Bonds of Love and Hate: a review of Skyfall

The real James Bond was an American ornithologist and a world renowned expert on the birds of the Caribbean.  When author Ian Fleming was birdwatching in Jamaica, his guide would have been Bond’s Birds of the West Indies, the definitive textbook of avifauna in the region.  In 1953, Fleming wrote the spy novel Casino Royale and gave his hero the “brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon” name of the ornithologist.  James Bond, he said, was the dullest name he had ever heard and a suitable one for the “anonymous blunt instrument” of state policy.

By the time Fleming died in 1964, the Bond character had featured in 12 novels and two short stories. Perhaps more importantly he had made a successful transition to the big screen in three movies. Fleming didn’t immediately like the look of the little known Sean Connery before the filming of Dr No in 1962. “I’m looking for Commander Bond and not an overgrown stunt-man,” Fleming said.  Connery’s casting as the first Bond owed much to Dana Broccoli, wife of producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli. Broccoli was convinced of Connery’s sex appeal and a new image was born. In the end Fleming was so impressed by Connery he added a Scottish back story in the later novels.

Fifty years on, the writers of the latest Bond film have added a further Scottish twist in Skyfall, the 32nd entry in the durable franchise. The current Bond, Daniel Craig is from Cheshire (a fact perhaps responsible for his statement in the film during the word association when he equates Country with England) but the Bond character supposedly grew up on the remote Scottish property of Skyfall. Either way the Bond series has become a classic British institution and Bond himself the embodiment of British stiff upper lip and never say die exemplified by the Queen's complicity in the Olympic opening ceremony parachute landing.

And despite the confusion over nationality, Craig is a classic Fleming Bond. Craig is a silent, often morose, blunt instrument, or as Fleming put it “Exotic things would happen to and around him, but he would be a neutral figure”.  Skyfall captures most of the Bond nuances. There is the classy, brassy theme music, the femme fatale Bond girls, the malevolent hero, the vintage cars and suits, the “before I kill you, Mr Bond" moments and the usual spats with authority. As M (an almost wistful Judi Dench in her final outing in the role) noted, “orphans make the best agents” and no challenge is too big or too dangerous for our hero, who always retains a sense of style and dignity no matter how hairy the situation.

And matters do become extremely hairy when the lead villain is finally introduced 70 minutes into the film in a memorable long-take entrance.  Spanish actor Javier Bardem has already brilliantly played one baddie. His psychopathic assassin Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men won him a best supporting Oscar in 2007. Bardem’s CV is impressive and he wasn’t immediately sold on the idea of becoming a Bond villain. Director Sam Mendes promised Bardem he could develop the character and said the ideas about the way he looked and the hair colour -were Bardem's own. "I thought they weren't going to work," Mendes said.  "All of them worked.”

In one of Bardem’s most famous film performances, he plays the Cuban homosexual author Reinaldo Arenas in Julian Knabel’s Before Night Falls. Bardem recreates some of the sexual tension in that film when as Skyfall villain Silva, he interrogates Bond and runs his fingers across Bond's bare chest, before parting his legs. "What's your regulation training for this?" Silva asked him. Bond’s wisecrack "What makes you think it's my first time?" does nothing to dispel the notion a gay Bond might be possible.

If such a prospect would leave Fleming turning in his grave, he would be little happier with the other major sexual relationship in the film, that of Bond and M (or “Emma” as Albert Finch's gamekeeper Kincade insisted on calling her). Dench is a convincing hard-nosed matriarch whose tears for a supposedly dead Bond she cannot shed are instead provided by the rain outside her Millbank window. If it is love, it must remain a taboo as her firm insistence he could not sleep at her house showed. The oedipal undertones are underscored by the baddie Silva’s referral to her as “mother” and “mummy”. Bond shows more ornithological reserve but the tenderness in their relationship is obvious all the same.

