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A question of mighty distrust

a con, banking, BBC, News Corp, News International, News of the World, paranoia, police, police state, policed state, politicians, politicking, politics 2 Responses »

Nov 102012

Puffles summarises in one tweet tonight what I have been feeling for longer than I can remember:

Puffles (*notes*) the crisis of establishment institutions continues. BBC, politics, banking, newspapers, police…all in a v short time space

Now some of you already know that in 2003 I was almost sectioned for an illness which came over me as a result of the lies told around the Iraq War. The illness came over me because of other reasons too – but principally it involved me furiously writing a blog where I tried to demonstrate that what the politicians were saying was false.

I failed, and fell quite seriously ill as a result.

I was interviewed by a highly unsympathetic psychiatrist at three o’clock in the morning for about two hours – and condemned myself to a month in hospital through the very words I spouted in those two hours. I was undoubtedly ill, I can’t deny it; had, indeed, done some very strange thing in the weeks leading up to that moment – but my recovery was so much quicker than my social worker said it would be (she told me I could expect to be able to do no more than two hours a week voluntary activities for months once I got out when in fact I started work almost immediately for a fast-food company on a twenty-hour shift) that although it took a while for me to get my wits together, it did finally become sufficiently self-evident that my savage distrust as exhibited by the diagnosis in question was not entirely due to illness: in massive hindsight there is for me a grand sense that the reality was closer to my perceptions and the illness was a consequence not of seeing falsely but – rather – of seeing all too clearly.

I mention all of this today because what is happening in our society, as Puffles summarises so presciently and accurately, may lead far more of us down similar roads of mighty distrust. I suspect that it no longer really matters whether Mr Murdoch is doing cartwheels over the latest revelations at the BBC (more here), whilst his own irresponsible leadership disappears over the media event horizon; nor should anyone worry whether Hillsborough and Orgreave will finally get the justice they deserve; nor, even, should we care if Masonic paedophile rings riddle the country or not. No. In truth, the wider damage has already been done. Those of us of a paranoid bent are becoming the commonplace, not the exception. Those of us who see shadows everywhere are seeing we are right to see them anywhere.

In truth, the reality is that the mighty distrust which in other times was judged ill-founded has become a normalised and common reaction to everyone and everything we perceive.

This evening my son was walking home from playing football. He popped into the local Spar to buy himself some Ben & Jerry’s. Whilst he was there, a blonde woman of around fifty looked him over in a way which called his attention. He then left the shop and continued his way home. At the top end of Caughall Road, near where we live, the lady in question, sitting alongside a man who my son didn’t properly see, stopped her car across the road and offered him a lift. My son didn’t know her; had never seen her in his life prior to the Spar; couldn’t understand why she should even know where he lived.

A case of potential paedophilia? My son is seventeen, so I don’t think so. But I phoned 101, all the same, with the details. The police also found it quite disconcerting. They didn’t take my details as there was little detail to report, beyond that the car was green and was driven by a blonde woman in her fifties, but did remark that whilst they would have recognised the pattern if my son had been a child, a couple attempting to pick up a seventeen year old was certainly rather strange.

My family called me paranoid for phoning the police.

Was I?

Surely, in the light of all that’s going down, they should see me as foolishly trusting.

To go to the police in precisely that part of the world where accusations of alleged and historical investigatory reticence have recently surfaced is – you could argue – a sign of madness in itself.

Anyhow. The broader conclusion we might come to could not really be worse.

In the light of all the terribly uninvestigated things that it would now appear have been taking place over the past forty years, one thing ties all these establishment institutions together: all of them – from politicians, the BBC, News International, the police, banking and the Church to business leaders and organisations various – have committed the same mistake. Lines of command, where authority breeds an unquestioning allegiance, have proved to have been responsible for rotting our institutions from within – to such an extent, in fact, that the whole bloodied pack of cards is tumbling apart in evil procedural slow-mo … even as they attempt so ineffectively to devise a better truth.

The haemorrhage of good was never so terrible as of late.

In the absence of a true war, we seem to have stumbled across an awful instinct to reproduce the conditions that lead up to civil war. Only the English, as we know all too well, have such a stiff upper lip that they can but ignore these conditions; they can but ignore the implications.

This is, nevertheless, a war of civil characteristics: a war where people begin to side with their tribes; a war where tribes begin to form like puddles in the park; a park which ends up dramatically flooded by a superstorm; a superstorm which terminates communities as it rapes their sense of trust.

The damage is done – as I said above.

Right and wrong don’t really matter any more.

All that matters is fear.

And a growing – encroaching – violently destructive sense of horrific disbelief in almost all the things we once held dear.

So what if Cameron is prejudiced? Aren’t you?

David Cameron, gays and lesbians, in a hole, politicians, politicking, politics, prejudice 4 Responses »

Nov 092012

This, from Jon Stewart, post-US elections, is very funny – and makes me sad. Its total enjoyment of the chagrin of evil others really does not bode well for the future of consensus politics. This is, in fact, politics made war – and, perhaps, as a species, it is all we are capable of.

Contrast it with reactions such as these – “No time for collaboration” – and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

Meanwhile, back in Britain, Mr David Cameron has mentioned the words “paedophilia”, “witch-hunts” and “gays” in the same conversation.

This has, of course, provoked reactions of all sorts.

I am, myself, actually inclined to believe Mr Cameron did act out of the very best of intentions. I do feel, however, that – like so many of the rest of us human beings out here – he unconsciously revealed his deepest prejudices. Just as as the American left as represented by Jon Stewart so visibly despises the hardline American right for all their lies, obfuscation and manipulatory politics, so Mr Cameron probably despises the British left for all their nit-picking and prejudice-catching instincts. Yes. He was probably accurate when he said that gays would come worst off in any such witch-hunt. How could it be any other way? We’ve already seen how the disabled, sick and poor are equally at risk of suffering the full weight and heavy-handed politics of the worst government we’ve had in the last forty years.

Gays are no different. A visible and organised group of people who rightly defend their rights to make a life at what used to be the margin of traditional establishment assumptions about what was right and wrong in human discourse.

