A detective contemplates a corpse stabbed so many times that he concludes – this was personal so I am called an evil terrorist as if the zombies in a first person shoot-’em up were suddenly weighted to win I don’t want to witness my crime by seeing the enemy as people so I remember my X-box shooting down Nazis whose Holocaust ironically helped justify our Palestinian “displacement” between the bullets and the bombs
I press the button which drops the bomb but I don’t see the blast blossom the seven stories pancake down all in my rearview mirror I don’t even see the confirmation back at base – nothing to learn about smart bombs and our TV does not show the dead children or traumatised living amongst the rubble an angel of death my hands are clean only the world seeing the blood dripping from them between the bullets and the bombs
I am an old woman whose heart has just given out on the refugee road to elsewhere surrounded, shelled we took the only road they left open my children will go to Kuwait via camps in Lebanon where they will be displaced again by Saddam Hussain and die in England they will call this The Disaster but my great-grandchildren will have a good life far from the bullets and the bombs
I am an old woman from Poland I escaped the Holocaust of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and the less-than-perfect of mind or body only to find myself taken to another prison camp where the Jews are outside the wire my husband and I helped the inmates driving them to hospital and I learned their language so they have scheduled me for early release and I will not die between the bullets and the bombs
I am a baby who died as the grossest provocation the loudest shout-out to a world that has long since stopped listening and covered its eyes whilst I am a baby crushed into my mother’s breast my grave a concrete sandwich but we two babies separated by bullets and bombs whose ancestors lived here side by side in peace for millennia if tested genetically cannot be told apart brothers and sisters under the skin…
This post by Di on Pandamoniumcat’s Blog, is in response to the No vote in the recent Australian Referendum on the issue of Constitutional recognition of Australia’s indigenous people. Failure to recognise the existence of people who already lived in the land you took can never end well and hopefully, this is not the end of the road for this cause… It was posted in response to For Dverse Poets Meeting the Bar: A Collective Point of View
We have gone far beyond a love affair with the car, the motor car, the automobile, we are beyond the comfortable love of wedded bliss and we have reached the time when divorce must be considered, with all the compromises and new freedoms that implies…
The Love Affair
And it was a Love affair to begin with! Admittedly, one that could only be pursued by the rich – the freedom given to those Edwardian pioneers, to go further than on horseback, to travel in a group, and oh! the speed – think of Toad in The Wind in the Willows – “Poop, poop!”! Then came The First World War with lorries and ambulances. The interwar years when cars spread to the middle classes and finally, after The Second World War, we were truly wedded to the car, cars for all but the poorest and our world and lives changing beyond recognition.
Urban Sprawl and the Escape to the Country…
How were we seduced into these changes and what form did they take? It’s a tale of city and countryside, of congestion and the freedom of “the open road”. We live, mostly, in cities and towns but we dream, most of us, of living in the country. How many people drive 4-wheel drive monsters that were originally designed for country-dwelling landowners but became must-have status symbols of the urban elite – Chelsea Tractors as they are known – how many of those owners ever go off-road or ever use their 4-wheel drive? Incidentally, these huge cars, often justified as being safer for your family (if you can afford them)- take an unjustified amount of both materials and energy to construct, so that’s a very un-Green and inequitable contribution to Climate Change right there!
Advertising campaigns focus on a romantic image of the SUV as the car of the great outdoors.
Levelling Up
Recent changes in internet technology and in working practices stimulated by the Covid lockdown, mean that we can work wherever we want to – from home or at the office, the office usually being in the city and the home wherever we choose or can afford. But in this respect, those who live in the country, are still disadvantaged since the high-speed optical transmission available in cities, has not always yet reached the countryside. There is a clamour from rural populations for a levelling up so that the commuters, enabled post-war, by the motor car to live outside the cities, and commute in to work, may not be disadvantaged by slower broadband, that they may take full advantage of living in the country.
There are other things not available in the rural areas, such as supermarkets – another phenomenon that grew with the car, because even if you live in the city, the supermarket, unlike the corner shop, is likely to be some distance away from home and how else are you to manage to get a weekly shop home without a car? Food, DIY, furnishings, and any kind of specialist shops are in the urban environment and unavailable out in the country – at least if you want to touch and feel goods – because we now have online shopping. Assuming your broadband is fast enough for shopping online, you can order things online, have them delivered (by motor vehicle – anything from a lorry to a private car) and if it does not match the expectation (that touch and feel would have obviated) you can send it back, by vehicle again – still it’s better to have one vehicle doing a round of rural locations than dozens of rural dwellers motoring into town and back… This leads to other, less obvious environmental impacts – clothing retailers are very poor at standardising garment sizes so consumers may order a minimum of three items to bracket their size and having tried them on, return two of them, which the retailer cannot be bothered to repack and resell – best case they go to a third-party retailer like TK Maxx – worst case, they go to landfill, still in their torn-open plastic bags. 92 million tons of clothing end up in landfills. Only 20% of textiles are collected for reuse or recycling globally.
The Suburban Deserts…
It is not just country- dwellers who are dependent on cars – as the car became more widely owned between the war – ribbon development spread out along the arterial roads stretching out from the cities towards those aspirational countryside locations and post-Second World War, the spaces between those roads were infilled with suburban housing estates. These estates were not provided with shops or pubs and buses – buses still modelled on earlier urban trams, did not, on the whole, extend their routes into these estates (as they do now, using smaller buses) – so another “driver” towards mass ownership of the car. There is now guidance on how to design housing estates in order to be bus-friendly but it depends on local authorities being prepared to press this home.
-and “Liberation”
Once you had a car, many other uses for it became apparent and were catered to, holidays at the coast demanded an ever-improving road network and the upgrading of A-roads to motorways and with car ferries and later, the Euro-Tunnel, motorists could even take their cars abroad if only to stock up with beer and fags on a day trip to France. How much was saved when the petrol was factored in, I wonder? Trips to the dump, car-boot sales, lazy trips to the corner shop, driving the kids to school, sometimes even when the distance is walkable and the exercise would do both kids and parents good, Z-cars (car crime demands police cars), driving to watch motor racing, banger racing, picnics in the rain, dogging, actually making babies, babies being born and too many people dying in cars– and so it goes on – the love affair was over and we became truly wedded to our cars.
