‘Who are we really?’ It sounds like a simple question doesn’t it? But wrapped up in the question are some difficult notions. For example, is our identity anything more than a buy-in to a concept of self that is illusory?
What gives most of us, most of the time a strong sense of self? Arguably it is a combination of:
· a sense of place; we wake up in the same immediate surroundings we went to sleep in, with the same people, objects, sounds and smells, even if we’re in a boat cabin or a plane or a car seat (unless of course we are abducted by aliens);
· a sense of continuity, enabled by consciousness, reflection and memory. We remember and know ourselves and the key events from the day before, the year before and the decades before. We have agency and purpose and spend most of our time in familiar surroundings. We know what it feels like to be…….well us.
All this leads to and supports a strong sense of self, an identity. In other words, “I think therefore I am.”[1]
Most of the time we don’t ponder the metaphysics of identity overmuch.
In our day-to-day lives we just get on with it; we go to sleep with a strong sense of self, rest our tired bodies and minds for 6–8 hours and wake up in the same body and the same room and with the same feelings and thoughts we went to bed with and carry on: we know who we are. Perhaps that is what the true horror of Alzheimer’s disease is — the loss of memory, of awareness, of familiarity with a place, of chronology and, because of all this, the loss of self. Carers speak of losing a loved one and sufferers of being lost. Everything that anchors identity is lost and so the person is lost.
In my younger days Satre almost convinced me, in an aside in what I think was his Doctoral thesis, that, a strong sense of self not-withstanding, the idea of an identity, a fixed and permanent persona, an us, was no more than an accident of language and consciousness.[2] These days I can as easily believe that the language came because of the sense of self rather than the other way round.
As an aside, for a species which, at least in western cultures, places so much emphasis on self and personal identity we do have an extraordinary need to be part of a tribe, community, gang, club, congregation or nation. Our ability to think and act in opposition to our group is generally not great; think of small-town America, that nice village in the Cotswolds, national mindsets, the far right, the far left, those of a devout religious persuasion, Man. U supporters and so on. At the extreme our group membership releases us from personal responsibility — we can forget or lose ourselves in the excitement and freedom of belonging in the moment. Think of Germany in the 1930s or MAGA supporters at Trump rallies. We can be carried away, be Dionysian rather than Apollonian (if I’ve remembered my Nietzsche correctly), governed by the Id not the Superego (if I’ve remembered my Freud correctly) and be part of a good ruck or riot or mass killing (if I’ve remembered recent and more distant history correctly). So identity and sense of self are somehow bound up in group-think and external culture and norms, not just something inside us. We need our tribe and our tribe will reinforce what we think and feel — and change it. Humans are intelligent pack animals banding together against ‘the other’ pack animals — that’s what we are programmed to do. Have a look at the Asch Conformity Experiments in the 1950s and the Milligram experiment findings in the 1970s if you need convincing: https://tiredandemotional.org.uk/what-if-the-hokie-kokie-is-what-its-all-about/
“Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. ……….when they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.
I think we might need to reflect on how we can educate men and women to sustain their truth whatever the situation.”
Stanley Milgram, 1974
It is difficult for any of us to go against the shared beliefs and values of our group whatever the consequences and not having a group, not belonging, being a loner, can have consequences for the individual and his/her community. How many school mass shootings in the land of the free involved one or more young men whose only friend was a social media portal?
But I don’t really want to torture myself or any reader with a deep dive into these issues and am happy to concede we have identities. What I really want to know is how did we become who we are? First though, let’s just recognise the incredibly unlikely happenstance that we exist at all.
Bill Bryson has something to say about that. First, think about the astonishing physics of our being here.
“…for uou to be here at all now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and curiously obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialised and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once.”[3]
As far as I know atoms are not alive so how does this work?
Atoms becoming me….or you: image by Dean Simone from PixabayDNA: image by Alex Antropov86 from Pixabay
Then consider how our species (and therefore we) evolved over aeons.
“To get from ‘protoplasmal primordial atomic globule’ (as Gilbert and Sullivan put it) to sentient, upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long time…..The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary imperatives and you might now be licking algae from cave walls….or disgorging air through a blowhole….”[4]
Of course, those of an extreme religious persuasion ‘know’ none of this is true. But, if you believe in evolution, you know that the journey from protoplasm to sentient (more or less) mammal was a long and tangled road with lots of blind turnings and cul-de-sacs. Even if we just take our journey from the time of early humankind to this point the odds on our being here are incredibly low.
“Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years…..every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so…….to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result….in you.”[5]
It is something of a miracle of generational survival that we exist at all. If you think today’s world is a tad dangerous think about what life-chances were a couple of thousand years ago.
So we are very, very lucky to be alive; atoms aligned and ancestors survived to breed and someone was around to care for the offspring — plague, famine, violence, natural disasters, fatal accidents, and the rest somehow passed us and our ancestors by or at least didn’t kill them before they managed to procreate.
But I am no nearer to working out how my identity/personality came to be. We kind of assume that physically we look like us, although most of us know too that we look like someone else don’t we? Has anyone not been told at some time or other how much we look like a parent? And our parents were told the same thing and their parents before them. Not an original thought I know but somewhat disturbing. Here’s Thomas Hardy’s take on it.
Heredity
I am the family face; Flesh perishes, I live on, Projecting trait and trace Through time to times anon, And leaping from place to place Over oblivion.
The years-heired feature that can In curve and voice and eye Despise the human span Of durance — that is I; The eternal thing in man, That heeds no call to die.
Thomas Hardy: looks just like his dad!
So whose faces are we wearing and can we really call them ours?
Beyond the fact that, physically, we resemble ancestors there is another question. If we look like s/he or them, could it be that we also act and think like s/he or them? The nature/nurture debate is an old one. It seems these days that science is leaning towards nature as having the strongest influence on our character, talent (or lack of it), and personality (or lack of it). That raw clay of the new-born me or you already carried the imprint of our predecessors and their experiences; it’s not written in our stars, it’s in our genes. It seems like a variation on reincarnation beliefs.
“The word reincarnation derives from a Latin term that literally means ‘entering the flesh again’. Reincarnation refers to the belief that an aspect of every human being (or all living beings in some cultures) continues to exist after death. This aspect may be the soul, mind, consciousness, or something transcendent which is reborn in an interconnected cycle of existence; the transmigration belief varies by culture, and is envisioned to be in the form of a newly born human being, animal, plant, spirit, or as a being in some other non-human realm of existence.
An alternative term is transmigration, implying migration from one life (body) to another. The term has been used by modern philosophers such as Kurt Gödel] and has entered the English language.”[6]
I struggle to believe that my particular collection of atoms is carrying around a soul which is immortal and will hitch a lift with another life-form once I’ve gone. I can accept though that my genetic inheritance is keeping alive a good part of what made my ancestors who they were….not so much ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ as corporeal inheritance. I’m fine with that. I am myself! My ancestors lived in very different worlds, encountered different challenges and were shaped by them as I’ve been shaped by mine. Bits of me (the good bits I hope) have already been passed on to my children, along with bits of my wife and quite a few, if not all, of the bits we gained from our predecessors, so a thankyou to them and to the primordial slime from which all life emerged.
We also know, don’t we, that our life experiences and particularly our childhood experiences shape and change us…for better or worse. There is no escaping our childhood and it colours our lives and shapes the way we view the world and respond to it; it plays a huge part in triggering the good and the evil that human beings exhibit and, of course, it often limits and defines our life chances. As an aside, if the physics of parallel universes is more than just another theory I don’t really understand, there may be other me’s out there living different lives and thinking they are unique……….
I am not the same person I was when six years old, or when sixteen years old, of twenty-six years old. And yet I don’t think of myself as having been many different people but as one evolving person. We grow and change over time so that a sixty-year-old adult is nothing like the six-year-old child s/he once was — only memory joins the two and the sense of self and identity it enables. As I get older I grow more child-like; I am more anxious, I do less, I am less capable, I grow weaker not stronger, my memory (never great) gets worse. Can it be that my adult working life was no more than the child in me managing to mask my fears and insecurities in a cloak of seeming confidence and competence? Do we simply learn to disguise ourselves as grown-ups and then, as the years pass, become less and less capable of, or bothered about, sustaining the illusion? Only we know how much of our public face is an act or illusion — a projection of who we would like to be. As for social media and influencers and not a few evangelical church leaders….well it’s a living I guess! The difference and distance between our pretensions and our ‘true’ selves is sometimes significant and constant honesty, with ourselves or others, is too big an ask for most of us. So are we who we’re pretending to be or the person doing the pretending? Most of us struggle with the discrepancy at some time or other between who we really (really?) are and the bullshit we put out; politicians must struggle almost all of the time. As for the likes of Trump…………………
Humans are intelligent pack animals banding together against ‘the other’ pack animals — that’s what we are programmed to do. We are complex combinations of what we inherited across the aeons, the family and culture(s) we were born into and reared within; our experiences as we grow, develop and decline and how we react, respond and change because of them. We are a conscious and evolving living individuals (probably of no great significance) connected to the past and, if we are lucky, to the future. Still there’s that nagging thought that ‘I think therefore I am’ might not be much closer to the truth than ‘I am therefore I think I think’.
[1] The Latin cogito, ergo sum, usually translated into English as “I think, therefore I am”, is the “first principle” of René Descartes’s philosophy. He originally published it in French as je pense, donc je suis in his 1637 Discourse on the Method, so as to reach a wider audience than Latin would have allowed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum
[2] ‘The Transcendence of the Ego’, an Existential Theory of Consciousness, La Transcendance de l’ego: Esquisse d’une description phénomenologique), published in 1936
[3] ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’, pp17, Bryson, Bill, Transworld Publishers, Doubleday, 2003.
Prabowo’s win is dismal news for democracy Half the country’s electorate is under 40; many voters do not remember his past or the days of military dictatorship under his father-in-law, Gen Suharto. Those who do predict that “winter is coming”
Putin critic Alexei Navalny, 47, dies in Arctic Circle jail
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68315943
The list is growing of ‘elected’ leaders whose mission is to stay in power and make sure any rivals are either banged up or side-lined…or worse.
This is an interesting year for democracies. More than two billion people across 60 countries representing half the world’s population will go the polls this year voting in presidential, legislative, and local elections. Some will be free and fair and some, like North Korea, a tad less so. Quite where the US is on the ‘free and fair-sown up like a kipper’ continuum is a tricky question but if the orange-faced candidate wins we all know the direction of travel. It may anyway be that genuine democracy in the US is not really threatened by Trump because it was subverted a good while ago. American politicians appear now often to be the best that money can buy. Generally they have to have, by UK standards, huge amounts of financial backing to get elected (fortunately and I’m sure co-incidentally, those same politicians have enacted quite loose legislation on political funding) and then, once elected, show themselves to be quite partial in which of ‘the people’ they really represent. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the notion of toppling an elected government is now being applied within the US as well as outside it.
