This is a post inspired by a cartoon on a lavatory wall. No, not that sort of cartoon, as I shall explain shortly. Actually, the one above.
But first, those of you kind readers who wondered if the reason why my posts have dwindled from weekly to monthly to almost never, might be forgiven for thinking that this writer is incapable or dead. Though far be it for me to assume that you actually noticed my voice in the first place and thus my subsequent silence. Happily, I’m neither deceased nor dribbling. But one of the curses of advancing years is a tendency to repeat oneself, something I do my best to avoid. I struggle to find anything to say about Donald Trump, for example, that hasn’t already been said, by me or by others. And so it is with a host of other subjects, though many of my pet obsessions have faded into obscurity (such as Boris Johnson), though not unfortunately the odious Nigel Barrage (as I like to call Britain’s favourite demagogue these days).
But Trump lashes on and out like a dystopian android whose circuitry has been toasted, taking full advantage of the ultimate platform. I shan’t write about him again unless he breathes his rancid last before I do, in which case I shall rouse my shaky old hand to craft a suitably admiring obituary.
There’s plenty of other stuff to write about, though much of it is about issues that are unlikely to be resolved in my lifetime. Though I hope that those who will live longer than me can resolve the perils of climate change, AI and meteorites barrelling their way towards us, I’m not inclined to sacrifice myself for the sake of future generations as one might in some soppy Netflix series.
Which leads me to one subject, seemingly eternal to those of us born after 1948, that has always baffled me: the future of Palestine and, for that matter, Israel.
This is where the cartoon comes in. It was in the public loo of a small French village. Given that in this area there are plenty of native English speakers, there’s a fair chance that it was one of them who, perhaps during a bout of constipation, decided to share their artistry with us. Had they been French, they would have written Palestine Libre, or the imperative thereof.
In Britain, the cause of the people of Palestine, who suffer unspeakably from the relentless cruelty of Binyamin Netanyahu and his legions, has gained massive traction across a diverse range of people of different ages and political persuasions. I have friends of my age who have felt impelled to risk their personal safety by going to demos. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the first time they’ve taken to the streets since the sixties or seventies, when many of us did our bit in protesting against The Bomb, Apartheid, the Vietnam war and the Neo-Nazis (who these days, incidentally, seem rapidly to be becoming fashionable again).
Much as I line up in spirit alongside those who are outraged by the appalling violence inflicted on Palestinians since October 7th 2023, I find Hamas’s assault on the elderly, women and children in Israel equally abhorrent, even if Israel’s response was, statistically speaking, utterly disproportionate to the original act.
Yet as I watch the old and the young shout themselves hoarse on the streets of London and other cities, I wonder what they mean by “Free Palestine”, and how many have even thought the question through at all. Calling for the freedom of an individual, a group of people or a population is the easiest and most effective rallying cry for those who believe that they themselves live in a state of freedom. On the other hand, I suspect that many of those who accuse others of “genocide”, a word that appears on endless placards and tee shirts, have never explored in any depth what genocide actually means, let alone witnessed it. Both words, I would argue, started life as technical terms. They have now become emotional rallying cries with infinitely mutable meanings.
Or to put it another way, these are easy words with which to manipulate, because they are simple and can mean what the user wants them to mean.
Parking genocide for a moment, what do we think freedom means to the chanting thousands?
Does it mean a democracy whose leaders can be elevated or cast aside by popular vote? Which enacts laws approved by popular referendum or elected representatives? In whose laws human rights are enshrined and protected by an impartial judiciary? Whose military and law enforcement are under the control of a directly or indirectly elected executive?
Perhaps. Or would they think of freedom as a finite slice of time following the casting off of the yoke of oppression?
Which is where the opinions of the oppressed come in. What does freedom mean to them? Replacement of a conquering oppressor with a home-grown strong man – a Saddam or a Gaddafi? A theocracy, with generous funding from Iran or the Gulf? The appearance of democracy, wherein an entrenched oligarchy makes all the important decisions – as in Xi’s China and Putin’s Russia? Or do they yearn for the “democracy” imposed on Iraq by George W Bush and his proconsuls? Or something we in the West haven’t had the imagination to conceive?
That’s for them to decide, I hear you say. Meaning, the cynic might reply, that the newly free are free to decide their method of future oppression and enslavement.
Even after fifteen years’ experience of living and working in the Middle East, I couldn’t begin to volunteer a solution to the future of Palestine. As for freedom, which of fifteen variants might satisfy the majority of stakeholders?
And what of Israel? What does freedom look like for those who did not fall victim to the attack of October 7th? Would it be freedom from rocket attacks, car bombs, condemnation abroad, antisemitic abuse, economic boycotts and the necessity to be constantly in a state of tension in anticipation of attack? Freedom to live without the protection of an iron dome, perhaps? Or from the worry of losing sons and daughters called to battle at a moment’s notice?
As I promised earlier, I have no answers – only questions.
While I was writing this I happened upon two movies, one that I watched for the first time and the other that I knew well. The first was Operation Finale, about how Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution in World War Two, was kidnapped in Argentina and smuggled to Israel. As the team of Israeli kidnappers prepare for their operation, they’re visited by Ben Gurion, the Prime Minister of the time. He urged them not to fail, because putting Eichmann on trial would show the world the horror of the Holocaust.
Would Netanyahu have refrained from killing Eichmann on the spot? I doubt it. Would Ben Gurion have agreed to the total destruction of Gaza and the killing of 60,000 occupants? I also doubt it. Different times, different mores.
And then there’s the famous scene from Apocalypse Now in which Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz, the renegade special forces officer fighting his own brutal war against the Viet Cong, shares a story with the man sent to kill him. He tells of how he and his company go to a village and inoculate the children. Shortly afterwards, the Viet Cong come and cut off each inoculated arm. To him this act shows the power of an opponent without moral scruples, and whose overriding objective is to defeat the enemy. “If I had ten divisions of those men,” he says, “then our troubles here would be over very quickly.”
At that point I thought of the defenceless families in the border settlements, and of bomb craters filled with the bodies of children. The horror never seems to go away.
Which leads me to genocide. Once again, questions, not answers. Though when thinking about the term I find it helpful to have read East West Street, a multi-layered examination of the origins of the word interleaved with the story of his own family, by Phillipe Sands, a distinguished international lawyer. My review of the book is here.
In determining what constitutes genocide, I read once that lawyers tend to focus on intent, but historians on the result. So, applying a legal test, has it ever been the intent of Netanyahu and his subordinates to destroy, as defined by the UN Genocide Convention “…in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”?
And from a historian’s perspective, at what point is it justifiable to declare an event a genocide? And in the case of Gaza, where, between zero and 60,000, is the tipping point reached after which such a declaration can be made?
Difficult questions, possibly not considered by all of the protesters accusing the object of their fury of genocide. Far simpler to ignore the definitions (of which are are more than one) and embrace the term as an emotional rallying cry.
By questioning the thought processes of the thousands who are utterly sincere in their condemnation of the violence in Gaza, I fear I might lose a few friends. But I write through doubt, not conviction. And I ask myself on what streets did the righteously indignant demonstrate when Putin took the children from the occupied territories of Ukraine to be re-educated as Russians? And who is standing up for the displaced Syrians living in Turkey? Or the Rohingyas of Burma? Or the Uigurs of Xinjiang? And so on.
Real life is murky, ambiguous and nuanced. Most people who take to the streets with their banners and shout about freedom and genocide surely know this. By protesting, they are using their voices to gain the attention of a wider audience. Yet whether or not they care to admit it, I suspect that the simplicity inherent in slogans, and yes, pictures on lavatory walls, is a comforting antidote to the maddening complexity of events on the ground.
So by all means we should continue to condemn inhumanity wherever we find it. But we should never forget that simplicity is also the demagogue’s ladder to tyranny.
I can’t comment on the meeting between Trump, Vance and Zelensky last week, because I can no longer bring myself to listen to Trump’s whiney voice. However, the reaction from Trump supporters and more than a few neutral observers was that Zelensky screwed up by failing to prepare himself in the art of handling the orange monster.
As far as I’m concerned, that has to be bullshit. Zelensky has more than enough experience in handling foreign leaders. He has succeeded in enlisting most of them into the cause of Ukraine, which is why I’m inclined to believe that he was ambushed. In other words, Trump and Vance were set on a course of action and waiting for an opportunity to pursue it.
Why, you might ask, would Trump jeopardise his much-touted minerals deal by behaving like a silverback gorilla threatened by an interloper? Because, perhaps, such deals only have value as propaganda rather than substance. One deal goes away, another takes its place. And for Trump, politics is all about presentation. And how the media loves the scowls, the smirks and the elbow shoves!
The same could be said for many of his acolytes – especially the males. Musk, Stephen Miller, Vance and especially one veteran Trumpian stormtrooper: Sebastian Gorka.
This chap, who also featured in Trump One, made a memorable appearance recently in the BBC’s current affairs flagship, Newsnight. I have no abiding memory of what he was talking about – Ukraine I suspect – only of his performance as an interviewee. When it was over – a masterclass in arrogance, bullying and all-round nastiness – one of the other guests on the show described Gorka as a “blowhard”.
An interesting word, blowhard. Bombastic, bullying, boastful, bullshit-laden. A pretty good description of his boss, but with none of Trump’s creepy charm.
Speaking of stormtroopers, what’s interesting about the whole DOGE business is that Musk’s teenage psychos appear to have been told to target federal institutions on the basis of the direct impact of their destruction: jobs cut, short term cost savings that ignore long-term consequences, such as the next pandemic or the unprecedented climate-driven hurricane surge disasters.
Many of those institutions were set up to benefit America, and yet by cooperation with other national organisations, NGOs and even the much-maligned UN, they benefit not only America but the whole world. Maybe the current numbskulls in charge don’t believe in soft power.
Another interesting aspect of Trump’s wrecking ball tactics is that he and his cronies no longer seem to disguise their admiration for Putin. It’s almost as though he feels that his electoral victory entitles him to say what he thinks and act accordingly. Where a covert connection with Putin during his last presidency might have been enough to see him impeached, he has no qualms in echoing the Russian president’s arguments today.
I pay no attention to theories about Trump being under some sort of blackmail threat from Putin. But if it turned out to be so, the details will probably come out within the next year or so, as will any other deadly secret that’s likely to destroy his credibility and possibly his presidency. The reason for that would be the number of enemies he’s currently gaining within the federal government. Bodies buried can be exhumed. What if he starts slashing at the CIA and FBI? How many renegade ex-employees might dish some long-stashed dirt on the president that has thus far remained locked in a safe somewhere?
How long also before his motley crew, who between them seem to harbour a collection of chips the size of mountains on their shoulders, begin to melt down in a quagmire of infighting?
These days I veer between waiting for Trump’s inevitable downfall without too much regard to its form, to lying in bed speculating about who or what will land the fatal blow: a deep throat in the car park, a military prepared to act after one outrageous violation of the constitution too many, mass protest over the consequences of an economic collapse or even sufficient members of congress prepared to ignore the president’s threats to launch a successful impeachment.
Ironically, extraordinary measures to dispose of a rogue administration might just produce more cracks in the US political system than are likely appear as a result of Trump’s actions.
Anyway, to end with a piece of meaningless cant, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Just as long as what makes America stronger doesn’t make everyone else weaker, which seems to be the intent of the current rabble.
How thrilled Americans must be that their government has officially renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Surely this outshines all President Trump’s other achievements, including gutting the federal government, switching support between Ukraine and Russia and sending tanks into Greenland and Canada.
Strange though, that the US persists in referring to the stretch of water between Iran and the states of the Arabian Peninsula as the “Persian Gulf”, as opposed to the “Arabian Gulf”, as it is known by those great American allies, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain. Given that Persia – or Iran as it’s been known for many decades – delights in calling America the Great Satan, and urging its death, you would have thought that the object of its affection would pay its allies the compliment of using their preferred nomenclature. But perhaps that’s yet to come, once all the treasonous reprobates who insist on referring to the Gulf of Mexico have been sent to Guantanamo.
I’d love to think that we Europeans settle such controversies by agreement rather than the diktat of the most powerful nation of the time. Alas, this has not always been the case. On my wall at home I have a map of the UK that refers to the waters to the North-East of the country as the German Ocean. It was only after the First World War, that said Ocean became the North Sea. If we had been able to, we probably would have called it the English Ocean, but this wouldn’t have gone down well with the French, the Belgians and other wartime allies who might also have had a claim on its nomenclature. So we all agreed on a suitable neutral name.
Perhaps the current US approach is similar to the centuries-old impasse between France and England over the naming of the channel of water that runs between Dover and Calais. We English call it the “English Channel”, and the French call it “La Manche”, or “The Sleeve”. A happy case of agreeing to differ that neither Henry V nor Napoleon did anything to disturb.
Since this blog is renowned for its incisive political commentary, you will no doubt be desperate to hear my take on this earth-shattering name grab by the US. It’s this: Trump will offer to change back to the Gulf of Mexico in return for Mexico ceding 50% of its oil and gas resources to its mighty neighbour.
Yes, I know that’s a monumentally silly suggestion. The trouble is, any serious and sober discussion of the antics of Trump and his rabble is instantly rendered irrelevant by each new act of malignant idiocy by the orange monster.
So perhaps the best approach to predicting Trump’s next move will be to make a list of the 50 craziest things you could imagine him doing, award points for each prediction that comes true and turn the whole exercise into a four-dimensional board game with a prize pot of bitcoins for each monthly winner kindly donated by Elon Musk. Think of the entry fees you could reap!
Better stop here. I see the people in white coats coming down the corridor with my morning medication.
Over the past two weeks I’ve had the chance to sample the joys of a British National Health Service hospital for the second time in eighteen months. The first was a cardiac episode that put me in St Bartholomew’s Hospital in central London, described in loving detail here.
This time it was Frimley Park, in Surrey, which is a centre of excellence for vascular surgery. Unlike the Bart’s episode, my visit was scheduled. The problem to be sorted was an abdominal aortic aneurism, also known as an AAA, which an NHS screening programme first identified eight years ago, when I was 65. This delightful condition is when your aorta (the artery that runs down your chest from the heart) loses its flexibility and begins to widen. When it gets to a certain width things start getting dangerous, so surgery is recommended. Otherwise you’re living under a Sword of Damocles – at any time the blood vessel can burst, leaving you to die in a welter of gore. Not nice.
The solution? The old-school approach is to be cut open, have the offending length of blood vessel cut out and replaced with an artificial graft. A bit like a heart bypass. Highly invasive and with a long recovery period. But generally speaking, when you’re fixed, you’re fixed for good.
If for whatever reason you’re not a suitable candidate for such butchery, you can get a stent which is inserted into the artery by keyhole surgery. This was the option prescribed for me, with the complication that my aneurism was close to where the artery branches off to serve the kidneys, the spine, the guts and the legs. So something called a Fenestrated Endovascular stent – or a FEVAR – was required. It looks a bit like a ginseng root (hence the photo), with bits coming out of it to mirror the shape of the blood vessels. Because everyone’s aorta is different, it has to be custom built, which is expensive. The all-up cost of the procedure, including surgeons, facility and aftercare, is around £50k. By NHS standards that rates as one of the high-cost options. Frimley Park does about fifty of them a year.
God knows how much the same operation would cost in the US. By way of comparison, my former business partner in North Carolina had a hip replacement ten years ago, which cost over £150k. That for a straightforward procedure far less complicated and expertise-intensive than mine. But then, in the States, if the surgeon scratches their back, you pay for their time.
The more complication, the greater the risk, it seems. The vascular surgeon who assessed my condition spelt it out in a letter to my GP: “He is aware of the mortality risk of 5% to 10% and the pros and cons of both open and endovascular repair”.
Now back in the day, on a visit to the races, I would cheerfully put money on a horse at 10-1, not expecting it to win, but still fancying its chances. Often it would. Scary odds, only underlined by the consent form, which listed an absurdly long litany of risks ending with a single word: death.
So after six months of waiting, with one eye on the Sword of Damocles that might at any moment cause me to perish in a mess of flapping artery and gushing blood, the day of the operation finally arrived. Given the apocalyptic language of the consent form, I was fully prepared not to wake up, which would have been a bit of a non-event, since I would have missed the moment of oblivion.
Four hours later, with the surgeon hovering over me, I woke. I’m sure he’ll confirm that my first words were “I’m alive”. A bit knackered, lower back aching through spending the operation on a hard surface, but alive after a complex piece of equipment had been threaded through the arteries of the abdomen, there to be the bulwark against the dreaded rupture.
Then the fun started. 24 hours in recovery listening to a woman with a better grasp of swearwords than me howling like a banshee at the ever-patient staff. Anger? Pain? Dementia? Who knows, but a very impressive display of invective that went on through the day and night. So much for a nice calm recovery environment.
Then into the ward, only to discover that the same woman had followed me. She was joined down the corridor by a truly unhinged male patient who eventually had to be moved to a single room until the sedation took hold. My room-mates and I lay quiet as mice as bedlam raged beyond.
The highlight of the stay was when a gentleman who I think was the ranter decided that he owned the bed next door to me. When the occupant went for a pee, came in and sat down with a thunderous look that brooked no argument. He bore a distinct resemblance to Oliver Reed as Proximo in Gladiator. What made him all the scarier was the bloodstained tunic he was wearing. I looked in vain for his gladius, but none was visible. Eventually some quiet persuasion extracted him.
Nights were quieter, interrupted only by multiple pee breaks and distant howling at the moon by Proximo. One feature of the male ward was that, as at Bart’s, nobody seemed remotely inhibited from letting rip with what appeared to be coordinated volleys of farting that would be well-received in a rugby club. One night it was almost as if the inmates had decided to stage a simulation of the Battle of Jutland or possibly to create the explosive accompaniment for Handel’s Fireworks Music. It could only have been more exciting if they had pulled the blankets back and treated us to a pyrotechnic display. A bit dangerous with all that oxygen around, mind. Given that a windy digestive system is a sign of normal activity, I’m pretty sure I could also hear quiet sighs of relief.
