Getting the public to appreciate the public good

He wished to God the dust would settle. Why didn’t someone complain? Always the same when a lot of people use one place: no one’s responsible, no one gives a hoot.

Ah, I wish I could write with le Carré’s intense succinctness. A few short sentences to conjure up an entire atmosphere. This is Peter Guillam, in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, undertaking one of the most terrifying tasks as a spy: stealing information from his own service, in the duty room of its headquarters in London.

But it’s the idea le Carré expresses that struck me. No one gives a hoot for a place that many people use: “it isn’t mine, so it isn’t my responsibility”. I suspect we’ve all come across that attitude at some time or another.

It poses a problem for Socialists. How do you get everyone to take responsibility for something none of them owns as an individual, but we all own as a collective?

The simple way around the issue is to go for nationalisation instead of public ownership. Unfortunately, they’re absolutely not the same thing. A nationalised undertaking belongs to the state, not to the people. The extent to which it serves the public interest depends on who controls the state.

As I repeatedly point out to the fans of nationalisation, it was a nationalised industry, the National Coal Board, that was responsible for the slagheap slip at Aberfan in 1966, when 144 people were killed, 116 of them children. It was that same National Coal Board that broke the back of the miners and, in effect, killed the coal industry in Britain in the 1984 strike. 

‘Nationalised’ is not synonymous with ‘at the service of the people’.

One of Luton’s most attractive places: Stopsley Common

There are, however, instances of common use, if not common ownership. The trouble is, like the duty room in the spy service building where Guillam was at work, because no one owns it, some may well abuse it.

Danielle joined volunteers cleaning Luton streets when we lived there. What’s more, one of the loveliest places nearby was Stopsley Common, its very name underlining that it’s a public asset. Sadly, though, some people felt that this tract of common land was an ideal place for dumping waste. It was repeatedly disfigured by piles of builders’ rubble. Someone had decided that, since it was cheaper to dump the waste on the Common than take it to a tip, and the land didn’t belong to them as individuals, they might just as well leave it there.

It’s an international problem, as we confirmed this weekend. Near us, here in Spain, La Vallesa woods are even more spectacularly beautiful than Stopsley, and just as much a public resource. We joined volunteers there this weekend to clear up junk. It included, once more, builders’ rubble. In some cases, the rubble was in sacks, which had been dragged quite a way from the road, as though the people who left it were prepared to make a special effort to make it more difficult to collect.

Why drag it into the woods?
By the road, it would have been easy for the Council to collect

The woods don’t belong to them. To use Le Carré’s language, they don’t give a hoot.

The encouraging factor, on the other hand, is that there are people who do give a hoot. There were several dozen people there helping to clear up. There’s not a huge amount one can do in a couple of hours, but it was nonetheless a pleasure to see so many show up.

Volunteers cleaning up the rubbish

They represent the spirit that can make common ownership viable. That’s the public at its best.

We just need to educate the waste-dumpers to see things the same way. They’re the public at its worst, least concerned with the wellbeing of all. Make no mistake about it: it’s the biggest blockage to a socialised approach to the public good, and the attitude is by no means limited to the most privileged in society. A mindset change is needed throughout society.

When we’ve surmounted that obstacle, one of the fundamental planks of socialist thinking will stop being just a pious wish and become a feasible objective. But don’t be fooled – it’s very different and far better than mere nationalisation.

Emily, whose words speak to me still

One of the benefits of retiring is that I have, over the last few weeks, renewed my acquaintance with a fascinating woman.

Actually, I think it’s more than a mere acquaintance. I like to think of it much more as a friendship.

It’s a one-sided friendship, I grant you that. Well, it could hardly be any other way. Because Emily, as I like to think of her though she’d be more properly referred to as Emilie, does not include among her stellar qualities – brilliance, drive, generosity – the rather practical one of being alive. In fact, she died well over 250 years ago.

Emily at work

As it happens, even if we had been contemporaries, I doubt my friendship would have been reciprocated. As a member of the French aristocracy, and an outstanding intellectual, she would have been unaware of my existence.

Emily may be one of my friends, but I would not have been one of hers.

