Politics

U is for Utopias…

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  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, Utopia is a central theme in the book…


I looked at how the desire for someone to be living a Utopian existence, led us to project the idea onto Scandinavian countries under my entry for S, and how we have eventually discovered that they have feet of clay like the rest of us. But what exactly is a Utopia and must we always be doomed to disappointment?

The word Utopia was coined by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book of that name  describing a fictional island society in the south Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South America. The term has come to be used as a synonym for “deluded”, “impossible” or “far-fetched” and it has a counter term Dystopia. The very SciFi picture at the top, comes from a blog piece that argues for the additional idea of a False Utopia – one which initially appears Utopian but hides a dark secret. An example of this would be HG Wells’ “The Time Machine” where the happy, beautiful people living their utopian life above ground, are in fact fodder for the Morlocks who live underground.

The Wikipedia article on Utopias suggests that whilst mainly a literary endeavour, thought experiments if you will, Utopias can be the subject of real-world experiments too but quotes Lyman Tower Sargent who argues that “the nature of a utopia is inherently contradictory because societies are not homogeneous and have desires which conflict and therefore cannot simultaneously be satisfied”. In other words, to offer equality to all people – a fundamental aim of the Utopian dream – you cannot offer the same thing to all people because they are different.  Lyman Tower Sargent further states “There are socialist, capitalist, monarchical, democratic, anarchist, ecological, feminist, patriarchal, egalitarian, hierarchical, racist, left-wing, right-wing, reformist, free love, nuclear family, extended family, gay, lesbian and many more utopias…”

We tell stories, I believe, as a fundamental aspect of our human nature – a consequence of our big brains. For if we can deduce “Those are lion tracks, they were made three days ago and there was a cub too, so a lone female, with a limp – so wounded…) then we can also put together a story which is completely made up, because both the deduction and the fiction require the use of our big-brain imagination. So in telling Utopian stories, we are trying to imagine a better way to live, one which will reconcile the flaws in human nature and the contradictions those flaws create in the real world.

Are we wrong to keep trying to visualise Utopias? Of course not, our human nature might remain essentially the same but our superficial circumstances change all the time and we must constantly re-envision utopian possibilities…

“Train Wreck” is just another Utopian experiment imagined and described and then traversed to uncover its inevitable flaws and contradictions – but I hope, that in the tradition of HG Wells, my SciFi tale is a good enough story to be worth the reading…

“And now I was to see the most weird and horrible scene
of all that I had beheld in that future age.”

crop from File:The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, August 1950).pdf


T is for Terrorism…

humanist55

 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, some thoughts on a subject that plays a very small part in “Train Wreck”.

The image above is the nearest I could find to the dream-vision I had that launched the writing of my novel (work-in-progress) “Train Wreck”. Nearest in the sense that it is an explosion on a train in the desert although in my case it takes place on another planet onboard a MagLev train whilst this image is from David Lean’s classic film “Lawrence of Arabia”.

In my book, terrorism is discounted by official sources and the public are told the explosion was due to a gas bottle malfunction. Privately though, government investigators remain mystified by the explosion which they determine to have been a bomb and yet no claim of responsibility has been made and no motive can be imagined…

We do come to learn the motive – not terrorism – but the whodunnit forms the narrative trajectory of the book. Still, I have a few thoughts on the subject of terrorism…

I suppose I first became aware of the phenomena of terrorism during the 60’s and 70’s when the hijacking of airliners – mostly by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)- was a regular occurrence. I remember wondering at the time, why airplanes? If I was a terrorist and wanted to create terror, I would blow up elictricity substations, unguarded and too many to protect, plunging random residential areas into darkness and striking at the heart of a target people rather than some remote group of travellers. (I was not as dangerous a teenager as this may suggest…) The answer to why airpanes was, I suppose, because they guaranteed publicity worldwide. International airflight was still relatively new and glamourous so trains would definitely have been infra dig as a target.

As a result of these activities, the PFLP and later factions such as the PLO, attached the word terrorism to the Palestinian people as if they were the prototypical terrorists – a fiction unceasingly re-enforced by Israeli propaganda. For let us not forget, that if the Palestinians got the idea that terrorism might get you what you wanted, they learned it from the Zionist gangs that commited atrocities such as the bombing of the King David Hotel in which 91 people of various nationalities were killed. The hotel was the headquarters of the British administration and the members of the Irgun right-wing zionist gang infiltrated the hotel dressed as Arab  (Palestinian Arab) workers. If that isn’t ironic I don’t know what is… The attack took place in the run up to the unilateral declaration of the state of Israel which has continued, against its own declared constitution, to steal the land from Palestinian Arabs. 

