Patriotic

I've largely stayed out of debate on the EU lately, as the whole thing is just too depressing to even attempt to engage with. Chief amongst my disappointments is the fact that millions of people are still stupid enough to believe that any one politician is different from the rest simply because he says he is. Didn't we already see the folly of that one with Nick Clegg? Politicians are fundamentally all the same: they are looking for your approval and they will go to pretty much any lengths to get it. Saying that they are not really a politician is clearly just another thing that politicians say; it would only be accurate if they weren't on the TV or radio telling you that you should vote for them. 

My last post was about the hope that we can finally move away from the politics of oversimplified broad agendas of the past and on to voting for issues that we actually care about. I see UKIP as the last gasp of that old fashioned politics: people aren't voting for UKIP because Nigel Farage has presented a series of well reasoned solutions to the myriad issues this country faces, but because he's told them that the source of all their problems is the EU and leaving it will solve all their problems. Somehow he has managed to present this action as policy, which is something that even Alex Salmond has been unable to achieve: not even the most ferverent supporter of Scottish independence believes that that action of leaving the UK will suddenly, magically solve all their country's problems. It is a shame therefore that so many (mainly English people) seem to see Farage's playground politics as some sort of ideology that they can broadly agree with. This is, of course, because it isn't an ideology at all; it is single issue politics disguised as ideology. Hopefully it is just a transitional anomaly caused by the transition from the party-based system to an issues-based representational one, resulting in the worst of both worlds. Voting for UKIP is voting on a single issue that they will have no power to affect, whilst they actually absent themselves from representing you on every other issue that actually might affect you. In many ways, voting for UKIP is equivalent to not voting at all, but then it is likely that a lot of people are voting UKIP as they wouldn't vote at all otherwise, so perhaps they will get the level of representation that they crave. 

This is rapidly turning into the rant that I hoped it wouldn't, so I should probably wrap it up, but before I do, I'd like to quickly look language surrounding this election. For some strange reason, the right-wing press has allocated sole rights to the claim of patriotism to those of the Euroskeptic persuasion. It's as if being patriotic is the same thing as being myopic. I thought being a patriot meant you were willing to go abroad and fight for your country; certainly that's what our grandparents thought. For some reason, the understanding of patriotism has been redefined to mean that you are willng to stay at home and ignore what is happening abroad regardless of the cost to your country of this course of action. As the 70th anniversary of D-Day approaches, I think I'll stick with the old definition of patriotism and engage with Europe in a way that will help my country. 

Potholes

The first episode of a new season of The Reunion on Radio 4 was one of those episodes where, 20 years on you can tell the guests are still not going to agree. Indeed the programme showed that the emotions of those involved in the 1984 miners' strike were still very raw, at least the emotions of those who were emotionally involved in the first place: Ken Clarke did a good job of presenting the cold, 'rational', ideology-dressed-as-economical-necessity of the Thatcher government. This struck me as perhaps the most notable fact of the whole program: that even then the Tories were presenting their ideology as simple economic necessity, unless of course this was Ken Clarke re-casting history to align with contemporary policy. Whether it was conscious or not, this was the point at which Fukuyama's end of history could be seen to have occurred in Britain: the Conservatives won the argument by presenting the arguments of the left as fanatical ideologies that had no practical basis, but rather existed just to oppose progress in a violent and destructive manner. All of the left became the loony left; reason resided with the right. 

I draw attention to this, because I think my generation is fundamentally a post-miners' strike generation and therefore our view of politics is filtered through Fukuyama's post-historical lense. I remember the euphoria in 1997 for those of us who had only known Tory government. We thought Tony Blair had managed to make the left acceptable again, when in fact he had made Labour acceptable again by moving it to the right, to the world of 'rational necessity'. Blair had recognised the power of the image of leftist ideology as irrational and saw no way to counter it other than doing away with leftist ideology almost completely. Perhaps he had seen the way the left in America had been wiped out by the end of history logic of the right and saw the same as inevitable in the UK. This is understandable, as the stigma of unreason is a powerful tool of those who fear ideology: look at the way feminism is consistently and successfully presented as the preserve of unhinged women; the spectre of hysteria still looming large in the language of the patriarchy. The problem with Blair's response is that it is a pre-miners' strike approach to a post-miners' strike situation. 

