Paradigm

I didn't realise it till I got off the train at London Bridge. I wasn't even meant going to London Bridge, but Southern Trains are so messed up at the moment that the one to London Bridge was the first one going to any part of London that had actually run in an hour and a half. So from a whole day of suburban depression and acquiescence, knowing that I must logically be in a minority (even though no one around me all day would proudly admit having voted leave), I emerged from London Bridge to an unusually large police presence. After a few more seconds, I was aware of the reason for this profusion of law enforcement: there was a rally outside News International: hundreds of people shouting their love for humanity, their compassion for refugees and their passionate desire not to give into the hatred, fear and xenophobia peddled by that organisation and others. It was the first thing that I encountered on the day of the referendum result that made me feel alive or positive about anything in any way. It was invigorating. I am not a joiner in, I am definitely not a protester, but I have been around protests before (I worked round the corner from the G7 protests in the city) and I understand that they have they have a compelling energy just from being, but this felt different. This was unmitigated. 

I am one of those who before and after the referendum decried the fact that such a complex question was put to a referendum at all. We are and have always been a representative democracy, relying on the people we elect to make the best decisions on our behalf. This is their job: they are paid to devote their time to this task because the rest of us are busy doing the other things that need to happen in order to keep capitalism going. In devolving responsibility for the most important decision about our country in the last 40 years, the politicians that we elected failed in their duties to us. I am not joking when I say that each time a government decides to hold a referendum, the costs of that referendum should be met out of their salaries. 

As if to emphasise their lack of effort and their half-arsed attitude to their jobs, most of the major players in the referendum have decided that now the easy part is over (the bit where the public did their jobs for them) they're going to give up being involved at all. Contrary to his pre-referendum promises David Cameron has resigned, making sure he abdicates all responsibility for dealing with the consequences of his thoughtless attempt to avoid the schism within his party. Boris Johnson, the face of Leave whilst he thought it would make him prime minister, has now decided to return to a life of punditry, scoring easy points from his comments as a journalist without having to take any responsibility for them. Indeed in a recent Telegraph article, Johnson had the audacity to call on the prime minister to make the positive case for Brexit, when the rest of us are still waiting for Johnson to do that. I'm talking about a real reasoned case, rather than some empty waffle about taking back control. In many ways only Nigel Farrage cannot be seen to be shirking his duties, he was never more than an single issue protester, with one empty aim and seemingly no care for the consequences of his actions. His record as an MEP was a clear indicator that he had no interest in actually engaging in the business of a serious politician, but rather was happy to take money and votes off anyone foolish enough to give them to him. Like many of the most feckless and useless members of our society, he managed to convince us that others were a drain on our resources whilst personally being a much bigger drain than many of his favoured scapegoats put together. If you really want to make a principled stand, it always looks better if you don't profit greatly from it. 

Of course, if any of these people genuinely cared about the state of our democracy or indeed our country, they may have thought about the other consequences of their abdication of responsibility. The feeling that led to that protest, the feeling that many of the 17 million people who voted to remain in the EU probably felt in some form or another, the feeling that 'leave' voters would have felt if the result had gone the other way, that feeling was different to how one feels about any other kind of defeat. It was personal, we knew that 18 million of our countrymen had changed the future of our country in a way that we fundamentally disagree with. They did it to us; it was personal. Almost anyone we encountered could have been partially responsible and could be blamed. If the politicians had taken us out of Europe without implicating the rest of us in their decision, we could have blamed them. That would be fine, it is their job to be blamed for stuff; we elect them to take decisions on our behalf and take responsibility for those decisions. Nigel Farage never wanted this, he never wanted to take responsibility for anything, he just wanted to be popular, so he offered an easy answer with no concern for the consequences. He didn't need to care about the consequences, he could just blame them on the elites that he detests so much (presumably because they invite him to so many lunches). Of course the most hopelessly vain of our politicians saw what popularity Farage got from the easy answer and wanted some of it for themselves, so they let us take responsibility for the consequences of the easy answer and now we resent each other for it. 