There is a maxim “One man’s Terrorist is another’s Freedom Fighter!” and although terrorism is the underdog’s tool in the assymetric warfare of liberation, the converse statement must be true of government. “One man’s Legitimate Government is another man’s Illegitimate Occupying Force!”

Terrorism was elevated during the latter part of the 20th and into the 21st Century, by the rise of Islamic suicide bombers, recruited by shadowy manipulators who would never put themselves in harm’s way and promising a quick ticket to Paradise to idealistic (mostly) young Moslems. Suicide bombers are not a new phenomena and have in the past been state sponsored – think Japanese Kamikase pilots but the suicide vest allied with the mechanisms for recruiting and grooming suicide bombers in “support of Islam” has reached new levels. Whilst my adolescent musings were of a terrorism that hurt nobody (directly anyway), the latest form of suicide terrorism are designed to cause maximum carnage indiscriminately. 

Does Terrorism work? In the UK, the toies, led by Margaret Thatcher, despite vowing not to talk to terrorists (the IRA in Northern Ireland), were forced to do so once the bombing campaign reached mainland Britain and in particular, the bombing of The Arndale Shopping Centre, Manchester in 1996. The government then entered into secret negotiations( influenced by Jermy Corbyn’s more nuanced approach to the IRA) which eventually led to the Good Friday Agreement. Presumably insurance companies put their feet down and said enogh is enough – negtiate or we will not insure commercial properties. Commercial Unoin itself, lost all its windows in the Baltic Exchange bombing. So yes – terrorism can achieve results if applied to the right pessure point.

Arguably, bringing war, (so often inflicted by the US on countries around the world), in the form of 9/11 to american soil, did not work to make the US question why such an act might have occured and applied more of the same by launching yet more wars in the Middle East which continue to this day, justifying and feeding the military industrial complex.

Israel continues to mislead and brainwash its children into thinking that Palestinian Arabs are the agressors rather than the Zionist project – “truth is the first casualty in war” and I ask you – in Israel, who are the real terrorists?

S is for Scandinavia, Sex and Social Workers…

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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 – this post explores some myths about the supposed utopian society of Scandinavia…



When I was a teenager, there was rumour that Scandinavian women were hot! In fact the words Sex and Swedish were almost synonymous, at least as far as women and certainly by contrast to us allegedly uptight British men… 

In recent decades, another myth has done the rounds, that Scandinavian countries were all exemplary utopian societies. Okay so the tax was high but then so were the wages and the social welfare net unprecedented. More recently, this myth has proved to be just that – a myth and newspapers will have to search elsewhere for the next big meme. You can read a quite amusing article on the subject here or an article on why America’s left might be unwise to embrace the idea of Scaninavian utopianism with aspects of Swedish society best forgotten, forced sterilisation of 63,000 people who might have physically or mentally deficient offspring. I will not repeat all the arguments in these two typical articles seeking to revise our view of Finnish, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian society but here are a few random facts:- 

  • Danes claim to be a happy people but are second only to Iceland in consuming anti-depressants
  • In Norway, September 2013, the rightwing, anti-Islamist Progress party – of which the mass shooter Anders Breivik had been an active member for many years – won 16.3% of the vote in the general election
  • Norwegians boast of using only renewable energy sources but their wealth comes from selling fossil fuels to the rest of us. (subject of the excellent Scandi drama “Occupied”)
  • Women in Nordic nations deal with high levels of rape and abuse even as the countries lead in gender equality
I think that two issues are raised here, why did we so want to hear about the supposedly utopian Scandinavians with their Hygge and secondly, why is there a gap between the myth and the reality. One thing is about us and the other is about them…

Taking the point about the Scandinavians first, and reading between the lines of several articles, some things happen because governments devise them in top down programmes such as high tax to pay for high social security and other things come from the grassroots up. In a book called “Made in Sweden: how the Swedes are not nearly so egalitarian, tolerant, hospitable or cozy as they would like to (have you) think”, Elisabeth Åsbrink, an acclaimed Swedish journalist writes “Sweden has a very strong self-image of being a good country,” Asbrink said. “It’s in the tradition of Sweden to put itself forth as a moral role model.” and later in the book, “As soon as welfare is based on all citizens contributing,” Asbrink writes, “those who are not considered contributors become a problem.” Hence the enforced sterilisations and anti-immigrant attitudes. Hygge, it seems is a residue from traditional values that don’t stand up when the people are threatened by new influences from new people.

