The territorial imperative in practice

It’s curious the impact neighbours can have on your life.

Right now, I’m thinking of the neighbours at the front of our house, a pair of house martins, and one from next door, a Siamese cat.

The house martins I mentioned once before, when they turned up a few weeks ago and moved into the nest over our front door. It’s unlikely to be the same pair who were there last year, though one of the two of them may well have hatched there then. Since one of the things they’ve done is drive away a pair of larger house martins who clearly had their eye on the same nest, I can’t help suspecting that this is an ungrateful son or daughter taking over the parents’ place and kicking them out.

Kids, right? Think they’re owed a living.

My suspicions are reinforced by the fact that the female of the pair isn’t just smaller than the male, as they tend to be, but far smaller. Clearly a very young lady. Perhaps just a bit too sure of herself, a bit too convinced of her right to call the shots around the place.

We had a neighbour like that once. That was when we were living in Luton. She used to have parties that went on from about 10:00 at night until about noon the next day. We assumed that they were cocaine-fuelled, if only because I couldn’t imagine anyone being able to keep going that loudly for that long without some artificial stimulant to give them the energy.

The noise they made tended to follow a cyclical pattern. There’d be some silence when we’d think that we might perhaps be allowed to sleep. Then the voices would start up again, growing louder and louder as the revellers fell out with each other, until they were shouting abuse. That would sometimes culminate in the noise of breaking crockery, weeping, or loud lovemaking – well, sex, anyway - before returning to silence. Then rinse and repeat.

This was several years into the austerity programme of the Tory government, so the resource-starved police couldn’t do anything about the noise. One policewoman I was talking to did actually say, “Good God! I can hear her down the phone line!” That was through the intervening wall. 

The policewoman was sympathetic but couldn’t help.

I’m glad to say that the young lady who has moved in over our front door is far more attractive and far more well behaved than that neighbour from hell. But pretty or not, she and her partner are just as good at making their presence felt. Not, I’m glad to say, at night. During the day, though, if we have the gall to step outside, or merely open the front door, they like to share their views on the matter with us.

The house martin making her displeasure known to us
Small in size but highly communicative

Now, I had a limited education, and was never taught house martin. So when they go and perch on the phone line that crosses our yard and chatter away to each other, to any other passing house martins, and above all at us, I really can’t make out what precisely they’re saying. But I have no trouble with the gist. It’s “who the heck do you think you are, wandering around this place as though you own it?” I’m cleaning up the language here a bit, but I think they add a request roughly translatable as “go away” though I suspect expressed somewhat more forcibly. And who can blame them?

It’s clear that they regard the place as theirs and our irruption into it as a gross and unwarranted invasion of territory, bitterly to be deplored. And they tell us so. Loudly and at length.

Another creature that makes that kind of point indisputably clear is our assault poodle Toffee. She now weighs in at not a terribly long way off 4 kilos, making her a no doubt daunting presence to any passing creature the size of a squirrel or smaller. But like Queen Elizabeth I, she has the heart and stomach of a King, and she thinks foul scorn that anyone should dare to invade the borders of her realm.

That was made clear to me when I saw her, flat on the ground at the bottom of our garden, barking into the hedge while her tail flailed from side to side so fast that I swear, had we been able to attach a generator to it, we could have driven a dishwasher off it.

Toffee making her displeasure known to the Siamese
Small in size but not in heart

The object of her anger? The Siamese cat from next door.

The previous occupants of our house had no animals, so the Siamese clearly got used to wandering in and out of the garden as the whim took him. Toffee, though, has no intention of allowing such liberties. So there she was, barking her heart out to defend our territory. Sorry, correct that: her territory.

It really is an imperative, isn’t it? The protection of territory. Humans have that instinct too. It inflames anti-immigrant rhetoric: we don’t want him here, he’s foreign. Or, indeed, racist thinking: we don’t want him here, he’s different. Or the American or British hostility towards international institutions: we don’t want to be with them, we’re different.

Natural, I suppose. Though also a bit sad.

After all, aren’t we supposed to have bigger brains and more powerful intellects than house martins or poodles?

'Official Secrets' and getting the perspective right on Blair

“I think we were lied into an illegal war,” says Katharine Gun, excellently played by Keira Knightley in a film well worth watching, Official Secrets.

Back in 2003, Gun was working at Britain’s communications spying centre, GCHQ, when she was included in the distribution of an email from the States, asking for blackmail material against a number of UN Security Council delegates, to push them into backing a resolution authorising war on Iraq.

Keira Knightley as Katharine Gun about to take a life-altering step
Sadly, it didn’t stop the war

Gun, appalled that the resources of GCHQ were being used merely to provide cover for the UK and US governments, leaked the email. To keep the spoiler small, let me just say that the film includes a particularly telling exchange about her role.

“You work for the British government,” she’s told.

“No, not really,” she replies.

“No?”

“Governments change,” she explains. “I work for the British people. I gather intelligence so that the government can protect the British people. I do not gather intelligence so that the government can lie to the British people.”

The film was an excellent way of spending a lockdown hour or two. It also brought back memories. Not particularly cheerful memories, accompanied as they were by a sense of disappointment and even betrayal.

