G and I saw Capote last night.
Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Truman Capote, a writer (author of Breakfast at Tiffanys and writer for the New Yorker) who becomes obsessed with the murder of a family in Kansas, and forms a bond with one of the men accused of the murder, Perry Smith (top row of photos). Through his friendship with Smith, Capote researches material for his book, In Cold Blood, which is published to critical acclaim.
Philip Seymour Hoffman is astonishing as Capote – capturing not only the mannerisms and speech of Capote, but also manages to convey some of the turmoil and contradictions of the man who both sympathises (perhaps even loves) the accused men, and yet exploits their predicament. Hoffman must be a candidate for Best Actor.
Definitely recommended.
Sir "Ming" Campbell, on a special edition of Any Questions on Wednesday evening, explained why Mark Oaten could no longer serve as the front bench spokesperson on Home Affairs:
Dimblebore: Does it matter if a member of your party with a responsible job has had a relationship with a prostitute of either sex? Does that matter for the discharge of the job or not? …
Merciless: I think it matters, or it may well be thought to matter, if you are the Home Affairs Spokesman and you have to comment about prostitution.
What new principle is this? If you go to a doctor, are you disqualified from being your party’s Health spokesperson? If you drive a car, are you forbidden to be the party’s transport spokesperson? Why does visiting a prostitute disqualify Mr Oaten from speaking for his party about prostitution?
The US Consul in Jerusalem, Jacob Walles, speaking on BBC Radio 4 PM today:
…In terms of our own policy and our own law, Hamas is considered to be a terrorist organization and we do not engage with terrorist organisations, we don’t have meetings with them, so as long as that remains the case we are not going to be having contacts with them …
Now that Hamas is the elected Government, how can it be a "terrorist organisation"? How are we now definining "terrorist"?
Ethan Zuckerman has been sleuthing to understand the inner workings of Google’s system to censor search results on its new China site. The details are unlikely to be interesting to everyone, but Google cannot relish the prospect of public discussions, in excruciating detail, of the machinery they have built to collaborate with repressive Chinese censorship:
Basically, it looks like two things are going on here: certain sites
are simply so controversial, Google.cn won’t offer links to them.
inurl: searches reveal that pages exist, but results won’t let you see
them, and site: searches give you the same result as if you searched
for a nonexistent domain. (There’s a slight difference – search for a
non-existent domain and you don’t get the message that certain results
may be removed…) Use a particularly controversial keyword
(falun gong, taishi – though not tibet or democracy) and you’re forced
into a search only of pages hosted in China… generally pages approved
by the government. (Search for “falun gong” on Google.cn for an example of the sorts of “impartial” content this turns up…)
Whether you think that Google’s decision was a commercial necessity, a foot in the door by providing more information in China, or a betrayal of its founding values, it is hard not to feel that Google is a different company today.
I see that Blogger News Network has decided to discontinue using Google Ads, and they list some other blogs that have made the same decision. (This would be a bit more convincing if the blog were not hosted by Blogger, which is owned by, ahem, Google. Update: I got this wrong. Blogger News Network are not hosted by Blogger – see the comments below. I don’t run ads on this site, but if I did, I wouldn’t run Google ads any more.
In case you are wondering about the title of this post, it is from Robert Browning’s poem, The Lost Leader. Browning wrote it when William Wordsworth abandoned his radical politics to become Poet Laureate "for a handful of silver". It is well worth reading in this context:
The Lost Leader
Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a riband to stick in his coat–
Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,
Lost all the others she lets us devote;
They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver,
So much was theirs who so little allowed:
How all our copper had gone for his service!
Rags–were they purple, his heart had been proud!
We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him,
Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,
Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,
Made him our pattern to live and to die!
Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,
Burns, Shelley, were with us,–they watch from their graves!
He alone breaks from the van and the free-men,
–He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves!We shall march prospering,–not thro’ his presence;
Songs may inspirit us,–not from his lyre;
Deeds will be done,–while he boasts his quiescence,
Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire:
Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,
One task more declined, one more foot-path untrod,
One more devils’-triumph and sorrow for angels,
One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!
Life’s night begins: let him never come back to us!
There would be doubt, hesitation and pain,
Forced praise on our part–the glimmer of twilight,
Never glad confident morning again!