The staff were kind and professional. On the nursing side the proportion of women to men was around five to one. Among the doctors and anaesthetists, the observable ratio was the other way round, which I found quite surprising. Why? No doubt some expert NHS watcher can explain. I’m just mentioning it in passing. Another distinctive feature of Frimley is the ethnic makeup of the workforce. Most of the usual ethnicities were represented, but there were many more Nepalese among the care and nursing staff than in any other UK hospital I’ve visited – perhaps the result of the neighbouring Sandhurst Military Academy hosting the UK headquarters of the Brigade of Gurkhas. And lucky we are to have them too – smart, cheerful, attentive and with excellent language skills.
The hospital itself is fifty years old. It was built as a joint-use military-civilian facility. The military bit perhaps explains why you need orienteering skills at the highest level to find your way around it. Some human factors designer decided to create a system of streets distinguished by colour – blue street, yellow street, green street etc. The result is bewilderingly unintuitive. One expected to find the mummified remains of little old ladies who failed to reach their destination in remote corners of the building. A joke, of course. The staff more than make up for the navigational chaos by going out of their way to help stragglers get their bearings.
One charming little quirk amid all the science was that in Recovery, there was no Bed 13. Nor is there a Ward 13. Very reassuring for the patients!
The buildings are also in danger of falling apart because of the prevalence of RAAC beams in their construction. Since 2022, this concrete, which crumbles with age, was used in public construction all across Britain in the sixties and seventies. It turned out to have a shorter lifespan than originally estimated. Hence collapsed beams and all manner of perils. The bill for repair or replacement of affected buildings is huge. In the case of Frimley, the solution is replacement, but the project appears to be proceeding at a snail’s pace. So the hospital’s capacity has been cut back. It’s also notorious for its overcrowded accident and emergency department, which has resulted in rows of patients waiting for attention stretching down corridors.
The unfortunate impression you get as a visitor begins with a nightmarish car park in which at peak times is so full that it often takes fifteen minutes to find a space. Unless of course you arrive by ambulance, in which case you will at least get through the front door reasonably quickly.
And how did it go for me?
I’m now home – extracted from the sea of bugs. A bit battered, not much energy and not much enthusiasm for the next four weeks of “taking it easy”. But alive, thank goodness. My thoughts on the experience can be best summarised by this extract from a thank-you note I sent to those who looked after me:
I don’t take for granted the efforts of all the staff (not forgetting those who work in the wards) in the NHS to keep me alive and comfortable. The NHS may be going through many problems (when did it not?), but for sure it’s kept alive and kicking by the efforts of its people. Long may that continue.
On Monday I posted about the madness that has gripped America during the presidential interregnum – between the November election and Trump’s inauguration next week. Things are almost as rancid here in the UK. We have our very own version of Gladiator 3: the Conservatives and the Reform Party scrapping in the colosseum of public opinion over ownership of Britain’s extreme right. But this will simply be an entertaining overture, before Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate, duly installed as Elon Musk’s gauleiters, get on with the job of purging Britain of its grooming gangs, mosques, curry houses, drag queens and gender-ambivalent therapy patients.
I jest, of course. But by gum, we British really need sorting out, don’t we? The real madness lies in the relentless campaign against our government and its leading figures by both domestic and foreign enemies.
As if Labour’s task of clearing up the wreckage created by the last government wasn’t hard enough, a gang of well-connected trolls have decided to make their lives even harder by resurrecting the alleged “Pakistani grooming gang” scandal. Thanks in large part to Musk, the level of vilification aimed at Keir Starmer, Jess Phillips et al compares nicely with the press received back in the day by the likes of Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Then there’s the “two hundred and fifty thousand victims”, of the grooming gangs, according to the godfather of X. Or is that “up to a million” as he claimed in another tweet? That’s surely an impressive exaggeration even by Truskian standards. Taking the lower figure, if you assume that each grooming gang member was responsible for seducing ten girls (which would make you wonder how they managed to pay attention to their day jobs), such a ratio suggests that there are 25,000 miscreants out there, most of whom have never been identified, let alone prosecuted. Somewhat unlikely, I suggest.
But Musk has many willing helpers. Over many decades of watching politics in Britain, I can’t recall a similar level of vituperation hurled at a relatively young government as is currently the case. In yesterday’s issue (13/1/25) of The Times – a newspaper that in the past studiously avoided the attack-dog tendencies of its nearest competitors – each of the three stories on the front page is designed to raise the hackles of people who might otherwise be prepared at least to give Labour the benefit of the doubt. The headlines tell all….
“Tech firms can plunder NHS archive to fuel AI revolution” under plans to be announced by Kier Starmer. Note the inflammatory use of the word “plunder”. Not “access” or “make use of”, but plunder, the first cousin of steal.
“Labour’s net-zero push ‘hands power to Beijing’”. This warning comes from the former head of MI6, who fears that Labour’s “ideologically-driven” push towards net zero is increasing China’s power over our economy. The stinger, of course, is the implication that ideological fanaticism (Labour) trumps realistic pragmatism (Tories, Trump et al). The Yellow Peril rides again.
As for the third story, no brick-by-brick demolition of a government’s credibility would be complete unless the wreckage emanates a whiff of corruption. And who better to be accused of corruption than Labour’s anti-corruption minister, whose auntie is the former prime minister of Bangladesh, who was dismissed for corruption among other transgressions. Now some of Tulip Siddiq’s election material has been found in Sheikh Hasina’s “luxury palace”. A long story this, but the underlying accusation is clear: auntie was corrupt – so is her niece. (Yesterday, she resigned. First blood to the demolition squad.)
The only other feature of the front page is a photo of the frozen English countryside. Even The Times couldn’t find a reason to blame Labour for the current cold snap.
The Starmer blood-fest is not confined to the newspaper media. The newsfeed that greets me when I open my laptop gleefully leaps upon every negative story about him that the algorithm can find.
Take the links presented to me this morning:
The Daily Express says: World leaders invited to Donald Trump inauguration including Milei as Starmer ‘snubbed’. Just to confuse the faithful, the news feed chucks in Daily Mirror’s assertion of the Truth behind Elon Musk’s claim Keir Starmer snubbed at Donald Trump’s inauguration, which, it claims, Starmer never intended to attend in the first place!
Meanwhile, the Daily Mail screams that Labour’s law ‘threatens Brits’ ability to speak freely at the PUB’. Imagine! A mortal blow struck at one of Britain’s treasured cultural institutions.
Not to be outdone, The Daily Telegraph pops up with a headline inviting us to look at The charts that show Starmer’s Britain is falling badly behind. Economic trends whose origins stretch back way beyond the life of the current government.
I’m not saying that Starmer and Labour haven’t made mistakes All governments screw up, especially the inexperienced ones. Even Elon Musk’s new rockets blew up a few times before his engineers made them fly. But the informational area bombing aimed at Starmer and his team over the past months is so relentless as to be positively sinister. And to think that one of my country’s proudest cultural emblems was once fair play….
It seems to me that without our even thinking about it, a process is going on in the UK similar to that in the United States, through which the Republican party and its billionaire donors, by taking control of media that previously may have been impartial, by forming political organisations masquerading as think tanks and by creating huge funding wells ready to flood target states with money in the form of political donations, have massively shifted public opinion against Democrat incumbents.
We not yet at such an advanced state of political subjugation, otherwise it would have been impossible for Labour to have been elected last year. But it’s worth reflecting that there are now two parties with – if the opinion polls are to be believed – a large share of popular support, touting policies that would have horrified right-wing icons from my youth such as Margaret Thatcher. And let’s not forget that these parties are egged on by media proprietors both old and new – old in the case of Rupert Murdoch, and new in the case of the financiers who own GB News, the current standard-bearer for the far right.
Labour have another four years in power, with a very healthy majority. But should they falter enough in the meanwhile to trigger a new general election, expect the long-term effort to neutralise any political organisation to the left of far right to work up into a frenzy of spending and, inevitably, misinformation.
I carry no torch for Labour – I didn’t vote for them in the last election. But neither would I go anywhere close to the assortment of headcases and cultists that control the Conservatives and Reform. Never have, never will. In my view, the strength of British political life has always been that not since the eighteenth century has any party been able to achieve long-term ascendency.
I don’t want that to change. The reasons why it might are for another time. But for those who look across the Atlantic for indicators of future trends here in Britain, I refer you to an interesting article by Thom Hartmann, a “progressive” writer and radio show host, who has written an article in which he describes in some detail how Republican strategists, aided by massive funding from billionaire backers, have managed to upset the traditional balance between the main US political parties. Well worth a read, even if you don’t share his political inclinations.
Here’s a key passage:
Want to seize control of a nation and turn it into a neofascist state with the consent of the people? Just take control of the channels of public information and news, and then turn lies about your opponents and their supporters into a perceived reality.
Over the past 50 years, Democrats have been busy focusing on and working out policies to benefit average Americans. Increasing access to medical care, $35 insulin, reducing student debt, the CFPB to protect people from banks, cleaning up the environment, American Rescue Act, Inflation Reduction Act, etc.
Republicans and billionaires aligned with them, however, have not only fought against all these efforts, but, far more importantly, have engaged in a massive power play to shift control of popular opinion — and thus control of our government — toward themselves in a way they believe could be permanent.
You can clearly see Hartmann’s bias, and I’m not suggesting there’s a direct parallel with the UK, especially in terms of the objectives of the oligarchs. But the techniques for undermining opponents are similar, and have been used continually since the Brexit Referendum (and there’s my bias emerging!).
So is Britain, in electing a Labour government last year, an outlier, as we stand rather nervously against a global movement towards authoritarian, not to say fascist, politics? That’s for you to say, dear readers. As for me, I’m keenly interested in seeing to what extent history is about to repeat itself. Or not.
Once upon a time, in the middle of the last century, we in Britain had what we used to call the Silly Season. This was the period in the summer while parliament was in recess. Most of us who could afford it, including the politicians, went on our summer holidays. In the absence of government ministers to rant about, our national newspapers (for there was no such thing as “the media” in those days) spent much of their time twiddling their thumbs and inventing silly stories to fill their pages. Hence the silly bit.
So we were bombarded with stories about the doings of the crazed and eccentric, about sex scandals, ghosts and UFOs. Occasionally something would happen to burst through the silliness and disturb our shrimp-catching in the tidal rock pools of the Welsh coast, such as the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. But more often than not, the world minded its manners and left us in peace.
No longer, alas. There’s no time of the year when the news media, fake or otherwise, is unable to dredge up or invent some startling stories from somewhere in the world to keep us alarmed, outraged and entertained through the dog day afternoons.
However, while the silly season has disappeared, we do still seem to go through periods of outright craziness. I call them rabid seasons. We are going through such a time at the moment as we watch this year’s US presidential transition. This happens every four years between November 6th and January 20th. Those that involve a change of president are particularly rabid – even more so when the incoming president is Donald Trump.
The current interregnum has not disappointed. Since at my age I would be foolish to take for granted that I might see another year, let alone another four, I’ve resolved not to take the gremlins and goblins too seriously. So forgive me when I make a few observations about the current festivities with a certain detachment.
At the back end of last year, for example, we were apparently being overwhelmed by aliens. Why they should choose to swarm the skies of New Jersey is anyone’s guess. I would have expected them to descend mob-handed on Area 51 in an attempt to get their buddies back. But anyway, not a day went past without some video of mass ranks of multicoloured intruders on the horizon. Yet all of a sudden, we hear nothing about these strange creatures hovering over The Land of the Free. Have they gone away, or did their batteries run out? No doubt the truth is out there.
Then we have that well-known alien, Elon Musk, having successfully swung America Trump’s way, deciding it’s time to change the governments of the UK and Germany. I suspect he will find us and the Germans to be different propositions. We may be as susceptible to his lies as the Americans, but our saving grace is a layer of cynicism that refuses to allow us to be so impressed by Musk’s myriad achievements that we swallow his political bullshit without thinking. Will the Germans fall for him? That remains to be seen. But I suspect that their inoculation against lying demagogues is still strong enough to resist a foreign Goebbels.
Trump himself will be a continual source of amusement in the years to come. With his grotesque cronies – an assortment of alcoholics, psychos and conspiracy nuts – it will be an endless pleasure watching them stab each other in the back as they manoeuvre for power and influence. As for the Donald himself, he can be relied upon for at least one hilarious quote per day that highlights his supremacy as the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.
Of course he might be actually mean what he says. In which case I look forward to the emergence of a new tripartite world order, as the US annexes Panama, Canada and Greenland, along with Mexico and the Caribbean for good measure, while Russia takes back its empire up to the boundaries of the Warsaw Pact and China takes Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines.
To whom will we Brits belong? Well, we know that Elon has his ideas on this, so I’m thrilled at the prospect of having a vote in the next Presidential election, which will probably be in at least ten years’ time. By that time Donald’s brain will have dissolved into dribbling senility. All attempts to reconstitute him using one of Elon’s infernal medical devices will fail.
Oh, and a memo to Ireland: if you think you’ll escape absorption into Greater America, consider this. There are over 50 million Americans with Irish ancestry. If a minority population of Sudeten Germans was large enough to allow Hitler to annex Czechoslovakia, imagine what Donald will do after some canny Bostonian has started whispering in his ear.
Another delicious prospect is of the imminent battle of the oligarchs. The likes of Musk, Bezos and those shadowy billionaires nobody knows anything about tearing chunks out of each other will make great entertainment, especially when AI hoovers up the remains from the battlefield.
Looking further on, ask yourself this. If Americans who voted for Trump because he offered them a hope of a better life – through lower taxes better jobs and so on – are disappointed, on whom will they turn? Surely the swaggering tech bros who have broken cover and flaunt their devotion to Trump. Do they not taunt the have-nots, who see their prospects of prosperity reduced to ashes? Will not the demagogue who takes over after Trump take aim at the oligarchs, who have gobbled up an overwhelming proportion of the nation’s wealth? No doubt Vladimir Putin would be happy to provide a tutorial on defenestrating the wealthy.
It all adds up to a stormy ride ahead. For those who follow the machinations in the White House and other centres of government – such as Downing Street and the Kremlin – I heartily recommend a little light reading to soothe the troubled mind.
In Palatine, Peter Stothard vividly describes the plotting, scheming, flattering and back-stabbing that permeated the court of the early Roman Emperors. If we think the machinations at the modern centres of power are something new, Stothard’s account of the vipers and toadies on Palatine Hill striving to win the favour of the likes of Caligula and Nero will put you right. The Romans built the template – their successors are merely imitators.
And where will all this madness end? At times of maximum rabidity, I go back to the Classics. So I leave you with a quotation from Sophocles:
τὸ κακὸν δοκεῖν ποτ᾽ ἐσθλὸν τῷδ᾽ ἔμμεν’ ὅτῳ φρένας θεὸς ἄγει πρὸς ἄταν; which translates as “Evil appears as good in the minds of those whom God leads to destruction.” Or, to put it another way: “those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad”.
Much as I despise Donald Trump, there are people who support him who rank very close to the man himself in my low estimation. Of these, a few deserve a special place in the underworld.
Not the cult followers, for they no longer seem capable of thinking autonomously. The people I have no time for are those who support him for the motive of personal gain rather than as a result of Trump’s manipulation. I’m talking of the zillionaire tax dodgers, the would-be government appointees, the politicians who are supporting a candidate whom they know to be a truly bad person, the religious leaders who go through logical hoops to justify urging their faithful to vote for a man who is a living repudiation of all the principles of their faith.
For my money, first among the rabble of courtiers is Elon Musk. This is a guy whom I’ve admired in the past for his success in building Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink. Unlike Trump’s imaginary businesses, Mr Musk has built real enterprises with obvious value. True, he’s always been slightly odd. Yet oddness often lies on the flip-side of extreme talent.
My high opinion of him went sour when he bought Twitter. Not so much because he bought a social media business. After all, someone has to own them. More because of how he has used Twitter to propagate his vision of society, particularly where free speech is concerned. At least that’s how it seems to me.
For a long time, Twitter, whose name he changed to X, has been like a vast planet. It’s been impossible to visit every part of it. Most of us put up with the stuff its algorithms want us to see. Often though, those algorithms don’t get the message when they show us stuff we don’t care for.
In the past, that’s meant things that are mildly distasteful, sublimely uninteresting or plain stupid. Now, however, it’s hard to wade through a hundred posts without being invited to watch a act of extreme violence – a murder perhaps, an accident in gruesome detail, combat deaths in Ukraine or Russia. Block the sender and another one pops up. I don’t want to make the obvious link between a 12-year-old school shooter and the gruesome content they can freely watch on Mr Musk’s site. But if we’re normalising the portrayal of real-life death and destruction, are we surprised when people decide to create their own videos?
And what else do we expect when Mr Musk’s algorithms determine that an elderly fool like me will be entertained by videos posted under labels like Dead Guy Hub, Girl Fight TV and Crazy Fight Clips?
Here in the UK, if a broadcaster attempted to post such material, they would be shut down immediately for violating OFCOM rules, such as:
“Programmes must not include material (whether in individual programmes or in programmes taken together) which, taking into account the context, condones or glamorises violent, dangerous or seriously antisocial behaviour and is likely to encourage others to copy such behaviour.”
As for Mr Musk’s cherished devotion to free speech, is it really a violation of that freedom to prevent young kids from accessing snuff videos?
In the great man’s defence, perhaps there’s an argument that since violence is such a normal part of our online lives, we should no longer cast a veil over the real thing, just as we should ignore the powerful taboo, still prevalent in the west, that discourages us from seeing dead people. But by the same principle, why doesn’t he allow people to post hard porn?
Since I have no influence with Mr Musk, my only sanction is to walk away. Why then, you might ask, if I object to so much of the content it shows, do I still engage with Twitter? Well, it’s still a place where I can find political commentary from across the globe. And yes, I will freely admit that Trumpian effuent does’t hold a monopoly on political content on the site.
But Twitter/X must think I’m a strange chap. Unsolicited content that appears on a regular basis on my feed also includes classical music videos and rock clips some of which which in the morning I have to listen to with headphones to avoid frightening the horses, not to mention my slumbering wife.
Aside from the video nasties, what I find most disturbing is Musk’s loud and relentless personal promotion of Trump. In this he is different from most media proprietors. Whereas although Rupert Murdoch, for example, is well known for leaning to the right, you almost never hear him express his own opinions. Instead he leaves it to his various mouthpieces, such as Fox News and the London Times to act as their master’s voice.
Elon Musk, on the other hand, makes no pretension of anything except a laser focus on getting Trump elected. He’s quite happy to share his own opinions as well as retweet the most dubious assertions of others, particularly when it comes immigration, which is one of his pet obsessions.
