2016 is a time for national embarrassment, Ctd

Kevin Myers wrote in the Sunday Times of August 11 2013:

"The surreal tone to this year's MacGill Summer School was established at its opening ceremony, as the Taoiseach declared: "To be a real republic, Ireland has to be a sovereign republic." What? Sovereign? After surrendering vast swathes of legislative and financial independence to Europe? Has the man gone mad?"

Previous post on this topic featuring Fintan O'Toole here.

Human Rights - "The UK is the best pupil in the class"

"UK is the best pupil in the class. It has always been seen as the leading nation on human rights." http://t.co/4VgqwvolVi
— Adam Wagner (@AdamWagner1) November 6, 2013

What does an artist do? - "They notice things."

Grayson Perry shared a funny anecdote during the fourth lecture of BBC Radio 4's Reith Lecture series. by telling a story he managed to distill what it is artists do. He said:

"Recently a friend told me that she was working on an education programme at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and at the beginning of the project she asked the children, she said, “What do you think a contemporary artist does?” And this very precocious child, probably from sort of Muswell Hill or somewhere like that, she put her hand up and she said, “They sit around in Starbucks and eat organic salad.” Now it was probably quite an accurate observation of many fashionable artists in East London, but I thought … you know anyway. So then after this, they spent some time looking at what contemporary artists did. And at the end of the project, she asked them again, “What now do you think an artist does?” And the same child, she said, “They notice things.” And I thought wow, that’s a really short, succinct definition of what an artist does. My job is to notice things that other people don’t notice."

Fourth Reith Lecture in full here.

Loyalists are traitors to Northern Ireland

Just as dissident republicans are "traitors to the island of Ireland", so dissident loyalists are self-destructive traitors who debase and deface their own cause. As Am Ghobsmacht said:

"If Sinn Fein went to the Bahamas or Cancun for the next 15 years and put their feet up they could easily find a United Ireland here when they get back. Loyalists are doing a grand job of demonising Unionism and encouraging educated Protestants, sorry, I mean ‘liberal naive Lundy types’ to leave Northern Ireland."

Irish racism

@NotThatBigIan @brianjohnspencr You're both welcome to express your ethnic identity in Ireland as are our immigrants. But Irish is Irish :-)
— Ruaidri Ua Conchobai (@Irish_Gaels) November 5, 2013

John McCallister - "I am no settler, no colonist"

John McCallister addressed the Collins 22 Society. He said:

 "Firstly, as with Collins, this island is my home. My family has lived in the same town-land for at least the past 220 years. I am no settler, no colonist. This island – its story, its geography, its rich cultures – is my home just as it was the home of Michael Collins."

This measure of language resonates with that of John Hewitt who spoke of being 'no rootless colonist'. John also explained that being British does not preclude you from being Irish. He said:

"George V addressed the overwhelmingly Unionist members of the Stormont Parliament as "Irishmen". It is a reminder of something that unionism has too easily and too readily forgotten: That being a British citizen, supporting the Union with the rest of the United Kingdom does not mean that we do not share values, interests and an identity with the rest of this island. It does not mean that being British excludes or denies a sense of Irish identity."

Read John McCallister's speech to the Collins 22 Society in full here. Also on Slugger O'Toole here. You can also read John McCallister's speech to the GAA Ulster Council here. 

The Irish in the First World War

Diarmaid Ferriter explains here:

"With the outbreak of the Great War, Redmond appealed to individual Irish Volunteers to join the war effort as a moral imperative. MacNeill accused him of mental and moral corruption and insisted British parties were conspiring to stop Home Rule, a defeat that only the Irish Volunteers could prevent. 

A split ensued, with Redmond supported by a majority of Volunteers, by a ratio of 15 to one, now termed the National Volunteers, while MacNeill retained command of the minority, keeping the original title."

