Trump: ready to steal what he can't win

Nothing Trump does surprises me anymore, but it’s still saddening to read that he’s now proposing a delay to the presidential elections.

It’s unsurprising because the US economy is in terrible condition. At the same time, deaths from Coronavirus have risen above 150,000 and are running at around 1500 a day. By way of contrast, Spain, where I live, is struggling to contain the epidemic but has a daily death toll in single figures.

The US has going on seven times the population but perhaps as much as 300 times as many daily deaths.

No wonder, then, that Trump would like the election held later, when the news, both on the economy and the epidemic, may be less damning for him.

What is even more depressing is that he’s challenging the validity of postal voting. Many prefer voting by post precisely because they don’t want to expose themselves to Coronavirus infection by attending polling stations in person. It’s true, too, that historically such votes tend to break more for the Democrats than the Republicans. That doesn’t make them fraudulent, as Trump claims against all the evidence, just less favourable to him.

Why that’s so particularly worrying is that it sounds far less like an argument for delaying the election, as for challenging the validity of the results if it’s held as planned and he loses. It’s by no means certain Biden will win, but it does look as though Trump is preparing a plan B, in the event of his losing. 

In other words, it feels as though Trump is preparing to steal the election.

Biden (left) working to win by the rules
Trump: preparing to rob him?

He could. Just imagine the following scenario.

The Democrat wins the presidential election by a small but nonetheless clear majority of the popular vote, say 50.9% to 47.9%.

And he wins the electoral college by a similarly small but conclusive margin of 39 votes over his Republican opponent.

Then things turn murky. Republicans challenge the votes of four states amounting, between them, to 20 electoral college votes, all of them for the Democrat. Removing those disputed votes from his total would leave him, exasperatingly, just one vote short of a majority – still 19 votes ahead of his rival, but not able to clinch the election.

Of course, he only needs one of the disputed electors to win. Things still look good for a Democratic victory. Republicans are worried.

After long weeks of negotiation, the two Parties agree to arbitrate the result. A special commission will adjudicate on the votes cast. It will include five members of the House of Representatives, five Senators and five Justices of the Supreme Court.

And that’s when the wheels start to come off the bus. Because on every vote, the commission splits 8:7 in favour of the Republicans. As a result, every single one of the disputed votes is awarded to the Republican candidate who emerges with an electoral college majority of just one and is duly sworn in as President.

The Democrats needed just one of those votes. They received none. And so they were defeated.

The worst thing about this scenario is that, far-fetched as it might sound, it’s no fantasy. In fact, it’s already happened.

What I was describing was the 1876 Presidential election. Samuel Tilden, the Democrat, was defeated, or rather robbed of victory. His Republican opponent, Rutherford Hayes, won the election, or rather had it stolen and handed to him. He became the nineteenth President.

Never heard of him? No surprise there. He deserves his obscurity. He achieved little and left little trace. Sadly, the same can’t be said of Trump. As the death toll from Coronavirus, and the damage to the economy, of the US and the world, have shown, his legacy is assured. Another four years, and there’s every chance it’ll be far more devastating still. And all the more difficult to recover from.

The only way to make it hard for Trump to steal the election is to make sure his defeat is so comprehensive that a challenge to any votes would not change the result.

Back in 2016, a lot of people, including friends of mine, couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary. Let’s hope that this time around, whatever misgivings they may have about Biden, they understand the importance of backing the candidate best placed to beat Trump.

Electing Rutherford Hayes was a dirty business. But re-electing Trump would be a real catastrophe. And be warned: he’s preparing the ground to steal what he can’t win.

 

Postscript

Though Samuel Tilden was, no doubt, robbed back in 1876, his campaign could hardly claim to be pure or admirable. Many of his wins came in the deep south, and were only obtained because white agitators physically threatened black voters to prevent them voting. Eleven years after a Civil War during which a Republican President, Lincoln, had freed them from slavery, the vast majority of blacks voted Republican.

In other words, had Tilden won, his victory would not have been that much cleaner than Hayes’.

Rutherford Hayes (left), the Republican
Samuel Tilden saw his victory stolen and handed to Hayes

Still. This time, though, Biden is trying to play by the rules. Let’s hope that doesn’t cost him victory.

Seaside with the family

There are two great things about seaside family holidays. One’s the seaside. The other’s the family.

As for the seaside, the great thing about that is the sea. Beaches? Yeah, fine, good enough. But let’s remember the deathless verse of Lewis Carroll:

The Walrus and the Carpenter

      Were walking close at hand;

They wept like anything to see

      Such quantities of sand:

If this were only cleared away,'

      They said, 'it would be grand!'

 

If seven maids with seven mops

      Swept it for half a year,

Do you suppose,' the Walrus said,

      'That they could get it clear?'

'I doubt it,' said the Carpenter,

      And shed a bitter tear.

As for beachballs, buckets, spades, air mattresses, umbrellas and camp chairs, all the general beach litter that seems to accumulate near seaside sun worshippers, you can keep them. Collateral damage of a pleasant interlude by the sea, is my far-from-humble opinion.

No. It’s the sea itself that makes the trip worthwhile. Swimming in it. But also just enjoying the sights, or giving those sights permanent expression in a photograph. That’s something that constantly draws me to the sea.

