Politics

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

humanist55
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…

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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!


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…

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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!

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…

J is for Judgment

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!

An open letter to Boris Johnson


Dear Prime Minister Johnson

or may I call you Boris since you are now to be perceived as one of the people,” in it together”? I wish you well on your recovery from Covid 19 and I despise those who have made political capital out of your illness and I wish you no harm as a fellow human being.

Whilst I disagree strongly with decades if not centuries of the policies of your party, I know you are not responsible for all that, but you have willingly picked up the mantle. On a personal level, l am given to understand that your position on Brexit had more to do with seeking the highest office in politics rather than conviction and now you have achieved it. Your personal approval ratings are high as the jolly man who promises to “Get Brexit Done!” But this pandemic means that all bets are off, Brexit almost irrelevant for now except that the benefits of international co-operation have never been more needed or more obvious. Furthermore, now that you have experienced the very best treatment by a National Health Service which your party has done so much to wear down under your plans – to change it into an American for-profit system – I hope you have seen the results of those policies, understaffed, under-resourced, yet offering heroic service to the nation in the present crisis.

I hope when you return to work after the rest which your father has prescribed for you, that you’ll see things in a different light – you may question the wisdom of your earlier judgments. I know you will be surrounded by a cabinet full of the people who still believe in austerity as the default position, the same people who pressured this country into Brexit and they will not be happy to see you turn your ideas around but I beg you to do so for it is not possible for this country or indeed the world to return to things as they were. Do you endorse your stand-in having said, whilst you were ill, that “this is not the time to be thinking of a raise in salaries for nurses.” Surely you of all people must now agree that there can be no better time…

You may wish to emulate the man I understand to be your hero – Winston Churchill – a man who made many errors of judgment in his career before finding his ultimate role as leader of the country in a time of war, much as you are now, However, remember, despite having led us through the war successfully, Churchill was disappointed to lose the election in a landslide to Labour after the war, because the people knew by then, that they were entitled something better and they rejected those who traditionally felt entitled. This is how the Welfare State was born and the time has come for the government to renew the Social Contract and rebuild the Welfare State for the people, or as Labour would have it “For the Many Not the Few”. After your election victory you realized you had to look after the so-called Labour red wall seats or else you might lose at the next election. None of us could have foreseen that this crisis would spring up so quickly on your watch, but here it is – your Churchill moment. How are you going to play it? You have the chance to be an outstanding leader if you dare to take a radical position as the times call for. Or you can just attempt to restore things as they were with the massive gaps between rich and poor. But will you then succeed at the next election with an electorate who have had unlimited time to understand and consider how we got to this place in such a poor state of preparedness and to watch how you manage to deal with the crisis.

Please! Go for blue-sky thinking, out-of-the-box thinking, make judgments based on new criteria, try something different – make no mistake that is what is required in what will be a new world order.

PS Your senior advisor – the self-styled Disruptor, Dominic Cummings – is he the right man for the job now. Breaking things is so much easier than trying to fix them and Covid 19 has surely given him as much disruption as even he could wish for -just saying…

I is for Internationalism v. Isolationism.

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!

Lying in bed this morning, trying to think of a subject for the A to Z Challenge 2020, I had a sudden insight that I had never quite grasped before with such clarity. The right-wing Prime Ministers, Presidents, and Dictators, who have slid to power on the back of inflamed Nationalist sentiments, the scapegoating of “the other”, are against Internationalism because they want total control within their fiefdoms – as much as they can grasp without showing their true colours. What were the first things that Donald Trump did after getting elected? He put travel bans on Muslims and made a start on the wall he had used to get elected by whipping up the very people he and his kind routinely neglect. The isolationism of Trump’s US has been ramped up with ill-conceived trade wars – especially with China – this is quintessential Isolationism.