With car chases and spectacular action sequences, Skyfall remains a commercial product designed to sell lots of theatre tickets. And though it has succeeded in being the best selling Bond movie yet, it is not the only attraction. As the minimalist gadgets supplied by Q show, Bond is a killing machine who must do most of the legwork himself. The audience is forced to either work backwards from Silva’s taunts or fill in the gaps themselves to put a human face on the enduring anonymous blunt hero.Craig’s “unromantic Anglo-Saxon” Bond remains, like the original’s birds, an enigma we never tire of watching.

Brand Branson

TWENTY-THREE Australians are among the 600 people who have stumped up a cool $US200,000 each to be among the first space tourists with Virgin Galactic. The flights are expected to take place at the end of next year after Virgin test flights prove successful and the passengers undergo basic space training.

Flights on Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo will carry two pilots and six commercial passengers on a two and a half journey that will involve just six minutes of sub-orbital weightlessness 21,000m high. The idea is the latest brainwave of serial inventive British businessman Richard Branson who will be on the first scheduled flight with his family.

The entrepreneurial icon turned 62 in July but shows no sign of slowing down.

Where others see disaster, Branson sees opportunity.  CNN called him part Warren Buffett, part PT Barnum and an “unflappable inventor and promoter”.He has vast interests on six continents, including airlines, express trains, mobile phones and credit cards.

Branson was always an independent sort. Aged 16 he set up a magazine to put out a student point of view. “I didn't like the way I was being taught at school,” he said in 2006. “I didn't like what was going on in the world, and I wanted to put it right.” Plenty of advertisers were willing to stump up to reach the cashed-up youngsters reading Branson’s mag and his career was up and running.

He advertised records in the magazine and started selling them himself at a London store at discounted rates under the brand “Virgin”.In 1972 he launched Virgin Records and was approached by a struggling artist called Mike Oldfield to listen to his demo. Other companies thought Oldfield's instrumental work was unmarketable but Branson took a gamble. Oldfield’s Tubular Bells was the first record released by Virgin. The album took off after it was used as the theme music for the movie The Exorcist and by the end of 1973 it was a massive international success. Branson was always grateful to Oldfield and would later name one of his first Virgin America planes Tubular Belle.

Branson’s willingness to take a gamble paid off and he was at it again in 1976 when he signed the band the Sex Pistols. Johnny Rotten and his punk crew were controversial but they knew how to shift records. Though the band broke up before Branson made serious money out of them, they successful changed Virgin's image as a hippie label. In their wake, he signed up XTC, The Skids,The Culture Club, The Human League, and Sting. Virgin’s income went from a loss of £900,000 in 1980 to a profit of £11 million in 1983. In 1992 Branson was able to sell the music label to EMI for £0.5 billion. 

By then, Branson had broadened his scope with expensive airlines in his firing line. In his autobiography Losing My Virginity he explained why. “My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them,” he said. “From the perspective of wanting to live life to the full, I felt that I had to attempt it.” Just as his assault on the expensive record industry worked, the over-regulated airline market was also ripe for picking.

His Virgin Atlantic Airways was followed by Virgin Blue in Australia in 2000. Virgin Blue took full advantage of Ansett’s collapse a year later to become the country’s second largest airline. Internationally there was Virgin Trains and Virgin Mobile and even Virgin Comics as Branson spread his net far and wide. Meanwhile there was a succession of world record attempts, film appearances and humanitarian initiatives as Branson the man competed with Branson the brand. 

He was knighted in 2000 for “services to entrepreneurship” and he now gets rock star treatment wherever he goes. Last year, stadiums in Sydney and Melbourne were filled with people who forked out $300 a ticket to attend a “financial education summit” where Sir Richard was the star speaker.

Now at an age when many are reaching for the pipe and slippers, Branson is still reaching for the skies and beyond.

Salman Rushdie: From Bradford’s Fahrenheit 451 to the memoirs of Joseph Anton.