This happened the other day. We were out on a rocky headland. More than that, really. A ruddy great rock sticking out of the sea.

A rock on the Spanish coast
Fortunately not surmounted by the Union Jack

I’m surprised it’s not a British possession: we like to seize control over large rocks off the Spanish coast, don’t we? But I suppose this one’s smaller than Gibraltar, and maybe the Foreign Office hasn’t noticed its existence.

It was clear that, with a bit of a scramble, I could get right down to the water level. At worst, I might suffer a bruise or two, perhaps a slight graze. But some of the waves were striking the rocks and throwing up great spouts of foam, potentially making a great picture.

Unfortunately, I was never quite on time to get that photo, or at least quite the way I wanted it. I got some pretty views, but nothing spectacular.

Wave breaking on the Ifach rock
Not as spectacular as I'd have liked

What I hadn’t taken into account was that the sea could produce a fairly spectacular picture of me. And the other part of the holiday, the family bit, would be right on hand to record it. Gleefully.

I got soaked by one of those lovely waves I was so keen on. Davide – which, pronounced as though it were French, is what we use to distinguish him from me (I don’t like ‘old David’ and ‘young David’) – is a far superior photographer, and he was cheerfully snapping away.

More spectacular than I bargained for
Davide catching me as a wave caught me

He even got the aftermath, of me standing there, trying to put a brave face on things and smile, though I knew I’d be spending the whole evening, including dinner, sopping wet.

The aftermath, or the price of my art
Soaking wet just in time for dinner

Ah well. The sea. And a son. Sources of joy, both of them.

And they come together just as they should in the family seaside holiday.

How the mighty have fallen. And are falling today

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…

Replica of Columbus’s ship, the Santa Maria

Ah, the jingle we all learn at school. Making 1492 almost as memorable to British schoolkids as 1066 and the Norman invasion of England. But Columbus did more than sail the ocean.

To this day, Spain’s national day is 12 October, supposedly the anniversary of Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the New World (in quotation marks because I assume the people who were already living there didn’t feel he’d discovered the place. Nor would they have seen much to celebrate in the event).

That day is also celebrated in much of the Americas, even the US, where it’s explicitly referred to as ‘Columbus Day’.

It’s that important because it marks the ascent of Spain to the status of world power. The primary world power of its time. The head of perhaps the greatest Empire the world had seen up to then, an Empire on which the sun never set. It stretched from the Philippines to the Americas, and quite a lot in between. Even in Europe, the Spanish holdings were massive: a lot of Italy, bits of France and Germany, and the whole of the Low Countries (present day Benelux).

It was true that it was always daylight somewhere in the Spanish Empire.

Of course, that isn’t always such a good thing. It was later true of the British Empire that the sun never set on it, but Duncan Spaeth, a bright commentator in the US commented, “I know why the sun never sets on the British Empire: God would never trust an Englishman in the dark.”

Spin had the muscle to back up its status. The ‘tercios’ were the most feared infantry units in Europe, virtually unstoppable on battlefields, and it had redoubtable maritime forces, to service its overseas imperial possessions.

And then it lost it all. At the Battle of Trafalgar, at the start of the nineteenth century, the best of the Spanish fleet was destroyed, alongside its French allies. In the course of the following decades, most of its American colonies fought and won their independence, until by the end of the century its only substantial possessions were Cuba in Latin America and the Philippines in Asia. Then it fell out with the new upstart nation on the world stage, the United States, which sank the weakened navy it still had, and relieved it of Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam.

America justifies its its toasting of Spain

Things hadn’t gone well at home either. The decision as to who should be King would be determined by fighting between foreign powers – Britain and Austria on the one hand, France on the other – at the start of the eighteenth century. At the start of the nineteenth, Napoleon would put a brother of his on the throne. Meanwhile, instability and war had reduced the country to poverty and backwardness. Where once it had called the shots in Europe, it was now the victim of other nations’ bullying.

What went wrong? How come in 400 years Spain could go from straddling the globe to suffering poverty and defeat as a third-rate European power?

You don’t have to look far to find the answer. The Church imposed a regime of solidly enforced ignorance on the people. When France, Britain, and many states of Northern Europe were driving science forward, and building new technology on it, the Inquisition made sure that such dangerous ideas were given no opportunity to grow in Spain.

In parallel, a class of super-wealthy nobles ensured that the unbelievable levels of wealth extracted from the Empire maintained essentially themselves. They owned huge holdings of land and lived off them. They paid little or no tax themselves but enforced payment of backbreaking sums from those poorer than themselves. Just as the Spanish Church prevented enlightenment ideas from spreading into the development of new ideas and techniques, so the Spanish elites ensured that no significant investment would be made in new industries and wealth-creation generally.

The result? There was neither the will nor the means to do what was necessary to preserve Spanish pre-eminence. For instance, to replace the fleet lost at Trafalgar.

Spain lost its status as a world power because its domestically powerful weren’t ready to embrace any change that threatened their lifestyle. And so they, and the rest of the people, lost the lot in the end.

