Margaret Thatcher was underrated as a European politician. As prime minister, she was very much in favour and deeply engaged in the creation of the Single European Act and therefore of the single market. It is a cliche to say that the Brits only think of the European Union as a single market, but this is ahistorical – in the mid-80s, single market completion was the absolute top priority on the European agenda. If Europe is a project under construction, the single market was the phase that was completed in the 80s. The notion of catching up with Europe, competing with Europe, trading across Europe – all of this was ingrained in Thatcherite style, tone, and rhetoric.
British macro-economic policy in the Thatcher years was also driven by European integration. After giving up on monetarism, the UK government decided to establish a fixed exchange rate with the D-Mark, and later formalised this by joining the Exchange Rate Mechanism. In fact, the UK spent as much time under Thatcher tracking the D-Mark as it did targeting the money supply. The notions of “importing credibility” that were used to promote the Euro in the 90s and 00s had an earlier run-out in the UK in the 1980s.
With an open capital account and a currency pegged to the D-Mark at a dramatically high parity, the UK in the late 1980s looks rather like a peripheral European economy of the mid-2000s, with inflows of capital chasing yield, a growing financial sector, a trade deficit, a housing bubble, and a political elite frantically clapping themselves on the back, before the crash.
The UK’s broader foreign and defence policy could have been reduced to the word “NATO”, which is another way of saying that it was focused on Europe. In the early 1980s, UK defence plans were all about the BAOR operational area in Germany and the NATO Northern Flank. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the accident of the Falklands, they would have been much more so, sharply reducing the Navy at the expense of the Army and RAF and the nuclear world. Similarly, Thatcher really didn’t care about the Commonwealth or anything much outside, yes, Europe or the North Atlantic.
Who names the streets? Street naming decisions are made at the discretion of Toronto City Council. However, no street name can present a personal benefit to any City employee or official.
How does it work? The City of Toronto Honorific and Street Naming Policy govern the street naming process in Toronto. The City reviews the street name application to ensure that it complies with the law. They don’t create names or keep historical records on the backgrounds of street names (though there is book called Toronto’s Street Names by Leonard Wise and Allan Gould, published by Firefly Books). The City take names provided by applicants and processes them according to the policy. Street names must commemorate local history, honour noteworthy people associated with the city, or recognize wildlife features in the area.
Can names be changed? Names of streets that honour organizations or individuals, such as the Martin Goodman Trail, cannot be renamed. New street names will only be approved under exceptional circumstances and the historical or community significance of the current street name is considered. The City will consider naming proposals, but there is no obligation to accept or present them for consideration. All name submissions must entail a positive image, be original (to avoid confusion), and do not lend themselves to any inappropriate acronyms.
Speaking at a gala marking the 100th anniversary of Leaside, Harper reminisced about the east Toronto neighbourhood where he grew up in the 1960s.
He says back then, girls and boys were still segregated in the school yard, although some of the older boys were growing out their hair and the girls started wearing shorter skirts.
Harper says it was a place where the local pharmacist made house calls and you could knock on a neighbour's door if you needed help.
He says he has some political memories too — namely the passionate national debate over a new Canadian flag in 1964.
Harper says emotions ran high and some neighbours even stopped speaking to each other.
So as a five-year-old boy, Harper says he plowed right into the debate and asked everyone on his street which design they favoured and why.
Some people, like his parents, favoured one of the two principal designs for a new flag, he said.
"The Harpers liked the one with the blue borders," Harper said with a smile, "and three maple leaves."
He remembers watching the Maple Leaf going up the flagpole outside his kindergarten class in 1965. "And very quickly, peace came back to the neighbourhood," Harper added.
The city spent $650,000 on a bike station under Nathan Phillips Square before the project was quietly shelved by staff in 2011, a decision some councillors say should have come back to council for approval.
“That seems very strange,” said Councillor Paula Fletcher. “The scope of work for the Nathan Phillips Square revitalization is part of a pretty public restoration. That should have been reported out.”
The station, with secure parking for 380 bikes, was a signature element in the revitalization and would have been one of the biggest in North America.
Council approved $1.2 million in funding for the station in 2010. The $650,000 was spent on design as well as electrical and mechanical servicing. The remaining money, $550,000, is still sitting in the budget, said city spokesperson Natasha Hinds Fitzsimmins.
