Murder Anomalies #1: Victoria Hall and Jeanette Kempton

 This is the first of a series of short articles which are really part of a thinking process towards a conclusion not yet reached. (Rather than starting with a conclusion and then trying to force the facts to fit it.)

Ever since Steve Wright was convicted of the five Ipswich Prostitute murders in 2006, people have wondered aloud if he might also have killed Victoria Hall (who lived in the same village as Wright) in 1999. But this theory has only been entertained by the police from 2019, when they received more information, after releasing covert CCTV footage from the precise site where Victoria's body was found. The police had (for those twenty years) never released the exact location, because it was some distance from the road and therefore not something that a person suffering from idle curiosity was likely to locate without a lot of random wandering. What they wanted to see, was who went straight there. There were people who knew exactly where to go, and in the month following the discovery of Victoria's body, they did. "People" is a plural and that's the first part of the anomaly. If the location was known only to the killer and that was someone who worked alone, how come there was more than one visitor (in more than one vehicle) to the location?

Another part of the anomaly was that Victoria was apparently tracked all the way from the nightclub in Felixstowe, which she left at 1AM on the 19th of September with her friend, Gemma, to a point in Trimley St Mary within yards of Victoria's home, where they finally parted at 2:20AM after walking all the way.

There's a workload issue for one man doing that tracking, just as there is with one man carrying Victoria's body and arranging it, as it was found, in a running stream channelled through a ditch. (It's not just a field drain.) And, as suggested above, more than one man seemed to know the exact spot.

Steve Wright has also been nominated as a suspect in the murder of Jeanette Kempton, who disappeared in South London in January 1989 and was found near Wangford in Suffolk about two weeks later. Given that this involves a journey straight up the A12 from South London, where Steve Wright was living and working up to 1988, to Suffolk where moved back to when he got into trouble and lost his job, he's not an unreasonable suspect at all. Except that workers on the country estate where her body was found, associated two different suspicious vehicles (a hire van with tinted rear windows and a somewhat ropey white car) with the case and the police didn't conclusively trace either one. (An untraceable hire van must take some doing!) Again, multiple vehicles suggest multiple perpetrators.

Jeanette's body was too decomposed to establish her exact time of death, but the pathologist was able to say that she'd suffered a head injury about forty-eight hours prior to death. That suggests a two-day period of captivity and, again, there's a workload issue with that for one man acting alone. And how does anyone hope to establish an alibi if they are absent from their normal setting for two days? You'd need a large-enough group for everyone to turn up where they were expected to turn up, whilst keeping the victim under control. It's a bit hard to calculate the number needed, but it's obviously more than two.

At no point up to and after the moment Steve Wright was charged with the Ipswich Prostitute Murders did the police, or prosecution counsel, suggest or say anything which could be taken to imply that he acted alone and to this day they still haven't! Indeed, at the moment that Steve Wright was so charged, another unnamed suspect was in custody, where he remained, the author believes, until the following afternoon.

And at least three of the Ipswich Prostitute Murders present similar workload issues as Victoria's murder, in that the body was artistically arranged in a problematic location with flowing water. (That is almost certainly why the police have resisted any suggestion that Steve Wright acted alone, even though accepting that premise would spare them an awful lot of work and resources.)

Again, whilst a forensic psychologist who'd worked on the Ipswich Prostitute Murders was convinced that Steve Wright might well have had something to do with a similar cluster of prostitute murders in Norwich, Norfolk police say that not only do they have a DNA profile that is not his, but they have more than one DNA profile that's not his. This has been used to "prove" the psychologist wrong, but all it really proves is that there was more than one man involved in killing prostitutes in Norwich, a possibility that Suffolk Police continue to hold open for ALL the murders that Steve Wright has been convicted of so far.

{One last thought, which takes us a long way from Suffolk. One of the detectives who investigated the disappearance and probable murder of Claudia Lawrence in York, ended up wanting to charge pretty well ALL the customers from her local pub who'd been interviewed by the police, with withholding information or making false statements. He wasn't allowed to, but the fact that he wanted to is telling.}

Anyone who has read this far will now understand why the author isn't yet ready to come to any conclusions, other than the obvious one: there's something here that defies understanding with the currently-known facts. Steve Wright is absolutely not innocent; the issue is more one of how many others might be involved and why on Earth would several people (one assumes all males, but that really is an assumption) cooperate to do something so vile?

The Farshoreman: New Novel Published

When touching an interplanetary space probe sparks young women's dreams of touching the stars, an adventure in spacecraft building begins and flourishes despite pandemics, spies and stalkers.

The Farshoreman is available as a Kindle E-book and Paperback on Amazon.

Link for users of Amazon.co.uk: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0B47FLBDS

Link for users of Amazon.com:   https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B47FLBDS

Users of other Amazon domains can search Kindle Books for:

The Farshoreman by Matthew K. Spencer

The base prices in the UK are £3.00 for the Kindle E-book and £9.75 + delivery for the paperback. Prices in other countries are derived from this, but in some cases, especially Australia, the paperback may be disproportionately more expensive than the E-book. 

And on Smashwords and Affiliates!

The Smashwords Edition, with its own distinctive Katie Hounsome Cover Art, is available from Smashwords and its affiliates. The base price has been set to $3.81 to match the Amazon base price of £3.00

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1291276

https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-farshoreman/id6445158728 

ISBN numbers:

Smashwords ISBN: 9781005315016

Paperback    ISBN:  9798837658099

These may help when ordering either format from some retailers, such as Barnes and Noble.

 

NB: The author does not mean to criticise the BBC's proposed price increase; rather he is trying to lead the BBC by example hence the e-book price reduction from £5.00 to £3.00 or $3.81 as of the 4th of December 2023. The paperback price is dependent on the printing costs.

The author's books will also be participating in the Smashwords end of year sale for 2023.

Book Review of the Library of Heartbeats by Laura Imai-Messina

 

Book Review of the Library of Heartbeats by Laura Imai-Messina

(Translated by Lucy Rand)

* * * * *

(This review is based on a free review Epub from the publisher via Net Galley UK.)

A lyrical real-world fable set in modern day Japan.

An artist brought up by a widow who edits his reality to spare him from tragedy learns to face life without his mother, and, it turns out, his son, when he befriends a little boy. Man and boy bond (when they know they must part) on a journey to the “Library of Heartbeats” where the unique heartbeats of people from all over the world are stored in a beautiful building on a small Japanese island, where visitors can listen to any heartbeat in the archive and record their own, with any message they like for those who might one day hear it, or leave no message but the heartbeat itself. Along the way, they learn that imagination and friendship can not only deal with tragedy and purge needless guilt*, but enhance reality and make life so much better and well worth living.

