PPP

I have finally found myself at the true arse end of market capitalism. I am a man of privilege, these things don’t usually happen to me, but it is important to realise that the people who pay the people who run my country want this kind of thing to happen more often. It was a relatively trivial incident, but in what it represents it was deeply troubling.

I was stupid enough to go out for drinks with old friends in Shoreditch during the tube strike. When we finally left the pub later than we perhaps intended, my friends instantly got an Uber to their relatively cool bit of southeast London. I didn’t try Uber at first, my prejudice against loss making tech firms hell bent on destroying public transport infrastructure forced me to try another (probably equally exploitative) app. I put in my (still zone 3, but much less hip) destination and watched for a few minutes as the app failed to convince any drivers to drag their arses all the way out to my particular part of north London when there was a tube strike on and there was plenty of rich pickings to be had locally. The app asked if I wanted to go for a more expensive option. Sure I did, but none of the higher paid drivers were interested either. Exasperated, I swallowed my principles and opened Uber. Surely east London would be awash with drivers only too happy for a solid fare to the arse end of somewhere. It wasn’t. Again, various cars briefly flashed up on the display, presumably as drivers saw the route and thought “sod that”. I stared at my phone for several minutes more, but nothing resolved itself. I stared pointedly at the drivers in the parked cars across the road, all of whom I imagined were swiping left on me. No one wanted my fare. I cancelled the request and started walking. This is fine for me, I’m a middle aged white man, waking through the almost entirely gentrified environs of East and North London is an entirely innocuous experience for me. If I’d been a young woman it probably would have been fine too, but it might not have felt it. That is not the whole point though (even whilst being a pretty good one). 

I am an infrequent user of taxis and an even less frequent user of Uber but I still view it as a service. A few years ago, stood outside my hotel at 6am shortly after the T6 typhoon warning had been declared, with the concierge hopelessly waving at all the taxis heading home with their lights off, I turned to Uber. The app duly informed me that surge pricing was in effect, but that was no problem because work were paying. A 20-something local duly showed up in a mean looking Prius (if such a thing is possible) and drove me to catch the last flight out of Hong Kong before they closed the airport. This particular example, where the market triumphed, is the kind of thing Uber loves: I needed to catch my flight, I had the means and someone was happy to name a price for the required service. Market economics in effect, everyone wins, but what if there hadn’t been anyone available to drive me to the airport (unlikely in Hong Kong where people drive for Uber just for the excuse to drive - but still) or what if no one had wanted to ride the fine line around what typhoon rules apply when (again unlikely given Uber drivers in Hong Kong are mainly young men)? The market would have had no answer to that. No amount of money I could have offered would have got me a lift to the airport. Of course it was a much more mundane example that stranded me in Shoreditch on a Friday night a few years later: all available drivers simply believed they could get a better fare. I was not able to offer more money (or maybe I was and I just didn’t have the knowledge of how to game the market) and I was not able to talk to them to discuss terms. The market, mediated in this way, had failed me. I’m sure Uber’s response to this would be to add the ability to up the fare offer as a passenger (enhancing the concept of transport as commodity exchange), but that wouldn’t solve the problem for everyone. At some point the transport market would become unaffordable, or ~ if there is no one available supply side ~ simply unavailable. This is why we have public transport that gets you near to where you want to go for a fixed price: everyone knows how to use it, how much it will cost, when and where it is available. 

Companies like Uber have an open policy of wanting to undermine public transport infrastructure in order to create greater dependency on their products. And we should call them products; we can’t call them services if they don’t provide a service. The problem is they’re sold to governments and authorities as services, they are sold as alternatives to genuine service infrastructure, but they shouldn’t be. Increasingly the Uber model is creeping into all aspects of what used to be service provision. Cash strapped local authorities are presented these products by venture capital backed tech execs with examples of where they’ve delivered alternatives to infrastructure they’ve undermined elsewhere. It’s effectively free! It will cost you nothing (except possibly the increased marginalisation of your most vulnerable communities). The public servants are wowed, the tech bros move in with their heavily subsidised product and smother the existing service. Once they are the only game in town, like my Hong Kong taxi driver, they can charge what they want. And provide ‘services’ at their discretion: there is rarely any kind of agreement or service level expectations for these products. The tech firms have no actual agreements with the local authorities save any licences required to meet minimal requirements (and sometimes not even those - what’s a few million quid in fines to a tech giant?) and a few vague promises in some fancy PowerPoints. 

 Whilst the rest of us gradually fall out of love with the reality of a patchy service delivered by a flashy app, (mainly right wing or at least neoliberal) governments can’t help but keep falling in love with them. It’s only a matter of time before the public service one of these technological ‘innovations’ is more essential than public transport (assuming you don’t think that is essential enough) and people start dying because they haven’t got the money or the supply isn’t there. I’m sure many people think that couldn’t happen because such injustice would not go unnoticed, but it would. Big technology has the ability to deflect the responsibility for events it doesn’t facilitate, even when (according to its publicity) it should have facilitated them. In my case there is no evidence that I couldn’t get an Uber on that Friday night during the tube strike. There is no assessment of the root causes and plan to resolve the issue. As far as Uber is concerned, its product was working optimally that evening: matching available drivers with the customers they wanted to take. In this way, if we don’t stop it, our services will be replaced by products that obfuscate away any requirement to delivery, and public infrastructure as we know it will disappear in a cloud of vapour-service.* 

 *in tech the term vapourware refers to ‘software’, usually built for demonstration purposes, that is little more than a front end. It cannot undertake the genuine operations of the final product, although it can be set up to appear as if it is fulfilling these functions so a client can see what it should do. It seems fitting then to describe these products as vapour-services, as they only appear to deliver the service they intend to replace.

