How the world sees Greece
 Toronto Star | Aristotle Onassis's Greek island Skorpios sold for $100 million Toronto Star MOSCOW—The daughter of Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev has bought the Greek resort island where shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis famously married Jacqueline Kennedy in the 1960s, Rybolovlev's investment office said. The sale price was not ... A Russian billionaire bought Aristotle Onassis' island Onassis Island Sold To Russian Billionaire - The Inquisitr |
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Muslim Council of Britain attacks new plans for teaching history in British schools, for omitting reference to Islam's trade, cultural and military achievements
One of the UK's leading Islamic organisations has warned that plans to revise the school history curriculum risk ignoring the Muslim contribution to western civilisation – an omission that will only foster alienation.
The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), which claims to represent more than 500 Islamic organisations, is calling for "everyone who cares about the education of British schoolchildren" to lobby the Department for Education (DfE) as the end of the consultation period on the plans looms.
While conceding that history "has always been the most controversial subject in the school curriculum", the MCB says it is "deeply disappointed" that the DfE's draft specification makes no reference to Muslims and Islam. The consultation period closes on Tuesday.
An estimated 10% of children in Britain's schools are Muslim, but the MCB says the proposed new curriculum will not recognise the role Muslims have played in shaping a multicutural Britain and Europe.
The MCB says the plans ignore the contribution of Indian Muslim, Hindu and Sikh soldiers to two world wars, particularly on the western front in the first world war. They also, it adds, fail to acknowledge "the preservation and enhancement of ancient Greek and Roman learning by classical Muslim civilisation, which percolated into Europe via Spain and Italy, leading to the European Renaissance".
Nor, it says, does the curriculum take into account Britain's history of trade, diplomatic and other relations with Muslim-majority regions, or the longstanding presence of Islam in Britain.
The council concludes that the present draft curriculum would fail to teach a "true picture of the past that prepares our children for life" in 21st-century Britain.
"British Muslim children will see no place for themselves in their country's history, creating the risk of alienation," the MCB said in a statement. "At the same time non-Muslim children will grow up believing that Muslims have contributed nothing of value to Britain."
It is not the first body to criticise the proposals. In a joint statement the Historical Association and the Royal Historical Society claim the curriculum has been drafted "without any systematic consultation".
But other historians have defended education secretary Michael Gove's proposals, saying they will allow pupils to understand history's "connected narrative" and put the subject back at the centre of the educational syllabus.
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The Peter principle has it that men are promoted beyond their competence. Now the Paula principle says the opposite happens for women. So who is to blame for slow progress towards more women directorships?
Back in 1969, a book called The Peter Principle was published, and became something of a classic in management texts. It may have influenced the odd change in the way businesses operated but, more memorably, it made readers laugh: its central premise being that employees are eventually promoted to jobs at which they prove incompetent.
So the excellent salesman, whose naturally charming patter compensated for his administrative weaknesses and won over thousands of customers, proves a disastrous sales manager who can't understand why his team of less enchanting but harder-working colleagues don't pull off his trick. Worse, he remains in that job, blocking anyone better qualified from doing it properly.
Now a chap called Tom Schuller is writing a book with a modern twist. It is called the Paula Principle and it argues that most women get promoted to a level below their competence. Far from rising to a position their talents don't deserve, they languish below what they could easily manage.
The Paula Principle is a clever joke – only with a rather serious point. It is 45 years since the Ford sewing machinists' strike forced changes that led to the 1970 Equal Pay Act ending discrimination in pay between men and women, yet in 2013 there is still clear discrimination over who gets the top jobs.
Last week Lord Davies – whose 2011 review on female representation in the boardroom set a target of a quarter of board posts being filled by women by 2015 – was forced on to the defensive after evidence showed that progress towards a more equitable gender balance has slowed.
For the past six months the percentage of female directors appointed to FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 boards has slipped to 26% and 29% respectively, according the latest report from the Cranfield International Centre for Women Leaders. This is a long way short of the 33% required to reach Davies's target. It is also a marked slowdown on rates seen for the preceding six months – 44% and 36% for FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 companies respectively. Women now hold 17.3% of FTSE 100 directorships, but just 5.8% of executive roles, and 21.8% of non-executive posts.
The deceleration in progress may, of course, be a statistical quirk, and certainly business secretary Vince Cable was careful not to use too much alarming language when reviewing the figures. But it seems complacent simply to assume this is a one-off.
When the Davies inquiry launched there was much low-hanging fruit. The worry now is that the easy early gains have been made, and further progress will be much harder to achieve – especially in terms of getting more women into executive roles.