*perhaps the truly guilty experience no guilt themselves, but this fable sees no guilt in anyone.

The Library of Heartbeats by Laura Imai-Messina is published in the UK by Bonnier Books on the 4^th of January 2024.

Album review of Super. Sexy. Heartbreak by Mary Spender

This is a low-resolution version of the album cover

 

* * * * *

This is a very well-crafted debut album by a talented musician who has spent a lot of time and effort building her reputation, skills and confidence via live performances and her popular YouTube channel. Streaming services, however, have been politely declined in favour of offering her audience a tangible product of lasting value. Musical production values are high by any standard, let alone a self-produced debut by a singer-songwriter with no big name or big-money backing. The CD booklet contains a good, themed original Art-Noveau-style illustration for each song. Big money would never have invested this much love and care on anything! It wouldn’t actually have invested the money either.

All of which is highly commendable, but is the music itself any good?

Well, yes, it is all is. I found the drum beat on track 4 “Do You Wanna Play” a trifle annoying but I still enjoyed the track. Mary’s voice is rich and enticing. Perhaps that voice is sometimes given more support than it needs, though?

Track 1, “You Can Have Chicago” is a “big” number by which I don’t mean either “loud” or “lengthy” but rather setting a style for the whole album which I think will find fans on both sides of the Atlantic.

Track 2, “Getaway Sun” is a quieter bus trip. (The bus, evidently, was NOT a Bristol LoDecca!)

Track 3, “One Kept Secret” has a more elaborate structure rather than a more elaborate arrangement, something which several of the following tracks share.

Track 4, has been discussed above. It’s nice, but it might be at least as nice without the drum just keeping time.

Track 5, “Make me an Offer” is gentler.

Track 6, “Church Bell” is my favourite and the mix here is suited to the style and feel of this album. It might be even better with a simpler folkish arrangement and a more Catalonian feel than American? That wouldn’t fit on this album, but might make a nice single or YouTube offering at a later date.

Track 7, “Wake Up To You” is fine, too.

Track 8, “Drop, Drop, Slow Tears, Drop” features the instrumental skills of Ariel Posen as well as Mary’s vocals and writing.

Track 9, “One to the West Coast” is another “big” number.

Track 10, “I Blame Myself” sounds nice, but the lyrics actually READ as if Mary had a near miss with a manipulative sociopath!

Track 11, “I’ll Stay Quiet” winds things up gently.

Super. Sexy. Heartbreak. By Mary Spender is available directly from the artist’s website from, I believe the 4^th of October 2023, at:

https://maryspender.teachable.com/p/supersexyheartbreak

Review copyright (c) by Matthew K. Spencer 1^st of October 2023.

Book Review of Kennedy 35 by Charles Cumming

 * * * * *

Cracking third spy thriller in a popular series.

(This review is based on a free review .pdf from the publisher via Net Galley UK)

This is a well-written and thoroughly-researched novel about the Rwandan Genocide and its aftermath.

Set mainly in Senegal, London and to some extent New York and Paris as well as other locations, this is a story about how an attempt to deliver justice for the victims of the nightmare of 1994 becomes a smaller nightmare in its own right, in 1995, leading to a significant accomplice escaping justice and being used by a (French) traitor to help him build a huge fortune by laundering money for terrorists. 28 years later, an opportunity arises to put things right, but not without more danger and a further terrible sacrifice. The concluding adventure sequence delivers justice in a satisfying way, but the leading character is left on the cusp of seizing personal disaster from his professional triumph. (This makes the reader wish that someone would hit him briskly on the shins with a cricket bat, but it no doubt sets the scene for the next volume in the series.)

The French government (especially in 1994, but also that of 2023) does not come out of this at all well and it’s very hard to argue, from the evidence in the public domain, that this is in any way undeserved. The DGSE are portrayed as making the CIA look like boy scouts and that might not be too far off the mark, either.

The central premise of the BOX 88 series, though, is a joint Anglo-American intelligence agency acting below the radar. In any kind of real-world practice this might be a recipe for internecine warfare rather than successful cooperation. In actual fact, there was a vitally-important joint UK-USA photo-reconnaissance organisation during WWII, which a Colonel Roosevelt (the president’s son) recommended, on the eve of the D-Day invasion of Normandy, be wound up because the Limey-faggot RAF was in charge! And it is unlikely that BOX 88 could operate “below the radar” in a world where a US Senator on the intelligence and foreign relations committee can be found in possession of a closet full of unexplained gold bars and carrier-bags of banknotes!

But, as a literary device, the Anglo-American BOX 88 with America as by far the senior partner allows the DGSE to be the not-quite enemy in a way that would be enormously offensive to a large swathe of pro-EU opinion if BOX 88 were British! Which is all good fun.

Kennedy 35 by Charles Cumming is published by Harper Collins on the 26^th of October 2023.

Book Review of The Bone Chests by Cat Jarman

* * * * *

Using old bones and science to answer historical questions and, perhaps, ask new some ones.

(This review is based on a free review .pdf from the publisher via Net Galley UK.)

This book tells the story of Wessex, Mercia and then England in the five centuries or so leading up to the reign of William Rufus, through modern attempts to literally unscramble bones mixed up by an act of sacrilege another five centuries after that, in THE English Civil War. Along the way, reference is made to other English civil wars and numerous Viking raids, occupations and two actual conquests. Which by itself shows how much more complex our history is than our general understanding of our own history.

As well as showing us what science can tell us about the fairly distant past, this well written and well-researched work shows us which kinds of historical question science cannot answer: science can tell us whether a traditional account or even a contemporary record is possibly true and it can sometimes tell us when it definitely isn’t true. But that isn’t the same as knowing what really happened in any detail not evident in the long-term consequences of an historical event.

Whilst nearly all of the evidence cited here was found in Winchester, the case cited to best exemplify the limitations of forensic science as well as its power comes from the discovery of the bones of King Richard III under a car-park in Leicester. Because, even though the DNA evidence (popularly supposed to be the gold standard of forensic evidence in modern criminal cases) is actually a bit open to question, pretty well ALL the circumstantial evidence favours the bones discovered in Leicester being those of Richard III, not least the fact that the body was more or less exactly where one researcher had already predicted it might be (and the first place she looked), based on years of work with available records. The body was on its own, it had been buried with no reverence whatsoever, the deceased had suffered from the right sort of long-term skeletal health problems and had died in battle not wearing a helmet and suffering more than one potentially-lethal injury. Possibly several enemy soldiers had gone for the same man at the same moment, which suggests that either they were running out of targets, or he was the target that would end the war!