Can it really be that democracy has had its day? that it wasn’t after all a major step on the road to freedom, just an experimental alternative to the ‘strong’ leadership we all secretly want, or at least will take a punt on when the going gets tough.
The ideal of democracy has a genuine appeal and had an even stronger one when memories of the alternatives were still fresh. Government ‘by the people for the people’ for a fledgling US compared well with ever-increasing taxes imposed from the other side of the world. And, on the other side of the world, a peasant class (liberated by plague-deaths and consequent labour shortages) proved itself unwilling to return to serfdom and began the long treck towards universal suffrage. It took a long time for the UK to build the rather quaint version of democracy we have now. Influence over, often despotic not to say mad, kings (and a very occasional queen) was limited to an aristocratic elite and then only secured via threatened or actual revolt and rebellion. Magna Carta gave the barons a degree of influence and over many, many years the influence of parliament grew as a counter-balance to absolute rule. Suffrage was limited to a pretty small proportion of the population for most of our history. It was extended over time, notably in 1832 with the Great Reform Act, which basically gave the vote to middle class men, leaving working class men (not to mention all women…and they didn’t) disappointed. Universal suffrage (surely one of the defining characteristics of a full democracy) was still years away. Two world wars accelerated progress in the UK and its imperial possessions. It brought the classes together and was particularly effective at showing the working-class cannon fodder that their ‘betters’ weren’t actually any better. Ironically, the Second World War was probably the high point of progress towards democratic government, at least in the west. In fact, part of the reason it took so long to get the US into the war was that it was a democracy and the strong inclination of many Americans was towards isolationism; Europe had been bailed out twenty-five years earlier and not many Yanks felt it was worth more Americans dying to save Europe again. Had it not been for Pearl Harbour the world might look quite different now. WW2 brought together and united peoples from pretty well everywhere.
“Walk down any of its (London’s) streets and every uniform of the Free World was to be seen…..The uniforms of the Canadians, South Africans, Australians, New Zealanders, the Free French, Polish, Belgium, Holland, and of course the English and Americans were everywhere.”
Band of Brothers pp 49, Ambrose, Stephen E, Simon and Schuster, 2017
No mention of the Indians, Africans and Asians but then this was the perception of an elite, white airborne company. The point remains that World War 2 was (and is) perceived as a just war in the cause of freedom and against tyranny. It was seen as a victory for freedom-loving peoples of the world, again at least by the West. Unfortunately, the post-war world saw two at least of the freedom-loving nations, the US and the UK, engineer the removal or death of democratically elected leaders in Africa, Asia, South America – anywhere in fact where the people’s (left-wing) choices were felt to be incompatible with the interests of….. ehhhm,… the US and the UK.
It would be a mistake too to think that democratically elected politicians always believe in democracy. Quite a few seem to believe in staying in power for as long as possible by subverting democratic safeguards and processes. There is a common playbook of strategies and tactics used by national leaders to weaken opposition and strengthen their own position.
Lie; no I mean really lie, whatever the evidence. If you lose an election claim you didn’t. Claim, if you did lose that it was because of fraud and criminal actions by your opponents. Claim you’re a victim. Claim there’s a deep state plot to steal power.
Attack and neuter any serious political opposition; jail them, drive them out, mobilise trolls or, if push comes to shove, just kill them. Examples that spring to mind include Pakistan and, of course, Russia. These days it’s quite dangerous to lose an election because the winner will come after you!
Supress voter rights for those groups unlikely to vote for you.
Attack and emasculate any and all independent press journals and web-sites and tightly control state media.
Sow division – religion is always fruitful ground or ethnicity/race.
Attack the judiciary and ensure that they will always act in accordance with your wishes (or else). Make judicial appointments with this in mind.
Suppress protest. Make most forms of protest illegal and increase penalties.
Attack and suppress other forms of collective action such as trade unions. Legislate to control and outlaw them.
Control social media and the internet; shut it down when ‘appropriate’.
If all else fails manufacture an external threat: a war always helps.
Here are some notable examples of ‘strong’ leaders who have the T-shirt:
It may seem odd to have the likes of Putin for example in a piece about democracy but they do have elections in Russia – not free and fair elections of course but then again it’s getting quite hard to find a country where the direction of travel is towards free-er and fairer. Is it fair to have parties with vastly different funding bases? Is it fair to redraw constituencies so that one party benefits? Is it fair to restrict the franchise?
Orban, Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Modi, Erdogan. ……it’s far from a complete list; countries like Poland, Brazil, Pakistan, and, oh yes, the UK, have seen or are seeing elements of the right wing song-book played out. And in Poland, Donald Tusk is finding life difficult as he tries to reassert democratic safeguards following his 2023 election victory because media, judiciary and presidency were all politicised by his predecessor.
So is democracy finished? Well, to be parochial for a moment, the UK persists in a first past the post, winner-take-all electoral process which pretty well ignores the wishes of as many voters as it heeds. Proportional representation would be a quick and easy fix …so it probably won’t happen. The theory is that parliament, the judiciary and the free press interconnect as a finely balanced system of checks and balances.
Except that, on the whole, our media is owned by wealthy individuals with political affiliations which lean a tad to the right – well perhaps more than a tad – free in the sense of not owned by the state but, with a few exceptions, politically biased. Here’s an example of the UK’s fearless defenders of press freedom.
Courtesy of Facebook
As for the BBC, it seems to have become increasingly susceptible to government influence in the last few years as a combination of threats, funding cuts and government appointed/sanctioned placemen (and women) have made themselves felt. Have a look at what George Monbiot wrote about BBC ‘impartiality’ under its previous Chair, a Conservative Party donor and mate of Boris Johnson.
We should never underestimate the extent to which the BBC changed this country by giving endless airtime to Nigel Farage, other far right extremists and the Tufton Street junktanks, while shutting out progressive voices.
https://twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot/
More about Tufton Street later. On the up-side, the BBC seems at the moment to be breaking free of the intimidating straightjacket of government threats and cuts, presumably because the graffiti is on the wall for our benighted Rishi and his friends (friends in the Tory Party not being what you and I think of as friends). As for the judiciary, well they are independent (the idea of their being political appointees as in the US just wouldn’t run in the UK), but they are generally from well-to-do backgrounds and they are being ‘pressured’ to stop ‘interfering’ in matters that don’t concern them, such as illegal or questionable government practice. So, in the UK, a degree of media bias just goes with the territory. If you factor in the relatively recent launch of GB news, the UK equivalent of Fox News, it’s almost job done.
So the media are sorted; what else might make a difference to the health of the UK’s democracy….mother of parliaments and all that stuff? Well:
in response to almost non-existent voter fraud, photo-ID has been made a requirement in elections, making it less likely that the young and the poor will vote;
the judiciary are being pressured and laws changed to ensure policies claimed to be ‘the will of the people’ (honestly what does that remind you of?) can be implemented without legal challenge;
the right to protest has been limited; and
new legislation has been enacted to curb trade-union led strikes in areas like health and transport.
Small steps but then Rome wasn’t trashed in a day.
I wanted to write something positive about what we’ve imported over the years from the US but I can’t think of anything. A country with terrible environmental protections, in thrall to business and extreme wealth and where the people or the system insist on the election of a president who then fails to govern because one or other House blocks progress, is not one to imitate. I’m not even sure what the popular vote means in the US given this weird thing called an electoral college which seems to be able to overturn the will of the majority. That said, over the years Conservative governments have adopted the worst of the US’s education and other policies (think SATs, academies, free schools, workfare, elected mayors, elected Police and Crime Commissioners, privatisation or full jails) and not surprisingly, the UK now seems to be an attractive place for obscenely wealthy right-wing Americans to try and subvert, said wealth, having already subverted many democratic safeguards and the real will of the people in the US. For example, Roe v Wade was overturned by conservative Supreme Court judges hand-picked by the orange ogre after years of remorseless and expensive ‘pro-life’ campaigning. Wikipedia lists 96 anti-abortion organisations in the US . Here are a few from the list and don’t they all sound all-American, patriotic and wholesome?:
Those hand-picked Supreme Court judges of course promised, prior to appointment, that Roe v Wade would never be overturned. Moral? Always check if prospective Supreme Court judges have their fingers crossed behind their backs when in front of Senate Confirmation hearings. Overturning Roe v Wade was not really the will of the people just the will of neo-conservative, wealthy (often religious to the point of idiocy), individuals. While the battle was being won in the States a second front was opened in the UK and I expect in most other ‘developed’ countries around the world. Abortion clinics were picketed, misleading media campaigns were mounted, pro-life ‘impartial’ pregnancy advice organisations that were anything but impartial were opened and ‘suitable’ politicians were ‘supported’. So far the only impact has been the real distress caused to already distressed women…. but give it time.
‘If in doubt follow the money’ is always good advice but it’s really difficult to do that both in the States and here. That’s why it’s called dark money. Have you heard of 55 Tufton Street? It’s a kind of community hub and shared office space, only quite selective about who’s allowed in. Tufton Street provides facilties for, among others, The Institute of Economic Affairs, the Adam Smith Institute, the Taxpayers’ Alliance, the Centre for Policy Studies and Policy Exchange.
“These groups also happen to have been rated by the campaign ‘Who Funds You?’ as among the most opaque of all those it investigated.”
George Monbiot, ‘Has Liz Truss handed power over to the extreme neoliberal thinktanks?’, The Guardian, Fri 23 Sep 2022 06.00 BST, www.theguardian.com
This network has been linked to major US funders of climate-change denial and right-wing political causes including the Koch brothers and Robert Mercer, and to populist far-right parties in Europe, such as the Sweden Democrats and the Brothers of Italy.[6]
So was democracy just a phase, like mullets, being served food on a slate or bell-bottoms? It feels like there is a real and present threat to ‘the least worst form of government’. With conspiracy theories on one side and dark money on the other, just getting out the vote might not be anything like enough any more.
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…..
I quite enjoyed the bits I saw and read of ‘What the Romans Did for Us’. It was quite a list as I recall.
Central heating and siege weapons, bridges and fire engines, frescoes and fast food – what do all these things have in common? They were all introduced to Britain…..by the Romans.
‘What the Romans Did for Us’, Foreword, Adam Hart-Davis, Boxtree, 2000
We forget so easily don’t we who did what and why, so I thought, in the interest of balance, I’d try to remember what, in the last 13 years or so, the Tories have done for, I mean to, us. Why not join in? my list won’t be anything like complete. See what you can add and I’ll offer a Mars Bar to the winner, though, of course, Mars Bars aren’t anything like as big as they were thirteen years ago.