I've been fascinated by the Spanish civil war for a number of years, fascinated by a society that can become so utterly entrenched in an ideological schism that it sees no solution but war. Of course, it also required a hard line element in the military, and a lot more mediaterran passion than the Brits could muster, but I couldn't help but think I sensed its echo in the protest I encountered the evening after the referendum. I hear it when everyone I speak to says they can't help speculating on whether each person they encounter voted leave or remain and judging them accordingly. I see it in the vitriolic tweets of the hardened Brexiteers laughing at the losers, stopping short of calling them gay, but only because the implications of modern language paint a broad spectrum of society with the same weak/fey/degenerate bully-fodder inference*. They feel validated by the democratic process - some even seeing the result of what became a vote against immigrants as an endorsement of racial hatred. The other half (or 48% to be precise) feel entirely cheated by the democratic process, cheated not only by the politicians who forced the most important decision about our country's future on lies, but cheated by our fellow citizens. The faintly patronising liberal mantra since the referendum that people voted leave because of a lack of education attempts to hide the fact that plenty of perfectly well educated people voted leave. Indeed I heard a senior colleague with a good degree declare that he would vote leave because he wanted to give his sons a better chance of getting a job. People voted based on the same shortsighted misguided selfishness that governs most of the rest of their lives. That is the reality of modern Britain that this vote has only served to emphasise: we are no longer the reasonable moderate types we like to present ourselves as to the rest of the world. David Cameron gambled on the reasonable nature of the British people and lost, this was the final confirmation of the passing of the 'traditional' British character of moderation. We are left with a country divided by an unspoken antagonism that will fester and genuinely has the potential to spill over. More so when many of those who voted leave realise that their protest vote solved none of their problems and addressed none of their concerns. We may not have the Mediterranean passion (or hopefully the overtly politicised military) that catalysed the Spanish civil war, but we no longer have the moderating force of, well, moderation. 

The recent Tory leadership coronation aims to paper over the cracks and carry on as if it's business as usual, but it isn't. Our country will probably never be the same again, not because it it will no longer physically be a United Kingdom (which it may well also not be) but because we have realised we think as two different countries, and that is an attitude that it is hard to change. 

* perhaps a small victory for equal rights: a broader spectrum of people are now discriminated against. 

Poultry

At the battle of Hastings in 1066 Harold Godwinson's troops had a commanding position over the battlefield. From the top of the hill that they occupied, they could repel the attacking Norman army to great effect. Indeed it looked for a time like in the space of two weeks Harold Godwinson would have repelled two invasions at the opposite ends of his country with a 500 mile march in between. 

Then the Normans retreated; this was not a rout, but a ruse, a tactical move by William of Normandy to draw the Saxons off the hill. Harold's tired troops, believing the battle to be won, ignored the orders of their commanders and pursued the retreating Normans; their ranks were broken and they were slaughtered by a counterattack. This is one of the only times in history that retreat has been a good idea, and even then it was a sneaky French good idea. The victors of that battle went on to form the rump of the elite that still govern our country today, many of whom have decided that once again retreat is a good idea. Of course for them it is: they have seen their power eroded and dissipated across the continent of Europe by a partially elected political body over which they can have limited influence. Obviously, they don't like that very much, so they have designed a process to take back control: convince the people of Great Britain that they would be better off giving power back to the English elite. Of course it's an easy message to sell: finding and highlighting inefficiencies in an imperfect political institution, or simply making up stories about the current situation and how that could change if only we would walk away. When you own much of the popular press, it is easier to spread an unquestioned version of your made up stories. I have spoken before about how much we are willing to accept made-up realities when they are repeated to us by the media and our superiors over and over again. Just to be clear, these people do consider themselves our superiors and they do think they can fool us into doing their bidding because, despite what they are trying to tell you, they have utter contempt for the people and for democracy. So next time someone tries to justify their proposed retreat from Europe by talking about "taking back control", think about who is going to get that control and why they are so keen to get it. Please don't be deluded enough to think it will be you. 

In the 'debate' around the referendum both sides have evoked the Second World War, and I can't help thinking of that war's most famous retreat - the evacuation from the beaches of Dunkirk - when I think of our current situation. That event marked the symbolic low point in the war for Britain, but it defined us as a people, we got the Dunkirk spirit and muddled through, we regrouped with our allies and went back to the continent. In Europe's darkest hour we planned a way to free it from the spectre of extreme nationalism. We increasingly find ourselves in a comparable situation: this is not a war, but make no mistake, it is a battle for the soul of Europe. We have retreated as far as we should and it's got us nowhere. It's time to regroup and return to the beaches. We have to fight for the Europe that we want and we can't do that if we walk away. 

