Stamped Out

On November 1st 1765 the British implemented the highly unpopular Stamp Acts. The intention was to force colonists to use paper manufactured, embossed and taxed in England. The tax raised on the paper was to pay for Crown Troops stationed in the colonies.

This act came into force in the same year as the equally unpopular Quartering act, which billed colonies for the housing and feeding of British Crown Troops.

To the highly independent and self reliant American colonists this looked like they were paying twice for soldiers they considered surplus to requirements. The militias considered themselves more than capable of defending themselves against any risks posed by natives or the French.

If you tell your masters that you don’t need these soldiers and your master insists you have them, it increasingly looks like the soldiers are there to enforce rather than to protect.

While the colonists grumbled about the quartering act the Stamp acts seem to have been the last straw. They sparked widespread acts of disobedience, boycotts of English goods, riots and personal assaults on tax collectors. The movement that grew up around the stamp acts adopted the slogan “no taxation without representation”.

Despite the repeal of the Stamp Act within 6 months the bond of trust between England and the Americas was broken. Within 10 years the American colonies were lost to the British Crown.

The British Parliament exhibited arrogance, demanded obedience and seemed entirely deaf to the appeals of moderate voices in the American colonies. It is an insular deafness that still exists in a nation that no longer has an empire.

It is the deafness I experienced in my own childhood, when Northern Ireland collapsed into violence under the relentless oppression of the Catholic minority by the Protestant majority. When the organs of the police state could no longer function the reaction of the British Parliament was to create a state governed by martial law. They sent in the British Army to “impose” order. Did they learn nothing from 1776? Nothing from 1921 in Ireland? Nothing from India or Kenya? Is the Westminster parliament so oblivious to the lessons of history?

It is a deafness that has resulted in the split with the EU. This time instead of alienating 13 distant American colonies the British Parliament is alienating its European neighbours and it’s own territories of Northern Ireland, Scotland and even English communities.

And who are the troops they send in to “Impose Order?” Callow youths, ignorant, uneducated and lost in a foreign land. Canon Fodder.

Anthem for Doomed Youth; by Wilfred Owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
the shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
and bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
and each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

-=o0o=-

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Coddle

The complex history of Dublin in a bowl of simple food.

Coddle is a traditional Dublin dish and is very particular to Dublin and Dublin alone. Many country people in Ireland have never heard of coddle and fewer have eaten it. Most take one look at the boiled sausages and turn their head. Fools!

Firstly a bit of history. The culture of the sausage in Dublin was introduced by German butchers. Growing up we had butchers with names like Spicer, Youksetter, Hafner, Olhausen, Seezer, Horlacher and Mogerley. In the late 19th century German food was massively popular in Ireland and in Britain. The outbreak of WW1 ended the love affair for the English, and the German-Irish immigrant butchers also struggled, but many did survive. Perhaps the people of Dublin felt that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” and a German Sausage was sticking it up to the oppressor or maybe we just have a love of sausages.

Traditionally many German bratwurst are boiled and it may be from this tradition that the Coddle arose. You also need to look at the cooking technology of the day. Dublin was famously a city of tenements. When the Irish had their own parliament Dublin was a wealthy and fashionable city. The gentry came up to Dublin from their estates in the country for “the Season” while parliament was sitting. The Season was marked by Theatre productions, Operas and most importantly the Balls. Young ladies had a debutante season when they “came out” and were auctioned off on the marriage market like cattle at a mart. The well to do lived in grand Georgian mansions in areas like Mountjoy Square and Henrietta Street. When James Fitzgerald, the Earl of Kildare, built his home on the unfashionable South Side of Dublin he led a migration. The nobility drifted from the North Side to St. Stephens Green, Merrion Square and Fitzwilliam Square.

Over time the fine Georgian houses of the North Side slid down the social ladder and were rented to less salubrious tenants. When the Acts of Union were passed in 1800 the Irish Parliament closed and the wealth migrated to Westminster. The Dublin houses fell to rack and ruin. Landlords adopted the practice of filling them, room by room, with families of poor tenants. One Georgian mansion which housed an Earl and his servants in 1800 became home to 10 destitute families by 1900. Dublin in 1900 had some of the worst slums in all of Europe. The occupying British Army had access to the largest Red Light district in the world, stretching almost from O’Connell Street down Montgomery Street (Monto Town) which ran from Talbot Street through Foley St, Sherriff St and all the way down the North Wall servicing the Royal Navy along the docks.

Former bedrooms and living rooms were ill-equipped for cooking. Many of these families were reduced to cooking on a fireplace, a coal stove or on a single gas burner. They had a kettle to boil water for tea and a pot to boil the food. Oatmeal for breakfast. Some kind of stew for dinner. The evening meal was probably using what was left from the dinner stew, mopped up with some bread and butter. If you had a frying pan it gave you options to fry bacon, sausages, fish, bread and leftover boiled spuds. The “Irish Breakfast” was invented as a tea time dish.