Many of us who have grown up politically in this era often struggle to fully understand the world that brought such a conflict about. We struggle to comprehend the extraordinary hubris of the left in believing in the ubiquity of the power of mass labour. From our 'enlightened' vantage point, the whole thing seems a little bit simplistic, a binary conflict of black and white viewed from a world where there are so many different shades and colours. Of course we would view it that way, that is how the post-historical viewpoint is supposed to appear: these things are too complex for simple working folk and are best left to the technocrats. This has partially succeeded in turning younger generations off politics, but in many cases they have simply changed their approach away from a traditional party oriented view to a single issue oriented one. This acceptance that the complexity of the world means that voting for the party that best fits your worldview doesn't really work anymore obviously hasn't really permeated our political institutions. Like many outmoded organisations, the politicians at Westminster cling to the status quo tenaciously, hoping that getting their aides to run a Twitter account will suffice in terms of their engagement with the electorate. Meanwhile, as the traditional vote fragments, the likelihood of majority government fades away and MPs have started thinking about how they can keep their seat at Westminster. This is most notable amongst the new Tory cohort, who have repeatedly voted against the government when they thought it was in their own best interest (i.e. they thought they'd get a kicking from their local constituents). This would seem to point to a greater degree of representation and in many ways it does, especially if the MPs take notice of constituents who didn't vote for them as well as those who did. Of course in a world where people no longer vote for parties, any politician would always look to be keeping the largest number of (active) constituents happy. Such a system requires a bit more of voters than simply showing up at a polling station once every five years, but it seems they are willing to engage when a matter concerns them anyway, and often more so than if they were required to get off their arses and actually vote. The potential danger is that politicians will only react to those who shout the loudest, but it ever was thus: politicians currently gear their policies towards older voters who are much more likely to actually vote. The other worry is that politicians become simply the mouthpiece of anyone with an agenda, but at least it would be transparent and anyone with an agenda would need to engage others rather than simply being rich enough to lobby directly. The complexity of the system would lie in establishing a functional executive, as the role could not simply be handed over to the party with the most MPs. In a post party parliament, the current coalition government would appear even more utterly dysfunctional than it currently does, as the executive would have to be chosen by general consensus, based on each candidate's suitability for the post. 

This is clearly a bit of a pipe dream at the moment, but it is not inconceivable. Currently the only thing keeping our major parties from financial ruin is the 'largesse' of a few individual donors, and such power over politics in the hands of a few wealthy individuals or organisations cannot be good for democracy. Therefore the only thing standing between the current situation and my dream of the future is limits on individual party donations, and I mean limits of hundreds rather than thousands of pounds. This would inevitably lead to the collapse of all the major parties, but what is lost if they no longer exist? Traditional party structures appear solely to facilitate the power of minorities and such an illusion of democracy is something that we should be consigning to history and the failures of the twentieth century. 

Hopefully the conceptual problems that my generation have with the miners' strike is the fact that it illustrates the failure of pre 21st century representational democracy, rather than we have all been brainwashed by a 'post-historical' right wing perspective. If we view the miners' strike as the struggle between two executives, neither of whom had the full backing of their constituents for their actions but both of whom used a dysfunctional model of democratic representation to justify their actions, then we understand the democratic ideals which modern communications should allow us to aspire. If we just look at all forms of protest and political conflict as things that only trouble the unsophisticated democracies of the past or other countries, then we completely deserve whatever government we get. 