Divorce
Divorce is going to be painful and it is going to have to happen, because there can no longer be any doubt that climate change is happening and happening faster and more damagingly than we imagined possible. The time for tinkering about with lightbulb replacement is past, we must all take more serious steps towards doing our bit to arrest the worsening problems affecting rich and poor countries alike, though the effect on poor countries is worse and the contributory factors of any kind of mitigation lie with the rich ones. Changing lightbulbs was, initially, a costly outlay because the energy-efficient bulbs were not cheap, but then came LED and suddenly lighting fixtures themselves changed and every public building must change colour constantly at night. However, even changing lightbulbs was a struggle to sell to people initially – because of the cost – even if the long-term effect was a saving – it was cash upfront and savings later and we humans are not good at deferred gratification. If lightbulbs were hard, how much harder will it be to make serious changes in our car usage? No wedded person wants to get divorced, not least because of the massive cost both financial and emotional and this divorce is no different – when you blow up a life together, it’s hard to believe there might even be any upside, or be able to see beyond the chaos to a new and settled life…
Like a divorce, changing our relationship with the car is not going to be a single, simple matter, no more than you can change housing, separate finances, account for custody of children, divvy up the record collection, who gets the dog, who keeps the friends, let alone the emotional toll, good breakups, the bad breakups, the goodbye sex, the loss of support and confidant – divorce is messy and the solutions are multi-faceted and often unique to each couple and it will be no different with the car. Going electric is only a part of the story and presently, a dubious part at that – so let’s examine some of the many parts that might contribute to the solution.
Social Changes
There are two avenues to be considered – the technological and the behavioural and neither is easy or straightforward. Taking the social first, there have been studies showing that already, some people would save money by ditching their own cars and simply hiring a car for those occasions that they need them – holidays, weddings, big shopping trips but many would question the use of the word “simply” because nothing is without any cost – yes you would need to plan ahead and make a booking but is that really so onerous? Yes – you would no longer have a status symbol that you feel reflects something about you sitting on your drive and some people might think you “gone down in the world” for leaving the ranks of the car owners – but then again, many would applaud you…
Good Government – Hands On or Hands Off?
Another example of the need for social attitude change is the term “Public Transport” which now carries a whiff of class distinction – let us rechristen it as Green Transport or Make a Friend Transport – for in the words of a British railway advert – “Let the Train Take the Strain!” – I can vouch for this as after breaking hip in a car crash, I was unable to drive for at least a year and enjoyed travelling by bus to my nearest city, some 35 miles away so much, that I didn’t return to driving a car for five years. Not only was I able to more fully enjoy the beautiful scenery where I lived back then, but the bus afforded me the opportunity to meet people I would otherwise not chanced to talk to… By contrast, the Conservative party here in the UK, took great pride in announcing via posters at railway stations, how the UK had the lowest subsidy for railways of any country, however the list that the poster detailed, might have been the list of railway operators from best to worst, with the UK at the bottom. The Conservatives are the party of the car and they also adopted, as part of Neoliberalism, the idea that for governments to govern – to make considered decisions about what works best for the country and nudge or even legislate for it – is a bad thing and that market forces (read unabashed greed and profiteering) should determine the course of things. They sold off (euphemism – De-nationalised) British Rail, breaking it up into a series of franchises operated by the highest bidder and disastrously, made the rails themselves, the purview of another company. Operating for profit almost always means cutting corners and this, plus the disjuncture between infrastructure and operators, contributed, in large part to many incidents, the worst of which was the Reading Station crash in which six people died and sixty-one were injured. Major rail crashes also occurred at Southall, Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield, Potters Bar and Stonehaven.
There are already schemes bringing commuters together such as Car Pooling where people who work together, or in nearby home/job locations, share car and/or petrol expenses – what if we took this idea further wherein people within a given neighbourhood would belong to a co-owned carpool and could book a car suitable for “the day that’s in it “– a small runaround for taking and collecting the kids from school or doing the weekly shop and an estate car for that annual holiday – perhaps even a sports car to impress on that first date… There might need to be changes to insurance rules to facilitate such schemes but it’s not insuperable. In Canada, the distances to be travelled are vast and although it is illegal to hitchhike anywhere except at a petrol station, it is common to accept passengers who pay their share of the petrol. All these ideas are facilitated by online connections – either informal or actual websites, and this demonstrates both that people are willing to co-operate for a change benefitting the environment, even if there are some small inconveniences in co-ordinating themselves and secondly that these things, once mooted, can be organised from the grassroots up – with a minimum of governmental interference but perhaps the odd facilitation.
The Lessons of Oxford
I grew up in Oxford and would naturally have ridden a bicycle as soon as I was old enough even if I hadn’t had a father who became a crusader for “Intermediate Technology” (simple rather than high-tech solutions). I never learned to drive until I was 35 and had stopped living in London where I continued to ride a bicycle when possible or took public transport – busses or trains if the weather was inclement. If more people took to bikes and public transport, there would be fewer cars on the road and the benefits would be safer cycling, healthier bodies as well as the immediate environmental benefits – think Amsterdam or Oxford. Oxford has embraced and been the testbed for every measure to try and reign in the motor car. First it built a Ring Road or Bypass coupled with creating one-way streets that made it less attractive to go through the centre. Far from killing commerce in towns, many places have discovered that a more car-free city centre is such a boon that it promotes shopping, eating and sightseeing! Next, Oxford introduced bus lanes (which also facilitate bicycles and taxis) and shortly after, Park-and-Ride schemes. The latest scheme in Oxford has however, brought a backlash, not exclusively from those immediately affected (or benefitted, depending on your point of view) but as a rallying point for car defenders from far and wide who see Oxford’s latest experiment as the thin edge of the wedge – the enforcing of automotive divorce. What is this dastardly attack on the institution of marriage to the car? It stems from the idea of the “Fifteen Minute City” That every city be divided into neighbourhoods within which all the essential needs for living – shops, pubs, meeting places, bus routes out – should all be found within a fifteen-minute walking distance – innocuous you might think, but Oxford’s implementation – a retrospective planning measure, is to ring-fence such neighbourhoods with car-barriers to limit ingress and egress for cars – and this has been seen by some as a totally unwarranted attack, not just on car owners, but on their very human rights! Protesters were not merely local residents but car supporters from far and wide who flocked to oppose the dastardly council who dared to challenge the rights of the motorist! In our necessary divorce from the motor car – a front line has been drawn… True, such cellular enclaves have been devised before by town planners – anyone who has visited a friend in the suburbs of that planned city, Milton Keynes, will know the nightmare of entering such a cell and then not being able to find the way out. Not least, this is because the suburban cells of Milton Keynes were designed without the shops and facilities that would have made them into 15-minute solutions but would also have provided landmarks for navigation in a sea of identical housing. Planning for the future means making sure that housing estates are more than just housing, that the cars are parked or garaged around the outside of neighbourhoods, or at least, like the mews coach-houses of old – at the back of the houses with pedestrian thoroughfares leading to shops et al, at the front. Private developers are particularly notorious for neglecting to build any community facilities and merely cramming as many houses with concomitant roads, drives and garages as it takes to carry the occupants out of their housing only ghetto. Reto-fitting is, as Oxford has discovered, more challenging still…
Technological Options
Turning to the technological options for environmental solutions to divorce us from the CO2 emitting motor cars, vans and lorries – “What of the electric vehicle?” I hear you say. Setting aside the fact that you still have to generate the electricity to power electric vehicles and all the difficulties in weaning power generation off fossil fuels, there are major flaws in the current approach to electric cars.
