EU and Hitler “By Different Methods”: A Dangerous Misjudgement

15th May 2016PoliticsJim Gunther

Boris Johnson’s drawing a comparison between the European Union and Adolf Hitler shows a dangerous level of misjudgement. He asserted that Napoleon, Hitler and “various people” attempted to recreate a mythical Roman “golden age” of European unity and that the EU is another such attempt “by different methods”.

Let’s unpick those last three words with an analogy.

Relationship Counselling Equals Murder?

Jack and Jill have been married for ten years. Both are in their late middle age and were in long-standing relationship with other people before they met. Frankly, the marriage is in the doldrums. Each came to the relationship having accumulated a range of habits and personality traits developed over several decades of adult life. They are finding that, all too often, they rub each other up the wrong way. They get irritated by each other, they argue and quite often find themselves on barely speaking terms for a day or two.

Both agree they can’t go on like this. They agree they have a common aim: to eliminate, as far as possible, the opportunities for friction between them. Deep down, Jack has pretty much made up his mind that he wants a divorce. The only problem is that Jill, for deeply held religious reasons, doesn’t believe in divorce. She suggests they try relationship counselling. After a few sessions, they seem to have made little or no progress. They discuss whether to continue the sessions. The discussion builds up into a blazing row. Jack takes a kitchen knife and stabs Jill to death.

In the subsequent court case, Jack uses an unusual argument in his defence. In trying to justify his actions, he makes the following statement: “We had both agreed we needed to stop irritating each other. She wanted counselling sessions to achieve this. That’s no crime. I ended up stabbing her. It achieved our agreed aims, but by different methods”.

Reckless and Ill-judged

OK, analogies can’t be stretched too far. But those three little words, “by different methods”, make both Jack’s and Boris’s statements meaningless. Genocide and reconciliation between Jews and Arabs are both ways of bringing peace to Palestine, by different methods. Talking without preconditions or striking can settle the junior doctors’ dispute, by different methods. The Good Friday Agreement and dropping bombs are ways of addressing systemic discrimination against Nationalists in Northern Ireland, by different methods.

These examples are essentially variations on a theme. The different methods are either harming, killing or shouting at each other or sitting down, talking and listening to each other to try to reach a mutual understanding. The different methods are, necessarily, the point. The EU is, above all, an institution for people from different countries to come together and thrash out their differences verbally, rather than violently.

For Johnson to take such a line of argument shows the emptiness and desperation of the leave campaign. It shows a dangerous lack of judgement on his part. What makes things worse is that I have a strong feeling that Johnson doesn’t really care either way whether the UK leaves the EU or not. His decision to join the Brexiters was, as ever, about his own personal interests and, in particular, his Prime Ministerial ambitions. This demonstrates a breathtaking recklessness with the future of this country just to pursue his own selfish aims and to continue a long-running feud with one of his Eton contemporaries. You can’t play games with the national interest.

I note that Nigel Farage has just come out and said Johnson should be the next PM. So that’s two good reasons why Boris must never, ever succeed in that ambition.

Human Imagination: The Ultimate Time Machine

10th May 2016Ethics, Social and RelationshipsJim Gunther

Occasionally I wake up in the morning – or the middle of the night – when I’ve had a really weird dream. Sometimes it takes several minutes to shake off the sense that it was real. And I think about it and say to myself: “Wow! Where did all that come from?” The situations, characters and story lines can be far removed from my life’s experiences. Dreams, of course, are some of the most mysterious aspects of that thing of wonder: the human imagination.

The imagination, of course, plays the central role in works of art, used in the widest sense. From the impassioned brush strokes of J M Turner to the incisive pen strokes of a Steve Bell cartoon. From Antigone, King Lear and Hamlet to Harry Potter, Hard Times, Hobbits and Discworld. From Bach, Berlioz and Beethoven to the Beatles, Brel and Bowie. Experiencing the results of another person’s imagination is part of what binds us together as human beings and makes life rich and fulfilling.

Out of Time

But the idea I’m exploring here is how one’s imagination can take us out of our own time – and space. We use our store of memories, tidied up and altered in ways it’s difficult to assess, to analyse and reminisce over past events . We can engage in thought experiments to imagine some planned – or unplanned, hypothetical – future event. By imagining possible futures, some of our best and worst hopes and fears can be played out. When deep in our own thoughts thus, we are – literally – out of time.

His Master’s Voice and Where’s My Nuts?

So what makes human beings unique? It’s clear that other creatures have some sorts of memory. Dogs and cats recognize their owners. Any number of territorial creatures can recognize smells associated with marking out their territory. There’s some evidence, but the jury’s probably out on whether squirrels can really remember where they buried their nuts. But only humans seem likely to be able to put together a cogent narrative about past events.

