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Withdrawing welfare: kind of like knee-capping the defenceless

a con, Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, Coalition economics, credit crunch, criminals, crisis, economic chemotherapy, economy, econopocalypse, Labour, LibDems, Tories, welfare, Welfare State, wellbeing No Responses »

Jun 062013

On the subject of welfare, I have the following to say:

When a system breaks down because the wealthy have buggered up, you don’t have the right to blame the system’s victims.
Demonising poor, sick and disabled people is evil under all circumstances.
Lying about statistics is an act of intellectual criminality.
Manifesting incompetence in the face of severe socioeconomic crisis is an act of unaffordable luxury.
Not being honest about one’s failings is stupidity squared – and infuses in absolutely no one the otherwise necessary confidence which our society needs to properly function.

To blame welfare for the crisis we’re suffering from – as well as arguing it needs to be controlled in order to recover a semblance of economic normality – is like saying you can have an overdraft facility, which, by the by, they charge you for, exactly when you don’t want it, and then withdrawing it precisely at the moment you go overdrawn.

(This, by the way, once happened to me. I shall never forget the moment. I shall always remember, from that moment on, how it coloured my view of life – and banks in particular.)

But then that is how politicians, business leaders and hangers-on various – who don’t do or need welfare personally at all – all prefer to see the lie of the land.

We’ll charge you for welfare until and unless you actually need it. And then, particularly if it is our fault, we will take away what is becoming in our eyes a disproportionate right to access it.

Never mind that the suffering is more than equal to its disproportionate access. Never mind that disproportionate access is symptomatic of terrible suffering.

To cap it all, let’s go and cap welfare. Sounds much less painful – don’t you think? – than capping people.

Yes. Kind of like capping the knees of the most defenceless. And whoever needed to care at all when those that hobbled were the least vocal in society?

Memo to Ed: “On UKIP and giving the Tories a really really bad name”

Ed Miliband, Labour, Tories, UKIP, unclassifiable No Responses »

May 182013

UKIP’s been getting itself a pretty unpleasant name of late. Holocaust deniers, equal marriage haters, out-and-out racists – the accusations have come thick and fast. Now much of the political debate, for Labour at least, has centred around how far it needs to triangulate to the right of the British political spectrum. Especially in the light of political shocks such as this.

There comes a time when principle must come first, however.

However hard the decisions might be, however unfavourable the polls might seem, however tempting that triangulation becomes, however risky sticking with the values of a wider movement may be perceived, UKIP’s success is precisely the reason why Labour should firmly ignore the pressure-cooker venting of political prejudice clearly going on at the moment.

UKIP is, in fact, a perfect opportunity to paint the Tory right with the broad brush of rancid ideology. The more the rather private British right becomes unavoidably associated with the public witterings of such figures, the more the difference between what we need Labour to be and what the right is becoming revealed as will become clear in the public mind.

It’s time we saw UKIP not primarily as a threat to Labour’s heartlands but as a perfect weapon to sully the Tories’ own attempts at detoxification. It’s not the Labour Party which should be worried about losing its voters but the Tory Party its room for manoeuvre. We need to make that happen. We need to ensure it does.

The good people will come back to a Labour Party which remains firm on this one.

The sad people will bury the Tories one way or another in overbearing prejudices of UKIP’s making. It’s not Labour’s job to make the sad people happy but make the good people realise they were right all along.

Remember that, Ed. Remember that, please.

Why the fruitcake party makes mincemeat of our body politic

in a hole, Labour, Lib Dems, LibDems, Tories, UKIP No Responses »

May 032013

According to the Guardian this morning, on the subject of UKIP’s gains in local elections yesterday, Labour’s Hilary Benn tells the BBC that:

Hilary Benn, the shadow communities secretary, played down the Ukip threat. He told the BBC: “It is a protest party and not a party of government. Its economic policy does not add up.”

Meanwhile, the same paper reports:

Professor John Curtice of Strathclyde University said Ukip had achieved a “remarkable performance”. In a briefing paper for the Political Studies Association on the local elections, he said Ukip presents the most serious threat by a fourth political force in England since the second world war.

Now it might, as the Tories suggested recently, be that fruitcake party everyone fears. Certainly, its selection procedures seem to have been found rather wanting (more here), leading many of us to feel that “fruitcake” is exactly the right metaphor for a grouping whose ingredients are so very mixed.

But I think when Hilary Benn says what he says, and especially when he argues its economic policy does not add up, he is being about as lackadaisical as he could be on the threat that UKIP poses to the allegedly “non-fruitcake” parties.

Let’s just summarise what’s happened under the reign of these non-fruitcakes: we discover that bankers, MPs, police officers, journalists, celebrity sex-abusers and a whole host of other citizens have been allowed to continue for decades doing their stuff, in what most of us consider entirely unfair and even immoral ways.

These non-fruitcake regimes have allowed such things to continue happening unchecked: most stones appear to have been left unturned from Thatcher’s days onwards. What’s more, in a complex society where technocratic experts hold the reins, they have failed the needs of ordinary people mightily. Billions of pounds-worth of dosh has been transferred from civil society to bankers, from taxpayers to MPs, from people who struggle to get to the end of the month to people who take bribes, and from licence-payers to famous people who sexually assault under-age boys and girls during decades.

And now it would seem that any present or future governments of the non-fruitcakes will continue to force ordinary people to pay for the awful consequences of the acts of the inefficient powerful. Is it hardly surprising, then, that voters should want to protest?

So maybe Benn is right when he says UKIP is a protest party. But if he considers this to be “merely a protest party” sort of message, then he and his fellow MPs have got it really wrong. To date, we’ve seen little organised protest on the streets of England, or the UK more widely. We’re not like the Spanish or Greeks – we’re not, yet, at the edge of the abyss. But when Little Englanders change their voting patterns so consistently and so radically, surely professional “non-fruitcake” politicians should be sitting up and paying attention, rather than casually comforting themselves with the idea that UKIP’s idea of an economic environment doesn’t currently add up.

The real issue being, of course: whose does?

UKIP will continue to make mincemeat of our body politic, if politicians of the calibre of Benn continue to choose to defend themselves via a naked appeal to technocracy. Technocracy has failed us disgracefully: it’s bloody time to protest about the implications! And if the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems cannot see this for what it actually is, then UKIP will not only make mincemeat of the body politic, it will be able to do so without having to convincingly add up the economic numbers beforehand.