Present

10 REM --HAPPY BIRTHDAY BASIC!--

20 PRINT "How old is BASIC?"

30 LET N = GETCHAR()

40 IF N <> "" THEN GOTO 70

50 PAUSE 100

60 GOTO 30

70 LET M = GETCHAR()

80 IF M <> "" THEN GOTO 110

90 PAUSE 100

100 GOTO 70

110 LET Z = N + M

120 IF Z = "50" THEN GOTO 150

130 PRINT "Wrong!"

140 GOTO 20

150 PRINT "Correct! Happy Birthday BASIC!"

 

Preparation

"Perhaps the second shot of the energy wars was fired when Scottish and Southern Energy froze their prices for 18 months..." is a sentence that will not grace the pages of history. I'm sure Ed Miliband and the lunks in charge of our major power companies would like to dream that we might all look back on this pathetic mud-slinging exercise as some epic battle, but the truth is that when the shit actually goes down, it will seem like so much window dressing on the Titanic. The undignified scramble by the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition to claim credit for the price freeze rather covered up the details of what this price freeze has cost. In order to maintain their profit margins, SSE are looking for 500 voluntary redundancies and ditching plans to build three offshore wind farms (which increasingly appear to be the only type of wind power the Tories will countenance). Being deeply cynical, I can't help but think that maybe this was the real purpose of the whole exercise. If wholesale energy prices fall over the next 18 months, will SSE keep those jobs or recommit to building the offshore wind farms? I think that both are unlikely, with the latter being extremely unlikely. 

Every time anyone has made a point about the high price of energy in the UK, the 'big six' energy firms bleat on about having to pay green levies, which subsidise making homes more energy efficient and the building of more sources of carbon-free generation. I can understand the energy companies not being keen on the former, as it would reduce their profits, but are they genuinely unhappy about being forced to invest in their own long term future? If this truly is the case, it shows the problem with allowing markets to regulate the energy industry: the interests of the markets are so short-termist that market-driven companies are actually willing to sacrifice their long-term profits for the sake of short-term cost cutting. 

The next intervention in this squabble came from Centrica, who said that the breakup of the big six that they clearly think will follow a competition commission investigation into the energy market will result in the collapse of investment in infrastructure and new generating capacity. They may be right: a larger number of smaller companies may well have to work together to deliver infrastructure and generation improvements that are in their long-term interests and we've already seen what these companies think of long-term interests. Why should they make any long-term investments, when they know any self-respecting government will bail them out in a future where their lack of investment has left the country's energy security in a precarious position. This is where the alleged power of the market is undermined: regardless of whether the consumer has a choice of providers, those providers know they don't have to deliver anything other than the bare minimum and they don't have to invest in infrastructure because if it deteriorates to a point where it actually threatens service delivery, the government will step in to fix the problem. The power companies basically hold the people of this country to ransom, and we have no means of redress. 

One of the reasons the EU hasn't reacted more forcefully in the face of Russian aggression in the Ukraine is that countries like Germany are reliant on Russia to supply a significant portion of their gas. This means that these countries are having their foreign policy dictated to them by their energy supplier. If nothing else is, this should be a clear indication that already energy security is national security. We don't leave the physical defence of our country in the hands of private companies (although I am aware of the amount of industry that is supported by our defence policy), so why would we leave our energy security to private companies whose apathy will soon force them hand it over to the foreign power with the greatest remaining mineral assets?

Any true historical scholar will know that the first shots of the energy wars were fired as long ago as the early part of the twentieth century, but it is perhaps only now that we start to see energy as a weapon of that war as well as it's object. Increasingly, countries like Russia will see their mineral reserves as a tool of hard power to compliment their army, navy and airforce. Our only defence against such aggressors will be to have enough alternative energy sources to render their mineral wealth meaningless. This is a serious enough threat to our national security that I don't see why the ministry of defence shouldn't be running all the power stations in the land. Obviously that is a terrible idea, given the fact that the MOD can't even handle buying weapons competently, but the consequences for our national security and independence are too serious for us to leave this in the hands of short-term profits-obsessed companies. We need a viable national policy on energy security now, and if that means nationalisation (there, I said it), then so be it. I know in a world where the right wing won the argument nationalisation is heresy, but I think it may well be a small price to pay for guaranteeing the future independence of our nation. This is a threat that no market can counter.  We need to stand up to a few company directors now to make sure  we can still stand up to despots in the future. 