Coddle is made with five ingredients, and maybe a sixth at a push. The purity of Coddle should be protected like the Reinheitsgebot, the German Beer Purity law of 1516. Coddle contains four solid ingredients; Irish pork sausages, bacon, onions and potatoes. You add water to boil them. The sixth ingredient is thickening, but more of that later.

If you see carrots in the pot it is not Coddle. I will die on a hill for this. Carrots have no place in a coddle. If you see sausages that have been browned in a pan then it is not Coddle. I don’t know what that is, but Coddle it ain’t. There are wannabee gourmet chefs all over Dublin these days trying to reinvent what is a perfect dish. Yes it does look pale and insipid when you see it, but Coddle is about the taste. It was never meant to be a “Cheffy” dish. It is peasant food.

Raw pork sausages, raw pieces of bacon (cheap trimmings), quartered onions and peeled potatoes go into a pot. You top it up with water and put it on the stove on a gentle simmer. You do not fry it off first. No frying! When the potatoes are cooked through it is ready.

At this point we come to the great Coddle Schism: Brown or White. You can eat the coddle exactly as it is with a thin broth, but most cooks like to thicken the broth to a gravy. In Dublin there are two main camps.

Camp 1 mixes cornflour with milk in a cup until it is dissolved. Add some of the hot stock to the cold milk in the cup (never the other way round) and return the cornflour thickening to the pot. This gives you a white gravy.

The competing camp use a browning such as Bisto Gravy to make a brown coddle. These days it is probably Gravy Granules. Honestly it makes little difference to the flavour. I think the brown version looks slightly more appetising. But I grew up in a brown coddle clan.

Parsley sprinkled on top is a Cheffy introduction. Families in tenements did not have window boxes growing parsley. It is not a dish that needs salt, that is amply supplied by the bacon. But it might benefit from pepper, and in old fashioned Dublin that meant white pepper. Don’t be tempted to use black pepper – it’s just wrong.

Finally you can serve it with a plate of buttered bread, which was a given along with the pot of tea, the jug of milk and the bowl of sugar. Some Dubliners will wax lyrical about Batch loaves but the bread of my youth was the Turnover.

On Raglan Road; by Patrick Kavanagh

On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
that her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
and I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.

On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion’s pledge,
the Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay –
O I loved too much and by such and such is happiness thrown away.

I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that’s known
to the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone
and word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say.
With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May.

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
that I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay –
when the angel woos the clay he’d lose his wings at the dawn of day.

-=o0o=-

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The 5th Estate

The Tennis Court Oath, Versailles, 1789

In the traditional model of rule, dating back to feudalism, there were three powers in the realm.  These were called the “Estates General” in pre-revolutionary France.

The first, and foremost was the Lords Temporal, made up of the hereditary royalty of the realm.  In effect these were the main landowners.

The second estate was the Lords Spiritual, the Cardinals and Bishops who ruled the church and wielded the power of “God” on earth.

The third, most numerous, and also the weakest estate was traditionally made up of commoners.  This is not to say they were poor peasants.  In fact the “Commons” were merchant princes, bankers, lawyers and aldermen selected to represent the interests of the middle classes.

Three great events in the 17th and 18th Centuries changed the dynamics of the Estates General forever.

• In 1649 the British Parliament ordered the execution of King Charles, shattering the concept of “Divine Right” to rule.
• In 1776 13 colonies of the United States of America declared their right of self-determination, a right of the 3rd estate to be free of the rule of the 1st estate.  No taxation without representation!
• In 1789 the French 3rd estate seized power from the 1st and 2nd estates and firmly issued in the age of enlightenment.

Never again were the 1st and 2nd estates to hold power in the Western world without the agreement of the 3rd estate.

In the midst of this redefinition of the balance of power Edmund Burke, an Irish peer, made an address to Westminster on the reporting of parliamentary business by the Press.  He pointed out that the Press represented a 4th Estate which potentially wielded more power than the 3 estates general.  It proved to be a prophetic prediction.

Today almost every coup d’état begins with the seizure of the organs of the media, the presses, the radio stations and the TV stations.  Politicians and their military arms know that the media battle is as important as any conflict of arms.  Tight autocratic rule is only possible where the rulers control the media, the 4th estate.

The concept of a 5th estate, non mainstream media, emerged in the counter cultural revolution of the 1960’s, originally as the eponymous Detroit Newspaper.  It spread to a variety of media, but was restricted by traditional constraints on output.  The odd piece of output made a splash, such as the “Anarchists Cookbook”, but most of the small publications and independent radio broadcasts were lost to tiny circulations.

Then the internet arrived.  The 5th estate has blossomed on media such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and in the darkest corners of the deep web.

Despite the best efforts of autocratic regimes it is very difficult to control the 5th Estate.  China is the best example of a state that exerts tight control.  Even the great firewall of China is porous.  The regime cannot control all the information that filters in and out of the nation.  People import smartphones from abroad, or use various tricks to bypass state control of the firewalls.

The “Arab Spring” revolutions in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and the Middle East were made possible by the 5th Estate.  Rebels were able to use social media to tear apart the propaganda and lies of the ruling elite.  They then used social media to coordinate and organize protests, uprisings and even battles.