Huge demos against the invasion, in London and around the world
Also couldn’t stop the war

Huge numbers, up to a million, had demonstrated in London against the war. Dubya Bush, US President, and Tony Blair, UK Prime Minister, had flopped from one unconvincing source of authority for war to another. They claimed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but weapons inspectors on the ground had found none. Blair went for a United Nations resolution because British legal opinion said he needed one. When he couldn’t get that authorisation, he asked his Attorney General to provide a different opinion, which he duly did.

Dubya had clearly decided to go to war in Iraq however weak the justification, and Tony Blair had decided to go along with him, with or without authority.

They went in, toppled a deeply unsavoury dictator, but at huge cost: as well as six-figure casualties in the fighting, the war spurred the emergence of ISIS, leading in time to its blood-chilling dictatorship and many more years of war to break it.

No Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were ever found. And, when the legal advice offered to the government was finally published, it confirmed all our suspicions: the Attorney General had warned that invasion would be illegal and potentially lay Ministers open to prosecution as war criminals, unless a covering resolution was obtained from the UN. He only changed that view when it became clear the resolution had failed.

Nothing people could say or do would change anything. Not the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. Not Katharine Gun laying her job and liberty on the line. Not even the law would restrict its behaviour: it was going to war even if the action was illegal.

It was all deeply depressing.

That’s why I find it ironic now to be labelled a ‘Blairite’, as I have been by many on the far Left of the Labour Party. Far from an enthusiast for Blair, I felt betrayed by his behaviour over Iraq. And there were other issues on which I felt his government behaved reprehensibly. The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) has left public sector bodies, in particular hospitals, still struggling today. Blair even repudiated one of his best initiatives, the Freedom of Information Act, when he realised it could be used to force him to reveal information he would rather hide.

No, I was never a Blairite. And today, the committed supporters of Blair are few indeed. But the difference, in assessing Blair, between those of us who refuse the label ‘Blairite’ but don’t belong to the hard Left, is that we’re not prepared to write off his governments’ achievements as though they never happened.

Among others, they include the major assault on child poverty. The minimum wage. The Human Rights Act. Devolution of powers to the nations of the UK. Freedom of Information. The Good Friday Agreement. Huge investment in the health service.

The latter is particularly topical, given that the health service is today struggling so pitifully to cope with Coronavirus. Had the investment started by Blair continued, instead of being reversed in the name of austerity, how much better-placed would the NHS have been to cope with the present pandemic?

Lives have been lost due to austerity. Thousands of lives. That’s worth bearing in mind when we assess the Blair legacy.

Without being a Blairite, I’m in no doubt that the governments he led were infinitely to be preferred to the one we have now. And, in arguing for a return to a Labour government, that’s something we need to proclaim loudly. Things would have been better without the last ten years of Tory government.

What’s more, he achieved far more than those who followed him as leader, and who lost power to the Tories or failed to win it back. He achieved far more than Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband or Jeremy Corbyn. Whether their policies were good or bad, they were unable to enact any of them.

You can only do any good at all if you get into power. Which Blair powerfully demonstrated. And you don’t have to be a Blairite to understand that. 

I reject that label. But I also refuse to belittle the good he did among the harm.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re looking for a good way to spend a lockdown evening, you could do a lot worse than watch Official Secrets.

A touch of Arab genius to perfect a multicultural experience

It’s not especially fashionable any more, but I’m an old-fashioned sort of guy, so I still feel attached to the idea of multiculturalism.

Carlos Bonell binding his spell
With an Alhambra guitar and RC strings. And an Arab wall behind him

The other day, Danielle and I travelled into Valencia, the Spanish city on whose outskirts we now live, for a guitar concert in one of University’s buildings. The city offers these, and many other cultural activities, free to anyone who cares to show up. Plenty do: the room was packed. Coming from austerity England, where fundamental necessities – such as a police service, refuse collection or adequate healthcare – are increasingly rare, it’s refreshing to be somewhere that still values culture enough to offer it free to citizens.

That’s especially striking since the national income per head in Spain is a third lower than in Britain.

Nor, I should say before anyone decides I’m making a partisan point, was the funding entirely public: two companies, one making guitars and the other the strings, had subsidised the concert. Long may Spain maintain that kind of collaboration between sectors of the economy; let’s hope that Britain can, some day, find it again.

What made the concert particularly satisfying for an unreformed multiculturalist like me, was that it was given by an outstanding guitarist, Carlos Bonell, of Spanish parentage but born and trained in England, where he still lives. Among other more highbrow pieces by contemporary or nearly contemporary composers, he also played his own arrangements of two Beatles songs. He explained that a guitarist brought up in England has that music ingrained in him, though he also played some classic Spanish music to restore the balance.

What’s more, the concert took place in a room where one of the walls was built by the Arabs, at the time of the Moorish occupation. The room is in a basement now, but the wall was clearly at ground level during Moors’ rule: that’s what happens with old cities, they get built on top of themselves, as new houses are built over the wreckage of old ones.

One of the reasons that the organisers selected that room for the concert was that the acoustics are particularly good. And they are. You could hear every note, follow every melody, with perfect clarity, and without any echoing or reverberation. It was an ideal setting for such a concert.

English, Spanish, Arab, all combining to give a glorious cultural experience. It’s hard to imagine what could be better.