Mr Cameron prejudiced? Absolutely. After all, aren’t we all? Did he mean to connect paedophilia, witch-hunts and gays in the same sentence? Yes and no. He didn’t mean it to come out as he said it – but under that PR mane of suave communication, and perhaps very very deep down, it’s what he surely believes.

Perhaps despite himself.

For example, I’m sure he and his wife wouldn’t choose for their children a nursery school run and staffed entirely by gays.

Now would you? And if you wouldn’t, why not?

In all this, we’re losing something very precious. The glorious English right to eccentricity is disappearing over our cultural horizons. Jimmy Savile and his ilk have done far more to destroy the essence of English freedoms than any New Labour-driven obsession with using the state to prevent child and teenage abuse and deprivation.

The impact that all the above will have on our society will shake its reality to its profoundest foundations.

All because those in power had far too much power.

All because our newspapers decided that money and influence were more important than truth.

All because every one of us is prejudiced beyond belief.

All because – in the end – no one ever knows how to properly avoid compromising their principles.

And in this, this terrible sequence of matters, we’re definitely all in it together.

Accusations of paedophilia: a cry for justice, yes – but what else?

a con, politicians, politicking, referred anger, sex offenders, sexual abuse No Responses »

Nov 022012

If you’re living in Britain at the moment, it can’t have escaped your notice that paedophilia is the flavour of this generation’s angst. Or should I say, a previous generation’s angst.

I’ve already posted on one high profile case (as well as the media’s lily-livered reaction to it): the DJ and entertainer, Jimmy Savile. Tonight, it would appear that the BBC current affairs programme “Newsnight” will – if it doesn’t find itself looking down the barrel of a super-injunction – reveal that a senior politician from the Thatcher era was allegedly involved in similar activities. What’s more, it would seem that this person is still alive.

The Twitterverse is going pretty barmy with the rumours at the moment, as the Twitterverse tends to do in such matters. But I do wonder if we shouldn’t take a wider look at what’s happening here. Over the past few days, I’ve read about 650 instances of abuse in 40 boys’ homes located in North Wales; astonishing allegations of a paedophile ring close to the heart of a previous government; celebrities various arrested and bailed by the London police; and a general and growing sensation of something very ugly.

Paedophilia is most definitely ugly: an attack by the strong and imposing on the most defenceless of all our citizens. This sudden raft of revelations is clearly a cry for justice: that Jimmy Savile appears to have been so “prolific” is, for example, an undeniable way for an emotionally awful boil of such characteristics to be utterly lanced once and for all.

But bringing to light paedophilia as a crime of previous and supposedly responsible generations also fits another curiously appropriate purpose: that of attributing terrible acts to such generations which, however agile and cunning their political arts under normal circumstances, cannot ultimately escape a finally ignominious fate and vigorous condemnation from their very own offspring – both figurative and literal.

It’s almost a challenge from beyond the grave: these politicians, celebrities and makers and shakers of all characteristics might have managed to conserve their reputations as far as history was concerned – but try and beat this rap if you can.

So if I am right in the psychology of this, even a little, even a mite, where Thatcher and her reputation for Iron Lady could not be properly besmirched by political discourse – essentially because those who supported her saw value in precisely those elements which her opposition so violently criticised her for – they most certainly can be damaged, and perhaps in the near future fatally for Cameron & Co, by such profoundly unsettling allegations about the establishment’s behaviours in the distant but still imposing edifices of the past.

In summary, revealing crimes of paedophilia is a perfect way (whether subconsciously or not) to forcefully hit back once and for all not only at the perceived sexual abuses of a prior generation but also their far more prosaically sociopolitical ones: a perfect way to hit back for those of us who are hurting because of what our parents’ generation has done to this world – a world we are now to do little more than survive in; a perfect way to hit back for those of us who feel society has become a heartless machine – a machine whose humanity is now so very visible by its manifest absence.

____________________

Update to this post: today, November 3rd, Tom Watson has published a terrifying series of observations, on the basis of information only a politician of his integrity is ever in the position of having honest access to. As he rightly concludes:

I wish I could fight the case of everybody who has been abused by a paedophile who has so far got away with it, but I can’t. That is a job for the police. Up and down the country private grief is being stirred by these stories. I cannot help in each individual case, but the police and support services can, must and will. If you were abused a long time ago and want justice now, go to the police. It is not too late.

What I am going to do personally is to speak out on this extreme case of organised abuse in the highest places. At the core of all child abuse is the abuse of power. The fundamental power of the adult over the child. Wherever this occurs it is an abomination. But these extreme cases are abuse of power by some of the most powerful people. Abuse of trust by some of the most trusted. It is a sickening story, but one which – like the truth about Jimmy Savile – is now going to be told.

I strongly advise you to read his article in full. As with the hacking scandal, this strikes at the very soul of a very British way of doing things. Whilst communities were destroyed in the name of distant and abstruse economic policy, these politicians were untouchable. But even an establishment as powerful and navel-gazing as the British clearly has been – well, it cannot resist forever the tidal wave of ordinary people’s disgust.

Whilst political argument and discourse acted as a barrier to closer examination, there was nothing we could do.

But there always comes a time when good people like Mr Watson get to have their say.

A moment and opportunity to truly re-examine our profoundest and most hurtful memories.

All power to him, then. All power to the people.

On confusing sex and power

business leaders, leadership, politicians, power, sex offenders, sexual abuse, unclassifiable No Responses »

Oct 282012

I’ve been working these past couple of days, setting up a language-learning site. Thus, the moderate radio silence.

Meanwhile, the unhappy news about sex abuse and paedophilia at the heart of our most sacred institutions continues to unspool our perception of our childhoods and their – up until recently – complacently happy memories.

I wonder if history will judge the BBC as an especially bad egg in this matter. Or, alternatively, as a kind of measure of what the rest of society was doing.

Just one simple question today – and one simple post. Those political behemoths who have traditionally run our nations and their body politics – were they, indeed are they, any better than the Jimmy Saviles and Gary Glitters of this world? After all, what does the phrase consensual sex mean – if it involves the whiff of powerful people behind aphrodisiacally closed doors? Isn’t that just as substantial a distortion of what sexual relationships between, in this case, adults ought to be?