None of that stopped me working on a novel based on her life. It takes the form of a confession, from her death bed, in which she reflects on all she has done or failed to do, the things that might have gone better, the things that could have been or actually were disasters. I was fascinated by the subject and got the whole thing written bar perhaps twenty pages some three or four years ago.

Other things then got in the way. Work was one, but that has finished. A different novel also held me up: this is the one where I make space available for Misty, our cat, along with Luci, our first toy poodle, and Toffee, the second and the most turbulent of the three, to express their views. These I have stolen from their diaries, and I’m proud of all three for their achievement: after all, most peoples’ pets can barely hold a pen let alone keep a diary.

The first book of their diary extracts (wittily entitled Through a cat’s eyes and dogs’ tales) is now complete and is only looking for a publisher (I say ‘only’ but that’s a far bigger undertaking, it seems to me, than writing the dratted thing in the first place). 

All three animals with Danielle
One of the illustrations by my daughter-in-law Senada

So now I’ve been able to get back to Emily. 

One of the pleasurable aspects of the book is that I’ve used her voice wherever possible. We have a lot of her correspondence, so I know what she actually said about certain events and people (not necessarily what she thought about them: as the politics of today’s world show, what people say isn’t always what they think).

She also wrote a lot, though she didn’t always publish it. For instance, she kept her Discourse on Happiness strictly to herself in her life, though we’ve published it since.

The best way of making sure of happiness, she argued, was to make it depend entirely on yourself. Study, she says, is the best way to achieve that aim. And yet:

…the passion which can give us our greatest pleasure and make us happiest, leaves our happiness entirely dependent on others: you understand that I am talking about love. This passion is perhaps the only one that can make us desire life, and make us grateful to the creator of nature, whoever he might be, for giving us our existence.

Emily had such a passion. The one great love of her life, among many other lesser ones, was for the most celebrated wit and polemicist of their time, Voltaire. But:

I don’t know however whether love has ever brought together two people made for each other to such a point that they would never feel the surfeit of pleasure, or the cooling to which ease and security lead, nor the indolence and half-heartedness which arise from familiarity and the long continuance of a relationship

That was the fate of her bond with Voltaire. Towards the end of her life, they were both indulging in affairs with others. Indeed, she fell pregnant at 42, a dangerous age at that time, as a result of an infatuation for a much younger and entirely inappropriate man. She died as result of an infection associated with childbirth.

Hence the death bed with which my novel starts. But it’s striking that gathered around it, as well as the young man who’d fathered the newborn daughter, there were her husband, always a loyal and supportive friend to her, and, whatever cooling there may have been in their relations, Voltaire, grieving his coming loss.

They remained attached to the end, then. Though Emily was clear that it was she who ensured that was so. There are loves so great, she tells us, that there’s never more than one in a century. Hers was one of those. And it persisted, returned or not, and despite any side dalliances they may have had. The soul that loves, she tells us:

… has to love so much that it loves for two, and that the heat of its heart makes up for what is in fact missing from its happiness.

Across the centuries, I’m as moved as ever by those words from an exceptional friend, however remote she may be.

BBC or Better Be Careful what you wish for

“Democracy,” wrote the American journalist and wit HL Mencken, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

There are times when some on the left seem convinced that they know what they want, and getting it good and hard might refocus their minds. Not that I’d like it to happen: we’d all suffer if they did.

What makes me say this is the internet meme I keep seeing, with a picture of Peter Falk as Columbo, making his trademark comment: “Excuse me sir… just one more thing” and then asking the (apparently) killer question, “why does the BBC never quiz the Tories about doubling the national debt to £1.9 trillion?”

Back in 2010, the Tories had promised that their austerity programme was a necessary evil to reduce the national debt. It is indeed ironic, at the very least, that after nearly a decade of the evil, the debt, far from being reduced, has doubled. So why doesn’t the BBC quiz the Tories about this sad state of affairs?

The BBC is primarily a news organisation. The doubled debt may be deplorable, but it isn’t news. It isn’t because nobody is quizzing the Tories about it. Not Labour, for instance. If Labour took up the issue in the current general election campaign, it would become newsworthy.

Why doesn’t Labour do that?

