Nuclear Not Happening
Posted: October 24, 2022 Filed under: Energy, Society Leave a commentSaturday November 17th 2035
No mains electricity for the last two days, the fifteenth cut of the year lasting more than 24 hours, no sun for the photovoltaics we got ten years ago, no wind for the roof turbine. Main problem is the freezer. If there’s no power tomorrow, no sun and no wind, we’ll have to put the generator on. That’s not the automatic response any longer, because it’s an elderly model running on petrol, which is super expensive while pensions are meagre.
We have five gallons in a drum and we try not to use it. Why has the power failed when we haven’t had a storm? Simple, we are over-dependent on sun and wind for our electricity, and the nuclear stations that we were promised are still mired in delays. Only three stations are still working, that’s Sizewell B, and the two at Hinkley Point C. They have a total capacity of 4,476 MW, and I think last year they produced about 33 billion kWh. That’s about 470 kWh for each of Britain’s 70 million people compared with 910 kWh from nuclear generation for each of the 65 million back in 2020.
It’s about time we stopped using our freezer at all and relied wholly on preserving jars, smoking and salt!
Laughing at a Good Life
Saturday November 24th 2035
The power returned on Monday. Wil cycled over today and we watched an ancient comedy repeat from about 60 years ago, called The Good Life about a couple called Tom and Barbara Good who decided to become mini-smallholders in their home in suburban Surbiton, and to live entirely on the output from their garden and allotment, to the chagrin of their conventional friends and neighbours, status-aware Margo Leadbetter and executive husband Jerry. The Goods are cash-poor but live in a comfortable house and always have fuel for their range. They have clothes from their old life, vegetables and eggs from their expansive super-sized garden and no need of entertainment because the Leadbetters unknowingly provide all of that. Margo is forever in social combat with Mrs Dooms-Paterson, who is at the pinnacle of the Surbiton suburban hierarchy. The Good Life ended after three years, about the length of time that Tom and Barbara could reasonably survive on garden produce and items they had bought earlier, before the roof of their middle-class house began to leak and the paintwork to flake off. It’s different now, not a choice any longer, and even tougher because houses with large gardens have not been built for decades. The surnames are revealing: who could quarrel with the Goods, trying their best, but Leadbetter, lead-better, suggests we should regard the rebels as crazy and follow the Leadbetter path to salaried material contentment. While it lasted.
Neighbours from the Maldives
Posted: October 14, 2022 Filed under: Climate, Society Leave a commentSunday August 5th 2035
Azaan Hassan, his wife Zeena and their two girls Ainy and Niha, were settled in our village exactly a year ago by the local authority, in a house requisitioned from an absentee landlord, in the same street as me. They lived in the Maldives until the islands were lost to rising waters. Their journey here involved boats, lorries, and selling the few possessions they had left, chiefly Zeena’s jewellery and Azaan’s gold watch, a family heirloom. The government did not want to let any of them in, but they had no home, no country to be sent back to. The London government, which long opposed all attempts to devolve foreign policy to the UK’s nations, just said ‘No Entry’ but the Wales Government set up a resettlement scheme for 5,000 families and one of them came to our village. They have lost touch with so many of their relatives and friends, who may or may not be alive. Azaan is a make-do and mend mechanic and keeps our petrol and diesel vehicles operating, important because we don’t have timetabled public transport anymore, and there was a backlash against electric cars when it became clear just how polluting they are to make, how difficult to recycle, and how they propelled demand for electricity way above the capacity of the National Grid. So we plan journeys with great care and travel as little as possible. It limits our world view, but we do have an electric community minibus (reluctantly, because it’s not cheap to keep it on the road), and we have learnt a lot from the Hassans. Zeena makes clothes from recycled materials, Ainy does this too, and Niha grows vegetables on the school playing field. The school was closed in 2015, when the local authority decided to bus the children to town 10 miles away, at huge cost, on the basis that large schools are better. The education authority let a not-for-profit group have the school on a 30-year lease, I joined in and we opened a local history centre. Then the buses stopped three years ago and we opened a little general shop, a craft skills centre – and once again, a school.