Despite all that, this work does tell us which Saxon and Norman-era legends and myths might well be actual history and gives some clues as to which might well be fabrications. What it does NOT do, is apply the same patient methodical analysis to the Civil War-era accounts of the desecration of the bone chests and Winchester Cathedral, upon which the whole narrative is hung. That’s not so much a failing as an opportunity for further study and further questions:

If you chuck bones that are between two and five centuries old at stained-glass leaded lights of any quality, do those bones retain anything like the mass and density (“ballistic coefficient”) to actually wreak anything like the destruction claimed?

If men inside the cathedral break the windows by any means whatsoever, how does the glass end up mingled with the bones, also inside the cathedral?

Parliamentary soldiers systematically and habitually desecrating OTHER cathedrals and churches hurled (and shot) much more effective projectiles than very old, almost certainly lightweight and friable human bones!

Wouldn’t a more likely scenario have been something more like the Parliamentary soldiers doing what they had some considerable practice at doing: smashing the windows and doors in from the outside in order to concentrate the broken glass in the space used by (kneeling, if non-Puritan) worshippers before coming inside to see what else needed to be smashed?

How likely is it that the bone chests were actually the LAST thing the Parliamentary soldiers set out to desecrate (definitely the hardest objects to reach, not immediately obviously important), thus explaining why their officers became impatient and called a halt before ALL the bone chests were broken up and their contents thrown around inside the cathedral to mingle with the broken glass?

Might the old and friable bones have done so little damage that soldiers simply got bored with throwing them at things which didn’t break in a spectacular way? Or had they already broken every available glass object by other means?

Using old bones to answer long-standing questions is applied science.

Real science is using the evidence (old and new) to ask new questions.

The Bone Chests, Unlocking the Secrets of the Anglo-Saxons, by Cat Jarman is published by William Collins on the 14^th of September 2023.

 

Book Review of Steel Girls at War by Michelle Rawlins

 * * * *

(This review is based on a free review .pdf from the publisher via Net Galley UK.)

A city, workplace community and families under the stress of war.

If the previous titles in this series seemed a bit rose-tinted, it’s perhaps because the opening months of WW2 actually were a bit rose-tinted. Dire pre-war predictions of massive civilian casualties hadn’t yet come to pass (and in the UK they never quite did) but the phoney war lulled many people into no longer expecting anything really bad to happen -and then, of course, it did. This book in the series covers the summer of 1940 when the really bad stuff happened and it didn’t look as if Hitler would ever be stopped in his tracks. (NB: even winning the battle of Britain didn’t immediately change this perception, no matter how it’s presented in the feature film of that campaign.)

This story is about what it was like for real people on the receiving end of both real bombing raids and the more shapeless threat of invasion and conquest that lay behind them. And it’s well told:

A woman already driven to the point of collapse with worry about the fate of her husband, missing in France, learns that he’s now in hospital in Portsmouth: one of the cities now being bombed. The psychological impact on the man in question of his frying-pan to fire experience being well described. Another woman and her daughter are coping with a husband and father still traumatised by his experiences in the first world war. Food is short, unless you have somewhere (and the time) to grow your own.

Other characters are still loving and hoping and to some extent this is what allows those in a worse situation to feel a bit of hope themselves.

The author sets out to show how destructive selfishness, even excusable selfishness, can be in high stress, high-risk situations and that, I fear, is a lesson we all need to learn, because the coping mechanisms of nineteen-forties British society have largely been suppressed and dismantled in the present day.

If, in the earlier books in this series, the levels of neighbourly love and community spirit seemed absurdly high to the modern reader, the summer of 1940 was when those “absurdly” high levels of neighbourly love proved to be just barely enough.

Steel Girls at War is published in the UK by HQ on the 31^st of August 2023

Book Review of Reykjavík by Ragnar Jónason and Katrín Jakobsdóttir

(Translated into English by Victoria Cribb.)

 

* * * * *

Icelandic chiller thriller with a resolution!

(This review is based on a free review EPUB from the publisher via Net Galley UK)

The narrative of this well-written and competently-translated novel stretches from August 1956 to November 1986 (there is a reference to prior events in 1955), with most of the story happening in the run-up to the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Reykjavík when a decades-old missing persons case is revealed to be a murder case which comes to a head and is resolved on the day of the summit meeting itself.

This structure sets the scene for the thriller whilst giving the readers a series of snapshots of Icelandic society changing (and the economy and population growing) as changes in communications, travel and entertainment technology bring the outside world closer to Iceland than it has ever been before, before the world’s most powerful leaders arrive in Reykjavík to thrash out their differences and focusing the whole world’s attention there.

Almost all the action takes place in Reykjavík or its suburbs, or on the “remote” island of Videy, which bears about the same geographical to Iceland’s capital as Hayling Island does to Havant. (This may or may not help British readers from North of the Trent.) The one, interesting, exception is when the heroine has to travel to her home community in the North of Iceland for her brother’s funeral. Buildings there being painted in bold colours (as they are in Port Stanley and some Hebridean communities) in a brave attempt to stop the settlement blending any further into the landscape than it already has.

The heroine herself is brave and brilliant, though she only discovers this in herself when tragedy forces her to take on her older brother’s mantle and complete his journalistic investigation into what might happened on Videy before either of them was born. She has to cope with generational differences as well as those of politics and social class. Though when push really comes to shove, she gets prompt support from those she thought most conservative and disapproving of her -even as someone she trusted acts with monumental treachery. Though the story shows us some divisions within Icelandic society, these fade away as soon as the shocking truth, which no-one can excuse or accept, is exposed.

If there is a moral here (and in Nordic thrillers there often isn’t) it is that it’s not the presumption of innocence that allows the rich and powerful to get away, literally, with murder, but their own blithe assumption of immunity. Guilt and innocence are irrelevant to those who are never required to account for their own actions. And in the summer of 2023, we have all seen a lot of evidence of that!

Reykjavík by Ragnar Jónason and Katrín Jakobsdóttir is published in the UK by Michael Joseph on the 17^th of August 2023

Book review of Delicate Condition by Danielle Valentine

* * *

A gestation thriller!

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK)

 

 This is a well-written and generally well-thought-out novel with an interesting surprise ending. It describes a nightmare pregnancy during a winter which seems to go on for so long that the setting might be Narnia rather than the Hamptons. That cost it a star, I’m afraid: I know it’s about the way that perceptions change during pregnancy, but a pregnancy supplies a certain timeline and the season doesn’t seem, to the reader, to turn with that timeline. It may be alright in the author’s original plan, but so much of the book happens in winter that it seems eternal.