Not that this would make them necessarily ineligible to govern in Westminster. Right, my non-fruitcake friends?

____________________

Update to this post: final results for yesterday’s elections have come my way concisely via Twitter just now. As follows:

RT @Tom_Waterhouse Final seat tally: Con 1,116 (-335), Lab 538 (+291), Lib 353 (-123), UKIP 147 (+139), others 208 (+28) #vote2013

How Chester Tories like to snoop on my eighteen-year-old son

Chester, in a hole, Stephen Mosley, Tories 1 Response »

Apr 292013

This came through our letterbox recently. It’s the Chester Tory “Young Persons’ Survey 2013″.

Let it be said, upfront, that I like the idea of politicians engaging with people via the communication tools they are most familiar with. But this particular survey, unfortunately in my opinion, goes a little beyond simple engagement: in particular, because it seems to sell the idea of fairly traditional party-political voter-tab-keeping in the guise of hierarchically latterday – and almost peer-to-peer – communication.

Also, me being the grammar Nazi that I am, I notice that the people who wrote the survey in question don’t know the difference between “uninterested” and “disinterested”.

But that, I suppose, is something most of us care less about.

Now most of the text is pretty easy to read, but – curiously for an MP who’s sat on the Snoopers’ Charter parliamentary committee – the terms and conditions are not. So for your delectation and delight (probably not), here they are:

How we use your data

Some data we receive from you will probably comprise personal data about you and may include sensitive personal data.

The types of information we may collect about you will probably include your name, address and contact information and information about your ethnic origin, political opinions, and religious, philosophical and other beliefs.

The data you provide will be retained by the Conservative Party Stephen Mosley MP (“the data holders”) in accordance with the provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998 and related legislation.

The data holders will use the data we collect for the following purposes: (i) to improve our understanding of political life in the United Kingdom; (ii) to compile and provide anonymous statistics about voters in the United Kingdom; (iii) to facilitate our operation as a political party; (iv) contact you in the future by telephone, text or other means, even though you may be registered with the Telephone Preference Service, without asking for further permission.

Your data will not be sold or given to anyone not connected to the Conservative Party. If you do not want the information you give to us to be used in these ways, or for us to contact you, please indicate by ticking the relevant boxes: Post _ Email _ SMS _ Phone _

Those of you with better knowledge of such matters may be able to let us know how reasonable the above T&Cs might be. I don’t personally have the ability to decide whether an organisation can request a partial waiving of TPS adhesion.

As far as the content of the survey itself is concerned, especially in relation to questions 4 and 5, I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about a) how loaded or not the questions might be; and b) to what future purposes any answers might be put. But if I am to draw any wider conclusions, I think they may be these:

I assume for an MP with such an obvious knowledge of matters relating to online privacy, intellectual property and the 21st century rights of citizens that this survey has not been carried out hurriedly.
If someone who has sat on a Snoopers’ Charter parliamentary committee feels it OK and unchallengeable to ask for personal, philosophical and political information of this nature of an eighteen-year-old young man, in order that this be processed by machines for the purposes of party-political activity in such an open-ended and blanket fashion, then I do wonder how deeply these mindsets have now permeated almost every sector of public life.
I wonder how many other political parties are doing exactly the same.
I wonder if the battle for privacy is already well and truly lost.

No. Nothing illegal is going on here. But that is precisely the point. This mining of information is so prevalent and accepted that no one blinks twice in its presence. In the end, my son didn’t complete the survey – but mainly because he hates politics. Not disinterested at all, of course – frankly, like so many of us out here, totally uninterested in the bollocks it’s become.

A final couple of thoughts to be going away with, then:

Will the results of this survey be used to fashion future local- and national-government lies? I imagine so.
Will we be told the proportion of those who answered the request for information when the results are misused? I imagine not.

It’s sad that Mr Mosley, with all his online experience, should feel it fine to want to drill so unreasonably down into my son’s thoughts, communication tools and inner responses.

But what’s even sadder is that he’s clearly not the only one.

____________________

Further thoughts: I’ve been cogitating a while more on the wider drivers behind this survey. It seems to me that both lily-livered triangulation and impositions from on high have motivated the whys and wherefores of its drafting. Wanting to know what interests people have from a very young age, wanting to know their political and philosophical inclinations, wanting to know how they might be divided from people older than themselves … all this and more shows that both the aforementioned instincts are still alive and well in the English body politic.

And this obsessive wanting to know bodes well for no one. Whatever the party driving such surveys.

Further reading: the Open Rights Group, of which I am a member, has just published this comprehensive briefing around the knotty subject of the Snoopers’ Charter – and what, as a result of its imminent demise, may surface later instead. You can find this briefing here. Well worth your time. As would joining the organisation itself!

Time Ed Miliband gave David Cameron a helping hand

Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, Coalition economics, Coalition U-turns, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Labour, latterday capitalism, latterday socialism, New Labour, New Toryism, on a high, One Nation Labour, one-nation conservatism, Tony Blair, Tories No Responses »

Mar 112013

Paul Burgin asked an intriguing question this afternoon. I retweeted it and answered it thus (for those of you not familiar with Twitter’s syntax, you have to read the second part first and the first part second):

What Ed M is doing right now? Rock boat, but not too much. RT @Paul_Burgin: What does it take to ensure that Cameron remains PM until 2015?

Is it, in fact, time that the leader of the Labour opposition, Ed Miliband, gave David Cameron, the Tory Prime Minister, the helping hand it would appear he so desperately needs? After all, this judgement of Cameron’s efficacy and historical potential is biting – and eye-opening:

My friend writes:

“I’m struggling to get the incredulity of the commentariat regarding leadership threats to Cameron. Why should anyone expect that a Party leader who failed to win an unlosable General Election, did nothing with being PM, and apparently has no chance of winning the next General Election would survive unchallenged?”

Ouch. And, as he points out, it is often forgotten that later this year Cameron will have been leader for eight years.