Plebiscite

I took a few days off over the second May bank holiday and went to Herefordshire and the Welsh borders. Anyone who knows me, knows that I go there quite a lot, partly because of the availability of free accommodation provided by my in-laws, but also because it's a beautiful part of the world. Our holidays there may seem a bit boring and habitual to many people, but we both like low maintenance holidays and have yet to get bored of any of our habitual activities. I won't list them all, but they mainly revolve around cooking, eating, walking and reading. 

We always go to Hay-on-Wye and buy some books. I always buy old science fiction - way more than I have time to read - and end up stockpiling it in my bedroom there ready for the day when my life has enough spare time to devote to unloved sci-fi. Given the frequency of our visits, it was perhaps surprising that this is the first time we've been during Hay festival. Naturally, we bumped into someone we know from London. "It's crazy," she said, "and so far away!" 

I'm happy for other Londoners to think that, they can all hang out in the Cotswolds and Gloucestershire with David Cameron and Giles Corren. I don't really want to share Herefordshire with others. Several times over that sun-drenched weekend I sat in the garden or outside a country pub drinking in the sheer beauty of the British countryside and feeling glad I didn't have to share it with many people. I don't even actually live there and I want to keep it from 'incomers', so I can only imagine how the locals feel when a bunch of London dickheads like me turn up. To be honest, I doubt I strike fear into the hearts of the people of Herefordshire: they know I'll go away again, having spent lots of money on old books and 'authentic' local produce. Londoners are part of the problem though, they might not 'come over here and take our jobs', but they do buy holiday homes and retire to the countryside reducing the stock of affordable housing, or pushing up house prices in general. Unable to afford to live in the countryside, the young migrate to the cities and the countryside becomes a haven for retirees and holiday makers. Of course in working countryside, someone still has to do the labour, so immigrant labour is brought in because only immigrants will suffer the living conditions that the associated wage will allow. Of course the countryside's affluent new residents - just like me - don't want to share it with incomers and the most obvious incomers are those who don't speak the same language, so they become the focus of fear and loathing. Certain politicians look to exploit that natural fear of others, stating that it's the cause of our problems rather than a symptom of some of them. Perhaps not surprisingly I saw a reasonable number of very large 'Leave' posters as I drove around the countryside (note: that is very different from a large number of reasonable ones). I understand the desire to preserve our green and pleasant land, I feel it keenly, but I cannot legislate to keep Londoners out of Herefordshire, I can only rely on their natural laziness. Besides which, as I have already intimated, outsiders bring a much needed chunk of the wealth and labour into the county. 

Since that weekend, I have tried to listen to the arguments of people who want our country to cecede from the European Union, and the only concrete one I have actually heard beyond some vague notion of 'taking back control' (as if our country is suddenly going to become palpably more democratic) is so that we can control immigration. It's the word 'control' that is key here; I think many people who may vote for it would be wildly disappointed should it come to pass. The talk of Australian-style points systems give the lie to any assertion that Brexit would mean an end to immigration, and those who fear immigration are not going to be comforted by the fact that the people coming in to the country are better qualified to take their jobs. Unfortunately subtleties of the argument such as this are not even hinted at in the idiotic shouting match that will determine the future of our country. I find the level of debate (especially the level to which the old right wing trick of simply dismissing any fact that is inconvenient has been employed) so depressing I tend to turn off. I increasingly look for escape and find myself spending more time reading the one work of old science fiction I did bring back from Herefordshire. It is a book written in 1978, partly about a colony in space (of course), but mainly about a cynical cabal of coporations (one called 'International News' owned by a belligerent old Australian man) who ferment (and fund) a series popular nationalist revolts against a benevolent but slightly ineffective international government so that the weakened national governments that result will be no barrier to the power of the corporations. What fanciful ideas they had in the seventies: who could imagine a cynical elite blaming a political organisation for social problems that they themselves are at least partly responsible? And seeking to gain more power though it? 

Who indeed. 