Provision

Why do the clocks go forward during the night, why don't they go forward during the day? Is it because our society is still formed around the notion that our productivity is more important than our wellbeing? 

Point made

A little while ago I wrote a defence of the Shard from an aesthetic viewpoint. That was before it was complete, and whilst I still don't object to it aesthetically, I am well aware of what it has quickly come to represent: the triumph of wealth over imagination. The uses to which the building has been put reflect the general approach of it's Qatari owners to the spending of their spectacular mineral wealth, which appears to be to build something obscenely big and then fill it full of stuff for obscenely wealthy people to do. Of course the Shard isn't full by any stretch of the imagination: at the beginning of the year it stood 2/3rds empty. This fact seems almost unpardonable when one considers the fact that London suffers a chronic housing shortage. You would think it would bother the building's owners, given that they are losing out on potential millions of pounds in rent, but I doubt they even give it a second thought. Like many of the nations made rich by our obsession with burning as much of our planet as possible, the middle eastern countries invest for the long term. Sensibly, they know that their resources, whilst currently ample, are finite and therefore they should invest in things that will make money long after the oil has run dry. Everyone knows that property is a pretty good long term investment and moreover that in London property prices never go down. So the Shard, like an increasing number of buildings in Central London, doesn't need to make money as such to accumulate wealth for its owners. It could quite easily sit there partially occupied for the next few years until its owners decided they needed to realise the capital and sell it. Of course, it will eventually fill up anyway, so they will probably make a profit long before they come to sell it. All this maybe doesn't matter much with a commercial/clerical building in a slightly odd corner of the City of London borders, but as always with the Shard, the problem is with what it represents: it is property almost entirely divorced from its original purpose, property almost entirely as a commodity; a new form of currency to be traded. 

I should probably declare an interest at this point: Ms P and I are currently in the process of trying to buy our first home. Like almost everyone I know who has bought a first home in London, we have had some help from family and we cannot afford to buy where we rent, so we are moving to a part of London that makes our parents pull funny faces and say things like "I'm sure it's very up and coming". Some might say it ever was thus in London: once Islington was considered an undesirable place to live, as (more recently) was Hackney. The fortunes of an area rose and fell as different parts of the city became fashionable or immigrant communities moved in and out; the city had a cycle of regeneration that made it vibrant and fresh. Now anywhere within zone 4 is fashionable and immigrant communities move to satellite towns where the rent is cheaper but they are more feared because they are a much greater portion of the population, allowing the 'floods of immigrants' claims of opportunist politicians to seem genuine. 

I am lucky, my household income is above national average, so we can at least afford to live somewhere in London, but the house we're hoping to buy was probably built with the intention that it would be relatively affordable housing. So we have become part of the problem: pricing others out of the market, unwittingly assisting in the demographic cleansing of Central London. Our intentions are at least reasonable, we just want a house to live in, whereas much of the property in the city centre no longer serves this purpose, it merely sits there, often empty, accumulating value. Ironically it seems that on this market it is residential property that is most desirable, as this is what is being created wherever possible by developers keen to maximise the money they make selling property to foreign investors. Perhaps even more ironically, this property is likely to gain more value if it is left empty, as by not adding to the housing stock in use, it exacerbates the housing shortage, pushing the price of all property up. Gradually this rush for residential investment property will wash all the character out of whole areas of London, as businesses move away, pushed out by property developers keen to turn their premises into flats and the lack of local business due to the lack of locals. Of course the owners of all this property won't care much as they don't actually live in the property and so don't care if it has any local ameneties; even when they do stay at their London residencies, they will be eating at the international restaurants in the Shard or elsewhere, and getting all their services provided by international concierge services. Local businesses for such people are just something that messes up the view from their car window as they are driven from one over-designed and sterile space to the next. To them the poor are to be kept the other side of a window at all times and in comparison to them 99% of the world is poor. The result is that parts of London will become vast empty storage units for expensive furnature, populated almost exclusively by private security guards. Even tourists will keep away from such areas, as there will be nothing to see or do there. Meanwhile, the rest of London will become a ghetto for the upper-middle classes, filled with identikit coffee shops and sterile gastropubs. All the character, culture and innovation that used to differentiate London from the rest of south-east England will gradually disappear and the city will just a more expensive version of the many featureless urban conurbations that litter the bottom corner of the country. 