Before you think I am swinging too far the other way and painting the Scandinavians too noir, (and Scandi noir has given us some great dramas – why are we so fascinated with gruesome crime?) – no! They are just human like the rest of us! It seems that human nature allows us to befriend strangers from other places as individuals whilst simultaneously feeling threatened on a group, welfare or cultural level. To pay high taxes for a great social welfare net but not then be so willing to share it. Margaret Meade, the anthropologist, said that rather than the burying of dead, she saw the beginning of civilisation as being when we see evidence of healed broken-bones – evidence that we not only had time and resources plus the knowledge of how to set bones, but the will to support a fallen comrade. (The story of this quote is told here and here) This would appear to be an issue which is always in the balance in human nature depending perhaps, on the availability of resources…

So why did we want to believe in the myths about Scandinavia? Perhaps it is human nature to think that the grass must be greener somewhere and so all us uptight English boys, lacking as we did, either the, climate or the  surf-culture of Beachboys California, fantasised about embracing the nearly in reach,uninhibited, blonde, Swedish sex-goddesses and later in life we wanted to embrace the supposed values of Hygge as we sat surrounded by our not always soft and cuddly IKEA furniture. There is indeed a post-modern irony in the Swedish “death thrash” band naming itself “Bleeding Utopia” (pictured above).

“Train Wreck” is about a Utopian experiment on a planet where a completely fresh start with a handpicked population are not threatened by mass immigration or poverty and their society has been carefully structured in cantons equating to the earliest tribal size of mankind – a size at which everyone knows everyone else in each community and – so it is thought – policemen are therefore not necessary. But can you root out and socially structure away, the worst aspects of human nature? The private demons of greed, envy, hubris and the things that cause dysfunction such as sexual abuse? Hawaii 2 may or may not need policemen but it may well need Social Workers… Our central character, Jack Gulliver is like someone who accepted at face value, all the myths about Scandinavia of the last decade, and is now travelling through the less palatable circles of existence on Hawaii 2 with his guide Stig. Where will it lead and who planted the bomb on the train and killed Jack’s wife…? 

P is for Politics, politics and the Pan Human Federation…

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 My goal in the 2021 A2Z Challenge was to complete a novel I started a few years ago but which has languished for lack of love (writing!). Each Post, daily in April (Sundays excepted), was to consist of some aspect of the novel plus a chapter from it. I hope that the Alphabetical items will give a bit of extra background, muse on the writing process, but most of all, help me develop certain ideas to improve the novel. I had 12 chapters already written at the beginning of the month but my day job has taken too much time and I have only completed another two. So although I hope to complete some more chapters before the end of April, I will continue with these posts for sure. If you have been following the novel and would like to receive the balance of the book then please leave an email in the comments…


Political party, politician, playing politics, isn’t politic -we all use the word and its adjuncts frequently, but when I came to consider the politics of Hawaii 2 in my book “Train Wreck” – I realised that I didn’t know what the real definition or etymology of the word was. Of course, Wikipedia was there, itself a form of political example since anybody may edit a definition and this has famously led to tussles with some items being repeatedly re-edited. Here then, is the definition from their very excellent article:-

“Politics (from Greek: Πολιτικά, politiká, ‘affairs of the cities’) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status…”

The  article goes on to refine the understanding of the word “politics” usage – “limited” referring only to the process of governance whilst “extensive” meaning a total view of life as it is lived, as in a feminist view of the power relationships between the sexes as in the statement “The personal is political!”

Another dichotomy over the meaning of Politics is the Moral/Realist schism. Aristotle believed that every societal dispute could be settled by discussion and never by recourse to war – an ethical approach which is strongly exemplified in Utopian ideas. Political Realists like Machiavelli and Hobbes, thought that might is right, although Bernard Crick argues that “politics is the way in which free societies are governed. Politics is politics and other forms of rule are something else.” (My emphasis).