Though it does leave one question that still puzzles me: how did those Arabs, a millennium ago, work out that building that wall, in that place, with those materials, lend itself to such a superb musical experience a thousand years later?

Arab wall built of just the right stuff, in just the right place,
for superb acoustics

Corbyn, or socialism in words

First, a short cautionary tale for our times.

The top man in an organisation appoints a friend as a senior executive. She proves a most loyal supporter, if far less kind to the other employees, fiercely driving them to accept her rigid discipline, and rewarding them far less than they probably deserve, and certainly need. He awards her a 15% salary increase, putting her on nearly four times the median household salary in Britain, while she limits everyone else to 2.2%.

That’s not just less than a sixth of what she got, it’s less than the rate of inflation (measured by the way retail prices are going), so it’s effectively a pay cut.

It’s the story of Britain over the near-decade of austerity: real wages fell year after year until 2016, since when they have flatlined. Meanwhile, the number of millionaires is rising, and the total fortune they hold keeps going up. Those least able to absorb the pain of austerity are paying the price, while a self-serving elite makes sure it’s well protected from its worst effects.

Real value of wages over the near decade of austerity
from Full Fact

That’s Tory Britain for you.

That’s what Labour exists to combat, and never so energetically than when the Left is in charge. So with Corbyn as leader, we would expect the fight to be waged all the more intensely.

Except that the cautionary tale I started with wasn’t about the Tories. That was the Labour Party. The top man is Jeremy Corbyn. The tough operator he appointed and then rewarded with a 15% increase is his chief of staff, Karie Murphy. Speaking to the Guardian on condition of anonymity, one staff member said of her:

It’s got to the stage where people are afraid to speak up as individuals, because when you do you get sent to Siberia. When an individual has that much power in an organisation, it’s a concern.

Guardian photo of Corbyn with his Chief of Staff, Karie Murphy
Apparently a dangerous woman to challenge

All the worst aspects of a bullying, top-down, private-sector organisation, in fact.

Now when I first posted on this subject, a Corbyn supporter replied to me to point out that decisions on pay weren’t in the leader’s gift. My first response is that this is a standard Corbynist copout: anything good that happens is all down to the revered leader; anything bad is somebody else’s fault.

My second response is that Corbyn is constantly promising a fairer, more equitable, ultimately more socialist distribution of the resources of society. That’s going to take a huge effort from a Labour government (assuming Corbyn can get into government at all, which is by no means a foregone conclusion): convincing parliament to pass the necessary legislation; working with a lot of public and private-sector organisations to ensure not just the letter but the spirit of the measure is applied; convincing many reluctant if not frankly hostile groups to accept the principle on which it’s based.

If Corbyn can’t even get them accepted within his own organisation, the Labour Party, what possible hope is there of his achieving anything in society in general?

But there is another and far more worrying implication of this story.

Does Corbyn really mean what he says? There is a conviction on the far Left, as on the far Right, that anything they say must be correct simply because they say it. Corbyn claims he is a socialist, so what he says, and what he does, is socialism. Consequently he can apply a deeply iniquitous and thoroughly right-wing wages policy, and it’s socialist because it is he who is behind it.

Might that not be exactly what he does if he ever gets into Number 10? Let himself be convinced that a wrong-headed approach to wages must be the Labour way, because he incarnates Labour values? His track record rather suggests that this is just what he’s doing inside the Labour Party, after all.

Or, to put it in simpler terms, if he can’t even implement socialist values within his own party, why should anyone trust him be a socialist for the nation?

Season's greetings. From somewhere else

Merry Christmas to you all! Christians, non-believers, believers of any faith or none – enjoy the Christmas break!

This is the time of year when I remember the wonderful experience my wife and I had in the predominantly ‘Indian’ part of Luton, the town where we live: one 24 December, we saw a queue that seemed to be made up of both Muslims and Hindus outside a (halal) butcher and Danielle, who talks to anyone, asked what the they were waiting for.

“Turkeys,” they replied, “naturally. People all around us are celebrating. Why wouldn’t you expect us to celebrate too?”

That’s the spirit in which I wish you a merry Christmas.

We’ve certainly been having a great time. For the first time, as far as I can remember – and I’ve had 64 Christmases – we went somewhere we could enjoy it on a beach. And that’s precisely what we did today, wandering along a glorious strip of golden sand as the Atlantic beat the shore next to us – and our feet: we didn’t swim but we certainly walked through the surf. What’s more, on the way back we were treated to sunset too, a most satisfactory way to wrap up Christmas Day.

A fine way to end Christmas Day

This was on Cofete Beach, on Fuerteventura in the Canaries. The name itself was part of the pleasure: it reminded us of one least harmful of Donald Trump's blunders, his tweet which read precisely “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.” 

Alternatively, it sounds like a waiter offering a choice of hot drinks: “Coffee? Tea?”

Either way, the name's fun and the place is better.

Now I know that my friends from the Antipodes – or friends who spent time down there – have all had the experience of Christmas on a beach. But to us it was new and delightful.

We had the meal, as befits a Catholic country, yesterday: the tendency is to celebrate Christmas Eve rather than the day itself. We didn’t have turkey but that wasn’t as new to us as the setting: we haven’t had that particularly dull meat for a great many years. Instead, we drove to restaurant (selected from Trip Advisor, of course) in the heart of Fuerteventura's main nature reserve.