[. . .]
Both Mayor Rob Ford and Councillor Doug Ford have said they will try to kill it when it comes up for approval at city council this month. They say the facility — complete with four shower stalls — is a waste of money and deprives the city of revenue-drawing parking spots. (The staffed station would charge fees for users but not earn a profit.)
“The Ford brothers should actually look at the drawings,” says Andrew Frontini, a member of the architectural team who won a design competition for the square. The showers are made of concrete blocks and finished inside with the “most economical porcelain tile you can get but that you can still clean,” said Frontini. As well, the storage area for the bikes is basically a metal cage.
To understand the scale of disco's triumph you have to appreciate the magnitude of its initial rise and fall. Pop music has always been susceptible to fads but disco's imperial phase is the closest it has ever got to the irrational exuberance of a stock-market bubble. Between July 1977 and August 1979 30 out of 38 US Billboard No 1 singles were disco records, whether by titans of the form (Chic, the Bee Gees, Donna Summer), canny dilettantes (Blondie, the Rolling Stones) or corny opportunists (Meco, with his glitterball Star Wars medley). The Saturday Night Fever soundtrack remains the seventh biggest-selling album ever made. Passengers on the bandwagon included KISS, the Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, Ethel Merman and the Cookie Monster.
At the same time it was hated: by older black artists who resented the way it replaced the muscle and grit of funk with a mindless, frictionless groove; by punks who saw it as crass, bubbleheaded capitalism incarnate; by macho rock fans who believed its effeminacy was infecting even some of their favourite artists; by pundits who made it a cultural lightning rod for their growing angst about national decline and America's place in the world. In a telling coincidence, the summer of 1979, when baseball fans trashed disco records at Chicago's Comiskey Park and the Knack's My Sharona ousted Chic's Good Times from the top of the Billboard chart, also saw the launch of Jerry Falwell's ultra-conservative lobby group The Moral Majority. And of course some people hated it, as people tend to, simply because it was everywhere.
To Chic's Nile Rodgers the backlash "felt like it was racism, like it was book-burning", but a more potent driver than prejudice was embarrassment. To some longstanding opponents it might have been too black, too gay, too European or too female, but it only lost the public when it became too naff. The industry's attitude was, roughly, let us never speak of this again. "Disco was dead by 81," says pioneering house DJ Frankie Knuckles. "Overnight it went from disco to country-and-western and heavy rock. The industry was trying to get 360 degrees from what was going on the day before and they didn't want anything that in the slightest way resembled disco."
Knuckles and the other gay African Americans who invented house music began the process of rescuing disco from its own excesses by stripping away the cliches and reconnecting it with its subversive counter-cultural roots. Tough and electronic, house was disco in the raw. Years later the house producer Gusto looped a sample of Harvey Mason's Groovin' You over a drum machine and pointedly called the result Disco's Revenge. But disco bounced back quickly in the mainstream, too, just with a different identity and updated production. Michael Jackson's Thriller retained the lessons he learned on Off the Wall while Madonna approached Nile Rodgers to produce Like a Virgin. Like beneficiaries of a musical witness relocation programme, Billie Jean and Into the Groove were disco records in all but name, as were the early Hi-NRG productions of Stock Aitken Waterman. "No one has named the dominant trend in 80s music because they're afraid to: it's disco, and all the critics know it," wrote proud fan Bentley Boyd in 1987. "They know it and fear it. It is the strange uncle who lives in the attic and can't be acknowledged."
This was the strange thing. Disco had so thoroughly reconfigured pop that even as some of the biggest musicians of the 80s assimiliated its tenets – the synthetic four-to-the-floor beat, the celebration of dancing and community, the dominance of black and female artists, the hints of sexual ambiguity in someone such as Prince – audiences regarded their music as a different entity because nobody was wearing polyester jumpsuits and employing a Barry Gibb falsetto. It was just a matter of time before the spectre of ridicule passed and the continuum became more obvious.
[H]ere are two somewhat surprising cohorts taking a positive view of Collins’ landmark announcement: China’s state-owned television and Chinese users of Sina Weibo. Yesterday, China Central Television, better known as CCTV, ran a news spot tagged “An Example of Courage: Collins Openly Admits That He’s Gay,” noting that Collins had earned the support of US president Barack Obama, NBA president David Stern and Lakers superstar Kobe Bryant.