Best fight on well, for we taught him–strike gallantly,
Menace our heart ere we master his own;
Then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us,
Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne!– Robert Browning
Kristen, Amy, me and Gabor at the track this morning (photo taken by G).
We did 3 sets of 4x400m at 5km race pace, with a very short (40 second) recovery between efforts.
(Click the photo for more photos from this morning.)
According to Forbes.com Stanford is going to podcast lectures, speeches and debates
In an unprecedented move, Stanford University is collaborating with Apple Computer to allow public access a wide range of lectures, speeches, debates and other university content through iTunes. No need to pay the $31,200 tuition. No need to live on campus. No need even to be a student. The nearly 500 tracks that constitute “Stanford on iTunes” are available to anyone willing to spend the few minutes it takes to download them from the Internet.
There is plenty of scope for greater global knowledge-sharing here.
I have written here before about the failure of the rich countries to take action to prevent the worsening suffering in Sudan (see here, here, here). Two million people are displaced – living in refugee camps – and three million people are dependent in international relief. The peace talks are grinding slowly, with no immediate hope of a conclusion. The AU force of 5,000 troops is insufficient to maintain peace in a region the size of France.
Rich countries accepted last year that they have a “responsibility to protect” people from genocide and crimes against humanity. Over the coming weeks our governments must live up to that responsiblity. They must adopt a meaningful mandate for the UN operation that will be taking over form the AU peacekeepers in a few months; they need to supply troops, equipment, logistics and other military support for the AU forces and for the UN peacekeepers; and they need to provide sufficient food, blankets, water and other essentials for the people of Darfur.
Kofi Annan, writing in today’s Washington Post says this:
When I visited Darfur last May, I felt hopeful. Today I am pessimistic, unless a major new international effort is mustered in the coming weeks.
Please write to your MP or write to your Congressional representatives. Now is the time for us to act. Please do not be one of those people who passed by on the other side.
Google has agreed to create a censored version of its search engine for China:
Initially, Google’s Chinese service will be limited to searching Web
pages and images. The company also will provide local search results
and a special edition of its news service that will be confined to
government-sanctioned media.
Now is a good time to re-read Google’s page about its mission, Our Philosophy. This is where Google originally claimed "you can make money without doing evil", a thought which was later echoed in Google’s IPO documents.
Here is some of what they say there:
4. Democracy on the web works. …
6. You can make money without doing evil.
Google is a business. The revenue the
company generates is derived from offering its search
technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed
on Google and on other sites across the web. However, you may
have never seen an ad on Google. That’s because Google does
not allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they’re
relevant to the results page on which they’re shown. So, only
certain searches produce sponsored links above or to the right
of the results. Google firmly believes that ads can provide
useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what
you wish to find….8. The need for information crosses all borders.
Though Google is headquartered in California, our mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world, so we have offices around the globe. To that end we maintain dozens of Internet domains and serve more than half of our results to users living outside the United States. …10. Great just isn’t good enough.
… Google’s point of distinction however, is anticipating needs not yet articulated by our global audience, then meeting them with products and services that set new standards. This constant dissatisfaction with the way things are is ultimately the driving force behind the world’s best search engine.
Just last month, Eric Schmidt and Hal Varian said this:
Don’t be evil. Much has been written about
Google’s slogan, but we really try to live by it, particularly in the
ranks of management. As in every organization, people are passionate
about their views. But nobody throws chairs at Google, unlike
management practices used at some other well-known technology
companies. We foster to create an atmosphere of tolerance and respect,
not a company full of yes men.
I now notice that the corporate philosophy illustrates "don’t be evil" with the example that advertisements should be unobtrusive; and Schmidt and Varian interpreted it to mean that management should not throw chairs. Google never actually said they would not cut a deal with an undemocratic regime to deny information and access to news to hundreds of millions of repressed people. But that was the kind of thing that "don’t be evil" implied to me.
I have some sympathy with Google’s dilemma – they are, after all, a shareholder-owned company, not a branch of Reporters sans frontières. But companies that say one thing and do another eventually get themselves into trouble.
Google was once the underdog; a quirky startup, doing one thing (search) really well: and quickly without all those annoying ads. We got cool free gizmos, like Google Earth and webmail with big storage. And it seemed to have a corporate philosophy that hackers and the internet generation could relate to. Today Google seems a lot more like Microsoft, AOL or any other large corporation. It buys companies to get their technology (what exactly has Google invented, since PageRank?). It introduces Digital Rights Management systems for video. And now it cuts deals with the Chinese government to expand its market, instead of standing up for uncensored access to the internet.