“Eight years after becoming Conservative Party Leader … Thatcher had got inflation from 22 per cent to 4 per cent and beaten the Argies. Heath had joined the EU. Churchill had won World War Two. Baldwin had seen off the General Strike and the Great Depression and broken both the Liberal and Labour parties, utterly. (No other Conservative leader lasted eight years post World War One). Cameron, on the other hand has … well, there’s … umm …”

Now I’m not entirely sure that in that poverty-stricken “umm” everything is necessarily lost. Blair’s abiding achievement, after all, was a bloody conflict in Iraq. It may have been the case that history was cruel to him – but the energy, resource, financial weight and body count which the conflict in question required of us leads me to wonder if a cipher of Blair wasn’t exactly what we were looking for in Cameron. So did Cameron really fail to win an “unlosable General Election” – or was it, rather, that he instinctively comprehended the British people’s need to tether just a bit more definitively their next leader to their evermore parochial kennel?

Sometimes, the closed system that is politics has its own karma. You give up a country’s sense of itself to a foreign power such as the US, however apparently justified at the time the deal may have appeared to be – and the next leader but one who comes along has no alternative but to reverse the ship of state. No more foreign adventures for the moment – no more Falklands, no more Kosovos, no more Iraqi conflagrations. If you must lie to the people, then divide the country cruelly up into deserving and non-deserving; get your communications paid for by the viewers via the TV licence fee; and tell those huge lies as hugely as you can, whilst history – or at the least the next general election – remains firmly on your side.

But whether Cameron is the cipher we needed or not, I think it’s pretty clear we in the Labour Party now need him to remain. We need his frantic straddling of supposedly detoxified Toryism on the one hand and the lurching to the right which UKIP’s current bounce presages on the other to continue for as long as it might.

And it is in Paul Burgin’s original question and in Iain Martin’s perspicacious friend that I think I finally discover the reasons behind the modest approach which, to date, Labour’s Ed Miliband has taken. Miliband has had Cameron’s measure since the very beginning. After all, Miliband was an MP under Blair – had the opportunity to observe at close quarters the very man Cameron has surely modelled himself on.

In both Cameron’s strengths as a professional obfuscator and his manifest weaknesses as a professional salesman, Miliband will have seen it all before.

Miliband knows Cameron’s laying his own traps. He just has to be there for him – with the kind of helping hand all enemies proffer.

Enough rope to keep him hanging on.

Not too much to hang him.

Not yet.

The Tomb of an Unknown Donkey

a con, corporate frankfurter meat, corporations, customers, Europe, European Union, eurozone, food speculation, Mafia, Tories, www.ciwf.org.uk No Responses »

Feb 102013

And so it has come to pass. The beef that was not beef but was actually, to a very great degree, horsemeat may not – in the event – be horsemeat either. Whilst lurid tales have been recently spread by government ministers – alluding to Eastern European mafias shifting equine loot – the Independent reports tonight that we could be facing a culinary invasion of donkeys. In its astonishing report – verging on the most English of parodies in tone – the paper also reminds us (the bold is mine):

The French consumer minister, Benoît Hamon, said today that he would not hesitate to take legal action if evidence emerged that the two French companies which handled the meat had been aware of the fraud.

In passing, Mr Hamon also took a swipe at the British Government. He said that London was complaining about weak European food inspection while cutting the budget for EU food-safety checks in Brussels.

This is a revelatory sentence and explains with great clarity the behaviour of the Tories. “How perfect!” their strategists must have proclaimed on discovering that good old British beef had been contaminated by pesky European horse. No matter that in reality we could argue these things happen because hands-off neoliberal thinkers a) like to believe the market will attend in an absolutely perfect and efficient way to both its own and our needs and b) love to suggest the complex B2B transactions that now populate our globalised world are always going to be entirely beneficial.

In truth, the B2B transactions I mention don’t really have to be as complex as they are. It’s only so huge transnationals can easily reach – with their tenuous distribution channels – each and every corner and supermarket shelf of the nations that make up the developed world that we tolerate these complicated and interdependent ways of delivering food to our tables.

And so now that it turns out our meat has been properly tested for hygiene but not – it would seem – for species, what other lurid thoughts can flood our minds?

Horses?

Donkeys?

Mafias?

Concrete boots?

Various and varied ways of disposing of that which one would prefer to make disappear forthwith?

It’s official!!! The Tory Party comes out in favour of immigration (well, sort of)

cultural dissonance, cultural DNA, cultural orientation, cultural rub, football, foreigners, Google, immigration, police, Raspberry Pi, Tories, unclassifiable No Responses »

Jan 302013

We had this headline a couple of weeks back:

Tom Winsor says outsiders will ‘enrich’ the police service

By “outsiders” it seemed, at the time, that he meant those who were not primarily police officers. In their wide-ranging efforts to de-professionalise our society – and at the same time rid the hold such evidence-based individuals apparently have over the same – it looked like this government was now setting its attack dogs on the police as they looked to apply to allegedly hidebound practice the synergy and synchronicity of other ways of seeing. Just one more profession in a long line already under fire: lawyers, doctors, nurses, teachers … well, the list could be as long as you wanted it to be – as long as it didn’t include politicians themselves.

Today, however, we have a truly pleasing development. The outsiders Tom Winsor was describing weren’t just other professions: they were – actually – people from abroad. Yes! It’s official!!! The Tory Party comes out in favour of immigration:

Senior officers from overseas will be able to run police forces in England and Wales for the first time, under a government overhaul of recruitment.

Outsiders will be able to join forces as superintendents and recruits can be fast-tracked to inspectors.

Police Minister Damian Green said the service would benefit from a wider talent pool.

In favour indeed, as I say, of an immigration of the most blatant kind. Right to the heart of the law and order of our state, no less. Foreigners to be in charge of how we weave the very tapestry of the English and Welsh way of doing things.

Well, sort of anyway.

A couple of caveats, as always with this government. First, no nasty European-types will be allowed to sully our oppressive instincts, as the Home Office only plans:

Opening up chief constable roles to senior officers from countries such as Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand

We really wouldn’t want untrustworthy horsemeat-eating individuals anywhere near our command-and-control infrastructures, now would we? Who, after all, could trust a Frenchie with our tasers, rubber bullets and CS gas?

Second, even now, even after all the above proposals have come to light, not quite all immigration is as welcome as it might be. This, for example, also published today, on the government’s initially wizard wheeze to selfishly cream off entrepreneurial talent from other – perhaps less advantaged – countries where you might think such characters might be just as usefully needed:

Immigration rules intended to encourage entrepreneurs to settle in the UK are being abused and need to be tightened, a minister has said.

Immigration minister Mark Harper said a “meaningful assessment of the credibility” of immigrants claiming to be entrepreneurs would be introduced.