Some of the things on the list go all the way back to 2010 and the Tory/Lib Dem co-alition – what a treat that was. That means the average thirteen year old’s view of life will be of things steadily getting harder and less promising and it’s hard enough being an average thirteen year old without that.
Anyway, here’s my list in the order I thought of them rather than ranking by seriousness, chronology, the scale of the misery or the number of deaths caused. I’ve added a little detail and source links for those who like to check things or find out more but put the stand-alone list first for those only interested in the Mars Bar.
Food banks
Brexit
Stoking racism/gaslighting migrants and refugees
Bedroom tax
Inflation
Boris Johnson
Liz Truss/economic meltdown
Rees Mogg
On-shore wind turbine ban
Austerity
Child poverty
Public services and LA’s underfunded
Privatisation
Covid mismanagement/excess deaths/fast-tracking mate’s PPE and other contracts
NHS in crisis
A wrecked social care system, failing residents, employees and bed-blocking the NHS
Trashing vocational qualifications
Packing the House of Lords with mates and chancers. (see above: Michelle Mone and PPE)
Trashing of due process and standards of behaviour in political life
Economic decline
Politics of division
Attacks on civil liberties/right to protest/human rights
Food banks
There are over 1,400 Trussell Trust food banks in the UK, in addition to at least 1,172 independent food banks.
Since 2010 the number of emergency food parcels distributed by Trussell Trust food banks has risen from just over 40,000 to well over one and a half million – an increase of 3,900% in just 9 years.
Since food insecurity implies a nutritionally inadequate diet, it is a phenomenon of significant importance for public health. Poor dietary intake has been linked to a number of diseases and chronic conditions, including cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, some types of cancer, and osteoporosis [15, 16]. In addition, inadequate dietary intake during pregnancy and early childhood can increase the risk for birth defects, anaemia, low birth weight, preterm birth, and developmental risk.
‘Understanding the post-2010 increase in food bank use in England: new quasi-experimental analysis of the role of welfare policy.’, Filip Sosenko,, Glen Bramley & Arnab Bhattacharjee, https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/
Brexit
Brexit means….we’re screwed!
There are too many consequences to detail from travel restrictions and costs, a hammering of small businesses and declining exports, untypically high inflation, labour shortages to damaged science and higher education sectors so I’ll limit myself to the economic impact.
The UK-based Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) states that the long-term impact of Brexit will be worse for the UK economy than Covid-19. The OBR estimates that Brexit will reduce the UK’s potential GDP by 4% and the pandemic by a further 2%.
EU exports fall by 46% following UK exit from single market
UK-EU trade lags China and the US
UK FDI (Foreign direct investment) fell by 17% in 2020–21
Inflation hits 13-year high
Trade deals with third-party countries will have little impact
So the plan here is to stoke fear and resentment among ‘Brits’, close down, or make difficult to access, almost all legal routes, declare that anyone not entering the country ‘legally’ is a criminal and deport them.
Caitlin Boswell, policy and advocacy manager for the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) said: “The racism of the UK’s immigration system couldn’t be more clear, with this government drawing policies affecting people seeking safety along stark racial lines. At the same time, ministers are using unashamedly inflammatory and far-right language, whipping up hatred towards black and brown migrants.”
Mark Townsend Home Affairs Editor, Guardian, Sun 7 May 2023
Robert Jenrick has cartoon murals painted over at children’s asylum centre
Paintings were considered too welcoming at Kent centre for lone children arriving in UK,
Of course there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this nastiness. According to the Minister, the mural was not ‘age-appropriate’.
Bedroom tax
A really great idea; everyone knows the poor don’t need spare bedrooms and it’s only common sense to make them poorer if they don’t move to smaller hovels, sorry, homes. At its worst the tax made bereaved parents (no need any more for that extra bedroom) poorer. It didn’t encourage people to move, not least because of the shortage of suitable smaller properties.
In July 2014, a report was published by the DWP that said only one in twenty claimants affected by the change had downsized their property. A study published four months earlier had similar results.
The report also showed that there has been great demand for downsizing properties but there has been nowhere near sufficient supply of suitable sized housing.[47]
The under-occupancy penalty (also known as the under occupation penalty, under-occupancy charge,under-occupation charge or size criteria)[1] results from a provision of the British Welfare Reform Act 2012 whereby tenants living in public housing (also called council or social housing) with rooms deemed “spare” face a reduction in Housing Benefit, resulting in them being obliged to fund this reduction from their incomes or to face rent arrears and potential eviction by their landlord (be that the local authority or a housing association).
The under-occupancy penalty is more commonly referred to as the Bedroom Tax; especially by critics of the changes who argue that they amount to a tax because of the lack of social housing (or in some areas, any rented accommodation) for affected tenants to downsize to (and the refusal to accept the risk of taking in lodgers).
In 2016 it was announced that the penalty would be extended to pensioners. Caroline Abrahams of Age UK said: “Imposing the cap on older tenants will not only cause them anxiety and distress, it is also pointless given the lack of affordable housing options available to them”.[2][3] It has not been applied to pensioners.[4]
One bedroom is allowed for each of the following:
An adult couple; Each other person aged 16 and over; Two children of the same sex under 16; Two children who are under 10 regardless of sex; Any other child (other than a foster child whose main home is elsewhere); A non-resident carer (or group of carers) for a person in the house requiring overnight care; Where a room is required by a disabled child who is unable to share a bedroom
At least we’re good at something. The Bank of England has a 2% target for inflation, but like my own target for drinking less wine it is a tad tricky to achieve, perhaps because of the outrageous pay demands of food-bank using nurses.
The consumer price inflation in the United Kingdom held steady at 8.7 percent in May 2023, unchanged from the previous month’s 13-month low and above market expectations of 8.4 percent. The rate remained significantly higher than the Bank of England’s target of 2.0 percent, adding to concerns about its stickiness and placing additional pressure on policymakers to maintain the bank’s ongoing tightening campaign. Rising prices for air travel (31.4 percent vs 12.6 percent in April), recreational and cultural goods and services (6.7 percent vs 6.3 percent), and second-hand cars (3.9 percent vs 1.2 percent) were enough to offset falling fuel costs (-13.1 percent vs -8.9 percent) and slowing food inflation (18.3 percent vs 19.0 percent). The core inflation rate, which excludes volatile items such as energy, food, alcohol and tobacco, rose to 7.1 percent, the highest since March 1992. source: Office for National Statistics
Core CPIH (excluding energy, food, alcohol and tobacco) rose by 6.5% in the 12 months to May 2023, up from 6.2% in April, and the highest rate for over 30 years; the CPIH goods annual rate eased from 10.0% to 9.7%, while the CPIH services annual rate rose from 6.0% to 6.3%.
Core CPI (excluding energy, food, alcohol and tobacco) rose by 7.1% in the 12 months to May 2023, up from 6.8% in April, and the highest rate since March 1992; the CPI goods annual rate eased from 10.0% to 9.7%, while the CPI services annual rate rose from 6.9% to 7.4%.
There are many politicians I don’t admire. Here are three who I think have caused enormous damage to the country, its people and its reputation. Of course there are others including recent or still serving members of the government, though quite a few seem to be seeking gainful employment elsewhere.
Boris Johnson
A fantasist and liar who will make more money this year than most of us in twenty. Loved by the Tory Party until he crashed and burned (well got singed at least). They thought he was a winner following a Brexit election win after years of blaming the EU for any and everything and promising it would be a glorious new dawn once we’d stuffed Johny foreigner. No citation needed for this one. He will be the king over the water (his new house has a moat) until he ‘can’t be bovvered’. I gather he’s paid £21k an hour for whatever he does now.
Liz Truss/economic meltdown
Liz cost us all most or all of our pocket money with her fearless dash for growth.
Rarely has a budget caused such political and economic damage. Not even George Osborne’s “omnishambles” budget, when he was forced in 2012 to back down from the pasty tax, comes close.
Initially hailed by her supporters as “at last, a true, Tory budget”, the “mini” fiscal event included the biggest tax cuts since 1972, funded by a vast expansion in borrowing, and with only a vague attempt to argue it could be paid for by an unlikely economic boom.
Economists balked at the idea that £45bn of unfunded tax cuts for the rich could ever catalyse economic growth and pay for itself in the way the government argued. Not just critics from a supposed “anti-growth coalition”, but also from Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and the IMF. With inflation at a 40-year high, rising recession risks and higher borrowing costs across advanced economies, it was a big gamble at the wrong moment.
The international reaction was swift and damning. The pound fell to its lowest-ever level against the dollar, while gilt prices collapsed. Over four days, long-dated government bond yields – which move inversely to prices – rose by more than the annual increase in 23 of the past 27 years.
The mini-budget that broke Britain – and Liz Truss, Richard PartingtonEconomics correspondent, The Guardian, Thu 20 Oct 2022, https://www.theguardian.com › business › oct › the-mi…
Here are a few more headlines from Liz’s tilt at fame (achieved) and (mis)fortune.
I’m writing this just after the hottest June on record in the UK as wild fires burn in Canada and elsewhere and the government’s own advisers, the Climate Change Committee have just warned that the UK is missing climate targets on nearly every front.
He said the committee’s confidence that the government would meet its shorter-term carbon-cutting goals by 2030 was even lower than last year, despite the publication of a new green strategy by ministers. “We’ve slipped behind, and other people have moved ahead,” he said. “This is not a report that suggests satisfactory progress.”
Fiona Eliot, Environment Editor, The Guardian, 28th June 2023
Yet the Tories banned on-shore wind, arguably far less damaging to the environment than off-shore wind. If large parts of the world become too hot to sustain human life Conservative MPs will find stopping wind farms in their backyard a tad pyric; ‘not in my back yard/constituency’ won’t work with climate change.
Austerity
Can you remember ‘We’re all in it together’ and the move to get rid of ministerial cars and first class rail travel? Talk about hair shirts. I’ve not managed to find out how long it took to reinstate both but my guess is not as long as the queue at the benefits office. Austerity implemented by the extremely rich George Osborne was needed to pay off the debts caused by the 2008 financial crash rooted in reckless financial speculation and gambling by banks and chancers. Just like the post-office sub-postmasters scandal, ordinary people and public services felt the pain. Still, it was worth it to get the country’s finances on an even keel wasn’t it? Except that:
From 2010 to 2019, total gross government debt increased by £643 bn from £1.2 trillion to £1.8 trillion. UK debt since 1975.
Debt under Conservatives 2010-19, economicshelp.org,
https://www.economicshelp.org › blog › debt-under-con.Nov 2019.
Child poverty
This on its own would have finished any government not so long ago. Now we seem to have got used to it.
350,000 more children were pulled into relative poverty (after housing costs) in 2021-2022. That means 4.2 million children (29% of all UK children) were in poverty – up from 3.6 million in 2010-11. 45% of all children in poverty were in families with a youngest child aged under five.