There’s nothing unique to humans about the lived experience of consciousness: living in the present. So that just(?) leaves awareness of the future.

I Have Seen the Future

This, I think, is where human beings come into their own. To give a really bad, but current, example. The “debate” leading up to the EU referendum vote next month seems to consist almost exclusively of two rival speculations about the future. Person A says the sky will fall in if we leave. Person B says it won’t. Person X says we’ll be miles better in some respect if we go. Person Y says we won’t. And so on, and so on. It’s tedious and ultimately fatuous. One person’s “project fear” is another’s wise cautionary tale. But it is all, at heart, just competing narratives about the future. No other species on the planet could communicate in this way.

People do actually like to be told about their future, even when they know, deep down, what they’re being told is utter nonsense. I’m thinking here about fortune tellers, horoscopes, séances and such like. These rituals seem to satisfy some half-buried need for reassurance.

And It’s Murder

So from reassurance, I think it’s high time – indeed inevitable – that we talk about death. (Not about taxes today: sorry, Benjamin Franklin.) There is a generally, if not universally, held view that only humans have a concept of the inevitability of their own future death. There are some interesting discussions in the New Scientist and NY Times about other species’ understanding of death and use of rituals. A long discussion can be read in a US blog Rational Skepticism expressing a variety of ideas along the same lines. A really thought-provoking item in Wray Herbert’s We’re Only Human blog extends the discussion into more dangerous territory. It explores the reasons behind why humans are the only species prepared to commit murder and genocide on the basis of differing philosophies or world views, including religious differences.

Clash of civilizations — Clash of Civilizations

The Time Machine

There are a great many other avenues of thought to explore from the discussion so far – perhaps for a future blog. But my central point today is that it is our ability to think out of time and, above all, about the future that marks us humans out from the rest of Earth’s inhabitants. So I finish with a salute to that extraordinary product of evolution: the human imagination. It’s a source of our joy, our sorrows, our hopes and fears, and, inside our heads at least, it’s the ultimate time machine.

The Luckiest People in the World

8th May 2016Ethics, Politics, Social and RelationshipsJim Gunther

One of the dominant themes in the debate leading up to the EU referendum is that of immigration. There is much talk of this “problem” and repeated references to “controlling our borders”. There’s more than a whiff of seeing foreigners as some kind of invading pestilence from which we must be protected. The depressing old “taking our jobs” argument keeps resurfacing in one way or another. I can only repeat that those making such an “argument” simply don’t understand how national economies differ from household budgets.

But my point is this: there’s a whole, better way of discussing the subject of immigration and which needs to be presented in a positive and uplifting way.

The Way We Were

I was a young child in the 1950s. Looking back now on old black-and-white film clips from the time, the past, in the words of L P Hartley, “is a different country”. The landscape and the people have a uniform monochrome appearance – in more than one sense of the word. It was a world of deference, of knowing your place and never challenging authority. The moral certainties of the former Empire were still largely intact, although crumbling at the edges with shocks like the loss of India and the Suez debacle. Frankly, it looks pretty boring!

The World Comes to Leicester Square

Let’s move on – to the late 1990s. I was waiting outside Leicester Square tube station for a friend in the early evening. I’d arrived early and had about half an hour to wait. I stood watching the people as they poured in and out of the station entrance. I’d obviously chosen a popular meeting point to stand. What struck me was the sheer range and diversity of the people I saw: in age, ethnicity, style of dress and so forth. They were meeting and greeting each other – with smiles, with hugs and kisses and with an overwhelming sense of people happy to see each other. It was just people meeting people, from all walks of life and from who knows where.

Different Cultures, Fresh Insights

I spent several years on the committee which interviews and appoints candidates for the magistracy. As is common in public sector appointments, we were expected to follow a fairly structured and common list of interview questions. After a while, a certain pattern often emerges in the answers given to particular questions: a certain air of predictability. One candidate was a Nigerian-born man in his 40s who had arrived in the UK around the age of 20. When the interview was over, the three of us on the panel turned to each other and together said something along the lines: “Hey, what did you make of his answer” to a particular question. We all agreed it was a fascinating new insight into the issue that none of us had ever considered before.

Economists are pretty much unanimous that immigrants bring a net boost to an economy. But here was an example of something much richer than just the numbers: this man’s cultural heritage brought a new and refreshing way of thinking about an issue. The benefits of the interactions between people in a diverse population are obvious in creative fields such as music, dance and art. But here was a further example from the rather more formal world of the administration of justice.