The largest building on the school site is stone with high ceilings and a slate roof, so it is bearable in our hot summers, but heavy rains test the roof too much. We can’t afford to replace it completely so it’s buckets and patch-ups. Earlier this century the costs of constantly rebuilding weather-damaged homes, roads, railways, power lines, whole villages and towns, were ignored, partly because the reconstruction works counted towards the economic growth that our government, most governments, still desired. It looked as though we had a supercharged economy, but all we were doing was to use up resources quicker and quicker and pump more carbon dioxide and noxious gases into the heating atmosphere. People were still reluctant to say ‘Stop’. They didn’t think their lifestyles would change so dramatically, so fast. I think it’s called ‘optimism bias’. The Hassans are not optimistic any longer, I’m not, my late cousin Pat was not, but I still meet people who think the worst has already happened and that this is just a temporary blip.
Scenes from an imagined future, if we are no longer dominated by the kleptogarchy
Posted: October 10, 2022 Filed under: Society Leave a commentWhat Happened to the Revolution? Sunday July 22nd 2035
I remember the revolution of 2024 to 2027. It petered out in the heat and humidity of summer 2027. Energy prices had skyrocketed, impacting everything else. There was some financial help from the government of the time, but by the end of 2024 more than five households in ten could not pay their bills without borrowing. The debt overhang collapsed into a political crisis, we experienced riots, strikes, violent uprisings. We had shortages of everything. The failing government tried to cling on, while it over-filled the jails with the protesters it had criminalised. Eventually so many ministers resigned that the government crumbled. Turnout in the general election that followed was low, because people were exhausted and dispirited. The new administration didn’t pretend that a return to affluence was possible, we would all have to manage with less. And we did. No more super rich, they agreed to heavy taxation or they left. In years past the super-rich would have persuaded enough of us that they were indispensable, that without them the economy would crumble, but not this time. The mystique had evaporated. The new government was labelled socialist, but it was more complicated than that, a rich or untidy mixture, depending on your point of view, of not-for-profit and state-owned enterprises, individual and family businesses and co-ops. The deluge of dubious money flowing into the City of London slowed to a streamlet and now it is a dribble. Redundant bank buildings were converted into homes. We are poorer, more self-reliant, and think of progress as the abandonment of 19th and 20th century notions of humans as the dominators, the big beasts of the living world. It is a long road back. A hot, dusty road.
Perennials: Thursday July 26th 2035
I hesitate to write ‘what a hot day’ because it’s nearly always hot, energy-sapping hot, and I work in the garden only at dawn and dusk. In the middle of the day, I try to sleep. Now that I’m 89, the bones creak a bit, but we need to keep going. My daughter Rose visited on Sunday, travelling the ten miles from Llandew on her electric bike, and we sat under the green striped umbrella in the garden. There’s a hosepipe ban, like every summer now, but I have water butts to collect any rain that drains off the house, garage and shed roofs. The butts are not full so I prioritise the vegetables, because they are such a vital part of our diet. A few years back I started growing a lot of perennial vegetables, like Babington’s leeks and perpetual spinach, and count myself lucky to have a garden, especially considering the food shortages we often face. We grow and swap, and order what we can’t produce ourselves – flour, rice, pasta, sugar, salt, pepper — through the community council’s purchasing group. Tea and coffee are such luxuries now, but we do have milk, butter and cheese from Dai Davies’ dairy just outside the village, on the flatter land of the Geitho valley where the dense sward of native grasses helps to retain moisture in the soil.
Money is a problem because of course old-age pensions have not been uprated for inflation since 2030 and so they buy less and less every year. Inflation now is not due to strong demand, but to shortages of supply. I expect pension payments will stop completely before long, and it will be as if David Lloyd George had never introduced them back in 1909. They rescued the aged and infirm from the fear of the workhouse, which we thought had been banished for good. We will all have to be inventive. We barter, spend any cash we can get hold of, and worry about how the next generations will cope. There aren’t many public services left, it’s down to community groups to organise what they can. Rose has a small salary from the regional council for her work with disadvantaged children, but it’s only a half of her income of 15 years ago. Then her husband Henri was alive, but he died nearly three years ago of sepsis after what seemed a minor cut, but it became infected. The infection did not respond to antibiotics.