He would have you believe that there’s a whole branch of government dedicated to letting in as many illegal immigrants as possible and making them citizens as soon as possible, so that in gratitude they will keep the Democrats in power for ever. Which in my opinion is pure bullshit, not least because most new citizens in the US do what everyone else does, which is to vote according to their interests. Call me a cynic, but I rarely see much in the way of gratitude or loyalty in modern politics.
These days, since he declared for Trump, his rhetoric is not confined to immigration. Here, for example, is a small excerpt from his speech at Trump’s Pennsylvania rally the other day:
“The other side wants to take away your freedom of speech. They want to take away your right to bear arms. They want to take away your right to vote effectively.”
In one respect, is Mr Musk skating on rather thin ice, at least as far as US law is concerned? Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act draws a distinction between acting as the publisher of internet content on the one hand, and the distributor on the other. Currently, social media sites such as X and Facebook are considered to be “platforms”. When they show content from third parties, the law states that in effect they’re acting as distributors, as opposed to providers. This gives them a defence against prosecution for providing what the law defines as harmful material.
Under Section 230, there are three tests that must be met if that defence can be validated:
- The defendant must be a “provider or user” of an “interactive computer service”.
- The cause of action asserted by the plaintiff must treat the defendant as the “publisher or speaker” of the harmful information at issue.
- The information must be “provided by another information content provider”, i.e., the defendant must not be the “information content provider” of the harmful information at issue.
But if the owner of a site (Elon Musk in the case of X) publishes “harmful” information on his site under his own name, by my reading of the law the site may be protected, but does the owner, in a personal capacity, have the same defence?
No doubt the owner of X, Tesla, Starlink and SpaceX has a battery of lawyers who assure him he’s fireproof. What disturbs me somewhat is that the guy has 200 million followers, many of whom are prepared to believe what he says because he is who he is. And no doubt many of those followers are also devotees of Donald Trump, who in my view is the most detestable presidential candidate in modern history.
What motivates him in supporting Trump I have no idea. There are plenty of theories floating about and possibly more than one reason. Vanity could be one of them. Trump’s offer of a role as an adviser to a his administration clearly appeals. Since Mr Musk can’t be president himself (he wasn’t born an American citizen), perhaps the next best thing would be to sit at the right hand of the most powerful man in the world.
Should that come to pass, I wish him good luck. Trump’s cronies tend not to last very long in a state of grace. Should Trump fail, it will be interesting to see what Elon Musk does next, and whether expediency causes him to reset his principles in order to weather a less sympathetic climate than that promised by the orange monster. For I sense that by jumping into politics he’s made a few enemies he didn’t have before. And a man who operates on so many fronts risks descending into paranoia through not knowing where the next threat is coming from.
Not a recipe for a quiet life, either on Mars or back here on dear old Earth.
As a dedicated political voyeur, I used to love British elections. Watching the mighty fall, the underdog triumph and the status quo thrown upside down. Staying up all night while the hacks struggled for something meaningful to say. And finally, exhilaration or despair as the ones you wanted or didn’t want stood on the steps of 10, Downing Street and spouted pious nonsense.
My involvement would be limited to voting. No canvassing, demos, silly rosettes, milkshake throwing or insult hurling. And anyway, elections tended to be a bit less histrionic back in the day. By and large, people behaved themselves. There was the occasional joke candidate. The odd irritable TV debate. But the back and forth rarely descended to the sewer level. By and large, the liars covered their tracks, and one party would usually refrain from direct accusations of lying against their opponents.
Perhaps I’m drawing on faulty memories, but I seem to recall that there was a basic level of respect for the participants in process. Politicians would reserve their fiercest vituperation for private conversations that couldn’t be picked up by Alexa and open mics..
Not now. Insults, cheap stunts, lies and accusations of wrongdoing are now common currency. If you can’t deal in that currency, you have no place in modern politics. And when you vote for the dog-shaggers, you get what you pay for. Shaggy dogs on steroids.
When did all this stuff begin? In the US, was it the coming of Trump, or, a couple of decades before him, Newt Gingrich, his John the Baptist ?
In the UK, was it Enoch Powell? Surely not, because whatever else you might say about him, Powell expressed his opinions in words of more than one syllable and with a measure of civility. If we point to the emergence of Nigel Farage, we mustn’t forget the backers who bankrolled him and his various “parties”. And we should also point the finger at the social media, whose creators broke the monopoly on opinion-forming previously held by the print and broadcast media.
And of course we should look in the mirror at ourselves. Twenty years ago, was it an accident that Russell Crowe in Gladiator rips his opponent to pieces and turns to the crowd, screaming “are you not entertained?”? In the case of the millions who saw the movie, the answer was surely yes. As it surely is today. Is it an accident that in recent months you can look at countless videos on Twitter/X showing Russian soldiers being blown to smithereens by Ukrainian drones? And today, a video of a wounded man being put out of his misery by his comrade?
There are no limits, it seems. And yes, our capacity to be entertained seems endless, as is the supply of political wannabees prepared to deliver that entertainment. It’s ironic that this election is taking place during a football tournament involving the England team. The thugs and drunkards are still to be found on the terraces, but nowadays they have their counterparts in the House of Commons. Or did until the King, as an act of mercy, dissolved it. Not forgetting those who rode into deep waters for groping colleagues, snorting coke and betting on the date of the election, of course.
Where am I going with this? Elections are about broad brush. Government is about detail, usually hidden underneath the broad brush, and often in a completely different direction to the brush strokes. An example: afraid of the reaction of the voters against tax rises? Answer: stealth taxes, buried in the small print.
There’s nothing new in such tactics. During an election, there are armies of politicians, researchers and journalists ready to flush out suspicious contradictions. But what is new, at least in my perception, is that the vast majority of voters don’t care about the detail. All they see is the brush strokes.
I was about to go on and say that not only are most voters uninterested in details (except those that directly concern them), but that a good proportion of them are too lazy (or distracted by the football) to pay any attention to the narratives propagated by the parties if it contradicts their own prejudices (as in immigrants, Brexit and so on).
Then I realised that I’m one of those people whose prejudices are set in concrete, even if my party loyalties aren’t. That said, in 50 years of voting I’ve never gone with the Conservative. So I do have an open mind: anyone but the Tories. That being the case, when the Reform Party leaflet dropped though my letterbox, I thought that I should give them a chance to impress me, even though Nigel Farage, their “leader” is someone that would have me hanging myself from the nearest palm tree should I be unfortunate enough to end up in his company on an otherwise desert island.
My local Reform candidate is an elderly gentleman whose gin-soaked tonic facial complexion appears to have been washed away by the suitable use of photoshop. He looks at the camera with an expression of pugnacious chippiness. His platform, presumably reflecting the party’s primary messages, is all negative. Control immigration, leave the European HR Court, cut taxes, scrap Net Zero targets and so on.
I managed to find a video of him talking to a local online magazine. He speaks with a whiny voice, and comes out with the usual disclaimers before launching in his dog whistle stuff: I’m not being racist, but….; I’m not a nimby, but…..” He looks like the kind of guy who would spend thousands of pounds fighting with his neighbours over leylandii forest at the end of his garden, or on a dispute over six inches of his boundary.
In addition to his portrait, there’s a photo of him at his desk. Pen in one hand, keyboard under the other. A painting of a diving Spitfire on the wall behind him, next to a fake brass candle wall lamp, probably courtesy of Homebase. His face is composed into a smirk which I’ve seen often on his leader (see the leaflet above). Perhaps Farage sends all his candidates to a special smirk school in Clacton or East Grinstead.
The gentleman wants us to believe that the Tory Party has “moved to the left” and are no longer conservative. He ends by saying that “if you want to save Britain, vote for what you believe in, vote for Reform UK.” Indeed. I’m resolved to do the former, which unfortunately doesn’t translate into the latter. As for saving Britain, I’m not sure I can influence its future one way or another.
Anyway, we only have another ten days or so of this. I’ve managed to avoid the debates, the policy discussions convened by the various TV stations and, by and large, the political columns of the national newspapers.
All I care about is that the current government is booted out of power, and that whoever follows them is booted out in much shorter order than the current rabble managed to cling on for. Whatever the next lot do will only be partly within their control, so the best wishes we send to the next government will be laced with strong degree of luck – for us rather than for them.
And what then? On July 5th, will we be singing “things can only get better” as we surf on a wave of optimism, or “yesterday” as we wallow in the despair of the dispossessed? How long will it take before hope is replaced by disappointment, and despair by sullen pessimism? How many former ministers will find safe harbour in the cosy consultancies they lined up well before their demise? And how many memoirs will sell 257 copies over the next five years?
Finally, what do we retired political junkies have to look forward to in the months to come? Ah yes, The Felon’s Last Stand. At least that’s what I’m praying for. Any other outcome would be a cataclysm. But enough of the Orange Monster for now. Let’s get the next few days out of the way. There are enough diversions, from the cricket and the footie and all those box sets I haven’t started yet, to keep me away from the politics.
The last time Labour got in for any length of time was in 1997, when Tony Blair was the man of the hour. My wife and I were at an election party. As I cheered the results coming in for Labour, our hostess fixed me with a beady eye, and accused me of betraying my country. Should anyone be foolish enough to invite me to a knees-up this time round, I shall keep my mouth shut, in case someone’s tempted to blow my head off with a shotgun – a reaction the would definitely be in tune with the times.
Best to stay at home, unless the Dalai Llama’s planning to have a do.
I wait for the 4th July with quivering anticipation.
The other day, I posted something about me being stupid. It was, I admit, somewhat tongue in cheek. But today I wonder if I really am stupid, because something has just happened in the United States that I utterly fail to understand.
It concerns my favourite Antichrist, Donald Trump, who today appears to be at least $3 billion richer through a deal that on the face of it seems as solid as the bridge in Baltimore that collapsed late last night.
The basics appear to be this. A Florida wheeler-dealer puts together a shell company and persuades a number of investors to put money into it. A shell company does nothing. The idea is that it waits to merge with another company that actually does something and then floats on the stock market. Clearly the investors, who chucked $300 million into the shell company, had plenty of faith in the wheeler-dealer, much in the same way as film studios commit huge sums of money into movies on the back of the “bankable” stars and director they’ve persuaded to sign up.
Then along come a couple of other wannabe wheeler dealers who once appeared on Trump’s Apprentice TV show. They have this brilliant idea of getting Trump, who has been banned by Twitter because of his various naughtinesses, to lend his endorsement to Truth Social, a new social media platform, Trump agrees to this in return for 60% of the shares in Trump Media, the company formed to own Truth Social.
The intention is that Trump Media will merge with the shell company, Digital World, thus getting its hands on Digital World’s $300 million. The new entity will then float on the stock market.
Today, two years later, after a few technical glitches (involving, you guessed it, lawsuits from aggrieved partners) have been resolved, the merged company hit the stock market. Its only asset apart from Trump’s reputation (hollow laugh follows) is Truth Social, which according to the New York Times “… is losing tens of millions of dollars and generated just $3.3 million in advertising revenue over the first nine months of last year.”
My reaction on hearing this news was astonishment. After all, who would bet on Donald Trump right now, mired as he is in multiple arraignments and law suits? And how on earth do you end up with a company worth $5 billion when it owns …. less than nothing? I suppose you could ask the same question about Tesla; how can a company selling 1.8 million cars in the last year be ten times more valuable ($500 billion versus $50 billion), than General Motors that produced 6.2 million vehicles in the same period? Blind, irrational, over-exuberant optimism? Or the terminal explosion of a global financial system gone bonkers?
The other reality is that what appears solid and everlasting can go pfft in a minute. How would you value Trump’s company if he ends up going to jail? Or if he avoids jail but loses the presidential election? Or if he keels over through an excess of cheeseburgers? Any of those outcomes appear a distinct possibility. And what would happen to a company ran by Trump’s successors? Depends who the successors might be, I guess. My bet would be that it would be acquired someone like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, both of whom have a few spare billions up their sleeves. But only once the value of the company has slumped to rock bottom.
The worst thing is that unless Trump and his partners are ineffably stupid, the whole transaction will have been perfectly legal.
So here we are. From 2008, when bankers risked fortunes (and lost them) on financial instruments they didn’t understand, to today, when it’s possible as if by magic to create something allegedly worth $5 billion out of virtually nothing. And equally possible that what has been brought into existence by the sorcerer’s apprentice will be blown away again once the sorcerer returns from his lunch break.
Would I have much sympathy for Trump Media/Digital World’s 400,000 investors who would likely lose their shirts? Not really. There’s a sucker born every minute. And as for Trump, he who lives by the sword dies by the sword. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
I watch the progress of Trump Media with interest.
PS: according to NASDAQ, as of 19.30 UK time, Trump Media now valued at $13 billion. Bananas!!!
News of an interesting piece of research on the cognitive ability of people, such as me, who have had COVID. Depending on the variant of the virus that infected us, it seems that our cognitive ability might have declined by between 4 and 9 points on whichever IQ scale the researchers used.
This explains a few things. Even though I was only marginally ill for a couple of days, I’ve noticed a marked decline in brainpower since I got the bug. For example, I couldn’t tell you the identity of 80% of current British cabinet ministers. There is an alternative explanation for that, of course. Given that the shelf-life of most ministers is about three months or less, how is one expected to have an up-to-date knowledge of who the this week’s incumbents might be?
Another explanation for my incipient stupidity is that when you get older there are a whole bunch of things you might remember if you were minded to do so, but that you can no longer be bothered with. These days, if you have an urgent need to know the dates of King Richard II’s reign or the life expectancy of a garden snail, the internet will tell you, thus freeing up a bit of your brain for random mush.
And in my case, I have an additional extenuating factor not shared by everyone. A couple of years ago we moved house. Our new place is quite old, which means that the doorways were designed for people considerably shorter than me. I didn’t see this as a problem until about 48 hours of moving in, at which point the top of my head looked as if it had been attacked by a mad axeman. Blood everywhere. Since then – which was around the same time as my one and only bout of COVID – I must have lost at least as many brain cells as the virus destroyed simply through failing to duck through doorways, usually while in the middle of a conversation with my wife (something about not being able to walk and chew gum at the same time, I suspect).
The upside of a COVID decline is that it can be a useful excuse for forgetting someone’s name or temporarily losing vocabulary. No longer a senior moment. Not even dementia. A COVID lapse. Which conveniently turns one into a victim, rather than a fat slob who’s had too many doughnuts and not enough exercise in their life.
Speaking of fat slobs, but on a less facetious level, Donald Trump was pretty wacky before his COVID episode, but far more so since then. His decline appears to be becoming ever more steep with every cheeseburger he snaffles down. Could this be Fauci’s revenge?
There must be a conspiracy theory lurking behind all this. Unfortunately in my virus-raddled state I can’t figure one out.
Have the lizards figured out we’re getting too smart for our own good and decided to slow us down a little? Has Xi Jinping decided that turning half his own population into gibbering dullards is a price worth paying to deliver the newly-minted dullards in the US into the hands of the arch-dullard? Or is this Putin’s little scheme?
To be honest, I don’t know and I don’t care.
And besides, I’m more interested in discovering what the actual effect might be of losing 9 points on an IQ scale, assuming we can all agree a common scale in the first place. Could it be a benefit in disguise, by rendering all those people who are “too clever by half” as dull as the rest of us? Or is it simply a matter of taking a few seconds longer than everyone around you to get a joke (in which case I probably never had the missing 9% in the first place)?
What we don’t know at this stage is whether the little grey cells will return, or whether they’re lost forever. If they do return, perhaps we face the horrifying prospect of Trump regaining his marbles, in which case he becomes not only malevolent but clear-thinking. As for me, I have no desire to recover my missing cognition. I’m quite happy with my current stupidity, thank you very much. And so is my wife, on the basis that having spent 40 years living with a smart-arse, she no longer has to deal with that less than attractive side of my personality. After all, it’s hard playing the smart-arse when you forget the subject of your smart-arsery half way through the act of talking about it.
And what if 9 points is merely a marker on a path of further decline? If so thank you COVID, for giving me reason not to finish 50% of the books I read, not being able to understand Tenet and Inflection, forgetting every password I’ve ever known, including where I hid the backup paper list and wondering why Xbook or FaceX don’t come up on a Google search. Before long, for five minutes I’ll be at the same intellectual level as my grandson, who at the age of six will soon be capable of reading Harry Potter, after which he’ll pass me on my way to Peppa Pig.
At which point I hope I have the cognitive ability to reflect that it was good while it lasted, and to mumble thanks and farewell.
This time four years ago, my wife and I flew back to the United Kingdom from a holiday in South-East Asia. As it turned out, we were just ahead of the first wave of the COVID pandemic. Within a couple of weeks the country was in lockdown.
We’ve done that trip a few times since then. Last week, we arrived home from Singapore bedraggled and somewhat ratty after a 14-hour flight. We don’t watch much TV when were out of the country, so we missed Breathtaking, a three-part drama documentary about Britain’s COVID experience. It’s based on one doctor’s recall of life in a busy public hospital as the virus took hold. Watching the first episode was quite a queasy experience. Not only the sight of doctors and nurses struggling to come to grips with a new virus that was willfully refusing to behave in the manner prescribed by the public health “guidance” at the time, but also in its recall of the time when we all dutifully watched the live broadcasts from Downing Street by ministers and civil servants. A time when we were hoping for Churchillian inspiration, but ended up with Boris’s bombast.
It also recalls the growing realisation by health service staff that they – and as a consequence we – were being lied to by the authorities. Thus the changes in “guidance” which downgraded the level of protective equipment required when treating COVID patients – against the evidence seen by front-line staff every day – was the result not of the considered deliberations of distinguished scientists and epidemiologists. They were required because the UK was running out of equipment. The lies were considered justifiable because the powers that be didn’t want us to panic.
No doubt all of this stuff will be covered by the ongoing public inquiry into the pandemic. And actually, I saw nothing I hadn’t already read about in Dr Rachel Clarke’s recall of that traumatic time. I also have my own resources to fall back on as a reference while watching the series. From the middle of March 2020, as things started going distinctly pear-shaped, I started writing a diary of the pandemic in this blog. I ended up writing what was effectively a daily lockdown column for 135 days in succession. By my reckoning that was quite an achievement. Whereas newspaper columnists often have teams of dedicated researchers to feed them stories and background information, I had only me. But then again, like most of us who spent our days confined to quarters, the one thing I had in abundance was time.