Doing the Crap Jobs

Bedfordshire has a long tradition of brickmaking: it’s to do with the type of clay. The social history of the brickworks is a fascinating story. Different waves of immigrants, principally (and chronologically) from Italy, Poland and Bangladesh, have come to work there, prepared to do the dirty and physically demanding jobs that longer-standing residents would rather not do. As each immigrant group matures, they and their children move on to a more varied range of occupations, become more middle class and integrate into the community. This appears to happen typically over a period of around 20 to 30 years. There’s then the need for a fresh wave of immigration to keep the kilns firing.

bedfordshire brickworks — Bedfordshire Brickworks

Celebrate!

Partly as a result of the brickworks, the nearby former county town of Bedford is surprisingly diverse for the area of “middle England” in which it sits. By some accounts, around 100 different nationalities are represented. I’m proud and feel really privileged to be Chair of Governors at a school which positively celebrates the diversity of our students. We have kids with around 45 different nationalities. We encourage all to value, explore and celebrate the diverse histories and culture that enrich school life. It’s a joy to watch as, for example, a deeply traumatised and diffident child whose family escaped war-torn Afghanistan blossoms over a few months into a motivated, more confident and welcome member of the school. We don’t give up on the ones with more challenging behaviour, either: we haven’t expelled a child for over 8 years. It’s great to play a small part in the development of the next set of enlightened, confident and well-informed citizens.

Yes We Khan

All of which brings us quite nicely to the welcome result in the election for Mayor of London. Congratulations to the voters of our capital city for rejecting the mean-spirited, racist campaign of Sadiq Khan’s main opponent. Even the former chair of the Conservative Party, Sayeeda Warsi, has raised the spectre of the “Nasty Party” label again – and rightly so. With London now the most diverse capital city in the world – 40% of Londoners were not UK born – the town is a living example of what can be achieved if people live and work together in an attitude of mutual respect.

sadiq khan — Sadiq Khan: New London Mayor

This positivity is a welcome antidote to the other side of the coin. Large sections of the Tory party embody the mean-spirited values of the xenophobe. Cameron’s grudging concession on allowing a paltry number of unaccompanied refugee children from Syria and Britain’s opt-out of the arrangements to share immigrants between EU members are examples of this aspect of modern Conservatism. Is this what they mean by “British Values”?

neil and christine hamilton — Did the Welsh Really Vote for This?

But the pinnacle (is that the right word??) of this mean-spirited, ill-informed negativity has to be UKIP and all its works. I find it deeply depressing if I try to imagine what it must be like to live your life holding such negative, soul-destroying attitudes to our fellow human beings. Yuk!

People Who Need People

“Ah!” some may say, but how can we afford to build the extra school places and other items of infrastructure needed for new immigrants? The short answer is that we can if we choose to. Austerity is a political choice, not a necessity. We could choose to tax the rich more and to change our spending priorities – who needs a new aircraft carrier with no aircraft?

But my main point has nothing to do with economics. It’s all about people – people needing and welcoming other people. They’re the luckiest people in the world.

Getting a Good View of the Road Ahead

7th May 2016Environment, PoliticsJim Gunther

In 2000, I had a holiday visiting British friends then living in Colorado, USA. Whilst there, I hired a car and took myself off for a few days exploring the National Parks in Utah. Distances were long and driving alone gave me time for reflection. (In those pre-USB port days, the only radio options in that part of rural USA were country and western or Christian stations. So no radio, then.) I began to realise that I was spending quite a lot of my time driving with a slight sense of unease. It wasn’t just the unfamiliar car. Nor was it just driving on the opposite side of the road. Then it occurred to me. I seemed to be spending more time than normal driving without a clear view of the road ahead.

monument valley — Monument Valley: Part of My Driving Tour

On reflection, it seems only natural that one feels more comfortable driving when there’s a clear, unimpeded view ahead. This will be either when there is no vehicle in front of you or, if there is, there is still a clear view through the rear window and the windscreen to afford an almost full view of the road ahead. This is the case for most of the time when I’m driving in the UK. What was different here was that I was in an average-sized family car, much like I’d be driving at home. But what was different was that, most of the time, the vehicle in front was bigger – taller – than mine and I couldn’t see through the tailgate.

So, I concluded, the folks here drive around in much larger lumps of metal on wheels than we do back home. Even my friends, who, in all other respects, were reasonably liberal and considerate people, had one of these great gas-guzzling beasts for day-to-day driving, for no apparently good reason. The physical laws of the universe require that moving such vehicles around consumes more fuel. It seems all part of the Great American Myth of the open western frontier and limitless resources.