Small Farms Retrieved from the Past
Posted: November 5, 2020 Filed under: Agriculture, Society | Tags: John Seymour, Retrieved from the Future, small farms 1 CommentTwo new books, one by Colin Tudge and one by Chris Smaje, reviewed here and here, advocate regenerative agriculture on lots more small farms across the UK, indeed across the world. A quarter of a century ago, John Seymour wrote a novel called Retrieved from the Future in which he made very similar arguments.
John Seymour, the self-sufficiency guru and author of Self Sufficiency and The Complete Book of Self Sufficiency among more than three dozen other books, set Retrieved from the Future in an unidentified year of the 21st century, quite early in the century because some characters remembered World War II. There has just been a disaster called the CRASH, triggered by jihadis destroying the oil wells of the Arabian Gulf. Very little oil was getting through. Bob Hurlock, a character with a great deal in common with John Seymour himself, writes:
“In December of 20__ we had a Conservative government in England and all the usual things were happening – strikes, bankruptcies, thousands being flung out of work and the inner cities decaying. Plenty of crime and all that and nobody seemed to know what to do about it. It was obvious – to me at least – that the whole thing was due for collapse anyway. And it was the coldest winter I’d seen in my lifetime and that made it all a lot worse”. (Ch.1 p.6)
The story is set on the Suffolk coast, an area familiar to John Seymour, who also wrote The Companion Guide to East Anglia, and was himself a nautical man familiar with sailing boats. Despite describing the hardships of lives suddenly without oil, and without all the conveniences made possible by oil, the novel does not mention climate change or the surveillance state in which we now all live. When John Seymour was writing the book in the years/months before publication in 1996, mobile telephony was very young. The world’s first text message was sent only in December 1992, and large brick-like portable phones were beginning to be used in businesses, but were still out of the ordinary. As for surveillance, cameras recording the movements of people have, like other monitoring paraphernalia, mushroomed since 2000, the year of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which might also be called the Rollout of Investigatory Powers Act. Consideration of climate change was mainly under the radar. The United Nations Framework Convention was signed in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, but the issue only gradually, slowly, edged into public consciousness.
So when John Seymour was imagining Retrieved from the Future, the violence he thought would follow the last days of oil was between a demoralised Army, and guerrilla groups carrying old-fashioned firearms on foot and bicycles, cutting telephone wires and taking cover in pine forests. It was not remote-controlled Death by Drone. In fact, drones do not have a role in the book although they have been common in military operations since the early 1980s.
The point is that, due to weather instability and climatic deterioration, and easier ways of controlling and killing people remotely, building new ways of life after some colossal shock will be even more difficult now than John Seymour assumed in the book.
In his little republic of Gretford, somewhere imaginary between Felixtowe and Southwold, extractive monoculture farming by corporations – his was ‘London Farming’ — quickly fails for lack of fuel for farm machinery, for lack of agrochemicals derived from and manufactured using oil, for lack of veterinary treatments for the over-intensively housed livestock. In this complete breakdown, organic farmer Bob Hurlock and his elected government redistribute the land to new small farmers, who at first have to labour on meagrely-fed stomachs to prepare and plant their land, while also regenerating the meagrely-fed soil with seaweed or leaf mould, any source of carbon and nutrients they can find. Trade by sailing barge replaces trade overland, which is fine for a coastal district but not so great for a city like Birmingham, base in the book for the army that tried, but eventually failed, to seize and hold power.
As for Wales (where I live, and where John Seymour lived for many years), the nation declares itself independent and areas of England west of the Dee and the Severn ask to join.
