Wales, T'ai Chi, Bankers, Autistic Actors, Aid Donations, Corruption

 ...Moving to a Welsh castle from the Australian jungle (I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here) represents a big shift. And as a regular holidaymaker in Wales these past 20 years, I reckon they could do more to add a flavour of the country to the trials.

Snowdon Range
Kyffin Williams (1918-2006)
Photo Credit: The National Library of Wales [Public Domain]

... For instance they could challenge the remaining contestants to watch the rugby, England v Wales, in a packed pub in, say, Llanelli. Triallists would have to tell them to burst into a rendition of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot a minute after kick off. For every minute they lasted without getting flattened after that they would earn a meal for the camp.

Then at rush hour on the Monday morning, they would be forced to do the ten-mile stretch of the M4 near Cardiff in less than two hours or starve. I'd also send them into the Labour club in Merthyr Tydfil and get the one with the poshest English accent to shout: "Nye Bevan, eh? What a prick! The NHS is overrated!"

After that I'd disperse the celebrities all over the country, Newport, Neath, Carmarthen to Conway, and tell them to find a spot somewhere, anywhere, more than 50 yards from a massive plate of cakes. Can't be done. Not even in Snowdonia.

Who can last more than ten minutes in St Brides Bay without a wetsuit? I've done it in August, just. But in late November? Good luck with that. Afterwards, swinging back north, I want our heroes to go into a crowded pub in mid-Wales, approach some agricultural-looking locals and say: "Goodness me, your cottages are so keenly priced, I've just bought two as holiday homes. Let me buy you a drink; I feel sure we're going to be friends."

Anyone who survives all that will watch their successors next year, presumably back down under and gagging on a plate of kangaroo bollocks or whatever, and think: "You've got it easy, mate."

(Robert Crampton, The Times, 2020)

*He is as famous for his turbulent personal life as his acting skills: a hard-living, heavy-drinking, headline-grabbing Hollywood icon.

But a more gentle and rounded picture of Richard Burton is to be found in a major exhibition of his life opening at National Museum Cardiff...

The Kiss
Auguste Rodin (1840-1917)
Photo Credit: National Museum  Cardiff [CC BY-NC]

Becoming Richard Burton tells the remarkable story of how a boy from modest beginnings in south Wales developed into an international star.

It seeks to dig into the man behind the headlines. He was a global celebrity but also a family man, a bibliophile who despite his jet-set lifestyle always felt very much part of Wales.

Sally Burton, his widow... said she hoped people would inspect objects, many being seen in public for the first time, that tell the poignant story of his childhood, especially formative years growing up in the Taibach area of Port Talbot as a miner's son named Richard Jenkins.

His diary gives a glimpse into a childhood spent playing rugby and Monopoly, visiting the cinema, library and chapel in the second world war.

The diary is open on 6 February 1940 - "Had a fine afternoon especially with Burton who talked about Astronomy." "Burton" was Philip Burton, a talented English teacher who spotted the young Richard's acting talent and became his legal guardian.

Ms Burton said: "One of the interesting things about Richard is that he emerged from Wales, rebuilding and recreating himself as the country was rebuilding after the war."

Many items have been loaned by the Richard Burton Archives at Swansea University and Ms Burton. There is also a digital exhibition on the museum's website.

(Steven Morris, The Guardian, 2020)

(See Wales, Dec 15)

T'ai Chi

Tara Stiles is the undisputed queen of the New York yoga scene ... she has amassed 329,000 subscribers to her yoga YouTube channel and a client list that includes the actress and activist Jane Fonda, the model and lingerie designer Elle Macpherson and the author Deepak Chopra...

Anxiety, Head of a Girl
Jean-Baptiste Greuse (1725-1805)
Photo Credit: Victoria Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND]

Yet despite this Stiles is concerned that the ancient discipline has lost its way, and that far from turning attention away from the stresses of life, it has become a source of added anxiety for many... Stiles says that if we really want to unwind and seek inner calm, what we should try pursuing is the altogether less competitive - and, so far, less commercial - practice of t'ai chi.

"Yoga has become so fast-paced, competitive and a bit exclusive," Stiles says. "It can also be restrictive because of the fixed theories it adheres to and what happens is that, in trying so hard to achieve the postures, we miss out on the sense of inner peace that it should bring... Everyone is feeling stressed anyway. And by muscling our way through a yoga routine to get to the next pose, we aren't helping that."

"Our need to slow down can be met by t'ai chi, a traditional Chinese practice... defined by its gentle, fluid movements based on the movement of animals. It is designed to keep your body in constant motion and to promote serenity"...