There, surrounded by desert scrubland, bathed in sunlight and warmth, we had a leisurely meal of local specialties, cooked in olive oil and flavoured delicately with herbs. I hate to sound so unpatriotic, but we really didn’t miss the turkey at all.

Substitute for turkey. And much to be preferred

But it isn’t just the sun, the sea and the flavours that make me pleased to be here. I’m also glad to get away from the depressing atmosphere of Brexit Britain for a few days. In particular, and I feel embarrassed to use such a clichéd, indeed Dickensian, term in connection with Christmas, but it’s wonderful to be away from the humbug of its being a Christian festival in a Christian country.

Britain is far from a Christian country in religious practice, with barely one in twenty of the population regularly attending a church service. Nor, and this is far more important, is it a Christian country in its values: just in the last week we’ve read of a young man dying of cold in a Birmingham street and the children of the poor having a far higher likelihood of being hospitalised for conditions which shouldn’t require hospitalisation at all, such as asthma.

Children of the poor. Those who we should be protecting above all others. Children!

Most recently, there’s been the news that landlords are beginning to evict people on benefits, as a result of the introduction of the new system of Universal credit, which is leading to many failing to keep up their rent payments. Homelessness will rise. As though there weren’t far more than enough already.

Until we address those issues, until in fact we wean ourselves from belief in austerity, I don’t see how Britain can claim to uphold anything resembling Christian values. Christmas is just an excuse for binge drinking, binge eating and binge spending. Its Christian content has long since been lost and a secular celebration seemed more appropriate, or at least more honest.

So it’s good to be away from that pretence without foundation. Though sun, lovely beaches and delicious food help too. We’ve enjoyed our Christmas.

And it’s in that spirit too that I wish you as much fun this season as we’ve been enjoying.

Austerity buried? And the NHS too?

Britain has a new budget.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, for whom the word ‘beleaguered’ might have been specifically invented, has announced the government’s plans for spending and tax over the next year. And though it does little enough, what it does do is more noteworthy than one might have expected.

Hammond with the traditional red box for the budget

He has admitted at last that the prospects for economic growth are a lot worse than the government had previously claimed. What’s more, debt is at twice the level the Tories inherited when they first came to office in 2010, and which at the time they described as intolerably high. 

Indeed, their primary goal was to reduce the debt level massively. To achieve it, they launched a painful programme of austerity, to get government spending in balance within one parliament (five years), later extended to two parliaments, and now to some time in the next decade. Meanwhile, debt climbed inexorably.

This track record ought to be enough to prove to any but the most ideologically blinkered that austerity isn’t working. But the dogmatism of the Tories has prevented them ever accepting as much previously. So it’s interesting to discover that in this budget they have at last made the admission, if only tacitly: the Chancellor has announced plans for actual spending, most notably on housing, as a way of addressing the parlous state of the economy.

Sadly, however, he is doing a lot too little, particularly after the damage of the last seven years. For example, faced with a warning from the Simon Stevens, Chief Executive of the National Health Service in England, that healthcare needs another £4bn a year as a minimum, he has come up with £2.8bn over the next two and a half years. That’s going to mean that the service must still make choices that will be tough to the point of grief: certain treatments will simply not be available or will be denied so long as to lead to suffering or even death among patients.

What makes this even more depressing is that Hammond has also earmarked a further £3bn for Brexit preparations. In other words, we have to stump up more money that is being denied to healthcare, to cover the costs of a step – leaving the European Union – which will itself cause us even worse and longer-lasting economic damage. Not just shooting ourselves in the foot, but paying for the privilege.

There’s a special irony in the fact that we’re having to come up with this money for Brexit at a time that the NHS needs it so badly. A major element of the Leave campaign was the notorious claim that Brexit would free up £350m a week for the NHS. £18bn a year which would certainly sort the underfunding of the service.

Curious that in reality Brexit is costing us money, while the NHS crisis deepens.

Austerity in the GP surgery

Curious.

We – my wife and I together – joined our current GP practice because the service was simply so much better than any other we’d known.

The practice is associated with a walk-in centre, which itself provided great support for patients: anyone needing care immediately but not urgently – in other words, patients who were sick or in pain but not obviously suffering from anything potentially life-threatening – could attend the centre and be seen, seven days a week, from early morning into the evening.

A generous service. But not one it pays to cut

That’s a relatively expensive service to provide. There is at large today, throughout the Western world, a view that such expense should be cut back wherever possible. I wrote the other day that it’s often in the little things that we see austerity economics at work, and our GP practice is no exception.

Today, Saturday, I tried to renew a prescription on-line. That didn’t work. I could log in to the system but the buttons thoughtfully provided to select a medication to renew simply didn’t react if I clicked on them (and, before I’m challenged as a computer illiterate, let me assure you that I tried on two machines, using tree different browsers between them).

I then phoned the surgery but was told that, while the walk-in centre was open, the surgery itself was not. Could I ring in again on Monday?

“Yes,” my wife told me, “we’ve had a couple of letters. Funding’s been reduced so that they can’t stay open at weekends any longer.”

Once more, I felt the glacial fingers of austerity gripping my innards.

If the GP practice is facing cutbacks, the walk-in centre won’t be far behind.