The other troubling thing is that, until the surprise ending and explanation is reached, it’s hard for the reader to tell whether the pregnant heroine is being stalked by strangers or at least gaslighted by her husband, or if she’s delusional and hallucinating. This isn’t a crime for which any writer can or should be “cancelled” but it carries rather more risks in the real world than most of the things writers are being cancelled for these days. The whole point of stalking and more especially gaslighting is very often to get the victim declared mentally-ill and, most especially delusional. Either to discredit them in court (especially a divorce court) or for someone connected with the stalker to seize control of the victim’s financial affairs. There’s not a stalker in the known universe who wouldn’t be pleased to confuse women’s (or men’s in some cases) experience of being stalked or gaslighted with delusion, hallucination or some allied psychosis. And even when the novel’s fairly startling conclusion is reached, the necessary delineation between abuse and hallucination is not quite there.

This book has some interesting things to say, but the two deficiencies significantly dilute what is good about it.

Delicate Condition by Danielle Valentine is published by Viper (an imprint of Serpent’s Tail) in the UK on the 17^th of August 2023.

What REALLY made those behind the AI revolution panic?

 I published this article on this blog in 2021 and almost nobody read it:

https://mswritingshowcase.blogspot.com/2021/06/ai-and-economics-of-tyranny.html

Until, that is, about two months before the sudden about-face by leading AI researchers, politicians and business leaders, culminating in today's meetings between President Biden and not only the British Prime Minister, Mr Sunak, but King Charles as well. 

And between world leaders meeting in Singapore, supposedly about pandemic regulations, and last week, that article was being seen by hundreds of people located in Singapore every single day.

Now, the most obvious theme of the article is that it suggests that an AI-based economy is the only known way that tyranny can become sustainable (and thus persist for generations or the proverbial thousand years) in the modern world, because it's the only known alternative to letting people have enough freedom and the certainty of ownership of their own ideas to innovate and pursue more efficient solutions, because it's in everybody's interests to do things better.

Somewhat paradoxically, an AI-based economy allows for innovation to be suppressed and efficiencies found which do not actually benefit those who have to implement those efficiencies. So an AI-based world economy would have the benefits of economic sustainability without any of this freedom, democracy and accountability stuff: and the past few years have seen the global elite very much at war with all three of these graces. But that's precisely why the about-face is so strange: it's been very clear for many years that this is what all the decision-makers in the Capitalist and Communist worlds have wanted ever since the "fall of communism" or at least, the failure of the Soviet Bloc. They didn't change their minds because this blog (or any other source of the same basic concept) showed them that continuing on their chosen path would probably have the very results they most wanted!

Thing is, there's the theme of the article, which is obvious, and its implication, which took a bit more thinking time on the part of our lords and masters:

If the Chinese economy benefits proportionately more from the introduction of AI than the American economy precisely because the bulk of its workforce is less-skilled than its American counterpart and expects much less reward, so it can be replaced by AI with little or no economic disruption and very little in the way of compensation and with no imperative to maintain anyone's standard of living, then not only is it possible that those economies where the skill levels are much HIGHER than in the United States (Finland, Japan, Switzerland, South Korea, possibly even Croatia these days) could see a negative economic and social impact from the introduction of AI, those economies with a significantly LOWER technological skills base than that of Communist China (such as Sudan, Uganda or Tanzania?) might derive an even greater proportional economic boost from AI than Communist China.

The panic is really all about the rather belated realisation that the AI revolution will have all the effects the global elite have hoped and planned for, but the resultant power and all other benefits will flow to all the wrong people! 

The Definitive Rebranding of the Sussexes

 This Wednesday morning at 3AM (there's a song title in there somewhere) I was gently raised to consciousness by a somewhat premature blackbird to the news, from the perceptive, logical and rational Tom Bower, that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex plan to rebrand themselves as "The Spencer family." Here is the GB News video in question, though to get to Mr Bower you first have to witness the rather lovely Miss Kelly Osbourne not mincing any words at all. Which is good fun, but killjoys can scroll past her:

"Spencer" is probably the second most common Anglo-Norman surname after "Norman" and whilst the Duke of Sussex may assume that the inhabitants of Althorpe House in Northamptonshire are the only Spencers who need to be consulted about this (I cannot believe that the Duke and his Duchess might have failed to consult Earl Spencer, at least), they are but one cell in a global Spencer diaspora numbering at least in the tens of thousands and now covering an impressive range of ethnicities. Unless the Duke plans to consult us all, and he doesn't display any awareness that the rest of us Spencers even exist, it would be courteous of him to follow the politically-perceptive example of his great-great grandfather King George the Fifth and adopt a new and somewhat more unique family name.

It would need to be something that captured the popular imagination and which the public might start using of their own accord, rather than being woke-bullied into using it by endless pressure and coercion. And if it neatly epitomises his brand,it might remain in popular usage for his lifetime and for generations to come:

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Absalom-Jezebels!

The Man Who Would Play God

 

The image of Xi Jingping replaces Jesus Christ

The most dangerous leader in the world is not Vladimir Putin, Ali Khamenei or Kim Jong Un, but someone whom the Biden White House and the Cleverly Foreign and Commonwealth Office see and promote, not as the author of ongoing genocide against Uighurs and other ethnic minorities, but as a dear and trusted partner who "must not be isolated", which is precisely what both the White House and the FCO routinely seek to do to Vladimir Putin, Ali Khamenei  and Kim Jong Un. 

What makes Xi stand out from all the other despots is not the size and strength of his economy, nor his nuclear and biological arsenal and his conventional armed forces, nor even the unprecedented levels of surveillance and control he exercises over his subjects. Xi distinguishes himself by his willingness to lay plans of extermination, not against dissidents or some scapegoat ethnic group (he's doing that already without troubling the White House and the FCO in any way) but against his own Han ethnic majority, and on a scale to dwarf all previous acts of genocide.

The embedded YouTube video, below, describes a three point plan by which Xi Jingping plans to create manual jobs on construction sites for eighty million University and College graduates (a counsel of ruin and despair in and of itself), by sending a matching eighty million existing internal migrant construction workers (over fifty years old) "back" to countryside areas of extremely marginal fertility to grow grain. He also creates a uniformed militia with unprecedented powers even for Communist China, and their mission is to rigidly control every single act of agriculture or environmental management in the areas to which the eighty million "retirees" are being forced to go and this affects the existing resident population of those areas as well as the retirees. The third point of the plan appears to be the deliberate prohibition or sabotage of any act of agriculture by any of the participants that might allow them to feed themselves and their immediate neighbours, let alone earn revenue to pay for all the non-food necessities of life.