Parental Responsibility

I got in a Twitter spat. It wasn't really a spat as such, more like a half-arsed argument that happens sporadically and in 140 characters or less. I can see why people get pulled into these things: there's the compulsion of trying to complete a comprehensive argument through a series of short questions. Un/fortunately this particular conversation petered out because I: 

a) had a lot of work to do

b) got a bit bored 

c) discovered, on going back to pick up the thread again, that my conversant was some kind of weird natural law ideologue and left it at that. 

I had started this post before this all happened, but the argument is fundamentally the same, it's just here I have put it in complete sentences and paragraphs (and bothered to finish it), which in my opinion is a much better way to construct an argument. 

On that day a man went to the high court to defend his right to be utterly selfish (and won). At least, as far as I can see, that's his motivation. His interview on the Today programme that morning was one of those events that leaves you wondering whether a person has ever stopped to listen to what they are actually saying. His argument was broadly the usual libertarian rant about the state telling him what to do, but the justifications were amazing. He claimed that those of his children who go to a 'non-selective' fee paying school (surely by dint of the fact that it requires fees, it is selective) have shorter terms and yet the schools have better results than state schools. Of course the key point there (apart from the one about the school actually being selective) is that whilst the terms may be shorter, they are uninterrupted. Also I can't see shortening the terms of state schools being popular with the many other parents who struggle to find childcare for the existing holidays. 

The other part of his argument was that because his children have a good attendance record the rest of the time, they should be allowed to miss two weeks of school. I imagine this is a logic that he would not tolerate elsewhere in society. 

If I never drive under the influence of alcohol, but a few pints down one day, find that my child needs a lift to a friend's house, given that I know I am a good driver, I know the route and I have a good track record with drink driving, should I be able to exempt myself from prosecution? Even if I were to accidentally hit one of this man's children on that journey (maybe one of the ones he doesn't care about enough to send to a fee paying school), that's just an unfortunate consequence of the child being in/near the road and not because I broke the law. Right? This is clearly a preposterous argument; no one would defend their right to drink and drive (although it's not so many years since people would have done), but the principle is the same: if a law exists, who gets to decide that it is unreasonable? The initial answer given by my friend on Twitter was correct: 'we do', unfortunately when qualifying the 'we' bit was when he got all weird and nonsensical. We do agree on what laws are reasonable by two methods: 

1. voting for and lobbying the politicians who make them

2. testing the law in court. 

Clearly our man on the radio had decided on the latter course, and I'm afraid this is the bit that I think is rather selfish of him. I don't object to him taking his child out of school (I think it's stupid, but I'll come to that), but I do object to him attempting to change the law because he didn't want to pay a fine he could easily afford. If he thought the law was unjust, he could have campaigned against it or set up a petition to establish the unpopularity of the law and the desire for it to change. Instead I imagine he decided that as he knows what is best for his children (the monotonous chant of all his apologists), that must mean he also knows what is best for everyone else's children. He took his case to court and won, so now parents much less 'responsible' than him have an excuse to disrupt their childrens' education (and potentially the education of others in the same class) because he wanted to prove a point. Furthermore, the government has already said that it will change the law to make sure that the legal loophole he has opened by this court case will be closed again, so that's a whole bunch of civil servants' time plus the various sittings of parliament that we will all have to pay for, just so this guy could have his 15 minutes. Indeed the likelihood is that by challenging a law that he saw as infringing on his rights as a parent, he'll probably end up with an even more restrictive law. Well done, here's the sound of one hand clapping.

In many ways this is just the law working as is intended: the courts challenge the detail of the legislation and the legislation is modified to accommodate the weaknesses exposed by the legal process. As part of the social contract implicit in being the citizen of any country, we agree to abide by the laws and to accept the consequences of the laws; if we collectively agree that they are unreasonable, then we change them. Anyone who thinks that we can live together without engaging in such a social contract is either deluded, an anarchist or both. We learn about this at school, not necessarily by negotiating our own social contract, but by abiding by the rules and facing our punishment if we break them. As we grow up we gradually learn how those laws are agreed and how we can negotiate them. It is not a simple relationship and we all navigate it as best we can. There will always be things that we personally think are unjust and we have to find our ways of negotiating these, from our first detention* onwards. However, if someone in authority comes along and says that the rules do not need to apply, that we can just opt out of the ones we don't like, how do we learn to engage properly with them? We grow up thinking that we can always be excused, that we are exceptional, that we don't need to engage with society because we can change the law on a whim to suit our personal preference. We grow up believing in the primacy of selfishness. 

