Reino tintado

Como extractos de conversación escuchados en un pub, los sacados de The Guardian, The Times y The Daily Telegraph durante varios días de agosto:

1.

El domingo 5 The Observer publicó en portada la recomendación del NHS (Servicio sanitario público británico) de conceder a los pacientes transgénero acceso a tratamientos de fertilidad.

2.

El viernes 10, noticia, en el mismo diarío, de dos colegios católicos que habían ocultado prácticas de abuso sexual en niños durante 40 años: “The true scale of sexual abuse at two of the UK’s leading Catholic independent schools over a period of 40 years is likely to have been far greater than has been proved in the courts, a report by the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse has concluded.

Ten people have been convicted or cautioned in relation to sexual offences at Ampleforth in North Yorkshire and Downside in Somerset. The schools “prioritised the monks and their own reputations over the protection of children … in order to avoid scandal”, says the 211-page report published by IICSA on Thursday after hearings last year.

The monks avoided giving information to or cooperating with statutory authorities investigating abuse, it says. Their approach could be summarised as “a ‘tell them nothing’ attitude”.

The report says: “Appalling sexual abuse [was] inflicted over decades on children as young as seven at Ampleforth school and 11 at Downside school.”

The inquiry heard that boys were made to strip naked and were beaten. Some were allegedly forced to give and receive oral sex, both privately and in front of other pupils. Alleged abuse included digital penetration of the anus and children being compelled to perform sex acts on each other.

Physical abuse had sadistic and sexual overtones, the report says. One survivor described his abuser at Ampleforth as “an out-and-out sadist”.

A victim of Fr Piers Grant-Ferris, who was convicted in 2006 of assaulting 15 boys, described being forced to straddle a bath naked as the monk beat him while masturbating. It was “absolutely terrifying”, he told the inquiry.

“Many perpetrators did not hide their sexual interests from the children. The blatant openness of these activities demonstrates there was a culture of acceptance of abusive behaviour,” the report says.

Ten people, mostly monks, connected to the two schools have been convicted or cautioned in relation to offences involving sexual activity with a large number of children, or pornography.

Ampleforth and Downside are schools attached to abbeys of the English Benedictine Congregation, and are regarded as leading Catholic independent schools.

Monks at both institutions were “very often secretive, evasive and suspicious of anyone outside the English Benedictine Congregation,” the report says.

In 2001 the Nolan report made recommendations on the safeguarding of children in the Catholic church, including that incidents or allegations of sexual abuse should be referred to the statutory authorities.

Both schools “seemed to take a view that [the report’s] implementation was neither obligatory nor desirable. This failure to comply appeared to go unchallenged by the Catholic church,” the IICSA report says. “At Ampleforth and Downside, a number of allegations were never referred to the police but were handled internally.”

It says an abbot of Ampleforth between 1997 and 2005, Timothy Wright, “clung to outdated beliefs about ‘paedophilia’ and had an immovable attitude of always knowing best”.

Abbots at both schools would confine suspected perpetrators to the abbey or transfer them elsewhere. Records were destroyed by both schools, the report says. One former headmaster of Downside “made several trips with a wheelbarrow with files to the edge of the estate and made a bonfire of them”.

During the inquiry’s hearings, senior clergymen in the English Benedictine Congregation expressed regret for past failures to protect children. However, this was “not accompanied by full acknowledgement of the tolerance of serious criminal activity, or the recognition that previous ‘misjudgment’ had devastating consequences for the lives of the young people involved.”

3.

El sábado 11 The Guardian publicó una reseña, firmada por Fara Dabhoiwala, del libro de Keith Thomas In pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England: In pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England:

“In truth, of course, standards of civility are changeable. As Keith Thomas points out in his wonderfully entertaining history, according to Giovanni della Casa, the 16th-century authority on polite behaviour, it was perfectly proper for the master of a household to relieve himself in front of his servants and inferiors. When King James I went out hunting all day, he similarly didn’t bother getting out of the saddle to answer calls of nature; and when parliament met in Oxford in 1665-6, Charles II’s courtiers left behind “their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coal-houses, cellars”. Seventeenth-century searchers after potassium nitrate were keen to excavate under church floors, because they knew that, during services, “the women piss in their seats, which causes excellent saltpetre”. Visiting England in 1763, Casanova was startled to find people defecating in the streets: evidently he wasn’t used to such behaviour elsewhere.

What really alarmed foreign visitors throughout this period, though, were the table manners of the English: using their fingers, belching and spitting at table and, especially, sharing drinking vessels. In 1784, a French observer was revolted by the sight of a group of 20 people all drinking beer from the same glass, while an English gentleman visiting Paris was surprised to discover that everyone was given their own goblet.”

4.

Un día después, The Times publicó una reseña, firmada por John Carey, del libro de Robert Holland The warm south. How the mediterranean shaped the British imagination. Ese mismo día, como si la historia de un antídoto fallido, The Observer publicó esto: “Theresa May is facing calls to imbue a new generation with a sense of civic duty with a programme that would see the young pitch in to help struggling students, care homes, charities and hospitals. Almost 60 years since national service was brought to an end, a group of 18 charities, businesses and youth organisations has proposed a new programme of voluntary “full-time social action” for those under 30 as a way of preparing them for work and helping public services. In a letter to the prime minister, the group – which includes the Scout Association – calls for the government to test the idea to see if it would boost the employment chances of young people and help knit together an increasingly divided society.”

Ese mismo día también podia leerse lo siguiente, escrito por Nick Cohen: “If you could shade your eyes from the glare, the long, stupid summer of 2018 was a joy to live through. The sun shone for months on end, as if Britain was not leaving the EU but moving to southern Europe. 

Historians could look back on the summer of 2018 as they look at the summer of 1914: an innocent time when people did not realise they were sleepwalking towards disaster. The warning signs are there if you care to draw the parallels. The causes of the First World War provide an endless source of historical controversy because the conflict was avoidable. You don’t have to agree with AJP Taylor’s gloriously self-confident assertion that all you need to know about the seminal catastrophe of the 20th century was that it was “imposed on European statesmen by railway timetables” to accept that the politicians of 1914 could not control the military or stop the outbreak of war once the troop trains had started moving.

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The referendum result is our railway timetable: it must be stuck to, whatever the consequences. In normal circumstances, politicians would assert their view of the national interest and ask the voters to judge them at the next election. But the direct democracy of the referendum has superseded representative democracy. Unless we somehow can force a second vote, we must crash out of the EU and pay the price of wholly unnecessary damage to Britain’s economic and strategic position. Or we must accept a deal that protects the economy at the price of obeying so many EU rules it’s not worth leaving. Almost as bad as no deal is a deal that fudges the big questions and turns Brexit into a rolling crisis that will enfeeble Britain for the best part of a decade.

Both main parties are dominated by cranks, who not only have no answers to the big questions of the day, but haven’t even thought about them. For what unites the Tory right and Corbyn left is not just their support for Brexit but their inability to say how they would cope with the collapse in productivity, the health and social care crisis, the end of the era of cheap money and the rise of China.”

5.

Y aún quedaba espacio para el artículo de Richard Partington: “The ability of the British economy to improve the living standards of workers will come back under the microscope this week, when the latest figures for wages, employment and inflation are revealed by government statisticians.
The Bank of England reckons higher wages are just around the corner, helped by the lowest rate of unemployment since the mid-1970s, yet economists are doubtful there will be much positive news just yet. While the economy has gathered pace in recent months, helped by the warmer weather, the royal wedding and the World Cup, there has been little evidence so far of the spoils being shared through pay increases.”