I am reminded of the closing paragraphs of George Orwell’s Animal Farm:
But as the animals outside gazed at the scene, it seemed to them that
some strange thing was happening. What was it that had altered in the
faces of the pigs? Clover’s old dim eyes flitted from one face to
another. Some of them had five chins, some had four, some had three.
But what was it that seemed to be melting and changing? Then, the
applause having come to an end, the company took up their cards and
continued the game that had been interrupted, and the animals crept
silently away. … Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they
were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the
pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to
pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say
which was which.
G and me working this afternoon
On the whole I am not an admirer of the right wing of the Liberal Party and so I have never had much time for Mark Oaten, though he seemed to me to do a good job giving grief to the Labour Government on its indefensible proposals to detain suspected terrorists without trial.
As we all know, Mr Oaten has been forced to withdraw from his position as the Home Affairs spokesperson for the Liberals because of revelations by a Sunday newspaper about his private life. My thoughts on this are not terribly original, but I should like nonetheless to stand up and be counted:
- There is precisely no public interest in Mr Oaten’s relationships. I do not care who he does or does not have any kind of sex with. It is shameful that the News of the World should publish it, and even more shameful that anybody should buy such a newspaper and so reward them for having done so.
- It is ridiculous to describe a 23 year-old man as a "rent boy". The term is presumably intended to link homosexuality to child abuse, and it is outrageous that it has been used in this case.
- The bloggers who claim to have contributed to making this story public should be ashamed of themselves. (Actually, as far as I can see the NoW ran a different story than the one that the bloggers put into their podcast, so it seems as if the claim is self aggrandisement). We bloggers should be standing up to the mainstream media, not joining it in the gutter. (Doctorvee and Chicken Yoghurt are both right on this.)
- The suggestion that Mr Oaten should not stand as a candidate for Parliament at the next election is absurd. On the contrary: whoever wins the leadership of the Liberal Party should defy the newspapers and restore Mr Oaten as a Front Bench spokesperson. They are supposed to be liberals, for chrissake. I hope the public would rather admire a party that simply ignored irrelevant and prurient interest in his private life.
Performancing for Firefox has released version 1.1 of its very impressive add-in for Firefox. It is a full featured blog editor that sits within Firefox, and makes it very easy to bash out a quick post while you are browsing. It is especially useful if you are mainly a "link-quote-comment" blogger. Easy to install (and uninstall if you don’t like – but trust me, you won’t want to.)
This seems to me to do most of what I would have wanted from Flock.
I had lunch with Quentin Stafford Fraser, the Executive Director of Ndiyo.
Ndiyo! is a project set up to foster an approach to networked computing that is simple, affordable and open.
The idea is to use very thin clients – basically small enough and cheap enough to build directly into a monitor – to access a central Linux or Windows server, over ethernet or over USB.
Technologies are being developed (see Newnham Research, for example) which could revolutionise the cost of providing computing services, for example in schools, internet cafes, businesses or government departments. Instead of providing each user with a beige box, with processing power, memory and in most cases a sotware licence, each user would access their own account on a central server. The result would be computing that is cheaper and easier to maintain.
I’m much more excited about this than I am about Nicholas Negroponte’s $100 laptop.
Executives from NBC in New York confirmed yesterday what many industry-watchers had been expecting and its admirers dreading. They intend pulling the plug on the programme for good when its current season – the seventh – ends in May.
I am enjoying BBC’s The Thick of It, a kind of a cross between Yes, Minister and The Office which has just transferred from digital to terrestial TV, but Hugh Abbot won’t take the place of President Bartlett.
It is almost enough to make me oppose term limits. At least for fictional presidents …
Danny Glover in the National Journal on the importance of blogging in US politics, arguing that bloggers are indirectly influential, because they help to frame issues and define the agenda.
As Hampton Stephens points out, there have been few, if any, examples in the US of blogs affecting US foreign policy (yet), though arguably they have been important in the UK in keeping some attention on the controversy over extaordinry rendition.