It is a hopeful story in the end. Bob Hurlock says:
“As the year wore on, we found that we could spare children from the fields, and they began to go to school again. Sam Packard, our Minister of Education, helped and advised by various people who were interested, devised a completely new system of teaching children. They were not so much taught, as helped to read and write and do arithmetic, but their education was based on handicrafts, arts, agriculture. The aim was that every child should leave school with at least a working knowledge of all the crafts that were worth practising, and of agriculture and stockmanship, but also with a first-class knowledge of one chosen craft. Our aim – the ideal for which we were to strive – was the educated peasant-craftsman.” (Ch.23 p.224)
’Peasant’ is used here as a term of respect for a self-sufficient person who has mastered several skills, and it can of course apply to men and women. But in the book there is only one major woman character, Bob’s wife Jessie, and the women’s work is largely cooking, gardening and the Arts, which is fine as far as it goes, but places the author firmly in the 20th century, in which he lived for all but four years, dying aged 90 in 2004. But his take on soil improvement, habitat diversity, mixed farming, and people working their own land, is in tune with Colin Tudge and Chris Smaje. Oil-based farming is the temporary aberration, and restorative farming should – will, if we are sensible – become the standard to which we aspire. We will have to turn the planning and financial systems on their heads to allow new small farms on land valued according to its productive capacity and not its notional capital price, and these are alien ideas to many, at least unless and until we experience a CRASH shock.
And now the disappearance of oil is just one of the tsunami events facing us. The longer we take to change, the harder it will be.
Retrieved from the Future sets out John Seymour’s philosophy in an entertaining and thought-provoking way, and as a bonus contains sections written in Suffolk dialect, heard much less often now that the countryside has emptied of people who worked in it. Published in 1996 by New European Publications Ltd, ISBN 1-872410-05-7, paperback, 235 pages.
Living in a time of contraction: random notes from a corner of rural Wales
Posted: March 23, 2014 Filed under: Eco Politics, Politics, Society | Tags: GDP, Long-term thinking, Retirement Leave a commentIn the Co-op supermarket, people’s trollies containing fewer processed foods than hitherto. More vegetables, fruit, bread, less confectionery and cake. That’s what it looks like. Also signs of supply strains, good quality fresh produce shifts fast, and there isn’t enough for everyone.
Quiet roads outside commuting times. In the evening I can drive 10 miles back from nearest town without seeing another vehicle. We only drive when we have to.
Raising money for good causes. Less easy than it was, but then I am not very persuasive. Not much spare cash around.
Empty shops. Llandovery, several miles to the east, reflects the lack of local spending power. Even the pound shop has closed, the convenience store across the street, the seconds clothing shop near the (too expensive) car park, a good bakery and patisserie, HSBC bank, the local museum. The Post Office is scheduled to close. The closures have come at a time when people can afford to travel less, when subsidies are being pulled from bus services, when in our part of the world road maintenance spending is to be cut by a third.
Official policies continue to favour centralisation, but they are behind the curve of reality. Most politicians still seem to be living in the expectation of renewed economic growth which will pay for yet more centralisation.
However, we have already monetised previous voluntary, unpaid activities, such as care of the elderly and childcare, to boost Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures. There is not much left to monetise, so it was no surprise that in the Budget last Wednesday the Chancellor freed pensioners to spend their funds just as they like, instead of having to buy an annuity, or enrol in a tightly regulated income drawdown plan, the situation until now. Some new pensioners will be cautious, no doubt, but there are bound to be others who are tempted to spend – and that spending will inflate GDP. But is it wise in the long term? What happens when the spendthrift retirees run out of money and are subsisting on the new universal pension of about £7,300 a year, at today’s prices? Will that level of state pension be affordable? Will it be allowed to diminish in real value, so that pensioners sink into real poverty?
Short-term thinking has got us into a real mess. We are entering the era of resource limits without a strategy for fair distribution, without even a strategy for informing people about the likely trajectories of decline.
But then, for those who have scrambled to the top of the crumbling pyramid, the fate of the people below them is not always an important priority.
Centralisation Shifts Costs onto the Public
Posted: November 27, 2013 Filed under: Planning, Society | Tags: Climate change, Public sector Leave a commentWho benefits from service centralisation?