Let us not forget, in this time of distraction, Brexit, pushed by the likes of uber-rich, hedge-fund manager and Member of Parliament Rees-Mogg. His hedge fund no doubt made a huge killing betting on the outcome of Brexit – betting against the good of the country. The European Union is an example of Internationalism – it was set up in the aftermath of the Second World War with the aim, through close cooperation in all areas, trade, education, crime prevention, scientific research, and the freedom of movement for work or simply to live somewhere else. This aspect of the EU was completely ignored by Brexiteers who saw only a body that imposed rules which make it harder for them to exploit society, rules on human rights, on environmental and food standards.

Now, brought together by a greater danger, the Covid 19 pandemic, we are seeing unprecedented international cooperation – at least in the scientific community but whilst we are all distracted, there is a creeping seizure of “emergency” powers by many governments and the question is, will they be relinquished at the end of all this – they are the ones who will decide when it is at an end in any case…

There have been many ridiculous conspiracy theories about the virus and its origins and you may think that these warnings about power-grabs fall into the same league, but if you do take them ln any way, seriously, here is a link to Open Democracy who take these things very seriously and offer a comprehensive list of the implications for democracy around the world.

Sorry to offer more doom and gloom when the virus gives us enough to worry about here in the present, however, we need to think about how things will be on the other side of this pandemic and since the crisis has highlighted many inconvenient truths, the way austerity has run down the heroic National Health Service in Britain – softening it up for privatization US style – the complete and scandalous inadequacy of the “for profit” health service in the US or the way companies have denied the effectiveness of working from home for say, disabled people and which managers are now doing everywhere. People are questioning the way they have been made to live, in all sorts of ways and those on the right are terrified of where it will leave them if the people remember what they have learned including – Internationalism good for solving the crisis- Isolationism (on an International level though very definitely not the personal) bad…

Postscript to Fighting…

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This morning, after posting F is for Fighting, I read a piece online in the Financial Times by the wonderful writer Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things) written five days ago. It tells of the tragic events unfolding in India under the [monstrous] Hindu Nationalist Prime Minister – Narendra Modi. The usual catalogue of bad decisions based on early denial, but in a country of teeming millions of poor crammed into slums, this will be a human disaster of epic proportions.

In her preamble, Arundhati says, and I can’t quote for copywriter reasons and so must paraphrase, but please go and read the full work – that governments who are in charge of the response to the virus pandemic are fond of referring to it as a war and that they mean it literally rather than metaphorically. But if it was really a war, then the US, which has been woefully unprepared for the virus, would be the best prepared with guns and planes, soldiers and bombs.

Arundhati Roy spells out in much more detail than I and with far greater eloquence, the dangers of poor leadership and the human costs that are being engendered. At the end, she describes pandemics throughout history, as portals to a different future where-through we will have choices to make about whether we return to the same old systems which have been revealed  as broken, such as capitalism – or choose another direction…

The Death of Cash?

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One of the recommendations for businesses operating during the Covid 19 pandemic, is that they should encourage people to pay by contactless debit card. I say encourage, because whilst we and many other countries are rushing headlong towards, if not a cashless society, at least a much-reduced role for cash and yet there are still some obstacles – hence the reason they were recommendation rather than enforced restrictions. Last weekend, before the lockdown was more strident, my partner and I decided to head for Filey and a walk on the beach where we hoped we could be sufficiently socially-distant. Imagine our shock ar finding that everyone seemed to have had the same idea, the weather being fair if breezy and the seafront was almost as crowded as a summer day. Okay, we could keep reasonably distant from other people and the brisk off-the -sea breeze whisked any miasma emanating from others swiftly away. Besides, at this stage, it was a numbers game and the chance of catching the virus seemed but a small percentage as long as we kept our distance and touched nothing. Nevertheless, we risked ordering a cup of tea, paper cups naturally, from a cafe where I paid with a contactless debit card. I remarked that it was fortunate that they had the facility but the woman behind the counter said that the majority of their customers, local, elderly and not enthusiastic about card payments let alone contactless, prefer to use (filthy)cash still.