The current generation of electric cars is predicated on the idea that people want a car that does exactly the same things as the cars they will be giving up – carry five people, travel at 70 miles per hour or more, have a capacious boot, carry forward all the crumple zone technology which keeps us safe, up to a point, in the event of a crash – and it is worth remembering that it has been determined that once over 30 m.p.h. – there is very little that a driver can do to influence the outcome of a crash and also, that the speed of impact in a collision between two cars is the sum of their two speeds so two cars travelling at 30 m.p.h. smash together at 60 m.p.h. Of course, if we travelled much slower, then such high-speed collisions and the ingenious and weighty crumple zones which have been designed to protect us in such events, would be less necessary.
What has disappointed me about these new electric cars is that they look exactly as before, take the same massive amount of energy and share of Earth’s resources to construct, worse if you think of the issues around Lithium for the batteries and they are, at this stage affordable only by the relatively rich. I had imagined a wholly new style of lightweight runarounds – cars perhaps a little like the Smart cars – economical two-seaters, but if you want to achieve all the old requirements of a car listed above, then you have to go big – as big as existing cars, because you cannot fit a big enough battery to supply the range or speed to carry the weigh of all that crumple zone protective steel in a small car. It just can’t be done, and in any case, the first adopters of electric cars are the better off and it has been much easier to sell them the idea of going green by simply changing to a “greener” propulsion of an equally capable large car rather than that of a small one which they are not in the market for anyway.
Small is Beautifull…1
If we accept the reality that people who live and mostly drive only in cities, neither need a high-performance large car nor can utilise the capacities of such cars due to congestion slowing things down, then would it not be better, for when you need to use a car, to have a small electric vehicle! There is a class of cars termed Neighbourhood Electric Vehicles (how friendly does that sound!) which are small, light weight, much less greedy in manufacturing and material costs, and travel at the modest speeds actually suitable for driving in urban environs. That they have not gained greater popularity is in part due to the hazard of driving such lightweight cars in a mix with larger, faster, heavier beasts and partly due to the failure to grasp the necessity of switching to such vehicles.
Electric cars are not a new idea, in fact, they were quite common until petrol engines gained ascendancy, what about the electric milk-float – operating with heavy lead-acid batteries rather than the current lighter-weight Lithium ones, these workhorses carried a good load, travelled at moderate speeds and had enough range to get the job done – proof that a realistic spec. for an urban vehicle is eminently possible!
What if, instead of trying to change habits by applying punitive Low Emission and Congestion Charges to big cities (which become rallying points for the motoring rights lobby) we take joined-up government decisions to promote cities being small electric vehicle zones? What does joined up mean in this context? It means first promoting the manufacture of such vehicles up to and past the point of mass adoption, facilitating charging points by legislation where necessary (ie. all new homes to include them), and only then enforcing the adoption of the small vehicles in cities. Those who want to retain their old-style monsters might be forced to leave them in outskirt car parks and continue their journeys inward with a small vehicle or a bus. To get there from here is never going to be a single simple solution but always many parts that will eventually be greater than the sum of those parts.
My vision of the future is that there will be a two-tier division between town and country and it will probably reflect the difference in wealth that already exists between many (but not all) rural dwellers and those who live in towns and cities. Having said that, there will be a levelling up in many ways – more bus routes in town and out; smaller electric busses, electric vehicles in town and even in the country, they could be used to get to the station or connect with a bus route; status will not be judged by the car you own, in fact, ownership might not be the prime model.
New Ways of Doing Things
In Liverpool they have a company operating a fleet of electric scooters that registered users can pick up and use wherever they find them and are charged by distance travelled. All GPS locatable, the company goes round at night and collects the scooters to take back to base for recharging. Imagine how this might work for Neighbourhood Electric Vehicles. For sure you couldn’t go around with a car transporter picking them up at night – but wait! There are other clever technological solutions available! Firstly, if you operate a reasonably expensive drone, the last thing you want is for it to run out of power and crash miles away from you – so they have a sensor such that when they only have just enough power to get back to you – that’s exactly what they do – turn tail and use GPS to automatically get themselves back to you. Combine that with driverless cars – and a company could automatically retrieve vehicles back to base and deliver them to customers’ doorsteps for whenever they have been ordered. One of the issues around driverless technology is that it is aiming to be used in current type motor cars up to and including a mix of lorries and cars on motorways – imagine how much safer it would be if the technology were used to control new, slower, lighter vehicles around town.
There are so many aspects of our necessary divorce from the motorcar as we now use it and just as the effects of the growth of the car brought incremental consequences, so the solution to how to adopt a new relationship must also be incremental and multi-faceted. Let me leave you with one last anecdote that shows the interconnected nature of things. There are fleets of electric buses already operating and some of them are contributing to solving one of the problems of the regulation of power supply – especially renewable power supply which can be occasionally irregular. When the busses return to their depots after taking commuters home, they arrive back at the very peak time when those same commuters are cooking their suppers. So the buses can return whatever charge is left in their batteries to the grid and then later in the night, when the TV goes off, the buses recharge their batteries ready for the morning. Building storage batteries to smooth out the supply and demand for energy from renewable sources is one of the major drawbacks and costs to switching to those power sources but in this case, we can see how buses, and perhaps even private electrical vehicles could become part of the battery solution – food for thought…
What can you do?
