What political theatre ought to be
Former Labour education Secretary Estelle Morris, often a voice of reason, got it completely wrong last night on Front Row, when she was sniffy about the new political play, Little Platoons. We've forgotten what radical political theatre is supposed to be like, and Steve Waters' play Little Platoons has arrived at the Bush Theatre to remind us.
The curse of religion
Just back from Egypt, after ten days touring the monuments left by the ancient Egyptians, stunned by the engineering marvels that these people who lived 3,000 years before Christ could build. Vast underground tombs, with several huge rooms, carved into granite mountains, every inch of their walls decorated with careful, intricate, technically perfect pictures carved into the granite walls; the graves packed with marvellous furniture and ornaments made from precious metals; bodies preserved forever by processes which required detailed knowledge of biology.
And none of it designed to benefit a single human being. They made their tombs, they hid them skilfully, and they buried their kings and priests in them. No one was ever supposed to see them. All these wonders were designed only for the Gods and the dead. It was a religion for the dead, not the living.
Why isn't Julian Assange lionised throughout the USA?
Surely the founder of Wikileaks is a prototype American hero; just the sort of person Americans like to think they are.
He’s the enemy of big government, wants government held to account for what it does, wants to hand knowledge and power back to the people; he’s a rugged individualist and a remarkable entrepreneur, and brave. He seems to embody what are supposed to be American virtues. Yet all those rugged individualists in the USA want to put him in the electric chair.
David Chaytor: a politician with some integrity
I've turned away broadcasters wanting to interview me about David Chaytor tonight, and I wouldn't be writing this if I weren't flying out of the country tomorrow for two weeks, so that no one will be able to ask me any follow-up questions.
I like David Chaytor. I did not recognise the old, ill, white-haired, haunted man whose gaunt, terrified face stared out of tonight's papers. I have happy memories of a tall, erect, dapper, kind and occasionally rather amusing man, and of an intelligent and able politician, who knew, understood and cared about the environment and education; a politician of some integrity, held back by his independence of mind - if he'd been more willing to toe the Blair line, he'd have been in government.
Student demonstrations and the baby boomers
Today I'm sending copies of my Baby Boomers book to two old friends, both of whom I heard on Radio 4 this morning saying things about today's student demonstrations which I'd never have heard from them when we were all young.
Former New Statesman editor Peter Wilby defended tuition fees, and Ivor Gaber, Professor of Journalism at City University, who once occupied Warwick University and discovered the appalling truth about what corporate influence can do to a university, now feels obliged to defend it.