What I’m really asking runs as follows: what is the difference between paedophilia or more general sexual abuse – a question of someone exerting power over a manifestly weaker soul in a relationship – and that force which a powerful politician or business leader exerts over an individual, group of people or nation?

Aren’t all three of the above cases situations where those who have power use it to force others who don’t into doing things the latter otherwise wouldn’t?

That is to say, aren’t we confusing sex and power?

What, exactly, is the difference between a shallow celebrity destroying an individual’s peace of mind through a sexual powerplay and a shallow politician destroying an individual’s peace of mind through a political powerplay?

In fact, in essence, even that which we call consensual sex can take place against the better judgement of one of the parties involved.

To conclude, we don’t need less sexual abuse in society.

We need fewer people to abuse the power we award, delegate in and attribute them. Whether this be sexual, business or political.

A lesson for all our leaders, whatever their fields of endeavour.

Mr Jimmy Savile’s alleged crimes are a warning shot across your bows too.

On owning prime ministerial SMS messages (and maybe politicians’ lives)

government, messages, politicians, representative democracy, sorted, texting No Responses »

Oct 162012

In representative democracy, which I think is the democracy we’re supposed to suffer in silence under, we occasionally get the opportunity to vote on who we dislike the least – and then spend three, four or five years bemoaning our choice. Why? Well, mainly – it would seem – because instead of serving the public, governments serve themselves.

If you think about it though, where else, apart from democratic government, can leaders run an organisation on the basis of say thirty-five percent of the “vote” – and choose to reserve the right to ignore what the other sixty-five percent think?

In essence, you’d think representative democracy meant we owned our governments. In practice, it would seem that our governments always own us. Which brings me to this story from Éoin today:

After 7 months of waiting, the Cabinet Office have finally responded to my Freedom of Information Query. We, the taxpayer, can have access to the details and content of David Cameron & Nick Clegg’s Mobile Phone Text Messages. [...]

Now the implications of this are perhaps much wider than simple Freedom of Information issues – or, even, the political shenanigans that in this particular case might come to light as a result. As I wrote some months ago (the bold is today’s):

I read an interesting piece in the Guardian yesterday whilst waiting for a train at Oxenholme in the Lake District. It was arguing that the research of publicly-funded scientists should end up – as soon as practicable – in the public domain via the legal figure of open access. As the scientific journals and their publishers added very little real value to the scientific process, and in the meantime through their paywalls made access to new ideas evermore expensive and distant (I remember a calculation made by Lawrence Lessig recently which had him hunting down online documents to allow him to understand a family member’s illness better – if he hadn’t have been a top scholar at a US university, it would have cost him over $400 to access the information), so the argument in terms of a societal benefit to automatically place in the public domain such publicly-funded data has become considerably stronger.

But I’d go even further – as you jolly well might expect. I’d argue that such principles should not only be applied to publicly-funded scientists but also to all elected figures who reach positions of prominence or otherwise on the backs of the voters. Without the voters and their desire to delegate responsibility, a prime minister or secretary of state would be absolutely nothing politically speaking. When politicians give exclusive interviews to national newspapers and other media, such organisations hug very close to themselves the content thus generated. But, in reality, they have no right to at all: arguably the words and thoughts and ideas of our politicians already belong, in very strict measure, to ourselves:

David Cameron wants to snoop into your emails, SMS text messages and telephone calls. He is bringing forward powers to enhance the big brother state in exactly the opposite way he said he would do when he was opposition leader. But guess what, I have news for Mr Cameron. In 3 days time, I discover whether or not I will be given the right to snoop into his SMS text messaging. [...]

This does, of course, have implications for open government movements across the world. [...]

Indeed it does.

And I think it’s time to push the underlying assumptions of representative democracy way beyond their current creaking status: it’s time, in fact, to open up the very discourse that led us to deposit in our professionalised political class the functioning of government itself.

They are nothing without our votes.

They are nothing without our thoughts.

They are nothing without our needs and wants.

And this is really the mindset they should have.

Once and for all, as Éoin has demonstrated in his post today, in representative government it’s the people who should own the government – even down to its prime ministerial SMS messages.

Time to spread that message more widely, don’t you think?

On “post truth” politics

in a hole, journalism, political beliefs, political chicanery, political dissonance, political DNA, political guerilla warfare, politicians, politicking, politics, trades unions 2 Responses »

Oct 062012

Jay Rosen has just tweeted the following blindingly obvious truth – blindingly obvious in that way of certain scientific experiments. The ones which for centuries lie undiscovered and unproven – only for everyone one week to suddenly stumble across their whys and wherefores. Rosen’s experiment? As follows:

It just never occurs to old school reporters that the world could evolve away from them. I don’t mean technology but “post-truth” politics.

Bloody hell. He’s right. I remember once reading some declarations by the BBC‘s politics guru Nick Robinson. When asked why he limited himself to interpreting what politicians said and did, he argued something along these lines: politicians were the makers and shakers in our democracies and therefore deserved all the attention the media – and by extension Robinson himself – gave them.

Thus we get that “he said, she said” school of political reporting. And thus we sustain the hierarchies that have brought us to the disastrous situation we find ourselves in.

I expressed, in my last post, my unhappiness and disagreement with the general satisfaction – and lack of political ambition – which our elites express of late in relation to our “least worst” democratic institutions, as they currently stand. I suspect just as Rosen implicitly describes those old school reporters as simply unable to understand that the game our politicians are now playing is that of telling barefaced lies, so we could couch my comments in the post I refer to within an analogous situation. A political science which describes the needs of society in terms of a set of behaviours generally carried out in good faith is ill-equipped to deal with a generation of out-and-out liars.

An example from my own past: whilst I was working for a large banking corporation, I belonged to a trades union which managed to achieve some pretty damn good things. Amongst many others, one was a company objective to raise union membership across the group to seventy percent. To facilitate this, every new employee was given a joining pack with union application forms.

The relationship was anything but that of a sweetheart union. Business was properly and rightly engineered – behind the scenes, that is, as well as in full view of the membership – with great integrity and coherence on the part of the union itself.