Because it would face a counter-attack demanding to know how it intends to reduce the debt. Since Labour is more concerned with some urgent spending commitments – on the NHS, Education and the Police, among many others – the last thing it wants to do is to paint itself into a corner as committed to debt-cutting.

The truth is that the national debt is not an issue in the election campaign. The NHS is. Education. The Police. Housing and homelessness. Workers’ rights. The issues, in fact, on which Labour is quizzing the Tories and on which the BBC also should.

That the BBC were planning to make life difficult for Boris Johnson on such matters is reflected in Johnson’s apparent reluctance to be interviewed by Andrew Neill. Jeremy Corbyn was badly mauled by Neill. Boris would doubtless prefer to be called gutless for ducking the same experience than run that risk. Not honourable or courageous, but wily.

If he doesn’t face the same inquisition as Corbyn did, that’s not the BBC’s fault. It’s Boris showing how deviously he plays the political game.

But back to the national debt. Let’s be clear: for instance, it would be wrong to think that the BBC doesn’t talk about it at all. It took me about three minutes to find a recent piece on the subject. It included a graph showing how the debt has climbed. It’s true that it shows £1.8tn rather than 1.9, but that seems to be down to its reasoning in terms of ‘net’ national debt. Don’t ask me what the difference is – at best I’d be guessing.

The BBC on rising national debt, in a piece from 6 November

It’s true, though, that the national debt isn’t front and centre of the BBC’s news coverage. We don’t get news bulletins telling us that “with the national debt at £1.9tn, double the level when the Tories came to power, rescue workers are still struggling to rescue survivors or recover bodies from the earthquakes in Albania”.

A TV channel that behaved in that way wouldn’t be providing news, it would be peddling propaganda. That’s the way things are in the US.

There’s nothing wrong with propaganda, as long as it doesn’t pretend to be news. This blog is propaganda, for a specific point of view (mine). If you don’t like it, that’s fine. There are plenty of others to choose from – the Skwawkbox on the left, for instance, or Guido Fawkes (or the Daily Mail) on the right. What those channels have in common is a lack of journalistic standards. We publish what we believe to be true, or in some cases would like to be true, without verification or evaluation.

If you’re more comfortable with reading material that confirms what you believe, stick to the propaganda. But I think we’d all do far better to have independent organisations publishing seriously checked material, which we can interpret as we wish. As C P Scott, the iconic editor of the Guardian put it, “Comment is free but facts are sacred”. I’d like to have my facts served up to me as accurately as possible. Then I’ll make up my mind.

The BBC doesn’t always get things right. But it does one hell of a lot better than most. For that, I’m hugely grateful.

By way of contrast, take a look at Hungary. It has just announced that it’s pulling out of the Eurovision competition. In itself, that’s hardly world-shattering. What makes the decision importance is its motivation: it’s undoubtedly because the Hungarian authorities see Eurovision as “too gay”. The Hungarian government is increasingly homophobic. There’s little doubt that’s why the nation has pulled out of the competition.

But the decision isn’t the government’s to take. It’s up to MTVA, the national TV network. The problem is, MTVA does what the government tells it to do.

See? What happens when you start demanding that your national broadcaster serves one side more than it currently is? There’s no guarantee it’ll support yours.

Knocking the BBC in Britain doesn’t necessarily serve the cause of the left. It’s far more likely to assist the hard right, which is just as critical of the organisation and far more powerful.

Be careful what you wish for. You may get it a lot harder than you wanted. And there may be nobody out there to cover your denunciations when that happens.

The Torture Chamber that wasn't

What was that strange place, we wondered, each time we passed it in our walks through the local woods?

One of the gates. With a Levantina car parked inside it

A high wall surrounded the whole plot of land. It was pierced in two places by tall wrought-iron gates, decorated with representations of fruit or leaves, and in one case, topped by an impressive coat of arms. The iron was rusty, though, and the grounds were overgrown. There was just one building inside and, despite its fearsome defences, with close-mesh bars at all the windows, and the high mast of aerials and satellite dishes at the top, it looked distinctly uninhabited.