I haven’t yet laid my hands on a copy of Salman Rushdie’s new book, but it is an anticipated pleasure.  “Joseph Anton: A Memoir” tells his own story of being forced underground with armed surveillance after Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against him over The Satanic Verses. Acton was the name Rushdie used while incognito during the time when he was most in danger.  The fatwa remains current, as the only man who can lift it – Khomeini – inconveniently died a few months after the pronouncement. However Rushdie is beginning to rebuild his life in the open 24 years after the publication of that fateful book.

The best explanation for the fatwa and how it directly inspired the likes of London’s 7/7 are to be found in Kenan Malik’s “From Fatwa to Jihad”.  English writer Malik tells how in February 1989 he witnessed a profound event: the first burning of The Satanic Verses in public.  A thousand Muslims gathered in Bradford, Yorkshire with copies of Rushdie’s book and burned it in front of a police station.  It wasn’t quite Kristallnacht but it was calculated to shock and to offend.

Like Rushdie, Malik was born of an Indian Muslim family. He grew up in Britain in an Islamic culture which was deeply embedded but not “all consuming”.   He became a radical leftist in the 1980s, and did not think of himself as Muslim but black.  Malik quotes secular writer Fay Weldon who said the Qu’ran offered no food for thought. “It forbids change, interpretation, self-knowledge, even art for fear of treading on Allah’s creative toes,” Weldon said.

Malik didn’t mind treading on Allah’s toes. He was self-consciously secular and militant. Black for Malik was a political badge which stood for refusing to put up with the discrimination dished out to the previous generation.  The whites called them Asians but they were no more Asian than the Brits were Europeans.  Malik said it was much later they became “Muslims” and that for political reasons.  Rushdie came from a similar background to Malik and his early writings had done more than most to humanise the experience of immigrant Muslims. 

Rushdie was used to having his books banned if not burned. His first novel Midnight’s Children was banned in India and Indira Ghandi successfully sued for libel in a British court.  In the second novel Shame, Rushdie’s description of Benazir Bhutto as the Virgin Ironpants caused outrage in Pakistan and another ban.  Rushdie laughed it off as he won prize after prize for his great writing. The third book took his mockery to the next level. It would be no less than a fable about the origins of Islam. 

Written over 12 years before 9/11, The Satanic Verses opens with an exploding airline.  The magical events that happen to the two survivors of the explosion are used to discuss how God’s revelation to the prophet Mahound brings a new religion called Submission (the English translation of “Islam”) to a city in the sand called Jahilia (“Ignorance” – where Arabs lived prior to Islam).  A second tale in the book is a caricature of Ayatollah Khomeini and the third is based the true story of an Indian pied piper who leads all her Indian village on the Haj and then into the sea to drown.

In one book, Rushdie was attacking Islam’s history, one of its major political leader and one of its five pillars of behaviour. He might have expected some resistance, yet the immediate reaction wasn’t huge. Rushdie’s book was so obtuse and so difficult to follow in its non-narrative form it was almost impossible to understand in a single reading and almost threatened to go under the radar. 

Then Sher Azam stepped in. Azam was the president of Bradford’s Council of Mosques.  Azam wasn’t the first Muslim critic of the book.  That honour belongs to philosopher Shabbir Akhtar who called it an inferior piece of literature. But Azam was one of the earliest to realise how Rushdie could be a rallying cry for Muslim identity.  Azam had not read the book but read reviews of it.  He knew religious scholars had declared it blasphemous and he took on the task of writing to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Azam compared it to the Spycatcher affair and asked for it to be banned. He got no reply.  

Azam told Malik Christians don’t mind about what people say about their God because they no longer believe in “Him”.  But look what it means, he told Malik. “It means a country where the values have gone. People drink, take drugs, have sex like dogs.” Azam said those problems would disappear if people believed in God.  Azam tapped into a new consciousness among young radicals. These people were moving away from the radical secularism preferred by Malik to a radical religiosity that could be firmly rooted across the Muslim world.

The Muslims who burned the book in Bradford felt an immense power in their action. Applauded as it was across the umma, they felt tuned in to a philosophy much bigger than themselves. It gave them a giddy sense of power they had never had before in their lives. A few days later on February 13, Khomeini called on “all zealous Muslims” to execute anyone involved in the publication of the book, and Iran offered $3m for Rushdie’s death ( or a knock-down $1m if the assassin was non-Muslim). 