A Friends of the Earth study from 2009 showed that the average American consumes twice as much of the Earth’s resources as the average European. That’s also nine times as much as the average African. There’s simply not enough Earth to go round if everyone on the planet adopted a European lifestyle, let alone an American one.

A Very Brief History

Oil was discovered in the USA in the 1850s and by the First World War the US was extracting two-thirds of the world’s crude oil supply. It’s now the third largest producer of crude in the world, after Saudi Arabia and Russia. The USA was self-sufficient in oil up to the 1950s and has been a net importer since. Imports currently account for about one quarter of consumption: a rapid fall after peaking at over half of consumption in 2005. If only Americans had consumed at the same rate as Europeans over the years, they would have remained self-sufficient.

There’s a direct link between this need for imported oil and international Islamic terrorism. A potted history follows.

Abd-al-Wahab proposed an extremist “back to basics” form of Islam in the late 18^th century. A tribal leader Muhammed ibn Saud made a pact with al-Wahab: they would together bring the peninsula Arabs back to the “true” religion. The House of Saud remained just one of many Arab tribes until the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War One. Britain’s and France’s “divide and rule” policies of the 1920s brought British recognition of the Saudi King’s right to rule the whole of what is now Saudi Arabia. British and US rivalry over oil discoveries in the region led to US recognition of the Saudi regime in 1933, 6 years after the UK. Oil was discovered there in 1938.

After WWII, increasing Western dependence on Saudi oil led to governments overlooking the abuse of human rights in Saudi Arabia. (Saudi is ranked equal bottom with 6 other countries in a list of 205 countries published by Freedom House. The comparison measures political rights and civil liberties.) This was of no great international importance until the 1973 oil crisis which led to a five-fold increase in the price of a barrel of crude oil. Saudi Arabia started to accumulate a financial “war chest” of petrodollars. Part of this pile of cash was then spent on spreading their warped form of Islam by funding madrasas and other means of radicalising Muslims throughout the world. For 30 years, the west continued to turn a blind eye to this international indoctrination: we needed their oil.

And then along came 9/11, all but two of the perpetrators being Saudi nationals. Still not much happened to the west’s attitude to the Saudis – at least in public. The various groups have now morphed and re-morphed into ever more extreme versions of their predecessors and funders: Taliban, Al Qaeda, Daesh (Islamic State). In its most mutant form, Daesh is even now biting the hand that (historically) fed it and the Saudis must be privately wondering what monster they have unleashed. (My earlier post Fairy Tales of Syria give a fuller account of all this).

And so, joining the links in the chain, US energy profligacy leads to terrorism (with a little help from the Saudis on the way).

Climate Change, Too

What’s worse is that part of the linking mechanism is a fossil fuel: oil. Along with coal and natural gas, the developed western countries have been burning the stuff on a significant scale for about 200 years. Climate scientists now reckon that, cumulatively, we’ve burnt almost the maximum amount we can without catastrophic rises in global temperatures. I could stretch the “links in the chain” argument here to blame James Watt and his boiling kettle for global warming. Although this does seem to me to push the argument rather too far: the science did not exist in Watt’s time to know the climate effects of greenhouse gases.

This may seem a strange thing for an atheist like me to say, but there does seem to be something of the divine retribution in the devastating wildfires raging across northern Alberta. The fires are close to the area of extraction of fuel from tar sands – probably the most damagingly insane energy activity right now in relation to its effect on the global climate. The extraction process is grossly polluting to air and water supplies and the only sane policy is to leave the stuff in the ground. If not divine retribution, there are echoes of the Gaia principle, popular in the 1970s. Mother Earth fights back to save herself.

Look At the Road Ahead

All of which brings me back to my starting point. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. But if, at any stage in the sorry tale which got us to this point – with its dual threats of terrorism and climate change – we had considered the consequences of our actions (or inactions) we may have given ourselves a less bumpy ride on the road ahead.

The Careful, Compassionate State

5th May 2016EthicsJim Gunther

I recently attended an inquest at the Coroner’s Court in Warrington. No, it wasn’t the one looking into the Hillsborough disaster. This inquest was following the sudden death, in a road traffic collision, of a close family member. More on this shortly.

Is the Legal System a Villain?

David Conn is a Guardian sports journalist and author, specializing in football. It was an article of his in 2009 which prompted ministers Andy Burnham and Maria Eagle to take action which led to the quashing of the original “accidental deaths” inquest verdict and the setting up of the new inquest which ended last week. A lot has been written since then heaping criticism on the South Yorkshire Police and the ambulance service. But what led to the suspension of the SYP Chief Constable was the alleged insincerity of the apology he gave in 2012.