Of course the owners of the the homes in this brave new world will be largely unconcerned, as homeowners' main concern is apparently the value of their home. Certainly this is a fact that the current government is relying on, as its current housing policy appears to be geared towards making sure that more people are able to believe they can afford the same number of houses, thus guaranteeing a continuation of house price inflation in the south-east of England. Obviously this is sensible politics for the Tory party, the majority of whose core support already own their own home and so believe themselves to be benefiting from the increase in house prices. Of course, they rarely are; when celebrating how much their house is worth on paper, people seem to forget that they are likely to always need somewhere to live. Equally if they think they're providing a home for their children, they should probably think about the fact that rising house prices simply increase their children's inheritance tax liability. Obviously, building new homes would help mitigate some of the ridiculous lurch skywards of London house prices, but more effective than that in the short term would be measures to make sure that all houses are homes, rather than just investments. Of course the current government is going to do nothing of the sort because that would risk upsetting the kinds of foreign nationals the government likes: the ones who visit occasionally to spend money in the international businesses and so add much less to the local economy than they claim. Meanwhile politicians of almost all stripes make noises about restricting access to the UK for foreign nationals who come here to work and contribute to the local economy, the people who run our hospitals and bars. I struggle to see the logic; we are railing against those who add value to our economy whilst letting those who add nothing to it force us out of our own capital city. 

One simple change could reverse this tragic state of affairs, a change that could be symbolised in the Shard: any building not in use for a period of six months must be rented out (at local council rates) to key workers. The effect would be twofold: it would instantly eleviate the housing shortage in London and it would stop the international super-wealthy buying property near these re-appropriated dwellings, as they don't want to be that close to poor people. Gradually, as the global elite moved out of London, the price of property would deflate or at least rise at a rate more commensurate with wage inflation. I'm not saying it would completely solve London's housing crisis, but it would be a damn site more effective than building the same houses twice in Ebsfleet. Unfortunately no government will ever enact a change that will reduce house prices and certainly not in an election year, when their sole aim seems to be to inflate the economy as quickly as possible so people feel rich enough to vote Tory, regardless of the likelihood that this policy will in the long term leave them fiscally and culturally poorer. 

So it's not going to happen, which is a shame, but we know how we could make the Shard a symbol that London can be proud of, a London for the benefit of Londoners: we could fill the Shard with immigrant nurses. 