It didn’t matter that Khomeini issued the fatwa primarily as a marker in his battle with the Saudis for supremacy in the Muslim world. His intervention had made it an event of global consequence. That day Rushdie attended a memorial service for writer Bruce Chatwin who had just died. Paul Theroux came up to him and said “we’ll be back here next week for you.” Rushdie said it wasn’t the funniest joke he’d ever heard.  By the following morning, Scotland Yard had given him grade one protection and spirited him away to a safe house.  Joseph Acton was born.

But so was jihadism in Britain, according to Malik. He argues Britain and many other Governments formed pacts with religious movements because they thought they would be easier to control than the left. This was a miscalculation and it was made worse in the UK by Government policies that outsourced “Muslim issues” to Muslim organisations. In the wake of the London Bombings of 2005, Muslim leaders lashed Prime Minister Tony Blair for ignoring the warning signs that led to 7/7.  Blair hit back criticising moderate Muslims for not doing enough. “Governments cannot go and root out the extremism in these communities,” he said.  That was your job, it implied but no one asked Blair why he felt so helpless rooting them out. 

Under the guise of multiculturalism, Britain divested all its decisions on Muslim issues to the Muslim Council of Mosques. Radicalism fermented in these organisations. Six of the 7/7 plotters were trainee doctors.  The Satanic Verses furore was a catalyst for a more confident Islamic identity which educated young professionals could endorse. But it was not an identity recognised by most Muslims.  Islamism was not an expression of ancient faith but a modernist reaction against the loss of belonging in complex societies comforted by a literal belief in the Qu’ran. Rushdie, one of the most nuanced of Muslim culture writers, had no chance against the power of this certainty.

Slavery is as old a curse as humanity

The issue of slavery doesn’t seem like an important topic to be discussing the 21^st century but it is still a real issue in many parts of the world, including Australia.  Attorney-General Nicola Roxon recognised the fact this week when she announced new laws to criminalise forced marriage, forced labour and organ trafficking.  Roxon said Australia wasn’t immune from slavery and people trafficking. The new bill tackles worker exploitation, ensures those who help to enslave or traffic can be charged as well as those who keep slaves and allows for reparations with up to 12 years in prison for forced labour charges.

The news comes a week after an Irish publication revealed the news slavery exists today in Ireland and is exported to Australia. The Cork Independent quoted from a new book called ‘Open Secrets: An Irish Perspective on Trafficking & Witchcraft' based on data from the Trafficking in Persons Report issued annually by the US Department of State. Book co-author David Lohan said the data was available for several years but the issue was under-reported. 

The report found that Irish and Filipino people on 457 visas were “fraudulently recruited to work temporarily in Australia, but subsequently are subjected to conditions of forced labour, including confiscation of travel documents, confinement and threats of serious harm." It quoted a $174,000 fine issued to a Perth construction company in 2008 for violations of the Workplace Relations Act for “the deliberate exploitation of Filipino and Irish migrant workers.” The workers were not entitled to move between employers and presented with undated work agreements while being denied the required documents outlining their rights.

At the time of the case, Australian Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Senator Chris Evans welcomed the fine and warned that the exploitation of workers would not be tolerated by his Government. The Cork Independent said slavery exists in Ireland today because of a demand. “Irish people are willing to use, abuse and exploit their fellow human beings for economic benefit or their own gratification,” it said.

But this is not just true of Ireland or Australia. Slavery is as old as organised human society. It was codified in the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi 3800 years ago and accepted in the Old and New Testaments. Exodus 22:2-3 allows for a thief to be sold if they cannot redress their theft.  Ephesians 6:5 cautions servants “who are owned by someone must obey your owners”. The classical Greek definition of democracy glossed over slavery and it was a key component of the Roman Empire economy until it was gradually replaced by serfdom.

