The two charters for the Radical Consultation were hammered out over the weekend and are now up on the website. I am gradually adding content but for the time being only the Conference Bookshop, Who’s Who and Papers have been placed in the public domain.
My daughter remarked that the brochure we sent out with The Ecologist last month was weak on what the conference is about. In fact she has identified a broader weakness…the abandonment of our original intention to focus on youth recruitment. So a second flyer is now needed targeted at a younger audience.
Adam Crosland is working on a flyer for the Any Real Questions Show but another is needed with Ms Leviathan on one side and the two charters on the other. This should include a call for lyrics and MP3 files and act as a recruiting poster for the Knights of Gaia…who could set up their own Fringe Meeting at the conference.
On Friday night the British Broadcasting Corporation descended from on high and dwelt among us for sixty fun-filled minutes in the heart of Swindon. ‘Tonight Any Questions comes to you from the Pilgrim Centre in Swindon in the lovely county of Wiltshire. On tonight’s panel are Colin Blakemore of the Medical Research Council, Jackie Ballard from the RSPCA, the columnist Sir Max Hastings and Roger Scruton who has written lots of clever books. I am your host Jonathan Dimbleby. The first question please.’ Listen to us clapping…courtesy of the BBC.
I submitted a question about the abuse of parliamentary time by the Labour Government to force through their ban on fox hunting and John Papworth wanted the panel to bedazzle us with their thoughts on toxic waste dumping in their own backyard…Purton P & Qs is trying to stop the one in the village importing more muck. But we missed the cut.
A factotum from the BBC News Department was brought along to do the Warm-up Routine and duly assured us that Gilligan Moments in news broadcasting were the norm when asked why the BBC routinely uses different language to describe similar acts by Israel, Hamas or Hezbollah.
John Papworth…not one to be kept down…got in a question at the tail-end of the warm-up session while the Great and Good were trooping onto the stage. He wanted to know why the BBC puts police reports and other trivia in their news bulletins when listeners want to know what is really going on in the world? The response was along the lines of 'We do our best. Nobody's perfect. It is not easy to please all the people all the time.' Factotum was cut short by the eight o’clock news…which duly confirmed John's point.
My impression was of conversations at an Islington dinner party with its rather sophisticated posing...at least by the standards of a Wine & Cheese Party in Rye…and typical of much Radio 4 intellectual chatter. Newspaper columns talking at each other. The role allotted to the audience by the BBC was to deliver dutiful applause at the drop of the clever one-liner so I am left with the memory of a chimpanzee' tea party. The panellists were neither politicians nor stand-up comics so witty aphorisms were rather thin on the ground. The BBC could have stayed in London and faked the local audience. The age of the Instant Applause Machine is nigh. Abandon hope all ye who love live broadcasts.
All this is a little unfair to the BBC because Any Questions is the first half of a two-part programme with the sequel Any Answers giving the Great Unwashed the chance to challenge the panelists and their conventional wisdoms with their own uninformed prejudices. But there was not much atmosphere in the hall and sensing this Jonathan Dimbleby wound up the show several minutes early and tried to get the Swindon ordeal over as soon as he could. This confused Max Hastings…wise in the ways of the Beeb…who asked whether they were still on air. Nobody seemed to know.
It is four weeks since Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers prompting a ground and air assault on Lebanon by the Israeli Army. In that time 932 people have been killed in Lebanon with 75 missing presumed dead. 29 Lebanese Army soldiers have been killed. 3293 Lebanese have been wounded…half of them children. 913000 Lebanese have been displaced…a third of them children. A hundred Israelis have been killed and at least two thousand wounded. Ten thousand Israeli soldiers are currently fighting Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon.
Three thousand rockets have been fired at Israel by Hezbollah…the daily average is 90 rising to 169 over the past five days. Israel has flown 8700 bombing sorties, destroying 146 bridges and 72 roads. Up to thirty thousand tons of oil have spilled into the Mediterranean since an Israeli air strike on Jieh Power Station. Every country except the USA and the UK is calling for an immediate cease-fire. No UN Resolutions have been passed about the conflict.
After the Any Questions Show at the Pilgrim Centre in Swindon Duncan Butler boldly organised the distribution of conference brochures as the audience left the hall. These were surprisingly well received. The good news was the absence of small heaps of discarded brochures at the foot of the stairs. The bad news was that the only person who refused one was The Mayor of Swindon.