Joe's Jottings

Category: philosophy

  • When Ministers are right to fire advisors

    nutt_bbcnewI think it’s safe to say that these days I rarely agree with the behaviour of Government Ministers.  Part of it is a knee jerk reaction (:) ) and part of it is that Government Ministers rarely seem to exhibit a capability in their jobs above that of Jim Hacker – without the aid of Sir Humphrey.  But, much to my dismay, I found myself agreeing with the Home Secretary with regard to the firing of his Drug’s Advisor, Professor David Nutt.  Now,  I have no intention in getting in to the rights and wrongs of Cannabis classification or whether illegal drugs are more dangerous than alcohol and tobacco.  My thoughts here are on teh roles and responsibilities of advisers.

    It’s inevitable and highly desirable that Ministers will have access to a wide range of advisers to help them and their departments come to policy decisions.  The role of any advisor is to advise;  that statement may appear to be a tautology but it seems that some advisers believe their role is to actually make policy.  It isn’t.  When a Government policy fails, it’s incumbent on the Minister to fall on his or her sword.  (OK…that’s how it should be, but I appreciate that that doesn’t happen much these days!)  the advisor responsible for giving the advice that led to a policy being made is almost certainly going to be unknown to the public.  The process is that the advisor gives their advice, the Civil Servants and the Ministers and Secretaries chew it over, and eventually the Minister decides and takes it to Cabinet for approval.

    It’s similar to some of the consultancy work I do – I (as Advisor) am briefed on a problem by my client (Minister).  I advise the client to the best of my professional abilities, and the client then takes the choice to go with my recommendations as given, implement part of what I suggest or use my consultancy report to line his cat’s litter tray.  I obviously hope that it won’t be the latter.

    But that’s the prerogative of the client, whoever they are – to take or not to take your advice.  Whilst you’re on the payroll you may argue your case strongly within the confines of the organisation, but if you don’t get what you want you have two – and ONLY two – choices.  Shut up or quit.

    That is all – if you feel very strongly about your advice not being taken then the only intellectually honest and principled thing to do is to quit the job.  As a consultant I’ve done it maybe once or twice in 20 odd years.  My own thoughts were that there was no point in me being paid and giving advice if it was never taken, I felt I was just taking money for nothing, so I quit.

    What you don’t do is mouth off to teh media or outside the organisation in a way that’s likely to get attention whilst you’re still employed.  That is, in my opinion, disloyal.

    For me, the role of an advisor is like that of an Executive Officer on a ship.  You advise the Captain, you may even question the Captain’s decision, but once that decision has been made you fulfill whatever duties you have in making that decision work.  If you can’t, then ask for a transfer or ersign your commission; don’t try and organise a mutiny.

  • A bundle of needs…

    I appreciate that this is likely to be read as a massive attack on the Welfare State by some, and that I’ll be suspected of channeling the political spirits of Norman Tebbit, Margaret Thatcher and Atilla the Hun by others.  However, that’s not the intention.  As some of you will know, I hold Libertarian views and am a believer in as small a Government as is practicable, but that does not mean that I take the view that the State should not intervene to help those in genuine need.

    This entry grew out of the ongoing study-tidying process that’s been going on for a few weeks now here at the Towers.  I came across a newspaper article that I’d clipped in June of this year, and in the article was an interesting observation from William Beveridge – the architect of the modern UK Welfare State.  In 1948, 6 years after he originally wrote the report that gave ultimately gave birth to the benefits system, he expressed his fear that the reforms he’d introduced might encourage people to be passive about their needs.

    The Government of the day didn’t take his words on board; the rest, as they say, is history, and we’re now able to look at the society that was created and wonder whether the result of 65 years of cradle to grave Welfare State has been, in the words of the journalist Camilla Cavendish who wrote the piece, to reduce people to a bundle of needs.

    And I agree with her; one of the side effects of the Welfare State, especially in the increasingly Nannyish manner that it has been implemented in the last 12 years, is that many people have been dumped in to a dependency culture.  The risk to entitlements and benefits if a job is taken means that many people are not going to run the risk of taking a job that will result in them losing money from their weekly income – and I can see their point.  For all the talk of dignity of work, self respect, etc. the bottom line is that if you don’t have as much money coming in to the household then, in the words of Quark, the ferengi bartender from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – “Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack”.

    In 2007, roughly a third of all Government expenditure was in the from of State Benefits.  This constituted around 11% of GDP, and about half of the population of the UK were recipients of some form of state benefits.  Now, we live in a system where inevitably some people are going to slip to a point where they need state intervention to keep a roof over their heads.  And it’s appropriate that they get that help.  But half the country?  This is obviously not half the households; many households on benefits slip will involve a number of adults.  Some households can’t get much help at all; anyone who runs their own business or is self-employed will understand that if their business hits trouble they are very much on their own unless children are involved. 

