National Archives of Ireland falls victim to the Euro
When Michael Collins excused his forces' destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland at the Four Courts in Dublin in 1922 by saying
better a state with no archives than an archives with no state, it is doubtful that he anticipated current developments in the Republic of Ireland, now suffering under the thumb of European Union.
The Irish government has announced plans to merge the
National Archives of Ireland in Bishop Street, Dublin with the
National Library of Ireland.
For the Irish state to be overseeing the disbandment of a national institution is doubly ironic: that the national archives should again be disinvented when there is no obvious threat to Irish statehood and for it to be done by the political successors to the founding fathers of the Irish state.
The mining of the Public Record Office, Dublin, 1922Observers of Irish archival provision will be both bitterly disappointed and bemused. The present National Archives was a much heralded step forward for a service once split between the Public Record Office of Ireland and the State Paper Office at Dublin Castle. It also means the Republic of Ireland falls behind the example of Scotland whose
National Archives of Scotland, formerly the General Register House, even preceded the establishment of devolved government there. Thus the Republic of Ireland, a fully independent state (except for being a member of the EU) has no national archives while Scotland, a minor part of the United Kingdom, producing 20% of the UK's GDP, does have a national archives.
The National Archives of Ireland, Bishop Street, DublinSo what has brought this sorry state of affairs into being?
In the words of the
Bruges Group:
The Bruges Group’s detailed examination of the severe strains facing the Single Currency .... finds that the entirely ‘man made’ problems that confront the eurozone today have their origins in the fatally flawed notion that one exchange rate and one interest rate are appropriate for economies with very different and disparate histories, structures, performances and sovereign governments.
The euro was meant to bring convergence to the economies of the European Union. Yet it has caused even greater divergence.
This much applies to all of the Euro Zone. What about Ireland? Writing in
The Daily Telegraph of 28 February 2009, Gordon Rayner says:
Irish government bonds are rated as the riskiest in the EU and there has been panicky talk of Ireland being the next Iceland. On the streets, there is a whiff of revolution, with 120,000 people staging Dublin's biggest mass rally in 30 years ... to protest at the government's handling of the economy and its decision to impose what amounted to a pay cut on public sector workers.
Businesses in the north of the Republic are on their knees because competitors in Northern Ireland are undecutting them by as much as half. Thousands of workers who have lost their jobs in other sectors have been allowed to set up as cabbies, meaning that Dublin now has 16,000 licensed taxis. New York, with a population 17 times as large, has 13,000.
Crucially, the Irish government is powerless to act because, as a member of the eurozone, it has no control over interest rates or currency devaluation.
Further readingCould the EU invade Ireland?Archives and the stateAnyone give a damn?O Minister, Minister! wherefore art thou Minister?New EU working laws will be disaster for NHS The Sunday Telegraph 18 January 2009
Ditching the euro could boost our failing economy
Independent.ie
John Black, president of the Royal College of Surgeons has issued a dramatic warning that the National Health Service will not be able to cope with the effects of the controversial European Working Time Directive.
Mr Black is meeting Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary, in February to propose a "speciality opt-out" and an upper limit on surgeons ' hours of 65 to 70 hours a week.
"I have no doubt we will be told that it is impossible to alter or bypass the European law. I do not believe this. All manner of EC law must have been bent or ignored in nationalising a bank in 24 hours. The Government can do it if it has the political will," Mr Black said.
Sleep you stinking cowards
Philip PullmanAre such things done on Albion's shore?
The image of this nation that haunts me most powerfully is that of
the sleeping giant Albion in William Blake's prophetic books. Sleep,
profound and inveterate slumber: that is the condition of Britain today.
We do not know what is happening to us. In the world outside, great
events take place, great figures move and act, great matters unfold,
and this nation of Albion murmurs and stirs while malevolent voices
whisper in the darkness - the voices of the new laws that are
silently strangling the old freedoms the nation still dreams it enjoys.
We are so fast asleep that we don't know who we are any more. Are we
English? Scottish? Welsh? British? More than one of them? One but not
another? Are we a Christian nation - after all we have an Established
Church - or are we something post-Christian? Are we a secular state?
Are we a multifaith state? Are we anything we can all agree on and
feel proud of?