Through the vicissitudes of 2008, however, a takeover became necessary. The company which emerged from the process in question was anything but pro-union. Many of the mindsets which had grown up over the years on both sides under the previous regime were lost overnight; not by the union, you understand, but by management.

Sadly, for a while at least, at least in my humble opinion, the union continued to believe that the old ways of collaboration, cooperation and trust were appropriate to a radically different age. There was still that hope – at least as perceived from outside – that the new management could be made to see the sense of constructive industrial relations. This didn’t happen – and, as a result, my dear trades union was forced to observe a rolling programme of massive redundancies; in a sense, even, administer it.

It seems to me that such huge shifts in perceptions confuse anyone who must participate in the processes that engender them. Just as the affected may be trades unions and their members or political scientists and their adherents, so they can just as easily be political parties and their voters.

Or, indeed, as Rosen suggests, old school reporters and their readers.

Sometimes – it’s not a crime, mind – the world and its changes overtake us. This usually happens when we are unwilling to give up on deep, honourably-held and dearly-acquired beliefs. This does not happen out of ignorance – quite the opposite. Wisdom and knowledge allow us to hold out for much longer than perhaps sheer observation would indicate we should – in the hope that awful scenarios from the past are not repeated. But whilst we give our makers and shakers the benefit of the doubt, and they became cheaters and shakers instead, we lose all opportunity to stem the tide of bad faith that begins to overcome – in front of our very noses – even our most dearly-held institutions and structures.

Entrepreneurs, evangelists, conservative radicals – the circle is now complete

a con, entrepreneurs, God, money, politicians, religion No Responses »

Sep 232012

I think entrepreneurs – and how certain politicians see the concept of entrepreneurship – are tearing our Judeo-Christian societies apart. The argument I subscribe to is nothing new:

Entrepreneurship is the act of being an entrepreneur or “one who undertakes innovations, finance and business acumen in an effort to transform innovations into economic goods“.

Meanwhile, our love of Mammon – or our dislike of the blessed beast – inspires every waking moment of both those who believe in God, as well as those who don’t (the bold is mine):

Christians began to use the name of Mammon as a pejorative, a term that was used to describe gluttony and unjust worldly gain in Biblical literature. It was personified as a false god in the New Testament.{Mt.6.24; Lk.16.13} The term is often used to refer to excessive materialism or greed as a negative influence.

The Revised Standard Version (RSV) of the Bible explains “mammon is a Semetic word for money or riches.”^[5] The International Children’s Bible (ICB) uses the wording, “You cannot serve God and money at the same time.”^[6]

So must we really continue to ignore the contradictions – in particular, in the more traditional political parties?

How can they square – in their moments of reflection at least – their avowed and almost aggressive belief in serving a celestial deity which does not allow itself to be distracted by the charms of money alongside an earth-ridden obsession with using pecuniary-focussed ambitions to solve the vast majority of society’s quandaries? And what implications does this have for a decent and rational functioning of our civilisations?

The incongruences at a fundamental and soulful level must surely create their own pain: psychologically, the pressure must be unbearable. To claim that one is a practising Christian or Jew – or at the very least to depend for your status and lifestyle on those who have such belief systems – and at the same time use money to achieve absolutely all one’s major aims … how do you live with that? How can you remain in one wholesome mental piece?

And so it is that a society which depends on the very idea of entrepreneurship to convince the “plebians” (a grand class of people if there ever was one) that riches are within the reach of all of them – even when this manifestly cannot be the case – is being gnawed sadly away at by what should be an otherwise productive set of understandings.

Politicians and business leaders (synonyms these days, in fact) who claim to do God and then serve the cause of Mammon … it’s the oldest accusation of hypocrisy in the book. But whilst they simply filled their pockets, and let the rest of us more or less be … well, who cared?

The problem is that it’s now getting personal. If you don’t have an entrepreneurial spirit, you’re judged to be close to nothing in latterday society. And if you are an entrepreneurial soul but don’t get motivated by the pursuit and objective of concentrating wealth unjustly, you have no way out nor any alternative to giving in: our Judeo-Christian 21st century society only sanctions the wildly aggressive, infinitely expansionary and wholly unreasonable goal of world domination.

And, when you come to think about it, perhaps this is hardly surprising. What, after all, does any evangelical knocker-of-doors worth his or her black diary want of the rest of the planet – if not a total and absolute submission to their religious instincts to win over everyone to their cause?

Entrepreneurs, evangelists, conservative radicals – the circle is now complete.

The only people finding themselves excluded from the equation being those who love others – not for what they do but for what they are …

Can you be clever at politics and stupid at government?

a con, Coalition, government, New Labour, political guerilla warfare, political parties, politicians, politicking, politics, pork-barrel politics, privileged white men, professional politicos No Responses »

Aug 262012

I wonder if this Coalition government of Cameron’s isn’t living proof of and a definitive answer to the question I pose in the title to this post. It was Paul’s article on the English GCSE smoking gun which got me thinking along these lines. Especially where he says (the bold is mine):

Broadly, I think James is right to point the finger at Gove for deliberate political interference, but I think that interference may have been (deliberately) more indirect, and therefore deniable, than first supposed.

It seems to me that one of the prime dangers for the left right now – and more widely the buffeted people of this nation – is in overestimating the importance of being good at government for modern political parties to stay in power.

It seems to me, quite anecdotally I have to admit, that politics as a process and tool for the betterment of civilisation has morphed into a quite separate survival kit for those who belong to those self-contained shock-and-awe guerilla units which to date we have learnt to call political parties; which used to be sourced in and served to represent the interests of particular and well-defined sections of society; and which now – in their lily-livered triangulations – only manage to side with what they judge, well beforehand, to be the de facto winners in any and every political outcome.

And whilst New Labour for a while managed to attend stealthily to the needs of the less well-off, even as it preached liberty and freedom for the unnecessarily ostentatious, it’s this sub-Blair Coalition government of eagerly PR-focussed and cleverly Machiavellian types which has come to the final and destructive conclusion that it’s not the legacy you leave behind you, nor even what history says you do – but, rather, in each and every moment, when and who you do it to.