Ashton Kutcher - The entitlement society and redefining success

Ashton Kutcher recently appeared in the US chat show 'The Ellen DeGeneres Show’ here and slated America's media, celebrity myth and the associated 'entitlement' culture that this industry has helped to create. In many ways we share this phenomenon in the Britain and in Northern Ireland. Our young people need to hear his words too. Ashton said:

"There's an entitlement that's starting to emerge that's unhealthy for people and unhealthy for the country. I talk to some of my friends and they don't want to get a job at Starbucks or wherever because they feel its below them. And I think the only thing that can be below you is to not have a job."

Vincent Browne - Ireland has forever lost its sovereignty

Ireland's exit from the EU-IMF-ECB bailout programme will be sounded as the great restoration of Irish sovereignty and independence. In the words of Vincent Browne, "It will be no such thing. Just more spin." In the article in which those words were written, Vincent Browne further said that repeated claims by Enda Kenny that Ireland would soon regain it's economic sovereignty. He said:

"A year ago, in a televised address to the nation, Enda Kenny told us: “I want to be the Taoiseach that retrieves Ireland’s economic sovereignty”. He told an audience in Chicago in March 2012 that Ireland would regain its economic sovereignty by the end of this year. He told a Fine Gael conference last month that Ireland was on course to “retrieve our economic sovereignty and independence”. 

That promise is an illusion. The Lisbon Treaty, for which Enda Kenny campaigned, copperfastens Ireland’s surrender of sovereignty to the EU forever, a surrender we sleepwalked into in 1992 in ratifying the Maastricht Treaty. 

Ireland is obliged to avoid what is known as “excessive government deficits”, not just now but forever. In that connection the European Commission has indefinite authority to “monitor” our fiscal arrangements and if we get out of line, there may be consequences, including daunting fines (article 126 in what is now known as the “Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union”, a consolidation of several treaties). 

Specifically, in the case of member states that are members of the euro group, there are special requirements. “In order to ensure the proper functioning of economic and momentary union . . . The Council [of Ministers] shall . . . adopt measures . . . to strengthen the coordination and surveillance of their budgetary discipline [and] to set out economic policy guidelines for them, while ensuring that they are compatible with those adopted for the whole of the Union and are kept under surveillance” (article 136)."

Diarmaid Ferriter - 2016, a state bereft of meaningful sovereignty

Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin and has authored many books including The Transformation of Modern Ireland, 1900-2000, Judging Dev: A Reassessment of the life and legacy of Eamon de Valera and Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland. He wrote of the centenary of 1916:

"As we in Ireland edge towards the centenary of the events that comprised the revolution of the early 20th century, we face a stark conclusion: this is a state bereft of meaningful sovereignty due to its bankruptcy and a state whose governing culture has been exposed as rotten.

We may have little to cheer about in 2016."

http://www.opendemocracy.net/diarmaid-ferriter/state-of-ireland

Seamus Heaney for Protestants Too

Poets produce work that speaks not only for themselves but also give voice through which others can find articulation. Seamus Heaney does this for Protestant and Catholic alike. Fintan O'Toole commented on Heaney's conflicting impulses and how he gave expression to them.

"He was drawn to both Irish and English poetic traditions. He also lived through the death of the ancient rural world into which he was born and the emergence of a globalised modern Ireland. He struggled with contradictions, paradoxes, conflicting impulses. 

His genius lay in his ability to hover between them, to give each side of a political or emotional equation its full weight and proper due without becoming the prisoner of either. WB Yeats, the poet whose influence he both absorbed and transcended, wrote in a time of Irish violence that “we are closed in and the key is turned/ On our uncertainty” . 

Heaney humanised uncertainty, made ambiguity rich with possibilities. As he put it in the beautifully homely metaphor of Terminus: 

“Two buckets were easier carried than one./I grew up in between.”"

