How a poodle's pal made the point about Europe

It’s not often our toy poodle, Luci, finds a dog smaller than her. So it’s a matter of celebration when she does. When that dog shows none of Luci’s own shyness or diffidence, and is prepared to play like a mad thing, then joy is unconfined.

That’s Piluca, a miniature Yorkie who’s sometimes in the park nearest to where we live. She chases around with Luci and they both have a wonderful time and a lot of excellent exercise. The human she takes to the park with her is a young Spanish woman, who left Alicante to come and live in Luton.

“I imagine you came for the weather,” I suggested to her when we met.

“Oh, yes. What else?” she laughed, “though the work helped too.”

It turns out she’s a teacher. My first thought on meeting a Spanish woman teaching in England is that she must be teaching languages. Or at any rate, one language.

Nothing of the kind. She’s a maths teacher. And that’s an interesting discovery. The United Kingdom is suffering from an increasingly critical shortage of teachers. Not only do we have too few teachers, we’re recruiting too few to replace the number we do have.

Teaching recruits, by subject, against target, in Engalnd, 2014-15
Christopher Wilkins, University of Leicester

Meanwhile, Spain is suffering from terrible youth unemployment. The way a market is supposed to work, certainly in a worldview admired on the political right, goods and even people are supposed to flow from areas of weak demand to areas where demand is higher. So when Piluca’s human moved to England, she was behaving entirely according to the market model of economics.

She was able to do so because the European Union guarantees freedom of movement, residence and employment to all the citizens of all the member states, anywhere across the entire area it covers. That’s a crucial right. It means that we, as individuals, are not bound entirely to the economic success or failure to one country, but can take advantage of good times in another part of the Union, if things are not going so well in our own.

That ought to be a right defended by the Left, since it empowers workers.

It seems we have here a case that confirms the economics of the right – the clean working of a market – and the politics of the left – the exercise of an important freedom by a salaried worker. So it’s remarkable to see that there’s so much anti-EU talk on the right, and indeed a movement to leave the Union even within Labour.

What do they want? 

To deprive Piluca’s human of her right to take advantage of opportunities across the Continent? To prevent her enjoying our great weather? To deny the UK a way to solve its crisis in education?

Surely that would be a shameful stance to take. Especially as it would deny Luci of such an excellent friend.

Black holes and Donald Trump

One of the more remarkable aspects of the work of Albert Einstein is the way many of his ideas have been confirmed only decades after he advanced them. Decades, even, in some cases, after his death.

The latest to join that list is his notion that there’s such a thing as gravity waves. They have at last been detected, and along with them, a spectacular event: scientists using the snappily named Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory or LIGO observed a collision between two black holes. What’s most mind-blowing is that these two objects, one 35 times more massive than the sun and the other slightly smaller, were observed spinning around each at a staggering 30 times a second, growing to 250 times a second just before they finally collided.

A graphic of the black holes used at the LIGO press conference

35 times the weight of the sun and spinning around another object 250 times a second. It seems inconceivable. And yet Einstein conceived it, and the LIGO scientists observed it.

That ability to pierce what once seemed impenetrable mysteries shows humanity at its best. The kind of thing, like an excellent film or an outstanding teacher, which allows us all to feel proud of our species. It’s wonderful to have the feeling confirmed to us again by such an accomplishment as the LIGO team’s.

It’s only sad that the announcement came in the same week as Donald Trump won the Republican primary in New Hampshire and took a big step closer to the White House. Because if the observation of gravitational waves is an example of the best that humanity can do, the Trump campaign reflects all its grimier and crueller side.

Trump represents humanity at its most fearful and bitter. At their worst, men like to draw together into select, exclusive groups, and view all those outside them as in some sense different, or even wrong, or ultimately less than human. Faced with challenges, not necessarily to life itself but simply to a way of life to which they’ve grown accustomed, they react not by rising but by falling. They develop hatred for those they identify as outsiders, and they round on them, driving them out and ignoring their pleas for mercy.

What we’re seeing in Trump is simply the latest manifestation of that toxic behaviour. He literally talks the language of exclusion: illegal immigrants are all to be deported; Muslims are to be denied entry to the US; and a wall is to be build along the Mexican border to prevent further migration from that country.

This he presents as making the US great again, not seeing that it will make the US smaller, by cutting off and isolating the nation. If it’s even possible to achieve: Trump is always long on what he wants to do, and terribly short on how to do it.

I suppose this turns the week into a fine metaphor for the nature of mankind. An extraordinary achievement at one end of the week. A descent into shameless baseness at the other. And both are deeply ingrained characteristics of our species.