CPAG Official child poverty statistics: 350,000 more children.23 Mar 2023
Public services and LA’s underfunded
The pattern in UK political life and government since 1945 is of conservative governments cutting taxes and the funding of public services, privatising anything they can to raise cash for giveaways and letting a returned labour government, AKA ‘the party of high taxation in hoc to the union grandees’, rebuild public services during their term of office. Remember cuddly George Osborne’s ‘we’re all in it together’ claptrap, requiring austerity and then more austerity and a shrinking state. The country is still paying the price for their slash and burn approach to everything from public health to building regulations. Margaret Thatcher’s government used the North Sea oil revenues to fund tax give-aways (no sovereign wealth fund here!) and then began the movement to sell-off (at bargain prices) every public utility and asset around (see immediately below).
Privatisation
I’ve actually lost count of the number of privatisations. Macmillan called it ‘selling off the family silver’. It means that not much in the way of national assets is still owned by…well us. That makes us as a country, a tad lacking in collateral when we borrow. And we certainly do borrow. Privatisation was a sure-fire way of realising an asset (albeit at less than it was worth) and, of course, it could only be sold once). The cash raised was used as a short-term alternative to raising money through taxation – a vote winner for the party of low taxation.
The emerging doctrine was that privatisation would make the large utilities more efficient and productive, and thus make British capitalism competitive relative to its continental rivals. In this period, the government sold off Jaguar, British Telecom, the remainder of Cable & Wireless and British Aerospace, Britoil and British Gas. Inflicting a second defeat on the miners, the government proceeded with the final sell-off of British Coal, as well as electricity generating companies Powergen and National Power, and British Rail. After the Labour government election loss the privatisation bandwagon continued to roll. Energy, water, rail, busses, significant elements of the health service, BT, Probation, the Tote, British (soon to become Indian and Chinese) Steel– what have I missed out? Living in Cornwall, water is a particular sore point with me. I like the sea and I like being in it. I’ve never before had to check the Surfers Against Sewage site (https://www.sas.org.uk/water-quality/sewage-pollution-alerts/) to see what I might be swimming in and swallowing.
A short history of privatisation in the UK: 1979-2012, Richard Seymour, Thu 29 Mar 2012
Does it work? Here are two examples:
When The Post Office was privatised; the private equity buyer separated parcels (profitable) from mail (not profitable), sold off as many buildings as it could, closed as many post offices as it could and pursued sub-postmasters for alleged criminality while knowing they were innocent. Lives were wrecked and lives were lost.
Internal reports she (the chief excec.) commissioned repeatedly found the Post Office may have prosecuted completely innocent people and that the IT system was a mess. Vennells saw to it that no one was told about these conclusions, from the subpostmasters to parliament. She eventually left the Post Office with a CBE and £5m richer, failing upwards into some Cabinet Office business role and chairmanship of an NHS trust. Vennells has since gone to ground – but her giving evidence to the inquiry, when it finally comes, will be a momentous occasion.
‘After 20 years, here’s why the Post Office scandal is special: the cover-up is happening in plain sight’, Marina Hyde, Guardian, 18th July, 2023
Probation Services privatisation went equally well and a good deal of it had to be brought back into the public sector. The damage done to the service and to its employees has still not been recovered from.
Another (probation Officer) said: “I do not consider that we are in a position to protect the public, but we will be the scapegoats when tragedies happen.”
In their report Kirton and Guillaume said the privatisation had been carried out in the face of “massive opposition from criminal justice experts, senior probation leaders, the unions representing probation workers, and the workers themselves” and with “no meaningful consultation”.
It had created “conveyor belt” conditions in the privatised part of the service that meant officers were having to “compromise what they regarded as professional standards”.
And, as well as selling businesses and infrastructure, services have been privatised: Outsourcing has been extended into every possible area of government and public service. For example, Capita were ‘given’ the Army recruitment contract (no doubt because of their stellar record in other contracted work for government).
It also runs much criticised assessments of the eligibility of disabled people for personal independence payments on behalf of the Department for Work & Pensions. That business led to calls for an investigation last year after Channel Four caught one assessor on film dismissing a claimant’s “disability known as fat”.
The broadcaster’s Dispatches team sent a psychiatric nurse through Capita’s disability assessment training, where a senior staff member urged him to do “as many assessments a day as you can possibly manage”. Drag ’em in, get ’em rejected, and put another penny on the shareholders’ dividend.
James Moore, Independent, Thursday 02 March 2017 17:26
So how did army recruitment go?
Army and Capita must share blame for soldier recruitment. Capita admits that, at the time it bid for the contract it had been “chasing revenue”, being simply interested in booking additional contracts.
UK Parliament, https://committees.parliament.uk › committee › news, 1 Mar 2019
I realise as I write this that it’s a ‘Magic Porridge Pot’ list – it keeps growing, makiing this a piece that will never be finished this side of an election. I’m going to say a little about two more items and leave the rest for any reader to comment on or add to, not least because the list seems to be growing faster than I’m writing.
Covid mismanagement/excess deaths/ fast-tracking mate’s PPE and other contracts
There are books written about all this so I’ll stick to snippets. How many excess deaths can be laid at the government’s door? It’s a tricky question. The main thing to bear in mind though is that there is a perfectly valid reason for what some have called a lack of preparedness and planning for an epidemic like Covid; it seems civil servants were required to spend their time planning for…..Brexit.
First a quick question: can you remember the seven Nightingale hospitals opened during the pandemic?
(They)had different purposes – with some mainly set up as critical care facilities and others designed to deliver step-down care for recovering patients (Figure 1). But the hospitals shared at least one common goal (listed on one of the hospitals’ own websites): ‘Bring hope’.
And in the early days, the Nightingales did just that. Over March and April 2020, the consortia (including NHS, military and private sector experience) that built the Nightingales were rightly praised for rapidly converting conference and concert venues into places that could safely store and deliver oxygen to patients, support infection control and deliver complex critical care. Behind the scenes, a host of activity ensured the wider infrastructure that hospitals need would also be in place – from financing, to clinical governance processes, to ensuring there would be food and drink available to staff.
But over summer 2020, one issue came to define the narrative around the Nightingales – quite simply, they were not seeing many patients (Figure 2). And now, one year after they were built, many of the facilities are either being decommissioned or repurposed as mass vaccination centres or diagnostic centres.
But, in the end, the country has been left with relatively unused emergency facilities, hugely overworked existing facilities that were full of patients with Covid-19, and rising waits for routine care. The Nightingales have shown that in an emergency you can build ventilators, you can adapt buildings and you can manufacture personal protective equipment – but unfortunately, there is no magic NHS staffing tree to shake.
Was building the NHS Nightingale hospitals worth the money?, The Kings Fund, 5th May 2021
According to the Office for National Statistics, there have been about 170,000 excess deaths in England and Wales since the pandemic began. Most of these can be directly attributed to Covid-19 itself: after all, the virus’s name is scrawled on the death certificates of more than 212,000 UK citizens. Some of those who died may have been vulnerable or infirm, but in other circumstances years away from death. As the pandemic waned, we could have expected excess deaths to shift to below average levels over time. This has not happened.
Britain’s excess death rate is at a disastrous high – and the causes go far beyond Covid, Owen Jones, Guardian, 15 Jan 2023
Among comparator high-income countries (other than the US), only Spain and Italy had higher rates of excess mortality in the pandemic to mid-2021 than the UK. Overall, England has experienced a larger fall in life expectancy than most comparator countries between pre-pandemic 2019 and 2021.
In addition to its direct impact on overall mortality, the Covid-19 pandemic may have caused an increase in the number of people dying from other serious conditions, such as heart disease. The number of people seeking and receiving health care from GPs, accident and emergency and other health care services for other conditions fell significantly during the early waves of the pandemic. Routine and elective care, referrals and care for cancer and other outpatient referrals were also postponed or cancelled because of pressure on NHS services, leading to backlogs in diagnosis and treatment. It is too early to say what the full impact of the pandemic on the number of people dying from other conditions will be.
The number of people who died in care homes increased sharply in the first Covid-19 wave in 2020 peaking at more than three times the 2015–19 average (see Figure 3c), with about 27,000 excess deaths from mid-March to June 2020, comprising almost half (45 per cent) of all excess deaths nationally. The relatively large numbers of excess non-Covid-19 deaths in care homes in the first wave likely reflects the later roll out of testing in care homes compared with hospitals, and under-recording of Covid-19 as a cause of death among older people with pre-existing conditions. The impact of subsequent waves on the number of people dying in care home was more moderate with the introduction of stricter infection control measures.
The Kings Fund, March 2022
As is so often the case, attacks on the government’s handling of Covid are really unfair. Take, as an example, clearing old people with Covid out of hospitals and back to their care homes, without providing PEP to care home workers but while enforcing isolation through denying visits from relatives. All this while publicly stating (actually boasting) that ‘a protective ring’ had been put around care homes. As a result, shameful numbers of elderly people died alone while their relatives were prevented from visiting.
First of all, Matt Hancock never said it…..
During an appearance on The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, 6 June, Health Secretary Matt Hancock denied claims that he had spoken about throwing a “protective ring” around care homes at the early stages of the Covid-19 crisis.
Asked by Mr Marr if he regretted his use of the phrase “protective ring”, Mr Hancock said: “Well I said that much later, about what we were doing for the winter plan, and it’s been interpreted.”
But Mr Hancock actually did use the phrase multiple times in May 2020, to describe action taken during the first wave of the pandemic.
During a Downing Street press conference on 15 May, 2020, Mr Hancock said: “Right from the start, it’s been clear that this horrible virus affects older people most. So right from the start, we’ve tried to throw a protective ring around our care homes.”
Days later on 18 May 2020, when questioned on this wording, Mr Hancock told the House of Commons: “We absolutely did throw a protective ring around social care, not least with the £3.2 billion-worth of funding we put in right at the start, topped up with £600 million-worth of funding on Friday.”
Ibid
A fast-track route to securing government contracts for a company and loads of dosh for its owner(s) simply because they were known to Conservative politicians (even if the company had only existed for a week and knew nothing about the business defined in the contract) – well, what’s wrong with that?
On the sunny spring evening of 7 May 2020, in the lethal first wave of the Covid pandemic, the Conservative peer Michelle Mone and her husband, Douglas Barrowman, had themselves filmed for Instagram. Standing between the stone pillars at the front door of their mansion on the Isle of Man, they clapped for NHS staff, carers and other key workers, as they did weekly from different parts of their Ballakew estate.
“As always, Doug and myself would just like to say a massive thank you tonight to everyone … that are keeping the country going,” Lady Mone posted. “We appreciate each and every one of you.”
Two years later, officers from the National Crime Agency (NCA) were investigating PPE Medpro, a company that received more than £200m of government Covid contracts weeks after Mone referred it to ministers.