Fake businesses were being created and funds recycled to provide evidence of entrepreneurial activity, he said.

“Legitimate applicants” would not be deterred, he predicted.

Hmm. Legitimate applicants I hear you say?

One occasion, in fact, where Cameron got it right.

So why is his government so all over the place on this surely self-evident issue? Of course crossing frontiers and boundaries is good for the countries where this happens. Of course the sparks that cultural dissonance generates lead to far more creative soups of productive activity. Of course the good that globalisation can mean will only come out of exchanges of opinions and viewpoints amongst our evermore sclerotic specialisations.

What I really can’t understand, then, being as the Tories claim to be the party of those who wish to get on, is why they aren’t more consistently in favour of immigration as a grassroots process that benefits practically everyone who could participate in its primarily constructive embrace.

Which kind of football team would you really like? Cherry-picking believers in obscenely buying in top-class players like our very own Manchester City? Or youth-academy stalwarts investing in the long-term future of a Barcelona?

The kind of place, in fact, where foreigners are welcomed with open arms – and yet are also generously combined with carefully nurtured homegrown talent.

I know which I’d prefer.

The question is: does Cameron’s Tory Party?

Exclusive: Ten Tory Pledges For The Next General Election

PLEBS, plutocracy, thought experiment, Tories, unclassifiable No Responses »

Jan 082013

After this evening’s Coalition shenanigans at the House of Commons (with clear reasons to vote against from David Miliband here), ten Tory pledges for the next general election have just come my way. Remember, you read them here first:

“Anyone using foodbanks will be obliged to register their payments in kind with HMRC.”
“Anyone using charities will be obliged to register their payments in kind with HMRC.”
“Anyone who is found not to have registered such payments will be forced to make an official complaint to Amazon’s call centre about a Google ad for a Kindle accessory, using a Vodafone mobile in a Starbucks café. All such complaints will be recorded for quality, training and humiliation purposes by the local JobsWorth Centre™.”
“Obese children from families where joint parental earnings are £25,000 or less will be compelled to go down to their local Big Society LardWatchers Circle™ and follow a specially outsourced government apprentice plan to make them fit for chimney-sweeping duties. Where targets are not met within the specified timeframe, local officials may consider applying the guillotine procedure to both the children and their parents. If the family is a one-parent unit, the guillotine will automatically be applied. In this latter case, no resource will be wasted on training.”
“Fatties with incomes of £100,000 and over will be eligible for free gastric-band treatments on the NEHS (Not Everyone’s Health Service).”
“Toffs who work within a pleb’s throw of the House of Commons’ restaurants will be able to obtain free food and drink 24/7. Such rights will, it goes without saying, be tax-free – as long as excessive consumption can be proven.”
“Any subject who breaks any limb, contracts a cancer of any kind, becomes mentally incapacitated or otherwise unhappy with their lot will be required to give up all benefits whilst under the influence of their incapacity. Recovery shall lead to a temporary reassignment of such benefits, once a period of no less than ten months has passed – and an improvement free of benefits is demonstrated. If the recovery is sufficiently convincing and sustained, no benefits may be awarded at all. At the discretion of the Prime Minister, however, the person in question may be given a medal for acting above and beyond the call of humanity.”
“People who do not vote Tory will be automatically sectioned. Voting in accordance with one’s interests is clearly a white-coats matter.”
“White coats who do not vote Tory will be automatically bribed – or, alternatively, threatened. Acceptance of new terms and conditions of employment will generally be enough to avoid any more undue unpleasantness.”
“All other workers who are happy with their lot will be paid less. If they become unhappy with being paid less, they will be made redundant without notice of any sort. They will not be eligible for benefits of any kind. Under no circumstances will they be allowed to return to the labour market, though cremation may still be an option.”

Opportunity knocks – but for whom?

Labour, latterday capitalism, latterday socialism, Tories, unclassifiable 2 Responses »

Jan 062013

A couple of days ago I extended the hand of conditional friendship to David Cameron. This is what I argued:

Yes. I’m still prepared to give Mr Cameron the benefit of the doubt if in the next few months he not only continues the re-engineering of a society via benefit withdrawal but also proceeds to substantially reduce the cost of living by stamping down on his profiteering friends in corporate-land.

If he succeeded in being even-handed in this way, if he made Britain a much cheaper place for us all to live in, if he managed to reduce the cost of living so that the state found active intervention in people’s daily lives simply and totally unnecessary, we could I am sure, whatever our politics, all find it in ourselves to admire him in some way or other.

Maybe we might approve of a benefits society or not – but to excise the cancerous profiteers from the heart of a modern democracy like Britain’s would truly be a historic achievement for this extraordinarily complex Tory moderniser to take away as his indisputable 21st century legacy.

Only to conclude:

If his good intentions are now limited to unleashing a savage impoverishment onto millions, this extraordinarily complex Tory moderniser will have shown himself to be nothing but an extraordinarily simple sham.

Today we have some more rumblings from government circles which further complicate our judgement of the issues:

Senior Conservatives have outlined radical pro-enterprise policies designed to build an “opportunity society” and act as a blueprint for the party’s 2015 election manifesto.

These measures include the following:

[...] abolishing the retirement age, extending the school day by up to three hours and paying lower benefits in the North and other parts of the country where the cost of living is less expensive.

Other suggestions include encouraging more disabled people to work and obliging pupils who fail their exams to take resits during school holidays. In a wide-ranging report, the MPs also call for a “more entrepreneurial economy” that “re-legitimises wealth creation”.

Finally, one more thought (which for the moment will appear tangential) to throw into the mix on the back of another Telegraph report which came my way via Facebook yesterday – and to which I responded thus:

I wrote over a year ago that I thought a Slovenia-like gameplan was what the Tories were up to long-term. Happy to consolidate London and the Home Counties, to lay waste to the North of England and to engineer it so Scotland and its interfering majority of Labour MPs split off from the rump that would then be forever the Tory Party’s … It’s a thought, anyhow.

So it is that to me, at least, the aims, contradictions and paradoxes of these Tories become clear. Slamming as they have done in times gone by all attempts to devolve power to the regions, they now plan to create an opportunity society where those interested in creating monetary wealth are to be prized above all other kinds of human intercourse. And not only that. The opportunities to be thus taken advantage of will exist primarily in their strongholds of London and the Home Counties. And not only that. In all but name the United Kingdom will disappear: the Scots may achieve total independence or not but in the round they will no longer participate in or influence English electoral processes and divisions of power at Westminster. Meanwhile, the North of England – now an outpost of civilisation to be talked and taken down a rung or two – is described as and destined to be the British equivalent of the Skoda and Dacia factories: cheap Third World-like labour costs for those who would create personal and shareholder wealth above good jobs and sound communities.