Fintan continued: "He was not, in that sense, a national poet. He knew too much about the dangers of tribalism and the foolishness of slogans to ever want to be a spokesman for the collective. He would have agreed with Yeats’s dictum that “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”

Nick Cohen - Censorship is at its most effective when no one admits it exists

Nick Cohen wrote in The Spectator here:

"Censorship is at its most effective when no one admits it exists."

He continued: "The first step to freeing yourself from oppressive power is to find the courage to admit that you are afraid. The more people confess to being afraid, the less reason there is to fear and the easier it is to isolate repressive forces."

People in Northern Ireland have long been bullied, menaced, threatened, terrified and intimidated by hostile, hysterical and sinister gangs and sweaty politicians, and by extension have opted-out and silenced themselves from the process. This needs to end.

Day of Doodling with the Arts Council NI

  

On Wednesday 6 November 2013 I had the eminent pleasure and privilege to attend the Arts Council Northern Ireland staff and client day out to W5 at the Odyssey in Belfast as the rapportage illustrator. My brief was to capture events and to produce a cascade of illustrative candour. It still fascinates me, that we have the most unimaginable photographic and camera technology at our finger tips, yet men, women and children are awe-struck by the artist that can translate the fluid moment into a material object. It was this irresistible draw and awe to the almost-magical that first drew me into this area of cartooning people. 

What was extra special was that I was given the opportunity to showcase my drawings from the morning during the afternoon session. They say that imitation is the surest form of flattery. For me as a cartoonist, laughter if the finest form of compliment, because then you know you've captured the person and added a humorous extra. So let it be said, there were plenty of laughs. Taking to the podium also gave me the chance to talk about my morning's work and to also share my journey or "pilgrimage", as Grayson Perry calls it, from being an aspiring lawyer to artist.

Below you will see a selection of cartoons which I produced during the event of the various speakers. Hope you enjoy and please contact me on brianjohnspencr@gmail.com if you would like me to come to your event!

Fintan O'Toole on Arthur Griffiths

In 1992 Fintan O'Toole wrote of the founder of Sinn Fein, Arthur Griffiths as a racist, an anti-Semite and a reverse imperialist. In the Irish Times of August 15 1992 he wrote:

"Griffith is many of the things Mr [Brian] Mae says he is - patriotic, far-thinking, personally honest. But he is also in many ways a repugnant figure, the progenitor of a particularly nasty strain of far right-wing Irish nationalism. If anything, he is the classic example of selfish patriotism, claiming for his own country rights which he was not prepared to extend to others among the oppressed."

Fintan O'Toole continued and explained Griffiths as a racist and reverse imperialist:

One of the reasons for remembering Griffiths now is that he stands, at this time of virulent and destructive nationalism in Europe, as a great example of how nationalist ideals can become detached from their origins in the Englightenment principles of equality, tolerance, and humanity. Whereas a great tradition of Irish political thinking from Swift through O'Connell to James Connolly understood that Ireland's rights are inseparable from the rights of despised races around the world and from the rights of the oppressed withing Ireland, Griffith tried to break that connection. To the extent that he succeeded, his memory should be a bitter one. 

Griffith strongest antecedent in Irish nationalism is not O'Connell's democratic populism, but John Mitchell's peculiar brand of reverse imperialism which could encompass both a passionate denunciation of English savagery in Ireland and a passionate support for slavery in America. The mind-set is not one which challenges the assumptions of Victorian and racial imperialism but merely one which wants the Irish to be given their rightful places among the master races."

Fintan O'Toole explained that Griffiths' racist nationalism came from his time in the latter half of the 1890s in the Transvaal "as a propagandist for Boer nationalism." Fintan O'Toole also explained Griffiths' hard-line anti-semitism:

"Griffith in the midst of the 1913 Lockout, in which he was strongly on the side of the employers, wrote and instructive afterword to a re-issue of Mitchell's 'Jail Journal'. In it, he makes plain his support for Mitchell's contempt for the anti-slavery movement in America... Mitchell, wrote Griffiths, needed no excuse for 'refusing to hold the negro his peer'... To [the race nationalism in Transvaal (where Griffiths spent the later half of the 1890s)] he added the worst of the influences of the worst of the modernising right-wing movements of the Europe of his day, drawing heavily on both Bismarckian Germany and anti-Dreyfusard France. 