* detentions probably aren't allowed any more because some parent who knows what's best objected to them. 

Personal

In the work I do with computer based systems, I am constantly trying to stop myself from anthropomorphising the systems I am talking about. When explaining how a certain process works, it is all too easy to say "because the system sees x, it decides y". It instantly brings a process into a familiar context, allowing the listener/reader to empathise with the 'decision' the system has to make and therefore rationalise the reasons for the outcome. Unfortunately, this kind of language reinforces in the mind of the listener the concept of the system having understanding of the context in which it makes 'decisions', or at least the capacity to understand it, rather than simply producing a binary reaction (or a complex series of binary reactions) to the data presented to it. People want to believe in the intransigence or irrationality of computers because that is easier than trying to fathom the flaw in the governing logic that has led to an incorrect 'decision'. We seem hell bent on ascribing intelligence to machines that are a long way from genuine intelligence; on a superficial level it aides our understanding of process but at a deeper level it undermines a complete understanding of what is actually happening. It pushes us towards a tendency to excuse systemic problems as quirks or eccentricities. 

One of my least favourite occurrences of anthropomorphisation is in reference to evolution, where the phrase "evolution has given x species y ability" is rife. Evolution gives nothing, ever. Evolution is not some benevolent deity handing down useful physical attributes from on high, it is simply a process by which the organisms least well suited to an environment do not survive, eventually leaving only those best suited to it. The cheetah can run fast because all the slow ones died of starvation; gazelles can fun fast because all the slow ones got eaten; humans can run fast because they invented performance enhancing drugs. The point is that evolution did not waltz along one day and say "oh cheetahs, you look hungry, let me make you faster" because evolution is not a deity. We simply choose to represent it as such because the process is perhaps both too simple and too complex, and seemingly random (and possibly too brutal) to summarise. The obvious inference to draw from the anthropomorphisation of evolution would be that we are simply trying to replace God. However, I don't think this is the case, rather I think our ancestors obsession with gods was simply another manifestation of this same impulse; we have always had the desire to explain the complex by thinking of it as the product of sentience. This says a lot about our relationships with our fellow beings: we believe them to be fundamentally incomprehensible, but in that we believe them to be incredibly complex. Because the unknowability of our fellow beings is tempered by the familiarity of recognition in the commonality of our species, we wish to apply that familiarity to other aspects of our universe in order to compensate for its incomprehensible complexity. The anthropomorphisation of natural (and manmade) systems (in the form of a god or a more informal association) is a way of bringing comfort to the knowledge that we will never know or fully understand our universe. What it should never do is act as an excuse for ignorance. 

Prerogative

I think if I asked most people these days about the divine right of kings, they would tell me that the idea that the accident of someone's birth should determine whether they are allowed to rule us is an archaic nonsense. We have a royal family a bit like we don't knock down the Houses of Parliament and build a better one: because it's a nice tradition. In a modern democratic society, the idea of an enhanced set of rights and privileges being conferred on a person just because of their birth is anathema. Yet in the UK, we all benefit from the privilege of birth and we never question it. We are all allowed to live free from the threat of torture*, free from the threat of war, with comprehensive social care** and free health care**. We are allowed the expectation of one of the highest standards of living in the world**, all due to the accident of where we were born. Of course many people consider their place of birth to define who they are in some special way; we place a lot of stock in our roots. I've never really been able to understand why. On a good day, I can understand loyalty to one's family, but loyalty to a particular place? If the events that occurred to you in that place shaped who you are as a person, do you feel loyalty to the other circumstances that were key in those events? I would guess not, because they will mostly be intangible, or fleeting. Location is often the only abstract element of these events we can phsyically return to. Given that memory is so important to human identity, it is no surprise that the most solid reminder of any memory - it's originating location - becomes significant by association. It will be interesting to see whether, as the associative tags of memory are increasingly outsourced to entirely portable digital media, location retains its primacy of association. 