For that is what this Tory opportunity society is all about. The opportunities they talk of – opportunities which verily exist, that is true – exist primarily in the Vatican City-like bubble that is the plutocratic City of London:

What is this thing? Ostensibly it’s the equivalent of a local council, responsible for a small area of London known as the Square Mile. But, as its website boasts, “among local authorities the City of London is unique”. You bet it is. There are 25 electoral wards in the Square Mile. In four of them, the 9,000 people who live within its boundaries are permitted to vote. In the remaining 21, the votes are controlled by corporations, mostly banks and other financial companies. The bigger the business, the bigger the vote: a company with 10 workers gets two votes, the biggest employers, 79. It’s not the workers who decide how the votes are cast, but the bosses, who “appoint” the voters. Plutocracy, pure and simple.

Coupled with the drive to get us all on to self-assessment of income tax – for, at least in my humble opinion, means-testing child benefit has far more to do with reconverting us all into potential entrepreneurs, and at the same time ridding us all of the soft cocoon that is PAYE, than saving the state any money at all in the process – it is clear these Tories are messianic figures who believe we need a kick up the backside for the world to have any chance of being set to rights.

And as they learned from Blair’s experience with Iraq, no matter the collateral damage that is generated in the process.

Still, however, the question remains: opportunity knocks – but for whom? The answer to the question defines my own perception of what the Tories claim to be trying to achieve: yes, if they truly were to reduce the profiteering their corporate colleagues have been getting up to over the past three decades at the same time as they reduced the cost of the benefit state, I could appreciate a degree of good faith and even argue in favour of some of their alleged goals.

But in reality these Tories are not looking to create a cheaper society all around. Rather, they are looking to cheapen society for corporate capitalism and for corporate capitalists. But as corporate capitalism and corporate capitalists become – more and more – synonymous of a wealth creation which serves to increase plutocratic wealth at the expense of sufficiently decent and dignified plebeian jobs, so the Tories are even less likely to understand that a real opportunity society would contemplate far more measures than simply plutocratic expansion for us to know whether progress had been made or not.

Which is why I’m afraid this opportunity society these Conservative MPs proclaim today is almost certainly also a sham. As much a sham as David Cameron is manifestly content to remain.

And where Labour should see its own opportunity is precisely in pursuing not the rhetoric of knocking the disabled, poor, sick and unemployed who through no fault of their own need support from society in general, but – instead – in arguing that the Tories are correct in one piece of their analysis: we need to reduce the cost of and unnecessary reliance on benefits.

Where the Tories are rankly wrong, however, and here Labour is still nowhere on the ball nor sufficiently appreciative of the error, is in not following up their initial analysis with a cogent and consequential train of thought: if we are to reduce the cost of benefits to the state, we also need to reduce the cost of living to the people (or, alternatively, increase the wages they earn); if we need to make cheaper a whole raft of processes, we need to ensure this doesn’t cheapen our moral take on society; if we want to convince people that opportunities are out there, success shouldn’t be defined only in monetary terms; and if society is to move forward in truly good faith, we must not only stop the corporate cancer of profiteering injustice – a cancer which incidentally the Tories currently depend greatly on for their funding – but also actively enable a proper and fair understanding of societal justice.

A blueprint, that is, not for a lazy and counter-productive corporate takeover but, instead, a proper and constructive empowerment of the intelligences of every future citizen.

And whilst the Tories refuse to address the fears of the former, Labour still has the opportunity to engineer their blueprint for the latter.

Double obesity

a con, Coalition, Coalition capitalism, fascism, FibDems, obesity, Tories 1 Response »

Jan 032013

The Guardian reports on another Tory wheeze to confuse and confound the progressives amongst us – and presumably encourage us to take an eye or two off the ball. In this case, some of them propose to dock benefits to the obese who refuse to follow their GPs’ instructions to the letter. Let’s look at what the paper says:

Obese and other unhealthy people could be monitored to check whether they are taking exercise and have their benefits cut if they fail to do so under proposals published on Thursday by a Conservative-run council and a local government thinktank.

So how would anyone know that benefit recipients weren’t doing as they were told? Well, the mechanism would be as follows (the bold is mine):

Westminster council and the Local Government Information Unit say new technologies such as smart cards could be used to track claimants’ use of leisure centres, allowing local authorities to dock housing and council benefit payments from those who refuse to carry out exercise prescribed by their GP.

Some thoughts that immediately occur to me, as a result. Firstly, remind yourselves of Peter’s clearly prescient tagline:

At first they came for the smokers but I did not speak out as I did not smoke. Then they came for the binge drinkers but I said nothing as I did not binge. Now they have an obesity strategy.

For it does beg the question why this government of apparently 21st century conservatives and allegedly freedom-loving liberals can so freely continue the job New Labour started more than a decade ago, using exactly the same tools of intervention and, possibly, interference.

Self-awareness has clearly gone dramatically out of fashion.

Now to my second observation: why would a very public attendance of a paid and corporate way of exercising be the only way of proving you were carrying out the activities your GP had assigned you? Which transnational donors are heaving at the gates of evermore juicy government contracts to provide the nation with the kinds of svelte bodies the poor clearly deserve? Where would rambling afternoons and walking down by the canal – or climbing local mountain ranges or kicking a football around on a public right of way – fit into such mindsets as these? What kind of overarching and intrusive system would they have to come up with when payment to a third party was not involved in order to provide the necessary audit trail?

The monetisation of life was never so obvious – nor so repulsive.

Thirdly, just imagine what things you could doublecheck on if a system of smart cards as described above were introduced for everyone in receipt of state benefits: not just the gyms you used nor the alcohol you celebrated your son’s coming-of-age with but, even, the revolutionary tracts you started purchasing for the manifest and primary aim of bringing down the government.

And so to my last thought on this matter for now. The worst of it really isn’t any of the above points – unpleasant as they are. The worst of it is that we’re rapidly embedding a double-standard state. Whilst Tory leaders like Mr Eric Pickles have the money to pay for the medical care their obesity will require, they have the freedom to continue abusing of their selves. But someone who is poorer than the aforementioned gentleman will, in this new paradigm, have no freedoms left them at all.