The latter influence allowed him to add anti-semitism to racism in his political thinking. In the United Irishman he thundered against those newspapers which supported Dreyfus as 'the impotent ravings of a disreputable minority which is universally regarded as a community  of thieves and traitors.' 

When the Jewish people of Limerick were under attack in the pogrom of 1904s, Griffith, the great defender of Irish rights, weighed in against them, and even attacked the great nationalist Michael Davitt for his defence of them. His language is a remarkable foreshadowing of that used a little later by Adolf Hitler in 'Mein Kempf'."

As I wrote on the blog previously, Christopher Hitchens has made it clear that anti-semitism is a prejudice held by the mentally and morally unwell. Christopher Hitchens explained this of Billy Graham here. We can exchange the name Billy Graham with Arthur Griffiths and get a very clear picture and image of the nature and character of the founder of Sinn Fein. As Hitchens said:

"The evidence is that Billy Graham [in this instance, Arthur Griffiths] suffers from a very horrible disease, a version of paranoia that's known colloquially as anti-Semitism. It's impossible to be mentally or morally healthy if you suffer from this disorder. [He was] sick with this conspiratorial, infantile nonsense and that's not pardonable." 

On a side note, in 1904 Arthur Griffith suggested the idea of a dual-monarchy between Ireland and Great Britain in his book The Resurrection of Hungary. Griffith explained how in 1867 Hungary went from being part of the Austrian Empire to a separate co-equal kingdom in Austria-Hungary. Griffiths' was not a monarchist but supported the concept for the Anglo-Irish relationship. It was rejected by other Irish political leaders.

Grayson Perry - "How do we become a contemporary artist?"

Grayson Perry's fourth and final lecture in the Reith series was went by the title, I Found Myself in the Art World. This fourth lecture was directed by one question, as Grayson asked himself and the audience rhetorically: "how do we become a contemporary artist?"

Firstly. We need to work with an almost unconscious awareness. A "relaxed fluency". For as Grayson Perry said, "self-consciousness is crippling." As he said:

"Pablo Picasso said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” And I think what he’s trying to say is that you know a child has this unselfconscious joy of creativity and they’re always playing and painting and making things without a thought in the world, and then as we get older of course we become aware of art history and that what we’re not doing might not be very good and so it makes it harder and harder and harder as we get older."

The irony is that art education is an education in self-awareness. As Grayson Perry said:

"And one of the things that is very troubling, of course, is that art education in many ways is an advanced course in self-consciousness because you have to become very aware of the business you’re going into. A central irony is that the very enemy of expression - that is being very ‘oh my god, am I doing the right thing?’ - is tortuous necessity to enter the art world."

You need the "carefree joy of a child". That require's work. You need to kindle the child's flame of creativity and "keep that sort of burning, precious, childlike glimmer of creativity burning."

Secondly. Artists who've faced hardship and difficulty in their upbringing can find themselves using and transforming this experience, through an amazing process in the mind, into gold and into marvellous masterpieces that everyone can all appreciate. As Grayson said:

"The clinical scientist Raymond Tallis, he said, “Art is expressing one’s universal wound - the wound of living a finite life of incomplete meanings.” And I like that idea - that you know it’s quite a sort of noble journey we’re on."

It's the artist's mythologizing story.

Thirdly. Art is a "very primitive creative urge." As Grayson said:

"Art is not some sort of fun add-on. But if you go back to the Ice Age, the artists then, they still made art and yet they were constantly under threat from cold and starvation and from predators, and yet they still set aside hours and hours and hours to make art. It’s very, very deep - this need to express."