This is, after all, supposedly the grand age of all individualisms. How fitting, then, that politics should have become a guerilla warfare against its own voters. The ultimate individualisation of all: that which turns those who cede all power to precious representatives into mere weapons of mass and mutual destruction.

We, as voters, are no longer the point of modern politics. Neither is good government the aim any longer of all this politicking. Rather, it’s simply become a battlefield for socially acceptable benefit claimants: scroungers off the state galore who use ourselves, the voters, as their more or less permanent means (lobbing us as they do back and forth) to a more or less permanent set of positions of employment.

Professional politicos – don’t you just love ‘em? So obsessed with their calling are they that they’ve finally managed to split off the external objective – society’s progress – from their own internal needs.

A mighty purification of interests going on there.

A mighty purification indeed.

And is that sorry sound which I now hear actually yours truly falling into yet another clever trap laid by moneyed white Anglo-Saxon middle-aged men?

Middle-aged men, with their inevitable hands on the levers of power, who want to see the socialising and supportive – which is to say, overtly politicised – state fall into:

a lazy unexamined disrespect; and
a rigorously controlled disuse.

I do hope not.

But I rather suspect so. Don’t you?

We’ve always made a profit from the NHS! So what’s changed?

a con, corporate Communism, corporate lobbies, corporations, NHS, NHS cuts, politicians, profit No Responses »

Jul 312012

Matt tweets sentiments today I’m sure we all can sympathise with:

People still miss the point about the NHS. The point is: should people make a profit from healthcare? Should life and health be a market? No

But whilst sympathy is easy, agreement is not so simple.

Since its creation, and via their hierarchically differentiated salaries, GPs, consultants, surgeons, nurses, cleaners, ambulance drivers, managers and receptionists have all made a profit from the NHS. Many have chosen their roles as vocations: none could have worked for nothing.

And do we really think those who have supplied blood plasma, oxygen, sterile products of all sorts, medicines, bandages, syringes, hospital furniture, light bulbs, signs, telephone and communications infrastructures, sandwiches, food in general and a whole host of other products and services were not, in reality, motivated by the incentive of the market in order to make as fast a buck as possible for their shareholders?

Back to Matt’s tweet, then: “Should people make a profit from healthcare?” he asks. The answer is: “Of course.” And before this awful Coalition government, and maybe before New Labour, we didn’t mind when they did.

So what’s changed?

I think it has something to do with what I alluded to the other day. It has become all too self-evident that government is no longer the caped crusader and protector between naked capitalism and the rest of society. Whilst we trusted that the game between governors and corporate capitalists involved some kind of give and take on both sides, we were prepared to contemplate situations and structures that perhaps were a little unwise and risk-ridden on our part. But that silent social contract between a society which created infrastructures on the one hand and a large corporate base which generated employment on the other has been splintering for more or less a decade now. And when that corporate base showed that – despite all the favours society had paid it – it was manifestly unable any more to fulfil its unwritten social responsibilities, we began to suspect – and understand far more clearly – that we had been much more than a little unwise in our even-handedness; much more than a little risk-ridden in the way we had chosen to keep our eyes wide shut.

As long as key public services remain free at point-of-use, we should not mind that private companies tender competitively for public provision. But when corporations accustomed to engendering and working inside monopolistic markets want to do the same to our public sector, we not only gain nothing from the changeover in terms of efficiency, we also lose a tremendous amount in democratic accountability.

We could easily argue, with the evidence on the table, that the private sector is named thus precisely because it generally attempts to keep its sometimes horrific failings to itself. After all, the light of public day is not generally cast on the boardrooms which take their cold decisions – protected as they are by their legions of lawyerly advice.

Let us, then, understand one point: the truly free market could help our healthcare a thousandfold. But the market proposed by Cameron & Co is not the free market in question.

And the market proposed is not a problem because it allows people to profit from healthcare. We understand that a nurse or GP should want to build a life around their career.

No. In truth, the market proposed is actually a problem because it allows non-human corporations to profit to the ever-increasing exclusion of flesh-and-blood people.

That’s what’s changed.

And that’s why we now find it easy to sympathise with tweets like Matt’s.

The problem isn’t the profit motive, per se.

But, rather, what’s invading our social and emotional landscapes – and taking us over.

It’s not that we shouldn’t make a profit out of our wellbeing but, rather, that – in the future and at our expense - only others will be able to.

Why dequalifying the professions is a bad move

politicians, politicking, politics, privileged white men, professional politicos, unclassifiable 1 Response »

Jul 292012

Michael Gove and bathwater often go together. He’s the baby – we should throw him out with it. Or should we?

Once again, he understandably chooses to bury supposedly bad news on Olympic Friday by announcing teachers no longer need teacher-training qualifications to impart their wisdoms. The implication being that many citizens out there have wisdoms to impart. In this he is right. But dequalifying a profession in order to reach those wisdoms is a very bad move. In politics, in medicine and in teaching too.

There is a massive difference between knowing something and knowing how to transmit that knowledge to someone else. I suspect our current millionaire government believes it is in possession of significant gobbets of knowhow the rest of us are somehow missing. And in my current charitable state, on holiday as I am, I’m quite prepared to admit that they may to an extent be right. Private-sector business, when run well and intelligently, has much to add to our lives. But dequalifying that business would not help one little bit – just as doing the same to the public sector is going to bring us sadnesses galore.

What’s also clear is that in their desire to dequalify that public sector, this government and Mr Gove in particular demonstrate clearly exactly why we need trained teachers: whilst he may be right in saying we need to allow everyone to be a teacher in some way or other, he himself is showing how difficult such a role is – especially when training is not a part of the mix. The lesson he’s trying to transmit to us, interesting as I’ve already admitted it might be, is getting lost in his very personal inability to communicate effectively, openly and honestly with his “pupils”.

Gove is using the 21st century equivalent of the cane to move a society brought up in democracy. What’s more, he’s caning his victims behind the closed doors of Olympic Friday. That’s not a good example of teaching but a bad example of bullying.