And here we all were, complaining that the legacy of Thatcher was weighing down heavily on everything Cameron & Co were carrying out. Foolish you and me. In reality, it’s New Labour’s button-pressing which neither the Tories nor the Lib Dems can evade.

Bad as Thatcher was, the dark side of New Labour is only now just emerging. Whilst Blair and Brown were still in charge, all that terribly dangerous legislation they passed was just about in the hands of those most of us felt we could still generally trust. But the sword they used to slash through the undergrowth of Thatcherism was – as all swords inevitably are – a double-edged tool of dangerous significance. Change he or she who wields it and – as I remarked in a previous post – we’re about as stuffed as we ever could be.

Stuffed beyond rescue.

Stuffed beyond hope.

That men and women in power are given a right to an obesity the poor will now surely have removed them is about the biggest condemnation of latterday civilisation we could engineer – if, indeed, civilisation is the right word for what we are currently constructing.

That a benefit recipient’s benefits are made conditional on not getting fat, not drinking alcohol and not reading Marx (all of which I am sure will eventually come to pass), and that a man or woman who finds themselves privileged enough to be in the position of being able to buy their healthcare upfront – without strings attached or caveats on any of their less-than-elegant behaviours – really does make it absolutely clear how morally corrupting the pursuit of money has made our society.

That hangers-on of the Conservative Party, of all British parties, should propose the use of 21st century technologies to turn the consumption of food into an untrammelled right for the rich, at exactly the same time as it mutates into a technology-controlled duty for the poor, is just about as sickening as it gets.

For now, anyhow.

For there will be plenty more of this. The die is clearly cast.

This is a class war being waged on a scale we are only just now beginning to appreciate. And the paradox of it all is that those who would wage it are the Tories of this world – not the revolutionaries.

Not those who would call themselves progressives.

Not those who wanted to make the world a better place.

These so-called progressives have spent their precious powers over the past couple of decades believing that the wars which needed fighting were the ones in foreign parts.

In truth, the most significant war we refused to engage with was right under our very noses.

The war we refused to engage with being that of money.

A money which stationed itself – like a parasite in a host – in our very own communities, lives and – even – souls.

Curious how the stereotypes reproduce themselves, isn’t it?

If you want to be fat and free these days, just make sure you’re stinkingly rich.

A brand new electoral system fit for a coalition age

ConDem-millionaire complex, election manifestos, elections, electoral reform, Labour, Lib Dems, Lib-Con pact, LibDems, political innovation, political parties, politicians, politicking, politics, sorted, Tories 3 Responses »

Dec 012012

Here’s an idea – an idea for a completely new electoral system. Let me explain the background first.

I have to say that before this Coalition government emerged, I thought the idea of a coalition between a couple of left-leaning parties was just what the British body politic was crying out for. It didn’t happen that way, of course. New Labour finally blew it under the weight of its evermore creaking contradictions – and the Lib Dems rather more rancid right-wing tendencies came out on top as national government and power beckoned.

But I do now begin to wonder if the problem is really Cameron & Co – or something else. They are, after all, simply quite old-school first-past-the-post politicians – politicians who find themselves biding their time for a future they expect will bring them ultimate victory. They may, of course, also be conscious that they’ll get soundly kicked out at the next general election – but by then, through awful self-inflicted economic crisis, they’ll have stamped their positions and policies on anyone who dares to follow on.

Whether this anyone be a different party or – simply – different leaders within the same unhappy grouping.

It does, however, seem that a certain trend and tendency is being established. Two fairly impervious postures with an osmotic membrane of a kind sidling between. That the Lib Dems are running the risk of extinction at the moment, precisely because they have allowed the aforementioned process of osmosis to poison the public’s perception of their politics, and that their prior chameleon-like ability to pick and mix has metamorphosed into the uncertainty of violently flip-flopping behaviours, doesn’t mean that the functionality they could provide isn’t going to be needed in the future.

Which is where we come to my idea for a new electoral system: an electoral system designed to enable coalition government by facilitating its transparent formation. Let’s say, some way down the line, the United Kingdom (or whatever it is by then) decides to adopt electronic systems of voting. Let’s even suggest, once adopted in that typically British toe-in-the-water way, we decide to embrace further advantages such systems could bring. One of these advantages could run as follows: for many years, and throughout the first-past-the-post era, people have complained that voting for one party or another inevitably means compromising on certain issues. Yes. Labour might be OK for one voter on welfare but not hit the mark quite on Trident. Or the Tories might convince someone on the economy (well, this is a thought experiment and we are supposed to use our imagination) but not on privacy rights. Or the Lib Dems might get it right on grass-cutting and dog-control policy but be totally all over the place as far as drugs is concerned. How about, then, we use an electoral system which allows us to vote for a different party in a discrete number of specially selected policy areas? Yes! Once the votes were all counted up across the national landscape, each party would have direct responsibility for those areas the public had judged they should be in charge of. And a representative from the relevant party with expertise in the corresponding area would then be assigned by the party to hold the ministerial portfolio in question.

The figures of Prime Minister, Speaker and so forth could all still exist. The PM could, even, continue to have responsibility for reshuffles and changes of government. But in each case, he or she would have to choose from members of the parties which the people had voted for in each policy area.

This would clearly be a brand new electoral system – a system which depended heavily for its functionality on virtual-community technologies and multifarious software tools. But it would also be a brand new electoral system entirely fit for a consensual and collaborative – that is to say, a coalition – age. No longer would politicians have to triangulate their positions. No longer would the electorate have to compromise when they voted. In everything we began to do in such a body politic, honesty, sincerity and directness would become the definers of a completely new era in representative democracy.

What say you?

What upsides and downsides do you anticipate?

And how on earth, once accepted the principle by a sufficiently large constituency of citizens, could we convince enough of our first-past-the-post, anti-collaborative and anti-consensual politicians to finally and utterly let go of their carefully-tended turfs?

Ex-soft drinks executive to become interim BBC director-general?

BBC, in a hole, Tories No Responses »

Nov 122012

I always suggest, when a figurative bomb blows up in our faces, that we should take a quick look in the opposite direction. Who really benefits from such an explosion? Surely that person whom we see walking away in the opposite direction. The person or organisation, that is. Maybe even a political party.