Fourthly. Outside artists can make great mainsteam artists because they can often operate free of the crippling self-consciousness. Grayson said:

"Outsider art is art done by people who haven’t been to art school, probably don’t even have much knowledge about the art world or the market or they’ve maybe not even been doing it for other people; they just do it for themselves and never show anybody."

Fifthly. It takes time. He said:

"It does of course exist and that shock of pleasure is one of the you know greatest things that anybody who’s interested in art can experience, but the best artists, they take quite a while to find their voice. It takes a long time. I mean an art career is a marathon, it’s not a sprint."

He further explained: "And I think one of the best descriptions of that process is by a guy called Arno Minkkinen, a Finnish photographer, and he had this thing called - The Helsinki Bus Station Theory, he said. And when you’re leaving art college, he said, and you choose your style and what path in the art world you’re going to take, it’s like going to Helsinki bus station. There’s about twenty platforms and each platform, maybe ten buses leave from it, and you choose your bus and you get on the bus. And each stop is a year in your career. And maybe after about three stops, you get off and you kind of walk into a gallery and you show them your work and the people look at it and they go, “Oh very nice, very nice. Reminds me a bit of Martin Parr though.” (LAUGHTER) And you go, uurrrgh!! (exasperated sound) I’m not original, I’m not unique, and you get really cross. And you get a taxi back to the bus station and you get on a different bus. And of course what happens is the same thing - you get off at three years and the same thing happens. What you need to do, says Arno Minkkinen, is stay on the effing bus!"
Sixth. Crossing the boundary from student into the realm of the artist. He said:

"And then there’s that boundary, you know the boundary between being a student and becoming an artist. And I think that moment often happens to you at a party. You’re at a party and someone says to you, “Oh what do you do?” and you go, “Errrr …” and you have to summon up the courage to say it and you go, “I…. I’m an artist.” And I think that’s quite a poignant moment. You know you’ve crossed that boundary, you’ve started out on that hazardous path."

Seventh. It's a privilege.

"I think it’s a very noble thing to be an artist. You’re a pilgrim on the road to meaning."

Eight. Be careful of the "Picasso Napkin Syndrome". He said:

"It started to get into this sort of airy-fairy whatever anybody will pay for it kind of arena, and that’s a very strange moment. And at that moment, you start getting what I call “Picasso Napkin Syndrome” (LAUGHTER) and this is after the mythological power of that famous artist. He could sort of pay for an expensive meal by just doodling on the table linen. And it’s a very dangerous blessing that an artist can get - that Picasso Napkin Syndrome - because it’s like the Midas touch. You’re suddenly tempted to churn out your signature works because there’s a big collector demand for it and anything you sign is worth money! I mean literally artists like Andy Warhol literally did that. He would just sign you know a dollar bill and then suddenly it would be worth a hundred dollars. And that temptation to churn it out is very dangerous."

Nine. Be wary of the art world. He said:

"It’s a delicate organism and the art world can be very corrosive. Caustic atmosphere. I protect my ball of creative energy, I protect it with a shield made of jaded irony. (LAUGHTER) A helmet of mischief and a breast plate of facetiousness. And I wield my carefully crafted blade of cynicism.

Lastly. As Grayson Perry said:

"There’s no recipe for being an artist. That’s what’s good about it nowadays - you can be any sort of artist."

Grayson Perry - Outside Artists

In the fourth lecture of his Reith Lecture series on BBC Radio 4, Grayson Perry said that, for artists, "self-consciousness is crippling." He suggested that non-trained artists are more unfettered, more unencumbered and freer from this concern. He said: 

"One of the groups of artists perhaps who don’t suffer from self-consciousness as much as others are outsider artists. Since I was a teenager, I’ve loved outsider art. Outsider art is art done by people who haven’t been to art school, probably don’t even have much knowledge about the art world or the market or they’ve maybe not even been doing it for other people; they just do it for themselves and never show anybody."