The question is always which will prevail: the noble, outward looking, questing side, or the base, fearful, hateful side. If the former, we could go on to greater and still more admirable things. If the latter, our descent into a world wrecked by environmental catastrophe, hunger and war will be all the quicker.

A process as terminal as the black hole collision observed by the LIGO scientists.

Polarisation of opinion: boldness or recklessness?

Looks like we’re once more being cursed to live in interesting times.

Divisions, on both sides of the Atlantic, are becoming starker, more polarised. We’re rejecting the dull middle, the conformist and customary, and opting for the edgy, the bold, the different. Trouble is, the bold is exciting but can also be dangerous.

Charles the Bold, for instance, is often thought of as Charles the Reckless. It’s easy for one to slip into the other. Charles himself (briefly) made that discovery, as he lost his life at the Battle of Nancy in 1477.

Charles.
Could have been the bold. Turned out to have been the reckless.

In Britain, we in the Labour have elected ourselves as leader a man, Jeremy Corbyn, who identifies himself as a socialist. Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, another man who makes the same identification, Bernie Sanders, has won the primary in the race for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

“Together we have sent a message that will resonate from Wall Street to Washington, from Maine to California,” he announced after his victory, “and that is that the government of our great country belongs to all of the people and not just a handful of wealthy campaign contributors, and their Super PACs.”

Refreshing stuff. His is a nation, as Lincoln pointed out, founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and its government today is in hock to the men (and a scattering of women) with the deepest pockets.

Sadly, as Sanders won his primary, comprehensively beating the candidate of the middle and the establishment, Hillary Clinton, one of those deep-pocketed men was wrapping up the primary for the other party.

“We are going to start winning again,” Donald Trump made it clear, referring no doubt to his surprise defeat in Iowa, “we are going to make America so great again.”

Trouble is his view of making the US great isn’t to reassert the founding principle of equality of creation, it’s to chuck a lot of people out and build a bloody great wall to keep them out. The notion is ludicrous, of course, if only because it massively underestimates the ingenuity of man in getting around walls, and the sheer scale of the task of guarding any barrier 2000 miles long. All his idea would achieve, if it were ever put into practice, is to improve business for people-traffickers, who would be able to charge more to defeat the wall and trump Donald.

All the same, the idea’s gaining traction among a certain and far too large section of the US electorate.

And that’s the trouble with polarisation. It’s great if things go one way. Catastrophic if they go the other.

As happened to Charles the Reckless.

Happy birthday to a man who got things astonishingly right

It was good of Google to remind us, in one of its doodles, that 8 February was Dmitri Mendeleev’s birthday (the 182nd, as it happens, but then Google makes a bit of a point of celebrating slightly odd anniversaries).

What I’ve always liked about Mendeleev is that he didn’t just build the periodic table, which we’ve no doubt all gazed at in long boring moments if we’ve ever had chemistry classes, he used it to do something I regard as absolutely central to the nature of the scientific method as it emerged in the eighteenth century. For a long time, scientists set themselves the goal of explaining the phenomena they observed. They watched bodies falling at the Earth’s surface, for instance, and they came up with notions of rapidly spinning vortices of ethereal (weightless) matter that drove objects downwards, and lots of people went along with the idea because it seemed quite plausible.

Attractive as well as useful
And note number 32

The problem is that this view of the world suggests that objects would also be pushed sideways by the spinning matter, and they clearly aren’t.

The beauty of Newton’s theory of gravitation, long resisted by the proponents of the vortices, was that it predicted things that actually happened, from the movement of the planets (or most of them, anyway – Mercury needed Einstein to come along), to the orbit of the moon, to the action of the tides, to the falling of bodies, all in one theoretical framework. It’s that predictive rather than simply explanatory capacity that gave Newton’s arguments such force, compared to his adversaries’.

Mendeleev did the same, perhaps even more forcefully. He built his periodic table, and discovered there were holes in it: squares that ought to contain the name of an element, but for which none was known.

For instance, he worked on group 14 of the table, which starts with one of the most important elements of all, for us, since it’s the basis for all life: Carbon. It has the capacity of forming long chains of carbons atoms, or alternatively carbon rings, and they are vital in supporting life.

The next element is Silicon, which appears, in particular, in sand and glass.

Then there was a gap. Because the next know element in Mendeleev’s time was tin. It’s so much bigger than Silicon that there had to be another element in between them. Besides, tin is a metal, as is the then last-known element of the group, lead, whereas carbon is definitely non-metallic and silicon only slightly less so; there had to be some transitional element between them.

In 1869, Mendeleev predicted that the material would have an atomic weight of 72, be grey in colour, with a density of 5.5 grams per cubic centimetre and a high melting point. Its chloride, he believed, would boil at a temperature below 100C, and would have a density of 1.9 gm/cc.