The way I think of politics is this, there are essentially only two positions, those who believe that everyone is born with equal rights (even if differences between people sometimes mean offering them different things to fulfil that equality) and those who believe that some people are intrinsically better than others. For example, the belief of Native Americans that the land could not be owned and the view of immigrant settlers that it could, represents a conflict which was solved by political realists – the settlers ran the Native Americans off the land, and confined their non-ownership of land to small reservations. It is hard to see what kind of alternative, politically equitable settlement could have been reached between two such different peoples with their totally different political philosophies and that would have allowed a peaceful disposition of the land – in any event, power won.

In most societies, where differences in wealth, power and equality exist, my two political positions can be called Left and Right respectively, but in a utopian society, set up to avoid just such differences, there would be no need for Left and Right and true equality should prevail – Hawaii 2 is just such a utopian society.

In Ursula le Guin’s masterpiece, “The Dispossessed” – there is a similarly utopian society but what emerges is that even within a system of political equality, there can emerge a tyranny of the majority. Convention becomes oppressive and gossip, (charitably defined as a force for social cohesion) its enforcer. We do use politics with a small p to describe the machinations and manipulations, pleas and accommodations that occur between individuals and their immediate neighbours and no amount of utopian philosophy can totally eliminate certain aspects of human nature, envy, pettiness, jealousy.

The canton system of local government that exists on Hawaii 2 is described in Chapter 10 and representatives are sent to a planetwide government body and they in turn send representatives to the Pan Human Federation that is a forum, but not a government of the three worlds which humans have colonised Hawaii 1, Arctane, and Hawaii 2. But at the canton level, every member of the locality must attend at least three out of every six meetings and so the people govern themselves rather than being governed by elected representatives – something which can give rise to a class of self-interested politicians whose motives can diverge from those who they represent…

Without giving too much of a spoiler, I may hint that the solution to the mystery of “Train Wreck”, involves politics, but whether with a capital P or a small p remains to be seen…

O is for Oil in Science Fiction…

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  My goal in the 2021 A2Z Challenge was to complete a novel I started a few years ago but which has languished for lack of love (writing!). Each Post, daily in April (Sundays excepted), was to consist of some aspect of the novel plus a chapter from it. I hope that the Alphabetical items will give a bit of extra background, muse on the writing process, but most of all, help me develop certain ideas to improve the novel. I had 12 chapters already written at the beginning of the month but my day job has taken too much time and I have only completed another two. So although I hope to complete some more chapters before the end of April, I will continue with these posts for sure. If you have been following the novel and would  like to receive the balance of the book then please leave an email in the comments…

Oil refinery at night looking very futuristic…

This post considers the oil industry and whether it would exist in any future setting.

If we had the chance to start over on some pristine planet (such as Hawaii 2 in my book “Train Wreck”) would we have an oil industry.

Firstly – this begs the question, would there be oil on other planets?
There is, in geology, a Principle of Uniformitarianism which says, in a nutshell, that processes that can occur in one place and time, can occur anywhere. So that means that all planets can evolve according to the same rules and whilst they might be different due to their size, composition, and distance from their star, all things being equal, a planet like Earth could very well exist and support carbon-based life forms including those that lead to the formation of oil deposits. If there are tree-like forms, there will be coal, if there are plants, algae and bacteria equivalents (and there almost certainly will be – at least bacteria) in seas, then there will be oil. In the course of Earth’s geological history, there have been many different ages – long periods of stability then sudden changes to quite different climate and conditions. Certain ages favoured the creation of coal (the Carboniferous period) and others that of oil as that organic material sank to the bottom of the oceans and was eventually buried and transformed into oil.

Secondly and more importantly, would we want or need to use that oil if we found it?
Crude oil is a thick, sticky substance – it can be seen at the surface at the La Brea tar-pits where it has trapped and preserved many hapless animals over time. When refined, broken down into it’s constituent parts (fractionated), crude oil yields a plethora of chemicals, from the lightest, most liquid such as petroleum and kerosene, it yields lubricants (oils), through the substances used to make plastics, to the bitumen we use to make tarmac roads. Which was handy for the evolution of the age of the motor vehicle – crude oil gave us the fuel, plastic for components as well as the material that binds the roads vehicles run on.