That is illustrated by Cranfield's statistics, which suggest that there are simply not enough women in the pipeline with the necessary experience to get to the top. Its research shows the percentage of women sitting on executive committees – the management level one layer below the board – has dropped from 18.1% to 15.3% since 2009. There are probably several reasons for that, including issues such as flexible working and childcare, but it appears that outright discrimination still hampers those who overcome the restrictions. The figures also show that just 48% of female executive directors are internally promoted – compared with 62% for men. This results in ambitious, capable women feeling forced to leave their current company or accept the Paula Principle.
Davies, Cable, CBI president Roger Carr and equalities minister Maria Miller all spoke on these issues last week, and they all seemed to agree that more needs to be done. But none of them expressed a clear vision of exactly what, which is worrying if this slowdown proves more than a blip.
It leaves Britain's ambitious businesswomen hoping that those leading the drive for more female directorships have a Plan B, and do not prove to be operating a notch or two above their competence level.
Even by the eurozone's standards regarding its struggling members, the deal Cyprus's politicians will now be forced to sell to a wary public looks especially miserly.
Of the €23bn total cost of the bailout (€6bn more than was agreed less than a month ago, by the way), Cyprus is expected to find €13bn from its own resources. That means as well as the privatisations, public sector layoffs and tax rises that have become familiar from the Greek case, Cyprus will have to sell off a large chunk of its gold reserves, and depositors in the collapsed Laiki bank with more than €100,000 in savings are likely to find themselves completely wiped out. There are even rumours the bank may not open on Monday morning.
Yet, also in a familiar pattern, the calculations on which the rescue is based are still too optimistic: the country is expected to bounce back within a couple of years, despite a collapsed banking industry. Tourism, the country's other main business, will hardly have been enhanced by coverage of shuttered banks and riots.
In Dublin this weekend, eurozone finance ministers promised Cyprus "structural funds," to help rebuild its economy. But with the banking bust exacerbated by the bungled bailout, it's not clear what exactly they are planning to rebuild.
And despite euro-politicians' repeated insistence that the island should not be seen as a "template" for future rescues, the raid on bank balances will mean any renewed whiff of crisis in Spain or Italy will send investors fleeing to the safer haven of Germany – or out of the eurozone altogether. The collateral damage to the whole eurozone banking system may prove far costlier than the bailout.
Meanwhile hotel and restaurant-owners may be looking longingly across at the Turkish-occupied half of their island, which can offer a cheap lira and no chance of being stopped at the border and forced to hand over your holiday money. Pressure to leave the euro can only intensify.
There has been an absence of morality, and of a reckoning, in the aftermath of the British banking crash – until recent weeks. The report into HBOS by the parliamentary commission on banking standards has provided the catharsis, adding empirical clarity to a public anger that has raged without a focal point since 2008.
The subsequent statement by former chief executive Sir James Crosby is also one of the first genuine acts of atonement to emerge from that era. He was not legally obliged to ask for the retraction of his knighthood, or give up 30% of his pension, but the moral imperative held sway. Unlike Fred Goodwin at Royal Bank of Scotland, it did not take months of political pressure to make him succumb. If the banking industry is to regain public and political trust, it needs to mimic Crosby and find a moral conscience.
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The Tories, doing less well than they should be, are running scared of challenging what Nigel Farage's crew stands for
When they hear the screams of rage of the United Kingdom Independence party, leftwingers and liberals are tempted to label them as cries from a "far right". It is not a hysterical charge, at first glance. Ukip is to the right of the Tory party. Among its members are people who you wouldn't want exercising power over your life or anyone else's.
Take Julia Gasper, former chairman (not "chairwoman or "chair" or "chairperson", because to suggest that Ms Gasper isn't a man would be political correctness gone mad) of Ukip's Oxford branch. She licensed every kind of dumb prejudice when she said: "As for the links between homosexuality and paedophilia, there is so much evidence that even a full-length book could hardly do justice to the subject."
But here's a disconcerting point for those who want to chant anti-Nazi slogans at Nigel Farage. He condemned Gasper and obliged her to step down. Ukip followed up by suspending a party web forum where racists discussed the inferiority of blacks. No truly extreme-right party behaves like that. Ukip is not neo-Nazi like the BNP or Golden Dawn. Unlike the French National Front or Italian National Alliance, it has no roots in the fascist or collaborationist movements of the 20th century. Ukip is a party of the reactionary right, not the radical right, and it's worth understanding the difference.
Radicals believe the modern world is on their side. The fascists of the 1930s thought they were riding the wave of the future. The free marketeers who flourished from the 1980s until the crash thought that modernity and neo-liberalism were at one. Reactionaries loathe the present. "Modern" is an insult on their lips and nostalgia their dominant emotion. They want to return to the time of their youth, which they convince themselves was purer and better than the present. Ukip is not far right: it is the political wing of the Daily Mail; the noise from a Devon pub when the landlord locks in the regulars; the ideas your parents air when they think no one is listening.