Usually the costs are just shifted from the organisation doing the centralising onto the people who use the service, for example in costlier travel and more time spent in transit, individualised burdens with impacts that are insufficiently understood.
Here is an example from rural Wales:
http://westwalesnewsreview.wordpress.com/2013/11/27/the-wheels-on-the-bus-go/
Zero Hours Contracts: Divisive and Exploitative
Posted: April 20, 2013 Filed under: Employment, Society | Tags: Economic contraction, Zero hours contracts Leave a commentby Pat Dodd Racher
Zero-hours contracts bring short-term benefits to employers but remove income security from those workers unfortunate enough to have to sign them. Those workers are growing in number, heading rapidly towards 250,000 in the UK. By the fourth quarter of 2012, 200,000 employees had been hired on zero-hours contracts, meaning they have to be available for work when required but are not guaranteed any work, or income.
This regressive phenomenon reminds me of the plight of landless farm labourers after the appropriation of communal lands by rich individuals by means of the Enclosure Acts. Without land and dependent on irregular wages, country dwellers flocked to work in the factories of the Industrial Revolution.
A big difference now is that workers on zero-hours contracts do not have permanent, paid jobs to go to. Like unpaid interns, they are casualties of economic contraction. The 200,000 on zero-hours contracts in the latter months of 2012 were a quarter more than the 161,000 recorded a year earlier, and approaching three times more than the 75,000 reported in the final three months of 2005. An estimated 23% of employers with over 100 staff are making use of zero-hours contracts, according to a report in The Guardian* in April 2013.
Mark Mitchell, chief executive of recruitment firm Meridian Business Support, had a letter published in The Sunday Times business section on April 14th 2013, headlined ‘Zero hours give bosses vital flexibility’. Mr Mitchell said that “as long as both the worker and employer are content, the model is beyond reproach”.
He did accept some downsides, notably that jobseekers “hoping for regular income and work patterns do not always get them” but defended this in the interests of the flexible labour market.
This type of contract does give employers bucket-loads of flexibility, but workers do not know from week to week whether they will earn anything at all, and thus they cannot make financial plans and risk not being able to support themselves or their families unless they claim state welfare benefits.
Zero-hours contracts are being used as a loophole to escape the Agency Worker Regulations. These are European Union regulations which came into force in the UK in October 2011, and which require staff supplied by agencies to be given the same pay rates, hours, annual leave, breaks and rest periods as workers who are directly employed. All the time that zero-hours arrangements are legal, employers are likely to use them because they cut costs.
They probably don’t do much for staff loyalty, but employers do not seem bothered, probably believing that there is no shortage of new recruits.
Mr Mitchell believes that the numbers with zero-hours jobs will grow and grow, as employers respond to auto-enrolment into workplace pensions (being phased in between 2012 and 2018), and to real-time PAYE notification to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (from April 2013), by cutting back on job contracts offering specified pay for specified hours, and replacing them with the obligation to be available for work, in return only for pay when the employer wants work done.
Employment on this uncertain basis is a step back towards a past we thought had been left behind, a past of serfdom and slavery, a past in which there is no social contract and in which workers are depersonalised units of cost.
The media, argued Mr Mitchell, “does not fully understand Britain’s economic reliance on the agility and dynamism of the labour market. Small businesses need flexibility to be able to grow”. It would not be so bad if the flexibility were shared, if banks said “repay your loan when you can”, if suppliers said “use our materials and pay us when you feel the time is right”, but it is only the workers who are being forced into ‘flexibility’.
In some respects zero-hours jobs are more exploitative, albeit less physically cruel, than some manifestations of slavery. Slave owners had to house and feed their slaves or they were not capable of working, but modern employers have no compulsion to ensure their workers have a roof over their heads and food in their homes. Is this the society we really want? Or is it the latest manifestation of the attitude that there is “no such thing as society”?
* ‘Big rise in firms hiring staff on zero-hours contracts’, by Phillip Inman, The Guardian, April 2nd 2013.