When I look back at what I wrote then, much of the negative stuff about how we, or more specifically the government, handled the pandemic, was clearly evident, and was being written about by people, including Rachel Clarke, who were far more qualified to comment than me. But what continues to make me go green around the gills is the ease with which the lies issued forth from so many mouths – as though the truth or otherwise of what Johnson and his gang were telling us was more or less irrelevent. Much of the same, of course, was happening in the United States at the time, except that with Trump at the helm, the response to the pandemic descended into the theatre of the absurd.
Whether Breathtaking will end up being as consequential as Mr Bates vs the Post Office , the other British docudrama that hit our screens at the beginning of this year (which I wrote about here), remains to be seen. That seems unlikely, because we all went through the pandemic. Breathtaking will be a dramatic accompaniment to the COVID Inquiry report, just as the Navalny documentary was a compelling backdrop to the sombre commemorations in Moscow. The ITV series on the Post Office prosecutions caused the whole scandal to blow up in a welter of outrage. It was already known about before the series, but only by a small minority of the country.
I’m not sure whether the pandemic has any more surprises in store for us, unless definitive proof emerges on the precise origin of the virus and the cause of its escape. But the Post Office scandal keeps on giving.
The row between Henry Staunton, the Post Office chairman, who was brought in just over a year ago to help clean up the mess, and Kemi Badenoch, the minister who fired him, has become quite spectacular. In each side’s version of the circumstances of the firing, someone was clearly lying. Was it the vastly experienced corporate leader whose reputation was previously impeccable and who, you might think, had little reason at the age of 75 to lie about what appeared to be the final assignment of his career? Or the ambitious minister, tipped for the top job, for whom, in an earlier age, the consequences of lying in her statement to the House of Commons would be fatal to her political career?
But when was that era of unimpeachable rectitude, when a minister caught lying risked instant career death? I was going to write a few words lamenting its passing. But then I thought further, and realised that it probably never existed.
The period I was thinking about ran from the end of the Second World War to the late 1990’s. You could make a case for saying that, in the UK at least, a population exhausted by war, revolted by the lies spouted by the Nazis, but also weary about being lied to by their own side for “reasons of national security”, developed an intolerance for political lies. Hence, in 1963 John Profumo, the War Minister at the time, was booted into obscurity when he lied about his relationship with Christine Keeler, a 19-year-old model.
The unforgivable started becoming survivable when New Labour turned political communications into an art form, and after the turn of the century the social media wrested control over methods of mass communication away from traditional outlets such as press and TV.
YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and the like made lying with impunity not only feasible but highly desirable. From then onwards, political impropriety, when discovered, continued to be frowned upon, yet many of those who were caught with their trousers down managed to find a way back into power. And if they didn’t achieve political resurrection, they still had other options for cashing in on their notoriety – books, reality shows, podcasts, or a nice little earner with Russia Today. More recently, Boris Johnson lied blatantly and regularly while holding the highest office in the land. Allegations of influence peddling, corrupt fast-track procurement and dubious honours for wealthy contributors have eroded public confidence in the integrity of politicians and public servants. We no longer believe their words, but, more fundamentally, we don’t trust their motives.
So on one level, Badenoch and Staunton can’t win, whichever of them is actually telling the truth. There will be one constituency ready to believe that Badenoch is a lying politician whatever evidence exists to the contrary, and another easily convinced that Staunton is a greedy corporate bandit taking revenge for the fact that his last little earner has come to a premature end.
My experience is that whatever the material consequences, a reputation can take the blink of an eye to shatter and a lifetime to rebuild. And that reality applies as much to an organisation as it does to an individual. Which leads me to wonder why so many people are prepared to risk their good names on flimsy lies. Are they arrogant enough to believe, like Trump, that they can get away with it? Or are they just stupid?
And what of the liars of yesteryear? Did the political villains of the 50s and 60s lie just as barefacedly because there was a decent chance that their colleagues and employers would be willing to cover up for them? Or were the print and broadcast media less prepared than now to expose the wrong-doers – especially on the grounds that “there but for the grace of God go I”? Perhaps the reality of the post-war decades was that political malefactors managed to hide their behaviour more effectively than they can today because in those days there was still a high level of trust in public servants. Kim Philby was never suspected of espionage by those who should have unmasked him because he was “our kind of person”. John Le Carre had much to say in his books on that subject.
I have no answers to these questions, but I do wonder whether we have reached peak deception – the point at which the atmosphere of public discourse is so polluted by untruth that it will never again be easily breathable.
All I know is that many people, myself included, find themselves mistrusting individuals and organisations whose honesty we would never previously doubt. Who would imagine that the Post Office, of all creatures, would turn on and harass so many of its employees without exploring all the possible causes of the allegedly missing funds?
“Trust no one” has become our default attitude. That includes our leaders, our neighbours, our parents, our children and just about everyone else we encounter in our daily lives. Is there a road back from this pervasive paranoia? I’m sure there is, but perhaps we need to develop a different kind of intelligence to protect ourselves.
Which will probably be the subject of another post in the not too distant future.
A brief commentary on the sad demise of Putin’s gadfly.
There was only going to one out of two outcomes for Alexei Navalny when he stepped off his plane in Moscow back in 2021. One was that he would be neglected to death, yelling and kicking on the way down. The other was the Cry Freedom scenario, in which he was finally released – a mythical figure of Mandela-like authority.
Putin clearly chose the former outcome. He almost certainly wouldn’t have lived long enough to see the latter come to pass.
I suppose Alexei’s death does illustrate the difference between Putin’s methods of dealing with his opponents and those of his hero, Josef Stalin. You wouldn’t expect Uncle Joe’s hitmen to botch the killing of the likes of Alexei. So why did Putin’s team screw up? Was it a deliberate under-dose designed to put the wind up Navalny and his supporters, or was it just a cock-up? In any case, Stalin dealt with serious rivals by show trails followed by a bullet in the neck in the Lubyanka. Not so easy for Putin, since he’s under greater international scrutiny than Uncle Joe ever was.
In any event, I have a feeling that Alexei knew that his fate was sealed once he was taken off to his first penal colony. The only thing that might have saved him was some form of coup that got rid of Putin. But even if that happened there would have been absolutely no guarantee that the coup plotters would have welcomed Alexei back in Moscow. Would Prigozhin have been pleased to see him? Highly unlikely.
It only remains for those of us who are interested in the future of Russia and its relations with the rest of the world to mourn the death of a brave man, to hope that his passing brings closer a time when Russia will be able to deal with its competitors with less of a snarl and a sneer. For that to happen there will be a need for more Russians with Navalny’s courage and principles to show a different way from the oppression and paranoia that prevails today.
Needless to say there will also need to be some deft diplomacy on the part of Russia’s rivals to help ensure that whatever leadership succeeds Putin is encouraged to enter into stable and constructive relationships with those rivals, as once appeared possible after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Well now, since Joe Biden’s cognitive facilities have just been determined by a special prosecutor (who’s supposed to be impartial but seems anything but) to be seriously impaired, and for that reason an increasing number of supporters are saying that he’s not a suitable candidate to be president for the next four years, I thought I would do a quick audit of my own mental capacity at the grand young age of 72. How would memory perform if I was suddenly – and miraculously – elevated to the office of prime minister of the UK? And how would I measure up against Joe, for that matter?
Since Joe is said to have a bit of a temper, I’ve added a few curses for more convincing effect. So here, for your amusement, are some examples of my declining faculties:
When I wake up in the morning, I’m often not sure what day it is. Is that a problem? Thanks to my smart phone, hell no. Provided of course I can figure out how to use the damned thing. And should it fail, there’s always my beloved to kick me out of bed if required. Not a problem for Joe I imagine, since there are bound to be secret service agents constantly prowling around to make sure he’s not dead.
Sometimes I forget my wife’s birthday, or our wedding anniversary. Does that prevent life from going on? Not really, I just acquire a fresh layer of scar tissue every time it happens. I doubt if that EVER happens to Joe. That’s what chiefs of staff are there for, right?
No, I can’t remember when my mother died. I don’t need to. Her picture is on the mantelpiece. That’s enough. And as Joe might have said, it’s none of anybody’s fucking business.
If you ask me to make a speech, I might misquote a name or two. That’s usually because I’m too busy focusing on my audience to concentrate on the words in front of me. Or maybe I didn’t print the words large enough for my failing eyesight to pick up. I would explain Joe’s lapses by pointing out that some people are good at faces, some at names – rarely both. If in my new role I fail to recognise people in public gatherings, I’d just get everyone to wear a name tag.
How much Latin and Greek do I remember from my days studying those languages? Once upon a time, I was able to write grammatically perfect essays in either. These days I can barely translate a tombstone. Is this because I’m losing my wits or because my brain has locked away unused knowledge and skills? The latter, I suspect. It’s all still there. I just need to hit my head on a doorway to bring it back. And Joe? he has 50 years experience in high-level politics. I would say that there are plenty of shits he dealt with in that time whom he has chosen to forget.
Many years ago, when I was at university, I kept bumping into a person who seemed to know me better that I knew him. In fact I never knew his name, but in order to avoid hurting his feelings I pretended that I did. This was excruciating. I ended up knowing quite a lot about him but never his name. He was always “mate” or some other term of endearment. Which goes to show that impairment – if such it is – doesn’t necessarily strike late in life. it’s just that when you get old, you’re looking anxiously for the evidence.
I have a pretty large library of books at home. I read about a hundred a year, mostly non-fiction. As for the fiction, I have full sets of Le Carre and Robert Harris novels among others. I reckon there would be a 25% chance that I’d be able to tell you the plot of one of those books. The rest I’ve long forgotten. I don’t know whether or not Joe is a big reader. He can be forgiven if he’s not, given the amount of crap he as to wade through as president.
One thing I’ve noticed in recent years is that from time to time, when I’m talking about something, I might veer off track and forget what I’m talking about. It only takes a few seconds to recover. Joe does too. Is that such a bad thing? I’ve always found that there’s nothing like an unscheduled pause to keep an audience on their toes. Think of the unspoken questions from the audience: Was I asleep? Did I miss something? Is my hearing OK? Is he about to keel over? Has he just made a joke? Should I laugh?
I can think of all manner of other impairment evidence. For example, I remember very little of my riotous life in my twenties. Because there are few photos or letters to jog the memory, much of it’s gone. I often have to rely on old friends to fill in the gaps (thanks Andy!).
I suspect much of this is normal, but beyond the understanding of the smart-arse special prosecutor who made such a big deal of Joe Biden’s occasionally flawed memory. In fact I know very few people between the ages of 70 and 90 who don’t suffer memory gaps. That doesn’t make them incapable of effective and productive lives. They just develop workarounds.
So let’s think about what kind of impairment might make me incapable of filling my exalted position. How about remembering the names of one’s cabinet members? In the UK, a Prime Minister could be forgiven for forgetting a few names, given how anonymous the current lot are. Perhaps the same applies to Joe.
The stuff you don’t want to lose is the ability to communicate, to listen, to explain, to negotiate: the life skills. And what if you lost your understanding of the nature of things? If you no longer remembered the purpose and function of a nuclear bomb, or how budgets work, you’d be in trouble. But in Joe Biden’s case, and certainly in mine, it wouldn’t take long for your colleagues to summon the people in white coats. But what if you were Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un or, God help us, Donald Trump, if he were to become president again? What if your subordinates were so terrified of you that they would do your bidding no matter how deranged you were? Think of Hitler or Stalin.
I don’t see any evidence from Robert Hur, the special prosecutor in Biden’s case, that any of the fundamental degradation of cognitive faculties I’m referring to above has taken place. What’s more, Hur’s brief was not to provide a psychological evaluation of those faculties.
But here’s a thought. If you knew me well enough, you could easily design a series of questions that would make me look incapable of managing a teapot, let alone a country. And I suspect that the same applies to Biden. But equally, if you asked us a different set of questions, you would have no doubt about the ability of people like Joe and me in our seventies and eighties to deal with what’s put in front of them.
As we grow older, we hold on to knowledge and skills that continue to be useful to us. And we hone them by using them – by practice. And I suspect that the American people have far more to learn from Joe Biden at 81 than the ambitious Robert Hur at 50.
Should Biden end up running against Trump this time round, I suggest that both of them undergo the same psychiatric evaluation – administered by an unimpeachably impartial team – after their nominations. After all, there are illnesses that cause cognitive impairment. so it would be sensible to rule them out in the cases of both candidates. But equally, it is wrong to make assumptions – even about Trump – without proof positive.
Indeed, if an evaluation should prove that the kind of memory lapses that Biden suffers are not impediments to his doing his job properly, the same judgement might apply to Trump. But here’s the difference between the two. The problem with Trump is not what he forgets or misstates, it’s what he actually says, much of it with malicious intent. Whereas Joe might forget a few names, but he doesn’t tend to go on riffs about starting World War 3 or encouraging Putin to attack NATO members who don’t pay their dues. Out of the two of them I’d prefer to have a well-meaning gentleman with his finger on the nuclear button any time.
One final thought. An important variable among older people is motivation. The less you want something the less you try to get it. And the less you try, the faster your abilities degrade.
As for me, as I sit among my imaginary cabinet at 10, Downing Street and bark out orders, I have the comfort of knowing that William Gladstone only stepped down from my office at the age of 84, 12 years older than me. And Winston Churchill finally retired to Chartwell at 81.
So I reckon I’ll be soldiering on in my fantasy office for a few years yet. Anything to keep the Tories out…
There are times when I only post something to this blog after spending several days over it. Not because I’m struggling to find the right words or ideas, but because with some subjects I can say something that will be as true tomorrow or the day after as it is today. That in turn will be because every day there will be a fresh reason to say what I want to say. So no rush – the post will always seem newly-minted and topical. This is certainly true with Donald Trump, about whom I’ve written many times over the past decade.
Seven years ago, I made a vow that I wouldn’t go near the country as long as Trump was its president. I didn’t. I fact I continued to stay away even after Trump was sent packing to Florida. So malign has been his influence over his country that it sometimes feels that he’s never stopped being president, at least of a goodly percentage of the population. But now, I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t time I revisited the United States. If it’ll let me in of course
Why would I think about returning now? After all, America seems to be in the grip of a lunatic cult that defies logic and reason. Its messiah is one of the most repulsive individuals to have held high office in any democracy, let alone the United States. Surely that would be a good reason to continue to stay away.
Here’s why I’m thinking otherwise.
For as long as I’ve been old enough to think for myself, most of what I’ve thought about America has been positive. Of its people: ambition, determination, generosity, optimism, creativity, curiosity. Of its culture: music, film, theatre and art. Of its scientific and engineering expertise. Those qualities have always outweighed the less appealing facets: exceptionalism, parochialism, naivety, greed, lack of compassion for the underdog. Despite these less attractive traits, to someone of my generation, America, warts and all, has always felt like the good guy.
But now? Perhaps I look at the country too much through the lens of Twitter.
Other media provide perspective of course – I subscribe to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic and the New Yorker – but X, as we must now call it, has become a moral cesspit that seems a perfect match for the diseased mind of Donald Trump.
The X that Elon Musk has determined I need to see is a dark and grimy place. It shows me never-ending video clips of people beating the crap out of each other, especially in the US. Violent, nasty, almost snuff movies. Lately I’ve been regaled by a series of interviews with American serial killers. Am I really interested in the opinions of some psycho who took it upon himself to wipe out half a school classroom? So why is this stuff being directed towards me?
Then there are videos of pets being rescued and wild animals doing hilariously stupid things, which suggests that, according to X’s algorithm, people who enjoy watching snuff movies also love wildlife, and just love cosying up at night with cuddly Siberian cats or lovable XL Bully Dogs.
Then there’s stuff about Gaza, lots about Trump’s legal travails, a small amount about the imminent demise of the UK’s train wreck of a government. And no tranche of posts would be complete without a video of a Russian tank being blown up, or of some unfortunate soldier in his dugout being wiped out by a drone.
Those subjects account for about 50% of the content. The remaining delights – in my version of the site – are divided between Trump’s desperate efforts to stay out of jail, amplified by right-wing media from the US and the UK. And Musk himself – X’s very own Joker, doing his Deus Ex Machina act and spreading lies about immigration in the US. Much of what he tweets serves as a portal into an extremist hell, where gremlins and goblins lurk.
“Then don’t use Twitter/X”, I hear you say. And of course you’re right. But I suppose I keep wading through the sewer for the sake of the tiny percentage of content that from my perspective is interesting and worth reading – historical stuff for example. I guess there’s also the allure of having a prime seat in the online Colosseum to watch Maximus/Jack Smith delivering Commodus/Trump his just deserts.
But at some stage I also want to look beyond the sound and fury and revisit America before my memory of the country I once loved has been completely erased by the brutal portrait that Elon and his headbangers are painting. Has that welcoming, kind, and generous country for ever been marginalised and cast aside by the likes of Trump and his serpentine followers?
Perhaps I’m too late. I’ve certainly been through something of an attitude shift since 2016. These days, when I encounter an American with a big belly sporting one of those trademark chin-beards, I find myself automatically assuming that if prompted he’ll start spewing the MAGA Bible, or more particularly the Gospel of Q. Ten years ago, I might have thought of him as a good ole boy, essentially harmless unless you step on his toes. Now I might look for murderous intent, and wonder if he was one of those folks that beat up the Capitol on January 6 2021, or cheered on those who did.
Perhaps this is another way of saying that to my eyes, and most likely those of many foreign onlookers, the antics of Trump and his cult members have brought about a disastrous degradation of America’s international reputation. Politically, culturally and socially, America is no longer the lodestar. It’s unreliable, fractious, bitterly divided and quite possibly no longer an ally to be trusted.
I would like to see if that perception is justified. I’m not sure I’ll succeed, but it would be good to have a look around anyway, Have those outward-looking American values shrivelled into a meaner, more paranoid, inward-looking version of their former selves? Have the icons of decency gone altogether, or are they waiting for Trumpian America to self-destruct?
In case any American reader thinks I’m being unfair to their country, perhaps they can take comfort in the thought that the United Kingdom, my country, has for the past few years been experiencing a similar bout of insanity from which it has yet to emerge. Some leaders of the madhouse have shuffled off the political stage, but many still remain. But that’s for another day.