When I was a boy, oil reserves were synonymous with “energy” reserves, but now that we understand the consequences (unintended), of burning all those fossil fuels, we are having to regard oil as “stores of locked up carbon” – the burning of which, release carbon, as carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, back into the atmosphere. This is not new – humans have been contributing to climate change for millennia by cutting down trees either to burn for fuel, or to clear land for agriculture since trees remove CO2 from the atmosphere and lock it up.


In “Train Wreck”, the Earth, original home to the human race, now scattered across three planets, was destroyed as a habitat by a combination of climate change and other forms of pollution. The colonists are painfully aware of what human activities are capable of doing to something as large as a planetary ecosystem and ecological sciences are some of the most advanced that they carry with them to their new homes. Hence the greening of the deserts on Hawaii 2 by using tree planting and irrigation to produce a self-sustaining climate change of a positive kind!

So back to the question – if they found oil deposits on a new planet, would the use them? Well the plethora of chemicals found in oils have so many applications beyond simply using them as fuel that it is hard to resist the idea of using them. Other things besides internal combustion engines need lubricating and plant oils do not always meet the specifications. Burning fossil fuels to a limited, could be off-set by planting trees. Plastics are not he devil, but some of the uses of plastic are! The phrase “Unnecessary Plastic Objects” has never had greater resonance as we start to see micro-plastics turning up in the oceanic food chain (of which we partake) and even in the deep oceans.

If motor vehicles had not been invented at the beginning of the 20th Century, then our cities would not have sprawled such that, for those living in the suburbs, life without a car is difficult. on a new planet, planning could obviate the need for cars which besides their polluting fuels, are a huge waste of resources and more energy just to produce. But we have always had vehicles and I hardly think the new ecology of future planets would involve a return to donkeys and horse-drawn carts! What are the alternatives? Motor cars began around the same time as universal electrification, but electric cars were not a missed turning on the road to the present. In fact even in the present, electric cars are still at the expensive new tech stage and the pressure to create better batteries is intensifying – eventually they will become better and cheaper through greater mass production. But just as control of, or access to, the best oil resources has led to wars and defined the political geography of Earth in the 20th Century, so access or control of the Rare Earths needed for the new tech may occupy a similar place in the 21st Century. China recognised the possibilities of the deposits within its territories and developed the industry so that it now supplies 55% of the world’s current demand. It turns out that these “rare” earths are actually quite common at the bottom of the deep oceans but you can imagine the environmentalist alarm at the suggestion that mining those would obviate dependence on China…

So there you go, the skinny on oil in science fiction because I cannot remember any science fiction book which referred to oil production (please correct me if I am wrong) – generally speaking, science fiction writers prefer futuristic magical thinking – flying cars, for example, that defy the laws of physics as we currently understand them. It has given me peculiar pleasure to use “Principle of Uniformitarianism” as a tag…



Locusts…

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It is not my intention to make this a nature blog, but when a locust, an animal of mythical status quite literally, drops into your hand, or to be precise, onto the USB cable you have in your hand – it is worthy of a photo at least. They do occur in small or rather, regular numbers here in Crete but I understand they rarely get triggered into the massive swarms possible in nearby Africa. A quick search of the internet shows there are many species of even the European Locust but I was not able to identify this one easily – any entomologists out there?

Locusts are an apt metaphor for the outsourcing companies that the UK Tory government see fit to issue with contracts for Covid 19 Test and Trace as part of their ideological drive to centralise power with the Cabinet, richly reward their donors and no doubt themselves at some point down the line. It is the latest version of neo-liberalism and driven on the ideological side by Dominic Cummings (principal advisor to Boris Johnson) who is determined to curb what he sees as the bloated power of the UK Civil Service. However, as the linked article shows, this outsourcing is highly inefficient and costly. to give one example, local authorities in the UK have highly skilled tracing teams for use in sensitive areas such as STD cases but the government ignored this resource at the outset of the pandemic when it could have made a great difference in holding back the tide – preferring to centralise power to itself, not to mention the profits inherent in outsourcing. The outsourcing teams were undertrained, the privacy issues minimised for centralised efficiency and due to general inefficiency, were underused (staff reported being paid to sit on standby for calls and not receiving any) and when they did get calls, their efficiency in tracing (64%)was much lower than that achieved by local authority teams in their fields (97%). Still the locusts swarm around the government who are secretive about the amount they are dishing out but may very well run into billions on track and trace alone…