Charges of insincerity relate to the way in which lawyers acting for the police and individual officers cross-examined inquest witnesses. They made repeated accusations based upon the discredited lies published in 1989 as “The Truth” in the Sun. These lies included the fans’ drunkenness, stealing from the bodies of dead victims and urinating on the police. One estimate is that the second inquest (which lasted nearly two years) could have taken half the time and cost much less if this line of cross-examination had not occurred. The extra distress and grief to the family members would have been avoided, too. (Incidentally, SYP’s bill for lawyers has cost taxpayers £25m, 80% paid by the Home Office and the rest at £12 per South Yorkshire household on their council tax bills.)

Hillsborough 96 victims — Hillsborough 96

David Conn’s latest piece on Hillsborough makes an interesting new point. He states that the legal system itself is part of the problem. This led to the families of the dead fans waiting so long for justice and enduring an unnecessarily long and painful experience in the coroner’s court. He levels criticism at the coroner, John Goldring, for allowing lawyers working for the police to subject witnesses to hostile cross-examination based on the lies described above. It is the detachment of members of the judicial establishment (judges, coroners) which contributes to this problem. In Conn’s view, it is part of the way elites exercise power over “lesser folk”.

My Day in Court

My personal experience was rather different. The coroner’s Court followed due process, with the formality I expected from a court of law. We were all required to stand when the coroner entered the court. Formal titles were used in addressing all witnesses. The coroner sat on a chair which was a little raised above the rest. He took great care to explain to all present what was going to happen at each stage. He took special care to avoid open display or discussion in court of any details that might cause distress to the close family members.

Two officers of Cheshire Police force were present. One, the family liaison officer, has done an excellent job in supporting the family through the various stages, from the initial breaking of the news to support in the coroner’s court – and much in between. His care and compassion were very apparent. His job role is to speak to newly bereaved people, breaking terrible, shocking news and dealing with the inevitable questions and emotional reactions. What a day job! Someone has to do it. The other officer was an expert witness to the inquest. He reconstructed the “mechanical” details of the collision, vehicle speeds, angles and distances. His very clear explanation helped me enormously to finally get a full picture of what had happened. It also made it clear there was no blame to be attached to any of the parties involved.

I was grateful to have the opportunity to thank both officers for an excellent job done. There was also an opportunity to speak to the driver of the other vehicle, reassuring him that no one was blaming him in the least for what had happened. I know he has had a bad time since the accident: I hope that his chance to meet with us will help him recover from the experience and move on with his life.

Warrington town hall — Warrington Town Hall: venue of the Coroner’s Court

Overall, I took comfort from the whole proceedings. The care the coroner took to avoid distress was obvious. But I also found the formality comforting. I put this down to the fact that it was a living demonstration of the state making it clear that this was an important occasion and that the facts would be examined thoroughly and with due deliberation. There would be a danger of trivialising what had happened if the proceedings had been more casual. Even the “all rise” moments I take positively. All present were standing to show due respect to the law, as symbolised in the person of the coroner, sitting a little above us all. We are all subject to the law, and rightly so.

Why the Difference?

So, how do I explain the difference between David Conn’s accusation of cruel indifference and my own, more positive, experience? Well, some of it is easy. The two cases are hugely different. There was a vast amount of controversy surrounding the Hillsborough case. Various parties, primarily the South Yorkshire Police, took a stance to defend the indefensible, for which their reputation has been reduced to tatters. There were no disputed facts or major conflicts of interest in our own case. So the potential for adversarial debate was absent.

More worrying is the risk that David Conn’s assertion, although well intentioned, risks patronising the determined, brave group of relatives who were resisting the police’s lies, at the cost of further personal agony to themselves. My praise of the two Cheshire Police officers also has some counterparts at Hillsborough. The hearing was peppered with heartwarming tales of individual police officers who acted with bravery, compassion and integrity on the day of the disaster.

I had formulated in my mind the idea for this blog post before I read Conn’s article. I have retained the originally intended title, without question or ironic intent. My original point was to say that, despite the mind-warping distortions of thirty-plus years of free market thinking in Westminster and Whitehall, there are still parts of the public sector – in this case the Warrington Coroner’s Court – who act with integrity, humanity and compassion. In other words, they act using the best principles of public service values. I stand by this claim. But I do worry that the judicial system will still have a tendency to close ranks with fellow professionals, i.e. the police, when the chips are down.

What do you think?