The most useful thing that an individual can do at this moment is to examine the situation both personally and in terms of the wider picture – take an inventory of your own circumstances and figure out whether you could change things in your own relationship with the car as things stand now. If not – then what would need to change to make it possible for you – petition for more bus routes; wait for electric vehicles to get smaller and more affordable; buy a bike and start to use it for more than just leisure or exercise; discover car-sharers in your area or advertise if you can’t find any. So much depends on attitudinal change that you might start discussions with other people to explore the problems and solutions – knowledge and insight are vital to change.
And please, if you have responses, questions or opinions on what I have said – post a comment and start the discussion…
Image generated with Midjourney AI by Andrew Wilson
If you have seen my Theme Reveal for the A2Z Challenge 2022, then you will know that I am writing about becoming Vegetarian gradually as a response to the crisis in food supply chains sparked by the pandemic and made worse by the WAR in Ukraine. As well, I am keeping to the theme I originally planned of food which can be eaten on their own as well as becoming ingredients in other dishes…
As the WAR in Ukraine rages on, Ukraine’s minister of agrarian and food policy, announced that – Ukraine’s government has banned the export of wheat, oats and other staples that are crucial for global food supplies as authorities try to ensure they can feed people during Russia’s intensifying war. New rules on agricultural exports introduced this week also prohibit the export of millet, buckwheat, sugar, live cattle, and meat and other byproducts from cattle (see article). As things are, Ukrainian farmers will be lucky to get out to fertilise the soon to sprout winter wheat – ironically, whilst Ukraine is often referred to as the bread-basket of the world, and the yellow colour on the flag of Ukraine symbolises the wheat, the fertiliser used to grow Ukrainian wheat, comes from Russia, illustrating the perfect storm of food supply chains that Putin has, with lack of, or incorrect, foresight, loosed upon the world. Every World War is different, and make no mistake, we are in a world war, because the countries and peoples affected by the WAR, lie far beyond the extent of the fighting. Economies and supply chains require no declarations of war to involve and decimate. European countries will feel the loss of Ukrainian wheat, but the other grains on that list – buckwheat and millet are vital imports to many developing countries such as in Africa. Russia looks likely to take all of Ukraine’s coast and ports so that even if they stop where they are at that point, and back down, how will exports to those developing countries take place?
We may have no choice but to eat less meat since as we saw in the last post, it takes so much grain to raise beef cattle, and we should face this shift with no complaint since there are many people in the world who will have less choice than we do. We will not be being forced to live solely on the staple dish of bread (or as Marie Antoinette would have it – cake) but undoubtedly some things will change our eating habits, whether we like it or not. The rich will, of course, continue to afford the full menu of choices.
Bread is a Staple Food! Of the ten world staple foods, wheat, the source of most breads, is at number three, after maise and rice, which might come as a surprise to Europeans, whose massive use of bread and whose knowledge of foods foreign is often dismal. Maise, or Corn, is, of course, the source of Cornbread, whilst Rice is the main ingredient in most Gluten-Free flour and the bread made from it. After these three staples, comes Potato which is also used in some bread recipes together with some wheat flour. The rest of the ten staples do not significantly feature in the world of bread – Cassava, Soybeans, Sweet Potatoes, Yams, Sorghum and Plantain. If you know of any breads made from these, please correct me by sharing in the comments!
Before looking at bread as an ingredient, let us take a quick trip around the manna itself. The first thing that comes to mind, is a loaf of bread, and to make this, you need hard wheat, as opposed to the soft wheat used for cake and some softer, cake-like breads such as brioche, of which more later. If you take morning toast and sandwiches, you have the main ingredient of two of the daily meals and think of beans/spaghetti/cheese/eggs on toast and that represents supper for some people, or think pizza, or hummus and pitta bread. Most bread is Leavened (made to rise), with yeast, but Soda Bread (risen with baking soda activated by buttermilk) also has it’s place. Sourdough is very trendy but has a long history and depends on natural yeasts which gradually accumulate and become something unique in each baker’s precious starter… But there are many unleavened breads – a plethora of flatbreads – from all over the world – Middle Eastern pitta bread, to South Asian Chapatis or even Aboriginal Australian Dampers.
Some like hearty wholemeal, seedy granary or dabble with ancient grains but many people, at peril to their health, like the refinement of white bread! During World war Two, The refinement of bread was regarded as wasteful and wholemeal was the order of the day, so once the war was over, white bread boomed – a whole generation put themselves at risk of diverticulitis – the cure? Bran cereal made from the bran taken out of the flour to render it white!
But what of bread as an ingredient?
Bread goes stale with varying degrees of speed – not that it can’t be eaten, but it is hard and dry, however, since it is still nutritionally sound, there are many ways to use up stale bread by turning it into an ingredient – breadcrumbs, bread pudding, bread-and-butter pudding, Apple Charlotte – the latter made with bread crumbs. Rusk goes into sausages and that could be meat or veggie and of course, bread itself is Vegan – seems those one-celled creatures, the yeasts, don’t count… I once, briefly, had a restaurant, and I worked hard at developing a range of sophisticated puddings, however, I made a rod for my own back by including bread-and-butter pudding, because over 50% of customers chose that – of course, it may be that they liked my particular recipe, or maybe they couldn’t be bothered to make it at home, though why ever not, I can’t imagine – preparation time, even for a full family size dish, is 10 minutes at most. My restaurant version, though, is even quicker and I made them to order.
Frewin’s Bread and Butter Pudding Preheat the oven to 170C, 325F or Gas mark 3 Take a ramekin or very small bowl, and grease it with butter Cut a few slices of Brioch Bread and butter them with softened butter Cut a slice into pices to fit the base of the ramekin Sprinkle a teaspoon of the sugar of your choice Sprinkle half a dozen plump raisins or mixed, dried fruit (must be large, fresh and soft, no small gritty ones) Repeat till the ramekin is full to the brim (this won’t take much, leave small gaps for the mixture to find its way in) The mixture for a large pudding is 5 eggs beaten into 1 pint of milk but you will have to scale down for just a couple of ramekins. To make it even richer, substitute a little single cream for part of the milk. Sprinkle a little sugar over the top of the pudding and make sure no dried fruit is standing proud as it will go bitter if burnt. You need a pre-heated oven to finish the pudding – but start off in the microwave if you are in a hurry, or bake completely in the oven if you are not. You could assemble your puddings and leave to soak while you have your main course and finish off between courses. One minute or so, in the microwave and a couple of minutes in the oven. Watch as it microwaves and when the surface begins to rise, transfer to the oven. Keep checking and when the pudding has risen (as it will, splendidly) and is browning a little – your pudding is ready!