Meanwhile, here on Crete where our personal escape plan seems to have succeeded, that is to say, we arrived by air without so far, displaying any sign of having Covid 19 (touch wood). Due to the UK government first saying it was impossible to issue travel/quarantine on return bans for anything less than a whole country, they then did one of their trademark U-turns and following a planeload of returning holidaymakers from just one Greek island, the government imposed a 14-day quarantine on all people coming from all Greek islands. This ignores the fact that it was those British holidaymakers who probably took the disease with them and shared it amongst themselves as well as the islanders. Consequently, many people cancelled their Greek holidays, unable to take unpaid holiday leave to quarantine on their return and their employers unwilling to grant it anyway. Our own direct flight to Crete was one of the casualties and we had to fly via Athens which was a rushed and harassing connection.

The effects on the Greek tourism industry have been catastrophic – especially on the islands which often depend on tourism and considering that the total covid record for the whole of Greece amounts to say – one day in the UK, this seems very unfair and it is quite ironic that one should be expected to quarantine passing from the comparative safety of Greece to the dangers of out-of-control Britain. Given that most Greeks do not know anyone who has contracted covid 19, even at several removes, the level of compliance in mask-wearing in shops and by those serving in restaurants, is all the more remarkable. I feel that in the long term, people will look back on this pandemic and see the apparently limited numbers of victims compared say, to Spanish Flu) as opposed to the long-term effects which we are just beginning to suspect the extent of and be amazed at the initial good response of people to something they could not see happening for themselves and the squandering of that good effort by some governments due to concerns for economic health. The Greek islanders – through no choice of their own (unlike say, New Zealand) – have been forced to take the economic hit but been saved, so far, the health hit – it remains to be seen whether they will feel blessed by that…

Meanwhile, Barbara and I are still in the process of settling in to what is clearly more than a holiday (at a projected three-month minimum) and yet not an outright move to live in another country. This is what exercises our minds presently…

P.S.

On the millipede front, I was wondering what other creature might benefit from the bonanza of the beast’s appearance since this seems to be axiomatic fodder from our watching of nature documentaries. Every morning there are many dead bodies on the steps down to our apartment and no sign of anything eating them – so imagine my surprise when I saw the not merely dead, but somewhat desiccated body of a millipede moving with apparently unnatural animation – a sideways movement impossible for a live millipede. The cause was an ant, a fraction of the millipede’s size who not only dragged the beast on the horizontal, but up a 7cm step. Unfortunately, I missed this feat by the time I got the video up on my phone but below is some of the heroic event on the flat – David Attenborough eat your heart out!


An open letter to my MP

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Dear Mr Moore


It is with ambivalence that I write to you and with which, I imagine you will receive this letter since you are one of the MP’s who replaced – in our case, a very good and well-liked MP – on the strength of a facile slogan “Let’s Get Brexit done!”. Whether that was one of Boris Johnson’s own efforts or the handiwork of Dominic Cummings is a moot point but you undoubtedly owe your seat – in part – to the behind the scene machinations of Cummings – BUT – and here is my point, you may well lose it due to the catastrophic misjudgement of Dominic Cummings and his “boss”, the Prime Minister, if not now, then in the long run.

The Tory handling of the Coronavirus has been woeful, if understandable in their terms – the economic consequences of the crisis are inconceivable and immeasurable at present (though they will emerge in retrospect ) but it now appears that the delay of a week to eleven days at the outset whilst considering “herd-immunity” (a Cummings idea?), has cost many thousands of lives. If this was in any way a reflection of the work of the Prime Minister’s Chief Advisor, it was not well done, but we are unlikely to know that. What we DO know, is that Cummings – supposedly the great reader and manipulator of British public opinion – has got this one very badly wrong. Either he thinks the public stupid (but they are not, and with all the time in lockdown, are well supplied with the facts and incentivised to understand the facts) or Cummings is arrogant and dismissive – or both.

Cummings is a self-professed Disruptor and this was his modus operandi over Brexit – disrupt the status quo by taking us out of Europe and I don’t know whether he even cares if the beneficiaries are neoliberal profiteers – I feel the disruption is an end in itself for Cummings. He says a great deal about what he doesn’t like but very little about what he does like which suggests that whilst he at least knows how to disrupt efficiently – it gives me no faith that he has anything constructive  to offer the Prime Minister, your party and the country in terms of fixing the economy .

