Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

Phil Hall Sunday June 22, 2008 An 82-year-old former bomber pilot I met in the street the other day said: "Supermen. Ha! If Hitler had come over here we would have given him a proper kick up the jacksy." As Michael White suggests , British people are fond of the myth that they won't tolerate dictatorships, despite the fact that there were many fascist sympathisers in Britain in the 1930s. Yes, we do live in a relatively free and secular country - just ask any young Afghani woman studying at a college here for her opinion. But there is also evidence around us that the British government is engaging in repression. And not just in Iraq or Afghanistan, but here in Britain. Perhaps those of us who have lived for a time under dictatorships can spot some of the warning signs: • Inconvenient elections are avoided in the name of getting on with the job. • Leaders of the opposition are character-assassinated by the state media. • Institutions like the legislature begin to lose th

How about making a parallel for religion with language that goes like this: Languages - Language - dialect - idiolect Religions - Religion - Religious Sect - idiogen The point is, for example, that that attack on religion always characterises it as monolithic or sectarian which it isn't. All religious people have an unpredictable personal variant on religious belief too. And what you say and your private opinions are similar probably to many other Christians and Muslims. For example, the "idiogen" of a Muslim woman will probably be idealistic and hopeful about the future of women in Islam in a way that her religion as a whole or her particular religious sect would not approve of. So she keeps it to herself. She values her community above her idiogen. Talk to most Christians, of course, and you will find that each person, no matter what their church says, often has quite a rich and individualistic spiritual life. Most Catholic women, I believe, expect that at some point th

The government is curiously quiet on the impact of immigration on wages. When we took to the streets 30 years ago, it was a different story Phil Hall Is the government is being completely honest in the rhetoric it uses to justify its open-door policy for immigrants from the former eastern bloc? Hazel Blears, in her visit to Boston in Lincolnshire, focused on busting the myths around immigration, the myths that immigrants are a burden and the myths surrounding immigrants and crime, social housing, social security and health. But she doesn't mention inflation. Speaking in Bradford in June 2005, the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, was clear about one of the main benefits of the recent immigration : "Immigration has reduced wage inflation. The inflow of migrant labour, especially in the past year or so from eastern Europe, has probably led to a diminution of inflationary pressure on the labour market." In the Lord's report (pdf) , Professor Nickell is quoted

Most of the charm and the taste for me is in the food culture. In this respect both Delia and Blumenthal share a characteristic for me. They are both charmless. They cook, literally in the case of Heston, in a vacuum.. Delia is the reductio ad absurdam of Blumenthal.. Take Blumenthal's philosophy and boil it right down and you end up with Delia. Delve a little further and you end up with lambs fat on the cheapest chump. Pedigree Chum dog food research scientists say dogs go mad for it. "Adobo" is a very bitter red substance. It tastes quite acrid. Who would think to consume it? Or rotted fish - Where does the taste for that come from? It comes from 80,000 years living by the shores of the North sea without enough salt or time to preserve the fish. It doesn't come from Willy Wonka's food texturing lab. Marmite is the taste of the industrial revolution. Vegemite is a vegetarian riff on Marmite, there is something William Morris about it. Something post industrial. T

The Mexican regime escaped international sanction in 1968 through a combination of extreme and swift repression and by putting on a great show at the Mexican Olympics and thereby winning international support. Thanks, in part, to that continued international support, it managed to hold on to power for another 35 years. We must not let the regime in China pull the same trick. We should boycott the Beijing Olympics. Steven Spielberg resigned as an artistic adviser to the Olympics because of China's silence over Darfur. Before he quit, Mia Farrow drew parallels with the 1936 Berlin Olympics, saying he "could be the Leni Riefenstahl of the Olympic Games". Farrow had a point. But perhaps there are other Olympic parallels we can draw. The Mexican state in 1968, like the present day Chinese state, was corporatist. There was one-party rule indivisible from the government; no independent judiciary, trade unions or employers associations; the media was completely controlled by th

Unlike us, Mexicans don't gorge on dairy chocolate for Easter; if you too are tired of over-indulging in chocolate products full of milk and sugar, ditch the chocolate bunnies and try some Mexican "chocolate" chicken instead. One of the favourite sayings of my grandfather, a francophile and a gourmet, was: "Chocolate is nice, cheese is nice. So how much nicer must cheese and chocolate be?" We would laugh at his little lesson in good taste and I went along with the European idea that chocolate was simply a sweet food for a long time. That is, I did so until I tried mole. One legend is that mole was invented in Puebla, Mexico about 300 years ago. A bishop was coming to lunch and as the nuns hurriedly made the final preparations for the meal they were about to serve him, a tablet of chocolate accidentally fell into the sauce. It was too late for a change of plans, so the nun in charge simply carried on stirring in the sweet chocolate. They gave the dish to the bis