I take no pleasure in seeing so many people in both countries duped into believing one big lie after another. But at least an electoral reckoning is coming. At the moment I’d put money on Rishi Sunak going down in flames in the next few months. Of the outcome for Trump I have no clue, but it’s safe to say that even if he doesn’t succeed in November 2024, even more potent pretenders to his crown will be looking to follow in his footsteps.
Some years you can’t predict at all. About others, including this one, you know only one thing: there will be blood.
I watch with pain, sympathy and intense interest.
Why did a recent TV drama documentary featuring a scandal at what was once a humdrum British institution reduce me to blood-boiling fury, when so many other events, big and small, week in and week out, should have evoked a similar response but didn’t?
The answer presumably is that there’s only so much white-hot outrage you can experience in a given day before the adrenaline runs out or you collapse with exhaustion. Which perhaps explains why I’m not chewing the carpet about Gaza, or about a young fellow murdered in a park on New Year’s Eve, or about the iniquitous bilge spewed out on a daily basis by Donald Trump.
And why did this story about the British Post Office scandal, which was not new to me, have me shouting “bastards!” or worse at the TV every few minutes over the four episodes.
In answer to the first question, perhaps its a matter of desensitisation. We’ve become used to the inhumanity of protagonists in the Israel/Palestine saga. Knife crime has become so common in the UK that we’re no longer shocked by it. And Trump? What else is there to say about a country that could even contemplate such a monster from becoming its president again?
Perhaps what’s different about the Post Office story is that for me and I suspect many others in Britain who watched the series, it’s so close to home. Just about everybody has been to a Post Office for one reason or another. Over the past couple of centuries it’s become an embedded, indispensable feature of every town and village in the country. And until recently, when the suits took over, a trusted, and for many, a beloved, institution. Even after the corporate types encouraged us to think of it as a business rather than a public service, none of its customers doubted its integrity.
And what’s shocking is to see this pillar of British society turning on its employees with arrogance, malice and boneheaded refusal to question the validity of its actions. And even more shocking to see, both in dramatised form and from the actual mouths of those portrayed, even a small sample of the suffering inflicted on the victims.
So the idea that hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of sub-postmasters should suddenly turn into thieving shysters is almost as absurd as Santa Claus descending down your chimney with a cudgel, ready to rob you of your life savings. I won’t go into the details of the scandal here, except to say that the lives of hundreds of innocent employees and their families have been ruined. Their reputations destroyed, their livelihoods and savings wiped out.
Perhaps the root of my outrage is that these people could have been my neighbours. They could have been friends. They, their kids and grandkids could be seen walking the dog in the park. They were not a bunch of sinister chancers who lived in alleys and back streets and came out at night to rob us.
No. The chancers were the ones who gave bonuses to investigators based on the amount of money they recovered. The ones who told those who complained about the accounting system that they were the “only ones” who were experiencing such problems. The ones who lied about the reliability of the system, telling all and sundry that it was nigh on perfect. Who denied that the operators were able to manipulate the accounts of the sub-postmasters. And the ones who used legal tactics that the most ruthless sleazeball would be proud of in order to shut up the accused, with whom they did worthless plea bargains. And those who used legal delaying tactics Donald Trump would have loved to avoid the reckoning that their misdeeds would eventually incur, in the hope that the matter would just go away.
When I sat watching Mr Bates Versus the Post Office, they – the corporate persecutors – were the bastards I was shouting at. To my knowledge, none of them have been to prison or suffered financially, though those outcomes may be yet to come.
Two thoughts occur on the wider implications of the scandal.
Firstly. conspiracy theories are the jewel in the misinformation crown. Believe one and you will be more inclined to believe another. Before long you’re through the golden gate into cult membership. It’s easy to laugh at the crap people believe in, even when such beliefs lead to toxic behaviour. Unless they become full-blown religions, most of the really bizarre theories eventually die a death. The trouble is that we’re so infested with falsehood that whenever a real conspiracy is proven, especially with an impact as profound as the Post Office scandal, it tends to make all the dumb ones more believable.
Secondly, the idiots who were allowed to take over the Post Office in the 1980s gave it the appearance of a private business, even though it was always owned by the government. The intention was that it be prepared for privatisation, even if the final step was never taken. Its performance since then, crowned by the Horizon scandal, would seem to have banged yet another nail into the coffin of privatisation.
All of a sudden, the idea that a business whose raison d’etre is to make a profit for its shareholders can be restrained from using every available tactic – moral or immoral – to achieve that objective seems a little fanciful these days. As does the idea that a bunch of seemingly tame regulatory bodies backed up by tepid legislation prevent these companies from enriching their executives as a reward for short-term thinking that funnels money to shareholders rather than into improving the enterprise and preparing it for the future.
The Post Office joins the hall of infamy already populated by some of Britiain’s favourite privatised utilities.
Take our railways, for example. Looking back with nostalgia at the time when we had a single organisation called British Rail might be comparable to modern Russians looking back fondly at the era of Josef Stalin. But as we struggle to navigate a byzantine booking system and make it onto a train that isn’t delayed or canceled only to find that the prohibitive price we’ve paid for our tickets entitles us to standing room only, I suspect that more than a few of us look back fondly to the jobsworths and stale sandwiches of the publicly-owned British Rail.
And what of our water companies, whose main contribution to the life of the country is the turds and other detritus that slide past the banks of our once-beautiful rivers and decorate our favourite beaches? And our energy companies are hardly bywords for efficiency and diligence. Those that don’t go bust after a year or two scare the bejasus out of us by sending us bills that are inaccurate by a factor of a hundred or more.
About the only privatised utility I can think of that has escaped a large dose of public disapproval in recent years is British Telecom. I suspect that this is largely because it’s unrecognisable from the organisation that spawned it, but also because its original technology – copper wire, analogue landlines – is becoming a thing of the past. So it’s not really possible to look back with nostalgia at the broadband speeds provided back in the day by the General Post Office, which once upon a time looked after the nation’s post and telecommunications systems, because broadband didn’t exist. And nor, for that matter, did Fujitsu and Horizon.
The sad thing about the story is that it needed a TV dramatisation to ram home the depths to which the Post Office sunk. I’ve been following the story for years as new aspects kept coming up, and then, presumably though the efforts of its PR people, quietly disappeared from view.
I suspect that now, thanks to Alan Bates, Toby Jones, ITV and all those who had the courage to speak up against the suits, there will be no hiding place, even for those who thought that their connections with the great and the good would allow them to slink away unnoticed.
This is not going away, thank goodness.
A short post on recent testimony to the British COVID Inquiry:
First point: if the evidence provided by insiders – senior advisers, civil servants and politicians who witnessed at first hand the rank incompetence of Boris Johnson during the COVID crisis – is to be believed, what does that say about the members of the Conservative Party who voted for him as party leader in 2019? Were they dupes, idiots or doctrinaire fanatics? Or were they ordinary people incapable of looking at a picture bigger than their own interests? That question should be asked of the same people, who then elected Liz Truss, an equally incompetent politician, as his successor, with consequences so disastrous that the members of parliament in her party saw to it that she was kicked out within 50 days.
There are two ways to ensure that this tiny minority never gets the opportunity to impose a third disaster upon the rest of us. The Tories should change their rules to deny their members that chance. But better still, those of us who weren’t instrumental in the elevation of the two worst Prime Ministers in British history, should, through our votes in the next general election, banish their party from power until most of its gullible members are in their dotage and incapable of distinguishing between a politician and a goat.
Second, let’s suppose the behaviour of the juvenile delinquents in Downing Street and elsewhere in government had become generally known during lockdown. If you’d done a poll of the general population whether we should “do as they do or do as they say”, I wonder how that would have turned out. 48% do as they say, and 52% do as they do, I suspect.
Third, I have some sympathy (though not much) for the dramatis personae who revealed their innermost thoughts on WhatsApp and ended up shredding their reputations. Back in the day, the only record of their conversations would have been in the form of minutes, from which the naughty bits would have been washed away by some diligent civil servant, or diaries published years later.
Should yesterday’s great and good have been able to communicate via the same method as today’s players, what, I wonder, might we have learned about Suez, the miners’ strike, the three-day week and other big events of the last century? What would General Alanbrooke have said during World War 2 about Churchill on the spur of the moment rather than in his diaries?
In this respect, our American cousins are way ahead of us. Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon all recorded their conversations. In Nixon’s case the tapes cost him his job. No doubt there are some pretty ripe WhatsApp conversations from the Trump era that have yet to see the light of day.
All of which suggests that these days, if you want to avoid scrutiny of your conversations, do what the cold war spies used to do. Go into the bathroom and turn on the taps. Or play Verdi’s Requiem at full volume in the living room. Mind you, if it’s now possible to read the charred scrolls from Herculaneum, it’s probably easy to filter out Verdi.
So no hiding place, folks. Somebody somewhere can hear you. Best you mind your language, or don’t have any conversations at all that you don’t want everyone to hear. Which, for a lot of politicians, would probably take most of the fun out of being a politician.
If, like me, you’ve been overwhelmed by the torrent of words and images from and about Israel and Gaza, you probably won’t want to read this. But I’m writing it anyway. For the record, so as to speak.
The Latin quotation in the title of this post comes from Tacitus, the Roman historian who imagines a speech from Calgacus, a Scottish chieftain, before he goes into battle against the Romans. In English: Where they make a wasteland, they call it peace.
Actually, these words are at the end of a sentence. The quotation in full reads: They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal: this they falsely name Empire, and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace.
I’ll leave you to determine whether the words of Calgacus can be applied to the present, or even to the recent past.
If Tacitus returned to life in the present day, what words might he put in the mouth of a horrified observer of events in Israel and Gaza? Something like this, perhaps:
If I criticize Israel’s bombing of Gaza, you show me dead babies murdered by Hamas.
If I deplore the actions of Hamas on October 7, you take that to mean I am anti-Palestinian.
If I criticize Zionism you call me antisemitic, even though my understanding of Zionism might be different to yours.
If I assert Israel’s right to exist, you accuse me of agreeing with Israel’s every action to secure that existence.
If I deplore the selective use of scriptures to justify killing people, you call me antisemitic or islamophobic, depending on which scriptures are being quoted.
If I see pictures of thousands of protesters at a rally, you would have me believe that each and every protester is doing so on the same basis of belief.
If I resent attempts to manipulate my views with blatant or subtle disinformation, you just point yet more disinformation in my direction.
If I ask why the death of half a million people in Syria provoked less public outrage in Europe and America than the killings in Gaza and Israel, you accuse me of false comparison.
If I point out that blood feuds are rarely settled with blood, you tell me about the last outrage, not the first one.
If I point out that the use of words and phrases such as “genocide” and “war crimes” have themselves become weapons of war, you accuse me of sympathising with the perpetrators.
If I point out the shortcomings of one culture or political entity, and balance those observations with criticism of another, you accuse me of sitting on the fence.
These sentiments, of course, are mine.
ALL THAT SAID…..
I have no idea how it feels to be the descendant of people who were murdered in Nazi death camps. I have no idea how it feels to be the descendant of people who were expelled from lands that were home to them for generations.
But what I do know is that expressing the hideously complex in simple slogans is tantamount to deceit. So I refuse to speak in terms that give others leave to jump to conclusions over “whose side I’m on”. I’m on the side of humanity.
I can only speak from the experience of watching conflict erupt and subside over seven decades. And that experience from a distance – of Algeria, Vietnam, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Nigeria, Yugoslavia, Rwanda and any number of other wars – tells me that military means might end a conflict, political settlements might create the conditions for peace, but only forgiveness and reconciliation can heal the wounds handed down from generation to generation. And only the perception of justice by all sides in a conflict can bring about that forgiveness and reconciliation.
So for what little these words are worth, I urge all parties, for the love of the God most of you agree you worship in common, to stop fighting.
Stop before you bequeath a wasteland to your children.
Two weeks in from a heart attack, successfully (it seems) treated by angioplasty, I’m starting to wonder when I’m going to forget that I’ve had a heart attack. Perhaps another way of putting this is when it becomes no more significant as a past medical event than the appendectomy I had a few years earlier, or the hernia repair earlier than that.
Forgetting about it means that I’m doing everything I did before without wondering if I’m overdoing it. It also means everybody else no longer thinking of me as “someone with a suspect heart” and treating me, if not with kid gloves, then as someone who’s likely to keel over at any moment.
Clearly I’m not at that point yet, but I find myself casting around for role models – people who have had heart problems but don’t appear to have let those problems dominate their subsequent lives. Yes, I know it’s a bit silly for someone of my advanced years to be looking around for role models, so perhaps I should say “points of reference”.
And indeed there are plenty of people who have had worse problems than me – bypasses and even transplants – who have achieved plenty since their operations. Probably the best-known is Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Arnie has had several bouts of open-heart surgery, yet still pops up in the public eye on a regular basis. At the moment he’s promoting his self-help book, which brought him to London the other day. And then there are his video monologues, the latest of which is on hate in political and social dialogue and has gained huge traction on the social media. Even I’ve watched it. Whether or not he wrote it, it’s a very impressive piece of speech-writing and oration.
As ever in these cynical times, I find myself wondering why he’s doing them. What’s his motivation? The good of mankind or to promote the book? I’d like to think it’s the former, though both reasons aren’t mutually exclusive.
One of the interesting motifs in Arnie’s latest video (previous ones have included a tirade against Trump in the wake of the 2021 storming of Congress), is that those who hate are losers who through their hatred ruin their own lives. I can’t argue with that. Hatred never made anyone happy in the end, even if the communal variety can provide a huge adrenaline rush.
But what’s equally interesting is his depiction of a world of winners and losers. You’re either one or the other. Trump uses the same theme. In the former president’s world just about everybody who opposes him is a loser. And of course there’s only one pure, unadulterated winner.
This, it seems to me, is a fundamental element of American culture. To call someone a loser in the US is to insult them. There’s nothing worse than a loser. Losers in life deserve contempt or worse. If you’re poor, if you’re unsuccessful, it’s because you’re a loser. You can only fix this by pulling yourself up by the bootstrings. And if you can’t, well, tough shit.
If someone does give you a helping hand, it’s not because of a generally-accepted sense of social obligation, It’s because you’re lucky. And I certainly don’t see strong evidence among the Christian Right that Jesus’s pronouncement that “blessed are the meek” holds much sway. There are plenty of billionaires who would have something to say about such people inheriting the earth. For are the meek not losers?
This ethos is famously mocked by Dustin Hoffman’s character in Meet The Fockers, in which Hoffman’s proud Dad has a wall full of certificates celebrating his son’s sixth or seventh places in various school and sporting competitions.
I don’t know whether the obsession with winning transcends the American political spectrum. Interest in sport, where I suspect the whole thing started, certainly does.
But what about Britain, and the wider European continent? I don’t think we have the same contempt for the loser that’s prevalent in the US. Indeed, especially in the sporting arena, we have a tradition of being gallant losers. Heroic failures attract praise, not scorn. And we often find people who blow their own trumpets to be rather vulgar.
What’s more, much as one political party would have us get on our bikes, we’re much more culturally sympathetic towards those who fall by the wayside, often for no fault of their own. Hence a bigger welfare state and our catch-all National Health Service, founded on principles that are still anathema in the United States: described with horror as socialised medicine.
There is, of course, one recent historical exception in Europe – Nazi Germany, founded on the principle of the survival of the fittest, an ethos that has survived among the various neo-fascist groups that have sprung up since World War 2, and has found its purest form in Putin’s Russia.
In lots of ways, Arnie is clearly a winner. Even if I don’t share his political views, I congratulate him for rising above his medical problems and remaining a relevant public figure in his eighth decade. He conducts himself with dignity and, I think, sincerity, unlike the other “winner” who I fervently hope will turn out in the near future to be the greatest loser of this century,
In short, I’d rather have a terminator with good intentions as a role model than the lying, manipulative conman who’s currently having so much fun in the law courts of America.
I have far too much time on my hands at the moment. This might seem odd, given that a heart attack a couple of weeks ago reminded me how little time – potentially – remains.
When I got home this week it was after exhortations to take it easy for a while, to let the heart recover – and blah blah blah.
What this means in practice is that all my usual physical activities – wood-chopping, marathons, municipal dump runs in which I single-handedly flip huge pieces of furniture into skips, restoring the house to order every time our grandson comes to stay – are off limits. I’m even told off for lifting a shopping bag out of the car (which, incidentally, my wife maintains I’m not allowed to drive, though I think there’s an ulterior motive – she claims to be terrified by my driving).
The result is both positive and negative. Even though I feel quite capable of doing all the things I’ve just mentioned, I now have an excuse not to do stuff which requires me to get off my backside. This is good for a while, until I remember that each hour of inactivity turns my well-honed body into a teeny bit more like a lump of jelly. Which of course shortens my life.
So I’m going to have to fill the activity gap with walking, which I find ineffably boring. But my normal outdoor regime consists of three or four rounds of golf a week, which is quite a lot more walking than might be sensible right now. Swimming is a possibility, but I much prefer outdoor swimming, which limits options in this part of the world given that the water’s likely to be freezing, laden with sewage or swollen with toxic floodwater.
But right now I’m in a bit of a hiatus. I’m being told what’s not safe to do, but not what’s safe. I hope to get some expert advice this week that will set me straight. The only guidance I’ve had thus far from the medical profession came from my local GP surgery. One of the doctors, who is not known for his empathy, suggested that I should start by walking short distances using a stick. This without asking me about my normal level of fitness and how fit I actually felt right now.
My gast was flabbered. A STICK? He’s suggesting I use a bloody stick! The assumption seems to be that I’m a cardiac cripple, shuffling around the house, wheezing from armchair to armchair and requiring assistance to get up the stairs at might. Not yet, mate. Not never hopefully. I may be in my early seventies but that shouldn’t imply an advanced level of decrepitude, as any number of my vigorous peers would testify.
Anyway, I have inactive hours to fill. I was warned that the aftermath of a heart attack often results in feeling low, depressed even. This is not the case for me, or at least not yet. But I do find my mind working slightly differently. I ask myself strange questions about silly things. Such as why we don’t leave the Loch Ness Monster, if it exists, alone? For what purpose do we obsessively try to prove its existence? To shove the poor thing into an aquarium or turn the loch into a real-life Jurassic Park?