He continued:

"But becoming an artist is not just a process of having low impulse control or a burning unconscious desire to express yourself. There is a point, a fixed rung if you like, on the greasy pole of becoming an artist; and it does feel - many artists here will probably say - it does feel like a greasy pole. There is a fixed rung and that is going to art college because anybody can become an artist without going to art college - I mean outsider artists are a fantastic example of it - but it’s very difficult to make a career as an artist."

Grayson Perry made another interesting observation on the returns made by those who have invested time and money on going to university. He said:

"I mean on page thirty-one of the Department of Innovation and Skills Report, The Returns of Higher Education 2011, there’s a rather stark graph. I feel quite bad almost bringing this up in an art college, but I thought I have to confront this situation, which is that compared to someone who’s never been to university at all, the average art student will make just 6.3 per cent more money than that person. Women though will make 11.7 per cent more; men 1 per cent less than if you never go to art college. And that’s quite a shocker. But in many ways, I find it almost heartening because I think people still want to go to art college! And we’re always talking about arts, not about money or anything like that. So if these people, they still want to go to art college even though statistics staring them in the face are telling them they’re probably perpetuating their poverty by doing it, (LAUGHTER) I think that’s lovely. I think that’s a good thing. We almost need to celebrate it. But for an individual, there is no guarantee of making money in the art world." 

Giles Coren - Does education stifle your creative spark?

Giles Coren thinks so. Writing in The Times he said:

"It is more and more widely recognised that education cripples you, strips you of your originality and wit and spark."

He continued: "According to Jaron Lanier’s book Who Owns the Future?, the big tech companies are even now paying the brightest and best at Harvard and Yale to leave university and work for them while they are still fresh, uncorrupted and full of ideas. It is a given at the cutting edge that dropping out of college — like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg — is the mark of worth, not graduating.

He made an interesting observation on British universities, the democratisation of third level education, its effects and fees. He said:

"And if the internet were not enough to kill universities, then the determination of successive British governments to send every feckless dolt in the land into tertiary education, regardless of aptitude, has finished the job by necessitating the introduction of fees that will increasingly drive any genuinely bright candidate away from dusty halls full of dunderheads and straight into the workplace."

The similarities between Muslim and Irish anti-British language and feeling

Dr Usama Hasan of the Quilliam Foundation

Dr Usama Hasan is a senior researcher at the Quilliam Foundation (profile here) and part-time imam. He appeared on BBC Radio 4's PM show with Eddie Mair on Monday November4 2013 to talk about anti-British sentiment among young muslim men. He said:

"This is a wider problem within British Islam. There are many young people who feel alienated. They are sometimes subjected to extremist teaching which says they cannot be a friend or loyal to the west. That their identity has to be with Muslims only abroad, that's the Islamist idea with Muslims worldwide, global ummah. And the ultimate result of that is young men that want to fight and die for a cause. They won't fight and die for their own country - certainly not a European of western country - but they will go and join a militant group like the Taliban or al-shabab or al-Qaeda and go and fight in Syria or Somalia or Afghanistan. We have to understand that and grapple with it openly.

He was then asked by Eddie Mair: "How do we counter it?" He responded:

"The best way to deal with it is to bring the debate into the open and challenge the extremist ideas with better ideas rather than drive it under ground... Young people holding extremist views should be listened to and debated with calmly, to show them that Britain is actually a very tolerant and inclusive society which will give them the opportunity to participate in this society. 

There is a paranoid and conspiratorial mindset that everyone is against them and that the west is against Islam. As long as they're fed that kind of mentality then they will continue to operate in dubious ways.

There is no absolute parallel between the anti-British sentiment held by muslims and more hardline Irish nationalists and republican; but the parallels are very much there. Joe Brolly explained how Britain was regarded as he was growing up. He said:

"If I’d announced thirty years ago I was intending to play rugby and arrived home from school with a drawing of the Queen, they would have been sending for the men in white coats."