And, note very well, cash is also being extorted and drained from both the existing residents and the retirees at every turn. Resources in the affected areas that might enable life to continue, such as vegetable gardens, livestock and even orchards, forests and windbreaks of trees (some planted on the orders of Xi's predecessors to alleviate the damage done by Mao's policies of deliberate famine-creation) are being systematically destroyed. Freezers are being confiscated to stop "peasants" being able to preserve fresh food. The eighty million retirees are being transported to a land where every cupboard is bare before they even arrive. This differs from the notorious genocide of the Namib people in South West Africa by Imperial Germany at the turn of the twentieth century in only three respects:

• The (possibly only initial) number of victims is two orders of magnitude greater.
• The victims are mostly the same race and ethnicity as the militia forcing them into a desert to die and the leader ordering this to happen.
• The desert itself is being artificially created for the purpose as part of the policy!

 The motive and "justification" for this has been frankly stated that the "retirees" haven't funded their own retirement (they have only ever been paid enough in any given week to keep them alive for a week and they therefore expected to keep working till they dropped) and most only have savings to last for about a year and their own funeral. And it seems unlikely that the eighty million aspiring young university and college graduates taking their place will ever be paid enough to fund their retirement either. 

It has been stated (not by anyone connected with Xi) that all this is to provide jobs for young middle class ex-students to stop them rebelling. That may be a short-term benefit in Xi's eyes, but the reality is that a whole tier of the Chinese workforce has been given the same status as Vladimir Putin's "disposable infantry" in that they will be given jobs, and given no choice but to do them, until they become infirm or it becomes expedient to give those jobs to someone else. At which point they will be euthanized by transportation to a place where human life has intentionally been made impossible.

Not only does Xi condemn China's working class to a miserable death in an arid dustbowl of his creation: he is putting China's middle-class youth in the place of the old working class, both in the workforce and in the death queue. 

Western viewers of the video below will, on their first viewing, be most appalled at the environmental damage, but the real atrocity is that the environmental disaster is an intentional instrument of mass human execution.

Somewhat presciently, in my novel "The Lord of Billionaires' Row" (written and first published in 2018) the issue which finally triggers a civil war between opposing wings of the CCP boils down to "The Faction's" denial of the right of workers to make safe and sensible investments towards their own retirement. (Workers are fleeced, instead, by investment instruments all linked to the property market bubble.)

see:

https://mswritingshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-lord-of-billionaires-row.html

Afterthought, added on the 21st of June 2023:

It may seem to many that the very worst thing they can imagine, is a campaign of genocide against a religious or ethnic minority. And it probably is the worst concept that any of us can truly grasp, because it's the worst thing that happened (more than once) during the twentieth century. 

We can, however, reason (but not really grasp) that once the campaign of genocide starts against an ethnic majority the only limiting factor on that genocide is everyone being dead.

Book Review of Four Seasons in Japan by Nick Bradley

 * * * * *

Finding and building a future in Japan outside the mega city.

 

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK)

Kyo’s life ends at nineteen, when he fails his university entrance exams and his deported from Tokyo by his Doctor Mother to live with his formidable and somewhat austere grandmother in a small coastal town near Hiroshima, which contains absolutely none of the things he sees as essential to normal life. His mission is to study at a cramming school for a year and get his predetermined medical career back on track.

On arrival, he is shocked to find that people speak to him in passing on the street! Gradually, he comes to realise that they actually care about each other and even about him, the new stranger in their midst. And the community is more impressed by his artistic talents than his medical ambitions.

Interwoven with this is the story of a young American woman, living and working in Tokyo as a translator, who tries to rebuild her own life around translating a book she has found on a train, telling Kyo’s story. She must track down the author and get his permission to publish, whilst fighting her own crisis of confidence in her own talents.

By struggling with the impossible choice between pursuing his medical ambitions or his artistic talents, Kyo finds that the real choice is between Tokyo, where he must choose one career or the other, or the community which will support him whichever he chooses, or even if he makes no choice at all.

This novel, bordering on fable, quietly addresses a very important but seldom discussed issue in the modern world, which is that the whole basis for the “mega city” planning concept behind Tokyo and Shanghai, and turning the whole of England in to an extension of London, is to create a situation where every employer can easily find someone with the skills they need who has no option other than to render those skills for no reward beyond the barest necessities of life. Supposedly, there is a critical population mass of 100 million, at which point all but the 0.001% magically become compliant wage slaves, forever. The author shows us, without beating us over the head with the idea, that more traditional caring values offer an alternative to dystopia.

Four Seasons in Japan by Nick Bradley is published by Random House UK on the 22^nd of June 2023

Book Review of The Orwell Tour by Oliver Lewis

 

Image copyright (c) Matthew K. Spencer 1999, all rights reserved

 

* * * *

Travels through the life and work of George Orwell

This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK.

 

This is a good and useful book which I will give a four-star recommendation: it’s actually a lot more interesting than it would have been as a five-star flawless treatise with no flaws to set me thinking. Some of the episodes in Orwell’s life and travels I knew something about. About others, especially the extended visit to Morocco, I knew only that it had happened.

When the story comes to Orwell’s time in Wallington, North Hertfordshire, the author repeats the error most others have made and assumes that the tiny village of Wallington and the (then quite small) neighbouring market town of Baldock was the whole story of George Orwell in what used to be known pre-1974 as “The Hitchin Region”. His friendship with E.M. Forster, who would contribute much to Orwell’s wartime radio broadcasts, was strengthened by their ability to easily meet each other halfway in Hitchin, which was where many Hertfordshire buses ran on livestock market days.

But that’s not a major complaint, because the author has indeed toured the whole of George Orwell’s world and visited places a lot more remote than Wallington or the village of Orwell, just across the Cambridgeshire border from Wallington. These locations (as they are and as they might have been) are well-described in a manner not unworthy of Orwell and the author gives us quite a lot of insight into how well, or otherwise, Orwell is remembered.

Spain is the nicest example, because Orwell appears to be remembered widely and warmly and this is interesting. Yes, Orwell fought in the civil war, but so did other, more macho and flamboyant, literary figures. The key here is to remember a point once well made by the former British Railways Minister and Defence Secretary, Michael Portillo, that most families in Spain had members who fought on both sides of the civil war and many of those families had members who fell fighting for both sides, too. Orwell never really articulated, let alone supported, the Nationalist side of the argument, but his writings were sufficiently observational and objective for it to be evident to any thinking person that there might have been compelling reasons why people fought against, as well as for, the Republicans.

In Spain, to see the civil war too much from EITHER side’s point of view is to risk alienating any or perhaps every Spanish family, because they all had members on both sides.

In the city of Huesca, there is a campaign to erect a statue of George Orwell drinking a cup of coffee, because, when he was taking part in the siege of Huesca, he expressed a wish to find out what the coffee there tasted like in peacetime. If I were a resident of Huesca, I’d find that a much more palatable goal than most of those formed during the siege.