The new laws whisper:
You don't know who you are
You're mistaken about yourself
We know better than you do what you consist of, what labels apply to
you, which facts about you are important and which are worthless
We do not believe you can be trusted to know these things, so we
shall know them for you
And if we take against you, we shall remove from your possession the
only proof we shall allow to be recognised
The sleeping nation dreams it has the freedom to speak its mind. It
fantasises about making tyrants cringe with the bluff bold vigour of
its ancient right to express its opinions in the street. This is what
the new laws say about that:
Expressing an opinion is a dangerous activity
Whatever your opinions are, we don't want to hear them
So if you threaten us or our friends with your opinions we shall
treat you like the rabble you are
And we do not want to hear you arguing about it
So hold your tongue and forget about protesting
What we want from you is acquiescence
The nation dreams it is a democratic state where the laws were made
by freely elected representatives who were answerable to the people.
It used to be such a nation once, it dreams, so it must be that
nation still. It is a sweet dream.
You are not to be trusted with laws
So we shall put ourselves out of your reach
We shall put ourselves beyond your amendment or abolition
You do not need to argue about any changes we make, or to debate
them, or to send your representatives to vote against them
You do not need to hold us to account
You think you will get what you want from an inquiry?
Who do you think you are?
What sort of fools do you think we are?
The nation's dreams are troubled, sometimes; dim rumours reach our
sleeping ears, rumours that all is not well in the administration of
justice; but an ancient spell murmurs through our somnolence, and we
remember that the courts are bound to seek the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth, and we turn over and sleep soundly again.
And the new laws whisper:
We do not want to hear you talking about truth
Truth is a friend of yours, not a friend of ours
We have a better friend called hearsay, who is a witness we can always rely
on
We do not want to hear you talking about innocence
Innocent means guilty of things not yet done
We do not want to hear you talking about the right to silence
You need to be told what silence means: it means guilt
We do not want to hear you talking about justice
Justice is whatever we want to do to you
And nothing else
Are we conscious of being watched, as we sleep? Are we aware of an
ever-open eye at the corner of every street, of a watching presence
in the very keyboards we type our messages on? The new laws don't
mind if we are. They don't think we care about it.
We want to watch you day and night
We think you are abject enough to feel safe when we watch you
We can see you have lost all sense of what is proper to a free people
We can see you have abandoned modesty
Some of our friends have seen to that
They have arranged for you to find modesty contemptible
In a thousand ways they have led you to think that whoever does not
want to be watched must have something shameful to hide
We want you to feel that solitude is frightening and unnatural
We want you to feel that being watched is the natural state of things
One of the pleasant fantasies that consoles us in our sleep is that
we are a sovereign nation, and safe within our borders. This is what
the new laws say about that:
We know who our friends are
And when our friends want to have words with one of you
We shall make it easy for them to take you away to a country where
you will learn that you have more fingernails than you need
It will be no use bleating that you know of no offence you have
committed under British law
It is for us to know what your offence is
Angering our friends is an offence
It is inconceivable to me that a waking nation in the full
consciousness of its freedom would have allowed its government to
pass such laws as the Protection from Harassment Act (1997), the
Crime and Disorder Act (1998), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers
Act (2000), the Terrorism Act (2000), the Criminal Justice and Police
Act (2001), the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (2001), the
Regulation of Investigatory Powers Extension Act (2002), the Criminal
Justice Act (2003), the Extradition Act (2003), the Anti-Social
Behaviour Act (2003), the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act
(2004), the Civil Contingencies Act (2004), the Prevention of
Terrorism Act (2005), the Inquiries Act (2005), the Serious Organised
Crime and Police Act (2005), not to mention a host of pending
legislation such as the Identity Cards Bill, the Coroners and Justice
Bill, and the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.
Inconceivable.
And those laws say:
Sleep, you stinking cowards
Sweating as you dream of rights and freedoms
Freedom is too hard for you
We shall decide what freedom is
Sleep, you vermin
Sleep, you scum.
From an article to mark the Convention on Modern Liberty, published on and then pulled from Times Online
Further reading
click here
A new twist to multiculturalism
Farhad Hakimzadeh, a wealthy Iranian businessman who went on trial in November 2008 for stealing and mutilating manuscripts at the British Library, London and Bodleian Library, Oxford, has been imprisoned for two years. Mr. Hakimzadeh had a special interest in western European experiences of travel and colonisation in the Middle East from the 16th to 18th. Centuries.