Inside one of the gates, adorned with a sign proclaiming that the place was protected by Levantina security company, stood several cars from that company.

My first thought was that it was the estate of some minor noble of earlier times, now abandoned and left to go to rack and ruin.

“Old nobility?” scoffed Danielle. “The gates are set in simple cement-block gateposts. Whoever spent a fortune on the gates spent nothing on the frame he mounted them in. And it certainly isn’t old.”

Danielle inspecting the estate through the main gate
Note the heraldic decorations. And the concrete gateposts
You can just see Toffee on her back legs, also looking inside
Meanwhile Luci’s wondering why they’re bothering

I had to admit she was right. There was nothing ancient, venerable or even aristocratic in the plain concrete pillars on either side of the gate. How could I have been so naïve? After all, even the one building we could see was just a concrete blockhouse. Too big to be a gatehouse, and not close to a gate anyway, it was far too small and unsightly to be some kind of baronial hall.

The blockhouse. Note the aerial and satellite dishes
And the wire

The most striking feature of the place was its security. The wall came with an iron-bar fence, and further in, there was the line of barbed wire. I’ve already said that the building looked like a blockhouse, dour, featureless, undecorated.

But there were no watch towers, no guards, no manicured parade ground. So not a prison camp or anything like that. Going past with a group of friends, we debated other possibilities.

Could it be a drug lord’s highly secure location for storing his product? It’s true that it looks too much the part, but might that not be brilliantly devious double-camouflage? Make it look too much like a drug lord’s hideaway, and no policeman would ever suspect that it could be one.

“Too obvious,” they’d all say, and go and look somewhere else.

That didn’t feel too plausible. I preferred the theory that it was a top-secret site operated by the Spanish intelligence service. Underneath that apparently uninhabited blockhouse, there were deep basements equipped with sophisticated torture devices where, even as we spoke, orange-suited prisoners suspected of criminal subversion were screaming out their confessions to crimes of which they were entirely innocent.

That seemed possible until we considered that any self-respecting Spanish spook would want to be based in Madrid. The woods of La Vallesa somewhere outside Valencia? Much too far from the metropolitan delights that make life bearable to the senior servants of the Spanish state.

The mystery all ended the day we turned up and found a Levantina car outside the gates, with its driver at the wheel. He was pleasant, polite and friendly.

“The place belonged to some guy who was crazy about security,” he explained, “and his son, who inherited it, can’t sell it. It suits us, though, as a place to keep our cars. So we rent it as a car park.”

A Levantina Seguridad car

A security guards’ car park? What a let-down.

No minor noble entertaining his superiors to lavish dinners in the hope of an appointment further up the aristocratic ladder.

No drug lord bawling out an indolent underling who has yet again failed to liquidate an upstart competitor on a Valencia street corner.

No sadistic inquisitor pointing out that the electric dial setting has to be kept below five if his powerless victim’s survival is to be guaranteed, and then cackling insanely as he turns it up to six.

Just a car park.

“The mystery’s gone,” Danielle pointed out to me as we walked past recently. She was right. It had. Fortunately, the beauty of the woods around are more than enough to compensate.

Otherwise, how would I cope with the loss of my fantasies?

Yesterday: you don't have to be a Beatles fan, but it helps

Let me start with a confession. I was never all that keen on the Beatles when they were actually making music and releasing records. It was my sons, in their teenage years, that woke me to up to the fact that their music was worth listening to. So I’m something of a latter-day fan.

As Yesterday points out, it’s a sadder world where they’ve never existed

Still, as the Christians say, “there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance”. Though I’m not convinced that the realms of Beatles fandom will be particularly shaken by my joining them.

As a new convert (well, relatively new: my boys’ teenage years were twenty years ago now), I was enthralled by the premise of the film Yesterday. 

Early on, an inexplicable blackout takes place across the globe, and when the lights come back on, we are in a world in which the Beatles have never existed. The very names of the band or its members evoke no memories and are, indeed, completely meaningless to those who hear them.

Except that Jack Malik, excellently played by Himesh Patel who not only acts but sings the part with skill, has been knocked off his bike and been taken to hospital unconscious during the blackout. When he comes to, he has lost no memories whatever. When his friends buy him a superb new guitar, he decides that it deserves a great song, so he plays Yesterday for them.