Radical Retreat: LSE Tamed by Transnational Powers
Posted: April 15, 2013 Filed under: Society | Tags: BBC, London School of Economics, North Korea Leave a commentby Pat Dodd Racher
A long email from the London School of Economics arrived yesterday afternoon, complaining about the BBC’s decision to show undercover filming by a ‘Panorama’ team in North Korea. The team was accompanying members of the Grimshaw Society, which is linked to the LSE’s Department of International Relations. The missive seemed to assume that I, as an LSE graduate, would be ‘on their side’. Instead, it reinforced my view that the LSE has, perhaps irrevocably, abandoned its founding mission.
For several years it has seemed to me that the LSE has become an educational arm of global business, and no longer prioritises the purpose of its motto ‘Rerum cognoscere causas’, to know the causes of things.
The LSE was founded by Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Graham Wallas and George Bernard Shaw, all members of the Fabian Society, in 1895. The society was then (more than now, I would argue) a well of political ideas with a focus on social justice achieved in non-violent ways. H G Wells, R H Tawney and Annie Besant were all among the members, powerful intellects who challenged traditional notions of the social order.
Nowadays the LSE seems to represent the global leadership class, rather than challenging it. There are individual academics who interrogate dominant understandings of social justice, but the school is now well and truly part of the Establishment.
Back to the email. One paragraph read: “While this particular trip was run in the name of a student society, the nature of LSE’s teaching and research means that aspects of North Korea are legitimate objects of study in several of our academic disciplines. Indeed, LSE academics work on aspects of many politically sensitive parts of the world, including by travel to those locations (sic). It is vital that their integrity is taken for granted and their academic freedom preserved. The BBC’s actions may do serious damage to LSE’s reputation for academic integrity and may have seriously compromised the future ability of LSE students and staff to undertake legitimate study of North Korea, and very possibly of other countries where suspicion of independent academic work runs high.”
What’s more important, I thought, the possibility for a handful of academics to visit the world’s more unpleasant corners, or the potential for millions of Britons to learn something of the hardships afflicting the impoverished masses of North Korea, hidden from the rest of the world? In a closed society like North Korea, independent journalists are as welcome as a plague of bird flu. There are tourist trips – Beijing-based Koryo Tours runs several – but by all accounts visitors are very carefully managed.
LSE’s three most important higher education partnerships, according to its website, are with Columbia University in New York, Sciences Po in Paris – and with Peking University in Beijing. I wonder if the loud protestation of “deception” from LSE has Beijing as its target, rather than Pyongyang? China is North Korea’s nearest and largest ally, and so LSE may be very keen for more students and research contracts to come from China.
The students on the trip, none of them innocents abroad because the Grimshaw Society is for students of international relations, knew that undercover journalism would be one outcome. They knew the journalism would reach the public domain.
Sir Peter Sutherland, LSE’s Irish-born chairman of Council, has been particularly forceful in condemnation of the BBC. Sir Peter is a mover and shaker in globalisation, international finance and free trade, and while he is eminently distinguished in all these fields and more, from my perspective his position at the LSE signals a shift towards academia more as a branch of commerce. Sir Peter is chair of Goldman Sachs International, and a member of the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group, which is composed mainly of leading politicians, business chiefs and government technocrats, and holds private conferences to discuss global issues. He was chairman of the board at oil-and-energy company BP until June 2009, and in February of that year left the board of the state-rescued Royal Bank of Scotland Group after approving former chief Fred Goodwin’s £700,000-a-year pension.
One highly influential post he held between 1993 and 1995 was as director general of GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which became the World Trade Organisation in 1995. Before that, his roles included European Commissioner for Competition and chair of (later bailed-out) Allied Irish Banks.
Sir Peter’s positions at the intersections of industry, finance and government cast a glow or a shadow, depending on your point of view, over the LSE. Either way, the Fabian experiment in education for social justice is now a poster child for the power of Business Rampant.
At least, that’s how I see it.