Mainstream journalists use and abuse social media to bypass super injunctions by courts to control celebrity scandals.  They breach the laws of sub judice reporting in a manner that is impossible in the 4th estate.  Whistleblowers use social media to release data into the public domain including Julian Assange, Linda Tripp, Edward Snowdon, Bradley Manning etc.

The impact of the 5th Estate on Western Democratic politics is only now beginning to crystalize.

The rules are being formed but we get an emerging sense of the landscape.
Cover-ups don’t work.
Fraud is uncovered.
Nepotism is exposed.
Secret donations do not remain secret.
Past statements of politicians are dredged up and used as a stick to beat them.

The age of the media savvy politician and his spin-doctor sidekick is over.
We are entering a new era of politics, where consistency, honesty and openness are the sine qua non of political survival.

Large central parties are fracturing and falling apart as their corrupt members are isolated and exposed.
For the individual politician loyalty to the constituency is more important than loyalty to the party.
We see this in the rise of the independents, the mavericks, those outside mainstream politics.  The Trump factor.

The new era will favour smaller groupings with tighter internal agreement on issues and higher levels of trust between members.  “Family” style groupings who share values.
Governments will be by coalitions of these small groups.
The practice of governing will become more fluid as alliances are made, broken and reformed based on prevailing economic and political priorities.

The 4th estate has been increasingly controlled by the wealthy, who can afford to buy the media, and establish editorial standards.  Would the Watergate Scandal see the light of day in the current media climate?

By contrast the 5th estate is uncontrollable.  It can be influenced by those with the largest social media followings.

In the next 20 years you will see attempts by the wealthy to influence the 5th estate by buying influence.  Anyone who is seen as “bought” will rapidly lose traction.

King Canute (or Cnut) is famous for trying to hold back the tide.
In fact he was criticizing sycophantic nobles who accorded him divine powers.
He demonstrated that for all his power he was unable to order the tides.
Canute would understand just how uncontrollable is the 5th Estate.

Canute holds back the tide

 

The Greek crisis exposes how the European Union has taken a wrong direction.

The European Union was founded on principles of social democracy.  Rooted in the Christian principles of “Rerum Novarum” the European experiment used to sit comfortably between the extreme worlds of US Capitalism and Russian Communism.  It offered a particular type of bargain, with protections for those at the bottom of society, and controls on rampant exploitation of people and workers.

In any politically led economic system we find politicians struggling to make sense of the complex interplay of economic factors.  A populist politician is unlikely to have a PhD in economics.  When politicians run into a capability gap they rely on specialist advisers.

Ideally these advisers should be free of vested interests, and should give dispassionate counsel.  At the most senior levels of the EU, and the respective national governments, we are seeing a different dynamic at play.

In the USA the nickname for the Treasury Dept in the Whitehouse is Government Sachs or the “Goldman Sachs” dept, referring to the large number of treasury secretaries from that investment house.  If you recruit stockbrokers to run government they create policies that favour the interests of big finance.  They push for lower corporate taxes, they cut welfare, government spending and reduce government regulation of industry.

These are exactly the forces we are seeing now in the European Union.  The post 2007 austerity programme was a philosophy designed by bankers for bankers.  For the average European the austerity programme has been a failure.   For bankers it has been an unqualified success.  The banking sector has recovered from near collapse, and the recovery has been paid for by ordinary citizens.

At last the Greeks have called time on the troika of the IMF, ECB and the European Commission.  Syriza was elected into power in Greece on an anti-austerity ticket.  That should have been a warning signal to the troika.  Instead of heeding the warning they blithely drove forward with their programme to steamroll the Greeks into paying banks back for bad loans.

The troika have tried and tried again to bully Tsipiras and his party into submission.  In response the Greek premier pulled out the most potent weapon in his arsenal “Democracy”.  He is resorting to the will of the people to gauge their support for his non-cooperation with the austerity agenda.

This does not sit at all well with the “Goldman Sachs” style banking & stockbroking mandarins who currently drive EU economic policy.  They are not accustomed to having their policies questioned even by politicians.  The concept of populist support is anathema to them.  They have no time for debt forgiveness or for wishy-washy neo-Keynesian economic policies.

The democratic prerogative should be no stranger to the politicians in the European Commission, the Council of Europe and the European Parliament. These are the people we have elected and appointed to guard the interests of the ordinary people of Europe.  These are the people who are failing.  They have given over too much power to the vested interests.

A thin understanding of economics is no excuse for the abrogation of responsibility that we see in the politicians in Europe.  The Greeks will speak on Sunday.  I expect them to come back with a resounding no, OXI!

Then we need to understand how we can help the economy at the bottom of our EU society.  This is Europe, not the USA.  This is about unification and inclusion, not about punishment and exclusion.

It is time to fix the EU model.

If you fancy an additional good read on this subject check out this link:  The Austerity Delusion

-=o0o=-

This site is available for free and I make no money from any ads you see here. If you would like to show your appreciation feel free to leave a comment or you can buy me a coffee! http://buymeacoffee.com/DonalClancy