Kvass is a barely alcoholic drink made from stale rye bread from the Eastern European Countries through the Russias. When the USSR broke up, instead of embracing the western passion for Cocoa-Cola, the people of the east, in a patriotic passion, started to drink a lot of Kvass. what did Cocoa-Cola do? They bought Kvass factories on the basis that if you can’t beat them – join them! I can buy kvass from various Polish shops near me, but I was really intrigued by the fact that this drink was made from bread and that you could make it yourself, so I decided to have a go! There are many recipes on the internet and I am still trying them out, some contain beetroot, or fruit, but here is a good one to start with. So Rye bread is an example of a bread not made with wheat and many people are turning to it to avoid some of the side effects of wheat, gluten, bloating etc. – but the main reason to start including it in your diet is just that it is a rich flavour and when toasted, is crisp on the outside and soft in the middle – yummy! And now you know what to do with the leftovers!
So here were some ideas for using bread as an ingredient – care to share your favourites?
Carrie-Anne over at Welcome to My Magick Theatre, is writing about Ukrainian history and culture for this year’s A2Z Challenge and has a list of charities you may wish to donate to for the Ukrainian cause.
Zalka Csenge Virág posted on International Women’s Day, 10 tales about women and war (including a Ukrainian tale) over at The Multicoloured Diary.
Last Saturday was Nakba Day. It is no accident that there are more people in the world who do not know what that means, than there are people who do know what Holocaust Memorial Day is – the Zionist Project that is Israel has worked assiduously to make sure of that. Nakba Day is the day marking “Memory of the Catastrophe” for the Palestinian people – the day in 1948 when their society and homeland was destroyed and the majority of their population displaced. Those that remained have faced slow attrition – no let us call it what it is – Genocide and never less nakedly than right now when the stolen state of Israel is nakedly stealing more Palestinian homes in Jerusalem, invading their most holy place of worship with troops and tear gas during the holy month of Ramadan and then bombing the civilian population of Gaza in “self-defence” for their reaction to these provocative events. Meanwhile, state players around the world stand by and watch without condemning – HOW DID WE GET HERE?
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
[…]
And you may ask yourself, “Well… how did I get here?”
Talking Heads – Once in a Lifetime
During the recent A2Z Challenge, I encountered a fellow writer Iain Kelly who wrote about his State Trilogy. Iain lives near Glasgow which approximates to the northern capital of his future, dystopian State and in which the population live amongst other things, without alcohol. Glasgow is renowned for its drinkers of the beer known as “Heavy” if not for heavy drinking, and having bought Iain’s book, the question that constantly reverberates for me as I read it, and which he gradually answers, is how did things get there from here? How do you get people to accept what is fundamentally unpalatable? There is an irony in the promotion of Holocaust Memorial Day by Israel as part of its justification for a Jewish homeland in Israel – several ironies. The state of Israel was avowedly secular yet it uses a religious/tribal identity to define its raison d’etre and within that irony is nestled another. Many Orthodox Jews believe that God expelled the Jews from Palestine 1500 years ago and they have no business being there until God gives them permission to return. The monstrous act which was the Holocaust (whose veracity must rightly be defended against Holocaust deniers), is another example of something so unpalatable that one must wonder, how were the German people led to that unspeakable place? Other Orthodox Jews, within Israel – the Religious Right, are calling for an ever closer equivalence to the holocaust to be perpetrated on the so-called Palestinian people and they are driving the Zionist project in a way it never intended to be driven even if the desired end result might be the same. Why so-called?
Why the “so-called” Palestinian peoples – an exercise in Re-branding?
The state of Israel calls the Arab residents of the Occupied territories– Palestinians rather than Arab Israelis because this makes them seem like they don’t belong in the de facto state of Israel. They do! It is the mass of Jewish immigrants who have flooded into Israel that have a questionable claim to the land. The Arabs who live mixed in amongst Jewish people in the rest of Israel are referred to by Israel as Arab Israelis (or “Good” Arabs) but they prefer to refer to themselves as Palestinian Israelis in solidarity with their oppressed brothers and sisters but more of that later. The establishment of Israel has never been ratified in International Law and was imposed on the land of Palestine by force. Before this, Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews, both rich and poor, lived in harmony. Genetic testing could not tell the difference between the two groups because there is no difference – they are both classified as Semitic people and their different languages are nevertheless both classified as Semitic languages. These facts might come as a shock to most young Israeli citizens because the state lies not only to the rest of the world, but also to its own citizens, that, is Propaganda. Israeli children are taught to regard “Palestinians” as Arabs who do not belong, as terrorists who are trying to steal the country from those to whom it truly belongs – once again, this is the opposite of the truth. Palestinians are portrayed as terrorists who oppose the noble project of Israel – but those of us on the outside must never forget that one state’s terrorists are another people’s freedom fighters. This link to a film by a Palestinian filmmaker illustrates the degree of prejudice in a 15-year-old Israeli girl…
Just as the Nazis in Germany promoted the myth of the noble Aryan, so the Zionist project has cultivated the image of the sun-bronzed, hard-working, enterprising Kibbutznik striving to wrest modern farms from the dry land alongside their indolent Palestinian neighbours who are content to subsist on their backward farms consisting of olive groves and a few goats. The Jaffa orange, though developed originally by Palestinian Arabs, was developed by Zionists into a major export brand and similarly with the development of Avocado farming. Young people from around the world, and not just Jewish young people, volunteered on Israeli Kibbutz and became a party to this propaganda view. It is worth noting that wells dug by kibbutz often sucked dry the wells of Arab neighbours for their more intensive agriculture so stealing the water as well as the land… Now, as resistance to Israel increases as evidenced by the support for the BDS movement (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions), Israeli origins of agricultural products may be concealed rather than trumpeted. I live just outside Bradford, UK which has a large Moslem Pakistani population who have vociferously embraced the Palestinian cause in recent years. Imagine my disgust then, when shopping in an Aldi supermarket, to discover that mangos which had no indication of their country of origin, were in fact from Israel. The lack of labelling made me suspicious so I examined the box – bearing in mind that fruit boxes usually celebrate their country and company of origin with colourful artwork – nothing! So I lifted the box up and on the underside, printed in very small letters, was the name of a company which when Googled, turned out to be Israeli. I complained to the store both about the lack of labelling and the origin of the mangos from occupied lands and they were swiftly withdrawn…
Truth is the first casualty of war.