    But for those households and individuals who are dependent on benefits, and in many cases have their whole lifestyle driven by the need to maintain their access to the benefits system, let’s take a look at what this means:

    1. There are restrictions on paid and voluntary work that can be done whilst claiming benefits.  In other words, you are effectively being paid to do nothing for part of your week.
    2. The crossover between benefits and work is fraught with problems – it’s very easy to get a nice little job and lose out bigtime in the ancillary benefits that your household may be entitled to.
    3. The problems in moving in to and out of benefits – as may take place if you do contract / temporary work or find yourself on a series of short term contracts (not uncommon in a recession when piece work may be increasingly common) again discourages people from stepping out of the benefits pit to seek ongoing work.
    4. Some people with occasional illness that will prevent them working for a month or so here, a month or so there, again find it easier to stay on sickness and disability benefits rather than step in and out of the workforce and lose the regularity of cashflow of being on benefits.

    There are some people for whom a loosening of the restrictions around working whilst on benefits would be a great advantage.  For example, allowing someone on benefits to do a paid job for a couple of months without losing access to benefits might seem strange, but think about what it would permit:

    1. Ongoing guaranteed income over the first month or so when pay in a new job may not be immediately available.
    2. No sudden shock to the family finances.
    3. The work is bringing in extra money for a month or so – it is worth doing.
    4. At the end of this period then the benefits can be stopped. 

    There are people for whom this sort of movement in and out of the workforce would never be possible, due to illness or disability, and it should therefore be possible to allow them to do voluntary work / temporary work as required again with no financial loss.

    This would require a synchronising of the Tax and Benefits system.  And the Government would also need to make it very clear (and structure tax and benefit regimes accordingly to ensure it) that if you wanted to sit on your backside you could do, but that your income would be less than someone on benefits who is working as and when they can. 

    The aim is to encourage self-value, self-determination and get out of the need trap.  We cannot carry on like we are doing producing multiple generations of families in which no one has worked.  This is wrong, it’s perverse and we simply cannot afford it financially or as a society.

  • Screwtape casts the Net

    The following email arrived in my Inbox this morning.  I’m not sure what to make of it, but I thought I’d share it hear as it has some rather intriguing ideas in it.

    Dear Wormwood,

    You must think we senior tempters spend our heads in the burning sand.  Of course we’re aware of the Internet – we’ve had our influence on it from the very beginning.  There was a time when the humans expressed a concern about going to war based purely on the fact that their pathetic attempts to communicate with each other would fail at the dropping of the first hydrogen bomb.  Old Slitgrubber realised that this was a fine opportunity for us to increase despair by prompting them with a means of improving their communications, and hence making them slightly less squeamish about war.  Of course, it wasn’t the war we were interested in – it was the wondrous sense of fear and despair that such things bring about. 

    Of course, The Enemy was soon on the case – they are just SO bothersome – and managed to wrench some good out of the Internet, prompting it’s use by ‘normal’ humans who could use it to talk to each other,  do business, send greetings – all sorts of nonsense.  But, our Research Department was always on the case and they very soon realised that the Internet still provides a fine opportunity for soul-hunting.  Indeed, it’s use as a campaigning tool for us has improved with every new generation of software.  By Web 4.0 I’m sure it will be delivering souls by the Gigabyte!

    Your proposals are, as always, dear nephew, of mixed value.  Are you sure that some piece of human brain hasn’t got lodged up there with your own?  They range from the blatantly obvious to the abjectly stupid, with fleeting glimpses of items of possible use.  But, we are here to teach and you are here to be taught; I suppose I’d better get on with it.  It’s a big subject; there are many obvious opportunities for temptation out there that can be used in less than obvious ways for our end, but I’ll investigate those at a later date.

    Today I’ll give you a technique of achieving a ‘quick hit’ on your candidate, something that’s useful for …ahem….’grabbing low hanging fruit’.  See how I’m getting all the jargon right?  Who says you can’t teach an old devil new tricks?

    The Internet annihilates time.  Wormwood, to you and I time is something that we don’t take too much notice of.  For the humans it’s critical – many of them run around claiming they don’t have enough time to do this, that and the other whilst wasting what time they do have on activities that don’t benefit them at all – in fact, in many cases, they don’t even get pleasure from what they spend the time doing!   The Internet has greatly helped us here. Email, Immediate Messaging, Facebook and even Text Messaging has allowed us to short circuit their thinking by convincing them that whatever pops up in their electronic in boxes is actually important, rather than just immediate.