Slavery continued in many societies and gained a new lease of life in Western Europe with the opening up of the Americas in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. The Atlantic triangular slave trade brought textiles, rum and manufactured goods from Europe to Africa, slaves from Africa to the Americas and sugar, tobacco and cotton from the Americas to Europe.  Merchants of Liverpool and Bristol combined with the big American cotton producers and the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa to move 12 million Africans across the Atlantic in three hundred years. 

American-based British historian Simon Schama addressed the subject in his blood Rough Crossings:  Britain, Slaves and the American Revolution. The book tells the story of black Americans who sided with the British in the War of Independence because King George III embodied the idea of freedom for them better than George Washington.  The framers of the new American constitution had a bold plan for taxation and representation but behind the rhetoric of freedom, the reality of slavery was their Achilles heels. Tens of thousands of Black Africans looked to Britain to deliver them from the slavery.  When Boston lawyer James Otis called out the contradiction and said slavery diminished the idea of American freedom,  Founding Father John Adams could only “shudder at the consequences of such premises.”

The fact was the trade in humans kept the American cotton industry in profit and this was something the southern colonies were not to give away lightly. Slave rebellions in the sugar islands of the Caribbean created a terror the cotton economy was next and thousands of white Americans signed up for the revolt to protect their livelihood. 

But Britain was a dubious saviour for the blacks. Slavery was still legal in the British Empire and repeated attempts in parliament to ban it were always rejected on the economic grounds it would give bitter enemy France too much of an advantage in the Caribbean sugar trade. The notorious case of the slave ship the Zong where the captain threw 122 sick slaves overboard to get £30 a head compensation for their loss at sea spurred campaigners such as Granville Sharp (a founding father of Sierra Leone) and Thomas Clarkson to lobby for change. But even when revolutionary France rejected slavery (Napoleon re-established it in 1802), a suspicious British parliament would not immediately follow suit.

It wasn’t until 1807 the slave trade was made illegal in Britain and also in the US.  But the economic benefits of the institution of slavery continued in both countries until Britain made it illegal in the Empire in 1834. The internal contradictions of the US system were brilliantly exposed by 28-year-old runaway slave Frederick Douglass who wowed Britain when he toured in 1846. The articulate, witty, handsome and charismatic Douglass gave a dramatic account of cruelty in the plantations and lived constantly under the fear of re-capture. The book on his life was an immediate best seller.

Back home, many called Douglass anti-American but he defended his criticisms. “I have no love for America, What Country have I? The institutions of this country do not know me.” The contradictions tore the US apart leading to a reluctant Lincoln declaring war on the south in 1861.  The war claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and led to Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Declaration. When Lincoln was murdered, Douglass said Lincoln “shared the prejudices of his white fellow-countrymen against the Negro, [but] it is hardly necessary to say that in his heart of hearts he loathed and hated slavery.”

And while the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery after the South was defeated in 1865, the attitudes Douglass saw in Lincoln, lingered on in others. Slavery continued but went under a different name abetted by Jim Crow Laws.  Australia too enslaved its blacks by making them wards of the state.  While most of these schemes were wound back by the 1960s, slavery continues to be a worldwide issue.  In an article about South African slavery during the 2010 World Cup, Time said there were more slaves around today than ever. “Slaves are those forced to perform services for no pay beyond subsistence and for the profit of others who hold them through fraud and violence,” said Time. Slavery is likely to continue as long as humans have economic value.

The extinction of Pityus Mancityus

Manchester City’s stunning Premier League triumph was achieved in typically Madchester style. As someone wrote in the aftermath, the second half of their final game at home against Queens Park Rangers was a microcosm of their season. Comfortably winning the league, then almost throwing it away before finally snatching it back at the end.  It was an astonishing climax to a wild ride and probably just as well they won as the alternative would have been one calamity too far for a side renowned for its ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

It was an expensive triumph. Abi Dhabi's Sheik Mansour has poured almost a billion pounds into his expensive toy but he has achieved his first target of winning the Premier League within four seasons. As well as their expensive assemblage of players, Mansour also recruited a hardnosed winning manager in Roberto Mancini who took Inter to three Italian titles before adding the English crown to his collection. The talk now is of moving forward to collect European silverware, a task that fellow billionaire Roman Abramovich has found beyond him in his reign as Chelsea moneybags – though he has one more chance in Munich this weekend.