Rather like another thief of archives convicted recently,
Oliver Fallon, Hakimzadeh had the cover of a reputable organisation, in his case the Iranian Heritage Foundation of which he was founder and director.
Iranians in Britain have mixed reactions to their fellow countryman's activities, some seeing his criminal activities in the context of conflict between Islam and the West, others a conflict between the Persian and non-Persian sections of Iranian society.
Farhad HakimzadehHowever, of concern to SQA is the ease with which Hakimzadeh committed his theft and vandalism, over the lengthy period of 1997-2005 or 1998-2006, according to different reports.
We asked Benedict Crumplethorne, principal spokesman of SQA, to offer his thoughts on the episode.
It seems the national institutions are not quite on the ball as regards security procedures, exemplified in this instance by the British Library. It is axiomatic in the heritage professions that no matter how trusted researchers are, the same standards of security should apply as for the general public. This is common sense, of course. I tend to suspect that the heavier presence of academic types among the curatorial staff of such institutions causes them to lack the same orthodoxy of qualified archivists, who are almost certainly not to be found at the upper levels of British Library management. Instead, they empathise with their fellow researchers.
The founder of our profession, Sir Hilary Jenkinson for whom the physical security of archives was the paramount objective, would be turning in his grave. In referring to Jenkinson, I am reminded of his injunction that archivists' judgment should not be clouded by engaging in their own original research.
I must next address some of the odd statements made by the British Library and the police. Firstly, I quote a British Library spokesman:
Theft from the British Library is an extremely rare occurrence. Because we are a research library, not a museum, we are committed to making our collections available in the interests of scholarship and research: to facilitate this an element of trust is necessary. Hakimzadeh fundamentally betrayed this trust. I don't quite see how being a research library makes security issues different to those in a museum...say the British Museum. Do museums not make their collections available for research? Is the BL saying museums don't have security arrangements? Are they also saying they recognise different tiers of researcher, all ostensibly card carrying readers, but some more equal than others? In any case, all archive repositories exist to make their material available for research. However, the crucial sentence is the second last sentence. This seems to suggest BL staff took a calculated decision to favour Hakimzadeh, or to trust him as they put it. This policy is at best mysterious and at worst negligent.
Secondly, I refer to a comment made by Detective Chief Inspector Dave Cobb of the Metropolitan Police, that:
It is extremely difficult to detect the absence of these pages as Hakimzadeh took care to select material that only an expert would be able to identify, as early printed books are unique. The original owner might have commissioned additional illustrations, or pages might have been missing when the libraries acquired them.This carries forward the mysteriousness of the BL's own statement and indicates careful briefing of the police by the them. All archives are unique and the material stolen or damaged in this case is no different from archives at a county record office, insurance archive, business archive or university archive. That is to say, archives are descriptively listed so as to securely identify them precisely so the documents can be identified by a researcher. Quite often these descriptions are published in the form of online databases. Unwittingly, Mr. Cobb is acting as the BL's apologist. Any use of archives requires more mental capacity than taking a lending or reference book down from the shelf in your local library, assuming they still have such things as books.
We then turned to Ellison Millinocket, our security and conservation spokesman, based in Taunton, Somerset, for some practical insights.
Documents are retrieved from secure storage areas by staff rather than taken down from the shelf, as might happen with an open access book in a local library, and should then be inspected prior to being handed over to researchers and inspected again on return by issuing staff. There is no harm in repository staff also checking material, in the repository, we all have a responsibility. In the case of bundles of loose papers, these should be counted out prior to issue and counted back by issuing staff. I query whether this happened at the BL. The process of counting out documents and then counting them back in also allows searchroom or issuing staff to visually inspect the contents and intactness of the material. Some offices weigh documents, which even allowing for absorption of water from the atmosphere, is remarkably accurate, quite apart from being effective as a deterrent.