    You might be aware of the work of that objectionable human Jung.  Why he couldn’t have just kept spouting the useful materialism of Freud I have no idea, but The Enemy clearly inspired him on more than one occasion and he came up with the following observation – it’s almost as if he was reading the research Department’s report on technological advances and how we can use them:

    “[Most advances] are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications, which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before.  Omnis festinatio ex parte diaboli est – all haste is of the Devil”

    Fortunately for us, the humans don’t take too much notice of such comments and we can still con them in to thinking that all these advances give them time.  What they actually do is eat up their time, encourage them to focus on things that are immediate or that give momentary pleasures, encourage them to forget what’s truly important and reply to all these messages quickly and without deep thought – and hopefully in the process cause offence and irritation to the senders of some of the messages by their thoughtless response.  If we’re really lucky we can encourage a good run of selfishness in the souls we’re interested in, encouraging them to forget activities such as prayer and contemplation  – all by the simple expedient of providing a new game to play online.

    So, Wormwood – see what you can do with your case in terms of getting them to really take on board as many forms of new technology as possible, and, more importantly, encourage them to take their pleasure in the trivial, accelerate the tempo of their lives so that they don’t know whether they’re coming or going.  And then we can really get to work…

    The mail ended here.  I’m going to keep my eye on my inbox to see whether I receive any further missives from Screwtape, who(what??)ever he is.

  • The Duke, The Bankers and let them eat cake..

    There’s a line in Blackadder that sprang to mind today as I read the headlines on the BBC website:

    “If a Cannibal opened your head he wouldn’t have enough brain to cover a water biscuit”

    The headline was this – “Banker bonuses minute, says duke“, the Duke in question being Andrew, Duke of York.   My immediate comment to Twitter was ‘kind of like the Duke’s brain is minute in the scheme of things’, and certainly on the grounds of this comment at this time, not enough to cover that water biscuit. 

    I’m rarely personally abusive about people in the public eye, but this was one of those public utterances that suggests a number of thoughts.

    1. That Andrew is very much the son of the Duke of Edinburgh; such an ability to put one’s foot in one’s mouth must surely be inherited.
    2. That people with a republican sentiment might just have something going for them.
    3. That people in the public eye should employ a good PR person.
    4. And that playboys who wander around the world playing golf for Britain should perhaps belt up about such things.

    OK…rant over.  Maybe scope for a ‘Downfall Mashup’ later.  But for now, back on topic.   Let’s look at what Andrew did, in fact, say:

    “I don’t want to demonise the banking and financial sector. Bonuses, in the scheme of things, are minute. They are easy to target.  A number will have abused their privilege of a bonus, so get rid of the excesses, but don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.”

    According to this article, banker’s bonuses for 2009 will be around £6 billions – yes, billions – due to increased bank profits in 2009 to date.  This is up on 2008, when bonuses were a paltry £4 billions.

    The word ‘minute’ clearly means different things to people in the commanding heights of the British establishment.  The average income for all households in the UK for 2009 is about £30,000.  That 6 billion could pay the household income for a year for 200,000 households in the UK.  Goldman Sachs have recently said they’re putting aside about 600,000,000 for bonuses for it’s near 30,000 staff.  This will result in average bonuses, assuming everyone got teh same, of £20,000.  Of course, what this really means is that some of the GS people will get humongous bonuses again.   Again, even with that average, ‘minute’ is not a word that I would apply to even a £20,000 bonus, when it’s two-thirds of the average income.

    Vince Cable also makes this observation:

    “The investment banks more than any other institutions created the culture of excessive leverage, excessive risk and excessive bonuses that led to the downfall of the financial system. Now they are cashing in and the same bonus culture has returned. The result must be that we are being pushed to the edge of another crash.”

    Given that he’s been more on the nose than most politicians about recent financial crises, I’m getting worried.

    tumbril

    Whether Andrew intended his comments to come over as a ‘let them eat cake’ sort of speech is a moot point.  That’s how it does come over.  And I for one am increasingly sick of being told by people at the top of the heap that things are OK, really, and the guys who broke our economy really do deserve these bonuses, and, hey, it’s great to spend all day gadding about…ah, what the Hell.

    Andrew – and the rest of you out there with lots of money, safe sinecures and no other worries in the morning than whether to take the Rolls, the Bentley or the Helicopter – think before you speak. 

    Think hard, listen to your advisers, look at what is happening in this country.  We’re figuratively dying out here. 

    Where are the bloody tumbrils when you need them?