Still Battling On

30th April 2016EthicsJim Gunther

When I read a report of someone who’s died and see the phrase “battle with cancer”, I know the copywriter’s brain was on auto-pilot. Quite often the word “brave” appears before the word “battle”. (We all love lots of allusive alliteration!)

My first wife died of cancer at the age of 48. From my second hand perspective, neither “brave” nor “battle” gets it right. When diagnosed with terminal illness, after the initial shock, it’s only natural to try to spend your remaining days as fully and as joyfully as your health allows. Anything less would be a senseless waste of precious days. That’s not brave, that’s common sense. Moreover, cancer is an illness. It doesn’t convey any moral value on someone who lives longer than someone who dies sooner. “Battle” implies winners and losers – and heroes and cowards. Let people and their loved ones live their lives without some judgmental value being placed on their manner of living – or dying.

“Battle” – and “hero” – are much abused – and overused – words.

Homeric Heroes

The ancient Greeks loved a good hero. Here’s a list of quite a few to choose from. Homer’s epic poems, the Iliad and Odyssey, tell morally uplifting tales of heroes and heroism, of wars and battles. They set a kind of model paradigm, an ideal against which to judge all people. During the 18^th century enlightenment period, these classical themes were revived, in part as an antidote to the stifling religious conformism of the mediaeval period. These cultural influences survive in some form to this day.

Chivalric Knights

In mediaeval times, knights operated a code of chivalry as a guide to a good, heroic life. Some of the rules of this code reflect mediaeval thought: fear of God and a duty to serve your (earthly) lord, for example. But others still have a modern moral resonance. “Fight for the welfare of all” and “protect the weak and defenceless” have modern equivalents. Some notions that were popular a generation ago but now seeming slightly old fashioned, such as men not swearing in front of women, can be traced back to the chivalric code. But physical, as opposed to verbal, battles were all the rage at the time of the knights. Heroes, too, were judged in military terms.

Our Finest Hour

Britain clings nostalgically to “our finest hour” during World War II and the Battle of Britain in particular. It is viewed as a time when there was a sense of common purpose and the pain and suffering of war was shared by everyone, not just an elite band of knight warriors. It would be fair to say there were countless examples of heroic acts performed by both military and civilian populations during this period. In a real sense, we were all in it together. The battleground of the Battle of Britain threatened every part of the land.

Battles Physical and Metaphorical

Fortunately for us today, battles are generally verbal or metaphorical: few of us experience a real physical one. And its honourable counterpart, heroism, can take many forms. The stranger who risks his or her life rescuing a drowning child. A neighbour pulling someone from a burning house. Emily Hobhouse and others, who campaigned vigorously for a peaceful end to the First World War in the teeth of public opinion. Unarmed police officers risking their lives tackling armed criminals. The many different people from all walks of life honoured annually in the Daily Mirror’s Pride of Britain Awards. And of course the many campaigners fighting the British establishment for 27 years to get truth and justice for the Hillsborough 96.

So it will come as no surprise that I object to the British Legion’s choice of name for their fundraising campaign. It attempts to equate the word “hero” with service in the UK armed forces. There is nothing inherently heroic in agreeing unconditionally to fight for one’s country. This is especially so when I believe that hardly any British military action since 1945 has any moral or ethical basis. Most of it has solved nothing or made matters worse in the medium to longer term. The Legion’s branding is pure propaganda.

Battles and Heroes

So, what do I conclude? We should be grateful that most battles today are not of the military kind. It’s a positive sign of the progress of what we call “civilisation”. Heroism takes many forms, most of it far from a battlefield. And cancer is a disease, not a battle.

Jobs, Not Yachts!

26th April 2016Ethics, Politics, The economyJim Gunther

Philip Green, owner of retailer BHS from 2000 to 2015, is about to take delivery of a £100 million 90m-long luxury yacht. I’m sure it will look very impressive moored next to his other two yachts. Presumably he also has time to take a ride on his speedboat, private jet and helicopter as well. Handy for those commutes between London and his Monaco tax haven.

Green paid £200m for BHS and sold it for £1 to a City group headed by Dominic Chappell, twice bankrupt and with no retail experience. But don’t worry, Green doesn’t seem to have suffered too much. Within 4 years of buying the company, his wife was paid £400m in dividends. Over the 15 year period, the Green family received income totalling £586m. At the start of his tenure, the BHS pension fund was in surplus by £5m. The company’s pension fund deficit now stands at £571m, valued on the basis the company is insolvent.

Chappell lost no time in profiting from the ownership of BHS. It paid £25m to Retail Acquisitions, the company that bought BHS and which is 90% owned by Chappell. The £25m is a mixture of management, legal and professional fees, salaries and interest payments.