I wrote these words some weeks ago now on the subject of bbc.com, an element of the worldwide – but not accessible from Britain – commercial and online sales arm of our once beloved broadcaster:

Not that I think BBC Worldwide is really up to the job of competing on an open market with the ruthless Murdochs of this world. But the damage that might be wreaked in the meantime is considerable.

For what really worries me about all the above is the impact which greedy and yet simultaneously ineffectual mindsets will, whilst they attempt to commercialise the BBC, have on the ethos of what used to be a public service broadcasting corporation of the highest order. When the BBC mission talks of enriching people’s lives and valuing diversity here in the UK, how will that ever sit happily with looking to sell juicy and “premium” ad space to $1 million households in the USA? What effect, in fact, will such advertising needs have on the nature of the content that our licence fee begins to generate?

We might even begin to wonder if the BBC’s silence on the NHS reforms didn’t have rather more to do with those foreign million-dollar decision-makers than – to date – any of us have imagined.

So will this become a case of the bbc.com tail wagging the bbc.co.uk dog – as well as a harbinger to come for a wider Britain?

Today, however, I discover that not only is BBC Worldwide selling our old Beeb as a premium brand to million-dollar US households but that it was also to be run by an ex-executive of PepsiCo, Tim Davie. As a result of George Entwistle’s recent resignation as director-general of the BBC, Mr Davie will now be running the entire organisation on what we are told is an interim basis.

Just imagine it.

A man responsible for successfully marketing a cola drink to billions of people will now be in charge – at least whilst the firestorms rage – of managing a once, and possibly still highly, treasured public-service broadcaster.

The privatising instincts of the Tories couldn’t have got a better outcome if they’d all prayed simultaneously to a higher entity. A sometime leader from one of the largest US corporations now in charge of shaping the BBC’s next stumbling steps.

I suppose it could be going something like this:

Emasculate the BBC in order to privatise the NHS
Feed the BBC false information on sexual abuse (in a most roundabout way) in order to create a Twitter firestorm
Proceed to prosecute a number of notable Twitter users under the Malicious Communications Act
Emasculate Twitter – and social media more generally – in order to continue a process of foreign-driven privatisation of public-sector delivery
Ensure that the only media able to usefully inform are the relatively easily controlled and influenced mainstream-media behemoths

But, on the other hand, and even where in very good faith on my part, I may be totally wrong about all of the above.

I hope I am.

We all make mistakes.

And from our mistakes, they say, we learn.

I just hope the lesson they’re looking to teach us isn’t one that comes right out of awful dictatorial times of long ago: “Put up and shut up!” almost appears to be their motto.

That really would scythe our democratic instincts.

Oh.

Right.

So this is the establishment re-establishing itself, then. And there was I – instead of fearing – actually believing in a brave new world of open and honest communication.

Silly me.

Are headline Tories a Fifth Column at the heart of the Conservative Party?

conservative bias, Conservative Party Conference 2011, Conservative Party Conference 2012, Tories, unclassifiable No Responses »

Oct 092012

Mike tweets that:

Often I wake and think I do not want to live in a country that voted for this shower and then I remember the country did not vote for them.

This on the day that disproportionate force when dealing with burglars is to be redefined. And I myself then proceed to wonder:

What’s the definition of proportionate force when you’re defending a country from a party of Fifth Column politicians? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_colu…

Wikipedia has this to say on Fifth Columns:

A fifth column is a group of people who clandestinely undermine a larger group, such as a nation, from within. A fifth column can be a group of secret sympathizers of an enemy that are involved in sabotage within military defense lines, or a country’s borders.^[1] A key tactic of the fifth column is the secret introduction of supporters into the whole fabric of the entity under attack.^[2] This clandestine infiltration is especially effective with positions concerning national policy and defense.^[2] From influential positions like these, fifth column tactics can be effectively utilized, from stoking fears through misinformation campaigns, to traditional techniques like espionage.^[2]

The defence of property is clearly more important than the theft of rights here. No surprises there, then. And I don’t deny the importance of debating the right to defend one’s homestead. An Englishman’s home did, after all, use to be his castle. For many, of course, it now appears – as mortgage and rent payments start to strangle households – to be a mere stepping-stone towards homelessness and poverty.

But the less we say about that, the better.

Let’s just carry on re-engineering Britain from the inside out. A Fifth Column to a man (for men they generally are).

I suppose the only question remaining is whether they represent a rump of the Conservative Party – or actually its deepest instincts.

I thought for a long time the former.

I begin to fear the latter.

The Tories’ post-Orwellian Blitzkrieg against the British people

a con, Blighty, Chris Dillow, Conservative Party Conference 2011, Conservative Party Conference 2012, End of History, Orwell, Tories No Responses »

Oct 082012

If anything has seemed – for an outsider like myself looking in – to have characterised this Coalition’s behaviour almost from the very first day, it’s a firmly casual instinct to break the sacred bond between all those rights and responsibilities we might consider to inhabit a moral sphere.

The latest example is well described in Chris Dillow’s piece today, as George Osborne’s strategy to emasculate working-people’s rights proceeds apace. As I suggested a couple of posts ago, this process may be more out of a desire to give us an example than give us a kicking – but, even so, the results are clear to see. (And in truth, this Tory-led Coalition may be rightly perceived as wanting to give us an example and a kicking. But that, I guess, would lead us onto a completely different debate.)

Anyhow, Chris describes the Coalition’s latest wizard wheeze – to force workers to give up their rights in exchange for shares – as having the following implications:

Herein, however, lies a curious omission in Osborne’s speech.Although he talked of “new rights of ownership” he did not mention that ownership should entail control. As bank shareholders will tell you, ownership without control is just a way of ensuring you’ll be ripped off. Anyone would think Osborne wants workers to suffer a similar fate.

The mindset operating here seems bloody damn clear to me. The fear from without that bound us together during World War II, and drove us on to extraordinary socialising changes in our civilisation, did indeed make our country run more efficiently. The problem this government has, looking as it is to emulate Thatcher not Heath (or, indeed, Churchill not Chamberlain), is that there doesn’t seem to be a sufficiently cogent and convincing external threat to ready hand for the citizens of this country to line up in an orderly queue and follow Cameron & Co down the route they are (in a sense, literally) carving out.

No bloodless revolution here, after all.