As a Liverpool fan, I remain a fully paid up member of ABU (Anyone But United) for at least one season.  I have to say I enjoyed the way the title was snatched from Manchester United’s grasp on Sunday. I thought they were a poor team but I thought the same in 2003 and 2011 when they also managed to win the league. Sir Alex Ferguson has long ago proved himself the best manager ever to grace the British game and time after time he has come up with the goods to coach United sides in the fine art of grinding out victories.

I might be persuaded to leave ABU if City put together a run of title successes but I’m not convinced that will happen. I certainly wouldn’t bet against United coming back next season, having just lost out on goal difference this year. Defensively they are almost impregnable while the ageless pair of Giggs and Scholes will be back for another season, playing as well as ever. Wayne Rooney appears at the peak of his considerable powers well supported by the likes of Hernandez and Valencia though their midfield needs bolstering.  The memory of that 6-1 shellacking at Old Trafford (the size of the victory ultimately decided the title) should be enough motivation to do better next time round.

City meanwhile may struggle to keep up the momentum next season and could be distracted by a longer European campaign.  They will have money to spend in the summer but there will be much to spend it on with bad boys Tevez and Balotelli and relative failure Dzeko all likely to move on.  They also rely too much of Yaya Toure which is great when he is on the park, but a risky policy as shown when he limped off injured against QPR. Like United however, Mancini has drilled them into a formidable defensive unit with Kompany and company backed up by Joe Hart who has the chance to earn back the good name of English goalkeepers that was lost around 20 years ago. 

Chelsea and Arsenal will continue to flip around for third and fourth with Tottenham there or thereabouts. Redknapp has proved a shrewd acquisitor of talent in the transfer market with Van der Vaart and Modric both inspired signings while developing the considerable talents of Bale before the inevitable transfer to Old Trafford (or maybe the City of Manchester stadium). I’m not sure if Newcastle’s season is a one-off or they are back in the mix. Papiss Cisse was a sensation at the end of the season as was Demba Ba at the start and getting them both to click at the same time will be crucial to their chance.

My own team Liverpool look an absolute shambles and it is probably just as well they did not win the cup final as a second trophy would have disguised the fact it was their worst season in living memory. The fact is if they keep their 2012 form into next season, they would have to be among the relegation candidates. Their new stadium plans are in disarray, King Kenny’s crown is in tatters and they are a long way from getting back into the Top Four let alone making a title challenge. Gerrard is looking past it, Suarez and Carroll is not working, and none of Downing, Adams or Henderson have risen to the challenge. It’s difficult to see anything but hard times for the Reds in 2012-2013.

Wanting less News: Pay TV piracy and News Corp

If there was any doubt that News Ltd have too much power in Australia, it should be dispelled by their aggressive handling of the allegations of global Pay TV piracy this last week. The issue was launched internationally by a BBC Panorama program called “Murdoch’s TV pirates” and it was given a local angle with long time Murdoch tormentor Neil Chenoweth’s series of articles in the Australian Financial Review (Chenoweth was also an adviser to the BBC program). News Ltd has tried to bully the AFR out of their allegations while also questioning SBS for showing the documentary hinting it does not correspond with the station’s code of practice.

The Panorama program focussed on a British issue. It alleged the then News Corp security arm NDS (headquartered in Israel) hired an expert team of Pay TV hackers from the piracy site called The House of Ill Compute (THOIC). Originally known as News Datacom Systems, NDS established the “Operational Security” group in the 1990s to ensure the security of Murdoch’s growing pay TV interests. Cracking codes is not illegal but spreading the cracked code to encourage piracy is. NDS busted THOIC piracy but instead of prosecuting them they hired them. The THOIC brief was to open up the security codes of NDS competitors, Canal+ (from France), and flood them on the market. This action, Panorama said, was directly responsible for the death of On Digital (later called ITV Digital) which used the Canal+ system. On Digital was the biggest pay TV threat in the UK to Murdoch’s BSkyB which had smartcards made by NDS.