When an advisor acts so inadvisably, surely he must go! Perhaps he “has something on Boris Johnson” which accounts for the seeming hold over him and I am sure that he is telling Boris to hold his nerve and all this will go away, but I ask you to keep the pressure upon the Prime Minister, to remove Cummings forthwith because, apart from anything else, the public will not forget this element of the crisis when and as the full analysis of it takes place. Your party has a large majority with a full term but…

Kind Regards
Andrew Wilson

T is for Trust…

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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!

Do you trust your Politicians?

In a democracy, we choose people to represent us in doing the job of managing our country because the knowledge, processes and institutions involved in running a country are beyond most of us. In an ideal world, politicians would be elder citizens who have worked in the “real” world and bring a variety of experiences to the table. Too often, we get instead, a class of professional politicians who have never done a day’s work outside the bubble of government.

We have to place our trust in the politicians we elect and under the stress test of the present Covid 19 crisis, many governments are being found wanting, many are taking the opportunity to seize power in a more authoritarian way under cover of the crisis yet some governments, many led by women, are doing much better than others.

Sex and Trust

I am fascinated by the part that instinct plays in the human way of life. We must spend something like 21 years raising a family so the power of sex and love must glue us together for the duration through what, for most couples, is bound to have some ups and downs. Yet is said that infidelity on the part of men is down to their instinct to spread their seed wherever they can, and before the advent of genetic testing, men (and women) could mostly get away with this. However trust, once broken by infidelity discovered, is hard, and for some, impossible to rebuild. Women are often portrayed as the opposite of wild oat sowing men – faithful nest-builders yet not only among humans but also among some birds, has it been discovered that certain females partner up with good providers – first of nest-building materials and then food for the chicks. However the female then secretly mates with a more “fit” and showy male thus getting the best of both worlds…
In some bird species, such as the Bower Bird, it is the quality of the nest building and decorating which is the criteria for selection of a mate by the female whilst for others, it’s all about the Peacock plumage. How does this relate to trust in politicians?

“Male” and “Female” Values in politicians.

In an article by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox in Forbes, she writes about how the countries which have the best response to the corona virus crisis have one thing in common – women leaders! Iceland, Taiwan, Germany, New Zealand, Finland, Iceland and Denmark all have women Premieres and all have had better responses to the crisis than say Britain, the US, Brazil, India or Russia where right-wing politicians are consolidating power and wielding it unwisely at the cost of the lives of their citizens. Taiwan has had an exemplary response to the virus – a fast, testing and tracing based response by Tsai Ing-wen in Taiwan (which was lost to the world because the WHO is China leaning and wouldn’t acknowledge the existence of Taiwan or the warnings it issued about what was happening in China let alone report on its successful strategy!).
Iceland is a large island with a small population and a pioneer of whole-population genetic testing (which revealed lots of infidelity-produced babies that led to many divorces in Iceland) and so tested its entire population under the leadership of Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir, and “will become a key case study in the true spread and fatality rates of COVID-19” according to Avivah Wittenberg-Cox. Avivah goes on to suggest that for years, research has shown that the leadership styles of women have much to recommend them and points us to an article on 7 Leadership Lessons men can Learn from Women.

Are men led by the instinct first to reproduce and then to grasp power – the biggest and best tail feathers? Are some women seduced by the Donald Trumps of this world with their bright orange colouring and big towers? Are all women consummate nest-builders and faithful partners? How much are we driven by instinct to the detriment of common sense? These are the things that keep me awake at night – but on the evidence of the present crisis, whatever drives the women premieres in whom their people have placed their trust, seems to be working much better than the countries where men are the chosen ones…

N is for Neo-Liberalism…

humanist55

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!


What the heck is neo-Liberalism and why should I worry about it?

Don’t worry – it’s not so long ago that I had to look it up because I had seen it mentioned in so many articles as if it was a given that everyone understood. Sadly it is not and the people who espouse it do not want you to know about it, because it is not a good thing!

You can find a full definition of neo-liberalism here but in a nutshell – it is a revival of 19th-century ideas about free-market economics – that allows the market to determine economics – government should not interfere – in fact, the government should de-regulate wherever possible as regulations just get in the way of productivity. This is sometimes called laissez-faire capitalism.

