Claude Lanzmann

It was the late, much-missed, Colin Rosenstiel who alerted me to the fact that Shoah (calamity or destruction in Hebrew) had become the term preferred in the Jewish community to Holocaust for the Nazis' "final solution". Shoah was therefore the name given by Claude Lanzmann, who died last Thursday, to his forensic and exhaustive examination on film of the Jewish genocide. As well as testimony from Jewish survivors, Lanzmann also obtained, largely by subterfuge, the recollections of former Nazis. That this could still touch a raw nerve, a generation after the war, was demonstrated when Lanzmann was beaten up by a group of young Germans on an occasion when his fictitious persona as a mere researcher had been seen through.

Claude Lanzmann's work is a perpetual rebuttal of the claims of holocaust deniers.

[Update] For an obituary highlighting Lanzmann's childhood in the Resistance and his place in French intellectual society, see this article on France 24's English language service.

Subject for debate

As a Liberal Democrat party member, I have had this nice letter from Alistair Carmichael, MP, inviting me to help choose the subject for debate in the House of Commons next Tuesday. The Liberal Democrats have one of their rare allocated sessions when the parliamentary party picks the subject. Unfortunately, the choice has to be from a restricted list, rather like those BBC-run "your favourite TV presenter" polls when there is a menu of only a dozen or so names which does not include Kevin McCloud.

we want to hear what you think MPs should be debating on Tuesday. The three options are: 
• A final vote on the Brexit deal
• Sustainability of the NHS into the future
• Donald Trump's visit to the UK

It seems to me that two of these subjects have been done to death recently, and the third, sustainability of the NHS, is an England-only subject. Trump may generate some good one-liners from Vince which will make it to the popular media, but otherwise I cannot see any of those subjects being productive.

What about listening to renegade voices from the back-benches opposite? At Business questions yesterday, Cheryl Gillan MP pointed out that the rules for referendums are out-dated leading to the continuing disputes and legal actions as a result of the 2016 Brexit referendum; and the otherwise illiberal Peter Bone continues to harry the government over their cavalier treatment of Private Members Bills. If the puppet Leader of the House is unwilling to grant time to discuss these democratic deficits, then I believe one of the opposition parties should do so.

Beauty is not enough

On Swansea Bay TV, I caught the end of A Star is Born, the 1937 version with Fredric March and Janet Gaynor. The "print" was poor, clearly coming from the early days of transfer from film to broadcast media, but the quality of writing (by the husband and wife team of Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell) and production shone through. It is a tribute to the quality of the 1954 remake with Judy Garland that it loses nothing in comparison with the original - a rare feat. (Subsequent versions fall a long way short.) Indeed, I prefer James Mason's performance to that of March which I found rather cool and stagy. Moss Hart and George Cukor did well not to mess too much with the original.

Anyway, as I often do, I scanned down the cast list on IMDb and came across a name which rang a faint bell: Carole Landis. It soon transpired that it was for a melancholy reason: she was one of Hollywood's casualties. She committed suicide aged only twenty-nine, seventy years ago. One wonders how someone with good looks and a singing voice could fail to make progress. Perhaps her ample figure told against her and there was room for only one Lana Turner in Tinseltown.

Bevan: fake history

There is probably nothing one can do now to stop the myth rolled out by BBC Wales and the Labour Party now that Aneurin Bevan was the sole begetter of the National Health Service and that it was based on the Tredegar Working Men's Aid Society. Bevan certainly deserves his place in history as the man who put the UK's NHS into operation. Indeed, without him, it is unlikely that it would have emerged as a comprehensive service, if at all. It takes nothing away from him to point out that the roots of the NHS go back a long way, and that it was Beveridge's inclusion of a template for the NHS in his famous 1942 report, followed by the latter's adept use of the media, which forced Whitehall to accept it.

As I wrote last February,

 In fact, the Tredegar scheme is one of a long line of insurance-based healthcare systems that go back to Bismarck's Germany and continue in France, Germany, some other western countries and Japan to this day. The unique and praiseworthy aspect of the Tredegar scheme was that it arose from within the community rather than being imposed by the government. The English NHS model was unique at the time - though it has since been followed elsewhere - in being funded from general taxation. Its principal architect, William Beveridge, had studied the German system before the Great War, when he was an advisor to Lloyd George and Churchill as they created the first British welfare state. Following a 1926 Royal Commission recommendation and other inter-war discussion documents, Beveridge decided that the insurance link should be broken.

As a consequence, our NHS is known abroad as the Beveridge model.