Panorama tracked down Lee Gibling, the former head of THOIC who told them NDS hired him to break competitors’ smart card systems. Panorama also secretly filmed two other key witnesses, former NDS employees Ray Adams (previously Metropolitan Police commander) and Len Withall and aired the footage without their permission. The footage found evidence that emerged in 2002 showing links from THOIC to News Corp. Canal+ sued News Ltd who dealt with the problem by spending $1 billion on an Italian Pay TV company called Telepiu, owned by Vivendi Universal which was on the brink of bankruptcy. Vivendi Universal also owned Canal+. The terms of the deal was to drop the lawsuit and the Canal+ Tech team that developed the smart cards was also disbanded.

Here in Australia, the AFR published the end of what they called “a four year investigation” into similar allegations into the local pay TV market. They published an archive of 14,400 Ray Adams emails and said piracy cost Australian pay TV companies $50  million a year at its height in 2002. It helped cripple the finances of Austar, which Murdoch’s part-owned Foxtel (which uses NDS) is now buying. The AFR published emails which were submitted in legal cases brought against NDS by rival pay TV operators in the US (DirectTV, Echostar) Europe (Canal+ and Sogecable) and Malaysia (Measat). Like the way they dealt with Canal+, News Corp bought 34 percent of DirectTV to end that case. In the only one to go to trial, Echostar won three of six counts, but won only minimal damage and had to pay court costs.

In Australian law, unauthorised access to electronic networks and illicit modification of databases are criminal offences. But Bruce Arnold, Law Lecturer at the University of Canberra, is only prepared to say News Corp may have exacerbated the issue. “Academic and industry research over two decades indicates the problems experienced by the defunct or ailing television networks were primarily attributable to poor management, poor marketing and inadequate capitalisation,” Arnold said.

Finding hard evidence is not easy, as Terry McCrann alluded to when hauled out by the Herald-Sun to defend News. McCrann wanted to see an email quoted in the AFR. “You know, something like: Murdoch to 007: My plan for world pay-TV domination rests on your piracy skills. Let's target one million pirated cards by Christmas.”

McCrann was flippant but giving the nastiness at the heart of News Corp exposed in the Levinson Inquiry, it not beyond the bounds of reason to think Murdoch wanted to see exactly that: one million pirated cards on the marketplace by Christmas. Such thoughts never make it to an email. Britain’s TV regulator Ofcom is currently examining if Rupert and James Murdoch are “fit and proper” to be in control of BSkyB based on the phone hacking scandal. One of the hacked MPs Tom Watson says the pay TV allegations should be added to that investigation.

Here the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) is reviewing the $1.9 billion Austar takeover bid. With such a cloud over the Empire, it seems beyond belief the Australian Government should allow yet another contraction of ownership in the most concentrated media landscape in the western world. Yet time after time, Murdoch gets his way in Australia. Robert Manne explains why this is a problem: “The more the media is concentrated, the greater is the problem for the health of democracy”, Manne writes. “Yet the more the media is concentrated, the less likely it is that the issue will be debated freely in the only appropriate forum for the discussion, the media itself.” News Ltd Australia should be broken up, not expanded.

Hadrian's Wallet: Scotland's independence referendum and oil

Depending on who’s talking, the prospect of an independent Scotland would see either the arrival of a new, modern and confident state or it will be fed into the Euro-blender to be destroyed forever. The idea of an independent Scotland is not new – it dates back to those unhappy with the original Act of Union in 1707. What is new is the proposed referendum in 2014 to give Scots a chance to vote on the matter.

The governing Scottish National Party put the cat among the constitutional pigeons with their announcement on 10 January they would hold a referendum in autumn 2014. The referendum will ask two questions. The first is whether there should be an extension of the powers and responsibilities of the Scottish Parliament, short of independence; while the second asks whether the Scottish Parliament should "also have its powers extended to enable independence to be achieved".