I note The Daily Telegraph states
British Library staff believe he smuggled a scalpel into the building and positioned himself out of the sight of security cameras to commit his crimes.I am flabbergasted that Hakimzadeh perpetrated his crimes out of sight of CCTV cameras. No part of a searchroom should be uncovered by camera or the human eye or at any rate such researchers should be required to sit in clear view of at least one camera.
We thanked Benedict and Ellison for their contributions.
Further readingThe Daily Telegraph 21 November 2008
British Library
press release 16 January 2009
The Daily Telegraph 16 January 2009
The Daily Telegraph: 8000 items go missing from British Library 28 February 2005
The Daily Mail 16 January 2009
The Daily Telegraph 21 January 2009
The Guardian 21 November 2008
What drives people to steal precious books Financial Times 6 March 2009
Long-lost manuscript available to historians Derby Evening Telegraph 5 March 2009
Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know
Donald Rumsfeld February 2002
Archivists Against Global Warmism
In a letter to
The Daily Telegraph of 9 January 2009, John McGibbon of Cambridge advises anyone unable to heat his home properly during the present cold snap
to spend a day at their local council offices, perhaps researching their ancestors. As the temperature holds a sultry 75F, be prepared to strip down to not much more than underwear in order to blend in with the staff.
We asked Benedict Crumplethorne, principal spokesman for SQA, to comment on this apparent suggestion that local government record offices' public searchrooms are not only swelteringly hot but staffed by women wearing only bras and nickers.
You hint that the majority of local government record office staff are women. This is indeed the case, so we may deduce that the office Mr. McGibbon has visited to obtain this impression is typical of the trend, confirmed in various national surveys. As to a public searchroom being 75F, this gives very great cause for concern. We expect temperature and humidity in searchrooms to be controlled in broad conformity with BS5454 to ensure that documents temporarily relocated for research purposes from the strongroom to the searchroom will not be subjected to widely varying atmospheric conditions.
Devon Record Office: in bed with the Met OfficeWe also asked Ellison Millinocket, conservation spokesman for SQA, based in Taunton, Somerset to comment on the technical implications of searchrooms being heated to 75F.
Benedict is quite right. And may I say how heart-warming it is to see Fahrenheit used, instead of the fiendish metric Celcius system. Most British people prefer Fahrenheit, despite Met Office bullying. I would prefer a searchroom to be air conditioned so as to ensure documents are less subjected to microscopic mechanical wear through hydrolysis. There are other threats of course including photo-degradation but fluctuation or variation in temperature and humidity between or in document storage areas and searchrooms is something to avoid. And finally, may I enquire where these scantily dressed women archivists and archive assistants are to be found, I find I am free for the next few days and would like to pay them a visit....
We thanked Benedict and Ellison for their contributions.
However, still curious as to why a letter writer to a national newspaper should seem to want to grouse about the temperature in a local government record office searchroom, we invited Dr. Pochin Sturge of Wigston, Leicestershire, honorary consultant anthropologist to SQA, to offer some explanation.
Well, I rather regret this current obsession with global warming is behind the criticism. Local government has nailed its colours to the mast on this one, slavishly implementing EU directives on waste disposal and fining miscreants, so that any council is bound to be associated with the global warming phenomenon and become a target for disgruntled members of the public.
Even the national Archives has swallowed the bait. Their web site states Projects will soon be underway to understand the issues surrounding the impact of climate change on local environments in The National Archives, and archival collections globally. Existing models such as life-cycle costing, risk assessment and predictive modelling protocols will be applied to evaluate and define sustainable energy solutions and to optimise current preservation practices.....A climate mapping exercise has been carried out in all storage areas. The results will be used to develop The National Archives´ environmental monitoring programme as well as to improve the hardware and the Building Management System.
The significance of this for the tax-payer is that it may all be unnecessary.
The great shame is that there is no such thing as global warming. The evidence is that temperatures are cooling rather than warming and the ice caps are expanding. I have studied the origins of warmism and have deduced that the theory has been developed by the United Nations and its collaborators as a means of establishing world communist government. I am particularly fascinated by the tendency for Warmism to replace religion, especially Roman Catholicism, as being subject to inflexible doctrine and for anti-Warmists to be treated as heretics.
So you see, there is a very complicated social and scientific background to a brief and facetious comment in a daily newspaper. But whichever record office is in question, I wouldn't mind betting their visitor statistics are up at this time of year, hey what?