While the service it provides seems generous, it’s only those with the narrowest of account-book outlooks, entirely focused on the short term – in other words, Conservatives – who can persuade themselves that such a cutback makes sense. It’s true that shutting down a walk-in centre would save a lot more money than shutting any other kind of practice but, unfortunately, the patients who use it won’t go away. They still feel ill or in pain, so if they can’t find care from a GP, they’ll go to the emergency department of the local hospital instead.

An emergency department is far more expensively equipped than any GP surgery. I’m not just talking about physical equipment, much of which is indeed costly: for instance, devices to provide a view of what’s happening inside a human body, whether by ultrasound, radiology, or some of the more powerful and sophisticated techniques now available such as CT or MRI scanning. However, even that fades into insignificance compared to cost of staff: medical and nursing staff on a wide hierarchical range, professional support such as pharmacists and various types of therapists, and even administrative staff.

The result is that while it may cost £50 to see a GP, it can cost £124 on average to attend an emergency department.

Cutting back on GP care is, therefore, a false economy.

There’s nothing unusual in that consequence of Conservative healthcare policy. All over England, hospitals are spending a fortune on agency or bank staff (“bank” is in effect overtime: existing staff doing additional hours on a far more expensive, hourly-paid basis). Why are they spending so much? Because they’re being denied the funds to take on more permanent staff, though that would be cheaper.

Of course, the false economy of shutting the walk-in centre would turn into a real one, if the patients denied treatment were unable to attend an emergency department instead. But for that to happen, our local hospital would have to close, or be replaced by a private one which only treated patients who could pay the full, economic cost of the care it provided.

I suspect a lot of people at the top of the Conservative Party would be perfectly easy about that happening.

However, I wonder if all their voters, further down the income range, would agree with them…

Reminders of the shame of austerity Britain

Often, it’s the little things that mark you…

There is, near where we live in Luton, a rather attractive open space known as Stopsley Common. In the middle are wide open spaces, including three cricket fields and a dozen or more football pitches, as well as areas simply left open for walking. Around the edge are hills and wooded areas crossed by well-maintained paths.

Luci and Toffee enjoying Stopsley Common

It’s a place frequented by cricketers, footballers, dog walkers, joggers or just people out for a quiet stroll. It is an invaluable resource to be enjoyed by all, a reminder that community matters too, and not just the capacity of small numbers of individuals to makes themselves rich.

Sadly, however, it’s also an area much favoured by joy-riding bikers, the kind that like to race their motorbikes or quads, without registration plates, across the grass, churning it up and endangering lives including their own – the obligation to wear helmets is one of many they ignore.

Many of these people seem to be what one might call sedentary travellers. In other words, they belong to that community of people we think of as travellers, in the sense that they wander around the country in caravans (often, it has to be said, drawn by large BMWs or Mercedes) and only stop for short periods in any one place.

However, a group seems to have set up permanent home in Stopsley. Occasionally, they alert their more peripatetic brethren of the fact that a gate has been left open, or blocks of cement designed to prevent access to certain places, are more mobile than their designers imagined, and we discover a few days later that a favourite place has been invaded once more.

I use the word “invaded” advisedly. When these travellers move into a place, they don’t simply inhabit it for a few days before moving on, which I would strongly favour tolerating. Although they use highly sophisticated caravans, they seem not to like the toilets most of them contain, or perhaps they don’t like dealing with the waste. So they tend to use the area around where they park as an open toilet, making it generally less attractive as a place to wander in.

At least that involves substances which are biodegradable. Far more unpleasant still is one of the ways they have chosen to earn a living. They contract with unscrupulous builders to collect waste from construction sites, which they then dump, at no doubt highly competitive prices, anywhere they choose – including those same places, that others value for their beauty and their amenities. Our Council is starved of cash, so it can take many weeks before these materials are cleared away.

No way through
Dumped construction site waste blocking a path on Stopsley Common

”But,” you will no doubt exclaim, “such behaviour is surely illegal!” And it is. But the law can only be enforced if there are people to enforce it. I’ve already said that the Council is strapped for cash; so is our police force. It has the resources to chase major crime, to track down murder or terrorism. But what merely lessens quality of life or inconveniences the public, is beyond their resources. So no action is taken over the dangerous quad bikes or the dumping of rubble in a public park.

In 2010, David Cameron assured the British electorate that “… we have a moral obligation to stop running up bills that will have to be paid by future generations.”

He won the election that year and he and his successor, Theresa May, have had the opportunity to honour that moral obligation. The result? National debt has grown from a trillion pounds to approaching two trillion.

What has been the result of their austerity programme? Nurses are 14% worse off than they would otherwise have been. It seems that the poorest people in society are to lose on average a further £50 a week of income by 2020 or around £2500 a year. To put that in context, median income in Britain is around £25,000 a year. By definition, half the population is below that level; the forthcoming cuts will disproportionately hit such people.

Belatedly, the government has realised that its approach is failing. It has decided to start moving away from its pay cap for public servants. As usual, however, it is doing so in too mean a way – police are to have an increase of 2% instead of 1%, in other words a rise that is  paltry as opposed to derisory – and as divisively as possible: most public sector workers, including nurses, will have to suffer at least another year of the 1% limit.