Why is this worth reflecting on? Because I believe that the same happened to Britain. It replaced Spain as a nation of colossal power in the world. But then it couldn’t adapt to new circumstances or accommodate the changes in society needed to make the nation fit for a different world. It had the chance to embrace a powerful new role in 1970s, as a major player in a powerful world bloc, the EU. But, as nostalgic as the Spanish always were for a supposedly glorious past that was rapidly slipping away, Britain then left in 2016. Like Spain before it joined the EU, it will become a third-rate power struggling to make its voice heard.

And even more important than Britain, what now is happening to the US? As Trump has alienated nation after nation, he can no longer pull together a coalition, for instance for his quarrel with China. Like the Spanish leaders of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, he is fixated with a past that is vanishing. That leaves him incapable of dealing with a future that is careering down the track towards him.

It happened to Spain. It happened to Britain. If the US sticks with Trump, we may well see his people Making America Small Again.

Truth, fact and fiction

I love the expression ‘in my humble opinion’. That’s because it isn’t just wrong. It’s wrong in so many different ways.

After all, how can an opinion be humble or proud? Or pretty much anything other than right or wrong, well-founded or fanciful? The holder of the opinion may be humble, but if so, why advance the opinion anyway? Surely putting forward an opinion at all shows a certain confidence in it, if not downright arrogance?

Anyway, in my humble opinion, the two best pieces of TV I’ve watched in recent months are Unbelievable and Unorthodox. The fact that both titles are negative adjectives may be unnerving but is certainly unintentional.

Merritt Wever and Toni Collette as the detectives in Unbelievable
Fictionalised versions of real characters

Unbelievable is based on a compelling account of police work, led by two women detectives, on a serial rapist, with the linked story of a young woman whose rape complaint wasn’t believed by far less bright cops.

Unorthodox is drawn from the novel, built around her experiences, of a woman who broke free from an Orthodox Jewish community in New York, and the difficulties she faced both in her earlier existence and in coming to terms with the new one.

Shira Haas in Unothodox
The lake scene is one of the most poignant in the series

Both are works of fiction based on historical fact. This is not a spoiler, but there is a strand in Unorthodox to do with music which does not correspond to the real character’s history. But it’s powerful and engrossing, so it’s a welcome addition to the story. And it certainly doesn’t detract from its psychological truth.

Similarly, in Unbelievable, the names of the female protagonists have been changed. In the case of the young rape victim, this is principally to protect her identity. In the case of the two outstanding detectives, it is because though they are drawn from real figures, they differ from them in certain ways, and the invented names recognise the extent to which they are fictional creations.

Libby Hill recently ran an interview on Indiewire with Susannah Grant, co-creator of Unbelievable. The article’s worth reading in its entirety, but for now I’m going to focus on just a single sentence, because it struck me so forcefully. This is Hill’s opening, a quote from the novelist Madeleine L’Engle:

Truth is what is true, and it’s not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing.

Facts can be used to mislead. It is fact, for instance, that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently announced £5 billion of infrastructure expenditure as a key element in the government’s response to the economic crisis associated with the Coronavirus pandemic. It’s also a fact that when US President Franklyn Roosevelt had to respond to the economic crisis precipitated by the crash of 1929, he called it the ‘New Deal’.

Unsurprisingly, Johnson called his initiative a New Deal too.

The parallel with Roosevelt’s unprecedented and colossal programme in the 1930s is impressive. Or so it seems, until we add a further fact. Johnson’s New Deal represents 0.2% of British GDP, while FDR’s amounted to around 40% of the US economy.

A fact without context gave us a fiction that communicates a falsehood.

Unbelievable, on the other hand, took facts as a starting point, but then built a fiction around them which conveyed important truths. It used the fiction to illustrate the horror and distress of rape, the pain of the victim disbelieved, and the contrast between the slapdash work of an inept policeman and the tireless and exhaustive work of two excellent ones.

In other words, a good fiction can communicate an important truth, while simple facts, as in Johnson’s case, can be used to deliver a falsehood.

This all put me in mind of one of my favourites writers of all time, Denis Diderot, the French novelist and philosopher of the eighteenth century. He was a remarkable writer, and his novels sparkle and amuse even today (if you don’t know it, you should try Jacques the Fatalist, one of the greatest comic novels of all time). Strangely, he admired Samuel Richardson, an English writer whose novels are stodgy and cloyingly sentimental with a touch of sadism thrown in. Diderot was heavily influenced by him, which is odd, since his books are lighter, more compelling and above all funnier.

There was a sharp debate in Diderot’s day about the relative truth of history and the novel. This was a time when historians were not above inventing speeches to put in the mouths of the major figures they were dealing with, on the grounds that, though no one knew what Julius Caesar or Charlemagne had said on a particular occasion, this is the kind of thing they might have said. But even without such downright invention, much history is necessarily speculative – based on documentary evidence perhaps, but filling in gaps by interpretation.

Diderot directly addresses Richardson on this subject:

Oh Richardson! I will go so far as to say that the truest of histories is full of lies, and your novel is full of truths. History paints a few individuals; you paint the whole human race… The human heart, which has been, is and always will be the same, is the model you copy… I will go so far as to say that history is often a bad novel; and the novel, as you have made it, is a good history. O painter of nature! It is you who never lie.