Of course many of our feelings about a certain location are defined by what it is not; a location is often defined in opposition to another location. In the UK, one of the greatest markers of national identity is not being another nationality: for the Scots and the Welsh, it's about not being English, for the English, it's about not being French (or German, or pretty much any other nationality really). I'm not going to get into how the Northern Irish see themselves, because i wouldn't know where to start. Increasingly though, whilst we may bicker amongst ourselves, we will define ourselves by the fact that we are all not in the environmentally ruined parts of the world. This green and pleasant land will remain relatively green if not so pleasant over the next 100 years, making it ever more attractive to those who live in the increasingly yellow or red parts of the world. Whilst we may still want to escape from the hideous weather that global warming is likely to bring to our country for a holiday, millions of others will be looking to get in to the still fertile areas of Northern Europe for a life. 

This summer, the war of words has raged across the continent about how to deal with tens of thousands of people attempting to find a better life in Europe, about whether they are refugees or economic migrants. Current consensus is that some are the former, others the latter, but you could easily argue that they are all the latter. Like anyone who does anything, peoples' motives for migrating large distances are usually complex and varied. The idea that people will migrate away from a war zone to the nearest place of safety is probably inaccurate if that place of safety is unstable, unwelcomng or poverty stricken. If people have already left their home, they have no reason to chose one destination over another other than economics. By that rationale, as soon as someone leaves their birthplace, whatever their motive for leaving, they become an economic migrant. Only someone too tired or broken is simply going to go just as far as the first place they cannot hear the sound of gunfire. If you no longer had a home, wouldn't you try to get somewhere where you might have a chance of making a decent new one? 

All of the solutions to the refugee/migrant crisis that have been suggested so far have fallen into three basic categories: welcome them with open arms; keep them out with security guards and barbed wire or try to stop them migrating in the first place. This last is the UK's stated position, and I feel that in theory at least, it has merit, indeed I think I have previously suggested just such a course of action on these very servers. Of course my suggestions were more to do with the removal of people's reason to leave than buying them more tents, so their desert refugee camp feels more luxurious. Either way, the current crisis illustrates the didfculty inherent in this strategy: our short attention span when it comes to geopolitics means that we are not willing to make the real effort required to affect change in a region, whilst allowing us to quickly forget that it was our half-arsed meddling that caused many of these problems in the first place. We are not committed enough to be interventionalist but not isolationist enough to stop us from meddling a bit. However, regardless of our level of direct current or historical intervention in any particular war torn desert, the society of plenty that we currently enjoy, that the migrants and refugees from these countries so crave, has come at the cost of a better quality of life in these very same countries. Whether it is pricing them out of the market for the food that they produce, extracting all of their natural resources regardless of cost or changing their climate irreversibly with all the driving and flying that we see as our God given right. The system that has made our country a desirable place to live is not entirely a global zero sum gain, but it is also not entirely without cost; it most definitely contributes directly to making other parts of the world less desirable places to live. We can argue endlessly about the extent of that impact (unless you're one of the knuckle-draggers who still thinks manmade climate change doesn't exist, in which case I do not have time to waste on you, go bang some rocks together), but that there is an impact is undeniable; the fact that our high standard of living causes a lower standard of living for others is a fact. So when another part of the world becomes uninhabitable due to our unwillingness to suffer any form of inconvenience, and the people living there leave to try and find somewhere habitable to live, presumably we will label them disdainfully as economic migrants and put up more barbed wire fences to keep them out. 

Not that the anti immigration lobby are wrong: we don't have space on this little island for everyone, but how we decide who gets to live here is the real challenge. We can't base it on their potential future contribution to the country as we have no idea what that will be (qualifications are no useful guide - what's the point in letting in 500 chemistry PHDs when we're desperately short of lorry drivers?). If we base it on their past contribution, there are probably hundreds of people in the 'Jungle' in Calais right now who have more claim to residency than many people currently resident here (I am thinking mainly about the ones who think that siphoning large amounts of money offshore is somehow beneficial for the rest of us). There are no easy ways to decide who gets to live here. The process is largely abitrary, but I suppose we better get used to it: this summer was not an anomaly, it was a vision of the future. As the consequences of our comforts are felt ever more keenly on the periphery of the equator, we will see increasing numbers of people seeking those comforts for themselves. We will have to get used to the discomfort of witnessing at borders the desperation that the fluke of our birth means we will never have to endure. 