Austerity has caused pain, but there has been no gain on the debt front. On the contrary, things have got worse. And life has been impoverished in myriad ways.

For me, it’s the spoiling of Stopsley Common. That is a fitting tribute to seven and a half years of Conservative austerity rule. But I don’t deny it’s only the monument: the real thing is the terrible suffering being inflicted on people already poor enough.Still, at least the state of many part of Stopsley Common reminds me of the sheer ghastliness of Tory rule each time I take the dogs out there.

Reminders are what the British electorate apparently most needs.

Austerity: is it really a Tory blind spot?

A joke frequently told against Gordon Brown, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour governments led by Tony Blair, that he was having an extramarital affair. The object of his affections was a mystery woman known as Prudence. He simply couldn’t stop himself mentioning her whenever he spoke, so that the catchword for everything he did in dealing with the country’s finances was that it was down, he claimed, to Prudence.

“Mock on, mock on”, he might be saying today. And “what side of your face are you laughing out of now?”

After David Cameron brought the Conservatives to power, Prudence was unceremoniously dumped for a much less attractive siren known as Austerity. Far from seducing the Chancellor alone, Austerity seems to have bedded most of the senior figures of the Tory Party. Which isn’t to say they weren’t warned. Anyone at all familiar with the ideas of Maynard Keynes pointed out that there was a paradox at the core of the notion Austerity: when a government puts the brakes on spending the result isn’t necessarily a saving, but often the exact contrary. Reduced spending leads to reduced economic activity, and therefore reduced taxation, and far from emerging from indebtedness, the government merely sinks further into debt.

UK Debt as % of GDP: steadily growing under austerity
Source: BBC

Seven years on, it’s clear that this is exactly what has happened. Back in 2010, Cameron made a great deal of the supposedly unbearable cost of debt Labour had amassed, a toxic burden being passed on to the future generations. It was approaching the trillion-pound level at that time. Seven years on, it is now projected to reach £1.8 trillion by next March, but curiously the Tories have stopped talking about it.

Despite years of austerity, with constant cuts to essential public services, even the government’s deficit – the amount by which spending exceeds income – is rising again. In June, it was nearly 50% higher than it was in the same month last year. Keynes’s paradox of thrift is being verified with a vengeance: thrift cuts revenue and not just cost, so it can make things worse rather than better.

Anyone reading this piece might feel there’s nothing new in my making this claim. I’ve said it all before, haven’t I? So why am I saying it again now?

Because now we learn that the Tories are not only persisting with their austerity policies in the face of evidence that they aren’t working, but even in the face of evidence that they’re costing them votes. 

Now that’s truly odd. Because if the Tories are anything, they’re an election-winning machine, hypersensitive to any chance to win a vote, or any risk of losing one. It’s quite extraordinary that they’re sticking – for now – to a policy they know might lose them power.

Which leads to a further question. If it isn’t working financially; if it’s costing them votes politically; then why on earth are the Tories continuing to pursue austerity?

Could it really be that they are, ultimately, entirely heartless? Do they truly believe that the poor need to be punished for the offence of being, simply, poor? And the best way of punishing them is to impoverish them further?

I find it hard to believe that any but a few of the Tory leaders are quite that ruthless. Sadly, though, that leaves only one explanation: that they simply can’t see what they’re doing. Which suggests that the Parliamentary Conservative Party has simply lost all contact with reality.

Surely we wouldn’t want to suggest that Tories might be that benighted, would we?

The poor get poorer. But a Jewish story lightens the tone

In one of its more insightful headlines, the Guardian proclaimed this morning:

Low income families ‘less able to achieve decent living standard’

Classic headline

That struck me as being roughly on a par with “poverty found to leave you poor”. No wonder the headline had changed in the on-line edition by this evening...

Still, behind the headline there was a serious story. Each year, in Britain, the the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a charity concerned with poverty, commissions a study from the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University. It establishes what various types of family need in income to maintain what is generally perceived as being a minimum decent living standard.

It seems that despite increases in the minimum wage, the assault on state benefits, including those paid to the working poor, have meant that the gap between low incomes and the sum required for a minimum living standard has widened still further this year.

None of this is terribly surprising. The independent think tank, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has estimated that British workers’ incomes will be no higher (in real terms) in 2022 than in 2007. We’ve had seven years of austerity politics from the Tories and the price is being paid by the poor, and it’s a real price even though it’s failed to generate any real benefit – far from achieving the aim of cutting debt, the level has doubled under the Tories.

By contrast, bosses of the major UK companies saw their earnings rise by 10% in 2015 alone. That put them on average incomes of £5.5m, which allows them to keep bankrolling the Tory Party, In turn, that helps focus minds in Tory governments on favouring the incomes of the wealthy over those of the poor.

Still, I didn’t start this post planning to make depressing points, and I seem on the brink of making some. So let me cheer you up with one of my favourite Jewish jokes.

In a sad accident, a Jew is knocked down by a car in a North London street.

A man rushes out of a nearby house and puts a pillow under the head of the injured Jew lying in the street.

“Are you comfortable?” he asks.

The Jew raises a hand and tips it from side to side in the classic gesture.

“Comfortable, I wouldn’t say,” he replies, “but I get by.”

Well, it feels to me as though the British poor have been knocked down. It certainly hasn’t left them comfortable. Though it’s far from sure they’re even getting by.