Mention is made of the ferocious attacks on George Orwell by many on the left: by comparison with Laurie Lee, Orwell has (so far) been well-defended against “cancelling” but Lee was vilified all his life and his diaries stolen by those who claimed his memoirs of Spain to be “false.” Students and fans of George Orwell need to remain alert, because if the hard left could do what they did to the rustic, gentle and innocuous Laurie Lee, it’s not hard to imagine them one day doing worse to a more dangerous foe, such as Orwell.

The Orwell Tour by Oliver Lewis is published by Icon Books on the 26^th of September 2023.

Book Review of A Cornish Seaside Murder by Fiona Leitch

* * * *

A thriller of widening possibilities.

This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK.

There are two departures from current normal police practice in this story:

Two detectives who live together in an intimate sort of way investigate the same case and they solve the case by considering an ever-widening range of possibilities in the light of events subsequent to the original crime and the emerging evidence. The former adds a bit of spice, the latter is thought-provoking as soon as you allow yourself to start thinking about those possibilities rather than wondering when the author is going to actually narrow down the list of suspects.

Told with humour and with some Len Deighton-ish departures into cookery, the story follows the detectives, one having served in London and the other in the big, drug-ravaged cities of the North West, as they investigate what looks to them like an all-too familiar brutal murder, probably involving drugs, for which there is just a smattering of local precedent.

Except that this is rural Cornwall where this sort of thing is uncommon almost to the point of being unheard of and the explanation is something that could only really happen in that location, even though the level and frequency of violence is totally out of character for that community. The conclusion is frightening enough for this to possibly be the last book in this particular series, but it might not be...

A Cornish Seaside Murder by Fiona Leitch is published by Harper Collins on the 8^th of June 2023

Book Review of Five Chimneys by Olga Lengyel

 * * * * *

Lessons from the Holocaust for the present day.

This book is the author’s first-hand account of what she experienced between 1942 and 1945, mainly in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, bolstered by what she was told by others who were also there and whose accounts she was careful to check as far as possible. Auschwitz was a large forced labour camp including several different industrial enterprises which paid the SS for slave labour intentionally worked to death there. Birkenau was a reception and extermination camp within Auschwitz, where those who might be able to work were separated from those who might not be able to work. The former were set to work, for as long as they lasted in dreadful conditions, the latter were killed more or less immediately unless they had other uses. Few detainees were retained to work in Birkenau itself and even fewer survived. A significant proportion of these had medical training, and partly because of this not only were they forced to assist in medical experiments on humans; they understood what they were seeing. The author was more or less the only one who both understood what she was seeing and lived to tell the tale. Forgive me if there were others, but this really is the best all-round account we have.

This isn’t a review of a book I was asked to read and review or one I just happened to review: it is a review of a book I remembered from years ago and bought and read a fresh copy of, because there are things happening in the world today which cannot be fully discussed for many reasons, the most valid of which is that some crimes and tragedies are so unbelievable that they are innocently and helplessly denied by eye-witnesses and even direct victims at the scene and caught up in the process. The less valid reason is that the authors of great tragedies inevitably and energetically contest the facts until the last guilty verdict is delivered a decade or two after the event.

George Santayana wrote that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” but how might we learn the lessons of a recent past that is hidden from us? We cannot remember what we are not allowed to know! Well, Santayana’s quote supplies the tools we need: the sort of person or coalition of vested interests that might obfuscate truth and reality on a global scale might very well fail to remember the past and, therefore, the past will contain a template for the very actions they are condemned to repeat, the study of which will allow the rest of us to understand not only what has just been going and what is going on now, but what the next moves might be!

Because this is a non-fiction account of historical events with no surprise twists at the end, I will be breaking my usual rule by using three quotes from the text. The first quote is actually from a letter sent to the author after pre-publication copies were circulated and it is in the front matter of the Kindle version reviewed here; you have to click or tap LEFT from the “beginning” to see it:

“you have done a real service by letting the ones who are now silent and most forgotten speak…”

A. Einstein.

This is not a celebrity endorsement but an authoritative one. It is time for a substantial number of old and new readers to both read and discuss this book, if the evil described in it is not to re-occur either because we do not recall or because we do not understand. All knowledge, even seemingly unshakeable “scientific or historical fact” decays into myth and superstition without the regular refreshment of discussion and debate. And “never again!” becomes a self-denying mantra if no-one is allowed to compare the Holocaust to other situations: past, present or future. Because even though these things are not exactly the same as the Holocaust (no two things are ever exactly the same) some of them may very well be heading in the same general direction at a greater or lesser pace. If we redefine “never again” as being “we’ll let anything pass just so long as we can see a shred of difference between it and the Holocaust” then we really are on the fast track to Hell.

The second quote is:

“The dissemination of ‘false news’ was forbidden by the Germans on pain of death.”

The politics of the Third Reich is linked to the present not by swastikas, parades through avenues of upturned searchlights, MP38/40 machine-pistols or even gas chambers, but by the global trend towards the rigid and increasingly ruthless imposition of a single narrative for everything, imposed by those with no visible chain of accountability. Not only are people having their lives and careers wrecked by even minor departures from the official narrative, that narrative appears much more complicated and far-reaching than that of Dr Goebbels and is therefore easier to transgress against. And it is the single allowable narrative that makes “NAZI Science” a dangerous idol for those who have learned not to deny the Holocaust itself. The striking thing about most of the human experiments described in Chapter XXII is not that they were cruel and murderous, never mind “unethical” but that they were completely and utterly unscientific, designed either to prove a premise that it was illegal to contradict, or simply devised by the camp’s own medical officers for their own amusement.

The remaining experiments were mainly only semi-scientific and most amounted to product development tests by German chemical and pharmaceutical companies of which Bayer was (and still is) the most significant. “Big Pharma” starts with Bayer, not with Beecham’s Pills. A vaccine institute sent numerous vaccines to be tested on Holocaust victims, but it isn’t clear that any useful information was recorded, because the test subjects were mostly sent to the gas chambers before the vaccines had time to work. If in the present day or the future, mass experiments are conducted, without informed consent on either a national or a global scale, with their execution and interpretation subject to a single authorised narrative which may not be challenged on pain of whatever punishment, they will be as unscientific and useless as those conducted in Auschwitz-Birkenau and recorded in “Five Chimneys.” The results of the tests there weren’t always even recorded because the narrative would not change, no matter what those results were. This kind of experiment is only really intended to give diktat a scientific veneer.