Further readingWattsUpWithThat2008 was the year man made global warming was disprovedGreat Global warming SwindleBlizzard of mad proposals descends Wind Energy The Truth More Hot Air From the Met Office BBC Devon News Taxpayers' AllianceCustomer care training for women archivists and archive assistants
click hereNational Archives
Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.
Karl Marx, 1867
Take Note
We believe some colleagues in the archives profession will be chastened to read the following notice published in the British Weights and Measures Association annual report for 1907. The information is perhaps still as relevant now in the computer age as it was then.
Most progressive people now-a-days use card indexes of some sort or other, and with these obtain the necessary drawers, etc, for filing them. The standard sizes of these cards are 3 x 5, 4 x 6, and 5 x 8 — cabinets being sold to fit. We would warn all our members to make sure in purchasing these cabinets that the drawers will fit these sizes of cards. There are some cabinets on the market at present with drawers presumably of the standard size, but on looking closely at the circular or catalogue describing them, you will find the word “approximately”. These cabinets are not made in England, and are made to take cards according to millimetre sizes, which are incommensurable with British sizes.
If you should unfortunately get this make of cabinets in your office you will find yourself tied to obtain your future supplies of cards from the firm, or pay extra if you go elsewhere, as a drawer 75 x 125 millimetres will not take a 3 x 5in standard card. The difference is slight but just enough to tie you to one firm for supplies at their prices. We don’t want tied houses in the stationery trade, neither do we want confusion introducing into our sizes, which are based on the Imperial standard inch. There are excellent makers who supply cabinets to British standard sizes, and our members should insist on having these sizes.
Further readingBritish Weights and Measures Association
The Treaty of Lisbon exposed
Readers may recall our recent report of a
hidden agenda within the Church of England in support of European integration, a policy that extends to divesting itself of its own bibliographical and documentary heritage in order to remove any sense of national identity and a record of centuries of achievement. It seems this has stimulated a discussion between our patron Lindsay Jenkins and a mildly Eurosceptic vicar.
We reproduce their email correspondence below.
Lindsay Jenkins29 April 2008
Dear Mr. Knight,
Thank you for taking an interest in my posting.
I am very sorry to hear that both Archbishop Temple and Bishop Bell are today revered in the Church of England. Indeed I am surprised but no doubt you are in touch with a broad grouping.
Archbishop TempleMy own family tell me that Archbishop Temple was very far from universally revered while he was alive; many were appalled – even at a time when some were thoroughly hoodwinked by Stalin.
What was thought through in 1940 (and the thinking started a lot earlier than that) is what we now see in the Lisbon treaty – the EU in all its intrusiveness.
The end of the nation state was exactly what Archbishop Temple and others were working towards. He was not proposing a cosy federation of friends.
The aim was political union and that was exemplified by the first serious attempt with the help of a beneficial crisis in June 1940 – Anglo-Franco Union.
An Oxford lawyer, Professor Zimmern, wrote a detailed constitution of the proposed combination of France and the UK into one country and it had been agreed with sympathetic French in Paris in 1939. But it was stopped by the French government - cowering in Vichy and selling out to the Germans. You may remember the exchange:
General Weygand leading the defeatists said, ‘In three weeks England will have her neck rung like a chicken.’ (Churchill later replied, ‘Some chicken - some neck!’). Jean Ybarnegaray exclaimed, ‘Better be a Nazi province. At least we know what that means’.
An even more comprehensive constitution (similar to the treaty of Lisbon) to include most of Europe was written by an Australian solicitor, Ronald Mackay, who had settled in Britain in 1934, building on constitutional work begun by Lionel Curtis, and the American lawyer, Professor A H Goodhart of University College, Oxford.
That constitution was presented to a 1940 conference in Oxford organised by the Fabian Society with which Archbishop Temple was most closely associated.
On the World Council of Churches (WCC), if you have not already read it I found the Memoirs of the Rev Dr. Willem Visser ‘t Hooft illuminating: he was the first Secretary-General.
Many people over the last decades have not realised what was creeping up, because generations of politicians have either not read the texts (Ken Clarke), not believed them or have deliberately lied.
Should you be interested I have written a book on who has created the EU and why called
Britain Held Hostage, The Coming Euro-Dictatorship.