Oaks rather than mere iron

It’s always fun, or at least more often fun than it is instructive, to work your way through those self-help books that teach you all the wisdom you need to succeed in business, society or indeed life generally.

They tend to pick anecdotes carefully to illustrate their points. That makes me think of a vital principle from that unquestionably valuable book, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking fast and slow, “what you see is all there is”. We chuckle over one anecdote that seems to make an author’s point and conclude that it’s representative, rather than exceptional, and therefore proves a law. Often that’s a wild presumption.

Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle is the Way is the latest of these texts that I’m working through, and it’s certainly proving fun. That doesn’t mean I’m convinced: he argues, for example, that we need to focus on the thing in front of us, the task to be undertaken immediately, and not be distracted by visions of the remote goal. I’m convinced that it wouldn’t take long to find a book arguing, with equal conviction, for the opposition point of view, backing some variant of “not seeing the wood for the trees” to argue that without a vision of the whole, the work on any detail is likely to be misguided.

One of Holiday’s better anecdotes concerns Sam Zemurray. In the early years of the twentieth century, he was involved in a struggle with one of America’s leading corporations, United Fruit, for ownership of 5000 acres of land in Guatemala, ideally suited to the growing of bananas. The problem was that two individuals were in dispute for ownership of the land, so who could sell it?

United Fruit shipped in high-powered lawyers and set to work examining all the documents so they could establish, beyond all doubt, who had title to the land. This was an array of resources their competitor couldn’t match. That was a game they were bound to win.

Zemurray simply called in both putative owners and bought the land off both of them. So he paid twice. But he had the land. 

He beat them by playing a different game.

What Holiday doesn’t mention is that Zemurray later engineered a coup in Guatemala and eventually won control of United Fruit himself. A role model? I think perhaps not.

Still, he showed great ingenuity in winning that first battle. Ingenuity and above all, flexibility. That’s the notion I want to focus on.

Another book I’m not so much reading as listening to – one of the beauties of dog walking – is a biography of George Thomas. He was, in my view, probably the best of the US Civil War generals, and perhaps even one of the best generals of any war, anywhere in the last couple of centuries. He never lost a battle, he won the Union’s most comprehensive victory, and he never wasted his men’s lives in hopeless, glorious, criminal charges.

One of the generals who served with him, and later became President of the United States, James A. Garfield, said of him that he was “not a man of iron but of living oak”. That description struck me as highly attractive. Unlike iron, living oakwood is strong and yet adaptable, in that it will bend with the wind to avoid breaking, though it can also withstand a great deal. Above all, it is, as Garfield’s words especially underline, alive with all that implies of warmth and openness to other living beings.

That in turn got me thinking of a more recent time when “iron” was used as an epithet for character. The “Iron Lady” was Maggie Thatcher. She was truly iron in just the way that Thomas was not. Inflexible, sure she was right, she purused the objectives her ideology dictated to her inexorably and without compassion.

Her baleful shadow hangs over us still . Britain has been pursuing Thatcher-style austerity for seven years, with the stated aim of reducing debt – which has doubled. It still regards “regulation” a dirty word – and the terrible fire that killed at least 80 in Grenfell Tower has shown where that leads.

The difference now is that signs are beginning to emerge of a tiredness with this dogmatism. Far more people voted against the Tories in the recent general election than many of us expected. The most recent social attitudes survey shows opinion beginning to harden against austerity . And the decision to prosecute people, 30 years on, for the deaths of 96 people at the Hillsborough football stadium disaster interestingly includes charges that health and safety concerns were ignored, as at Grenfell Tower. Generally, the terms “health and safety” tend to be followed by the words “gone mad”, to make the notion a favourite butt of the anti-regulation crowd.

Well, maybe just as people are realising that austerity can be bad for your health, they’re also waking up to the fact that health and safety are to be cherished rather than despised.

Could this be the dawning of a time for people of living oak rather than iron ladies?

Those who emulate the ingenuity and flexibility of Zemurray, rather than Thatcher’s obstinacy?

Although perhaps we needn’t going quite so far i following him as to back coups in vulnerable foreign nations...

The lesson of dutifully paying my duty

What a tiresome experience it was!

Phoning a number and being told I needed to speak to someone else. Being kept on hold while trivial music played, only be told after a twenty-minute wait that I was being transferred to another department. Giving a credit card number only to have to repeat it and then being told the card had been declined, though it worked the time before and the next time too. The whole tedious business of trying to settle a bill – or rather three bills – over a telephone: never easy, certainly never pleasant, but in this case, urgently necessary.

Why was the need so great?

My work involves presentations to staff in NHS hospitals. After seven years of austerity policies of Britain’s enlightened government, many of them are close to bankruptcy. It’s good to be able to distribute a few gifts, from time to time, when we turn up: pens, say, or post-it notes, now officially banned for purchase anywhere in the NHS though still much in demand.

We get these things sent to us by our colleagues in the US. Before a series of meetings back in March, we asked them to send out a few batches to several hospitals we were about to visit, which they duly did.

Our visits and presentations went well and the gifts were gratefully received. At first. But then, a small number – for some strange reason not all – received bills from the carrier company. Duty was payable on these (free) gifts and it was up to the recipient to pay it.