And then I get to thinking about a real-life conundrum that might have faced me when I lay in a state of semi-collapse in Leicester Square. Two police officers were hovering, ready to try and resuscitate me if need be. One told me that he had done resuscitation on eighteen collapsed members of public in his career. Unfortunately fifteen of them died. The other guy had worked on three and they all survived. If I had the choice, who would I have asked to thump my chest? Not being a probability theorist, I probably have chosen the latter because of his 100% record. But would I have been right? Would it not have been better to go for the more experienced guy, given that the officer with a perfect score was more likely to fail with each successive attempt, whereas the guy who lost fifteen people had probably learned from the experience. Definitely grounds for phoning a friend. Unfortunately Daniel Kahneman isn’t a friend, so I’ll have to re-read Thinking, Fast and Slow.
I’m getting quite irritated by newspaper columnists whom I read regularly and usually find moderately entertaining. I pass over news articles I would normally read because I know what they’re going to say and they’ll be the same old bollocks. Same with politicians like our Minister of Education, who tells us that she’s going to introduce service levels to be imposed on teachers. Have these idiots learned nothing about the futility of decades of targets, quotas and service levels? Don’t they realise that quality can’t be defined by numbers, any more than that the beauty of a bird in flight can’t be captured by the measurement of beak, wing and claw?
Most difficult of all, as I sit in silent contemplation at times when otherwise I’d be out doing stuff, is Israel, Palestine and Hamas. I’ve written plenty in my time about the Middle East, yet I now find myself speechless. I have no appetite for pious homilies. Only a deep sense of pain and helplessness that there’s nothing I can say or do that might make the slightest difference to any of the benighted souls caught up in the conflict. Instead, I read lots of stuff, appalled at the suffering, the viciousness, the perversion of values and the emotional lightning storms accompanying the crisis. And then, bleeding heart liberal that I am, I’m appalled at myself for looking elsewhere when similar stuff happens in other parts of the world. Rohingya, South Sudan, Congo, Kashmir, Mexican narco wars and so on. And, of course, Ukraine, to which I do pay much attention.
Too many notes. As the Emperor Joseph said in Peter Schaffer’s play Amadeus: “you see, my dear Mozart, there are only so many notes that the human ear can hear”, or at least that’s what I remember from my lines when I played His Majesty in a production of Amadeus many decades ago.
Anyway, as the old ticker tries to return to its usual state of robustness, I shall fill the activity void with the occasional post on the subject of cardiac rehab and other topics, much as I did during the COVID lockdown. If you’re not bored to death by these ramblings, do keep reading!
What’s to be said about a heart attack? If you’ve never had one, not a lot, most likely, unless you’ve seen it happen to others. But if, as in my case, the Grim Reaper decides get a little non-lethal practice, several things come to mind.
First, and most obviously, I lived to tell the tale. So far. Which was far from assured when I got to the top of the stairs at London’s Leicester Square tube station en route to an evening at the theatre.
Second, it helps to be married to a medic. She knew straight away. So did I, but she had the presence of mind to find some aspirin in a nearby pub and cajole the ambulance service into sending a first responder. Before he arrived, I had two policemen hovering over me ready to shock me back to life. One of them told me he’d done resuscitation on eighteen people, which was a comfort, until he told me that fifteen of them subsequently died. His mate had a better record – three out of three. Fortunately, their assistance was not needed.
Third, if you’re going to have a heart attack, have it within a mile and a half of a major London cardiac centre. In my case St Bartholomew’s hospital was that unit. It’s the biggest in Europe. Lucky me.
On the less positive side, having a heart attack is a pain, literally and metaphorically. You feel your fitness being ripped away with every day in hospital. It turned out that one artery was completely blocked and two more were seriously narrowed. So they installed stents in two of them when I arrived, after which I felt quite normal. Four days later, I had the third one done. For some reason the after-effect of that one was far more debilitating. Perhaps it was the heart telling me enough already.
After the first procedure I ended up in a ward that had three other people. Two of them spoke no English whatsoever. The hospital had to use an interpreter to talk with them. The odd thing was that each new member of staff with a function to perform for that person had to find this out for themselves. I kept wanting to shout over “he’s from Barcelona”. (If you don’t get the reference, you’re not old enough.)
The nights were not pleasant. One guy moaning constantly, punctuating his high-pitched eruptions with invocations to his Maker. Another complained about gas and ending up deafening filling the room with a series of farts that sounded like a chainsaw in high gear. And a third guy spent much of his time belching like a bullfrog.
You’re hooked up to all these monitor wires. Every time you turn over, one of them pops out, so you have to call the nurse to rewire you. If you don’t, the monitor beeps incessantly until you do, waking everyone in the ward. Since there’s no sound separation between beds, you not only wake up to your beeps but everyone else’s as well. What I fail to understand is why, with all the whizzy technology they have, they can’t transmit this stuff from chest to monitor without the wires in-between.
And then there’s the commode run. It’s a bit disconcerting to be a yard away, separated by a thin plastic dividing sheet, from someone emptying his bowels with noisy aplomb. OK for Henry VIII’s Groom of the Stool perhaps, but not so much fun as the perfume wafts over.
But hey, I’m the one who paid the penalty for my lifetime of excesses, so who am I to complain about my presence in the middle of this physical and emotional mayhem?
I remain amazed by the number of people in so many roles involved in my care – taking your blood pressure, your blood sugar, shoving a bewildering array of drugs down you. Then there’s the dinner lady, the physio, the bed changer, not to mention the paramedics, nurses, registrars, consultants, the people wanting you to be part of their research, the cleaners, the porters and finally the sweet volunteer who wants to know what you thought of the hospital. I reckon that forty or fifty people were involved in my care over my eight-day stay.
Nationalities of all these people included Nigerian, Irish, Slovak, Hungarian, Ivorian, Zimbabwean, German, Lithuanian, Italian, Filipino, Mauritian, Caribbean and yes, a small smattering of Brits.
Of course everyone’s doing their best to keep you positive and as cheerful as possible under the circumstances. But I would advise that if you are unlucky enough to have a heart attack, try and make sure it doesn’t coincide with a war in the Middle East. Heartbreaking and depressing. As if Ukraine wasn’t disturbing enough. The older I get, the more I start thinking that one war at a time is just about as much as I can deal with.
If you do happen to fall ill during two wars, either of which could metastasise into some weird version of World War 3 (without the nukes hopefully), I suggest that for your light reading choice during your recovery you might avoid one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century, which is set in World War 2, and Stalingrad in particular. Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman – all 950 pages of it – is one of the most profound, intense, moving and thought-provoking novels to come out of the Soviet Union. And, depending on your physical and mental health at the time of reading, the most depressing. I shall write more about it some other time, possibly while I’m off games during cardio rehab. Next time I end up in hospital for an indeterminate period, I think I’ll bring War and Peace. More cheerful.
What of the little community of (hopefully temporary) cardio cripples among whom I found myself? To a man, the Brits were grumpy old men, including me. A moan a minute. Then there was a Brazilian, who seemed cheerful enough, boosted no doubt by a succession of noisy phone calls seemingly from all parts of the world. He was right to be cheerful, since he escaped after three days.
The person I will never forget was the little guy in the bed opposite me. He spoke no English. Despite coming from somewhere in the region of Bengal, he also spoke no Bengali. Therefore to communicate with him the hospital had find someone with his dialect, which they do through a subscription app on the net. His wife also spoke no English. From what I was able to gather from overhearing various conversations through the interpreter, he lives in a council flat somewhere in East London, which suggests he’s either a UK citizen or has permanent residence, most likely the latter because to get a shiny blue passport he would probably need a language test, which he would unquestionably fail.
Though I hate to say it, because generally I’m a bit of an immigration softie (which definition probably includes anyone to the left of the odious Suella Braverman), I’m wondering how he manages to function in this country without a word of English. Only if everyone in his immediate environment speaks a language he understands, assisted perhaps by younger members of the family who do speak English.
This is the point at which Nigel Farage jumps in with “there, I told you so, you right-on liberal elitist. This what the rest of us have to deal with”. Though I doubt if our posh champion of Little England has ever been near a Bengali home in the East End of London, whereas I have. Well, not in the East End, but in deepest West Midlands. This was in the course of a summer job fifty years ago. My role was to knock on doors and hand out forms related to an upcoming national census. My beat took me though an area largely populated by ethnic south Asians – in other words, exactly the kind of family that gathered in front of me during visiting time over the past week. The scenario was just the same, except that Enoch Powell was the harbinger of doom then, and now it’s Farage. Hardly surprising, yet depressing, that we still have people living in ethnic and cultural silos. Only a surprise in that so little seems to have changed since Enoch banged on about rivers of blood, which fortunately didn’t happen then and isn’t happening now.
So what can I add to the cascade of opinion from all sides that our National Health System is failing? The quality of staff was excellent, or so it seemed to me. The kindness, the individual care and the responsiveness, from paramedics through to cleaning staff, was undiminished. That the NHS is in the shape it’s in after the battering it received during COVID is a miracle. The institution is a huge machine with many working parts. Sometimes bits fall off. It certainly has inefficiencies, some of which were evident during my stay – for various reasons I ended up in a bed for four days more than necessary.
Given the excellence of the front line staff, it does seem that most of the issues are likely to be about process and management, as is often claimed. Can they be resolved by fine tuning or extra funds? I don’t know. But when I watch generations of government ministers, administrators and consultants having their turn at “sorting the NHS”, often with unintended and adverse consequences, I’m reminded of the comment someone once made about Google, that their algorithms have become so huge and tentacular that nobody really knows how they work anymore. Likewise, I suspect, the NHS.
I certainly wouldn’t want any more contributions from the kind of government that likes to put talentless cronies into key positions for political reasons (such as Nadine Dorries in Culture and, most recently, Grant Shapps in Defence). Perhaps we should wait for a new bunch to have a crack at it.
Meanwhile, ten days on from my little episode and safely installed back home, I’m in pretty good shape and looking forward to regaining my usual stellar level of fitness.
And finally, my little episode demolished a cherished idea I’ve always clung to. I always thought that the experience of having been at a boarding school between the ages of 8 and 17 would prepare me perfectly for life in an institution – such as prison. I was wrong. Eight days in a London hospital, excellent though it is, convinced me that if I was confined in any place on a long-term basis I’d soon become a gibbering idiot, or lose most of what brain capacity remains.
So certain lifestyle adjustments are called for to avoid a repeat of the Great Collapse of Leicester Square. Those of you who know me well will probably know what I’m talking about.
Many thanks to my beloved, to the NHS, and to all the relatives, friends, neighbours and bystanders who were so supportive during and after my little brush with eternity. I’ll try not to trouble you again.
Britain’s Labour Party has inflicted two massive defeats on the Conservative government in bye-elections held on Thursday (yesterday as I write this). The media reaction is predictable: Labour is heading for a crushing victory in the next general election.
What people tend to forget is that these bye-elections came about because of the resignation of two senior members of parliament: Nadine Dorries, a former minister who didn’t distinguish herself in office and checked out of her constituency for many months after announcing her decision to resign, and Chris Pincher, a former whip who resigned after accusations that he drunkenly groped a male colleague, not the first such incident, according to media reports.
Which leads me to make an obvious observation, which I’ll make anyway.
One of the reasons why the government is failing is because of a lamentable lack of talent in its ranks, or at least through the failure to promote those who do have a modicum of talent, There’s no shortage of opinion on the causes: pay, high barriers to entry, selection processes, toxic working practices and social media abuse are chief among them. No doubt all are valid reasons. Isabel Hardman, a well-regarded political journalist, wrote a convincing book on the subject, Why We Get the Wrong Politicians, which I reviewed a few years ago.
But here’s the obvious bit. We elect these people. Or we choose not to. Or we sit on our arses while others cast their votes. Do we vote for the candidates who stand before us, or do we elect who The Daily Mail, The Mirror, The Telegraph or some rabid pundit on the social media tell us to? Do we vote for Labour, the Tories, the Lib Dems, personified by their leaders, or do we pass judgement on the candidates themselves, their qualities, their track records and their opinions? Do we even take the time to listen to them? Do we figure out what questions to ask them?
Or do we just say to ourselves “well they’re all a bunch of shites, so I’ll just go for the one who seems the least shite”?
If we pay no attention to the actual people who want to represent us, rather than to the persuasion machines deployed by their parties, then we have no right to complain if those we elect turn out like Dorries or Pincher, or, worse still, the mendacious, the mediocre and the plain rogues who have led our government over the past ten years or so. Because those we elect are responsible, at least in part, for selecting our leaders.
So perhaps it’s well to remember in the run-up to the next general election that we, the voters, have our part to play if our democracy is to be worthy of the name. Whereas in yesterday’s bye-elections the parties presumably took some care to select the most attractive candidates, in the general election, thanks to the sheer numbers of candidates involved, the proportion of time-servers and dullards is bound to be higher. Of course, many of us are too distracted by our own problems to pay much attention to the details of what our representatives are saying and doing in our name. But for most of us there’s no excuse.
Time to pay attention if we don’t want another generation of wrong’uns crawling around Westminster on our behalves.
Edumacation, as we children of Birmingham call it, is about to feature strongly at this year’s Conservative Party Conference. Rishi Sunak, Britain’s esteemed Prime Minister, is about to pull another goodie out of his increasingly threadbare bag of policies. He wants to create a British Baccalaureate that will give employers the “skills they need”. So students will be required to continue studying English and Maths along with their preferred options as a replacement of the current A Level system, in which they specialise in three or four subjects.
A jolly good idea, you might think, though perhaps he should first address crumbling school infrastructure, teacher shortages and the overarching financial constraints that currently afflict us. However, assuming that there are sufficient classrooms that aren’t about to collapse and a whole raft of new and enthusiastic teachers stand ready to embrace his reforms, I suspect that Sunak will have ceased to be prime minister for many years before the changes he advocates are processed through the civil service meat grinder and survive a trial by fire on the part of all the vested interests that might have something to say about them.
Much as disapprove of Sunak and his rabble of a government, I’m in favour of baccalaureates. Why? Because no matter what specialisations students choose for further education, they will surely benefit from a broader set of knowledge and skills. Having said that, Sunak doesn’t go far enough.
Yes, enhanced language skills would surely be useful especially if they resulted in the student being able to write a coherent, error-free CV without the aid of ChatGPT, which was an ability I found surprisingly lacking, even from graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, when I was an employer of supposedly bright people.
And maths? Depends on the application. Not so many people are called upon to plot the trajectory of a moon lander using slide rules these days. But yes, understanding some basic principles before having to resort to software applications would certainly be helpful, though you would expect those principles to be embedded in the curriculum way earlier than the final two years.
So what are these other skills that would be useful for employers?
The first thing to point out is that knowledge and skills don’t stay with you for life. They need to be continually revived, rekindled and refreshed. If unused, they fall away. So what you learn at school isn’t an indicator of what you will know at the age of forty. At my advanced age, I can still (at a push) read an ancient Greek or Latin gravestone, but ask me to write a description of Boris Johnson in Latin and I’d be stumped.
But it’s good to start out in adult life with a set of usable skills, whether or not they wither away with time. So here are five my favourites. If I was Minister of Education I would ask my civil servants to think about how they could roll them up into a Life Skills module, should Baccalaureates finally become a thing:
Personal Finance: Learning how to budget is pretty useful, even if you end up busting it like Liz Truss. Understanding statistics and how they can be manipulated. Understanding how banks work (or don’t). And for those of us who fancy getting a mortgage or maxing out our credit cards, an understanding of compound interest would be handy.
Communications: This would seem to be a pretty obvious one. But how many people do you know who are all broadcast and no receive? So listening skills, and the art of empathy, provided it doesn’t slip over into manipulation, would be helpful. Framing questions to get the desired response. And what about public speaking?
Critical Thinking. The perfect weapon for escaping from rabbit holes. If ever we need bullshit detection, it’s now. In fact, you could create an entire A Level dedicated to distinguishing between truths, half-truths, white lies and outright porkies. Not just on the part of mendacious politicians, but of salespeople, media stars, preachers and lovers. Yes, study of the humanities, such as Classics, history or philosophy, theoretically equips students with decent critical thinking ability. But these subjects are in decline as the technocrats urge us to focus on STEM subjects. Which is maybe why we’re all becoming so gullible.
Negotiating: One of the interesting aspects of leaving home and starting out as an independent adult is all the things you suddenly have to sort out for yourself: phones, cars, insurance and salary packages to name a few. I suspect many people do deals without the faintest idea of how to negotiate to their advantage. Need I say more?
Time management: the biggest shock for someone leaving school or going to their first job is transitioning from the regimented world of the classroom into a world in which success or failure can depend on how they manage their time. There are plenty of well-known time management tricks that can bridge the gap. I speak from experience because I was a lousy time manager. I flew from exam to employment by the seat of my pants. I know many, many people who did and still do the same. These days, with so much focus on stress and mental health, we owe it to our children to help them organise their lives better than we did.
Influencing: No, I’m not talking about selling stuff on Instagram, though successful influencers use tactics that would be recognised in classic screeds on the subject such as Robert Cialdini’s Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion. In most walks of life. the ability to persuade give us a priceless advantage.
There are other skills jostling for a place on the list, such as project management and conflict resolution. Many people acquire these skills in the course of their careers. Some go on courses. Other learn by experience. How much better for them if they could acquire at least the broad principles when they’re starting out?
In any event, this is something of an academic discussion, since, as I said, Sunak’s government is highly likely to be wiped out at the next election. So it’s not his party of Trumpites, crackpots and Little Englanders who need to be persuaded. I’d rather hear what the other lot are planning beyond decimating the country’s private schools – the best of which, incidentally, inculcate precisely the kind of skills I mention above – by removing their charitable status.
I can’t say I’m holding my breath. Best to live in hope rather than expectation.
There are many aspects of modern life that cause us to stop and think. Wildfires, electric cars, low-emission zones, not to mention the impact drones are having on modern warfare.
Other changes have quietly slipped under the radar, to the point that the young take them for granted and even older generations quietly acquiesce in them, or embrace them without much thought as to their implications until they bite them on the backside.
Take air traffic control, for example. The travelling public take for granted that thousands of flight plans are automatically filed every day into air traffic control systems worldwide. When that system fails, as happened in the UK last week, chaos reigns. Flights are delayed or cancelled. Holidays are ruined. Thousands of work days are wiped out because people can’t get back to work on time.