The attribution of this well-known quotation is the subject of some controversy but I prefer the slightly more elaborate 1758 version by Samuel Johnson in “The Idler” – “Among the calamities of War may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.” There are two sides then to successful propaganda – interests that motivate the lies and credulous people to be deceived by the lies.
Truth is such a fundamental issue, if we do not have the correct facts about any given situation, then how can we make the correct decisions, the object of Israel’s lies about its Zionist project, is to obfuscate the facts so that, for example, if Israel cites the right to self-determination and a homeland, we think that it sounds reasonable without thinking that that is no good if it means that the Palestinians must lose their self-determination and their homeland. If Israel says rockets are being fired on innocent Israeli citizens by Hamas terrorists, we will not compare the proportionality of the response or the degree of provocation…
One central lie of the Zionist project has been to remake the very definition of Anti-Semitism. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of antisemitism extends the meaning to include any criticism of Israel. This definition has then been forced onto most countries in the world by means of bullying, threats and blackmail. Lest you think this an insignificant thing, well in Britain, this was used to assist in getting Jeremy Corbyn removed as the Labour Party’s Opposition Leader by constantly alleging that Labour Party members were making anti-semitic comments (mostly criticism of Israel) and that, under Corbyn, these were not being dealt with. This was an unwarranted interference in the democratic processes of the UK but so great was Israel’s fear of Corbyn – a supporter of Palestinian rights – being elected to the position of Prime Minister that Israel’s lobbying, propaganda and dirty tricks machine went into overdrive. Needless to say, the Centrist yes man Keir Starmer, who replaced Corbyn as leader, knows his place in relation to Israel and will not rock the boat…
In the US Joe Biden is equally hamstrung to prevent him from offering the kind of criticism one might reasonably expect from a man of his political persuasion because major Jewish donors are amongst the Democratic party’s main financial supports. Very few Americans have any idea how much money the US gives to Israel each year and would be shocked if they did although their government, no matter which party was in power, would justify it thus; Much of the “aid” to Israel is spent on American goods (for which read American arms). Israel deserves protection from its unfriendly neighbours in the Middle East and is America’s major ally in the Middle East. True that, though America’s other ally in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia reveals the true reason for US machinations in the region – oil! Saudi Arabia and America did a deal after World War 2 whereby America guaranteed not to interfere with Saudi Arabia’s religion in return for the guaranteed supply of Saudi Arabia’s oil. Saudi Arabia is an anomaly in the Islamic world since it is led by an oil-enriched royal family who has promoted a fundamentalist sect of its desert tribes to worldwide prominence whilst leading an opulent and perhaps decadent lifestyle behind closed doors. Saudi Arabia once supported Palestinian interests but as its own position in the region is increasingly threatened by Iran and more recently Turkey, and with America as a mutual ally, it should not be surprising that Israel and Saudi Arabia, whilst having no official Diplomatic relations, find their interests increasingly aligned…
Origins of an Illegitimate state…
UNSCOP (3 September 1947; see green line) and UN Ad Hoc Committee (25 November 1947) partition plans. The UN Ad Hoc Committee proposal was voted on in the resolution.
Much is made by Israel, of The Balfour Declaration. It is the first, and one of the few unequivocal declarations of support for the idea of a Jewish homeland and was issued during World War 1, just after Britain had declared war on the Ottomans who were in league with Germany. Palestine was occupied by the Ottomans and German/Ottoman forces clashed with the (British) Egyptian Expeditionary Force in the Southern Palestine Offensive – a little known part of the First World War since the story of the Western Front has eclipsed the war in Palestine. At the end of the war, with the Ottomans defeated, Britain was given a mandate to rule Palestine by the League of Nations and this, together with the Balfour Declaration, significantly led the way towards the creation of Israel. However, following the Second World War, with Britain anxious to please both Jewish and Arab interests, the newly formed United Nations, was unable to get its Partition Plan for Israel – Resolution 181 – across the line as although it was accepted by the Jewish population of Palestine it was rejected by the Arab population as well as neighbouring Arab countries. (See proposed Partition Map to right.) Britain had handed control of Palestine to the UN who eventually withdrew precipitating a civil war in Palestine until the Zionists unilaterally declared the formation of the state of Israel. Surrounding Arab countries joined in the fighting – the 1948 Arab- Israeli War – but America immediately recognised Israel as a state and began lending support. It has been said that the US has regarded Britain as a static aircraft carrier at a convenient location for stopping to refuel on its way to act as putative world policeman and Israel fulfils the same role as Britain in the Middle East. When Israel purchases armaments from America, it does not have to wait for delivery – there are already massive arms stocks cached in Israel, sufficient for any imaginable war America – or Israel – might want to wage in the Middle East. Israel, firmly supported by America where the Jewish lobby had been carefully nurtured by the Zionist project, eventually achieved a secure position by means of a series of short sharp wars and by making a pragmatic peace with the Egyptians. The Palestinian Arabs who fled their homes to avoid being caught in the crossfire, were not allowed back and their land was “legitimately” seized by the new state whilst the diaspora of Palestinian Arabs were left to foment in reugee camps in neighbouring countries. Israel weathered the storms of world opinion and terrorist threat and I return to my original question – how did they do it?