And whilst we do need more plurality and inclusiveness in teaching – in such a profession we will never have enough – we certainly don’t need more incompetence. If the government accurately represents a majority in society, and there is a feeling out there as yet unbidden that the current system of qualifications makes it impossible for more interesting people to be able to share their experiences with pupils, students and learners, surely what we need to re-examine is the system of qualifications itself – not ditch it entirely as something of little use any more.

As a final thought, I would even be inclined to wonder whether it wouldn’t be a good idea – as already mentioned on these pages – to properly qualify and professionalise the job and role of politicians.

In fact, perhaps the desire to dequalify existing professions has something to do with the rough, tumble and stupidity of latterday politicking. If I am right in my thesis, those who practise without proper certification in our 21st century democracies are bound to fear any wider movement in society to maintain and expand such systems of training (systems we might argue they are manifestly dismantling to facilitate in part their corporate sponsors). If an inability to properly carry out a political role in modern government is the current qualification, no wonder this crop of politicos wishes to do away with any move towards tests, training and exams for adult practitioners of the “dark arts” of any profession.

For one day, you never know, such an expansion of democratic knowhow could even lead to our leaders being fit for their responsibilities.

And that, surely, at least for people like Mr Gove, would never do.

Now would it?

Prejudice vs values – so was Labour a party of mumbo jumbo?

Labour, New Labour, political beliefs, political parties, politicians, politics, prejudice, Tony Blair, triangulation, tribalism, two-party system, two-tier society, unclassifiable, values No Responses »

Jun 272012

Bob Diamond, the top boss at Barclays, has this to say on the circumstances that led to a £290 million fine being slapped on the bank for apparently manipulating – in contravention of its own rules and to its own benefit – interbank interest rates over a sustained period of time (the bold is mine):

“The events which gave rise to today’s resolutions relate to past actions which fell well short of the standards to which Barclays aspires in the conduct of its business. When we identified those issues, we took prompt action to fix them and co-operated extensively and proactively with the authorities,” Diamond said.

“Nothing is more important to me than having a strong culture at Barclays; I am sorry that some people acted in a manner not consistent with our culture and values.”

The Guardian report which lays out these pretty repulsive facts starts out by telling us (again, the bold is mine):

The £59.5m fine from the Financial Services Authority is the largest penalty ever levied by the City regulator, which found that Barclays contravened its rules for a number of years and involved “a significant number of employees”.

Both these passages lead me to wonder if my previous piece on prejudice in politics isn’t being replicated in other areas of life. And perhaps when I said “prejudice”, I should have really said “values”. And when I say values, perhaps I should make the distinction between overt and covert values. For when Mr Diamond says “Nothing is more important to me than having a strong culture at Barclays [...]” and we learn that what happened took place over “a number of years and involved a ‘significant number of employees’”, what then do we have if not an organisation with two separate sets of cultures? The overt one, the one supposedly promoted by HR and communications departments various, the one – in fact – which Mr Diamond argues did not prevail; and the covert one, the one many people operated under for many years, the one which concentrated great wealth in the already deep pockets of its shareholders and managerial class – and which, presumably, went undetected by absolutely everyone at the top.

And so it is that I am minded to come back to politics. When politicians, think tanks, supporters and tacticians all slaver on about the importance of values in political action, are they actually following the same line Barclays Bank apparently followed? Overt values for the working classes and covert values for those who wish to get to power on the back of the former’s votes.

And if such a circumstance wasn’t sufficiently bad in itself, when they talk about values as if they were an intellectual breath of fresh air – and when they refuse to recognise the existence of any equivalent cousins of a covert nature – are they actually talking not about a distinct concept of political weight but, rather, about rank-and-file prejudices very similar to the most primitive which any of us out here are inclined to hold?

Just dressed up in fancy language …

In short, are political values nothing more nor less than tiresomely cobbled-together belief systems – as lacking in scientific rigour or, indeed, any basis in real and useful evidence as any mumbo jumbo we might be required to stumble across?

And if so, what does that mean for our most beloved political parties? Mine, for example – which, in Tony Blair’s massive reign, was rebuilt through the clever sleight-of-hand that was this game of remaining true to our values – even as we arguably changed our political colours.

All of which leads to me to want to add one final thought, before we shut up shop for tonight: if Labour has been a party of mumbo jumbo, it’s not the only political party which has played what is clearly a long-standing game of overt values versus covert values; nor the only one which has been selling the idea that values are far more resilient and acceptable than prejudices.

They are all, in fact, I would suggest, to a greater or lesser degree, tempted by this euphemism that the word “values” has become ; and, just as similarly, tempted to create a two-tier relationship – as per the Barclays example we started out with today – between the values they aspire to in public and the values they practise when at work behind the scenes.

Business and politics were never so mirroring as today. When it could be so good, it turns out so foul.

What have we done to our societies?

Really, what have we allowed to take place under our stupid noses?

What if prejudice quite correctly is the stuff of politics?

conversational politics, evidence-based blogging, evidence-based professionals, in a hole, political innovation, political parties, politicians, politicking, politics, prejudice No Responses »

Jun 272012

Chris concludes his post today in the following damning and depressing way:

[...] Miliband says, correctly, that Labour became “disconnected from the concerns of working people.” This is not just a political problem but an individual one for those of use who jumped through the Govean hoops of “rigour”: we become socially isolated, geeks, weirdos and nerds. Academic success has big drawbacks.

It could, then, be that the costs of rigour outweigh the benefits.

If I understand the implications correctly of his conclusion, academia and politics simply don’t mix. Academia is for a world where evidence is valued. But the problem politics has with such an approach – quite at the margin of whether we should trust our current leaders and give them the benefit of the doubt in what they do – is that most ordinary people don’t seem to value evidence at all. In much the same way, in fact, as most political actors in charge – who don’t seem to either these days.

I’ve recently had occasion to criticise politicians for being medieval (more on the greasy-pole theorem here), but Chris’s piece today makes me wonder if I’m being unfair. What if politicians are right to use prejudice to move the mountains of voters? What if nations cannot be usefully moved in any other way? What if we are condemned to a society and civilisation where “the concerns of working people” unhappily equal attitudes constructed on the sands of prejudice instead of solid opinions based on the realities of careful study?