Dozens of scientific studies have associated t'ai chi with everything from improved balance and muscle strength to better sleep, memory and mood. It has been shown in trials to help to reduce blood cholesterol levels, lower blood pressure, improve joint and chronic pain and boost bone health...

A review at the University of Auckland involving 9,263 participants concluded that t'ai chi yielded "psychological and physical benefits" including better flexibility, reduced depression and lower levels of anxiety. The same researchers also found that it improved lung capacity, balance, quality of sleep and even the running speed of volunteers...

Stiles predicts that it will become the wellness pursuit for the pandemic-weary in the year ahead and says that with trendy t'ai chi studios already springing up in New York and Los Angeles, we should expect to see them here...

(Peta Bee, The Times, 2020)

Another old element will arrive on the scene in the latest trend to attain "wellness" and good "mental health". In the search for the holy grail - "inner peace" -  the next tranche of charlatans, quacks, hoaxers and tricksters will appear and subvert what is, at best, a very good way to exercise and to meditate.

*... In a relentlessly goal-orientated world where even hobbies seem to come with performance targets attached, there's something relaxing about being publicly and unashamedly rubbish at something...

My own minor lockdown breakthrough was realising that yoga isn't meant to be a competitive sport. It's not about hovering miserably at the back of the class full of yummy mummies who can effortlessly do the splits, but about unrolling a mat somewhere quiet and being content just to stretch whatever will comfortably stretch...

For anyone who struggles with nagging inner demons, meanwhile, there's something comforting at the end of an exhausting year about the message that just doing your best (or even your half-arsed second best) will do...

(Gaby Hinsliff, The Guardian, 2020)

*...Religion is extremely demanding, but in the west it has sometimes become indulgent and self-centred. Hindu sages, for example, originally crafted the exacting disciplines of yoga to extirpate egotism, but in the west yoga has become little more than an aerobic exercise designed to induce calm.

The Buddha devised mindfulness to teach his monks that the self they prized so highly was illusory and must be discarded, but mindfulness is now used to help people feel more at ease and content with themselves...

The Buddha's story is especially interesting now. He defined human suffering as "sickness, old age and death", and historians believe that at this time there may have been a pandemic in the Ganges valley, where the newly founded cities attracted parasites that can flourish only in densely occupied environments...

(Karen Armstrong, The Guardian, 2020)

Bankers

People have inevitably been lining up to point out what is unrealistic about Industry, BBC Two's new eight-part drama about millennial graduate bankers in London...

Mammon
Elinor Proby Adams (1885-1945)
Photo Credit: UCL Art Museum [CC BY-NC-SA]

One thing that did ring true, though, was the opening sequence, where the protagonists were all interviewed aggressively for high-flying jobs and none confessed frankly to their primary motivation: earning shedloads of money. Indeed, one of the screenwriters. Mickey Down, a former analyst at an investment bank, remarked on the taboo in an interview with The Sunday Times. 

"It's the one thing you're not allowed to say in an interview: that you're there for money... Which is the primary reason why anyone is there."...

It is peculiar, when you think about it. Traders and bankers, after all, are in the business of money: they spend their days trying to make it for their clients and are notoriously well remunerated. If any one group of individuals were capable of talking about pay, it should be them. Yet the subject is off-limits in interviews. What is behind the contradiction? I... wonder whether branding experts might be partly to blame..

I am talking here about the marketing professionals who are responsible for BP declaring on its website that its "purpose is reimagining energy for people and our planet" (when the last time I looked it was still mainly in the business of flogging oil), and for British American Tobacco's claim on its website that it is "a leading multi-category consumer goods business with a purpose" to "Build a Better Tomorrow" (when the last time I looked it was in the business of flogging fags that kill people.)...

Barclays go around claiming incomprehensively, online, that their common purpose is "creating opportunities to rise... We are a company of opportunity makers working together to help people rise."... Credit Suisse defines its purpose vaguely online as "making progress happen"...

They have entered the world of euphemism and euphemistic cultures do not foster frankness...

According to The Times average starting salaries in investment banking stand at about £70,000, including bonuses, rising to £97,000 at top banks. According to Langbourn Partners, an executive search firm, you can expect to be earning up to £300,000 by your seventh year and £400,000 by your thirties. And if no one in banking can bring themselves to acknowledge these outrageous numbers in job interviews, it may well be because everyone involved knows that it is obscene.