The View from Mullion Cove: Mrs Thatcher and My Diary
Posted: April 14, 2013 Filed under: Economics, Society | Tags: Economics, Margaret Thatcher, Thatcherism, Unemployment Leave a commentby Pat Dodd Racher
May 3rd 1979. The date of the late Baroness Thatcher’s entry to No. 10 Downing Street prompted me to look up the diary I kept at the time. Flicking through the pages, I came to August 28th 1980:
“At home (the UK) more than 2,000,000 people are registered as unemployed. Mrs T says she will not alter policy. I think MLR (minimum lending rate) must come down, and incomes must be subject to a policy – i.e. maximum increase of 10% for 1981, with concessions for the lower paid. An increase in child benefit and long-term social security, also in retraining schemes and investment aids for ventures with long-term potential for increasing employment –
- Recycling plants
- Repair shops
- Manufacturing from organic renewables (wood, fibres, leather, etc)
We have to rediscover pre-Industrial Revolution technology and update that. The emphasis must be on cutting the cost of living and educating the public to accept that much spending is merely conspicuous waste. “It keeps people in jobs,” they will counter.” I didn’t have an answer to this accusation at the time. It’s not that logical to complain about high unemployment and then argue for lower consumption. Looking back, Thatcherism might have worked better if programmes for sustainable industries had been introduced during the 1980s, but all we got was Big Bang, and unregulated, very unsustainable greed in the financial sector.
Other topics to hit the diary in June, July and August 1980, just over a year into Mrs T’s premiership and when I had two small children and a full time job on British Farmer & Stockbreeder, were the shipyard strikes in Gdansk, Poland, by workers intent upon setting up independent trades unions, which led to the rise of shipyard electrician Lech Walesa and the Solidarity union. Today, it is hard to reconcile Mrs T’s support for Walesa – she visited him in 1988, shortly before the ‘Iron Curtain’ dissolved into holes and then rusted away – with the damage she deliberately inflicted on British trades unions, but Solidarity was a weapon against Communism, which for her was the death of Enterprise.
Nearer to home, at Reed International where British Farmer was based, there were union troubles aplenty. The National Union of Journalists demanded a 26% pay rise, a closed shop, a 30-hour week, longer holidays, jobs kept open during prison sentences, time off for ‘trade union training’…. “Completely unrealistic,” I wrote. This over-the-top demand probably marked the end of the good times for employees, because for the rest of the 1980s there was more fear than enthusiasm, fear of redundancy, of demotion, and of numbers, of the numbers in the monthly trading accounts which were used to make journalists very well aware that they did not bring in the money, but were costs. It was the rise of the Audit Culture.
Before that set of NUJ demands, we enjoyed good pay and were given the expenses to get out and about to do our jobs. We did not regurgitate press releases, but in later years that was often the default option.
Elsewhere, President Tito of Yugoslavia died, setting in train the events leading to the break-up of this amalgam of Balkan territories. Mount St. Helens erupted in Washington state in the USA “with the force of 100 Hiroshimas”. That’s what I heard then, anyway. The Russians were bombing Afghanistan, American hostages in Iran reached eight months in captivity, US cruise missiles were coming to Berkshire. At home, “strict monetarism is forcing firms into liquidation. The strong £ restricts exports, inflation damps home demand, stocks of goods accumulate, interest rates are too high for safe borrowing. Short time, closures, lay-offs – the spiral intensifies”.
On July 10th, I wrote that “more than 1,100 manufacturing jobs have been lost in Britain this week – every week of this year, according to the TV programme I am watching, about companies going bust. This year about 6,000 firms are likely to have to close.” I went back to the refrain I have been uttering ever since: “We need people trained in repairs, adaptation, recycling…. We are on a small planet and have to make our resources last.”
Events even indirectly associated with trade unionism were discouraged. In July I went to the Tolpuddle rally in Dorset, to commemorate the Tolpuddle Martyrs, farmworkers who were transported to Australia in 1834 for daring to form a friendly society and worker’s union.
“The main issue at the rally seemed to be Dorset Council’s plan to completely scrap school meals. Jim Callaghan (the former Labour prime minister) and a bevy of secret service men were there. The police directing traffic were positively discouraging about us attending the rally. We weren’t allowed to park by the road, even though it had been closed to through traffic. A policeman on a motor bike kept whizzing up and down just to make sure. We had to park two miles away, in Athelhampton.”