The third and final quote concerns a question which troubled not only the author but many of her medical colleagues forced to help conduct tests and experiments within the camp. There was a separate site for sterilisation experiments and these differed from the usual pattern in that the authorities actually seemed to have an interest in the results. Given that all camp inmates (and not just experimental subjects) were supposed to die in the camp anyway, what was the interest in sterilisation? They asked an Aryan German social worker who knew a lot of important people in Berlin (which may in itself explain why he ended up in Birkenau!) what it was all about:

“If they could sterilise all non-German people still alive after their victorious war, there would be no danger of new generations of ‘inferior’ peoples. At the same time, the living populations would be able to serve as labourers for about thirty years. After that time, the surplus German population would need all the living space in those countries, and the ‘inferiors’ would perish without descendants.”

The implication of that is that the primary victim groups of the Holocaust were just that: only the first on a list which ultimately included the vast majority of the human population of Planet Earth.

That’s an objective not recorded in “Mein Kampf” but it was inscribed on the Georgia Guidestones before someone fairly recently blew them up with mining explosives. (Since the Guidestones were erected without the knowledge or consent of local authorities and residents, it's not clear if this demolition broke any laws. Whoever did it may have been legally as well as technically expert.)

 

Footnote, not published on Amazon out of respect for their community guidelines.

Five Chimneys by Olga Lengyel has been published in several imprints since 1959; they all seem to be basically the same edition and this is a link to one of the imprints on Amazon that is currently available as either a Kindle E-book or a paperback:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B06XGLG1DR

This is the source which this review is based on, but for copyright reasons readers in some Amazon domains might have to search for a different imprint of the same title and by the same author. In some countries it might be easier to access from second hand bookshops, either online or in a quiet back street.

(There used to be a pub on the Herts/Beds border called “The Five Chimneys” and anything with this title but not by Olga Lengyel may prove to be a beery history of a rural hostelry overlooking the Arlesey Brickworks!)

I actually read this book as a paperback more than a quarter of a century ago, but when I found myself wishing for a book saying things about recent and ongoing happenings which are not yet allowed to be said, I remembered that one had already been written and published two generations ago and all I had to do was buy it on Kindle, check that it still said what I remembered it had said, leave a review on Amazon and encourage others to not only read it for themselves and reach their own conclusions, but leave a review of their own on Amazon or anywhere else that’ll accept it.

Book Review of The People Watcher by Sam Lloyd

 

 

* * * * *

A wholly original and gripping thriller which shocks and surprises until the end.

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK.)

This is going to be a very positive review, not least because when I reviewed the author’s previous novel I suggested that it shared a few features with his first novel (which had some points of contact with one by John Fowles) and the next one needed a clean slate.

The People Watcher got that clean slate all right! It benefits from this.

Most of the story is seen through the eyes of a brain-damaged person and some of the tension comes from this character’s inability to really know her own next move or even face her past. The bulk of the tension, though, comes from an accelerating sequence of ever more fraught and frightening events in the present and revelations about the past. Some of the relationships and actions depicted in this novel are spectacularly unwise and unhealthy, but are realistic in that murder is a perverse response to any situation, especially when that situation is normal life. What Sam Lloyd gets so right is the bell-curve of perversity that follows such an inappropriate and disproportionate response, where everything goes from bad to worse for quite some time until a catastrophe allows normality to begin to force her way back in.

There are moral challenges, too, for the reader as well as the main protagonist (who strives to right serious wrongs with small acts of kindness and is shocked when darker methods seem to work.)

The People Watcher by Sam Lloyd is published by Random House UK on the 12^th of June 2023

Book Review of Slaughterhouse Farm by T. Orr Munro

 

 Second forensic thriller in the Ally Dymond series.

* * * *

 

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK.)

In the aftermath of the traumas suffered by Ally Dymond and her daughter, Megan, in “Breakneck Point” “Slaughterhouse Farm” is a fast-moving and compelling story of how long-buried traumas and abusive relationships can lead to crimes decades or even generations after that initial trauma.

What unravels is not one thread of a single mystery, but a web of interlocking crimes committed by different people from three generations and several families and for a wide spread of reasons, which means that the pressure on CSI Ally Dymond and her family, and the tension for the reader, never let up till the very end. This wouldn’t be an Ally Dymond story if it did! And if you don’t know everything that’s going on, how can you ever know who to trust?

This is a very good read, but so much goes on that you more or less have to read it from cover to cover in order to keep everything in your head.

 

Slaughterhouse Farm by T. Orr Munro is published by HQ on the 25^th of May 2023.

Book Review of Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

* * * * *

This review is based on a free review EPUB from the publisher via Net Galley UK.

This is a fictionalised history of several people’s stories, intertwined with each other, the Vietnam War and its aftermath. It is well-written and deeply-researched. The themes include sexual exploitation, racism and bullying, from a realistic rather than a “woke” perspective. Fear of the impending communist regime turns out to be worse than the reality, though no-one specifically targetted by the regime is likely to think so! All of Vietnam’s regimes, so far, have been authoritarian and one thing which an authoritarian or totalitarian regime does not normally do is crack down effectively on bullying, which makes bullying the key problem for most of the protagonists in this story. (Authoritarian regimes tend to be coalitions of the culpable which find themselves obliged to let their accomplices get away with stuff -and, of course, they then have to go on letting the bastards get away with stuff no matter how bad things get. Marshal Tito was the sole (and belated) proponent of socialist economic liberalism to survive the Soviet era largely because he was the only communist leader to run a tight-enough ship to be ABLE to change course.)

The author shows us what’s wrong with sexual exploitation by showing us all the other things the exploited ones knew how to do and how much happiness and prosperity was possible when they were able to do those things instead. And always, education and new skills, acquired throughout life and not just in childhood, are a better escape mechanism from poverty and exploitation than the panacea of a US Visa. The moral arguments against prostitution are essentially the same as Adam Smith’s economic arguments against slavery: the waste of resources is always a moral issue when the resources being wasted are human ones.

American servicemen are shown as treating Vietnamese women extremely badly and there’s plenty of historical evidence of that. It’s partly because they were so much younger on average than the men who’d fought the Second World War, but also because the only goal they were ever given was to complete their “tour” and go home. The absence of any published definition of success emphasised the lack of any extant strategy for achieving success and led to a lack of much, if any, sense of responsibility on the part of American soldiers to those they left behind in Vietnam when they achieved their goal of going home. Nothing they did was seen as making anything any worse; the author’s skill is to show us that, actually, it did make things worse.

Reading this book left me with a feeling of admiration for the Vietnamese who seem to have recovered from the Vietnam war rather better than their neighbours in Cambodia and Laos. And gratitude for the post war British leaders who saw Vietnam as a hot potato which, like Aden and Yemen, simply needed to be dropped. Which makes the sell-outs of their successors, Blair and Cameron, to the mindless White House incumbents of their day all the more galling.

Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is published in the UK by One World Publications on the 6^th of April 2023.