“An Example of Courage: Collins Openly Admits He’s Gay” reads the caption.Screenshot of CCTV
On Sina Weibo, the official NBA Weibo site’s announcement was forwarded 3,885 times and set off a lengthy stream of comments. NBA star Dwyane Wade’s message in support of Collins was reposted 106 times[.]
Some bloggers wished Wade’s ailing right knee a swift recovery, but a good deal more cheered Collins’ bravery alongside Wade. Still more Weibo users posted the news about Collins’ coming out on their own. While there were a couple of negative posts, the vast majority praised Collins for his courage.
[. . .]
China loves underdogs. Many Weibo posts likened Collins to Jackie Robinson, the first black major league baseball player. Though that was perhaps a result of Collins’ own mention of Robinson, that Weibo users even know who Robinson is highlights the underdog fascination. Jeremy Lin, another NBA star, is a favorite in China not only because of his Chinese-American heritage but also because his underdog story. Just six-foot-three-inches tall, he warmed the New York Knicks’ bench for months before getting noticed. China’s enthusiasm for Obama is a similar story.
Famous people coming out is a fairly popular topic on Weibo. Many Weibo users compared Collins to CNN’s Cooper, who sparked tens of thousands of Weibo remarks when he came out last year. His revelation even inspired calls for China’s closeted gays to come out en masse on December 12 (this, evidently, didn’t take). Cooper was perhaps one of the most prominent people in the Chinese public eye ever to come out. The closest thing to a gay icon in China is probably Leslie Cheung, a Hong Kong actor and singer who committed suicide in 2003. Though he never publicly acknowledged his sexual orientation, Cheung’s homosexuality is now widely noted in China now.
The idea that Afrikaans and English are no longer the sole province of white South Africans may makes for a sexy sound bite, but the truth is that this doesn’t represent a major shift in South African language use over the last decade, particularly when it comes to Afrikaans. The results of Census 2001 found that 13,3% of South Africans spoke Afrikaans at home, and by the time Census 2011 rolled around, this figure had risen only fractionally, to 13,5%.
The popularity of English as a home language has grown slightly more significantly, from 8,2% in 2001 to 9,6% in 2011, and this spurt has allowed English to move up a rung in the popularity chart. In 2001, English was tied for the fifth most spoken home language with Setswana, after isiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans and Sepedi. By 2011, English was beating out both Sepedi and Setswana as the fourth most popular home language.
Possibly the more interesting finding, however, is the degree to which English is dominating the South African education system. Of the 12,2 million South African school pupils, just 850,000 (7%) speak English at home. But the SAIRR’s 2012 South Africa Survey, drawing on figures from the Department of Basic Education, found that 7,6 million of them (around 64%) wish to be taught in English. When it comes to Afrikaans, similarly, more pupils want to be taught in the language (11%) than speak it at home (9%), though it lags far behind English as a desired medium of instruction.
[. . . L]anguage has always been a thorny issue in a South African context, and pragmatism of this kind has often not been considered sufficient to swing the debate. For illustration of just how heated these issues can become, South Africans have never had to look further than 16 June 1976, when the spark that lit the tinder box that was the Soweto Riots was the decision taken by the National Party government that Afrikaans should be a compulsory medium of instruction in secondary schools within the Department of Basic Education. That day is a powerful reminder of the significance and centrality of language to national identity.
In South Africa today, English is not just dominant in the education system, but also as the language of power. IsiZulu may be spoken in the greatest number of South African homes, but it is English that is heard in the corridors of power. Parliamentary proceedings are carried out overwhelmingly in English; Hansard, the record of what is said in Parliament, is published in English; and all addresses of national importance – like the state of the nation address, or the annual budget speech – are given in English. This echoes the situation all over post-colonial Africa, where the official language of communication has generally been the language of the former colonial power (mainly English, French of Portuguese), even though knowledge of these languages may be minimal.
There are, of course, consequences to this if the majority of the population is not sufficiently fluent in the language of power. In Language in South Africa: The Role of Language in National Transformation (2002), University of Pretoria linguist Victor Webb makes the point that such languages can become substantial barriers to much of the population accessing their national rights and privileges, and also to accessing the country’s formal economy.
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