With kind regards
Lindsay Jenkins
www.lindsayjenkins.comFrom Rev. R. Knight
Subject: Re: THE CHURCH & ITS SUPPORT FOR THE EU - Another Letter to Bishop of Chichester
29 April 2008
Dear All,
I’m glad you are all vigilant about misrepresentations of what is going on with the Lisbon Treaty. I was dismayed to read a letter in the “Times” which seemed to imply that the Church of England supported Lisbon.
That cannot be so for the reasons I included in my letter to the Bishop of St Alban’s.
I must say, however, that I do not at all agree with Lindsay Jenkins and, as a clergyman in the Church of England, I must suggest that it would be
counterproductive to use his letter as a template. William Temple and George Bell were good men - no doubt flawed in some respects like all of us - and are revered in the modern Church of England. Any decent person would want to ensure that nothing like the two world wars could never happen again and it is not unreasonable to explore the possibility that leagues or federations of nations might be an answer. Bell and Temple ought not to demonised for trying. Neither can they be held responsible for the EU’s development into a superstate which wants to intrude into every area of our lives. No-one would have foreseen this in the late 1940s. Indeed, part of the case for a referendum now is that most people did not foresee how the EU would turn out even as late as the 1970s. I’ll paste in my letter to the Bishop of St Alban’s to offer alternative arguments to use with the bishops.
Roger Knight
The Bishop of St. AlbansLetter from Rev. R. Knight to Rt. Rev. Christopher Herbert, Bishop of St. Albans
2 March 2008
Dear Bishop Christopher,
I was dismayed to read your letter in today’s “
Times” suggesting that the Church of England supports the Lisbon Treaty. I should be very surprised if the Church of England has an official view on this subject or if there is any one view of the Lisbon Treaty to which Anglican Christians might be expected to subscribe.
In fact, I believe, there are two issues. Is the Lisbon Treaty a good thing? Ought there to be a referendum in the UK on the Lisbon Treaty?
The answer to the latter question is obvious. Nearly every MP at present in the House of Commons was elected on a manifesto promise to hold a referendum on the European Constitution. Virtually everybody, who has any expertise, in the matter agrees that the Lisbon Treaty is effectively the same thing as the constitution. MPs have broken a promise in refusing a referendum. Christians must condemn that (
Psalm 15).
There ought, therefore, to be a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. If we were given a referendum, I am sure that sincere Christians could with a good conscience vote either way. There is a strong case to be made for the EU and for strengthening its organisation and administration and you have made an important contribution to that case in today’s “Times”. One can also argue, of course, that the EU is a club of rich western nations which harms poorer parts of the world by its trade policies. One can argue that it is too intrusive into the life of its citizens. One can argue that there is a considerable democratic deficit in the EU. And one can also argue, that, while any decent person cannot but rejoice in the fact that nations which were deadly enemies twice in C20 are now allies and partners, it is wrong to overlook the fact that our membership of the EU has been to the disadvantage of Commonwealth countries and others who supported us in the fight against German expansionism under the Kaiser and the horrors of Nazism and Fascism. Christians are 100% committed to the reconciliation of enemies, but there is absolutely nothing in the Gospel that allows us to betray our former friends.
So, Christians, including Anglican Christians, should continue to demand a referendum on Lisbon and could vote either way in such a referendum without doing an injustice to their Christian conscience.
Roger Knight,
Rector of Cuxton and Halling,
Diocese of Rochester
John Hind, Bishop of Chichester28 April 2008
Rt Rev John Hind
Bishop of Chichester
c/o House of Lords
London
SW1A 0PW
My Lord Bishop,
In your recent speech in the House of Lords supporting the Lisbon Treaty, you described one of your predecessors, Bishop Bell, as 'one of the greatest Europeans of the last century'.
Bishop BellBishop Bell was indeed of that inner group which was seminal in creating what is now the European Union. But I am not sure that Bishop Bell's views are worthy of the eulogy, which you gave him in the House of Lords; unless that is you are either a Communist or a Communist sympathiser and that I doubt very much.