A bureaucracy to free ourselves from
If only Britain were

They didn’t, of course. They raised the matter with us. Politely at first.

We were abject. Can you imagine? Clients of ours. To whom we’d made gifts. Which naturally means free of charge. And now they were being charged.

My colleagues set about contacting the carrier service to see what could be done. But these things grind slowly. Long before we’d got to the bottom of the problem, the hospitals had reached the next stage of the exercise: letters that not only demanded that they pay up, but warned of dire legal consequences to come if they didn’t.

One of the hospitals had even gone a stage further. It had reached the point of a letter with a big red banner across the top. “Do not ignore this matter, it will not go away”. You could almost hear the guillotine blade being wound up. As for our embarrassment, well, you can imagine. It was crushing.

There was consternation within the company on both sides of the Atlantic. Nothing we’d tried had worked. We couldn’t get the carrier company to re-bill us instead of our clients. And the wolves were closing in on them. Broke hospitals. Being chased for payment of sums only incurred because we tried to give them something.

Fortunately, they’d sent us their dunning letters. And they had phone numbers on them. Into the breach I stepped: “I’ll ring and make the payments by credit card, over the phone”. Hence the appalling, tiresome experience. The waiting on hold. The explanations of why I was paying, not the client. The card payments that generally worked, if slowly, but sometimes didn’t. The well-meant but time-consuming apologies from the other end of the line. My requests to be sure to provide me with receipts. On and on and on. And all for a sum which, taking three cases together, barely topped £90.

But all bad experiences teach lessons. 

What did I learn from this one? Well, I didn’t need to be taught that NHS organisations were being driven to the wall by a government which regards public service as an inexcusable imposition on its paymasters’ right to make huge sums of money. I knew that already.

No, what I learned was how painful it can be to try to deal with transporting goods across the Atlantic. The petty regulations, sloppily applied: after all, not all our clients were even charged duty. The dead hand of the bureaucracy involved. The impossibility of making anyone listen unless it was to meet their immediate, monetary demands.

And yet Britain is about to throw itself into hugely increased dependency on transatlantic trade as it withdraws from the European Union. And, while it will no doubt keep trading with the EU, it will be under terms that face the same kind of bureaucratic meddling that already affects trade with the States.

Brexit will bring us back control and free us from bureaucracy? Don’t make me laugh. It will allow Britain to become a major world trading power? I wonder who the people who claim that think they’re kidding. It’s going to be a tiresome pain and source of costly inefficiency?

You bet it is.

We're all in this together: the shared pain and triumph of austerity economics

“We’re all in this together,” David Cameron assured us when he first came to office.

Labour, it seems, had caused a terrible worldwide financial crisis. Just how the Blair and Brown governments had managed to inflate the sub-prime mortgage market in the US and then bring it crashing down, was never made clear. But the British Conservatives are honourable men (and a few women), so who are we to question their pronouncements?

Cameron: who are we to question his judgement?

What was bountifully clear, in any case, was that we would all of us be paying the price. Austerity economics would be applied without fear and favour. That meant belts would be tightened in every part of society so that we could pay off the colossal debt Labour had accumulated and wipe out the government’s spending deficit. 

The pain would be hard to bear but such a prize was surely worth it.

Labour’s behaviour had indeed been intolerably bad. It had amassed a debt amounting to 76.6% of GDP by 2010. Fortunately, five years of enlightened Conservative rule delivered a figure of only 89.2%. Labour’s legacy was an unforgiveable debt to be passed on to our children and grandchildren. What the Tories have achieved is, I’m assured, a huge step in the right direction.

What about the deficit? Here, Tory success has been even more spectacular. At the height of the crisis, the deficit reached £103bn. That has been pretty much wiped out, as George Osborne, Cameron’s Chancellor of the Exchequer promised to do within five years – wiped out, that is, apart the final obstinate residue of £40bn or so. Still, look how that compares with the lamentable Labour government’s figure of £20bn in 2005, before the crash.

Which, don’t forget, it caused by manipulating the US sub-prime mortgage market.

These successes don’t come without a cost, of course. There has had to be a cut in the top rate of income tax, paid by those on the highest salaries, from 50% to 45%. Funnily enough, overall tax and benefit changes have reduced household incomes by about 3.3% on average.

Tough but fair, I’m sure you’ll agree. Especially as the elderly are much more assiduous in voting Tory.

Meanwhile, public sector workers have shouldered their share of the burden. They took two years of pay freeze from 2010, and since then have lived with a cap of 1% on pay increases.

Private sector employees have played their part too. For five years, their increases averaged 1.5%. But last year, there was a great loosening of the shackles as pay soared, on average by 1.8%.

There was at least one consolation for those coping with pay restraint. At least they know that everyone is shouldering their share of the burden. For instance, top executives of the biggest companies saw their salaries rise by a mere 10% last year. It seems that these fine gentlemen (there are no ladies among them) are now paid £5.5m a year on average which is 129 times as much as their employees, or just shy of 250 times as much as median income in the UK.

Achievements like taking the deficit down to twice what it was in 2005 and public debt from 78.4% of GDP to 90.6% don’t come free. Someone has to pay.

Isn’t it comforting that the pain has been so well-shared, confirming that we are indeed “all in this together”?