PPE Medpro and partners made as much as £100m profits At least £70m from PPE Medpro contracts taken offshore Small electronics firm behind supply of gowns for NHS Jet, yacht and racehorse purchased after PPE deal Tory peer and husband now selling yacht and properties Mone takes leave of absence from Lords and may leave UK
Ten years ago the NHS was meeting all its key performance targets from cancer treatment waiting timer to ambulance waiting times.
Underfunded for years, staff pay effectively cut for years, staff shortages, low morale, staff burnout, staff seeking other employment or emigrating, buildings in disrepair, record waiting lists (but surely our P.M. promised to cut waiting times and lists), poor health impacting on economic growth (lack of: see ONS report, Health, demographic and labour market influences on economic inactivity, UK: 2019 to 2022, Donald Houston, Jane Evans and Vahé Nafilyan, health.data@ons.gov.uk), falling life-expectancy, what’s not to like?
Finally, after long delays, we have from the government a workforce development plan. It’s great news; it won’t happen but it’s a good news headline grabber when very much needed. It comes from the party that abolished the nurse training bursary and failed to plan for a staffing crisis for 13 years, believing that the market would take care of recruitment – they did the same in teaching, committing themselves to the notion that schools would train their own teachers to fill vacancies (and removing the need for qualified teacher status for teachers in ‘free schools’). Wages were frozen or increased at well below cost of living rises. Result?
Department for Education survey finds that 40,000 – almost 9% of workforce – left state schools in 2021-22 before retirement.
Richard Adams Education editor, Guardian, Thu 8 Jun 2023 16.53 BST
First of all, Brexit’s £40 billion annual hit to tax revenues means less money is available to spend on our public services. We have spent around 20% less per person on health than similar European countries over the past decade.
By now, we all know without a doubt that the extra £350 million a week promised to the NHS as a result of Brexit was a complete fabrication. If you missed it, please watch and share the European Movement’s latest video, exposing this lie:
Another issue is staffing. We can’t ignore the fact that numbers of nurses coming from the EEA fell dramatically after the referendum and have not recovered. Growing hostility to ‘foreigners’ also drove some to leave. The effect was a 28% reduction in nurses and health visitors on the UK register who qualified in the EEA, a net loss of over 10,000.
In other specialist fields, such as cardiac surgery and anaesthetics, the loss of recruitment from EU countries has been even more pronounced. In hospitals up and down the country, these EU colleagues are missed.
Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health and Immediate Past President of the British Medical Association, European Movement UK, https://www.europeanmovement.co.uk/
A wrecked social care system, failing residents, employees and bed-blocking the NHS
When he became prime minister Boris Johnson insisted that he had a “clear plan” for solving the crisis in social care. However, he refused to offer any long-term solution to the social care crisis in his party’s subsequent general election manifesto. He did promise: to build cross-party consensus on a long-term solution for adult social care. The government promised to make a start on this within its first 100 days. After more than 1,000 days with no green paper most people gave up waiting.
Institute for Government, A parliamentary commission remains the best option to build lasting social care reform, Graham Atkins, 25 November,2019
Life continues to surprise me….I’m very glad to say. For instance, I turned round the other day and realised I was old. I can’t speak for others in my age group any more than I can speak on behalf of men just because I am one, after all, one is a pretty small sample size and I only know how one now-old male feels and thinks. I don’t feel old but the physical signs of system breakdown are pretty evident and it’s clear to me that I am perceived by many (most?) of humanity as old. So I thought I’d try and capture my experience of this odd business of becoming old and then realising it has happened.
What happened?
The hardest part of all this is physical deterioration. Like an assassin in the night, or an overdraft at the end of the month come to that, it comes stealthily and then suddenly you’re fighting off a murderous attack or a letter from the computer pretending to be a bank manager. First your skin goes; I don’t mean lines and wrinkles – that’s just the start. Things sag, skin gets blotchy, skin gets dry, skin gets saggy. Essentially skin stops being skin and starts being discoloured parchment. This happens gradually of course as does hair loss but they’re both one way processes.
What else could go wrong? Well aches and pains, stiffness, joint wear that brings unbearable pain, muscle wastage, indigestion, flatulence, incontinence, deafness, deteriorating eyesight and hearing, tremors, a stoop, libido as a distant memory and loads of other goodies without referencing the life-threatening diseases. Any one of these would be a tad annoying but all of them!
Just as the outside deteriorates, the inside does too. It’s a good job we can only see the exterior I think – that’s bad enough. And all this means medication! Suddenly the heaviest item when packing to go away is the medicine bag. On the upside the old have a lot more pharmaceutical knowledge than the careless young; you name it, we’ve had it. Ailments, medicine and the grading of GPs replace sex as the burning topics of discussion among friends, AKA silly old sods like me.
Alongside knowing and finally admitting I’ll never play for Liverpool, comes a touch, if you’re lucky just a touch, of mental deterioration. Vocabulary decreases, sentences present the kind of challenge the young only face when they really have drunk far too much wine (if it is wine the young drink these days). Ideas still form but not always in sequential order – and memory…well I can’t really recall what the word means. It’s pretty sobering to recognise that those old farts blocking my passage by standing around in supermarket aisles and motorway service entrances while wondering where to go or who they are, are……… just like me but mostly with better dress sense.
We worry more too, of course because we’ve got time to do it. The things we did on the fly in the past, have to be meticulously planned, not least because of loo breaks. There’s a business opportunity there for someone – a Baedeker’s of open public toilets would sell, especially in large print or as a (very loud) audiobook
Is there an upside? Of course; work, for some of us at least, even if a declining number, is optional. There is more time for friends too and, if we don’t become increasingly conservative with age there’s every chance we’ll become more radical. There are apparently around 160,000 Conservative Party members, which is amazing but puts them in a very significant minority; there are probably more Labour Party members in Liverpool than that, though they may not be happy with Sir K’s middle of the road policies. Being able to take a long view because we’ve been around a while makes it pretty easy to see just how messed up the world is; we know it wasn’t always like this and we’ve got a pretty good idea who to blame. Realising we’ve been alive a fair bit longer than we’re going to be alive certainly focusses the mind.
So, here’s some advice for anyone under 50 and especially for anyone under 25: don’t wait, live now, get out and get involved: march, protest, volunteer. Don’t just live in the world (though that’s better than the metaverse or Love Island) don’t just live in it, change it. You may not even notice the elderly and the old, or treat them with kindly condescension but, if you’re lucky enough to survive, you too will be old – not in the far distant future, but in the blink of an eye; you really don’t want to look back and wonder if you could have been more and done more.
As always someone said it better and shorter:
All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms. And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice, In fair round belly with good capon lined, With eyes severe and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances; And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon, With spectacles on nose and pouch on side, His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
Old what’s his name, it’s on the tip of my thingy, you know…he wrote plays and stuff
In the last few months a number of articles have appeared in the right-wing press (where else?) claiming that ‘taking the knee’ is empty posturing, that the Black Lives Matter movement is led by avowed Marxists and, apparently worst of all, that it’s just ‘WOKE’ and therefore can be tolerated (just), ignored or better yet, booed.
An empty gesture or a communist plot? (courtesy of Sky Sports)
It’s odd that such a cluster of articles with the same theme should appear so close together; as Ian Fleming wrote: “once is happenstance, twice is co-incidence and three time is enemy action.” Here are a few excerpts to give you a flavour.
Woke activists will tell you otherwise – but taking the knee will …
I would never boo England players for taking the knee – but I do understand why many fans find it offensive.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk, 2021/08/11
Taking the knee isn’t the best way of showing black lives matter
I’m a strong supporter of anti-racism both in the game and out, but by adopting this gesture, players risk alienating as many people as they persuade. Now that players have been taking the knee for some months now, it’s also worth asking: what has really changed?
Spectator, 21.6.21
Footballers taking the knee has lost its potency and should be …
Some supporters have grown tired of being force-fed gesture politics and Premier League needs to act before capacity crowds return.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk, 2021/05/24
What a relief taking the knee will be banned at the Olympics
Sporting protests everywhere now, multiplying to the point where the meaning is being lost – the IOC upholding Rule 50 dials things down.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk, 2021/04/22
The Marxist tag is presumably considered by the authors enough in itself to make it unnecessary to consider the rights and wrongs of taking the knee. So I guess I could just call the articles’ authors crypto-fascists (or just plain fascists) and end the piece here. But I’ve just bought a pictorial history of racial oppression in the US and it’s only a few weeks since players in one of our national football teams were vilified on social media, not for missing crucial penalties but for being black and missing crucial penalties. I guess they would rather not have missed the penalties but I somehow doubt they would rather be white; it’s increasingly embarassing.
I’ve attached below a few facts and pictures that might go some way to explain why making a public gesture against racial prejudice and intolerance is more important now than ever as black voter suppression legislation rolls back the years in the US and bigots and racists are empowered in the UK.
Forty-one shots and we’ll take that ride Across the bloody river to the other side Forty-one shots cut through the night You’re kneeling over his body in the vestibule Praying for his life
Is it a gun? Is it a knife? Is it a wallet? This is your life It ain’t no secret (It ain’t no secret) It ain’t no secret (It ain’t no secret) No secret, my friend You can get killed just for living in your American skin
Forty-one shots, Lena gets her son ready for school She says, “On these streets, Charles You’ve got to understand the rules If an officer stops you promise me you’ll always be polite And that you’ll never ever run away Promise Mama, you’ll keep your hands in sight”
Is it a gun? Is it a knife? Is it a wallet? This is your life It ain’t no secret (It ain’t no secret) It ain’t no secret (It ain’t no secret) No secret, my friend You get killed just for living in your American skin …………… Forty-one shots and we’ll take that ride Across this bloody river to the other side Forty-one shots I got my boots caked in this mud We’re baptized in these waters (We’re baptized in these waters) And in each other’s blood (And in each other’s blood)
Is it a gun? Is it a knife? Is it a wallet? This is your life It ain’t no secret (It ain’t no secret) It ain’t no secret (It ain’t no secret) No secret my friend You get killed just for living in You get killed just for living in You get killed just for living in your American skin
Forty-one shots (You get killed just for living)
The song is about the shooting of an unarmed 23-year-old immigrant named Amadou Diallo by four plainclothes officers: Sean Carroll, Richard Murphy, Edward McMellon, and Kenneth Boss. Carroll would later claim to have mistaken him for a rape suspect from one year earlier. In the early morning of February 4, 1999, Diallo was standing near his building after returning from a meal. At about 12:40 a.m., officers Edward McMellon, Sean Carroll, Kenneth Boss and Richard Murphy were looking for an alleged serial rapist in the Soundview section of the Bronx. While driving down Wheeler Avenue, the police officer stopped his unidentified car and interrogated Diallo, who was in front of his apartment. When they ordered Diallo to show his hands, he supposedly ran into the apartment and reached into his pocket to show his wallet. Soon afterwards the four officers fired 41 shots with semi-automatic pistols, fatally hitting Diallo 19 times. Eyewitness Sherrie Elliott stated that the police continued to shoot even though Diallo was already down.