As you may know, Bishop Bell was very close to Archbishop Temple, widely known throughout most of his adult life as a 'radical Bolshevik' and fervent admirer of the USSR. Bell joined Temple in many political ventures including the founding of Federal Trust in 1940 by an inner group of the Fabian Society.
Bell, when Dean of Canterbury, also helped Temple (then Archbishop of York) to launch the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 1937. Temple had for many years campaigned and manoeuvred to lead the Protestant Churches away from a spiritual role to a much more political one, and a very left wing one at that, and achieved it with the WCC.
I quote from one of my own books :
"Thirty-five clergymen attended the 1937 meeting at Westfield College, London University and Temple hoodwinked most of them. Only two bishops voted against the motion to set up the WCC because they guessed its purpose was political, not spiritual. It was: Temple and Bell had deliberately manipulated the meeting."
Both Bishop Bell and Archbishop Temple were no friends of the nation state and believed that nations cause war and should be totally subsumed into a federal Europe, a federal Europe that would echo the USSR.
I am sorry that you have apparently so misunderstood the nature of the European Union not only to praise it, but also to praise your own predecessor, Bishop Bell, who wished to hijack the Church of England for political ends, ends which many then and now find deeply distasteful and who worked to end the independent sovereignty of the United Kingdom.
Your present position, like that of Bishop Bell, does of course leave the role of the Church of England in a no-mans-land: no England, no Church.
I do hope that you will review the nature of the European Union and support not only the Church of England but also the independence of the United Kingdom.
Lindsay Jenkins
Further readingAnything but ordinary
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Ummm
The light-fingered brigade has been at it again, exposing deficiencies in the security aspects of several major UK archive repositories.
Last year we learned that a series of major thefts of archives from the
London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) had taken place. The thief had targeted the Jersey Collection there and had stolen documents including letters from Queen Victoria and the first Duke of Wellington. The
Islington Tribune was informed by the LMA’s parent authority, the City of London, that a security review was taking place and that Detective Inspector Joe Lock of Islington CID was asking for further information.
We await further news on the recovery of these stolen documents and the identity of the thief.
Scottish Catholic ArchivesMeanwhile, in Scotland we hear the
Scottish Catholic Archives has been raided by Oliver Fallon, better known internationally as a Sanskrit scholar, who has recently been convicted by a court in Edinburgh. 300 documents with a market value of £26,000 were stolen during five visits he made to that office in July 2006. Fallon adopted the normal technique of the archives thief, that of cutting or tearing off parts of pages or secreting smaller documents on his person. 132 documents are still missing and damaged documents require repairs costed at nearly £5000. The Edinburgh court learned from Fallon’s solicitor John Mulholland that he was already serving time in England for similar, apparently unreported thefts south of the border. SQA is unaware of any official connection between the LMA thefts and the Edinburgh thefts at this stage.
Oliver FallonSeveral sources place emphasis on Fallon’s story he was a postgraduate student, as though to say the Scottish Catholic Archives or its apologists need defend giving access to their archives to anyone. The issue in this instance is that Fallon was left unsupervised while he consulted the documents. It is unlikely in the extreme the public searchroom at LMA was unsupervised.
The Scottish Catholic Archives have also stressed researchers are not allowed to remove documents from the premises and must use pencils only, which is rather beside the point.
The Herald reports Fallon had also obtained documents by deception from the Catholic Archives in London although we are not aware of such a repository.
In an unrelated breach of security of a different kind, 29 forged documents have been inserted into 12 government files at the UK National Archives by Martin Allen, an enthusiast of Hitler’s Germany, in order to support spurious or unsubstantiatable claims. At least one forged letter was written on a blank page from an old book, a classic forger’s trick. The Times quotes Sir Max Hastings as saying
it is hard to imagine actions more damaging to the cause of preserving the nation’s heritage than wilfully forging documents designed to alter our historical record and John Fox states
how on earth were these documents slipped in? This is something that the National Archives has to answer. Whoever got these documents in must have done it in a very clever, sneaky way, so you can’t entirely blame the security. But maybe there are questions with the security.The National Archives is reported as saying new security procedures had been put in place.
We asked Ellison Millinocket of Taunton, Somerset, the outspoken security and conservation spokesman for SQA, to offer some comments.