De-regulation

Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan (or more probably his advisors) became taken with the works of Friedrich Hayek on neo-liberal policy and it has dominated British and US not to mention European and many other countries’ politics ever since. I say politics rather than policies because neo-liberalism is a favourite of the right-leaning political parties – for which you can read – “supporters of the rich”.  Even New Labour under Tony Blair went so far as to embrace it, because superficially, it doesn’t sound unreasonable. Look at the butter mountain of Europe – a result of governmental interference in the form of agricultural subsidies. Let the market sort out the price and if farmers can’t get the price they need for butter – let them grow what the market says it really needs instead. Who in their right mind wants unnecessary paperwork due to overbearing bureaucratic governance? Ditch those pesky regulations!

However! It is the de-regulation of banking – allowing banks to have both a lending branch and an investment (gambling on an unimaginable scale) branch with only their own promise that they would keep the two halves separate. Another story, but that is what led to the financial crisis of 2008. De-regulation in neo-liberal terms means removing all the regulations that restrict how the rich can get richer – pesky things like worker’s rights, health & safety, environmental protection – can you see where this is leading? Well for Britain it led to Brexit, softened up by stories penned by our now Prime Minister, about the EU calling for Straight Bananas (a complete fiction), the Europhobes who hate all those great areas of regulation which have built up in the EU, sold Brexit to the public on the strength of “taking back control”. The only people taking more control as a result of Brexit, are the rich supporting right.

Austerity

The greatest tool in the arsenal of neo-liberals which they tell us is for our own good but which is really another self-serving ruse of the rich, is Austerity. Who would not agree that being in debt is a bad thing and that the answer to debt is to tighten your belt and spend less? This might work for an individual, but it does not work in the same way for businesses or nation-states. When a government borrows money to spend on an infrastructural project such as a new motorway, a lot of that money comes back straight away in the form of tax from companies and workers and in the long run, the project creates greater productivity for the country and that allows the debt to be repaid. But this is against the neo-liberal agenda – it is tantamount to interference in the market by the government. If a motorway is really needed,  the market will spot the opening and a consortium will be formed to construct it. Austerity decrees that we save money by cutting spending so the funding to local government is cut forcing them first to become more efficient and then to cut anything which is not absolutely essential. Collecting waste is essential, support for drug or alcohol dependence is not so facilities for them are closed. In the short term, this does not create problems except for individuals, but the long term impact on health services and broken families and damage to the next generation and cyclical problems – you get the picture – costly…
Then there is the stealthy theft of the NHS – it goes like this – first you starve it of cash till it creaks at the seams, then you sell the parts that can make money for private companies (market forces right!) to your rich mates. Result – the underfunded NHS was totally unequal to the task of fighting Covid 19 as it is well into the starvation phase.

The great choice

One of the great lies of Austerity has been exposed by the Covid 19 Crisis. Tories derided Labour plans for increased spending on social welfare and infrastructural development. “There is no Magic Money Tree” they said. Now they are proposing borrowing our way out of the crisis at levels not seen since the Second World War. They are doing some complicated shenanigans with the Bank of England which, however, they deny it, amount to MonetaryFinancing which amounts to a magic money tree. Most people in the Tory party would like to see a return to the good old days of neo-liberal free-for-all which in the wake of Brexit, offers rich pickings for those who have plenty of money already (money comes to money). There has never been a time more urgently requiring the very opposite. Austerity was wrong before the crisis and it will be worse still afterward. We must not be persuaded that the only way to pay off the debt incurred is to tighten our belts for generations to come.

What are the alternatives?
An organization called Sovereign Money has detailed the problems that led to the 2008 financial crisis and what they propose by way of a solution remains valid in the recovery after Cocid 19 – if not more so. They say that there are two sources of money in the economy – money created by banks when they lend money – and money created by the Bank of England on behalf of the government which up to now has been a tiny proportion. Because austerity led governments believe consumer spending is the way forward, they have been happy to see banks lend to individuals which has led to repeated housing price rises (bubbles). At the same time, the banks have not lent freely to businesses – the real economy.

Now that the virus has shut many businesses down and locked-down debt-ridden individuals in enforced unemployment, more of the same must not be an option. The government must use its power to create money via the banks and must return to the real purpose of governance which is to take meaningful decisions about the post-virus world.

You can find much more detail at Sovereign Money – I have only offered a signpost but I urge everyone to quaint themselves with the issues and not allow us to be marched blindly into the same old problems that suit a small minority of the already rich.

M is for Money…

humanist55

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…