Saving the BBC Singers from the BBC

 

The BBC has decided to abolish the BBC Singers, who are the only full-time professional chamber choir in Britain. There is no particular evidence that "The Government" put the BBC up to this, and in fact the whole plan seems quite arbitrary and devoid of costing, or indeed anything beyond closing the singers down. Those responsible for the decision claimed, to an over-trusting press corps, that they were closing the singers down in order to do something "much better" in support of choral music across the whole of the country etc. etc. but when challenged they provided no details before walking away, leaving a senior colleague in tears, and it's quite apparent that the "better alternative" simply does not exist and probably never will. 

 There is a petition against the decision, which is still open and which I have signed. Here is a link to an update to that petition which includes a long letter to the BBC leadership detailing the true facts behind the decision and the shockingly disrespectful conduct of certain of the individuals concerned.

https://www.change.org/p/stop-the-planned-closure-of-the-bbc-singers/u/31407371

This shorter link should allow readers to add their own signatures:

https://www.change.org/p/stop-the-planned-closure-of-the-bbc-singers

The decision matches the templates of recent decisions to cut back ethnic community radio programming and local TV and radio news programmes in favour of "regional" news. If you live in Peterborough, Milton Keynes or Leighton Buzzard, the "regional" news is the world as it appears from Norwich, which is sometimes very distant indeed. There were petitions against those decisions too, which I also signed. However, since I'm not part of an ethnic minority it's hardly for me to comment on, let alone lead, a campaign to preserve ethnic community programming, but I would say that although it undoubtedly feels to many of those affected as if they are being singled out for cuts by the BBC on racist grounds, the mere fact that the presentation of so many different cuts to BBC community and cultural services conforms to the same template indicates pretty strongly that this is a purge against distinctiveness in any form and that excellence is just another unwanted "distinction" in the eyes of the BBC's managerial elite. And it probably is "managerialism" rather than socialism or conservatism which is behind all this.

The thing about managerialists is that it's a bother to them to see us as belonging to different ethnic, religious, social or even geographical groups and they are affronted when asked to perceive us as individuals. Whereas Bolsheviks and even NAZIs were capable of recognising, nurturing and exploiting talented individuals when it suited their purposes, managerialists simply cannot grasp the concept of a member of the "irrational masses" having a talent, or any other property, unique to them. So, in circumstances where Lenin, Stalin or even Hitler might have given Mr Simon Webb a few words of polite recognition or kind encouragement, a BBC executive, whom we shall call "Ms Kreb," simply left the room. And it probably was the realisation that the accumulated talent and learning of the BBC Singers, which he had helped nurture and was pleading for, meant nothing to Ms Kreb and her peer group which reduced him to tears. 

So why, given that this post is really about what to do next if the BBC managerial elite refuse to change course or even acknowledge that they have pursued an arbitrary policy in a supremely arrogant manner, do I recommend that everyone who reads this signs the petition and supports the campaign to save the BBC Singers within the BBC, to the bitter end?

There are three reasons for this: 

Firstly, though I believe a change of heart where no hearts beat to be profoundly unlikely, it would be a famous victory if it happened and the positive ramifications might rumble on for a gratifying amount of time.

Secondly, campaigning to the bitter end will not only raise public awareness of the BBC Singers and their genuine worth to the nation (rather than provoking fleeting sympathy over how foully they are being treated); it will give the managerialists the maximum possible number of opportunities to show the public -and even elected politicians- their true face. That is both a benefit and a duty.

Thirdly, what the BBC Singers will need to do next if there is no change of heart is going to take some steel and a lot of resolve. A bit of a fight will teach them about themselves and each other and how much support each of them will be able to give and how much each might need. And taking the matter to an industrial tribunal might even shake loose a few useful shillings.

What to do when the BBC relinquishes control

The first principle is that the funds needed to keep the Singers flourishing as a creative and artistic community must be raised separately from any redundancy payments or compensation for breaches of contract or other forms of corporate misconduct. Money owed to individuals by the BBC must be reserved for the needs and comfort of those individuals and their dependents. The second principle is that the Singers and their trusted managers and support staff are the talent and as such they must be given and retain control of any donated funds and the entity created by combining funds and talent.

There are some popular business and especially "charitable" structures which will conflict with the second principle and must therefore be avoided.

The purpose of the exercise is to allow the Singers to practice, develop, teach and pass on their art, for their own good as well as that of the public. It could be done on a non-profit basis, but any attempt to conform to the laws governing registered charities would make it more or less impossible for the talent to keep control of the enterprise for their own benefit. Indeed, conforming to charity laws, some of them rewritten in the past couple of decades by Gordon Brown, could well put the Singers back in the hands of the managerialists. 

A partnership might allow greater privacy than a company, but is it really desirable to allow the management of the Singers and their finances to disappear into a dark corner like those of the Blair Foundation? The discipline of a company, filing accounts, on time, where they are available for scrutiny, is often a protection rather than a burden. I wouldn't take advice from any financial expert who advised me to write my accounts in invisible ink, shall we say: because that might benefit the expert a lot more than me!

Cooperatives, trusts, endowments and so on are all prey for the sort of highly-organised people who regularly pore over archive records looking for trusts and endowments they might take control of. A company can defend itself against that sort of thing whereas in practice trusts and endowments often prove to be sitting ducks. The benefits of a public limited company in this instance are non-existent: the scale is all wrong and the Singers would be exposed to speculators and take-over artists manipulating traded shares.

A private limited liability company can be constituted either to make a profit or to be a non-profit. In either case, it can issue both preference shares and non-preference shares which actually come with a vote. The issue of non-preference shares should be limited (by a clause in the articles) to the talent and their trusted managers and support staff. Preference shares should be issued (if at all) sparingly and only to raise funds for a clearly-specified and agreed need. 

It makes sense for each Singer to have the same number of non-preference voting shares as the others. If a Singer wanted to invest more money than the others, they'd probably benefit financially by taking preference shares in any case, if the company had to be wound up.

And if the company (profit or non-profit) did need to be wound up, the Singers would be able to retrieve at least some of their invested funds for their own benefit or for a further venture. This would be more complicated (and very time-consuming) in the case of a trust, and potentially illegal in the case of a charity.

In the case of a non-profit company, remuneration would be on a salaried basis, related to work done. This might not be as tax-efficient as many schemes popular with certain highly-paid BBC figures, but it's pretty simple, transparent and also pretty safe: "tax-efficient" schemes do tend to end up in court, where the Crown has a uniform tendency to triumph over smooth-talking financial advisers, to the surprise and dismay of the clients who have to pay the resulting bills.

PS:

Those who think that George Orwell had it in for NAZIs, Bolsheviks and "Intellectuals" might want to read his remarks about James Burnham and the cult of managerialism which he founded!