*largely

**for now

Presentation

I was quite surprised by an advert on the tube the other day that claimed First Group were taking the 'unprecedented' step for a UK company of removing their name from the Great Western livery (or logo). Of course this is only truly unprecedented if you don't take into account the thousands of companies with wholly owned subsidiaries that do not bare their parent conpany's name, such as (for a few small examples) Cadbury not being called Kraft Cadbury, Jaguar Landrover not being called Tata Jaguar Landrover, or, if you want a train example, Southern and Great Northern not being called Govia Thameslink Railway Southern and Govia Thameslink Railway Great Northern. So it is only unprecedented if you completely ignore precedent. First Great Western is changing its name to Great Western Railway because the former is associated with an utterly miserable travelling experience whereas the latter is associated with the golden age of train travel. This is nothing more than a marketing exercise and claiming that it is 'unprecedented' is simply an attempt to make this rebranding exercise something special. Even if it was unprecedented (which, just in case you're not sure, it isn't), what is the merit of this act? We are clearly supposed to be astounded by the commercial bravery of this move, but apart from its (nonexistent) unprecedentedness I cannot see what is brave about it. Is the act of drawing attention to your actions (however banal) supposed to make it greater? Didn't we get over this sort of 'look at me' behaviour in childhood? 

I know it's only an advert, but this is not just advertising doublespeak anymore, this is how our world works. It is entirely possible to make entirely baseless claims and expect them to go entirely unchallenged, because no one actually thinks about what they're being told any more; we're all too busy being credulous or outraged by some other baseless assertion. This allows those fluent in the language of this new propaganda to create the empty 'realities' in which much of our world is placed. These 'realities', continually reinforced by a credulous media, rely on our relentlessly unquestioning credulity, they are credualities if you will. The modern creduality will make no secret of the duality of its created reality and the other reality based on facts because it will not need to. This was not the case with perhaps one of the earlier political credualities: Tony Blair's infamous 45 minute claim. In those early days, he had to make up nonexistent security operatives to back up his horseshit excuse for an illegal war. These days, the Tory party don't need to find any makebelieve experts to back up their fantasy that the Labour Party caused the financial crisis by borrowing too much; despite Nobel prize winning economists and the facts categorically refuting it, this has become an unquestioned orthodoxy. This has resulted in the unopposed destruction of of many of the means of wealth creation and redistribution over the last five years in the name of fiscal prudence, whilst nothing meaningful has been done to address the cycle of consumer debt led bubbles that will come back and bite 

us all again*. 

Our society and many of our institutions are founded on created realities. In many ways the legal framework is a codified created reality that has entire professions devoted to resolving the issues that arise when someone steps outside the bounds of that reality. Of course the law is an agreed reality that we arrive at through a combination of collective agreement and rigorous testing of the bounds of that reality. In a strange way the law is a reality that relies on criminals to make it whole: without a testing of the boundaries, we cannot arrive at a complete understanding of what they are. However, this does mean that it is very much a reality created by an understanding of its alternatives, of what lies outside it. It is a reality constantly under scrutiny, constantly being verified; by contrast, the modern credualities ignore even readily available evidence that significantly undermines their fundamental premise. What is the reason for this ostrich-like behaviour? Real life can be a complicated and distressing place and, as we are given the option outsourcing an increasing amount of our concerns to technology, we appear to have less concern about how those problems are dealt with. That's not surprising; technology is both increasingly complex and increasingly sophisticated, meaning that we are both less inclined to understand it and encouraged not to need to understand it. We become trained to believe that the complexities of the world will be navigated for us and we need not concern ourselves with how that happens. Some of us convince ourselves that we are still actively engaged with the 'real' world, but usually this is simply responding to fairly reductive sound bites that are spoon-fed to us in the most limited way (with the technology we use giving it the appearance of sophistication). 

It is likely that I am (as usual) being too pessimistic. It is likely that most of the people who read this will be insulted by the idea that they simply swallow any old crap as fact, but then so would the tens of millions of people who if stopped on the street and asked who caused the 2008 financial crisis would earnestly reply "Gordon Brown" and they clearly swallow a lot of old crap as fact. This is the problem: democracy is the rule of the majority, but if the majority simply believe whatever they are told by their rulers, is it really a democracy any more? It is not apathy that is the problem, it is credulity; people think they're engaged because they get angry about the stories they are fed, but their rage is misplaced. And perhaps sadder than impotent rage is misplaced rage. 

* indeed Gideon Osborne's recovery plan has been based on a property bubble in the south east and flogging our assets to the Chinese.