This is still a mindset and regard held by many Irish nationalists and republicans to this day. Brolly's plane of regard has, frankly, broadened and matured and taken in the context of the 21st Century. (Much like the west-Belfast, Ardoyne Catholic, British soldier here.) . As Alan in Belfast reported, "Joe Brolly’s son plays rugby for Malone and goes to the Cubs (coming home recently with a drawing of the Queen) [and] Joe finds himself standing for the [British] national anthem if he’s at a Cubs service to pick up his son."

The anti-Imperialism, anti-colonialism language employed by Muslims and directed against America is so similar in tone, mode and demeanour as that used by Irish republicans against Britain. Take the language used by the deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guard, who said:

"The crimes of US leaders and international Zionism in dealing with Iran's great nation will never be erased from public memories and minds."

Like in Iran, Belfast and Northern Ireland has a class of young people who are participants of the emerging world culture, but they also have an angry, hostile and hysterical class who are lovers of medievalism and haters of modernity.

We in Northern Ireland, like Quilliam, need to calmly and openly debate those who hold extremist views and challenge those extremist ideas with better ideas. People in Belfast and across Northern Ireland are being fed and actively hold a paranoid and conspiratorial mindset that Britain is bad, that Britain is the cause of all ill in Ireland and that Britain is the transcendent issue even above the economy, jobs, education and healthcare (the same for loyalists of course). People will continue to be fed this perverse philoshophy and they will continue to act in dubious ways and so we must counter this with reasoned, considered argument. We cannot allow these superstitious ideas to fester under the surface.

Modernity versus History in Tehran and Belfast

Christina Lamb wrote in the Sunday Times from Tehran describing how the young people live. She said:

"It is Friday evening in the Lorca cafe in downtown Tehran. Norah Jones is crooning over the speakers and the tables are packed with young people drinking lattes and smoothies, smoking and texting on their iPhones as they plan their night out. 

The boys are in jeans, T-shirts and leather jackets; the girls in tight jeans and colourful trainers or boots, headscarves so far back on their heads as to be barely a gesture. Later some of them will go to a friend’s loft-style apartment to watch Modern Family or Top Gear on satellite television, while eating pomegranate pips or pistachio nougat, and surfing the internet. One leaves to head to a rock concert." 

However there's an important qualification. Christina Lamb quoted a 21 year old chemical engineering student called Sohail who said: 

"You might look at our lives and think what's the problem? We're doing all these things but it's behind closed doors. We've no freedom. We'd just like to be normal like the rest of the world."

Christina Lamb then reported how just down the road from the cafe is a former American embassy known as the "Den of Espionage", taken by Islamic students in November 1979 and now used as a base for the Basji militia. November 4 2013 was the anniversary of the takeover and was celebrated by a group called the Death to the US Committee in an event called a "Grand Day of Death to America." A deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guard said:

"The crimes of US leaders and international Zionism in dealing with Iran's great nation will never be erased from public memories and minds."

YouGov finds that graduates aren't "work-ready"

YouGov has found that half of the regular graduate employers in Britain are finding their recruits without the basic skills to cope under pressure. The polling of company leaders found that just under one in five businesses believe that graduates are "work-ready". Only 19% of business leaders said all or most graduate recruits were "work-ready". Read more in The Telegraph here.

Libby Purves in The Times then piled on the pressure when writing in The Times. She said:

"Two years ago a poll of big graduate recruiters such as HSBC, KPMG and Procter & Gamble also lamented a shortage of “employability skills”. Specific grumbles concerned lack of punctuality, commercial awareness and willingness to work within a system and a team."

She the concluded: "One way or another, we should ease that gap between education and the hard-nosed workplace." Another point: Figures from earlier in  2013 showed that almost one in 10 students – 26,000 – were left without a job or a further education course after graduating in summer 2012. Data showed that the unemployment rate jumped much higher at some universities, with 22.6 per cent of graduates without a job after leaving London South Bank university.