They are moved nearly to tears. They wonder when he wrote it. And when he explains that it’s a Beatles song, they have no idea what he’s talking about.

Malik playing Yesterday to his friends, including Ellie Appleton
To them, it’s the first time they’ve heard the son

Why did they buy him a guitar in the first place? Because he’s a struggling musician doing occasional gigs in pubs or, at best, the underpopulated side tent of a festival. In fact, he’s had so little success that he’s decided to give up on music, much to the disappointment of his manager and one true fan, Ellie Appleton, intelligently played by Lily James.

Until now… For after the blackout, he knows a whole collection of songs that are completely new to his audiences. Knockout, excellent songs. So he starts to sing them, and then to record them. Soon, he’s discovered and finds himself on the way to international stardom, all on the back of Beatles song he presents as his own.

Critics have found much to run down in the film. It’s true that the plot isn’t wholly original. It’s true that we never hear the whole of a Beatles song. It’s true too that the story is often sentimental. But sentiment well handled, and it is in this film, can be moving rather than cloying. When it comes to the songs, there’s no reason why an audience should expect to hear them all, or hear them in their entirety – we’d do nothing but listen to the songs if that were what the film did.

As for originality, that strikes me as an overrated quality.

What matters isn’t how new your material is, it’s what you do with it. And Yesterday handles it gloriously. Again and again, one can predict exactly where the film is going and then, in a fine twist, it doesn’t go there, even if overall it reaches the point you might expect.

It contains well-constructed characters, performed by fine actors, including a monster of a music-industry woman whose shocking amorality is a constant source of humour. Why, it even contains Ed Sheeran playing himself in a lovely self-mocking portrayal of a real music star, if not so great a one as the Beatles.

Himesh Patel as Jack Malik with Ed Sheeran as Ed Sheeran

Besides, there are some excellent touches. It isn’t just the Beatles that are missing from the post-blackout world – some other major items from our world don’t make it. And there’s a clever theme about whether Malik really is the only person in the world who remembers the Beatles, a theme which leads to another good plot twist.

Overall, Yesterday provides a couple of hours of excellent entertainment. It’s well worth seeing. In addition, as I can now admit with enthusiasm, it includes some excellent music.

Retirement: an olive bough but not a bed of roses

Retirement, I had been led to believe, was a period of life in which one rested a while and recovered from the exhaustion of working life.

That, it seems, is not so. It’s just the opportunity to replace one form of work by another. Or, in my case, numerous others.

To be honest, and I think it’s probably best to be reasonably honest since I’m not leader of the Conservative Party (a role so much in the stratospheric elite that such bourgeois considerations as truthfulness simply don’t apply), to be honest, as I say, some of these tasks should soon come to an end. They involve such chores as submitting requests for pensions, which in turn require documents to be hunted down, copied, occasionally authenticated by a lawyer, and posted and all sorts of other exciting and life-enhancing bureaucratic tasks.

Picking olives in November

Others, however, are only just starting. One such was, it appears, the harvesting of olives. Not that we have an olive tree or anything. But Danielle and I went out walking the woods a couple of weeks ago and came across a rather sad and lonely olive tree which clearly didn’t belong to anyone, so we picked the olives.

It was an eye-opening experience for me. I tried one of the olives I picked, since I like olives, only to discover that it was horribly inedible. It seems it takes weeks of processing to turn them into the kind of delicious appetiser that I enjoy so much. Off the tree, they are neither delicious or appetising.

You may have already known that but I didn’t. Among other things, retirement seems to be turning into quite a steep apprenticeship in things I never previously realised I needed to know.

This all happened on 9 November. And one of the more attractive aspects of the experience is that we could be out there in light clothes. In fact, I was in shirt sleeves, Danielle in even shorter sleeves. Just this weekend we were out on the beach. Not actually swimming, you understand, although there were some swimmers there – one of them claimed to keep swimming right through the winter, so I dismiss his judgement of the temperature as having any kind of rational basis at all – but we did paddle a little. And it certainly felt warm.