Bully to Intimidate and Enforce…
If the last section implied that Britain was wholeheartedly behind the Zionist project and that Zionists gave her an easy ride of governing under the British Mandate – think again! In the run-up to the creation of Israel, many acts of terrorism were perpetrated by Zionist groups against the British administration and soldiers, against Arab Palestinians and even against other Zionist groups with different views on how to proceed towards the goal of creating Israel. One of the worst atrocities for Britain – was the bombing of The King David Hotel in which 92 lives were lost. These tactics were designed to put pressure on Britain to withdraw from Israel and so if one wants to ask from whom the later PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organisation) and their ilk learnt that terrorism might get you what you want or at the very least, get your enemy’s attention, well then, they learned it from the Zionists…
There are three main groups of Palestinians in Israel – those imprisoned in Gaza , those who farm in the West Bank and those who live intermixed with Jewish neighbours in the towns and cities. The Gaza strip is often described as the world’s largest prison since residents are completely controlled by Israeli security as to how or even whether they may leave Gaza’s confines. Goods in and out are also controlled by Israel and it has been alledged that at times, Israel has calculated exactly how much food is required by the population of Gaza and then allowed just a little bit less in. The farmers of the West Bank are the ongoing victims of land theft by illegal settlers – a thorny optic for Israel since the rest of the world has become increasingly aware of the shrinking land belonging to Palestinians and the corresponding growth of Jewish settlements. This runs contrary to the long espoused idea (by outsiders like America and the EU), of a Two-State Solution to offer both Israelis and Palestinians permanent lands but the West Bank is so riddled with illegal Jewish Settlements that this is beginning to seem impossible. Israeli “activists wield slogans like “from the river to the sea,” or “no settlement is illegal.” Israel was considerably emboldened under Trump, whose son-in-law Jared Kushner pushed Israels cause – the US controversially moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – an act of provocation to the Palestinians given that Jerusalem is sacred to Jews, Moslems and Christians and is supposed to be a neutral zone.
I have already referred to the “Good Arabs” who live in the town and the evidence that this latest conflict is different because this time, the Good Arabs are siding with their much more put upon brothers and sisters in Gaza and the West Bank and threatening or indeed committing civil insurrection.
Bullying tactics, whether they are directed at the state level or at individuals who displease the state, are designed to intimidate and enforce what the state wants and Israel is equipped with one of the world’s most assiduous secret services -Mossad who can dig the dirt and put the squeeze on individuals, groups, politicians and whole state apparatus. Israel may be too small to develop its own aircraft industry but they make up for it in other ways… Israeli firms have developed the “best” in spyware such as “Pegasus” which they now sell to other rogue governments around the world to enable them to spy on their dissident citizens via everything they can do with their phones and to record sound and video without the phone’s owner being aware of it. Another export of Israel to those who support it and to America in particular, is the hosting of training sessions for “Law” Enforcement officers which include the technique of neck kneeling employed in the murder of George Floyd which triggered the worldwide Black Lives Matter movement. Links back to the Israeli run training courses were highlighted and questioned – unwelcome attention from Israel’s point of view and which contributes to the slow sea change in opinion of Israel and other governments (lack of) response to Israel’s actions against the Palestinians… It is fair to say that Israel leads the world in techniques of bullying from straightforward violence against the person right up to the most sophisticated forms of social enforcement…
Control the Narrative…
The tricks used to establish and maintain control of Israeli politics both internally and externally are nothing new and they exemplify perfectly that maxim “History is written by the Winners!” Up to now, the Zionist project has been winning – but will it last?
One of the tricks of controlling the narrative is not to allow a hint that there even exists opposition on a political level. However, even Jewish groups who are dismayed at the atrocities being carried out in their name are starting to coalesce in opposition to Israel. The Jewish Voice for Peace says about Zionism that “Through study and action, through deep relationship with Palestinians fighting for their own liberation, and through our own understanding of Jewish safety and self-determination, we have come to see that Zionism was a false and failed answer to the desperately real question many of our ancestors faced of how to protect Jewish lives from murderous antisemitism in Europe.”
Indigenous people around the world are finding their voices against each and every one of their own Settler Colonialist states – not least the Native Americans and the Australian Aboriginal peoples and they are turning the property laws by which these countries are governed back on those who stole their land and with that, comes solidarity with other oppressed groups.
Israel has strenuously attempted to counter the use of words such as Genocide and Apartheid from gaining currency in relation to its treatment of the Palestinians but they are fighting a losing battle – this article in Mondoweiss details the recent blows to Israel’s propaganda and posits that Israel is beginning to face an endgame… Let’s hope…
The history of Israel is a very complex topic and I know this piece only scratches the surface in an attempt to answer the question “How did we get here?2, but I hope it gives food for thought and that the links will take anyone wanting to know more further along a search for truth and understanding. I will leave you with one final quote…
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Edmund Burke (in a letter addressed to Thomas Mercer).
If you have been following this blog’s A2Z Challenge then you will know that I have been trying to finish a novel, “Train Wreck”, and publishing a chapter below each post – at least until day 15 when I ran out of completed chapters – there is another one in progress – but if you have been following the novel and would like to receive the balance of the chapters – let me know in a comment. Meanwhile, more speculations as we reach the penultimate letter…
I had to resort to the dictionary for inspiration for today’s letter “Y”. Nothing from my book “Train Wreck” had leapt to mind. So Youth it is – and first I thought about two minor characters in one of Shakespeare’s plays (can’t remember which one), who are lamenting the fact that by the time they are old enough to have acquired wealth, they will be too old to enjoy it so why can’t money be given to the young and work left to the older generation? Or words to that effect – if I could remember the play, and the characters, I would check it out…
In the utopia that is Hawaii 2, Shakespeare’s characters would have found their dreams met – people of all ages, none of whom are richer (in money terms) than anyone else, are all provided with a Universal Income which allows them to spend their youth doing – well, whatever they want, or nothing at all, whilst still keeping body and soul together. (Should I, as a Humanist, use the word soul, without heavily qualifying it? That’s another story…) True, no one can have flashy cars or other trappings of a “rich” lifestyle, but you don’t miss what you don’t know and on Hawaii 2, no one has those trappings to be jealous of.
Given that many great ideas and work are achieved by people in their Youth, this is perhaps a very good idea although it is equally arguable that adversity -struggling to make one’s way in the world, both financially and intellectually – is the mother of invention. Will the youth of Hawaii 2 waste their young lives experimenting with drugs and bohemian living in Lowtown (Chapter 9) or will they throw themselves into whatever line of work has captured their imagination? Some will do one, some the other and who is to say either route is better or worse for achieving youthful brilliance…
The other thing which is associated with Youth, is Idealism. Here on Earth, we are well on the way towards the climate disaster which is the precursor to my book – the cataclysm that forces mankind to flee to the stars. And why are we headed in that direction? Because a small number of very rich people want to get richer at any cost and damn the consequence!. And because a great many other people, who I shall call Middle Class, are still bamboozled by the desire to attain wealth themselves, that they too are unwilling to face the hard choices which need to be made in order to avert the looming crisis. It is perhaps, a human trait that leads, politicians, in particular, to fail to deal with problems that are only going to manifest to the next generation when they will no longer be around to take the blame. The picture at the top is taken from an article pointing out that “Climate strike is not youthful idealism. It’s survivalist.” Greta Thunberg is not sweetly idealistic but deadly serious in pointing out what we are many of us failing to regognise.