(Sathnam Sanghera, The Times, 2020)

We have to ask ourselves if a radical review of wages and salaries, undertaken by an independent commission, is needed, if we are to live in a more just and equitable society. Can it be right that a surgeon, for example, earns less than a banker? Do we have to go along with the argument that this is how the market works? If a journalist working for The Times indicates that bankers' salaries are obscene you know that there is a powerful argument for reform. 

Below is one city's response to financial inequality.

*"San Francisco has some of the most extreme inequality anywhere in the world, and many of the best known companies growing here have some of the largest gaps between executive pay and worker pay," said Haney (a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the city's legislative body)... "The contrasts are especially stark in my district where I represent some of the richest parts of San Francisco and some of the poorest parts, with huge numbers of homeless people without access to healthcare... The health system was already very strained, and the pandemic has exposed it even more... It has shown how stark the inequality is, poor people could not afford to shelter, and people of colour and essential workers bore the brunt.

"The only way to solve inequality in San Francisco is to make those making huge profits share it... It is the 0.001% of society who are causing the problem, there has to be a reckoning or we will see more suffering and poverty."

Haney said that in the face of inaction from the national and state government, the city has decided to act on its own.

"It is a two-fold goal, to address inequality and bring in new resources to allow us to respond to the biggest emergency," he said. Haney hopes San Francisco could act as a template for others to follow. "San Francisco is a modern-day tale of two Two Cities everywhere you look, we can't have a nation that turns into that."

(Rupert Neate, The Guardian, 2020)

So what is San Francisco doing? The voters in the city overwhelmingly backed a new law to levy an extra 0.1% tax on firms that pay their  chief executives more than 100 times the median wage of their average worker. For example, Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and the world's third richest person, was paid £449 million last year - a median pay ratio of just under 10,000 when compared with the average salary paid to his workforce. The new tax is estimated to bring in an extra $60-140 million a year that will be spent on improving housing and healthcare provision for its poorest people.

(See Father Christmas, Dec 25)

Autistic Actors

Othello, the Moor of Venice
James Northcote (1746-1831)
Photo credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND]

News that the central character in the singer Sia's directorial debut, Music, is autistic, yet is played by an actor who is not, catapults us back to the "cripping up" days of film-making.

Memorable movies that cast non-disabled people as disabled characters include 1988's Rain Man, starring Dustin Hoffman as an autistic savant, and 1994's Forrest Gump, with Tom Hanks as the slow-witted protagonist. In 2020, 25 years since the Disability Discrimination Act and with disabled people bearing the brunt of Covid, Sia's casting is a misstep and reflects how far the arts have to go in truthful depictions of disability.

The singer-songwriter has reacted angrily to accusations of "ableism" in casting Maddie Ziegler in the titular role of Music...

More recent examples of "cripping up" include the film Come As You Are, which admirably focused on disability and sexuality but through non-disabled actors playing disabled people. None of this is as shameful as last year's play All in a Row, where an autistic character was played by a wooden puppet...

(Saba Salman, The i, 2020)

"Cripping Up" - refers to an able-bodied actor playing a character who is disabled.

Acting, as I understand it, is the telling of a story through characters. When people are cast for their roles in the story the casting director tries to find the most talented people for the part in question. It is then up to the producer or director to say yes or no. The key word is talent. Whether the character auditioning for the part is black, Welsh, able-bodied, Muslim, etc should not come into it. If the character chosen is chosen because he/she is the "best person for the part" then that's when the task is completed. Auditions and interviews for jobs should be the same.

No quotas of disabled, coloured, sexual persuasion,  religious, nationalistic or other forms of "positive discrimination" should be pursued. The only criterion should be talent, merit, skill - call it what you will.

Football is an excellent example of this in practice. The best players in the game, in the UK, are usually in the Premier league. The manager selects his team on their ability, their skill. Colour, religion, sexuality, nationality etc do not come into it. There are no quotas, no positive discrimination or targets. 

[See Cleopatra, Dec 22)

*Saba Salman criticises the use of non-disabled actors to play disabled characters in films, as "it matters enormously to disabled people and their families". She provides the example of Raymond played by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man (1988)

My brother, who had Prader-Willi Syndrome and severe learning disabilities, but also a photographic memory absolutely adored Rain Man, saying that he saw someone "just like me" in Hoffman's performance.

Great acting works and appeals across many spectrums, without the actor needing to have had the experiences of the character he or she is playing.

(Eccy De Jonge, London, The i, 2020)

*Sir, Your report that the BBC,s new director-general intends to secure a workforce that is 50 per cent female, at least 20 per cent black, Asian and minority ethnic, and 12 per cent disabled. Would it be out of order to ask what proportion of places is to be reserved for the cleverest, the most able and those judged most suitable for the job?