So there is the first issue – resistance. But in China, a country also well on the way to a cashless economy, the lag is more of an urban/ rural split though this might also equate to an older generation of peasant society since the youth have often left for the cities. This is not just a resistance issue but an internet access issue since all payment systems depend on internet coverage for universal availability. Wait that’s not quite true – on another continent not hitherto noted for financial innovation, things have taken a different direction altogether – in Africa, they have developed mobile phone apps to make payments. Where China has skipped over the whole Debit card stage and gone straight to the smartphone using 3D barcode scanning, in Africa, they have skipped over the whole banking stage because they don’t have enough banks and like China, they especially don’t have enough banks in rural areas. Also, Africa does not yet have enough smartphones to do QR Codes but it has a thriving market in secondhand mobile phones which together with necessity, the mother of invention, has created a uniquely African solution. Africans also demonstrate the highest rate of peer to peer payment – that is paying another person by text.

Top of the league for a cashless society, closely followed by Canada and then the UK, is Sweden where many people cannot remember using cash in the last month. But here another warning note has been sounded, the government has asked the Swedish people to envisage what would happen if there was a prolonged internet outage due to solar storm or more sinisterly, due to cyber warfare and they have suggested that citizens prepare emergency packs including – yes you guessed it – cash.

What Sweden and indeed most societies that are going quickly cashless demonstrate, is that the adoption is people-led – grassroots up not bank or government down. People like using apps for their convenience and if spending money was easy, perhaps too easy, with a Debit or Credit Card – then waving your phone at a terminal doesn’t seem like spending money at all – at least until the bill arrives…
One of the things that accelerates the adoption of whatever form of cashless purchase, is when the associated charges are reduced to the point where small traders, busses and toilet payments, all small, become viable. But there is a downside when, as in Sweden, even banks no longer want to handle cash either in or out, and the number of branch closures increases. This is also due to online banking, but again, the rural, elderly, internet poor and disadvantaged suffer first and most.

Another reason often put forward by those who wish to encourage the race towards cashless, is the potential reduction in crime – no bank robberies, no safes necessary, no pilfering of cash by staff, no money laundering. However criminality rarely goes away – it just shifts to new opportunities so cybercrime includes identity theft, new forms of fraud based around digital payment methods. Like the fight between humans and viruses, each side tries to stay ahead. For example, a new generation of payment cards will incorporate ultra-thin fingerprint readers which means my partner and I will have to stop paying with whichever card is appropriate to our budgetary arrangements. Once again, poor and older people often use cash to physically allocate spending – the rent jar, the shopping jar etc. and these people are the least likely to have time, means, understanding or inclination to use those natty apps offered by banks to assist you to manage your expenses…

Other aspects of crime might be that those who deal outside the law such as drug dealers can hardly use digital payment systems because they leave a trail (though not a paper trail!) and whilst some might cite this as a way of squeezing such activities out of existence, it would more likely create alternative illegal currencies or barter systems. Even the Bitcoin, a virtual coinage much touted as being impregnably secure, based as it is on blockchain technology, turned out to be hackable if criminals could muster sufficient encryption busting computer power. Interestingly, the method for tracking down these robberies was to trace the extreme power consumption required by such computing power.

Another huge area in the debate over the pro’s and cons of cashless is the aspect of control. There are no bank charges for keeping your money under the mattress and at the other end of the scale, once you are totally digital banked, you are at the mercy of bank charges, interest rate changes – once there is no physical cash, the banks don’t need to work so hard to incentivize you to choose their bank to keep it in. Furthermore, it is easier for the government to keep track of citizen spending and indeed the citizen themselves with digital. China’s government are rumoured to be entering the market, currently dominated by two large phone payment apps, with their own offering and where will citizens hide from the police or the taxman then? Of course, the answer given to that one, is if you have nothing to hide…

So. the current virus crisis might push a few more people to finally adopt payment by card and contactless but as a society, we perhaps need to question our unconscious slide towards cashless, be it for fear of solar storms, cyber crime or overweaning government control. Remember, its not for nothing that the rich have always placed their trust in gold and land…