I love that notion. Fiction can be more truthful than fact. “Truth and fact are not the same thing,” as Madeleine L’Engle so sharply put it.

To see how valid that is, watch Unbelievable and Unorthodox if you haven’t already seen them. And tease out the truths in these and other fictions, of screen or page.

Then listen to the allegedly factual statements of Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin or even mini-Trump Boris Johnson, with a seriously large pinch of salt.

Floods and worse

A visitor to Valencia has to be struck by the extraordinary, nearly ten-kilometre long park that runs through the city centre.

It looks like a riverbed for the excellent reason that that’s exactly what it is. In fact, Valencians still refer to it as ‘the river’. No river flows down it, however, and as well as grass and trees, cycle lanes and running tracks, and shaded walkways, it includes football pitches, a rugby pitch, an athletics stadium and a baseball field as well as a pleasure lake at one end, and a complex known as the ‘City of Arts and Sciences at the other’.

The river Túria, which once flowed here, has gone. And where has it gone? Out to the south of the city where it runs, though not very often, down to the Mediterranean.

Why do I say not very often? Because while Valencia has quite decent levels of rainfall, like most parts of Spain it doesn’t have enough water just to let it keep flowing off to the sea. So the Túria is heavily dammed outside the city and, most of the time, even the new bed is pretty well dry, with the water held in reservoirs, for, I suppose, the opposite of a rainy day.

How did this is all happen? Well, back in October 1957, there was heavy flooding, costing around 100 lives and huge physical damage. You can question the decision now, on environmental grounds, but back then it was felt that the best solution was to divert the river out of the centre of Valencia to make sure that never happened again.

What would have been an appalling outcome would have been if the original plan had been stuck to. That was to put a motorway down the old riverbed, to link the city with the port and the airport. Fortunately, although this was still in the time of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, a massive popular movement, “the river is ours and we want it green”, was able to convince the authorities to drop their plan and go for something more attractive.

It still took until 1986, long after the return of democracy, for the park to be officially opened. For many years, much of the riverbed was a dank wasteland used as a dumping ground. A friend of ours remembers standing on a bridge with school friends and throwing stones at the bloated stomachs of cows flung there from the local slaughterhouse. It was dramatic, apparently, to see the stomachs eventually explode.

Individuals began planting trees in this mess and, in time, the city council moved in and did some landscaping work, putting in the sports grounds, running tracks and cycling lanes, to make the glorious park which is such a precious public resource for Valencians today.

But back to 1957. One of our neighbours kept a newspaper supplement from November of that year, full of photographs of the flooding and its aftermath.

Looking through them is a poignant experience, revealing the horror of the event. But I also found it a chilling reminder of other aspects of the time.

The river in spate in 1957. The park at peace today

It was striking to see a river in spate rushing down what is now the park.

Equally dramatic was a photo of the Serrano Towers, now a major tourist landmark, with their base in the muddy waters.

The Serrano towers in the floods, and today

And I was also fascinated by a picture of the great square in the centre of city, near the old town hall, turned into a lake. But what struck me most about that photo was the caption, which described the square as the ‘Plaza del Caudillo’, or Chieftain Square. ‘Caudillo’ was the title the dictator of Spain assigned himself, not entirely inappropriately: he had no legitimacy apart from what force could give him. Like any bandit chief, he’d used violence to take what he wanted. He drew on the backing of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to reach his goal and, once there, he wreaked ruthless reprisals against his defeated, democratic adversaries. The total number of his victims isn’t known, but it’s in the hundreds of thousands, as are the numbers of refugees who fled abroad.

Plaza del Caudillo, flooded
and Plaza del Ayuntamiento, with more controlled water

Today, the square has the anodyne and neutral name of ‘Plaza del Ayuntamiento’, Town Hall Square. It was a little shocking to see it referred to as ‘Plaza del Caudillo’.

But then, I’d had the same shock when I first looked at the newspaper supplement. The front page has a photo of dignitaries visiting the stricken city, like politicians anywhere inspecting the site of a natural disaster. But one of them, surrounded by military men and Ministers, is Franco. It appalled me a little to see him behaving like an ordinary politician, given the man he was.

Franco (left of the front row)
and other dignitaries visiting Valencia after the floods

The caption, too, left me a smiling a little wryly. It described the flooding as the worst disaster to have hit the city since the ‘liberation’. I presume liberation in this context means the installation of the dictatorship.

That would be quite amusing if there weren’t, in Spain, quite a current of opinion, and even a party represented in Parliament, which seems nostalgic for a liberation of that kind.

We can be grateful that the city is at least safe from the kind of disaster that the 1957 floods represented. Sadly, however, the work of protecting ourselves from the kind of disaster Franco inflicted is never over. It has to be renewed in every generation.

And not just in Spain.

Refuge from toxicity

One of the great things about living in Spain is that the weather here is, generally, a lot better than anywhere else I’ve lived.

I say ‘generally’ because, around here in Valencia, when it rains it really chucks it down, for days at a time. But when it’s fine, it’s really fine.

Trouble with that is that it appeals to more than us humans. For instance, this is a nation in which there flourishes a particularly dynamic race of masonry ants. Now, I’m strongly in favour of learning to share our planet with other species. Call me prejudiced if you like, however, but I’m really not keen on having the bricks our house is built of reduced to long, thin trails of red dust.