The former Chairman of Northern Foods and adviser to Tony Blair has called for EU agriculture subsidies to be scrapped:
Subsidies sustain inefficiencies and encourage farmers to grow crops on unsuitable land. Without subsidies, the inefficient will have to pull up their socks or pass production to another grower, almost certainly larger scale. “Without subsidies, unsuitable land will go out of arable cropping. Either way, with less supply reaching the market, prices should rise.” Haskins supports the World Trade Organisation contention that all export subsidies and import tariffs should be wound down, and quickly. That will lead to a new, much more competitive, era. …
Every industry has experienced drastic reform, thanks to scientific and technological innovation and competition. European farmers, who have been protected from change in an unsuccessful attempt to maintain a viable rural status quo, must, in their own long-term interests, change.
The important point is that we should abolish these subsidies not only because they do immense harm to farmers in poor countries; nor even because they are expensive for taxpayers and consumers in the EU; we should abolish them because they make it impossible for our own farming industry to become competitive and efficient.
Hilary Benn, the UK’s International Development Secretary, has anounced that the UK will be suspending all its direct budgetary aid to the Government of Ethiopia.
I confess that I have been proven completely wrong about Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi. A few years ago, I believed he would be one of Africa’s great leaders. He is a former freedom fighter turned democrat. He was a former communist (a follower of Enver Hoxa no less) turned free market liberal. I was impressed by the peaceful secession of Eritrea (which entailed Ethiopia giving up its access to the sea); and his decision not to invade Eritrea when Ethiopia defeated its neighbour in June 2000. Under Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia has moved to greater democracy, federal decentralisation, and economic liberalisation. Aid flows increased, in recognition of the fact that Ethiopia is one of the poorest large nations on the planet.
Over the last year, Ethiopia has suffered an ugly period of repression. In the elections in May last year the opposition won over a hundred seats in Parliament. But the opposition parties believe that the election was rigged, and that they should have been won. There were violent clashes in Addis Ababa in November, which spread to other towns. About 40 people were killed and many others
injured. Opposition leaders, civil society leaders and journalists have also been arrested. Many thousands of young people were detained.
Alex Singleton makes an interesting point about patent and copyright protection in the WTO (known as TRIPS):
Free trade liberals take the view that unilateral liberalisation is good for countries, regardless of what anyone else does. But those, like Pugatach, who believe it would be a disaster to liberalise without an IP agreement can only, logically, be opponents of unilateral free trade. Without such an agreement, free trade would be a race to the bottom. … It is not uncommon for market-oriented people to believe in the necessity of TRIPS and also in the virtue of unilateral liberalisation. But the fact is that you cannot serve two masters: if you think that civilization will crumble without TRIPS, you have to reject unilateral free trade.
Is there an intellectually valid reason for supporting unilateral trade liberalization while still believing in the need for multilateral copyright and patent agreements?
I think there probably is a defensible distinction. In short, it is this: there is a colossal market failure in the market for knowledge-based products which can only be corrected by government intervention, nationally and internationally, which menas that "free trade" in these goods would produce a sub-optimal equilibrium. That is why they are different from other products.
Continue reading
The rich countries give approximately $2 billion a year in aid to Vietnam, which is about 4% of Vietnam’s national income. Aid to Vietnam has inreased in recent years as the Government has pursued a successful policy of market liberalisation, which has brought down the number of people living in poverty and expanded incomes. Despite the progress that has been made, average income per head is still below $600 a year, and half of Vietnam’s 82 million people live below the poverty line.
There has been some more good news in the last few years. The abolition of quotas on shoe imports from 1 January 2005 has given Vietnam an opportunity to begin trade its way out of poverty. Vietnam has begun making not only sports shoes but also high quality, leather upper shoes, partly as a result of a bilateral trade agreement with the US in 2001. The shoe industry in Vietnam now employs at least half a million people, four fifths of them women; and their incomes support many more.
The EU is Vietnam’s biggest footwear market, absorbing 75% of Vietnam’s shoe exports.
This is, of course, excellent news if you want to see an end to poverty. It is not such good news if you are an Italian shoe-maker. In July 2005, under pressure from Italy and European shoe manufacturers, the EU Commission launched an investigation into whether shoes with
leather uppers from China and Vietnam were being "dumped" in Europe at
prices below the cost of production. The Commission has until April to decide whether to recommend adding duties to shoes imported from Vietnam and China.