A few hundred thousand disrupted journeys is one thing. But what if card payment systems went down simultaneously? Suddenly payments grind to a halt. And what if nobody can get hold of cash because the ATM systems aren’t working?
It’s at that point that our fallback in such circumstances – for many people – no longer exists. We don’t do cash anymore.
Right now, in the first world at least, it seems that anyone with more than a few pounds, dollars or euros in their wallet is seen as something of a dinosaur. They’re the modern equivalent of the old peasant who keeps stashes of banknotes under their mattresses. If you splash the cash, you risk being perceived as a tax dodger, a payer of bribes, a money launderer or an oligarch who wishes to hide – or advertise- their wealth.
Cash is dodgy. Even shops don’t take it any more because it lessens their chances of being robbed. In fact it’s fair to say that bureaucrats – especially tax collectors and law enforcement – have never like cash because it enables the black economy, unless they themselves happen to be on the take, of course. So from their point of view, the decline of banknotes is manna from heaven. They now have the pleasure of following the money from their desktops, even if crypto transactions make their task more challenging.
So basically we’ve all been seduced by the ease of electronic transactions. For small payments you just wave your card over a little machine and pling!, it’s done. Here in France, in the markets, typically populated, you might think, by canny stallholders who love cash because no tax inspector is able to prove how many aubergines they’ve grown and sold, a good 50% of traders take cards.
I worry that we take our little cards for granted. So far, in the first world at least, there’s been little adverse effect except on the marginalised in societies – the elderly who find it difficult to use the technology and those who for one reason or another can’t get bank accounts. But in some countries, complacency leads to disaster. Lebanon, for example, where the country’s economic meltdown has led to banks restricting the amount of available cash, with the result that some desperate account holders have resorted to holding up their banks with guns.
True, the British government requires the banks to ensure that nobody is further than three miles from a source of cash, be that an ATM, a bank branch (a rare thing these days) or a post office. Which is fine, I guess, provided there are enough old folk with the energy to walk three miles to draw their precious notes.
All that being said, I’m personally a fan of cash, not only as an important fallback for when the cards don’t work, but because I was brought up in an age when cash and cheques were standard payment methods. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve been slapped down for automatically reaching for the readies when a card will bring precious air miles. But I’m mindful of the fact that banknotes are no less a construct than the digits in an online bank statement. If there’s anyone still alive in Germany who’s old enough to remember the hyperinflation crisis of 1923, during which millions lost their savings and resorted to having to take wheelbarrows full of banknotes to the bakers to buy a loaf of bread, they would perhaps let out a hollow laugh at their British friends describing their money as “safe as the Bank of England”.
After all, cash is merely one pillar of a massive, complex and interrelated global financial system. When one or more pillar collapses, what guarantee is there that those crisp banknotes will still have a role to play? In which case, it might be sensible to start thinking what a barter economy might look like. Perhaps we should be working out what we have to offer in exchange for a bag of potatoes.
What could I offer? Not a lot really, though I am thinking seriously about giving over the garden to the cultivation of cabbages. Or maybe some kind of herbal pacifier. After all, most of us will need to calm down a bit if the worst comes to the worst.
Meanwhile, given the way inflation’s going (in the UK at least) perhaps it’s time to give the wheelbarrow a service, because I don’t think your friendly local baker will be inclined to accept bitcoins for their precious product.
41 degrees centigrade sounds pretty hot. Yet somehow 105, the fahrenheit equivalent, seems even more extreme. I was brought up when Britain used the latter as its unit of measurement. Back then, such heat would have seemed almost apocalyptic.
But I’m not in Britain. My wife and I arrived at our little place in Southern France a few days ago. Since then the thermometer has been rising steadily. Apparently we’re sitting underneath something called a heat dome. I’m not unfamiliar with this level of warmth. During our time in the Middle East summer temperatures sometimes rose to as much as 50C. But then we had air conditioning in the car, the office and at home, so our exposure to the withering heat was limited to short excursions between one cool place and another.
Not now. Our house has thick stone walls, which takes the edge off the heat. But we still rely on fans, especially to sleep. Between the hours of midday and early evening, it’s definitely It Ain’t Half Hot Mum territory. So by and large, apart from excursions for lunch at our favourite restaurant, we stay indoors during the day, shutters closed against the sun, slowly making our way around the gloomy interior.
Which is fine, because we have no desire to be one of those much-touted heatwave casualties gleefully leapt upon by the British media. Lord help the campers who have no escape from the heat. Though many of them have a pool nearby where they can cool down, which we don’t. A paddling pool helps, but not much. Whales don’t appreciate bathtubs.
Happily, by the weekend we can expect some relief in the form of the usual thunder and lightning, most likely accompanied by hailstones the size of golf balls. Then things are likely to settle down in the mid 20s, a drop of about 15 degrees over two days.
What else is new in La Belle France? Well, over the past couple of months the nation has been wracked with anxiety since the bureaucrats introduced a form to be filled in by every property owner in the country. It’s effectively a house census. It asks questions at a level of detail such as the precise square meterage of buildings and land, what kind of material was used in construction, how many loos, bidets and basins, how many rooms, what they’re used for and, rather bizarrely, details of patios.
The purpose of this gargantuan piece of data collection appears to be – you guessed it – “rationalisation” of the property tax that most house-owners are required to pay. And yes, most of us will have to pay more once the data has been fed into the Ministry of Finance’s algorithm.
Unfortunately, a number of people, including us, only found out about it by accident. The Ministry had to extend the deadline twice. Call centres set up to handle queries about the form, which is byzantine in its complexity, have had to deal with endless calls from distressed householders who found themselves unable to fill in the form. Two days before the latest deadline expired, the website for online completion crashed. Naturellement. According to our local tax office, it will take months to process the information.
The other fun measure would gladden the heart of London’s mayor, under whose aegis the hugely unpopular Ultra-Low Emission zone scheme is about to be extended way beyond what most map users would recognise as the boundaries of London.
France goes one stage further. The authorities have designated 10 cities as low emission zones, and a further 19 areas where temporary restrictions can be imposed. The rules are fairly complicated, but the bottom line is that all vehicle owners must apply for a sticker that identifies their vehicle’s emission level. And before long, anyone in a high emission car, such as some diesels, will be liable to fines once the municipal cameras are up and running. Which probably means that our wheezy old diesel will soon become a mobile fine magnet in France as well as London. Oh merde. Time to buy a bike, I guess.
Such concerns, though, are far from the mind early in the morning as I sit on our patio looking out on the baked countryside. Straight ahead, we have copse of trees that hosts a variety of wildlife, including a family of deer I saw wandering across a neighbouring field. The dawn chorus gives me the excuse to enjoy a new app that identifies birds by their song. Much as I generally loathe apps, this is one that enhances life rather than complicates it. It’s called Merlin. It uses a huge database of bird sounds to tell you who’s visiting at the moment.
It’s found nothing out of the usual thus far, though a European Pied Flycatcher and a Spotted Flycatcher seem to be in regular attendance, which perhaps explains why this year we don’t seem to be plagued by as many flies as usual. Then there are the usual suspects: pigeons, magpies, woodpeckers, and a variety of tits. But wait! Up on my phone pops a Short-Toed Treecreeper. Whatever that is I have no clue, but, but its name could have been invented by Tolkein. It would also be a worthy insult to be hurled at a diminutive flasher.
Merlin is unlikely to turn me into a twitcher. I don’t have the patience. But what a quiet pleasure it is to get to know your neighbours without having to wander around hedgerows with outsized binoculars. Also a reminder also that you don’t need stickers, forms and permits to enjoy wildlife that gets on with its living while you get on with yours.
Time for a spot of breakfast as the temperature creeps up into the thirties. Whatever the weather, my bit of France is a glorious as ever.
The six words I dread most in dealing any organisation for the first time – especially one you need to call upon for services – are “you need to get the app”. The pervasiveness of apps, those clunky bits of software, often so badly designed that if they were a car you’d call it a lemon and immediately take it back to whoever sold it to you, is the latest weapon in what, if you’re conspiracy-minded, you might think is a gigantic con perpetrated on customers for decades.
The con, if that’s what it is, goes like this:
Wow, we can get rid of hundreds – or thousands – of staff if we can convince our customers that serving themselves is for their benefit. First we’ll install self-service terminals, then we’ll develop an app and then we’ll force everyone to use the app. Anyone who for whatever reason is incapable of serving themselves doesn’t deserve to be our customer. We can do without them. All on the pretext of delivering convenience to those customers we really want. We’ve collected the data. We know where our profit comes from. It’s not from little old ladies and men in mobility scooters. Or, more widely, from people without much money to spend on us.
In Britain, my country, we hear that the rail companies want to get rid of manned ticket counters. Spare a thought for those little old ladies milling around our stations fearful of being arrested if they board a train without a ticket, yet defeated by ridiculously complicated ticket terminals that sit in front of endless queues of passengers cursing the labyrinthine menu system.
Our National Health Service wants us to use its app to access our medical records, yet for one reason or another you can only see some of your test results and appointments. I sometimes think that a Russian hacker would find it easier to look at my stuff than me.
The banks won’t let you sign up for their most favourable products unless you get their app. And when you do, you find service features that aren’t working. Worse still, you find that for some unexplained reason you can’t make a payment. Then you need to use the call centre, which usually entails minutes or even hours playing pinball between robots before you get to speak to a human, after which you’re bounced around various other humans before you get to speak to the right person.
Even within the most sophisticated organisations, computer systems often don’t talk to each other, which results in endless recitations of security catechisms every time you’re transferred from one human (or robot) to another. Provided, of course, that your call doesn’t drop while you’re listening to the ghastly music that hasn’t changed for years.
All in the cause of convenience for the customer. Not.
Oh, and let’s not forget the lexicon of passwords you’re required to maintain any time you want to access a service or buy stuff online. Do you write all your passwords in a physical book, suitably disguised so that no burglar would be able to make sense of it? Or do you trust your phone or laptop to store the information safely, in the certain knowledge that these devices are never hacked?
I sometimes fantasise about where all this stuff ends. About supermarkets with a warehouse full of chickens that you can select and kill for yourself via an app that delivers the coup de grace on your behalf. About robots that will diagnose your medical condition and issue you a prescription that you can redeem through Amazon. Doctors? Pharmacists? Who needs ’em?
And who needs that kindly librarian when you can find the book you’re looking for via a terminal (or an app), go straight to the shelf and check the book out via a QR code that sits in front of a system that automatically fines you if you’re late returning it? Or indeed when our dwindling stock of libraries is finally extinguished, to be replaced by some government-controlled kindle system, in which authors are paid a pittance for downloads. Lord help the poverty-stricken kid from a home without books who learns about the world in the local library.
Where does it end? Most likely it ends in dystopia, as supply chains collapse and government disintegrates in the wake of some catastrophe permanently frying the internet. In such circumstances you might think that the good people of America, where half the population is armed to the teeth, have an advantage. They can take self-service to the extreme, demanding that the other half hand over the contents of their fridges at gunpoint, whereas we largely weaponless Brits have to resort to politely asking our neighbour for a glass of milk.
Am I afraid of technology? Not really. I’m one of the privileged ones. I got my first PC in the mid-1980s, way before mobile phones and broadband. I’m sufficiently computer familiar to be able to snorkel my way through the bog of apps written by pimply adolescents who aren’t as smart as they think they are. Yet the brutal reality is that the digital world is waiting for people of my age and above, who refuse or unable to use phones and apps for their daily business, to die off.
But I also believe that nothing powered by so-called artificial intelligence yet matches interactions with people, ideally face-to-face but if necessary on the phone. Yes, people need to be trained, and robots don’t generally have a bad hair day. But if we must pay a little more for our goods and services to retain the benefit of dealing with people, so be it. Because people can be kind. They have insight. They can be flexible in their response. Robots haven’t figured those qualities out. At least not yet.
Have you been to a hospital recently, been faced with a multitude of signs directing you to various departments, to be greeted by a volunteer who sees your nonplussed expression, asks you if you need help, then quickly directs you to the right place? Show me an app that’s able to read my face, or indeed my body language, determine that I might need help and deliver the information I need without going through a hierarchy of qualifying questions. I rest my case.
That said, I’m grateful for e-gates at airports. They usually work. Nine times out of ten – to my eternal shame – I use Amazon to buy my books as opposed to one of the few remaining local bookshops. Technology has its uses. But when self-service becomes the only form of service, which doesn’t seem too far away, I fear for the aged, the infirm and the lonely, whose only human contact is with charity volunteers, shopkeepers, health workers and the occasional caring neighbour. When so many of us have family members spread far and wide, cuts to public services made to fund pay increases for the employed will result in further alienation of those on the margins.
In short, is a whole section of society slowly falling victim to a survival of the fittest culture?
We’re not at that stage yet, but I fear that, as in so many other ways, we’re becoming slavish imitators of the richest nation on earth, where a large body of opinion holds that the poor, the weak and the deprived have only themselves to blame for their predicament. And down in Dante’s ninth circle of hell, is there a little man with a toothbrush mustache announcing to anyone who will listen “I told you so”?
Yet whatever Adolf might have thought, it’s never really been about the fittest winning out, has it? In a way, it’s better to speak about survival of the most persuasive, the most influential. Are those institutions deemed to be too big to fail really the fittest? In recent years our governments have been in thrall to lobbyists and pressure groups. Some political parties, including the ruling Conservatives, rely on dubious funding sources – sources that obviously want something for their bucks. Our banks, supermarkets and energy providers are able to raise prices and boost profits at more or less at will, safe in the knowledge that if they fly too close to the sun, a bail-out at taxpayers’ expense awaits. Inflation gives them licence to surf the wave of price increases, knowing that competitive pressures are low. Their target customers are not those who have to resort to food banks to get by.
Unfortunately, praying – and voting – for a different government is not going to produce more than superficial reforms of practices that don’t work to everybody’s benefit. People will vote for reforms that benefit them, provided they don’t have to pay for them. If the National Health Service didn’t exist today, would we vote for its implementation in the knowledge that it would result in higher taxes? Unlikely.
We have become so blind to the idea that the greater good requires a level of financial sacrifice that the only measures any political party proposes are short-term and palliative, for fear of losing votes. In other words, nobody dares to be radical. As I see it, such is our “don’t rock the boat” culture (or rather “don’t rock my boat”) that it will take a major catastrophe or an existential crisis for us, by wide consensus, to go back to the drawing board on many issues: climate, environment, energy, transportation, finance and employment chief among them.
I don’t have all the answers, or even a few of them, though I’ve floated a few ideas over lifetime of this blog. But let me throw this out for consideration. We should pass legislation that designates all sections of the economy that we deem essential to the lives of our citizens as public utilities. These should include food retail, transportation, water, communications, energy and banking. Declaring an area as a public utility wouldn’t mean nationalisation. What it would mean is that every private company and state-owned entity should meet minimum levels of person-to-person service, and minimum standards of accessibility. Call centres should provide fast access to human agents that bypass the usual hierarchy of options. Supermarkets should provide a level of checkout staff commensurate with their throughput of customers. Rail companies should not be able to close ticket offices. And critical decisions relating to customers should not be allowed to be made by AI-driven software, especially in finance.
None of these measures would stop people from using technology when they choose to do so. But nobody should be disadvantaged because they refuse or are unable to serve themselves.
Would such measures work? The devil is obviously in the detail. But surely, for the sake of the marginalised, a conversation along these lines is worth having. Otherwise, we risk becoming a society where the strong survive and the vulnerable simply fade away through neglect and the indifference of the majority.
Brian Harman, who has just won the Open Golf Championship, is the most prepossessing winner in a long time. Neatly dressed and short of stature, he looks like a banker or an insurance agent. He walks with a slight waddle. When he plays golf, he is mainly expressionless, though he allows himself a half-smile when he sinks a forty foot putt. On this occasion he played a conservative game, taking few risks. Just the kind of game with which to conquer the wind-swept, rain-soaked Royal Liverpool golf course, formerly known as Hoylake.
If you like your golfers to be adventurous risk-takers, like the late Seve Ballasteros or Rory McIlroy, you would probably think Harman is the ultimate in boring. The kind of dead-pan US professional who goes from tee to green seemingly unaware of the thousands of fans who, in the case of the Royal Liverpool event, are rooting for him to lose. If not Rory, those fans wanted the combustible Jon Rahm to win, or local hero Tommy Fleetwood, the man with the mullet and a smile that breaks out like sunshine across the face of a person who usually looks as though he’s undergoing an extreme form of torture.
When I play golf, I’m definitely on the wild end of the spectrum, except that my risks rarely come off. That’s because I’m hoping that my incompetence will occasionally give way to a ridiculously lucky shot that convinces me (though probably nobody else) that I have an innate talent just waiting to reveal itself. So I slash and crash – and usually burn.
Which is very much in keeping with the crash-bang-wallop style of modern sport, wherein if you can’t capture a moment in a two-minute video clip, it’s not worth capturing. A golfer as dull as ditch-water plotting their way around the course isn’t worthy of our attention. Likewise a cricket team scoring at two runs an over, or a soccer player grafting away in midfield to create the explosive goals that we all love to watch.
Come to think of it, we have little tolerance for slow and boring in wider circles of life. We will always watch Boris Johnson in preference to Keir Starmer, even if it’s only to pour abuse on the former. Much the same with Trump and Biden. We expect Ukraine to run a blitzkrieg counter-offensive through the Russian minefields. We want to see exploding tanks, wildfires, distraught holidaymakers on beaches, celebrity meltdowns and murder-suicides.
We want to be angry, joyous, grief-stricken, afraid and delirious. Why? Because that’s how technology, news outlets and the social media condition us to feel. We’ve become adrenaline junkies.
Yesterday was an interesting day of sport in England. Anticlimactic, as the England cricket team was denied the chance to hammer the Australians thanks to the same rain that poured down all day on Hoylake. Instead, I contented myself with watching an introverted American from Georgia plod his way to victory over his fiery and furious rivals.
And, in a strange kind of way, I felt comforted. Because for most of us, life is slow. It unfolds rather than explodes. That an American should remind us of that is doubly comforting. If you believe the media, his country is more explosive than most. Yet his avowed intent is to go home with his trophy and mow the lawn.