Profusion

For a certain type of middle aged man, what passed as entertainment even before the war in Ukraine was looking up facts about heat pumps on the internet. And so for a little while the suggested content pushed when I opened up YouTube on my phone was videos of heating engineers moaning about how much they hate heat pumps. Whether this is the only video content Google can find on heat pumps or whether this is the content certain vested interests have paid to be pushed whenever someone shows an interest in a profit-damaging shift away from fossil fuels I can’t tell. Either way it was depressingly tedious.  

Of course this way of serving content works and so eventually I found that I had watched the of best part of twelve minutes of some 50-something man in branded overalls listing all his grievances with heat pumps. As most of them seemed to be that they’re a bit of a faff to fit, they were easy enough to dismiss, but one fact stuck in my mind. It wasn’t a revelation to me, I knew it already, but the manner in which it was presented caused me to doubt, to worry, to genuinely reconsider whether I should be aiming to install a heat pump. It was the fact that a heat pump will only heat your radiators to 40-45°c. This is a much lower temperature than a regular combi boiler will pump out central heating. So I wondered, what if that means I won’t be able to heat my house in winter? What if I spend all this money doing the right thing only for my family to spend their winters wearing three jumpers round the house because of the input temperature of the fancy new system? 

Fortunately, I can experiment. My boiler has a temperature setting, so I set it to 45°c to see what would happen. Whilst the heating stayed on for longer each time it came on, it used less power and maintained a more consistent temperature throughout the house for longer. So what was the drawback? On the video, the heating engineer said the lower temperature means you won’t get the instant response of heating your home when you turn the heating on, and I’m sure you won’t, but that’s what programmable thermostats were invented for and also my experiment would tend to suggest that instant response is part of the problem. With the boiler output set at a higher temperature, the house heats up then cools down quickly without ever getting warm. I live in a 140 year old terraced house, it is double glazed and has some loft insulation, but nothing out of the ordinary, so what made this heating engineer believe that this form of heating will be worse for my house, rather than better (as my experiment showed)? 

I’m amazed by the number of pizza/chicken delivery places there are near me. Every week a leaflet for some hitherto unknown purveyor of fast food drops through my letterbox. I can only presume that very few people in my part of London ever do their own cooking. The latest one had the usual offers of increasingly startling quantities of chicken/pizza, but instead of the usual accompanying vat of cola, these came with a free energy drink. Now I’m not an expert, but I don’t think people about to undertake endurance sports are likely to want to consume large amounts of pizza or fried chicken immediately before they start. Also I’m not sure the endurance sport community were the target audience for these leaflets. The point of energy drinks is to provide a large amount of additional energy for high intensity or endurance activities so I really don’t understand why you would want to consume one whilst sitting in your joggers tucking into your bargain bucket. I’m a water, tea or booze kind of guy though so I’m probably not the target market either. Still, I can just about understand drinking a regular fuzzy drink to wash down your fast food, but energy drinks barely function as a drink, there’s not really enough liquid for that. 

My mother-in-law lives in a relatively isolated village on the Welsh border, so needs a car to get about. I regularly apprise her of the advances in electric vehicle technology and she always asks the same question: “is there a four wheel drive version?” Of course there are four wheel drive EVs, but they are universally expensive. By contrast she can get a four wheel drive petrol Subaru for relatively little money. I have repeatedly questioned her need for four wheel drive. Years ago I bought a dreaded SUV after being unable to get through flood waters round to her house in a regular height car, but I have never seen evidence of a need for actual four wheel drive. I have pointed to articles that say for country driving the kind of tires you have makes a much greater difference than four wheel drive, but to no avail. The local Subaru dealer is clearly making a killing by convincing pensioners that their well-being, indeed their whole way of life, relies entirely on four wheel drive vehicles. Throughout the twentieth century, we were wowed with feats that relied on a certain degree of over-engineering: climbing Everest, the space race or Concorde relied on materials and processes that had to operate beyond the extremes that their situations placed them in. Very expensive equipment operating in hostile environments needs overcapacity as a fail-safe usually because someone’s life depends on it. We have taken this necessity from extremes to simply be good engineering sense and ‘just to be on the safe side’ we overpower our central heating, we drive around cities in massive off-road vehicles, we buy extra food that we then throw away. We do it because we are told to, the supposed experts that we rely on to advise us about our heating or our vehicle choice have never questioned this orthodoxy of overcapacity because it has never failed them (and most likely allows them to charge more). No one bothers to find out what the sensible capacity is, so we end up wasting masses of energy and material just to avoid the effort of finding out. 