This means getting the pest control man in. In what feels delightfully paradoxical, he helps keep our house free of pests by using thoroughly pestilential products. One of them, as well as being lethal to unwelcome creatures, would undoubtedly not do our health any good either. We had to get out of the place for a couple of hours.

Ah, this is the life.
Just the retirement earned by a long mousing career

That was no problem for Misty, the cat. Of the four countries we’ve obliged him to live in, Spain seems to be the one he likes best. A fine place for his retirement, he seems to feel. Especially in the summer, when he shows no reluctance at all to staying outside, even overnight. During the day’s even easier. He just had to choose which particular patch of sun he felt most comfortable lying down in.

That just left us and the dogs. What we needed, we felt, was a bar or café, with a garden where we could spend an hour or so, nursing a drink, in pleasant surroundings.

Not as simple as it sounds, though.  It was like when someone asks us to recommend a hotel near where we live. I don’t know any hotels where I live. I live there, after all.

When we were in town, with loads of cafés or restaurants nearby, we knew plenty of places to go to. But we moved out here to be somewhere quieter. There just aren’t any cafés around the corner, and we don’t know that many even a drive away. After all, being out here, and this was one of the aims of the move, means that if you want a drink in an attractive setting, you can have one at home.

Which, as I’ve explained, wasn’t on just then.

Fortunately, we did know one place not that far away, a restaurant with a bar and a garden. It’s lovely once you’ve arrived, but getting there’s not much fun. In particular, one of the places you have drive down is in a such a state that you have to worry whether your car’s axles will stand it. Or, even more worrying, your neck. Really, I think of that stretch as a series of potholes with a few bits of roadway mixed in.

Still, it was just the place for us. Except for the sign we saw as we drove in. “Strictly no dogs”.

I suggested we drive on, looking for somewhere else. But Danielle thought I should go in and ask first. I realised she was right – after all, the worst they could say was ‘no’, which would leave us no worse off than if we left.

And this is another thing I like about Spain.

It may be down to Catholicism. Or perhaps to the Mediterranean way. It’s an attitude I’ve met in Italy and France as well. Regulation is seen as a guideline. Something to be approached, but not to be adhered to slavishly.

It can be irritating, as when people don’t respect social distancing or drive down our street at twice the speed limit. But it can be a joy at other times. Especially as a contrast to the “more than my job’s worth, mate,” I’ve met all too often in England.

You see, Protestants, or possibly Northerners, follow a harsh, unforgiving God. The “vengeance is mine” kind of God. Not so much the more broadminded God of “why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

“Ah, yes,” they told me in the bar, “dogs are strictly not allowed. But that’s because the owner has a large dog that wanders around here off the lead. But he’s away right now. So, just for once, and on a completely exceptional basis, you can have your dogs here while your house is being fumigated.”

A pleasant place, good company, a large G&T
make for a fine place of temporary refuge

Given that on top of that, they poured the gin for Danielle’s gin and tonic by eye – none of those cheapskate measures or anything – this place turned out to be just what we needed to pass the time of our exclusion from home.

Luci found the place perfectly satisfactory

And the dogs liked it too.

NHS reform, or rearranging the deck chairs

The NHS: much loved
but easier to reorganise than to fund properly

We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. Presumably the plans for our employment were being changed. I was to learn later in life that, perhaps because we are so good at organizing, we tend as a nation to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization. During our reorganizations, several commanding officers were tried out on us, which added to the discontinuity.

When I first came across these words, they were attributed to a Roman writer. But it seems they are far more recent, dating from 1957, and the pen of an American, Charlton Ogburn Jr.

It was back in the late eighties that I first came across them. It was the early days of my nearly 35 years working with, though never, in healthcare. And the reason a manager in the English NHS had dug them out, was because the service was in the throes of a major reorganisation.

Until 1983, local management in the NHS had all been by boards. The problem with this was that no single person could be held answerable for any decision. The boards were a wonderful hedge for individual executives to hide in.

The Griffiths reforms, that were still being implemented when I started work with the NHS, were introducing the notion of General Management, where a named General Manager would take top-level decisions and be held responsible for them. The report that led to the reform was by Roy Griffiths, formerly a director of supermarket chain Sainsbury’s. His selection, and indeed the notion of individual responsibility, reflected a Thatcherite belief that they order things better in private companies.

As the banks demonstrated in 2008.

In 1987, the same government decided to set up ‘NHS Trusts’. They would be bodies running one or more hospitals, but away from control by a geographical organisations, such as a district health authority. Essentially, it meant hospitals running hospitals. Which, like General Management, sounds like a good thing.

It wasn’t enough, though. In 1989, right at the end of the Thatcher era, it was announced that a provider-purchaser split would be introduced in the NHS. In other words, providers such as hospitals would deliver services to purchasers, organisations representing geographical areas or patients, in what came to be known as the internal market.

Again, note the ideological commitment to private sector concepts.

‘Fundholding GPs’ would hold finance with which to purchase services from hospitals or other healthcare providers. Non-fundholders would have their services purchased for them by geographical organisations. This process moved forward under Thatcher’s successor, John Major.