If – as members of political movements, as promoters of evidence-based social and mainstream media and as thoughtful people in general – we are foolishly swimming against an ultimately unstoppable tide, perhaps it is time we admitted that voters are on the whole not scientists, researchers nor PhD students – and prejudice-based politicians who intuitively press our buttons know far more about the business of politics than we, in our white plastic towers of iPads and connected gadgets various, will ever know.

It’s a saddening thought though, isn’t it? A saddening thought.

____________________

Further reading: a couple of websites which have come my way recently and which attempt to inject evidence and objective information into the hackneyed debates of politics. First, Political Innovation‘s new project Who Funds You?: a sharp attempt to make absolutely clear which political and business ideologues are funding which allegedly – and in some cases superficially – even-handed think tanks. Second, a new blog from Andrew which looks at how an overarching superstructure of attitudes, behaviours and hows might inform any British government, whatever the political inclination.

The Greasy-Pole Theorem (or more on professionalising politics)

doctors, education, evidence-based professionals, laws, lawyers, medicine, medieval mind, politicians, politicking, politics, science, sorted, teachers, teaching, trained lawyers, training 1 Response »

Jun 182012

Yesterday, I suggested that politicians – as opposed to evidence-based professionals like lawyers, doctors, scientists and educators – really were anchored in medieval times:

[...] those times when lords did their lording over serfs who did their kneeling; where people occupied castes which knew their place; and where every attempt at social mobility involved a threat against the integrity of the status quo.

I also concluded that:

Even as doctors, lawyers, scientists and educators have left behind them the dark and dreary miseries of medieval imposition and woodentop thought, politicians continue to believe in top-down hierarchies, in pyramidal politics, in tribal loyalties, in conditional relationships of all kinds … essentially, in the pursuit of a grand largesse where you get ahead only as far as birth allows you to; where you get ahead only as far as money defines is permissible.

Now I realise, in retrospect, that I was perhaps using a rather broad brush when I painted all politicians as medieval throwbacks. So here’s a gentle – and I hope reasonable – qualification of my original thesis: the higher up the greasy pole of power a politician gets, the more medieval his or her behaviours become.

Medieval in the sense I describe above. Or, alternatively, just as constructively, medieval in the sense of a persistent and resilient plague.

So not all by any means. Just those who exert power and count.

Does that sit more nicely?

Of course it doesn’t. And those of you who are practising politicians will resent my casting aspersions on a whole profession – especially in times of terrible crisis. “It doesn’t help one bit!” you will exclaim. “It’s unfair, unjust and totally unhelpful to be describing the vast majority of good professionals in terms of the awful ones at the top.”

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? When we talk of professional classes such as doctors or educators, we’re talking about roles where training periods can be between one and seven or more years. And whilst this training is taking place, performance, attitude and behaviours are all measured and tested so that the individuals under the microscope of improvement understand exactly what is expected of them – before they go out and practise.

Where is the training-ground of politicians? Local government politics perhaps? On the job, most certainly. My experience at parish-councillor level is depressing. Most significant decisions were taken (or not, as the case may be) on firmly partisan lines. No real thought going on there; no careful analysis of what was really needed. Just small people acting out of personal prejudice – and things they’d picked up from the papers.

Multiply this experience up a thousandfold and what happens? The more you get these politicians moving out of their comfort zones, the less they are likely to use data to guide them. Instinct, impulse and hunch rear their ugly heads. Which is when we get the plague of the greasy-pole theorem I mentioned above.

If politicians truly want to be treated on the same level as other professional classes, they must want to show the rest of us they are prepared to be trained, channelled, instructed and measured in the same evidence-based ways as those they would aspire to rule. And they must also show, as lawyers, scientists, educators and the medical profession do most days of the week, that their vocation and goal in life is to be what they train to become.

For far too many voters, there is a perception that political activity is a simple springboard – on the backs of ordinary people’s interests – to better and materially more satisfying things.

What do I suggest, then, we require of our political class before they can begin to enable our societies? A very short list made up of the following two items:

proper and professionally couched training and study as a minimum requirement before any formal political activity which involved representing others can be countenanced; and
a firm and indissoluble promise to never exercise any other profession or activity on the back of one’s political history

Would that do us?

Does that seem reasonable?

What, as a chastened voter, would you think of such changes?

And would you have any other items you’d like to add to the list?

Politicians really are anchored in medieval times, aren’t they?

a con, evidence-based professionals, politicians, politics 2 Responses »

Jun 172012

I’m getting quite cross now with the behaviours of that profession which only exists to enable a better functioning of our lives. Without a better functioning, there is no justification for this profession. The profession I talk about is that of politicians. Our lives are rapidly degrading – and it is my understanding that this is happening because our politicians are not doing the only job that justifies their existence.

What’s more, they are anchored in medieval times – those times when lords did their lording over serfs who did their kneeling; where people occupied castes which knew their place; and where every attempt at social mobility involved a threat against the integrity of the status quo.

Not much has changed, has it? Really, it has not.

Last autumn, I had an opportunity to witness examples of such mindsets. I was invited to a number of presentations for mainstream and social media by the Law Society on the Legal Aid bill which was going through Parliament at the time. I posted quite a bit from my generally limited understanding of the law – it was, at the very least, clear to me that Legal Aid was one of the prime and essential pillars of the post-war Welfare State. Without equal access to legal advice, a society collapses in the moral ruins the unbound powerful leave behind them.

Anyhow, I also had the opportunity to speak to evidence-based professionals involved in the process – lawyers in the main – and one of the things I noticed from the very beginning was their utter belief, their strategic mistake too, that a properly argued and costed case would be sufficient in itself to win the politicians over. What was their case then? Essentially, the Law Society devised a plan of cuts which would have protected the key elements of Legal Aid as well as saving even more money than the government itself was aiming to. The plan seemed such a wonderful double-whammy of an argument they simply couldn’t conceive how the politicians might reject it.

Yet consistently, and without exception, they did. I haven’t been following the most recent developments, so don’t know how it’s ended up – but I suspect the Coalition won’t have abandoned its attempts to reassert the medieval relationship of lord and serf.