(JR Maddicott, Kidlington, Oxon, The Times, 2020)

Aid Donations 

...Let us hope Sunak... presses on with his plan to reduce the foreign aid from 0.7 to 0.5 per cent of gross national income. There will be screaming from a tainted poverty industry that has become so bloated at taxpayers' expense, of course, along with grandstanding from a few backbenchers who think this policy makes them look compassionate rather than simply callow...

The economist, Angus Deaton, who earned a Nobel prize for his lifetime's work studying the issues and warns that Western handouts can corrupt poor governments and stymie growth.

As Deaton once told me, we should not run policies "to keep an aid industry going and let them have moral superiority over the rest of us". Yet those torrents of cash - which doubled under a decade of Tory prime ministers - have not just propped up repulsive regimes and boosted the bank accounts of rich people in poor nations but corrupted an entire sector.

This is why famous charities covered up abuse to protect their brands, why fat-cat private consultants tried to deceive a parliamentary inquiry, why fake orphanages filled with trafficked children boom around the world, why civil servants doling out aid in the Department for International Development paid themselves more than any others in Whitehall before its abolition...

Just listen to the likes of David Miliband, who pocketed more than $1m (£750,000) last year at a charity heavily backed by British cash...

If politicians really want to assist global development they should tackle tax dodging to stem flows of dirty money, legalise drugs to weaken crime gangs, loosen borders for trade and people, end the sale of weapons to despotic regimes, perhaps even stop promoting disastrous lockdowns for poor nations with young populations.

One thing is certain: slashing billions from the aid budget will have little impact on poverty - although it will upset fat-cat charity chiefs, former prime ministers and a few Swiss bankers.

(Ian Birrell, The i, 2020)

Aid programmes have saved millions of lives, supported progress in education and have had a modest, positive impact on economic growth. This must be placed alongside the issue of corruption and money being wasted on dubious schemes. 

 (See Dirty Money, Nov 24 and Charity Executives' Pay, Oct 23) 

*Ian Birrell is absolutely right to advocate the ending of the foreign aid target.

Having spent seven years in Africa, mainly in Kenya and Eritrea, I have personal experience of the frustration many Africans feel about the "patronage" of the West, as huge sums are paid out to various governments and agencies to little effect.

Much of the progress in Africa has been due to the efforts of Africans themselves, and their suspicions are aroused as to the motives of Western business and governments.

(Nicholas Wood, Colchester, Essex, The i, 2020)

*While Ian Birrell makes some valid points, it is wrong to vilify the whole charity "industry" based on a few bad behaviours. He also thinks that bosses of charities should not be paid £100,000 salaries but should do it for the love of the job.

Does he think the Government should be judged by the same standards? If some aid money is spent badly, that is an argument for better governance not reducing the aid budget.

(Doug Jackson, Great Glen, Leicestershire, The i, 2020)

*For 20 years I worked in the aid sector and was involved in several projects with the Department for International Development. In my opinion, Ian Birrell's analyses and recommendations are 100 per cent correct. Seventy years of foreign aid have achieved zero. Time to call it a day.

(James Siggs, South Molton, Devon, The i, 2020)

*Sir, The UK should of course pay a fair share towards alleviating the worst poverty worldwide. But it does rather go against the grain for £400 million of taxpayer's money to be given to countries that are not only nuclear powers but also have space programmes, while there is difficulty in being able to provide poor children here with free school meals.

(Robert Rhodes, QC, London WC2, The Times, 2020)

Corruption

Christ and the Tribute Money
Peter Paul Reubens (1577-1640) (after)
Photo Credit: Burton Constable Hall [CC BY-NC-ND]

... In fact, corruption is an area where the UK's self-image and other people's image of us are at times severely at odds.

Our electoral system is exceptionally clean - except that a judge described the conduct of a local election in 2005 as something that "would disgrace a banana republic". Our justice system is incorruptible - except that I covered a court case where a court clerk took bribes to keep points off the driving licences of dozens of young people who would otherwise have been banned.

Three years ago, Robert Saviano, Italy's premier writer on mafia matters, described the UK as "without doubt the most corrupt country in the world, not  in terms of politics or police, but in terms of money-laundering", on the basis of findings by the NGO, Transparency International. Corruption in the UK, he said, was no less corruption for being less visible.

Perhaps now that the pandemic is casting a light on potentially questionable appointments and contracts, we will take another look at our supposed incorruptibility.

(Mary Dejevsky, The i, 2020)

(See Dirty Money, Nov 24.)