photo: GETTY IMAGES
We will be told that a Brexit would embolden Putin, though it seems to me he is more likely to be emboldened, for instance, by the West’s relative passivity in Syria.
Above all, we will be told that whatever the democratic deficiencies, we would be better off remaining in because of the “influence” we have. This is less and less persuasive to me. Only 4 per cent of people running the Commission are UK nationals, when Britain contains 12 per cent of the EU population. It is not clear why the Commission should be best placed to know the needs of UK business and industry, rather than the myriad officials at UK Trade & Investment or the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
If the “Leave” side wins, it will indeed be necessary to negotiate a large number of trade deals at great speed. But why should that be impossible? We have become so used to Nanny in Brussels that we have become infantilised, incapable of imagining an independent future. We used to run the biggest empire the world has ever seen, and with a much smaller domestic population and a relatively tiny Civil Service. Are we really unable to do trade deals? We will have at least two years in which the existing treaties will be in force.
The real risk is to the general morale of Europe, and to the prestige of the EU project. We should take that seriously.
We should remember that this federalist vision is not an ignoble idea. It was born of the highest motives – to keep the peace in Europe. The people who run the various EU institutions – whom we like to ply with crass abuse – are, in my experience, principled and thoughtful officials. They have done some very good things: I think of the work of Sir Leon Brittan, for instance, as Competition Commissioner, and his fight against state aid.
They just have a different view of the way Europe should be constructed. I would hope they would see a vote to leave as a challenge, not just to strike a new and harmonious relationship with Britain (in which those benefits could be retained) but to recover some of the competitiveness that the continent has lost in the last decades.
Whatever happens, Britain needs to be supportive of its friends and allies – but on the lines originally proposed by Winston Churchill: interested, associated, but not absorbed; with Europe – but not comprised. We have spent 500 years trying to stop continental European powers uniting against us. There is no reason (if everyone is sensible) why that should happen now, and every reason for friendliness.
For many Conservatives, this has already been a pretty agonising business. Many of us are deeply internally divided, and we are divided between us. We know that we do not agree on the substance, but I hope we can all agree to concentrate on the arguments; to play the ball and not the man.
At the end of it all, we want to get a result, and then get on and unite around David Cameron – continuing to deliver better jobs, better housing, better health, education and a better quality of life for our constituents for whom (let’s be frank) the EU is not always the number one issue.
It is entirely thanks to the Prime Minister, his bravery and energy, and the fact that he won a majority Conservative government, that we are having a referendum at all. Never forget that if it were down to Jeremy Corbyn and the so-called People’s Party, the people would be completely frozen out.
This is the right moment to have a referendum, because as Europe changes, Britain is changing too. This is a truly great country that is now going places at extraordinary speed. We are the European, if not the world, leaders in so many sectors of the 21st-century economy; not just financial services, but business services, the media, biosciences, universities, the arts, technology of all kinds (of the 40 EU technology companies worth more than $1 billion, 17 are British); and we still have a dizzyingly fertile manufacturing sector.
Now is the time to spearhead the success of those products and services not just in Europe, but in growth markets beyond. This is a moment to be brave, to reach out – not to hug the skirts of Nurse in Brussels, and refer all decisions to someone else.
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