In many respects, the controversy over the referendum is a storm in a tea-cup. All the polls suggest that voters will turn down the proposal. YouGov’s polling from 1990 to 2009 show support for full independence hovering around the high 20s to low 30s percentiles. A clearer majority – though never more than 60 percent – are happier with more tax raising powers for the existing Scottish parliament created in 1999. The referendum that created that parliament two years earlier showed most Scots wanted power over their own taxes (currently they can vary the basic rate of personal income tax by a maximum of 3p in the pound). The issue with that was as First Minister Alex Salmond said in October 2010, “there is no point in being a pocket money parliamanet when the pocket money stops.”

The 2011 study of Scottish attitudes showed 70 percent of the population saw themselves as Scottish first compared to about 15 percent who thought they were British. The study also showed that support for increased devolution is also on the up but there was a lot of ambiguous findings on specifics that show there is much to play for. Specific questions on who should pay for what and by what amount narrowed opinion in a way that was rather different than the ungranulated question of whether you support nationalist or unionist.

Opinion is also divided as to whether Scotland would do better alone with its annual £6.5b North Sea oil wealth. According to Michael Moore, the secretary of state for Scotland, the year on year variations of oil prices in 2011 were better managed in a UK wide economy where Scotland could share in the risks as well as rewards. But Scottish finance secretary John Swinney disagreed saying Scotland contributed far more to the UK Exchequer than its share of population which underlined the strength of Scotland’s finances and the opportunities of independence. Scottish opinion polls consistently support the latter view with most Scots thinking those south of Hadrian’s Wall do better from the Union than they do.

Yet opinion polls are less clear on the economic benefits of independence. Most people think they would pay slightly more tax under an Edinburgh administration and there is no consensus on whether the nation would be better off financially. The debate reflects a strong and complex intertwining of English, Scottish and British traditions that make most Scots slightly ambivalent about their nationality.

Unlike the Irish Act of Union a century later, the English-Scottish Act of Union of 1702 was a genuine marriage of near-equals. Scottish kings had sat on the throne of England for over a hundred years (until ousted by the Glorious Revolution). Scotland was still the minor party in the marriage, and as in the case of Ireland, bribery was needed to get the Act passed in Edinburgh. Scotland was still reeling from the economic catastrophe of the Darien Scheme which hoped to set up a Scottish colony in Panama. But the Act of Union was good for Scotland; it gave its economy free trade with England and led directly to the Scottish Enlightenment of the mid 1700s. Thinkers like David Hume and Adam Smith had an immense effect not only on Scotland but on the newly United Kingdom and beyond.

Scots became a driving force in the new British Empire, despite the continued rebellions of the highlanders. The lowlands were transformed by the Industrial Revolution with linen, coal and steel and a massive financial centre. Glasgow became a powerhouse city based on shipbuilding and railways. Scottish cities paid a terrible price for their industrialisation in World War II with extrensive bombing by the Luftwaffe. The deindustrialisation of the post-war years was balanced by the discovery of oil in the North Sea in 1970. Though production has fallen in recent years, a 2010 report said there was still 25 billion barrels of oil in Scottish waters, though they are in harder to reach areas near the Shetlands.

The importance of oil in any border negotiation between England and Scotland cannot be underestimated. 85% of British oil is in Scottish waters. The nationalist site Oil of Scotland claims Westminster moved Scotland's marine boundaries in 1999 from Berwick-upon-Tweed to Carnoustie “illegally making 6000 miles of Scotland's waters English.” The website called the Scottish Adjacent Waters Boundaries Order 1999 an “unjust act secretly passed, without the consent of the Scottish People” that took 15% of oil and gas revenues out of the Scottish sector of the North Sea and £2.2 Billion out of the Scottish economy. “This lost revenue is more than the proposed £35 Billion Scottish budget cuts for the next 15 years,” the group said.