Note that there was nothing to stop GPs offering certain services themselves. They might do minor surgeries, for instance, such as ‘lumps and bumps’ or vasectomies. That meant some fundholders might buy services from themselves. Many felt this was an arrangement that was, at best, a little dodgy.

Then, in 1997, Labour came to power under Tony Blair. The internal market was all wrong, for ideological reasons, and had to go. But the provider-purchaser split would be maintained, but in a softer, kinder form. Two years later, GP fundholding was ended, and Primary Care Groups were introduced. These bodies represented large geographical groups of GPs and had the funds to purchase services on their behalf.

In 2000, the Blair government introduced the Private Finance Initiative. This enabled funds to be channelled to the NHS, but without appearing in government expenditure. It was a hopelessly expensive form of finance, for which we shall be paying for years.

In 2002, the Primary Care Trust was invented, as a more autonomous form of Primary Care Group.

But the most inspiring change in 2002 was the so-called Wanless review, which paved the way for colossal increases in healthcare expenditure. They took place over the remaining years of the Blair and Brown governments.

The next exciting reform was the launching of NHS Foundation Trusts from 2004. They would run hospitals, as NHS Trusts did, but with more autonomy, above all over their finances.

In 2010, the Tories came back to power, in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, and a programme of austerity was launched in the NHS. Budget increases were kept to around 1% annually. That was far below the level required to cover inflation, particularly high in healthcare where new and expensive treatments are constantly appearing, and the increasing cost of treating an ageing population.

In 2011, the Cameron government announced new changes, such as the creation of Public Health England. They also abolished Primary Care Trusts and set up successor organisations formed by merging groups of these PCTs.

In 2014, Simon Stevens was appointed NHS England Chief Executive (yes, General Managers went out long ago – terribly passé, don’t you know).

By 2018, the Theresa May government announced plans for significant increases in NHS funding, though still less than Stevens had been asking for – 3.4% annually as opposed to 4%.

Now, in 2020, we hear that Boris Johnson, or more likely Dominic Cummings, ostensibly his adviser, in reality the controlling power behind the government, is planning a further review. Unhappy with criticism of the handling of Coronavirus from Public Health England and Simon Stevens, it looks as though it will set out to bring the service far more under government control.

Control, indeed, seems the main concern. Certainly not the quality of service.

Again and again, I’ve watched reorganisation across the NHS.

Some of the ideas were good, some less so. None of them has really stood the test of time. Above all, I can’t point to a single one of them and confidently say it delivered a better service.

As Charlton Ogburn wrote, reorganisation is a “wonderful method… for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization”.

Yes. Because it isn’t reorganisation that will improve the NHS. It’s spending sums of money adequate for the service we want. Reorganisation costs money, it doesn’t deliver any.

As Labour demonstrated after the 2002 Wanless review, when we really started turning the NHS into a world-leading service.

And as the Tories showed negatively by putting the process into reverse and starving the NHS of funds over years of austerity.

But it looks like we’re going to get reorganisation again.

It takes a child

The thing about kids is the way they can amaze you.

To be honest, I’ve never been terribly good with children who can’t yet speak. “Yes,” I tend to feel, “I can see that you have something terribly important to tell me, but what exactly is it?” Or, just as exasperating, “I really do want to tell you everything I can about that fascinating [delete as appropriate] puddle/stretch of sand/breaking wave/odd looking insect/open flame/other (please specify), but I have no language to tell you it in that you’ll understand”.

The philosopher Wittgenstein once claimed that, “whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent”. A writer I far prefer, the playwright Tom Stoppard turned that around, into “whereof we cannot speak, thereof we are by no means silent”.

During her recent visit to us, my new granddaughter Matilda demonstrated clearly that Stoppard was right and Wittgenstein mistaken. It’s easy to be highly communicative without words. She had no difficulty at all letting me know how she felt about things (or people, including me) or what she wanted to do next.

Danielle is my wife but during that visit, it was much more relevant to think of her as Matilda’s grandmother (or Mamama, as she’s called, this being the customary name for ‘grandma’ in her native Alsace). Mamama has a laugh one can only call explosive. At one time, in a cinema in Strasbourg, a student of hers approached us at the end and said, “I was at the other end of the cinema, but I thought it must be you laughing like that”.

Matilda gives us a laugh
as her Granddad gives her a shoulder ride

Matilda has now picked up Mamama’s laugh. And she’s decided it’s something to deploy at every possible opportunity. For instance, when both of them went to the local baker’s, she started laughing at the woman behind the counter, who found it so irresistible, that she laughed back. Delighted with her success, Matilda laughed still harder. That got another client going, so Matilda turned her attention to her. Before long, the whole shop was laughing with the baby in her pram.

It was when she started using that laughter on me that I first noticed its seductive power. And, in an excellent example of communication without words, I quickly realised that she wasn’t laughing at me, but with me. Or, at least, since I wasn’t actually laughing when she started, inviting me to laugh with her.

It worked. Of course.

Slowly, I began to pay a little more attention to her other expressions. I discovered that even when she wasn’t laughing at me, she was often smiling. This slightly astonished me. After all, what with being so uneasy with a child I couldn’t talk to, I’d tended to hang back a bit. I mean, her parents and her Mamama were paying her plenty of attention. I rather assumed she didn’t need me to do much.