It really beggars belief. A searchroom left unsupervised? Have the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland no concept of security? I notice their entry in British Archives, 4th. Edition, states they allow access to bona fide researchers. It is all very well asking for a letter of reference but all researchers should be invigilated by trained staff when original and irreplaceable documents are being consulted. It tends to be the case archival material has high market value because it is unique and may bear valuable postmarks, autographs and stamps. The Standard for Record Repositories states:
When in use the study area should be constantly supervised by sufficient staff to provide an effective level of invigilation of the whole area, under the direction of a professionally qualified archivist (section 4.9)
I am not aware if the Scottish Catholic Archives employs a qualified, professional archivist. This would make a huge difference. The Standard also states:
Beyond the very smallest, record repositories accordingly require the services of one or more professionally qualified archivists with training or experience relevant to the kind of records held (2.2 (a))
and
In the case of a small repository where no appropriately qualified professional staff can be employed, the governing body should formally seek regular advice on such matters as acquisition, storage, conservation and cataloguing from a professionally qualified archivist in another repository or from The National Archives (which provides guidance on both public and private records) or, in Scotland, from the National Archives of Scotland and in Northern Ireland from the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (2.3)
Thus it would appear several national institutions are implicated. My final advice is always bear in mind the heritage professionals’ axiom, that thieves tend to be the most trusted of our users. There is no such thing as a bona fide researcher and the strictest invigilation is required at all times.
We thanked Ellison for his comments and next asked Dr. Pochin Sturge of Wigston Hall, Leicester, consultant anthropologist to SQA, to explain what makes individuals such as Fallon and Allen tick.
Actually, these behaviours are relatively common in modern western society, which has confused cultural heritage and cultural icons with economic wealth, through the mass media impact of the auction trade, Ebay and popular television programmes like the Antiques Roadshow on the one hand, and the substitution of economic status with privileged access to and interpretation of our cultural inheritance on the other. Knowledge is power, so to speak.
The thief of archival documents achieves several ends; he acquires economic betterment based on his discernment, he relocates cultural material to a more deserving custodianship justified by intellectual elitism and overcomes an irrational jealousy associated with the academic mentality by obviating the need to consult vital primary source material by going through an intermediary.
As for the forger, whether in dealing with the superior or inferior academic mentality, there is a tendency to abuse the legitimate custody of archives not by theft or vandalism but through the more subtle and perverse frustration that official archives do not contain evidence supportive of a thesis. By putting the cart before the horse, this inconvenience can be overcome and a new reality can be created. If the documents don’t exist, they jolly well ought to. Finally, in this regard, the deviant mind can be reassured by having other researchers fall into the trap of accepting his forgeries as evidence, through the creation of a supportive network of the like-minded people. Society thus rectified can be more habitable for the forger and those with similar behavioural abnormalities.
You have my hearty sympathies that such cultural behaviours affect your most worthy profession. Please be on your guard.
We thanked Dr. Sturge for his analyses.
In a sequel to the thefts from Scottish Catholic Archives, we learn in a new report that the collections may be transferred to Aberdeen University. It is telling that a Scottish Roman Catholic spokesman has stated the material could be better preserved at the university.
Further readingThe TimesStandard for Record Repositories BBC NewsThe ScotsmanThe HeraldEdinburgh Evening News 19 May 2008
Press AssociationGlasgow
Daily Record 20 May 2008
Advaita Vedanta Research CenterLetter to
The Guardian by Prof. Philip Murphy, University of Reading, 7 May 2008
The Convention brought together a self selected group of the European political elite, many of whom have their eyes on a career at a European level, which is dependent on more and more integration, and who see national parliaments and governments as an obstacle ... Not once in the sixteen months I spent on the Convention did representatives question whether deeper integration is what the people of Europe want, whether it serves their best interests or whether it provides the best basis for a sustainable structure for an expanding Union. The debates focused solely on where we could do more at European Union level... None of the existing policies were questioned... Consensus was achieved among those who were deemed to matter and those deemed to matter made it plain that the rest would not be allowed to wreck the final agreement.
Gisela Stuart MP, British Labour Party representative on the EU. ‘The Making of Europe's Constitution’ Fabian Society, London, 2003
The mining of the Public Record Office, Dublin, 1922
The National Archives of Ireland, Bishop Street, Dublin