The investigation found no weapons on or near Diallo; what he had pulled out of his jacket was a wallet. The internal NYPD investigation ruled that the officers had acted within policy, based on what a reasonable police officer would have done in the same circumstances. Nonetheless the Diallo shooting led to a review of police training policy and of the use of full metal jacket (FMJ) bullets.
On March 25, 1999, a Bronx grand jury indicted the four officers on charges of second-degree murder and reckless endangerment. On December 16, a court ordered a change of venue to Albany, New York because of pretrial publicity. On February 25, 2000, after three days of deliberation, a jury composed of four black and eight white jurors acquitted the officers of all charges.
Amadou’s shooting was not an aberration or a tragic but unavoidable accident: it was simply a continuation of the strong thread of oppression and violence running through American history from the slave trade on. In our modern and enlightened times there are many shootings in the US and around 1000 a year are by police officers. And race and colour often play a part. Black Americans account for less than 13 percent of the U.S. population, but are killed by police at more than twice the rate of White Americans. Hispanic Americans are also killed by police at a disproportionate rate.
Information from the Washington Post, September 6th 2021.
What could justify this?
During the Civil War in the US black Union troops if captured would be sold into slavery or simply executed or burnt alive. And, of course, black Union soldiers were paid around half the white rate though there is no evidence that they suffered at half the rate when injured or killed.
The post-Civil War Reconstuction aiming at biracial democracy was remorselessly dismantled in the southern states and the 1876 post-election trade-off of a Republican president in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the south led to increasing repression and racial violence. There were attacks by the KKK and other groups on black churches, schools and public officials and then, in 1883, the Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. Then as now the Supreme Court rolled back hard-won civil rights and then as now voter suppression accompanied discrimination in social, economic, political and legal areas of life. By 1910 to be black was to be disenfranchised in southern states.
The lynching of Garfiled Burley and Curtis Brown, Tennessee, October 1902
And there was lynching. At least
2060 African Americans were lynched between 1882 and 1901.
In parts of the South public lynchings became popular events.
Photos were taken and turned into souvenir post-cards.
In Waco in 1916 a black man was publicly burned in front of a cheering crowd of several thousand whites including many children.
‘Freedom’, Phaidon Press, pp39
After the First World War returning black troops encountered a ‘wave of white racist vigilante violence and rioting. African Americans were publicly executed, sometimes burned alive, sometimes still wearing their uniforms.
Cropped image: the smiling faces of a white mob of around 5000 that seized a black man from the courthouse, mutilated him, shot him over 1000 times and then burned his body. His smouldering body is just out of frame bottom centre. When? 1919 in Omaha. From ‘Freedom’, Phaidon Press pp101
Always the lesson that racist whites tried to instil in the peoples they enslaved and kept back was a simple one: “Don’t try to get up, we’ll just knock you down again.”
It’s a story of hundreds of years of oppression based on nothing more than some irrelevant difference, in this case colour, in others religion or gender. I’ve highlighted episodes from a largely American story – the English one is less violent, at least after the slave trade but won’t feel so different to many of us, whatever our colour. After all, the UK government deported some of its citizens because they clearly weren’t white and would have deported a whole lot more if the Windrush scandal hadn’t broken. Dawn raids were the order of the day along with a ‘hostile environment’ – just like Germany in the 30’s. And now we’re going to push refugee boats back where they came from. After all they’re not like us are they? Except…… I still remember Jo Cox’s maiden speech: “We have more in common than that which divides us.”
And we can believe that and act accordingly given the right leadership. Given the wrong leadership we can be blind to everything but division.
“Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. ……….when they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”
Stanley Milgram, 1974
There’s quite a lot at stake if we’re not allowed to be WOKE:
If we fail (to collaborate) the forces that contributed to Brexit, the envy and isolationism not just in the UK but around the world that spring from not sharing, of cultures driven by a narrow definition of wealth and a failure to divide it more fairly, both within nations and across national borders, will strengthen. If that were to happen, I would not be optimistic about the long-term outlook for our species.
Stephen Hawking
“And is the rift between Black and White? Or Poor and Rich? Stranger and Friend? Or between those whose fathers have died and those whose fathers are still alive? Or those with curly hair and those with straight? Those who call their dinner fufu and those who call it stew? Or, to ask it differently, what is the one true, crucial border?”
‘Go, Went, Gone’, Jenny Erpenbeck, pp211
So taking the knee is a pretty mild demonstration against the border between those who are held back, often suffer and sometimes die because of an accident of birth and those who thrive because of it; it might even be considered by some (Marxists no doubt) to be a relatively measured way to respond to, and protest about, hundreds of years of violence and injustice.
“A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman shall bear me.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
“Hard not to believe in the holy spill-it after that”, said John thoughtfully.
“Anyway”, said Bonnie, “I digress; you wanted to know how D died not the cat.”
“Well, one miracle’s much like another. Was he just asleep in the spare room with the cat or in the shower?”
“Shut up or I won’t tell you.”
“Sorry.”
“You’re forgiven. Well, you remember we left you lateish on Saturday afternoon because we had to get back for D’s cricket on Sunday morning?”
“Hm-hm. So a five hour drive and home around midnight.”
“More like seven hours in the end but there you go; anyone who travels on a Saturday just to play cricket has got it coming. Then the next morning I had a lie-in and off he went to his game. I thought I’d have a nice lazy morning, then get busy with final arrangements for his surprise birthday party that evening. I’d already spent what seemed like days on the phone, whenever he wasn’t around, phoning friends and family and organising the caterers so it was just last-minute stuff like picking up the cake and the glasses. Anyway, it wasn’t to be. The phone rings and it’s the team manager saying D’s been taken ill on the field and can I come to the ground. The first thing I thought, I’m ashamed to say, was ‘what about the bloody party?’…but you do don’t you?…Well I do anyway! I suppose I went into shock or something. Anyway, he’d apparently gone in to bat somewhere in the middle order, miffed already because he doesn’t open any more, faced a couple of balls and then just keeled over. Initially everyone just froze. Some people thought he was messing about but he’d actually had a massive heart attack. Luckily, an off-duty paramedic was watching and gave him CPR for fifteen minutes before the ambulance arrived. Everyone thought he was dead. His heart stopped three times on the way to the hospital. I was in a terrible state by the time I got to the ground: God knows how I didn’t hit something on the way. So, I ended up at the hospital and sat by his bedside for what seemed like days, having been warned to expect the worst! They’d sedated him of course so he was out of it until well after surgery. His arteries were so furred up there wasn’t really much room for stuff like blood to circulate. Skinny on the outside and lots of fat on the inside. They did a triple by-pass and, when he did come to, he couldn’t remember a thing but was nicely high on whatever they’d pumped into him! Typical. Just like him too, to have a heart attack when I’d spent weeks organising his surprise birthday party: I would have killed him if he wasn’t dying. Instead I spent hours by his bed cancelling the party while he dozed happily, and reorganised my life so Lisa could make school and I could get work covered. All the food was wasted of course.
“Well I don’t suppose he arranged the coronary just to ruin the party”, said John mildly.
In or out? Make your mind up!
“I wouldn’t put it past him; he’s always been awkward. Probably wouldn’t choose to die batting though, unless he was having a stinker. Anyway, whether he meant to die or not, it was very inconvenient. Apparently, it took ages for them to restart the cricket match afterwards too.”
“Well I suppose people were pretty shaken up after a thing like that; I’m surprised they didn’t call it off.”
“Oh, it wasn’t that. They just couldn’t decide whether he was out or not: the umpires didn’t know and there were opposing views. Apparently, if you’re injured you can have a substitute but if you’re dead you probably won’t be batting again. Not in this life anyway.”
“Very important things rules. Where would we be without them?
“Where are we with them?”
“Good Point.” It was too difficult a question for John to answer. He still hadn’t worked out the rules of the game let alone whether they were fair or not.
Finally he offered, “Resurrections run in our family too y’know.”
Bonnie smiled and said, “Do tell but it better be good.”
‘There must be someway out of here’
“Well my uncle Walter had an allotment when I was a kid. Walter was a gruff old sod on the surface, and underneath really when I think about it, but I was fond of him. It was soon enough after the war for all that ‘dig for victory’ stuff to still be in vogue, though it was more dig for survival ….victory wasn’t on the cards on our council estate. Rationing was still going on and everyone on the estate was stony broke so it wasn’t so much a lifestyle choice as an absolute necessity. Uncle Walter had a prize pig called Jezabelle which gave him a litter of piglets every year so pork was our meat of choice: it was that or eat the neighbours. You could keep pigs for next to nothing if you collected pig-swill from the estate for the promise of a bit of bacon; some people even bought shares in the progeny. That pig fed half the street over the years. Anyway, one spring Jezabelle got sick and Walter got worried. He doted on the pig as well as relying on it. He gave it patent tonics, fresh veg. and any little treat he could think of and spent a lot of time talking to it, pep talks…you know the sort of thing.”
“I’m not totally sure I do know what a pig pep-talk consists of”, Bonnie offered tentatively.
“It’s the same sort of tone as a cat funeral sermon”, John responded smoothly, “only the afterlife is more a threat than a promise. Anyway, nothing Walter tried did any good at all. In the end he was so desperate he decided the only course open to him was to consult……….. ‘the pig man’.”
“The pig man? ”……….
“I know, but that gives you a measure of how serious things were. ‘The pig man’ was famous on our estate; he was a kind of pig whisperer or grunter. He knew more about pigs than anyone and could cure pigs when they were at death’s sty door. ‘The pig man’ came along to Walter’s allotment and had a look. He walked round the pig, looked in its eyes, looked in its ears, looked in its mouth and then shook his head. ‘It’s no good lad’, he said. ‘That’s pig’s not long for this world. Best to kill it quick to put it out of its misery.’ Well Walter gave ‘the pig man’ his half a crown – good advice doesn’t come cheap – and said goodbye to Jezabelle. She looked a sorry sight so he got straight on with it. He took his heaviest spade and gave her a great whack on the head and she dropped down stone dead. The clang of the spade rang round the allotment like a…well like a very loud clang really I suppose. The whole estate heard it and knew it was all up with Jezzabelle and thin times were coming.”
“Oh the poor thing.”