BHS was founded in 1928. It is now in administration. 11,000 employees await anxiously their fate: will a buyer be found so they can keep their jobs? If the company goes under, the pension deficit will be taken over by the government-backed Pension Protection Fund. Under the terms of the takeover, future BHS pensioners will take a cut of at least 10% in their pension payments. Iain Duncan Smith will now doubt blame the 11,000 former BHS staff as scroungers who made the “lifestyle choice” of choosing to work for morally bankrupt billionaires. This is, of course, if he takes time off from campaigning for the UK to leave the EU. If we leave, Britain will then have a free hand to weaken employees’ rights even further.

One Pound, One Vote

I distinctly remember, a year or two ago, discussing the consequences of our government’s continuing economic policy of free market fundamentalism. I said that, over time, it inevitably leads to a situation where there are too many luxury yachts and too few teachers, doctors and nurses. By “too many, too few” I meant when compared with the public’s preferences if asked directly. The reason is simple. In a market-based economy, money talks. Gradually over time, the “invisible hand” of billions of transactions shifts the priority for the provision of goods and services ever more towards the needs of the super-rich and away from the rest of us. It’s hard wired into the logic of markets.

At a time when hospitals are clocking up record deficits and record shortages of medical and teaching staff are being reported, my comment – intended purely as a rhetorical device – appears to be coming literally true. What a morally despicable world we seem to have created.

Free Market Thinking Is Not the Answer

25th April 2016Education, EnvironmentJim Gunther

It should be obvious by now that free markets are not the solution to every problem. Sadly, too many people in power still haven’t learnt this simple truth. Here are two examples, one recent, one ongoing.

Schools Need Planning

About two years ago, the Chief Executive of a Local Education Authority was expressing the frustrations of her job. The essential problem was that she was responsible in law to ensure that sufficient places were available for all children who needed them in her area, but did not have the powers to bring this about. This ludicrous state of affairs first came about in 2010 when Michael Gove became Education Secretary. Gove’s ideological obsession for free schools (inspired by a Swedish example already disowned in Sweden) had removed the power for local government to create or expand their own schools. The famous “free market” would somehow step in and do the job. It didn’t: free schools were built, at great expense, in the wrong places.

Hardly anyone agrees with govenment policy. Unions and professional associations are opposed. The Local Government Association is against forced academisation. In mid April, Conservative MPs in the Commons opposed the policy too. A week earlier, councils warned that there will be a shortage of school places, with 40% of councils affected. Local authorities are not allowed to open new schools. The so-called “free market”, of free schools and academy chains, is somehow supposed to fill the gap. It hasn’t happened. It’s not going to happen. The proportion of parents getting their first choice school for their children is falling. Markets are no substitute for local knowledge and planning. The problems were largely avoidable, but for dogma and ideology.

Carbon Credits Don’t Work

School places are a problem for this country and the problem is contained. A much more serious, longer-term and globally important issue is that of man-made global warming. The evidence for this was first flagged up by scientists in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first serious international conference on climate change was held in Toronto in 1988. 1992 saw the first UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Sadly, by then, the ideology of free market fundamentalism had really begun to take hold of the thinking of governments throughout the world.

If we had still being operating the kind of interventionist policies which were mainstream throughout the western world until the late 1970s, things may well have turned out differently. The 1960s and 1970s saw a series of strong government interventions in many countries. DDT was banned, various Clear Air and Clean Water Acts were passed, along with legislation protecting wildlife on land and in the oceans. Regulate, control and ban: these were the weapons governments were willing and able to use.

By the time a consensus on climate change had emerged, government attitudes had changed. Markets were the solution; governments must not interfere or enact “anti-business” policies. Instead of direct intervention, free market thinking created the concept of carbon caps, credits and emissions trading. This was a ridiculously roundabout way to achieve the intended aims of reducing carbon emissions. Variations in global economic growth added wild fluctuations to the price of carbon credits. The scope for fraudulent use of credits and of corruption quickly turned into reality.

Once again, the barrier to clearly thought-through policy development resulting from free market dogma prevented the implementation of effective solutions to an increasingly urgent problem: man-made global warming. Only this time, the problem is not confined to one small country. It affects everyone on the planet.

Markets Aren’t the Answer, Stupid

Markets are fine in their place. Choosing which can of baked beans to buy, for example. There are no significant externalities which escape the market mechanism. Such as the quality of education for a generation of schoolchildren. Or the future of life on earth. It’s high time governments woke up to this stark but simple fact.