Somehow, we need to find a way to lower our stress hormones. We’re angry about the past, afraid of the present and the only visions of the future on offer are dystopian. Perhaps we need to take a deep breath, slow down and allow ourselves to find some positive thoughts about the life that’s ahead of us, whatever evidence to the contrary is presenting itself. And perhaps we could all do with a bit more horizontal time, because sleep is the great healer.
Speaking only for myself, I can think of no better way of nodding off than by watching re-runs of Brian Harman winning the British Open. For which I thank him and wish him a quiet, unspectacular but successful future.
And if we’re a Rory McIlroy fan looking for a silver lining, perhaps we should celebrate with the son of a friend of mine, who won a large sum of money by betting on Rory’s exact scores over the four days of the tournament. Though I hate to think of the amount of cortisol flowing through the guy’s veins when Rory sunk his birdie putt on the final hole.
Castillonnès is a little town in Southern France. As such, it’s too small to attract the attention of the rioters who are currently running rampant in many of France’s major cities. In fact, if you drive through the bottom of the town along the N21 between Bergerac and Agen, you’d hardly think it worth a visit, especially as the view is dominated by an extraordinarily ugly water tower.
But drive into the upper reaches of the bastide (fortified town), and you’ll find one of those beautiful medieval town centres that abound in the Dordogne and Lot et Garonne.
Not so pretty, but equally important to the living community, is the former municipal theatre, now a cinema, where, for the princely sum of seven euros per screening, you can watch a variety of movies, both French and international. No plush seats and multi-vendor foyer. Just a small counter manned by volunteers and a fridge full of ice creams.
Every month they hold a “Soiree Cinema d’Ailleurs”, which roughly translates as Movie Night from Elsewhere, meaning not Hollywood, Bollywood or any other well-beaten cinematic track. For 22 euros, you get two movies – the kind of work you wouldn’t find in Britain beyond the art-house cinemas of our big cities – plus a buffet outside the cinema in the interval.
A couple of nights ago, “The Elsewhere” was 16th century Algiers, followed by the mountains of Iran in the present day. We probably wouldn’t have sought out either movie, especially when to do so would have entailed an hour’s journey on the train and tube into central London – twice.
In case you might think that this was a tourist attraction laid on for visiting English-speakers, the movies – in Farsi and Arabic – came with French subtitles. Most of the audience were French, with a smattering of Brits confident enough to battle with the subtitles.
La Derniere Reine is an action movie with a feminist theme set in Algiers. Zaphira, the eponymous queen, breaks out of the boundaries of the harem to lead the resistance against Barbarossa, the pirate warlord, who has taken the city after treacherously killing her husband. It’s bloody and histrionic. She’s fiery, patriotic and fiercely protective of her young son. Things don’t end well for either of them, but the director, who also takes the leading role, uses the production to make the point that Algeria has a history worth telling from the period before it succumbed to colonial powers – first the Ottomans and then the French. Ironic, then, that we should watch the movie at a time when France is ablaze with the anger of its minorities of North African ancestry.
The second movie, The Scent of Wind, set in a remote region of Iran, couldn’t have been more different from the first. Minimal action, very little dialogue. It’s the story of an electrician who is sent to repair the power supply to the ramshackle house of a disabled man and his paralysed son. The father is unable to use his legs except to shuffle slowly in a crooked gait using his hands for support. The electrician doesn’t have the part required to fix the problem. He’s sent on a quest to cannibalise an installation in another village. Like an everyday Odysseus, he encounters obstacle after obstacle, including a river ford where he gets stuck and has to walk miles to find someone with a tractor to tow him out. Throughout the movie, people help others with no thanks, almost as if they’re fulfilling an unspoken obligation. That includes the electrician, who gives a blind man a lift and stops to collect a bouquet of flowers for him. As a final mission of kindness, he buys his disabled customer a new air mattress for the paralysed son.
The movie is a patchwork of minutiae. There are long scenes where acts of kindness, unsentimentally rendered, are left to tell their own stories. In one episode, lasting several minutes, an old man, trying to darn a sock for his wife, can’t thread the needle. His crippled neighbour, who has shuffled over to ask if he has a mobile phone so that he can call the electricity company, threads it for him. The husband finishes the darning and gives it to his wife, who takes the sock and slips it on her foot. No words are exchanged. And during the entire movie, nobody smiles or laughs.
The Scent of Wind is a parable of quiet kindness from a world in which mutual cooperation is the norm. While the subject is hardly likely to attract a generation used to Marvel blockbusters, it’s a moving portrayal of a human trait that anyone can appreciate, yet rarely gets an outing in the mainstream cinema. Pretentious? Not at all. Just an understated procession of acts of humanity.
All of which is in stark contrast to the brutal cruelty shown by the Iranian regime in suppressing the protests in 2002 over the killing of a girl accused of inappropriate dressing, as evidenced by Inside the Iranian Uprising, a BBC documentary screened on Thursday night. Scenes from another universe, you might say.
Two films in one night in a tiny town of fifteen hundred inhabitants. Castillonnès is never likely to be proclaimed as a European Capital of Culture, yet its promotion of such movies and of other events, such as the series of chamber concerts it holds in the Salle de Charbonniers next to the Mairie, is one of the reasons why I love coming to France. They may be of interest only to a relatively privileged minority, but they still happen, not only in Castillonnès but in other small towns around France. Could you say that of Britain, where everything seems to be measured in terms of value for money rather than value to society? Perhaps I’m being unfair, but I can’t think of a small town in Surrey, where I live, that boasts such treasures.
The cities of France may be burning right now. One would hope that the state will learn from the eruption and take measures that deal with the causes of the resentment within its troubled suburbs. Easier said than done, of course. Previous initiatives don’t seem to have had the desired effect.
But I for one love this country for all its contrariness and prickly pride in its way of life. Most especially I love its self-conscious embrace of La Culture, which is on display not only in grand receptacles like the Louvre, but in small towns and villages such as Castillonnès. And it’s worth remembering that away from the molotovs and barricades, much of the country continues to pursue a life of quiet minutiae that would be familiar to visitors from the mountains of Iran.
If I’m prepared to stand up for the Hallelujah Chorus of Handel’s Messiah, to eat savoury food before dessert, to get married in a church, to celebrate Christmas, to say “excuse me” instead of “oi you”, to close the door when I go for a pee, to eat potatoes with a knife and fork instead of my fingers and to stand up for the national anthem, without any legal compulsion to do so, then I should have no reason to object to the Coronation.
The cost? Just one week of the saving we were promised as the result of leaving the European Union, or the price of an absurd tree-destroying intersection of the M25 being ground out near me, or the profit achieved by one hedge-fund manager betting on Brexit. I have no problem spaffing a few quid on a bit of gold braid. Nor do I object to deploying the entire police forces of several counties to protect the dignitaries. What else would they be doing on a Saturday in May? Nor do I object to my patriotic fellow-citizens putting up the flags and having street parties in the rain, even though I won’t be at any of them.
I will watch the ceremony on TV when I get back from a round of golf, for one reason only: the music. No wedding, funeral or other state occasion would be anything other than crashingly dull without the exquisitely chosen and immaculately performed pieces of music, some written for the occasion, that have always stirred the soul and brought forth tears at such events. A chance to hear the works of Byrd, Tallis, Purcell, Handel, Stanford, Sullivan, Saint-Saens, Elgar, Walton, Vaughan Williams, Rutter and others in the grandest conceivable surroundings.
Do I think Charles III deserves his day? Why not? He’s of my generation. I grew up with him, saw his frailties and his quirks, but also his innate decency. I never found any reason to dislike or disapprove of him, despite his insistence that a flunky should squeeze out his toothpaste. And besides, who else would we prefer as our head of state? Prince Andrew? Some venal elected leader like Boris Johnson? Or a harmless old time-server who can be relied upon to say the right things in the right places?
So those who enjoy royal occasions should be free to revel in the sword-bearers, the clerics, the holy oil, the divine music, the military processions and the cheering thousands, while those who don’t (as well as those who do) should focus their attention on casting out of office the liars and charlatans who have thrown away more of our money in an average month than the monarchy has in a decade.
And besides, if we happily enjoy beer festivals in Germany, tomato-chucking in Spain, the Day of the Dead in Mexico and the 4th of July Parades in America, why would we poo-poo our own arcane traditions? Because tradition, positive or negative, connects us to our ancestors, defines our culture and promotes a common identity, even at a time when we seem to delight in using identity as a tool for dividing rather than for reaching across those divides.
So with that thought in mind, I wish His Majesty a happy day. The rest of us have the rare opportunity to witness a tradition that has been unchanged in its essence for more than a thousand years.
A rare thing indeed.
When you cross from one country to another, there are times when the differences are very obvious. On a land border, the geography might not have changed, but the human imprint leaves you in no doubt that you are in another place, and usually another culture.
After a sea crossing from France to Southern England, I normally don’t notice that difference. The landscape looks similar. In the spring, the trees are more or less at the same stage of blooming as they are on the other side of the channel. But on a night drive, things take on a different hue.
Thus it was when we took a ferry from Le Havre to Portsmouth on our way back from our little farmhouse in Lot et Garonne. As different as night from day. Or as day from night, in this case.
Our daytime drive to Le Havre took eight hours. The road signs are well designed: large, clear and consistent. Only on the odd occasion have I missed a turning in France (though I exclude Paris’s Peripherique horrifique from that observation). The roads themselves are excellent. A few roadworks, but much of the work carried out since the last time we drove the route has paid dividends. There are large stretches of immaculately resurfaced road. Locally, on our many trips around the southern countryside, I don’t remember a single pothole unexpectedly rattling the car. Clearly the result of something called investment.
After a five-hour crossing we reached Portsmouth at nightfall. On our way home the contrast was obvious,. Forests of signs, but the ones that matter are barely lit and poorly maintained. We stopped at a gas station to get some supplies for home, only to find that the M&S store was virtually devoid of food. They were waiting for a delivery, we were told by a rather embarrassed manager. I have never come across this problem in a motorway service station in France, strikes or no strikes.
Heading back to the A3, we went round the roundabout twice, because the entry to the motorway was far from obvious. The sign was obscured by trees. Too many signs when you don’t need them; none when you do.
Not that we don’t invest in roads in the UK. But most of the money seems to gave been spent in recent times on so-called smart motorways. Hard shoulders have gone, replaced by little turn-in areas every mile or two. Which doesn’t help if your car hasn’t the decency to stagger on to a safe area when it breaks down. Then you’re trapped on the inside lane with trucks bearing down on you. No wonder so many people have been killed waiting for assistance. If my car stopped on a smart motorway, I’d do the smart thing: jump across the barrier into the woods and leave the car to its grisly fate.
When you go further up the A3, you come across a major project. A new intersection between it and the M25. Here, for the sake of shortening the average journey through the existing intersection by five minutes, hundreds of trees have been ripped down within a radius of half a mile. Which says something, really. Spend millions of pounds turning precious trees into firewood for the sake of a modestly improved traffic flow. As the ancient British chieftain might have said if he had viewed the devastation: they created a desert and called it progress.
My purpose is not to write a France Good, Britain Bad polemic. Both countries have their issues. Always have and always will. But it’s worth pointing out when one country gets something right and another gets the same thing catastrophically wrong. A first world problem, I know, but if you’re lucky enough to have the resources, the least you can do is use them wisely.
Perhaps our roads suffer from comparison with those of the French because we’re an island – things are pretty dire everywhere. There’s little chance of an invidious contrast between one system and another, as is the case with France, from where you can drive effortlessly to and from Germany, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland. Once upon a time the poor relation was Italy – it was very obvious that you had left France. Now, it seems, Britain has taken Italy’s place.
Oh, and I almost forgot. Back home in verdant Surrey, the dozens of potholes that pitted the local roads before we left have still not been repaired.
Plus ca change, plus c’est le meme chose.
Postcard from France: in which this writer reflects on his lack of intelligence (or: stupid Anglais)
I’ve written a few posts lately about artificial intelligence, or more specifically about the chat engines with which ordinary folk like me can interact. I’ve mostly been skeptical about them, because I was expecting to encounter something scarily approaching sentience, whereas what I actually encountered was hardly much of an improvement on those infuriating help bots that pop up when your washing machine breaks or your printer refuses to work. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them started – on my request – conversing with me in the language of Shakespeare.
By way of balance, here’s a little story of human stupidity which shows that bots are not the only dumb beasts in the menagerie.
I love gardens but I hate gardening. If I was a wealthy landowner, I would be quite happy to sit on my terrace saying “carry on!” to my team of gardeners as they busily created beauty out of sculpted lawns and flower beds. A bit like Louis XIV at Versailles, in fact. Occasionally I might allow myself to be photographed fondling a flower, like King Charles or George Harrison. But actually doing the back-breaking work needed to bend nature to my will? Not my favourite occupation.
But since I’m a man of relatively modest means, at times needs must.
Thus it was when my wife and I took a trip – now just ending – down to our little farmhouse in rural France At this time of the year the state of the land shows how dramatically the growing season alters our environment. Fields have sprung to life. Green shoots everywhere. Here and there lavender and rapeseed. In the space of two months, our tiny domain has become a jungle. Or, to put it more mildly, a wildflower meadow dominated by foot-high dandelions lording it over daisies, buttercups and other weeds having their flowery moments of glory.
My wife loves it. It reminds her of the meadows that surrounded her growing up in rural Ireland. I hate it. I think of cricket, croquet and all the other opportunities offered by manicured lawns. When I look out over stretches of dandelions, I remember the disused factories of my native Birmingham given over to every passing seed that embeds itself into cracks between the concrete and tarmac. She wants wildness. I want order. An example of cultural differences between the English and the Irish? Not really. Irish farmers would be with me, I suspect, even though their fields presumably must lie fallow from time to time.
Normally my will prevails (at least when it comes to gardens). Re-wilding? Not in my back yard. We know a couple who come over and strim for us, so that we don’t have to venture out into the land clad in wellies. As in England, at this time of year Lot et Garonne gets plenty of rain, hence the explosive growth.
But this year, our friends couldn’t come. They were overwhelmed with work for their regular customers. So any taming of the jungle was down to me. My wife loves planting stuff, but she doesn’t enjoy things like mowers or strimmers. The one exception to that rule is that she’s long wanted us to have a chainsaw, something I’ve always vetoed, fearful as I am of an underlying nefarious motive.
When we bought it, the house came with a barn full of useful equipment. Actually, it’s a piggery, but I’m not allowed to say that. A petrol mower, two strimmers. A battery charger, an electric hedge trimmer, a bench saw for cutting logs and an array of rusting hand tools including an axe and a sledgehammer. Oh, and yes, a chainsaw, about which the less said the better.
The trouble is, as you will shortly learn, I’m useless with matters mechanical. Come the apocalypse, should I be unlucky enough to survive, I’d expire shortly thereafter through wobbly incompetence. DIY? Yes, I can use a drill, but I prefer masonry nails and a hammer. And do not speak to me about blinds.
Of the garden tools, the bench saw and the chainsaw are off limits. I have no desire to lose an arm. Our gardening friends got the mower up and running last time they visited, but now it doesn’t start. Which leaves the strimmers – the essential tools for meadow clearance. The little electric one died last year soon after I made my first attempt to cut a path between the house and the piggery. The petrol version would do the job, only it was missing the kind of head you need for vegetation. It was fitted with an alarming-looking set of blades you would use for uprooting hedges.
I’d failed to remember this when I took it to Vincent, our local repair guy. I could only mumble that there was a problem with the head. He sent me back with an instruction to find out what the problem was, and then he would fix it. So I duly contacted our gardener, who reminded me that it needed a head with nylon strings, not bloody great blades.
My technical French isn’t great, so with the aid of Google Translate, I went back to Vincent and told him what the problem was. Ah, he said. He went to a shelf and took off a unit which was just what we needed. I left the strimmer with him. Two days later he called to say it was ready for collection. After paying him his fifty euros, I took the device back, seemingly ready to go.
One small problem. I hadn’t a clue how to start the damn thing. It’s a German product, full of knobs, levers, bells and whistles. Over-engineered, you might think, in the manner of a Tiger Tank, should you believe the Brexit gospel of innate British technological superiority.
So here’s where my lack of intelligence comes in. As I stomped and cursed, my wife asked the obvious questions: “why didn’t you find out what the problem was before you took it to Vincent, and why didn’t you get him to start it for you before you took it back?” To which my standard answer to all such questions was “because I’m stupid”. Usually I say this with a sense of irony to stop the line of questioning dead, because I know I’m not stupid. But in this case there was no irony. I was stupid.
Rather than take the infernal machine back to Vincent for a third time, which would have been a tad humiliating, at my wife’s suggestion I went to the web to find the user manual. It provided me with precise instructions for starting it. After putting this knob in that place, pressing a couple of buttons and sliding a couple of levers, I pulled the handle on the string and the strimmer sprung to life. For about ten seconds. But this was good. It was firing, which was more than I got the mower to do despite the assistance of a hundred-page user manual.
So I pulled again. This time the handle came flying off. It was then that I remembered a warning in the manual to the effect that you shouldn’t pull it too hard or it will break. Once again, stupid me, though in my defence I would point out that what the manual failed to provide was a definition of hard. Still, it was a good hour before I was able to face my wife again.
But now I can take it back to Vincent with my head held high, knowing that there’s a defined problem for him to fix – even though I know he’ll take one look at it and once again condemn me for my stupidity.
Thanks to my manifest lack of intelligence, it seemed too late to prevent the garden from turning into an impenetrable mess of rampant vegetation, because we’re leaving in a day or so. Fortunately our gardening friends found a slot in a week’s time. They will clear the jungle in our absence.
All was not lost, though. In a nod to my post-apocalyptic future, I retrieved a scythe from the piggery. With that I’ve been decapitating dandelions like a bloodthirsty foot soldier of the Mongol Horde. At least those horrible downy heads won’t be able to seed yet more of their progeny around our stricken lawn. There’s something satisfying about the stroke of a scythe, even when it leaves a lumpy stubble in its wake. And as I slashed away, I felt a connection with the peasants for whom centuries ago it was the only method of gathering the harvest.
And thus is life in La France Profonde, far away from strikes and gilets jaunes, where my intellectual shortcomings go mainly unnoticed, except by my harshest critic and dearest friend. Oh, and Vincent, of course.