But do not take my word for it. On BBC Radio 4, Michael Buerk gave due credit to Beveridge. There was an objective Radio 4 Archive Hour programme about the birth of the NHS which is well worth a listen if you have not heard it already. The quotations from contemporary civil service minutes and pronouncements by leading medicos were revealing. I also quoted Phil Hammond in this piece from last October.

Health secretary Jeremy Hunt was up to his usual cherry-picking tricks at the Tory conferences, claiming that the brains behind the NHS was not Nye Bevan, but Conservative health minister Sir Henry Willink and his 1944 white paper.

In fact, the idea for a state health service is usually credited to the social researcher and poverty campaigner Beatrice Webb in 1909. Lloyd George introduced state-organised health insurance in 1911, but for workers only. Lord Dawson, president of the Royal College of Physicians, reported in 1920 that "the best means of maintaining health and curing disease should be made available to all citizens", and it was William Beveridge who first proposed "cradle to grave care" in his 1942 report.

Willink's contribution was important - garnering cross-party support for a consensus that "everybody irrespective of means, age, sex or occupation shall have equal opportunity to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available". But it was Bevan who fought the vested interests and made it happen in 1948. The Conservatives voted against the creation of the NHS 22 times, including in the third reading.

So let us praise Bevan on this 70th anniversary, but also Webb, Dawson, Willink  and especially Beveridge.

Train WCs disappearing

I had thought that the loss of toilets on trains was a particularly Welsh scandal, but it seems from a letter to the current issue of Railfuture magazine that there is a consistent attack on facilities by operating companies. According to Lloyd Butler of Suffolk:

Greater Anglia's refurbished inter-city stock has lost half its toilets [and] Chiltern Railways' refurbished Mark 3 coaches also appear to stripped of conveniences

The Department for Transport, so keen to micromanage train contracts when it comes to staffing, seem to have no concern when it comes to the comfort of the paying passenger. What concerns me is that people of diminished social responsibility are going, in desperation, to use the vestibules of trains as yobs once used red telephone boxes, as unofficial toilets. It only needs one or two to start a trend.

England breaks footballing jinx

I have no reservations about supporting England in the FIFA world cup finals, as the UK's sole representative. (I still have reservations about the way Wales was eliminated in the qualification round, but that is another matter.) Earlier tonight, in winning through to the quarter-finals, England put to rest the hoodoo of the penalty shoot-out.

It should, of course, not have gone that far if the referees both on the field and in the VAR room had done their job. Serious foul play has gone unpunished, presumably for political rather than footballing reasons. It is to be hoped that standards are tighter for the next round.

Good luck to president-elect Obrador

The hopes raised by the election in Mexico of a candidate pledged to remove corruption and improve economic performances reminded me of an earlier dynamic new broom. Sixteen years ago, Vicente Fox, who broke the 71 hold on the presidency by the PRI (institutional revolutionary party - the Mexicans have a nice sense of contradictions) soon found his election promises difficult to fulfil.

Any Mexican administration trying to clean up is handicapped by the huge profitability of the illegal drugs trade, of course. And that profitability depends largely on the appetite from her North American neighbour. Until the US sort out their drug trouble, the Mexican government will struggle to clean up its administration.

A memory of Pauline Boty

Whenever I turn on Talking Pictures TV I think of Harry Crabtree. He was a co-sixth former and an avid watcher of Westerns on TV. In the 1950s, following the broadcasting expansion triggered by the licensing of a commercial channel, TV was greedy for material, either re-runs of commercial movies or made-for-TV series. The latter were havens for character actors who did not hit the big time via the big screen. Harry was an avid spotter of actors, often uncredited, turning up in unexpected minor roles and would discuss his findings in school the next day.

On this side of the Atlantic, enterprising outfits like Merton Park Studios would turn out crime series to fill slots on ITV. Prolific writers like John Creasey (the "Gideon" series) and Edgar Wallace were mined for material. Now these series have been acquired by Talking Pictures TV and are having a further airing. I now have the pleasure of actor-spotting and testing my memory for names.

"Strangler's Web" turned up a few days ago. It was not the greatest contribution to the Edgar Wallace series. Production and direction were at least as good as the series standard, but it could not be said to be precisely plotted. However, it did feature a starring performance by Pauline Boty, playing a character as sexually assertive as she was in real life. She was better known as a pioneering artist but also as a radio presenter. I did not realise how few editions of The Public Ear there had been, so big an impression had it made on me in 1963 and 1964. Judging by her performance in the TV film, she could have made it as a screen actress, too. [Apologies for the lack of links; there appears to be some congestion on the Web.]

Her life was cruelly cut short by an aggressive disease fifty-two years ago today at the age of 28.