The occasional hug. A kiss or two from time to time. Maybe a bit of a walk or a shoulder ride. That felt like probably the appropriate level. I hoped Matilda would be pleased with the little I was doing, as a kind of bonus to the real attention she was getting from everyone else, but didn’t expect any particular further acknowledgement of my role in her life. Or, indeed, even of my presence.

And then I realised that she was turning a dazzling gaze on me from time to time, followed by a brilliant smile if I made any kind of response. A wave. A word. Frankly, even a smile back.

Amazing. I suddenly realised I could, after all, establish a relationship with this young girl. One that we could both enjoy.

Matilda telling Granddad she likes the playground

So I started doing other things. Making odd sounds. Hiding behind a chair and suddenly appearing. Planting noisy kisses on her legs, her belly or her neck (which always produced a wonderful, if whimsical reaction: she would turn her head away, but press herself closer to me so I could do it again). 

I even found myself sharing my orange juice with her.

Matilda sharing Granddad's orange juice

The reward was smiles. Occasionally, I even got that newly mastered trick of hers, an outright laugh. Or even better, a chortle, which was much funnier.

Ah, yes. Non-verbal communication. It works all right.

An astonishing insight. Hidden from me only by the veil of adulthood.

It turns out it’s child’s play.

Matilda makes it clear:
just have fun and the smiles will follow

The great Bill Gates conspiracy. A bit of context

In my previous post about the strange case of the Bill Gates conspiracy theory, I talked about those curious aspects of it that are, when all’s said and done, common to all such theories.

They’re impervious to lack of evidence. The fact that there’s nothing at all to prove that Gates is engaging in some sinister plot against the whole of humanity only shows how clever he is at covering his tracks.

Equally, no contrary evidence has any value. Any story showing that it simply isn’t true that Gates is doing any of these things, or even that they’re actually impossible in the present state of technology, are obviously wicked inventions by his acolytes, insidiously fed out to the gullible individuals who believe his protestations of innocence.

Well, as I said, this is the stock in trade of any conspiracy theory. But there is another specific aspect of the Gates story that’s worth looking at. That’s the global context in which it has emerged. Which is almost enough to make me want to launch a conspiracy theory of my own.

Look around the world today.

In China, we have Xi Jinping. He has had the constitution of his country changed so that he can remain in power more or less indefinitely. He’s been in the news recently for the way he has, at a legislative stroke backed by violent police power, wiped out the partial liberties that Hong Kong had enjoyed before.

More sickening still, around a million Uighur people, Muslims from Western China, are being held in what the regime calls re-education camps, and anyone else calls concentration camps. The figure of a million is a bit of a guess and the real figure may be much higher: the regime isn’t particularly forthcoming with the statistics.

Meanwhile, in the United States we have a Donald Trump for whom nothing matters other than his own advancement. He works to divide people, he advances racism, and he incites violence from some of the most despicable individuals in the country. And all the time, he has presided over the worst economic collapse the nation has known at least since 1929, and the deaths by Coronavirus of over twice as many Americans as were killed in the whole of the Vietnam war.

His own incompetence contributed to both those disasters.

Turning to a less significant country (but don’t tell its conservative voters – they like to think otherwise), we have Boris Johnson in Britain. He has in recent weeks defended, and ultimately failed to take any action over, Coronavirus lockdown breaches by his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, and one of his Ministers, Robert Jenrick. Again, the mortality due to the virus in the UK is far higher than in might have been, entirely down to the incompetence with which Johnson has addressed it.

Top right: Mark Zuckerberg, the enabler
Then, clockwise: Trump, Putin, Bolosonaro, Xi, Johnson

And the list goes on. Brazil has Jair Bolsonaro, a man presiding over the devastation of his country by Coronavirus, and who, after months of denying there was a problem, and refusing to wear a mask, has now tested positive himself. Or Vladimir Putin in Russia who has gone down the Chinese road, of a constitutional amendment to keep him in power for a lot longer, and who is almost certainly involved in a real conspiracy, to try to influence the US Presidential election through dirty tricks on social media.

Talking about social media takes us, of course, to the dominant figure in that world. Mark Zuckerberg continues to refuse to act against hate speech and incitement to violence on Facebook. There are allegations that the massacre of the Rohingya in Burma was promoted through Facebook. And Zuckerberg can play his role, unaccountable to anybody, and free from any kind of control, regulation or sanction. He is one man, elected by no one, and running on his own authority a communications system that feeds information, or disinformation, to 2.6 billion people around the world.

So we we see these characters at work across the globe. Some of them are preparing conspiracies. That’s likely to be true of Putin, and his people will use the means provided by Zuckerberg. But others aren’t even trying to work conspiratorially. We know what Trump’s up to, we have a pretty good idea what Xi Jinping’s doing too.

And in this world, we pick on Bill Gates? Because he correctly predicted that pandemics might be more serious than war? And contributed money to combating the present one?

Why, it’s almost as though someone were trying to deflect attention from some real villains. Distracting us because they’re working to a hidden agenda we know nothing about. Spreading disinformation, perhaps through Facebook, so we don’t look at the people who really deserve our suspicion and distrust.