Look at its programme. It wants to leave the EU and recreate an independent Britain. Ukip members never worry that the Scots and Welsh may not agree to go back to the future with them. It wants to make this a country where sturdy men (and women, I suppose) can keep their money by merging the basic income tax with national insurance to create a 31% flat tax on incomes over £11,500. (And abolish national insurance for employers.) Yet, as it cuts state revenues, Ukip wants to double the prison population and boost the income of pensioners (its core constituency) and, presumably, pay off the national debt, too. It wants to slash immigration so Britain will once more be a land where you can walk the streets without passing black and brown faces. Yet Farage admits we need skilled migrants. As for a macro-economic policy, it does not have one.
The Ukip programme makes no sense to reasonable people. But the crash and euro crisis have made reasonable people look like fools. We should count ourselves fortunate that the reactionary right, rather than the radical right, is benefiting from the collapse of the centre ground and look at who is sniffing around its supporters.
I wrote last week in the Spectator about the Tories' apparently dire position. The Westminster consensus was that they had had their best fortnight in months. They put themselves on the side of hard-working Britons in the welfare debate and painted Labour as the party of layabouts. Then Mrs Thatcher died and, like a grating old song on Radio 2, the bourgeois triumphalism of the 80s filled the airwaves. The Conservatives had saved Britain, made it fit to compete in the modern world, produced the greatest peacetime prime minister since 1945, since 1900, since as far back as anyone could remember.
Yet the eruption of favourable propaganda has done the Tories no good. Last Thursday, they recorded their lowest poll rating ever with YouGov: Con 28%; Lab 42%; Lib Dem 12%, Ukip 11%. I am not saying Britain has turned red. YouGov's Joe Twyman says the coalition isn't doing badly for a government in midterm during a recession. Labour ought to be worried it isn't further ahead. Still, the clock ticks and the days roll by. Soon, we will move from midterm to endgame and the temptation for the right is to look at those poll numbers, add the Conservative and Ukip figures together and notice that gets them up to 39% of the vote, just like that.
What we call the "Tory press" – parts of it are more the Ukip press – yearns for the party to move rightwards and forget about centrist voters. Cameron promises a referendum on Europe and fights a byelection in Eastleigh in which no one can tell the difference between the Tory and the Ukip candidates.
I don't believe begging reactionaries for their support will work for him – and not just because YouGov, and every other researcher who has looked at Ukip voters, says they are protest voters, not Tories in disguise who can be coaxed back. In the 2005 general election, I learned a hard lesson when George Galloway stood against Labour's Oona King in Tower Hamlets. As I despised Galloway, and had an equal contempt for the far-left Socialist Workers Party and Islamist Muslim Brotherhood that backed his campaign, I helped King get the vote out.
I knew she was finished from the moment her activists briefed the volunteers. We were not to criticise Galloway. We were not to tell Muslim voters that he supported tyrants who had massacred Muslims by the hundred thousand. We were to coax his voters to Labour by saying that a vote for Galloway would let in the Tories – in the East End of London, of all places. Labour was too scared to take on its opponent and duly lost.
The Tories are as frightened of taking on Ukip. They don't want to ridicule Farage, to say he offers no plan for a workable future, because they are frightened of alienating the reactionary rightwing press and their own reactionary backbenchers and activists. It is Cameron's fear, rather than any faith in the opinion polls or admiration for the statesmanlike qualities of Ed Miliband, that suggests to me the Conservatives may be in more trouble than they seem.
• This article will be opened for comments on Sunday morning
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 Greek Reporter | UPDATE 2-Troika concludes Greek bailout review, next aid tranche soon - source Reuters EU/IMF conclude Greek bailout review of reform progress. * Eurogroup, IMF likely to discuss deal in May. * Greece to wrap up talks with troika by Monday night. By Annika Breidthardt and Renee Maltezou. DUBLIN/ATHENS, April 13 (Reuters) - An inspection ... Greek PM says deposits are safe, banks shielded: paper Greek government, troika near deal Troika Says Greek Talks Done, Money Coming |
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Greek firms seek Saudi mart share Saudi Gazette JEDDAH – A Greek business delegation is currently visiting the Kingdom in an attempt to enhance bilateral trade relations between the two countries. The delegation, consisting of 12 companies predominantly active in the food sector, visited the Jeddah ... |
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 Greek Reporter | Samaras Says Deposits Safe, Banks Shielded Greek Reporter samaras4011012 Unlike on Cyprus, where the government is confiscating up to 80 percent of bank deposits over 100,000 euros ($130,000) to trigger an international bailout, Greece will not raid bank accounts of depositors as it continues to struggle with ... |
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