There are, of course, plenty of other examples around at the moment: doctors and nurses and the NHS reorganisation; teachers and education change. God only knows there are enough evidence-based professionals in our society for politicians to have a model they could easily follow.

But it’s not happening. Even as doctors, lawyers, scientists and educators have left behind them the dark and dreary miseries of medieval imposition and woodentop thought, politicians continue to believe in top-down hierarchies, in pyramidal politics, in tribal loyalties, in conditional relationships of all kinds … essentially, in the pursuit of a grand largesse where you get ahead only as far as birth allows you to; where you get ahead only as far as money defines is permissible.

Most of the world has moved on since medieval times.

This is why the incomprehension which exists between evidence-based professionals and our prejudiced makers and shakers only accentuates and reveals our understanding of why future degradation will almost certainly be our lot.

Our political class needs to leave medieval times behind it.

Question is, who can convince it of the imperious need?

Who can get through its prejudice-filled skulls?

Who can ensure – in time – that it begins to operate on the basis of fact, data and information?

Not, I would hazard a guess, the evidence-based professionals who, even now it would seem, fail to understand the breadth of the gap in ways of thinking between themselves on the one hand and the rhetorical types on the other.

So if the lawyers, doctors, scientists and educators can’t get through to the politicos, who – really – is left?

Who can save us from a professional class which – as history and civilisation have both moved on – remains in power but, nevertheless, has lost all right to call itself professional?

Are politicians the culprits or the victims of an impossible democracy?

civilisation, democracy, democratic deficit, experts, in a hole, politicians, politics, pyramid politics, pyramidal organisations No Responses »

May 242012

Nick Clegg will say this today, apparently:

Greece exiting the euro is something “no rational person” should advocate and would cause “irrevocable damage”, Nick Clegg is expected to say later.

In a speech in Berlin, the deputy prime minister is also likely to criticise European leaders’ “fragmented” response to the eurozone crisis.

He will say the way decisions are taken is undermining public confidence.

Meanwhile, Iain Martin over at the Telegraph berates Clegg thus:

[...] The Deputy Prime Minister is in Berlin to make one of his speeches, this one containing even more guff – or Clegguff, as I think it should be known – than usual. “A dark cloud hangs over Europe,” he says. He claims that anyone who thinks Greece leaving – which would be difficult of course, but is probably better than the alternative – is being “irrational”. Clegg says of the eurocrisis that “the tree is falling” but that we are “pruning it one leaf at a time.” It sounds like a spoof ancient Chinese proverb.

And a tweet which comes my way this morning goes even further:

Nick Clegg says “Greece must stay in the Euro.” He would know, because he’s been a skiing instructor and has a degree in archaeology. Twat.

It’s clear that of all pyramidal organisations which stand or fall as a result of the day-to-day actions of (generally) one single white male at the very top of the pile, politics in representative democracy is the very worst. And I wonder why our democracy appears to have become an impossible democracy: where accuracy of representation is a marketing-message process of massaging our instincts for truth and understanding; where efficiency is an extra, bolted on as afterthought; where expertise is no longer used to illuminate but hide and allow profits and personal incomes to be evilly eked out.

Are politicians, then, the culprits or the victims of an impossibly democracy? Is democracy – where we are told the ordinary citizen has a right to sit at the top table and have a voice – incompatible with an evermore complex society?

Has, in fact, democracy had its day?

As we criticise Mr Clegg for not having the knowhow he’d need to have a right to express an opinion on the eurocrisis, we can surely only be criticising ourselves for daring to express how we feel on a situation we suffer from but have no expert knowledge about.

What’s going to break down in the end is not the tenuous threads of our civilisation – for the large corporations will continue to deliver the electricity, oil, water and consumer durables we so crave; no, what’s going to break down in the end will be our sense of any kind of real democratic empowerment. By telling us off for only having a degree in archaeology, all desires and impulses to participate in democratic discourse can be scythed at one revealing stroke.

These days, you see, we’re experts in iPods – just totally inept at life.

Why we’re in the shit we’re in

a con, Coalition capitalism, David Cameron, economic abuse, economics, economists, economy, econopocalypse, elitism, politicians, politics No Responses »

May 202012

Apologies for the title. But reading this article from the Wall Street Journal this morning reveals to me with an evermore greater clarity exactly why we’re in the shit we’re in. Some choice thoughts from this excellent piece on the subject of what economists really (don’t) know:

As Greece girds for elections next month that could lead to its exit from the euro zone, economists are acknowledging an unsettling reality: No one knows what the bill will be.

[...]

The Institute of International Finance, a global association of banks that has represented private lenders to Greece in negotiations with the country, took a broader view. In a February report that leaked in March, it put the total cost at a minimum of €1 trillion, including over €700 billion that could be needed to prop up other troubled European economies, including Portugal and Italy.

[...]

“The IIF went for a trillion because, why not?” says Gary Jenkins, founder of Swordfish Research, a U.K. bond-analysis firm. “It’s a great figure, sounds fantastic.” However, Mr. Jenkins adds, “I don’t think anyone can work out a precise figure. The uncertainties are just absolutely huge.”

So whilst Mr Cameron’s government berates us for not putting our household affairs in order, his chummy friends at stratospheric economic levels go for a back-of-the-envelope figure when pricing the cost of things – because it “sounds fantastic”. And in the meantime, such back-of-the-envelope merchants continue to describe the less-advantaged economic powerhouses of the West as PIGS.

Fuck youse.

Question is, who are those “youse”?

Economists will argue that as theoreticians and thinkers, they simply lay before those who take the decisions the options they’ve duly imagined.

On the other hand, those who participated in developing the atom bomb surely had qualms of conscience around the matter – even if they took no part in the final decision to drop it.

So do we blame the economists for creating a self-consuming Darwinian evil of winner takes all? Or do we blame the politicians for eagerly attaching themselves to such theories when the intellectual times we live in could’ve delivered so much more?

Or can we simply rejoice – in a cutting-one’s-nose-off kind of way – that even the experts must now experience the directionless impotence the rest of us are living from day-to-bloody-day?