So seeing the example of Thatcher – demon witch of left-wing mythology – and the fear she induced in those who opposed her, and remembering the effect that the fear of an invasion of our British Isles had on us, and what it did to an often historically disparate set of nation states and peoples, who wouldn’t think the solution to a time of very 21st-century crisis such as this – an “End of History” crisis without clear enmities to define our latterday direction – is to progressively remove all state-organised support networks in order to force people to act as if in wartime?

In fact, this is perhaps the first post-Orwellian state we’re experiencing here. With terrorism generally beaten, with the Russians and their hold on Western civilisation’s energy supplies on the potential back-foot as fracking spreads across the globe, with the Arab states cowed and struggling with their own flowerings of democracy and even the Chinese involved in their own tentative stirrings … who the hell can we now blame for our ills?

Except, I suppose, our own body politic.

And what political leadership is ever going to admit to that?

Much easier to break that sacred bond between rights and responsibilities – and blame the workers for bringing this all upon ourselves.

Which, in a sense, perhaps, is what has really happened. We have got soft; have believed that rights don’t need to be fought for; have allowed ourselves to trust a referred and professionalised parliamentary democracy as the solution to all our ills.

Time for us to correct our path? Time to realise how post-Orwellian this has become? Time to act as if in wartime back?

I wonder.

For that – don’t you see? – is exactly how the Tories themselves are acting. Quite despite themselves … quite because of themselves … whatever the reason, they’re at war with the British people.

And there seems little, for the moment, we can do to remedy the situation.

But then that’s Blitzkrieg all round, isn’t it? Shock and awe squared.

Is the Coalition giving us a kicking or an example?

a con, Conservative Party Conference 2011, Conservative Party Conference 2012, Tories No Responses »

Oct 082012

Yesterday, I wondered why we are so rudderless – so unable to recapture that wartime spirit which so defined a generation seven decades ago. Now I’m asking myself if the government is deliberately giving us a kicking – or, alternatively, perhaps thinks it’s giving us an example.

Let’s assume the mindset runs as follows: a policy of support measures, designed to help the relatively small number of citizens who cannot help themselves, creeps into a wider population and encourages them – much as tax avoiders/evaders do when faced with convenient loopholes – to take advantage of any and every easy way through life. Let us be clear: I don’t think a life of support needs which requires us to ask for state help is an easy life – but I’m pretty convinced that’s what this Coalition believes in its most prejudiced mentalities.

The government and its ministers then proceed to fill their pockets with rich pickings via revolving doors – doors which revolve so quickly these days that one might gasp for breath as a simple spectator, never mind a full-blown participant.

But perhaps we are mistaken in our belief about their motivation in so doing: they are not mainly looking to fill their pockets, though this they most undoubtedly do. No. Their long-term plan is far more insidious: they wish to remind us that life is good – nay, far better! – when the accumulation of money is its principle pursuit.

If I’m right, then, they’re not aiming to give us a kicking – even where this is manifestly the result – but, rather, to give us an example they hope will filter down – trickle down even – to all levels below and beneath.

A new kind of trickle-down theory? A trickle-down theory which talks of changing societal behaviours? A trickle-down theory which via an example imparted, instead of a philosophy preached, is designed to make us all want to exhibit with the virulence our leaders show the greed and pecuniary gluttony in question?

It’s a thought, anyhow.

On the other hand, perhaps they’re just the nasty Tories some of us (mainly myself) refused to accept might be the case all along.

You never know. I could be totally wrong, after all.

Were Hillsborough, Orgreave and Milly Dowler due to a badly policed state or a well-constructed police state?

fear, in a hole, Margaret Thatcher, police, police force, police service, police state, policed state, Tony Blair, Tories 2 Responses »

Sep 142012

Yesterday, the BBC quoted Jack Straw as saying the following:

Mr Straw said that it was “a matter of great regret” to him that Labour had not ensured that the disaster had been investigated thoroughly enough earlier in its time in office, between 1997 and 2010.

But he also told BBC Radio 4′s Today programme: “The Thatcher government, because they needed the police to be a partisan force, particularly for the miners strike and other industrial troubles, created a culture of impunity in the police service.

“They really were immune from outside influences and they thought they could rule the roost and that is what we absolutely saw in south Yorkshire.”

I do wonder if it isn’t becoming a lot clearer here that some police forces are popping up with an ever-increasing frequency as the very worst guys of establishment behaviour. We had the apparently cosy relationship between the Met and News International which allowed the phonehacking scandal and other alleged behaviours to be unreasonably ignored for far too long – an ignorance which arguably led to the publishing empire’s iron grip over the vast majority of British politicians for decades; we had the South Yorkshire police in Hillsborough and Orgreave where incorrect policing – blunders or otherwise – were manifestly demonstrated in both cases without, apparently, any corrective actions being taken by anyone in charge. In all these cases, we just happened to have police forces close to the epicentres of the profoundest power struggles going on at the time under Thatcher’s reign.

So I do wonder if any of what Straw says is accurate, and – if it is – whether this doesn’t explain to a certain extent New Labour’s often secretive ways of running itself. If some key police forces really did act with an impunity certain people in Thatcher’s cabinet were able to tolerate, they weren’t going to lose the habit when New Labour came into power. And where any of the policies New Labour wanted to put into practice ended up challenging those who were really in power, the outcomes were never going to be easy – or, indeed, perhaps, safe.

I don’t know about you but certainly for me, in Straw’s words there is a degree of latent paranoia which makes me – as an outsider – think twice. What really went on inside those levels of British society so accustomed in Thatcher’s time to undemocratically exerting the levers of power? How did they negotiate the change between the Tories and Blair? Was it all down to Blair himself selling a donkey to the populace? Or did Blair & Co really have a fight on their hands – a serious and profoundly scary fight, as Straw’s comments would seem to indicate might have been the case?

When those bodies which exist in representative democracy in order to protect the people are, in reality, there only to represent themselves … well, this is when we do really have to ask questions. For example, is the common and underlying factor in all these unspooling scandals actually very English kinds of self-elected and autocratic leaders? Is the nature of our police leaders as allowed to unfold under Thatcher – and perhaps tolerated under New Labour for whatever reasons – an issue which now requires a proper airing? Orgreave and now Hillsborough? News International? Is there really not enough evidence to pull together a broader understanding of what has happened in the past quarter century?

For the difference between a policed state and a police state is often not all that easy to perceive.

And once we have slipped from the former to the latter, who’s to say we will ever know how to return?

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