November beach walk

So it’s been a bit of a shock to discover in the time since then that the temperature in Valencia really can fall. It can even become wintry. That’s particularly clear if you’ve mistimed overdue work on your radiators.

The radiators in question needed work because they had been removed from the walls when the painters were in this summer. They’d put them back up but radiators apparently need various technical things done to them, involving things like air (which I believe needs to be removed) and pressure (which needs to be raised). Clearly, this is something that, as a retired person, I should now be learning to do myself, but I’m glad to say Danielle was sensible enough to book an appointment for a plumber to come and see to it.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t be there until this morning, and this morning, when I took the dogs out, there was actually frost on the grass. Yes. Really. Proper frost.

Central heating is just one of those things most of us take for granted these days. Well, I can assure you that nothing teaches you not to take it for granted quite so much as not having any when the conditions turn frosty. Why, yesterday we had to go so far as to open the windows to let in some warm air.

It’s good to have central heating again. I promise not to take it for granted again. I truly appreciate what a blessing it really is.

In fact – it’s time for me to get rid of this jumper and be back in shirtsleeves. As though ready to go olive picking again.

Canny canines and humble humans

It’s always good to have family come to visit.

The poodles like it too. Each in her own way. When my son Michael and our daughter-out-law Raquel first turned up, Toffee went wild with delight. She recognised them at once, despite not having seen them for months, and she was ecstatic at seeing them again. She danced around them and kept trying to leap up and lick their faces which, considering she barely comes to their knees, was an ambitious endeavour.

Luci in front, Toffee behind, in the woods near our house

Luci was more circumspect. She barked at them as she does at all strangers who have the gall to enter her house, at least until they’ve spent twenty minutes there and she gets used to their presence. But her heart wasn’t really in the barking on this occasion. It was obvious she too was impressed by the rapture being displayed by Toffee and must have been asking herself, “if she’s that enthusiastic about them, perhaps I shouldn’t be too concerned. Especially as they don’t seem completely unfamiliar to me.”

Things quickly settled down and everybody got used to everybody else. In fact, they were particularly affectionate to Raquel, with the unerring instinct of any animal to make straight for the one person who is allergic to them. I can only congratulate Raquel on how obvious she made it to them that she returned that affection, and simply coped with the asthma and general discomfort they inflicted on her.

She’s had to head home, but Michael stayed with us. In fact, he took charge of the place while we were out, and kindly even gave the dogs a walk. And not just along the patch of green at the back of the house, but into the nearby woods which are one of the major attractions to living here.

Funnily enough, while Danielle is able to inspire them with enthusiasm for a walk in those woods, and they’re always keen if a whole group of us accompanies them, if it’s just me or just Michael, the dogs seem reluctant to go very far. Take them off the lead too soon, and there’s a risk they’ll make a beeline for home.

It’s not something that I’ve worked out. Maybe they like being out with a group because it feels like a genuine pack, whereas just three of us leave them feeling far too isolated. Unless Danielle is one of those present, since she has about her that air of quiet mastery that inspires confidence in all around, canine or human.

My technique is to keep them on the lead for rather longer than Danielle does. I release them only when it’s clear to them that we’re having the walk whether they like it or not. I have to say that they give every sign of enjoying themselves for the rest of the walk, although I notice that they only really get out in front of me when we’ve turned unmistakably for home. Maybe just because they’d rather get safely back to Danielle as quickly as possible.

Michael used all these traits to good effect when he took them out alone. He doesn’t know the woods particularly well. He therefore kept the dogs on their leads for a while and systematically went the opposite way from where they were trying to pull him. Once he’d decided that they’d gone far enough, he took them off their leads and simply followed them back, getting safely out of the woods.

“At path intersections, they’d stop and look at me to decide where to go,” he told me, “but since they always stopped at the entrance of the path they obviously wanted to take, I simply went that way.”

The technique apparently worked splendidly. They got home without difficulties, having all had a pleasant and relaxing walk.

Which just goes to show how effective it was for all concerned that, having established his leadership, Michael could then let his followers have their own way. Lead then listen? That sounds like a message it would be good to apply more frequently, even outside the limited sphere of dog walking.