Opponents of similar strength in Egypt

Uncompromising opponents of roughly equal strength is a recipe for political and social instability and this has become the condition for the people of Egypt. Removing the former ruler, President Hosi Mubarak, was the easy part. The establishment of a new government is harder, as Carl Leiden and Karl M. Schmitt, authors of The Politics of Violence: Revolution in the Modern World, point out. Political life has become difficult because the two main political groupings are becoming more and more clearly distrustful of each other and are mutually exclusive. These groups are President Mohammed Morsi and his Islamist allies opposed by National Salvation Front, co-ordinated by Mohamed El Baradei, the former UN diplomat. Their confrontations are witnessed on Egypt’s streets daily. Liberal Democracy is a fragile form of government. Egyptian politics does not really embody some of the conditions needed for liberal democracy to succeed, as Gilbert Pleuger points out in the section, ‘The Democrat’s Society and Its Members’ of his exploration of Liberal Democracy†; namely a tolerance of other people’s point of view and the absence of unassimilable minorities.

In the Sempringham office, there is money on the intervention of the Egyptian Army within two years. Unlike the police, the events of the last two years have barely affected their foundations and operation and they have kept, significantly, out of the public eye. To catch up on the issues look at [that is, search for] Q&A: Egypt constitutional crisis [12 December 2012] on the BBC Internet site.
† The Good History Students' Handbook, Sempringham, 1993, pp 134-6

Contributor: Geoff Williams. Sempringham [ehistory.org.uk] eLearning Office.

Hindsight and History. Entwistle and Savile

In the Sempringham office we saw about half of the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee questioning of George Entwistle on 23 October and the event brought several thoughts strongly to mind. The most powerful was the members of the committee inability to see the events they were investigating not with the advantages of hindsight but from the perspective of the time. This inability was especially marked in connection with the brief ‘conversation’, about 10 seconds in length, last December, between George Entwistle and Helen Boaden, BBC director of news, in which the Newsnight investigation, later aborted, was mentioned. It was surprising to this writer that the Committee members were unable to have a feel for the modus operandi of the BBC bureaucratic management culture.

If issues were as ‘clear cut’ as the committee members seem to assume then Jimmy Savile’s actions would have been ‘outed’ years ago. For historians these events are a reminder that one of historians' great challenges is to see the past as it was, a task elegantly defined by H.R. Trevor Roper’s [Lord Dacre] valedictory lecture as Regius Professor in the University of Oxford, History and Imagination, Clarendon Press, 1980

Is it significant that the members of the media frequently seek ‘a cover up’ and that the trend to seek compensation, promoted in the US east coast, continues to spread?

Contributor: Geoff Williams. Sempringham [ehistory.org.uk] eLearning Office.

GCSE Grades, August 2012, and The Rule of Law

The controversy over the GCSE English grades rolls on and with time and probing there are more layers and dimensions to the issue. There has been a statement in the House of Commons, the Commons Education Committee has started an inquiry and many have spoken out, such as Dr Christopher Ray, chairman of the Head Masters' and Headmistresses' Conference (HMC) and Russell Hobby, general secretary of the NAHT. There are calls for Ofqual's Chief Executive Glenys Stacey, to resign. The figures make clear that a fair number of English candidates who, by criteria and statistics, expected to gain a Grade C failed to do so as the per cent of candidates with A-C grades fell from 65.4 per cent in 2011 to 63.9 per cent in 2012. As English is a central GCSE, the educational journey for those who failed to gain a Grade C was changed. Without being too stuffy and I am capable of that, this can be seen as a constitutional issue, a matter of ‘the rule of law’. In a Sempringham [new perspective, March 2005] concepts series’ article on the rule of law, Gilbert Pleuger stated the rule of law gave emphasis to ‘citizens’ equality before the law and the predictability of actions: in short, enforcement of law is fair and not arbitrary and thereby citizens have security’. While I agree that the GCSE English grades are an administrative question and not a major ‘political liberty question’, I suggest that there is a ‘rule of law’ aspect that impinges strongly on a small swathe of teenagers and their families.

Contributor: Geoff Williams. Sempringham [ehistory.org.uk] eLearning Office.

Why Danny Boyle should be Chancellor / FRHistS

Reports suggest that Danny Boyle’s 2012 Olympics ceremony hugely engaged, if not enraptured, the worldwide audience TV audience. He brought to attention features of Britain and its History. It is worth recall that not only were the English the first modern regicides [Charles I], an action that led eventually, step-by-step, to representative government, later followed notably by the French [1793], Britain was the first to introduce industrial methods of production, followed by the Germans and French some hundred years later, and then by the US and the sequence of industrial societies including, notably and more recently, the Chinese with their industrial revolution. Users of high-spec mobile phones will be aware technological and manufacture change is rapid but History [in the form of 'heritage'] can never be created and changed. Britain has History ‘in spades’. In years soon to begin, Britain can earn needed foreign currency by strong substantial History tourism and huge swathes of manufacture structures should be preserved to this end, not just Cromford, Saltaire, Bournville … helped by Beamish and so on, but much, much more preservation. What is needed is more of a long-tern, strategic, whole-Britain History-trial view and less of local and knee-jerk decisions.

Contributor: Geoff Williams. Sempringham [ehistory.org.uk] eLearning Office.

Political prosecutions and the ‘rule of law’

Political institutions and politics are like a river; a river that changes as it flows through an evolving landscape. An identification of ‘spin’ and the quickened communications consequent to news from mobile communication and video has encouraged immediate ‘knee-jerk’ political responses to events over the last two decades. It is a similar pattern to that seen in the Arab Spring. More disturbing, there are signs that our liberal democracy is allowing political prosecution; that is prosecution as a result of public or political pressure and it is a development that can encroach on the rule of law. As was noted in our concepts article in March 2005†, the rule of law provides ‘equality before the law and the predictability of actions: in short, enforcement of law is fair and not arbitrary and thereby citizens have security.’ Without taking a partisan stance on the ‘Murdoch issue’, what is in mind is the arrest of Rebekah Brooks and five others on 13 March 2012 in connection with phone hacking, an issue that has previously been put aside.
† new perspective Vol 10, No 3. March 2005
Contributor: Geoff Williams. Sempringham [ehistory.org.uk] eLearning Office.

Greece, a case of déjà vu?

While inspecting my bunions recently, and pondering what can be learned from Chancellor Angela Merkel's body language, the sense of a revisit became strong. To clarify: in April 1941 Hitler launched a campaign through the Balkans to occupy Greece after the inadequate military actions of his Axis partner, Benito Mussolini … and then there came to attention the developing and hardening attitude of Germany to the Greeks and their sovereign debt uber-mega difficulties. So, is history cyclical (the Greeks were among the first to suggest that) or are some issues so long lived that they remain open for very many decades, say over 70 years? It's inspection and ponder time, real time, big time.

Contributor: Geoff Williams. Sempringham [ehistory.org.uk] eLearning Office.