Inequality, such as exists on many levels from the world economy down to individuals, is a great driver of idealism and Idealism tends to view the world in black and white, but as we grow older, trying to put idealism into practice, we become aware of shades of grey – things are more complicated than we youthfully imagine which is not to say that idealism is wrong and realism an excuse for doing nothing – rather that once the heady genius of youth is past, then the experience of later life should and can, be employed to tackle the things which are difficult, nitty-gritty rather than broad strokes…
As well as Realism, Idealism can also give way to Fanaticism which can be either good or bad, depending on the subject and form it takes. But for most of us, I feel, we find a balance, if we are driven beyond our youthful idealism into tempered realism and a life of service to our causes – a balance between living life for ourselves and living for what we can contribute to the world. As individuals, we come to recognise it is a relay race, not an individual sprint, and we must both receive and pass on the baton of our life’s work, be it practical, intellectual or emotional (not necessarily in that order). That can be difficult – as a teenager, I became fascinated by the idea of Bonsai – trees not only kept miniature, but sculpted into extraordinary shapes emanating nature. I soon learned that the most incredible, ancient-looking examples of this craft, were indeed ancient and that their current custodians had inherited them for a previous master and would hopefully find an apprentice to pass them on to. Sadly, I knew of no Bonsai master and my Bonsai dreams shrunk smaller than a Bonsai tree…
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!
Where is the money going to come from to get started again?
Individuals, businesses and governments are all moving from the “How can we possibly afford to stop working?” to “How can we possibly afford to start working again?”. Here in the UK, at the daily Press Briefing given by the representatives of government flanked by special health advisors, the awkward questions asked by the press are now including, amongst those on the competency of the UK government to manage the amount of testing required and the supply of personal protection equipment, new and urgent questions on how the government may be starting to envisage how we will restart the economy. There Is some suggestion that the government does not trust us with transparency in this matter for fear we will think its all over and rush back to normal life too soon. Or perhaps they just haven’t got a clue yet…
Largest amongst the issues to be faced is the question of where the money is going to come from and although I am writing from a UK perspective, many of the points will apply across the world. Before I begin, I know I am a day in late posting this challenge piece but in my defense, I only found out about this on the first day of it – those at A to Z 2020 Challenge HQ recently asked the question “Are you a pre-planner or a ‘pantser’?” Necessarily this year I am a seat of the pants writer which at least means that I can react to current circumstances and indeed make them my theme for the challenge. The subject of Money and how we shall find enough to exit the crisis is a big one and needed a lot of research – I have tried to boil it down but there will be links to articles if you want to go deeper.
War Debt
Many governments and others are referring to the struggle to contain Covid 19 as a “War” because it helps to conjure the spirit that is needed from everyone to “defeat” the tiny, invisible, senseless thing which is a virus. Economists are now starting to talk about the cost of the crisis to our economies, in terms of productivity lost, unemployment created and of course the borrowing which will be necessary to get things started, so my question is, if all the countries in the world are facing the same situation, then who is going to lend money to who in order to fix things.
One precedent is what has happened in actual wars – the World Wars for example. Britain had to borrow a lot of money, mainly from the US or in the case of the Second World War, the US and in a smaller amount, Canada. In 1945 alone, the UK borrowed 4.33 billion dollars and 1.93 billion dollars from Canada the following year. Suffice to say that the total repaid amounted to twice that which was lent and the final repayment was as recent as 2006. We may have a “special relationship” with America, but it does not come cheap. Furthermore, that war helped cement the Dollar as the world’s leading currency and saw US influence consolidated around the world – facts which are still pertinent in the crisis of today. Whilst Britain floundered under the weight of debt and the need to rebuild its shattered economy after the war, America, increasingly obsessed with fighting the spread of Communism, made satellites of the “frontline” countries using the Marshall Plan to rebuild European countries equally shattered economies in exchange for hosting military bases.
There is another way of raising money to fight wars which may become significant in solving our present crisis, the issuing of the enchantingly titled “Gilt Edged Security Bonds” – so-called because the certificates have a gilt edge to them. This is a way of borrowing money from private investors, individuals, pension companies and the like. Invented by the British as early as 1694 when King William III borrowed 1.2 million to fund a war with France, gilts are low yielding in terms of interest paid but they are very safe hence their attraction to pension funds. King William could not raise the money for his war from taxes and neither will governments following the Covid 19 crisis since the money they will be dispersing to help businesses and individuals, needs to be spent on producing and consuming, there would be no point in just taking it back as tax. There is a really good chart of all the ways governments can raise money here, at Positive Money – an organization for monetary reform – more of them later.
What do we know about the UK Exit Strategy?
The UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Riki Sunak unveiled a plan for £330 Billion which he described as an intervention in the economy “on a scale unimaginable a few weeks ago”. This is indeed true since the Tory party have predicated their policies on Austerity, beating up the Labour Party for years for their level of the national debt – before running up even higher levels themselves (which they predictably kept quiet about). Austerity is the central plank of neo-Liberalism which will be the subject of my next post – a sort of part II to this one. But meantime, the £330bn is actually government-backed loans – however, the loans will actually be issued by the banks. If the loans are defaulted on, the government will, then, and only then, have to shell out – so not quite as magnanimous as it first appears. There will be further offers of support from the government and some will require the government to borrow, either from the markets or by issuing gilts and of course, the Bank of England can always print money, “quantitative easing”, as they did after the 2008 financial crisis.
The Big Choice
The scale of the current crisis in financial terms makes the 2008 financial crisis look small by comparison – we are talking levels of borrowing nearer to that of the war, and our government(s) might be tempted to assert that all this has undone the savings from years of austerity and that we must tighten our belts once again, for the long haul. This is not the only choice and so tomorrow I will look at why austerity is an ideological position and what other choices there are…
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