“Walter or Jezabelle? Anyway, times were hard and nobody could afford a vet. Walter dug a big hole at the side of the path, heaved and shoved Jezzabelle into it and backfilled till there was no sign that Jezzabelle had ever lived. I’m not sure if he said a few words to the holy spill-it or not but he came home looking as sad as Jezzabelle had done and barely spoke all night. He was too depressed to bite my head off when I asked about pig heaven. All he said was, ‘Mebbe…I doubt there’s one for scrawpers like you though’. The next day he dragged himself down to the allotment as usual. There was a pile of earth round the hole and no sign of Jezzabelle. At first he thought someone off the estate had thought, ‘Pork is pork’ and exhumed her but then he heard a familiar and much-loved oink and he knew. Another miracle. She must have dug herself out in the night, gone back in her sty and decided she was cured…lived for years and never had another off-day. Something, some power beyond our understanding, saved her bacon.”
“You made that up didn’t you?”
“Not at all; I swear every word is true. It’s not a bad tactic when you think about it – a powerful incentive not to be ill if you think you’re going to get whacked with a shovel. I’m surprised government haven’t thought about it.”
“Give it time. Anyway, talking of born again, what about you? Have you got used to not working or is time hanging heavy?”
“There’s plenty to do….but not working, if by work you mean paid employment, is a bit odd.”
“I’d settle for odd – odd would do me fine compared with an ever-increasing workload and fewer staff: I’d really like to know when an efficiency saving becomes an act of vandalism. We’ve combined back-office functions, delayered, restructured, leaned and meaned, employed consultants with snazzy braces to tell us where we’re going wrong, outsourced to lob-lolly men, in short anything but employ enough workers.”
“Petronious had had enough too; ahead of his time he was. You know the quote? ‘We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. ….. and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.’”
“Mission accomplished then, as someone said.”
“Come on, I’ll pay and then we’ll climb the hill; there were people up there long before Petronious and you can see the whole peninsula from there.”
“What happened to the sharks and dolphins?”
“They’ll be back; they always come back.”
“Like pestilence and famine?”
“Would you settle for boom and bust? It’s a bit less portentous.”
“England’s mortality rate for under-fives 50% higher than in Sweden”, Guardian, 4.5.18.
Hands up if you think this is a surprising statistic. It’s not of course; it’s part of a pattern of declining social, emotional and physical health caused by increasing inequality. Things are getting worse…’worse by design’, a strapline to go along with ‘we’re all in it together’.
The Guardian piece goes on to say:
“although it has a similar level of economic development and healthcare to Sweden, the UK’s more unequal wealth distribution leads to poorer maternal health during pregnancy”.
To be clear, this means preventable deaths of children and babies are …well not being prevented. The way we let our children die (because that is what we as a country or they as a government choose to do) is the way we do or don’t do a whole lot of other things. Here’s a list[1] of things that grow worse as inequality increases:
low level of trust;
mental illness (including drug and alcohol addiction);
life expectancy and infant mortality;
obesity;
children’s educational performance;
teenage births;
homicides;
imprisonment rates;
social mobility (not to be confused with grammar schools!)
There are other items which could be added to the list; even levels of recycling are higher in more equal countries.
The most unequal countries in the ‘developed’ world are Singapore, USA, Portugal and the good old UK. In these countries the gap between the rich and the poor is …. somewhat extreme and so are the negative indicators of social and physical health and well-being. The same correlation is found when data for US states is analysed. The greater the level of inequality, the less trusting, mentally stable, alive!, BMI healthy, academically achieving, not pregnant, not murdered, not in jail, and socially mobile will be the population.
Here’s the thing though; these poor quality of life factors don’t just hit the poor. The poor are over-represented in the statistics to be sure – nothing surprising about that – but the negative physical and social outcomes are spread across the whole of society. In a more unequal society great wealth won’t stop you being less trusting or more likely to murder or be murdered than your counterpart in Sweden. Trickle-down economics and being “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes” are no recipe for the general good, or even the good of the filthy rich, it seems, as Peter Mandelson belatedly recognised .
These clear links between the level of inequality and well-being apply when the dataset is from countries and when the dataset is from US states. There is a clear correlation, demonstrating a causal link, between levels of inequality and quality of life – the greater the gap between ‘haves’ and ‘haven’t a chance of having’, the worse (and shorter) life is for all of us. The findings don’t relate to levels of absolute poverty or wealth, they relate to the distance between the two – they are about fairness and our perception of it.
The ‘developed’ world seems to have reached the point when further increases in living standards don’t actually make a positive difference to health and happiness and we’ve certainly reached the point when the earth and the natural world are showing signs of stress we had better stop ignoring. It’s a big ask to turn greed around. If there is profit to be made, the cost to others of making it is seldom a factor: biofuels seemed a good environmental idea once but someone saw a chance to make money so forests are being cleared to grow biofuel crops and tankers of biofuel are crossing the Atlantic from Europe to the USA and back in order to pick up the US government subsidy paid when small qualities of petroleum are added in the US rather than Europe.
The US is the most unequal society in the ‘developed’ world. It has the highest rates of crime, poverty, drug abuse, violence (you name it they’ve got the highest) in the ‘developed’ world too. We’ve been trying to catch them up under this government but the EU got in the way. So we’re taking back control so that we can give it to the US and become even more of a colony. Hence the right-wing press, politicians and tax exiles are pro-Brexit on any terms and hence the deliberate run-down of public services so they’re ready to be sold to US business.
If we focus on the UK
The graph below shows how income is shared amongst households. The poorest fifth of society have only 8% of the total income, whereas the top fifth have 40%.
Making work pay?https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk
Wealth in Great Britain is even more unequally divided than income. The richest 10% of households hold 45% of all wealth. The poorest 50%, by contrast, own just 8.7%.6
How the rich do carry on!https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk
We have astronomical pay inequality, with workers trapped on poverty wages while Chief Executives take home pay packets that resemble massive lottery wins each year. Britain’s top bosses are paid, on average, well in excess of 100 times more than nurses, teachers, police officers and care workers.
We have staggering wealth inequality, with the richest 1,000 people in Britain owning more wealth than the poorest 40% of UK households.
We have a housing crisis that is fueling homelessness, locks the vast majority of renters out of home ownership and traps many in substandard housing – plus an outdated council tax system that hits the poorest hardest.
We have a shocking gap in healthy life expectancy which condemns the poorest to 20 fewer years of healthy life than the richest.
We have unacceptable attainment gaps between equally bright children from richer and poorer backgrounds.
We have people falling through gaping holes in our safety net, a record high for food bank usage, and rising death rates for babies and the frail elderly and rising child poverty.
What does this mean for the lives we all live? Well here’s one thing it means:
The life expectancy gap between England’s richest and poorest communities has grown over the past 14 years, a report has found.
”We know that the UK has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the developed world and this report reveals that low incomes are costing lives. After ONS figures last month showing a similar trend, alarm bells ought to be ringing in the heart of Government. This trend can only move upwards, as the UK has become a country where nurses and teachers depend on food banks, where four million children live in poverty and working people are exploited by low wages and the gig economy. The roll out of Universal Credit and over a million children losing their free school meals could also contribute to more ill health and more inequality.”
It is, undeniably, a matter of life and death: The majority of the top 50 local areas in England and Wales which had the lowest life expectancy for both girls and boys were found in the North East and North West of England and in Wales. The top 50 local areas with the highest life expectancy were almost all in the East Midlands, South East, East of England, South West or London. I don’t think it’s because the south gets better weather. (https://fullfact.org/health/life-expectancy-and-poverty/)
Material inequalities have powerful psychological effects: when the gap between rich and poor increases, so does the tendency to define and value ourselves and others in terms of superiority and inferiority. Of course, we know all this; if it’s not common sense it’s gut feeling – fairness matters. Societies based on fundamental equalities, sharing and reciprocity generate much higher levels of well-being. If suicide pills like Brexit need an explanation it’s to be found in the alienation that springs from the rising inequality and unfairness that has been the raison detre of our government. And we’ve got used to it! The hypocricy of a slogan like ‘making work pay’ (well done that Spad) – so close to ‘Arbeit macht frei’ – and meaning starve the needy off benefits, no longer shocks.
Make work pay?
If we want a better life for everyone we’d do well to aim for narrowing inequality, implementing the circular economy[2], and recognising that the ‘developed’ world is about as developed as it needs to be. Can you see any sign that the UK government (I won’t even mention the US government) is heading in the right direction?Read more at https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/188607/the-inner-level/#KRFlTqxIVujgfuU5.99
[1] Almost all of the underpinning for this writing comes from The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, Penguin Books, 2010 and the Equality Trust (https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk). Look out for “The Inner Level – How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Wellbeing” their follow-up published this month.
[2] Looking beyond the current “take, make and dispose” extractive industrial model, the circular economy is restorative and regenerative by design. Relying on system-wide innovation, it aims to redefine products and services to design waste out, while minimising negative impacts. Underpinned by a transition to renewable energy sources, the circular model builds economic, natural and social capital. See the Ellen McArthur Foundation for more: https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/circular-economy
I had a bit of an epiphany the other day, a sudden realisation that the UK’s underperformance for well over a hundred years is almost entirely the fault of the appalling standard of education in our schools. Only, I don’t mean state schools; they are in a mess but it’s not of their making. If blame for the UK’s long-term decline belongs anywhere, it belongs with our hallowed public schools, which have a proud track record of producing self-confident wazzocks.
I realised this a while after watching an episode of ‘The Crown’. If you‘ve been watching you’ll know the scene where Anthony Eden is giving a speech to the boys at Eton.
Awkward quad: Pupils at Eton (Photo Graeme Robertson/Getty Images)
He asks a hall full of boys in tails:
“If Britain’s leaders aren’t coming from Eton where should they be coming from? You see before yourself the 16th Etonian prime minister. Out of 40. Not a bad percentage. Harrow incidentally only accounts for seven.”
There are lots of answers to Eden’s question (polite and less polite) but he (and I guess everyone else in the hall) clearly thought this was the natural order of things. Not much has changed since Eden’s day. Politics still draws heavily on our public school ‘elite’. The Sutton Trust’s ‘Leading People 2016’ (https://www.suttontrust.com/research-paper/leading-people-2016/) report offered the following statistic:
in 2016 32% of MPs had been privately educated and 50% of the cabinet (compared with 13% of the shadow cabinet).
Those who don’t enter politics slot effortlessly into other areas of influence and power. By effortlessly I mean without having to try too hard or compete with the plebs. Jobs are arranged not advertised. Rather disingenuously, Sir Peter Lampl, chair of the Sutton Trust put the success of public school graduates down to their character building ethos:
“As well as academic achievement, an independent education tends to develop essential skills such as confidence, articulacy and teamwork, which are vital to career success.”
Public schools are pretty good at building an old-boys network too of course and never having to compete to get a foot on the ladder tends to build confidence in even the dimmest Hooray Henry or Bullingtonian.