One individual event I have remembered ever since was a brush with possible death in Mullion Cove at the end of July. I was down in Cornwall, visiting farms, and one evening headed for Mullion Cove to take some photographs. “The tide was right in, the sea a churning cauldron. I wanted to photograph some spray, so walked out onto the jetty – unwisely. A vast wave was sweeping towards me. I clung on to the railings as it broke over me. Open sea on one side, swirling harbour on the other – both dangerous. Mullion Cove is a tiny harbour between craggy, cave-ridden cliffs. The rollers were booming against the cliff base, an awesome sound.”
Well, I did not drown in Mullion Cove, but the destructive power of the sea strikes me as a metaphor for the philosophy of Thatcherism: wave after wave of demolition, a free-for-all which flattened the flood defences of community solidarity. ‘New Labour’ softened the impact between 1997 and 2010 but with borrowed money, and now the poor are being forced to pick up the tab.
Jimmy Savile, courtrooms and notions of ‘them’ and ‘us’
Posted: March 16, 2013 Filed under: Politics, Society | Tags: Jimmy Savile, libel law, unconscious bias 1 CommentFirst discover hidden bias, secondly dismantle it
Institutionalised class and power differentials give entrenched authorities an advantage that is not interrogated sufficiently. Joe P from the down-at-heel estate, who left school at 16, has a part-time labouring job and no savings, is unlikely to win legal arguments against opposition with unlimited funding.
Bias in favour of a particular set of understandings helps to explain why some people are believed more than others. Thinking of the Jimmy Savile case, a TV celebrity enmeshed in several power networks, we have learnt that young boys were not believed, girls ‘at risk’ were not believed, hospital patients were not believed, and patients in a secure mental hospital didn’t raise complaints because they already knew they would not be believed. That’s why they were chosen as victims.
Choosing who you pick a fight with is just as important as what you pick a fight about. Our culture conditions us, as a society, to respect people who have attained positions of power and responsibility, a conditioning which makes the achievement of social change difficult because networks of authority act to reinforce their own advantages. Power networks are similar to families in that members tend to believe others in the same group more than those from groups who live differently and socialise differently. People in power networks also tend to have access to many more resources than Joe P.
Reflecting on a judgement in London last week, in which an amateur blogger lost a libel action against a local authority chief executive, the outcome did not surprise me because:
- The council had voted to fund the chief executive’s action, so it was effectively an individual versus an institution — the institution which runs the county where the blogger lives.
- The judge, an acknowledged expert in media law, concluded that the evidence provided to him by public officials was more convincing than the evidence of one amateur blogger.
I am not commenting on the judge’s decision, which is of course explained logically and in great detail, and given the facts presented to him makes sense to me as a reader unacquainted with all the fine points of the case. Instead, I am commenting on the social context in which we all make decisions. Do we make enough effort to discover our biases and then to deconstruct them?
The mid-20th century American social critic and author Vance Packard (1914-1996) wrote in The Hidden Persuaders,[1] referring to an experiment reported in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, that “people’s memories were ‘significantly better’ in recalling material that harmonized with their own political viewpoint or ‘frame of reference’. There was a clear tendency for them to forget the material that didn’t harmonize with their own preconceived notions”.
The need to engage with people who are, on the surface, unlike ourselves is fundamental if we are to understand each other better. As Sir Winston Churchill is supposed to have said, at a private White House lunch on June 26th 1954, “to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war”. How much more democratic it would be if we could achieve a political system in which there is far more jaw-jaw taking place outside the courtroom, and in which there is greater emphasis on reaching consensus. Here in the UK we are too adversarial, in politics, in law and in business. To become more co-operative, we first have to start dismantling the biases which perpetuate notions of ‘them’ and ‘us’.
Pat Dodd Racher
[1] Page 152 of the 1962 Pelican edition. The Hidden Persuaders was originally published by David McKay in 1957.
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