According to the Guardian, the Commission is considering a "tariff rate quota" which would allow a set number of shoes to be
imported, with a levy imposed on any surplus; and the European
Branded Footwear Coalition, which has denounced the Commission’s investigations, is proposing a "minimum import price".
So it looks as if European consumers are going to be asked to spend about $10-20 extra on each pair of shoes, in order to protect an unprofitable industry in Europe, to keep the people of Vietnam poor, so that we can go on giving them aid.
How hard is it for people to understand that it would be in our interests and the interests of the people of Vietnam for us to buy the shoes that they can make more cheaply than we can?
I installed the lastest version of SUSE Linux on my home computer last weekend.
Linux is a free alternative to Windows. For technically-minded people, it can be more powerful, safer and much cheaper to use than Windows. It is now widely used by businesses for servers (most webservers run on Linux). Easy-to-use desktop versions have been slower to emerge, partly because many of the geeks who contribute their time (free) to write, debug, improve and document Linux have not always given a high priority to developing an easy user interface.
If you have been using Firefox web browser (and about 20% of the readers of this blog do) you will know that free, open source software can be considerably more powerful, more reliable, easier to use, and more safe than the proprietary alternatives such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. And what is true for the web browser is true for the entire operating system.
The latest version of SUSE is a joy to use. I have Windows XP on my laptop, and I can honestly say that I think SUSE is better desktop operating system. It comes laden with free software, from music players (without any Digital Rights Management) to a free alternative to Microsoft Office which does the job at least as well (and in some ways better).
Installing and updating Linux on my desktop was quicker and easier than installing and updating Windows XP on my laptop. Installing Windows required me to update the driver for my laptop’s sound card so that I could update successfully to Service Pack 2; install SP2 (which takes an hour or more); and then uninstall various Windows services that I do not need to secure my laptop. SUSE Linux, by contrast, recognised all my hardware automatically, installed all the correct drivers, and updated itself online in 20 minutes.
I’ve made some notes here about the installation, mainly relating to ensuring that the computer correctly handles multimedia (such as MP3 files and commercial DVDs).
In addition, I have set up my own IMAP mail server at home. This is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut (I now have a commercial strength, secure mail server) and is quite involved (just as it would be in Windows). But it is also rewarding, as it gives me a very powerful and easy to use central mail system which I can access in many different ways. Full details here.
Most intelligent people who are not royalists also do not spend much time worrying about the monarchy. On the whole, we reckon that this is not the system that we would have chosen, but there is little to be gained by trying to change it. But the British monarchy is more than an interesting quirk of history. Quite apart from (important) philosophical issues about legitimacy and rights, here are six practical ways in which the continued existence of monarchy harms our politics, society and economy which are, in my view, sufficient to cause us to be more active in seeking an alternative.
- Royal prerogative gives extensive, unaccountable power to the executive.
The government of the day, especially the Prime Minister, exercises enormous patronage and exercises considerable power, all in the name of royal prerogative. These powers enable the executive to appoint and dismiss ministers, dissolve parliament, grant clemency and pardons, award honours, declare war, declare a state of emergency, sign treaties, issue passports, deport foreign nationals, create universities, designate cities, and to make thousands of appointments. All these powers are exercised with no legislative oversight or control. In the absence of a monarchy, the legitimate authority for these decisions would reside in Parliament, which could choose whether and how to delegate decisions to the excecutive, and how the executive would be held to account for the exercise of those powers. This alone, in my view, is sufficient reason to want to abolish the monarchy. - The monarchy has real political power to appoint and dismiss the Prime Minister.
In the event of an election which does not produce a decisive result (the likelihood of which is increased by the possiblity of electoral reform) the monarch has real powers to decide who should form a government. The present monarch, Queen Elizabeth, has been actively involved in determining the appointment of Prime Ministers in 1957, 1963 and 1974. Furthermore, there is precedent for the dismissal of a Prime Minister with an absolute majority: one of my first political memories is the dismissal of Australian Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, by the Governor General of Australia (the representative of the Queen) despite having a clear electoral majority of the lower House. Many Australians believed that they lived in a country in which the outcome of an election determined who would form a government, and were startled to find that the (written) Australian constitution makes no mention of political parties, the Cabinet or of the position of Prime Minister, all of which turned out to be no more than "conventions" by which the Australian Westminster-style democracy operates, just as they are in the UK. - The monarchy interferes in our day-to-day political life.