Personal ish

Over the Christmas break I caught up with a friend of a friend who I have only met physically once or twice before, but with whom I have a mutually following relationship on twitter (is there a word for this: 'followship', 'twinterdependance'?). So I guess I kind of presumed that we knew each other a bit and was therefore a bit surprised when at one point he said "oh, are you on Twitter then?" Indeed I was so surprised that I pointed out that he was one of the first people to follow me and it was only after I said this that I realised what meaningless statement it was. He would have had no idea that he was one of my first followers just as I have no idea what number follower of his I was. This was simply the first of a number of points in our conversation that made me realise the essentially unidirectional nature of Twitter relationships. My conversant is a much more committed Twitter user than I: he spends seemingly hours a day on Twitter, has many thousands of followers and is a legitimate user in that he is self employed and therefore uses Twitter as a promotional tool as much as anything else. He fully engages in many debates and through this appears consider himself familiar with a number of other public figures who engage in the same debates, at the very least he consders himself to know them in some manner and potentially to be known to (or by) them. I may be utterly wrong on this, but I suspect he knows them and they know him as well as I know him and vice versa (which knowledge, the evening's conversations led me to understand was somewhat lacking or even downright incorrect on my part). Maybe it is simply I who am surprised by this, having never encountered someone who talks about others as if they have met before when they clearly haven't. I am a very circumspect user of social media, so maybe this sensation of finding out which aspects of a person's online persona is actually part of their personality is much more familiar to more persistent social networkers, but to me it seems odd. I quite often find myself having conversations with friends in which I feel a bit lazy for regurgitating thoughts and opinions I have already written in this blog, but I guess at least it's an indication that I'm consistent. Any of my friends will gladly tell you that I am as prone to ranting on about the ills of the world in real life as I am on this blog or Twitter, the difference being that I probably present a bit more eloquently here (you never get the joy of the full shouty jabbing-the-air-with-my-finger version). I see this as just being consistent, but perhaps I am naive to think that my online persona should simply reflect who I am, or perhaps I am in denial if I think that it does. I find it easy to see that many of my friends are nowhere near as single-issue obsessed as their Twitter feeds would have me believe, yet I apparently can't see that someone who didn't know me as a friend might assume that all I am interested in is the lack of thought people give to their lives and environment. I'm pretty sure there is a bit more to me than that (although not much), so perhaps I simply need not to be surprised when the person I meet is not the collection of issues and ideas that I encounter online. 

We are constantly warning children and young people to be wary of strangers online for obvious and good reasons, but we grownups tend to believe that such warnings don't need to apply to us. Of course we are all (hopefully) on guard for the net's worst predators, but we don't seem so concerned about the potential emotional impact that not knowing anyone online could have when it is presented to us. I am not saying that I am emotionally traumatised by finding out that someone I thought I was friends with from the internet wasn't aware of this friendship, but the cumulative effects of such a disparity cannot be underestimated. That I am a fairly casual and occasional user of social media probably explains why this sensation is new to me, but for more frequent users of social media it must be all too familiar. People must surely become used to it and jaded; they must develop attitudes to society adjusted for the fact that people are something different from what they appear to be. Indeed what's to stop them from turning away from society altogether, or at least society as we know it: the society of present interaction. If only the only thing the 'real world' is gong to offer is disappointment, why engage with it at all? Of course, the alternative is to engage with the real world on the terms defined by the world of social media, dividing your friends and associates up into single interest groups and never allowing your interaction with each to stray beyond the confines of their defined interest. This strikes me as an entirely juvenile way to interact with people and indeed a potentially socially and culturally regressive one. Many of the most serendipitous moments in history have come about through the meetings and interactions of unlikely combinations of people, it would be a shame if we let the inflexibility of digital social networks kill the creative spontaneity of real social interaction. I'm sure many people would argue that digital social networks enhance networking because they allow one to connect to many more people, but I'm not sure this isn't the equivalent of battery farming friends. The resulting mass of identikit connections are unlikely ever to challenge our opinions and preconceptions in a meaningful way, allowing them to be reinforced and narrowed. We could end up holding bizarre sets of beliefs based on selected fragments of the opinions of people we don't know. Perhaps this is no different from the past when such opinions came from newspaper colmunists, but at least then we didn't think the columnists knew us or indeed, that we knew them. 

I recognise many people on my train every day, but because I wear headphones all the time I have genuinely no idea what they sound like, yet on some level I suppose I feel I know them. However, if I was to go to a dinner party with them, I would not presume to know anything about their lives because I only know them in the sense that I am familiar with their faces. Sherlock Holmes would be able to deduce much about these people based on the information I have available to me, but that is what makes him exceptional (and fictional). The rest of us will have to make do with the knowledge that we can only gleam from actually spending time in other peoples' company.