Although just 7% of the population attend independent fee-paying schools, almost three quarters (71%) of top military officers were educated privately, with 12% having been taught in comprehensive schools;
In the field of law, 74% of top judges working in the high court and appeals court were privately educated;
in journalism, more than half (51%) of leading print journalists went to independent schools, with one in five having attended comprehensive schools, which currently educate 88% of the population;
In medicine, meanwhile, Sutton Trust research says 61% of the country’s top doctors were educated at independent schools; nearly a quarter (22%) went to grammar school and the remainder to comprehensives;
In business, partly because of the internationalisation of top posts, the report says the proportion of FTSE 100 chief executives educated at independent schools has fallen from 70% in the late 1980s to 54% in the late 2000s and 34% today;
Graduates of Oxford and Cambridge universities continue to dominate the field, though they educate less than 1% of the population. In law, nearly three quarters (74%) of the top judiciary went to Oxbridge; 54% of the country’s leading journalists went to Oxbridge, and just under half (47%) of the cabinet attended Oxbridge, compared with 32% of the shadow cabinet;
(ibid)
To talk about this will be characterised as the politics of envy; I think it’s more like the politics of oppression in a country sewn up so tight almost everyone is suffocating. For a few hundred years every aspect of the lives of ordinary people has been influenced and governed by the products of our esteemed public schools. On the whole this sewn-up system for the preservation of status and privilege has worked pretty well for our betters. It went a bit wrong during the First World War of course; no-one anticipated the extent of the slaughter or that it would include the slaughter of the officer cadre. It was probably the first conflict where junior officers and gentlemen were forced to live and fight in close proximity with the cannon fodder. When this self-perpetuating system has hit a problem, as illustrated in two wars, it’s usually been a supply side one: in those circumstances the gates have been opened a tad to allow other classes to swell the ranks (temporarily). For example, in the Second War as the death toll of pilot officers rose other ranks were allowed to fly. Roughly two-thirds of the 3,000 or so RAF pilots who flew in the Battle of Britain were officers, the other third being sergeant and flight sergeant pilots. Sergeant pilots shared everything with commissioned officers, except the officers’ mess of course – that would never do.
Our betters are not necessarily bad people; I expect they are as mixed a bunch as any other. Their problem is that they just don’t know what life is really like for most of us. They’re brought up in an exclusive environment within a system based on separation and with a value base that encourages the notion that their success is based on merit and the failure of the locked-out is based on a lack of merit- ‘benefit scroungers’ etc. Empathy and understanding are unlikely when too many of what is, evidently, still a ruling class are emotionally damaged and suffering from attachment disorders – you would be too if you’d been sent to boarding school at 5 plus.
Courtesy of pinterest
The rest of us
Our education system is a privileged on underprivileged version of apartheid. It explains much of Grenfell Tower and Brexit. There’s a faint hope (and it is faint) that the Grenfell community will take back a measure of control of their lives. Meanwhile those who govern us and know they’re right to do so are taking back control of everything else. That’s why the EU was projected as the enemy of the people – it imposed social and legislative limits on what could be done by the elite to the rest of us.
So it would be unwise to expect the government’s new social mobility initiative to change the lives of ‘ordinary hard-working people’; the real indicator of the direction of travel is the resignation a week or so ago of all members of the government appointed Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission.
You wouldn’t have wanted my old mum in charge on the bridge of a destroyer or even in front of you in the checkout queue. She once helped me put washing out on a rotary clothes line by starting from the outside line and, when that was full, trying to work her way in, steadily getting wrapped in washing as she tried to progress. She said in explanation that it seemed easier. So it’s perhaps not surprising that she wasn’t much good at taking on the burglar/mad axe-man/rapist when he paid us a visit.
A different kind of fashion statement!
It was just before my brother went off to uni. and he was cultivating louche. He’d been given an amazing dressing gown the Christmas before. A description doesn’t do it justice. It was silk I think, shone like burnished copper and was patterned in black. It shimmered and dazzled in the light but he wore it sparingly, mainly, I suspect, because in our cold council house you really wanted to be wearing a couple of bear pelts or three duvets not a flimsy silk kimono. I can’t imagine what would have happened if anyone outside the house had seen it: a few years before kids at the bottom of the street had tried to hang him and his mate because they were there. His mate’s ma had had to take her pinny off and stride down the hill to say if anyone was going to hang her lad it would be her not some snotty-nosed kids from the ‘bottom end’.
‘Something modest and understated – I don’t want to be noticed’. Courtesy of Pinterest
It was a cold New Year’s Eve in the late fifties. My brother was going out with friends to see the New Year in. Mum and I were going round to neighbours. He’d said not to wait up and that he would be late. I was about nine I guess so midnight seemed quite late to me anyway.
We had duly stayed up till midnight and then strolled home. Mum had had a couple (or so) drinks and was still lively so we were going to have a ‘nice cup of tea’ before going to bed.
We were in the kitchen talking and waiting for the kettle when I thought I heard a noise upstairs. Mum said she hadn’t heard anything and we carried on talking while the kettle wheezed and thought about the effort needed to pass luke-warm. Then we both definitely heard a noise from upstairs and what sounded like someone coming down stairs.
“There’s someone upstairs.”
“There can’t be.”
Thump.
“There is mam.”
“It’s a burglar!”
“What shall we do?”
The captain looked out from the bridge at the darkening sky and grey arctic sea. Somewhere out there was a sub or burglar/mad axe-man/rapist with just one thought in its/his mind. His eyes narrowed and then a slow smile crept over his fine aquiline features.
“Let’s sing.”
“Sing?”
If the captain says sing, we sing!
“Sing. It will let him know there’s someone here and he’ll go away.”
I wasn’t entirely convinced that singing was better than depth charges and wasn’t sure of the words so, just in case, I retrieved the carving knife from the kitchen drawer as I joined in. I think we both sang a kind of descant.
The sound of someone or something coming down the stairs continued, getting a little louder with every step.
The captain’s eyes narrowed (again). “So that’s the way he wants it”, he said to number one. And then, brilliantly “Sing louder”, she said.
So we sang louder.
Mum was in the middle of the room facing the door. I was to the right of the door, clutching the knife. Now there was no sound from the stairs. The burglar/mad axe-man/rapist would either flee through the front door, traumatised by our singing and vowing to change his ways or come down the hall and into the kitchen. There was an ageless pause and a terrible silence, broken only by an increasingly discordant duet.
As I write this I realise why I hated being in the school choir.
We carried on singing but heard a muffled noise from the other side of the door. The door handle slowly turned. The door opened wide. A figure stood in the doorway silhouetted against the dark of the hall with a sinister half-smile on his face and there was a terrible flash of burnished copper. ‘Why is the burglar/mad axe-man/rapist wearing my brother’s dressing gown!’ I thought, expecting even a crazed psycho to have better taste than an adolescent swot. My mother took in the scene in an instant and let out a very long, very piercing scream.
The scream was more effective than our singing because the smile vanished from his face, and there was real terror in his eyes as my brother turned and looked behind him, wondering what horror had followed him down the stairs.
Later, when the kettle had finally boiled, he said there was nothing much happening out. He would have come down earlier but it sounded like we were having a party and he couldn’t be bothered to put clothes on again.
“a new, adventurous and epic film that explains why the big stories that politicians tell us have become so simplified that we can’t really see the world any longer”.
The film claims ‘the west became a dangerous and destructive force in the world‘. Most of the content is home or handheld video footage and it covers the middle east from 1946 to today, takes in banking’s takeover of geopolitics, oil and the rest. That’s quite a spread.
In 1946 the US set up a little colony in Afghanistan to ‘improve’ the country. Why Afghanistan? you may ask, I did, then I looked at a map.
Gosh, it seems Afghanistan bordered the USSR. So the US established ‘Little America’, as it became known, to build huge irrigation projects to modernise and westernise Afghanistan. The resultant saline soil was perfect for poppy growing.
At home in Little America
Bitter Lake is intercut with lovely little scenes from ‘Carry on up the Khyber’ – hinting at farce repeating itself as history do you think?
Captain Keene: [news of the native revolt arrives] What do you intend to do, sir? Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond: Do? Do? We’re British. We won’t do anything… Major Shorthouse:…until it’s too late. Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond: Exactly. That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said all day.
On the way the film takes in the US relationship with Iraq, the development of Wahhabi Islam and Iraq’s funding of Madrassas in Pakistan.
Culture clash doesn’t quite describe the west’s history of interference in the middle east. There’s a perfect image in the film where, as part of the coalition’s educational programme to persuade Afghanis of what they were missing, an extremely nice young british woman delivers a powerpoint lecture on conceptual art to a mixed group of Afghan men and women. Conceptual art is illustrated with a slide of a urinal – the first piece of conceptual art. She tells them the urinal was a political statement – the audience were probably quite familiar with political statements of another kind but not urinals. It’s fair to say the level of incomprehension on both sides was extreme.
Mutual incomprehension
The problem with seeing things as simplistically as right and wrong, good and bad (with us as the right and the good of course) is that it doesn’t keep us safe. Polarised views are dangerous – workshy/hard-working families, immigrant floods/refugees, free world/subjugated people, blacks/whites, jews/christians/moslems, Donald Trump/anyone else (except Palin!).
The US right seems to think if it could make the world in its image (and keep out migrants and arm school kids) we could all sleep at night. As President Regan said (and probably believed), ‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again‘
I sometimes think many Americans are brought up to salute the flag and watch Fox News – the equivalent in the UK of learning to read from the Daily Mail. That’s unfair of course and, without exception, the Americans I’ve met have been extremely nice, polite and generous, like the soldier below. Most Americans never travel abroad we’re told, so their view of the world is bound to be an odd one.
After all the US is God’s own country which I guess is why you can’t become president without boasting about the country’s greatness, invoking a Christian God at every turn and having a very big bag of money to share out.
Unfortunately, to stay safe, Americans have the largest military machine ever known and, of course, the right to carry arms. As a result:
the United States most likely has been responsible since WWII for the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world. http://www.countercurrents.org/lucas240407.htm
In order to defend its freedoms, at home it kills its own: 33,636 people died of gunshot in 2013 (that’s actually less than died from drugs or motor vehicles but still a tad high). http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm The US population is around 320 million. Within the EU (population 508.2 million) approximately 6700 persons die each year as a result of gunshot wounds.
and
In October 2013, the incarceration rate of the United States of America was the highest in the world, at 716 per 100,000 of the national population. While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, it houses around 22 percent of the world’s prisoners.
Surely something isn’t working.
It’s understandable but unhelpful for the right in the UK to attack anyone who asks ‘how did we get to this?’ or worse, ‘Was it our (government’s) fault.’ It’s easy to attack Corbyn and others as weak on terror whenever they speculate on how we arrived here. The film Bitter Lake offers a pretty compelling explanation and you can still watch it.
Watch the film, it’s incredibly moving and disturbing. Make your own mind up.