Aside from the power to arbitrate the result of an unclear election, the monarchy (and indeed the wider Royal family) exercises real political power. Civil servants produce regular briefings on domestic and foreign policy for the Queen and other royals. The Prime Minister has a weekly meeting with the Queen to discuss current policy issues (NB in a telling piece of Palace jargon, this is an audience of the Queen, not with the Queen), and Government Departments regularly receive requests for briefings on specific issues from the Queen and other senior royals. The royals are not getting all these briefings – over and above what they can read in the newspapers – out of idle curiousity. They see it is as their legitimate role to influence government policy (as Bagehot said, 'the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn'). It is no secret Prince Charles and his staff have had protracted discussions with civil servants and ministers on policy issues such as environment, architecture, nanotechnology andagriculture.As well as interfering privately with the deliberations and decisions of Ministers and senior officials (not for nothing are they technically 'Ministers of the Crown' and 'Crown Servants'), the Royal family uses its access to the media to influence political debates – for example, the Palace recently let it be known that the Queen was concerned about the proposed new EU Constitution.
- The monarchy perpetuates the class system and undermines the proper recognition of merit
There is not much wrong with Britain that isn't the fault, one way or another, of the class system. At the apex of the system is our hereditary Head of State, Governor of the Church of England, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces and head of the Judiciary (all one person!). Until we turn our back on hereditary power at the top of our political, military and religious institutions, we have little chance of shaking off the mentality of a society defined by class. Growing up in Britain, every child (but one) knows that they could never become Head of State, simply by virtue of being born to the wrong family.The Royal Family buttress their position with unearned symbols of achievement. They accept posts as Chancellors of universities, debasing the currency of academic merit. They appoint themselves to top military ranks and medals that they have not earned,belittling the work of true military professionals and the memory of those whomade genuine sacrifices. They allow themselves to be nominated as patrons of charities, degrading the efforts of those who make genuine contributions and have real expertise.
- The monarchy undermines our reputation abroad and is bad for business (even tourism).
The antics of our royal family certainly evoke an amused interest among foreigners. But the pomp and pageantry of Royalty project Britain as a theme park of Beefeaters, castles and soldiers in bearskins. In short, most foreigners see our royals as we see the King of Swaziland. This is a public relations disaster for our (economically important) efforts to project Britain as a modern democracy, with commercial strengths in modern sectors such as financial services, biotech and new technologies. The Royal Family does not convey the brand that our high-tech exporters want to project. If we want young people from around the world to come to our universities, or international investors to put their money into our businesses, we need to offer more than a quaint history. It is sometimes argued that royalty is good for tourism: but France has been a republic for over 130 years and attracts three times as many foreign tourists as Britain. The Palace of Versailles, which is the biggest tourist attraction in Europe, has more visitors than Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace combined, in part because it is fully open to the public, all year round. The British nation's royal art collectionsand memorabilia, currently hidden from us by the monarchy, could behoused in galleries that would be a huge boost to tourism, both from within the UK and from abroad. - The monarchy makes it impossible to separate Church and State
One reason why we still have an established church in England, which discriminates in favour of one religion above all others, is the difficulty of disconnecting the two while the Queen is Head of both Church and State. This is a piece of religious discrimination which is a dangerous anachronism in a multi-cultural, mainly secular society.
In principle it is possible to imagine reforms which retain a monarchy but which avoid many of the harms described here. For example, we could disestablish the Church of England; or Parliament could take stronger powers to override the royal prerogative. But while we have a monarchy, especia
lly one with substantial political influence, it is hard to see how such changes would be achieved, or why we would want to keep the trappings of monarchy if we were able to reform these institutions It is hard to imagine our royalty evolving into a Scandinavian-style monarchy presiding over a genuinely classless society.
For as long as we are subjects, not citizens, of our country, our political and social attitudes will retain a mediaevel flavour which is harmful to our image of ourselves and the attitude of others towards us.
Of course, there are more important issues than the continued existence of monarchy: but that does not mean that it is irrelevant. Those of us who care about the character of our politics and society should consider moving beyond indifference to monarchy; we should instead actively call for it to be replaced with a modern, democratic alternative.
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