In 1886, the element Germanium was discovered. It has an atomic weight of 72.61. It’s grey with a density of 5.35 g/cc; its melting point is 947 C; its chloride boils at 86C and its density is, indeed, 1.9.

Germanium also happens to be a semi-conductor, which makes it important in transistors, and places it neatly in a transition between non-metals and metals.

That’s what I call predictive capacity: to say so much about something unknown, and to find confirmation that close when it’s discovered. Impressive stuff. And truly the stuff of science.

So happy 182nd, Dmitri. And thanks for that great table. It whiled away many a boring period in chemistry lessons.

Impressive man. And didn’t he look it?

Overheard and harrowing

The young woman was walking down the road, a distraught expression on her face, her phone held out in front of her, and on speaker, for reasons I still can’t fathom. As our paths crossed, I heard a remark that explained her expression.

“Just remember,” a woman’s voice was saying, “no one likes you very much.”

Tough, tough words. And the only ones I overheard.

Communications are great
But the news isn’t always good

For the rest of my walk, with Luci–the-poodle faithfully trotting along next to me, I speculated on the back story. 

Was it a matter of unrequited love?

“Well, if you really can’t give up on Mark, by all means come to the party tonight. But he’s absolutely not right for you and Alice has got her hooks into him. So you could end up spending the evening miserable, surrounded by people you don’t get on with. Just remember, no one likes you very much.”

Or was it a work-related thing?

“What’s the point in keeping on pushing the idea, when no one likes it and Joan’s already decided to concentrate on the South.? Why are you so dead set against the job in HR? You’d be much better off in a group that obviously appreciates you. Why would you try to stick with a team that keeps pushing you away? Just remember, no one likes you very much.”

Then again, might it have been purely social?

“But you hate bowling! Why would you insist on coming? It’ll just stir up all the tensions with Henry again. You should have apologised to him, and you never did. Now they spend all their time bad-mouthing you. Why would you want to hang out with anyone like that? Just remember, no one likes you very much.”

All dismal scenarios. No wonder she was upset. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her.

But I also had to wonder why she was having a conversation that harrowing on speaker? Was it a cry for help? Did she want passers-by to share it with her, if only in fragments?

And what sort of friends did she have? Had she really chosen the right person to confide in? Did it make sense to turn for comfort to a woman who would make quite so cruel a remark to her?

Of course, it’s just possible I’ve got entirely the wrong end of the stick. Maybe with a little more context, I’d have found there was nothing quite so agonising in the comment. It might have been just a perfectly ordinary bit of gossipy conversation between friends.

Alternatively, it may be that I’m choosing entirely the wrong person to feel sorry for. Maybe she really isn’t all that likeable. The only information I have about her is that people don’t like her very much. So she may not be very nice, after all.

On the other hand, I may simply have misheard the whole thing.

Thank you for the irony, Daily Mail

It’s not often that the British Daily Mail makes me smile, but it did today.

It was the headline that got me going: “WHO WILL SPEAK FOR ENGLAND?” it demanded to be told.

Usually I’m put off by what is, after all, the paper that lines the sewers of British journalism. It could have been for the Mail that the celebrated ditty was written:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
thank God!
the British journalist.

But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed,
there's no occasion to.

In this case, however, my reaction was that of a lover of irony. There were, after all, simply too many layers of irony in that headline for them not to be appreciated.

The article is about what the Mail sees as a battle between Britain and the EU, currently being waged without much conviction by David Cameron’s government. From the perspective of the Mail and others that share its political outlook, this is a battle for the very soul of Britain, threatened today by all those nasty foreigners across the Channel.

The reference in the headline is to one of the most poignant moments in the history of the House of Commons. I’ve mentioned it more than once before, but it was an inspiring event so I make no apology for talking about it again.

The then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had just flown home from a meeting with Hitler, in which he’d been joined by the French Prime Minister Daladier. On arrival back home, he had waved an agreement that, he claimed, guaranteed “peace for our time.” It gave Hitler a free hand to dismember Czechoslovakia, in return for his not threatening any French or British vital interests.

Hitler ignored the agreement and within a year, we were at war with Nazi Germany.

The time of the agreement was perhaps one of the most humiliating in Britain’s long and colourful career. A great many people felt that way, even then. When Chamberlain made a statement on his meeting to the House of Commons it was greeted by silence – shamed silence. And when the deputy leader of the Labour Party, Arthur Greenwood, stood to reply for the Opposition, a voice called out from the other side of the house – the Conservative, Government side – “speak for England, Arthur.”