Like so many things our society currently defaults to, this orthodoxy of overcapacity needs to be challenged.

Patronising

The pandemic turned me into a republican (just to be clear, not the American kind with a capital ‘R’, a weird love of guns and hatred for women). I’d always been monarchy agnostic: not anti them, just, like a lot of people I guess, fairly ambivalent towards them. I supposed they didn’t really do any harm. Now I don’t know how I supposed that for so long.

It was during the first lockdown, if you can remember that weird balmy spring, where the sun seemed to shine every day as we sat in our homes, isolated, unaware of what stresses, strains and sorrows afflicted others in our neighbourhoods. We made a good fist of it, we got food for isolating neighbours, we got tipsy on Houseparty with old friends and those of us with kids and jobs forced ourselves into sleep patterns that we’ve never quite adjusted from since. About six weeks into this elongated pause, the queen made a speech. I didn’t listen to it, I couldn’t see the point. I supposed its intended purpose was to comfort a worried nation, like an animated version of one of those irritating “Keep calm and carry on” posters, but I couldn’t understand how the words of a 90-something aristocrat with what I presume is a limited knowledge of epidemiology was going to comfort anyone. Then I realised that the monarch’s purpose is never to reassure per se, but to reinforce the status quo. If people find that reassuring, that is because they have been trained from birth to seek reassurance in stagnation. The pageantry, the endless images of royals bestowing their presence on worthy, sick or vulnerable people and the speeches are all designed to train us to believe that the wellbeing of our nation depends upon the perpetuation of a system that rewards a small number of people for being born. The fact is that there is no rational or logical argument in favour of monarchy, much like religion, it relies on belief: a belief that some people were born to rule. 

We are told that the advantage of a constitutional monarchy is that our head of state doesn’t represent a particular political party, so can represent all the people. However, simply by existing, the queen is a living embodiment of the core conservative principle that some people just are better than others and therefore shouldn’t have to pay tax. Everything that the queen does is in service to this idea. If a politician visits a hospital, it is in order to infer that some policy they enacted had a direct impact on making that hospital work; if the queen visits a hospital it is in order to infer that the hospital simply wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for her sprinkling of platitudes and inane questions. We have to believe that as a nation we can’t function without a patronising pat on the head from our head of state now and then. And that weird dependence, this strange form of Stockholm syndrome extends to the patricians who rule us, allowing them to lie to us and steal from us whilst we gratefully vote for them time after time. 

Those politicians have shown us daily for innumerable days that they do not represent us, they represent the interests of themselves and others like them: a very small minority. It is this minority that our monarch’s patronage favours, and it is this minority alone that she represents: the international elite. Indeed, until recently the European monarchs had to breed amongst themselves in order not to sully the blood line. It is only in the last 40 years that they allowed selected commoners to join their ranks. Like Margaret Thatcher allowing people to buy their council houses it has been a PR coup: adding only a tiny number to the ranks of the elite whilst convincing the rest of the great unwashed that ‘happily ever after’ was within their grasp if they just played the game right. Kate was allowed to marry her Prince Charming because she played the game right: her parents had earned enough money to send their child to a good school where she had learned to be a good proto-aristocrat. She was perfect: ‘common’ enough to show how modern and diverse the monarchy was (having once bought a dress at Primark or whatever) whilst still being elite enough to show the people who really deserves a happily ever after. Meghan was an even greater gift: she was allowed a glimpse of her happy ever after with the coaches and horses and waving crowds, but when it turned out not to be happily ever after, she left. This allowed the constant stream of racist articles about why she was not fit to be royal to pivot to vindictive racist articles about her lack of gratitude for the crumbs that had been brushed her way from the royal table. She has become the establishment’s daily illustration of why the undeserving are undeserving, even if they have money. These stories  have been a valuable addition to the daily rounds of propaganda aimed at ‘proving’ what passes for our constitution is based on something more mysterious and intangible than inherited wealth, institutionalised corruption and systemic racism. 

As we all build up the the Jubilee ‘celebrations’ and the bunting is hung out, the jingoistic rhetoric seems to get ratcheted up. People will tell you that those who don’t want to celebrate the queen mustn’t love their country, but this is the kind of absolutist argument employed by those who fear genuine debate. The monarchy is just another cabal of rich people who have successfully managed to weave this unquestioned absolutism into a complex pageantry. They are no different from any other rich people who wish to retain family wealth, they have just convinced us that they are. I really love my country and I want a sensible debate about what is best for it to include whether unquestioning worship of inherited wealth and power is a good basis for a functioning democracy that (cl)aims to be meritocratic. I want to be able to sing a national anthem that celebrates my country, rather than droning on about keeping an old rich person alive. I have no objection to the royal family as people*, they can keep their wealth (as long as they pay inheritance tax) they can keep the properties (as long as the same rules apply to them as to all other property in the country), but they should have no constitutional role in this country. Until that changes we cannot say we live in a fair society. 

*apart from the fact that they seem like fairly objectionable people, but that is just a standard trait of privilege as far as I can tell.