Curious, isn’t it? Is it just a coincidence that Gates conspiracy theorists are putting this kind of stuff out right now? Or is it something more sinister?

The great Bill Gates conspiracy

We live in a time of conspiracy theories.

Of course, most times have had their conspiracy theories. The power of anti-Semitism in the early twentieth century spread rumours of an international plot of Jewish financiers to take over and run the world. There was even a remarkable document, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, explaining how this was going to be carried out.

Unsurprisingly, the document turned out to be a forgery. Equally unsurprisingly, that didn’t stop the conspiracy theory being believed. It is of the essence of a conspiracy theory that once you’ve been bitten by one, nothing will shake your confidence in it. Not even discovering that a key element is false. And if evidence for it is lacking, that only demonstrates how dastardly devious the conspirators are, in hiding all trace of their nefarious activity.

In the same way, any evidence against the theory is obviously fake news, put about by members of the conspiracy to fool the ingenuous and naïve.

You see, it isn’t the people who believe the conspiracy theories who are gullible, for accepting as true allegations with no evidence to back them. The gullible ones are the rest of us, without the acuity to realise that absence of evidence isn’t the same as evidence of absence. To say nothing of our being so innocent as to accept the truth of obviously fabricated so-called evidence against the theory.

Well, not a theory. The truth. Or even the Truth, with an initial capital letter.

Melinda and Bill Gates

The target of today’s favoured conspiracy theory is, rather oddly, the Microsoft founder, Bill Gates.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has put $300m into fighting Coronavirus. You might think that people threatened with infection by the virus might be grateful for the gesture. I’m sure most are.

He also warned in a 2015 Ted Talk, that the great threat to life in the next decades would be from a virus, not from war. You might think that people would admire him for his prescience. I’m sure most do.

But not the conspiracy theorists.

To them, this is just part of his smokescreen for his real agenda. He wants the pandemic to spread – indeed is responsible for that spread, which is why he knew about it so early – so that a vaccine, developed with his money, can be injected into people – and with it a microchip allowing the Gates foundation to establish control over the people vaccinated.

There are other even wilder accusations around, and if you want to catch up on them, you can do so here.

As Bill and Melinda Gates point out, “we are just giving money away, we write the cheque...” They don’t develop the vaccine. They certainly won’t be administering it to anyone.

Besides, there isn’t a vaccine yet, and there may never be. More to the point, to my knowledge, there is no chip capable of controlling a human being into whom it has been injected.

Why, there isn’t even any evidence that the virus was deliberately developed by anyone, let alone Bill Gates, as the conspiracy theorists keep claiming.

Now, I’m not saying that there are no conspiracies. There are. Indeed, it could be useful to look at a real one, to get a better idea of how it differs from the fake variety.

In March 2018, two characters travelling on Russian passports but in names it seems were not their own, showed up in Salisbury, in Southern England. They were there again the next day. They later claimed that they had been so impressed by the cathedral on their first visit that they decided to return from London at the first opportunity.

Not long after, a former Russian Intelligence officer, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter fell seriously ill, with poisoning by the agent Novichok, of which there are significant stocks in Russia. Skripal had been a double agent, revealing Russian secrets to Britain.

Traces of Novichok were later found in the hotel room in London used by the Russians. And they were later fairly reliably identified as being longstanding members of Russian military intelligence.

The Skripals both recovered from the poisoning, though they were dangerously ill for a time.

Now none of this meets the high standard of a criminal trial, which is proof beyond reasonable doubt (a great criterion, although it hasn’t always stopped innocent defendants being convicted). But Russia’s never going to admit to involvement in the case, or release the agents involved for interrogation and trial in Britain, so we’re not going to get the evidence for that kind of rigorous test.

But on the weaker test of balance of probabilities, it does feel to me as though someone in the Russian state ran a conspiracy to wipe out a man Russia views as a traitor.

Now this story is a wonderful illustration of what a real conspiracy looks like.

First of all, you find out about them. And not just in the form of loose, vague allegations, but with real and convincing, even if only partial, evidence.

But the second characteristic is even more striking. It’s incompetence. The Russian agents failed in their mission. Indeed, when two uninvolved British citizens found and handled the flask that had contained the Novichok, they both fell sick, and one of them died.

In other words, the agents missed their target but hit two people with whom they had no quarrel.

That’s the way most conspiracies go. Inept people within it deliberately or unintentionally let the secret out. And they generally don’t do very well.

That’s one of the things that strikes me most about conspiracy theorists. They massively overstate the intelligence of conspirators. They regard the plots as sinister because they think the plotters ingenious, when in reality they’re like the Skripal agents.

Well, all I can say to conspiracy theorists is, every time you think a brilliant conspiracy is being directed against you, remember the Skripal case. The Russian state’s pretty sophisticated. And look what a pig’s ear it made of that one.

Then think of Watergate. Or the Weapons of Mass Destruction myth for Iraq. Conspirators aren’t as smart as you imagine they are.

The steel magnate Andrew Carnegie once said that the man who dies rich, dies disgraced. And gave away his money.

If Bill Gates is following that example, wouldn’t it be nice if we could just congratulate him, rather than spin a web of unfounded and deeply implausible conspiracy allegations around him?