So that was irony number 1. It was a Tory, Leo Amery, who called on a Labourite to speak against the Tory Prime Minister.

Irony number 2 is that he made that call in the name of England. But the whole of Britain was affected. Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish would share in the ignominy, as they would share in the sacrifices that the war would entail.

Irony number 3 is that the Mail claims to be speaking for Britain, and also referred only to England.

Irony number 4 is that Leo Amery was speaking out against Nazi Germany. The Mail is railing against a bunch of politicians, no better or worse than others, but as committed to democracy as any current member of the British Parliament.

The Mail says in its article that it’s drawing no parallel between the EU and Nazi Germany. But have you been watching the excellent French series on TV at the moment, Spin (Les hommes de l’ombre)? There’s a moment in it in which the protagonist refers to her adversary as “disloyal” and immediately corrects herself to “loyal”. It’s deliberate: her correction is designed to free her from attack for her insult, but the insult is out there.

The Mail’s use of that headline draws the parallel, even if the body of the article denies it.

Finally, and funniest of all, the Mail is the newspaper which, back in the 1930s, supported Hitler and his British (indeed, English) opposite number, Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. How wonderful that it should now quote the great anti-appeasement Tory Amery to lambast David Cameron over his support for the EU…

Glorious stuff, isn’t it? Well worth a smile. And I suspect there’ll be plenty more such irony before we get our referendum on continued British membership of the EU.

That’s British membership including the English, by the way.

“I don’t mind a parasite,” says Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, “I object to a cut-rate one.”

That may not be precisely the right quotation for my subject. The Groucho Marx comment, “I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member,” isn’t quite right either but is maybe closer.

Clubs have rules. Members accept the rules because they feel the benefits of membership outweigh the limits the rulebook imposes on them. For example, if you want to trade with the European Union, one of the hugest trading blocks in the world, you have to accept its rules. Indeed, even non-members have to accept a great many of them: Norway, for instance, which obstinately remains outside the EU, can only trade with the members if it accepts the regulations it demands.

Even more powerfully, the United States imposes its laws on the rest of the world, which accepts them, however grudgingly, because the alternative means exclusion from the world’s largest market. In more than one non-US company, I’ve had to commit to respecting US regulations on data confidentiality or standards laid down by the Food and Drugs Administration. It wasn’t a problem, because I agree with the regulations. Even so, there’s no doubt that while it may not represent taxation without representation, it is certainly legislation without representation.

This makes the debate in Britain about the European Union particularly curious. We are currently members. That means we have to accept its rules but, on the other hand, we have some say in making them. Leaving would mean a huge loss of influence in the organisation that most affects how Britain makes its living.

For all that, there’s a powerful head of steam today to take us out. That would move us into the position of Norway: subject to the rules, at least as far as trade is concerned, but with no voice over them.

Many would prefer that status. They feel that to be out would give Britain back control over many aspects of national life which it does not control today. Most powerfully of all, it is felt that it would give the country back the authority to prevent what is perceived as excessive immigration: currently, anyone from a fellow EU-member state has automatic residence and employment rights in Britain.

Indeed, that has been the focus of the debate for many months now. Give us back our borders. Keep out all those immigrants who are coming over to take our jobs. Or more to the point, not to take our jobs but to take our benefits.

See how the thoughts progressed, from one to the next? We started talking about sovereignty. We ended up talking about benefits.

And, indeed, David Cameron, in trying to persuade critics that he has done enough to give authority back to London, has focused on little else. To keep immigrants out, he wants the power to reduce benefits. Wha has he achieved? EU members seem open to the notion of an “emergency brake”, allowing a nation to stop paying benefits to new arrivals. However, it would only be applied if their numbers were such as to drive the benefits system into crisis. And only with the agreement of the other members.

Donald Tusk, President of the European Council
With only a little bit to give away to keep Britain in

As one Tory critic of the plan, Nigel Evans MP, pointed out “if we have to phone a friend, indeed in this case 27 friends, to decide that we can put our foot on the brake, then no driver in their right mind would get into a car.”

So we now have David Cameron trying to persuade his critics that he’s won a good deal, while they proclaim he’s done nothing like enough. And it all comes down to whether the British government can refuse benefits to people. The right to deprive people of help is the acid test of membership of the EU.

A great question for the future of Britain, whether or not it will remain in partnership with the other nations of its continent, seems set to be decided on the basis of nickel and dime bargaining.

It seems Cameron’s not at all sure whether he wants to be a member of a Club that isn’t letting him be enough of a cheapskate. Which must be pushing that Club into wondering whether he’s much more than a parasite. Though it can’t be in much doubt that he’s a cut-rate one.