Play the Ball, Not the Man

23rd April 2016PoliticsJim Gunther

Only a day or two before Barak Obama’s visit to the UK, I remarked to my wife what I saw was the general difference between the two sides in the EU referendum debate. Whatever I may think about the likes of Cameron and Osborne, the main statements made by the Remain camp seem to be based upon some form of rational argument. The Leave lot, on the other hand, generally resort to personal abuse.

Then along comes Obama, who makes an impassioned speech about why he believes that the UK should remain in the EU. He also strongly debunks the Leavers’ fantasy that Britain will be able to negotiate, easily and quickly, a bilateral trade deal with the USA. And what do we get in return? A load of bollocks from Boris Johnson about a bust of Churchill in the White House (not realising there are two different busts) and some abuse of Obama. Johnson asserts, absurdly, that Obama just made his speech as a favour to Cameron. Can anyone really believe the President of the world’s superpower would actually do that?

There is a dark side to all this nonsense. Public opinion of politicians is already extremely low. This state of affairs was helped in no small way by the Daily Telegraph, who pay Johnson £600,000 a year for his newspaper column. I refer, of course to the paper’s exposure of the MPs’ expenses scandal. This was an important, but highly spun, piece of investigative journalism which tried, and broadly succeeded, in creating the impression that all politicians are as bad as one another. The continuing personal attacks, mainly from the Leave campaigners, can only serve to undermine our whole faith in politicians even further.

It would be a tragedy of enormous proportions if the decision on Britain’s future in Europe were made on a tide of the most despicable cynicism. For goodness’ sake, let’s raise the tone of the debate before it’s too late.

Reasons to Be Cheerful (Part-ly…)

31st March 2016The economyJim Gunther

My wife finds it hard to believe, but basically I think I’m an optimist at heart. Despite all the setbacks, humankind will get gradually wiser and we will learn how to make the future better than the past. Over the long term, of course.

I occasionally spot news items which seem to confirm, or deny, this belief. Here’s a couple from last month, on both sides of the argument.

Peak Stuff?

A report from the Office of National Statistics states that there has been a 30% drop in the UK’s consumption of “stuff” between 2001 and 2013. By “stuff” they mean items such as food, fuel, metals and building materials. Some at least of this drop is because we have become cleverer and / or frugal in manufacturing items. For example, much less metal is now used in building a washing machine. Music downloads have replaced vinyl LPs and CDs.

The optimist’s view is that, perhaps, as western consumer societies mature, we choose to buy fewer “things” and instead spend our money on less tangible leisure activities. If this is so, there is a better potential for the sustainability of our lifestyles and more hope for the future of our finite planet. Environmentalist critics say that the ONS figures are flawed as they do not properly take into account how we, as a country, import our environmental damage, for example through imports of manufactured goods from China. Nevertheless, there is at least some evidence of a glimmer of hope for the future.

Beyond Our Means?

To temper my optimism was another story from the same day’s newspaper. The Bank of England reported the biggest rise in consumer borrowing for a decade. Borrowing rose by 9.1% in the 12 months to January. Whilst this has a positive impact on economic activity in the short term, the medium-term implications are more troublesome. A consumer debt spokesman forecast a 17% rise in unsecured debt defaults by 2020. A professional economic forecaster said mortgage-to-income ratios are at record levels. The outlook, when interest rates eventually start to rise, looks decidedly dodgy.

credit card dominos — Credit card dominos

My principal concern is more basic. We Brits are currently living beyond our means. We are repeating the circumstances which led to the 2007-8 crash – only more so. It was excessive consumer debt which got us into this mess in the first place. The resultant bad debts threatened banks and so the government bailed them out, effectively “nationalising” the debt. Britain is uniquely vulnerable to the next global crash. We have an exceptionally lopsided economy. We have too much dependence on financial services – spectacularly so – and too little in other sectors, especially manufacturing. Osborne has done nothing in the last 6 years to correct this imbalance. His policies have, if anything, made matters worse.

Falling Jenga bricks — Our economy….. One small nudge…. And over she goes….

Think of the tower in a game of Jenga. If the size of the base represents the size of the national annual economy, our speculative trading in the City would be a tower nearly 160 bricks high. Osborne is ideologically committed to removing as much regulation as possible – like removing the lower bricks, one by one, in Jenga. One small nudge (financial shock) and the whole teetering pile crashes to the ground.

Still Cheerful?

So the good news is that we may have taken the first few steps towards a more sustainable future, at least as far as the world’s resources are concerned. But we’re saddled with a government that encourages a “Jenga economy”. Keep smiling…. through gritted teeth!

Human Eyes

Thoughts on Humanizing 21st Century Britain…