  • Gazing in to the abyss

    Looking-Into-The-CraterYesterday’s exploration of  ‘What would George say?’ led me to following up a few points of research and whilst browsing around I came across this quote of Orwell’s:

    Here is a saying of Nietzche which I have quoted before, but which is worth quoting again:

    He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself;
    and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.

    ’Too long’, in this context, should perhaps be taken as meaning ‘after the dragon is beaten’.

    The line that struck a chord with me here, and has done for some years now, is ‘the abyss will gaze in to you’.  My topic for today – have we all spent rather too long staring in to the abyss and what have we bought back with us from there?

    I guess a good place to start is with exactly what I mean by ‘the abyss’.  For me it’s that spiritual dark place where your personal and our cultural demons lie.  The trick is that whilst we need to be aware of the fact it’s there, we shouldn’t get ourselves too engrossed in it’s finer geography.   I look at it in the way that CS Lewis spoke of the Devil in ‘The Screwtape Letters’:

    ‘There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors.’

    Over the years I’ve wandered to the edge of my personal abyss a few times and stepped back.  We all have our personal demons – what matters is whether we give them the freedom to do anything.  Show me somone who claims to have no personal demons and I’ll show you a liar.  And then there are those people whose demons are, shall we say, rather more unpleasant than those that most of us have; the criminal, the depraved, the insane.   The problem that we have today, I believe, is twofold – the abyss is now much wider and deeper than it was even 20 years ago, and it impinges more than ever in to our daily lives.

    In 1984, Frankie Goes to Hollywood asked the question “Are we living in a land where sex and horror are the new gods?’  Back then I think the answer was still ‘yes’, but we didn’t really know what was around the corner. Twenty-five years down the line the abyss comes in to our house courtesy of the Internet.  Without sounding too much like Mary Whitehouse on a Sunday Evening,  the Internet, cinema and TV have increasingly bought the baser instincts of human beings to the forefront of our consideration.  I’m not dumb enough to believe that, in the words of Philip Larkin ‘Sexual intercourse began in 1963 (which was rather late for me)‘.  Interest in the more extreme edges of pornography – whether that pornography is the pornography of sex or that of violence – has always been with us and was usually squirrelled away in the far recesses of most people’s minds for a number of reasons:

    Society was more ‘up tight’ – certain forms of behaviour or artistic expression were simply regarded as wrong and tended to be either illegalor seriously frowned upon by society.  Sometimes this was right (IMO) and othertimes it was ridiculous.  But there were boundaries set.

    1. There seemed to be less moral relativism – there seemed to be much more of a concensus view in society as to what was ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.
    2. Extremely violent pornography of graphical violence was difficult to get hold of.
    3. Anyone who DID have extreme interests was typically on their own; they were in no position to talk about it with friends who might be horrified at their interest.

    In these circusmtances, if you went to your abyss, and peered in, and did dwell there a while the risk was pretty minimal for society as a whole.  Your trip was a private one, one not to be shared with anyone.  And for most of us there was the knowldge that certain things were, to put it bluntly, totally wrong.

    The Internet has brought a lot of good in to people’s lives, but it has also amplified the potential for people to gaze deeper and for longer in to the abyss.  It’s had two main impacts:

    1. Extreme sexual and violent imagery is available to everyone more easily than ever before in history.
    2. The sheer scope of the Internet means that it’s inevitable that no matter how extreme a person’s ‘interests’ are, it’s almost inevitable that somewhere in the 1.7 billion Internet users there is someone else with the same interests, and a web site delivering up media to accomodate those interests.

    The impact of these two facts is that people with particularly unpleasant demons in their abyss now find, to their mind, their beliefs and views  validated by the existence of those websites and users.  This permits these individuals to look in to their personal abyss and see nothing wrong with what they see there, and hence feel encouragement to express their views in to the world.  It’s not trendy to be in favour of censorship, but the validation of perversity that seems to be increasingly common surely cannot be healthy for society as a whole.

    The phrase ‘People of the Abyss’ was used by Jack London as the title of a book he wrote in the early 1900s about the poverty of the East End of London;  I believe wholeheartedly that we’re now generating a new breed of people of the abyss – those who’ve started hard and long in to the depths of their abyss, and have bought back their personal demons with them in to the workaday-world.   This new breed of Abyss Dwellers are to be feared and shunned; their moral compass seems to be dictated by ‘it works for me and is no one else’s business what I do’ and they exhibit a lack of respect for the social codes of the society in which they live.

    It’s not just extreme sex and violence that is an issue; I’ve just spent some time watching scenes of anti-fascist demonstrators protesting outside the BBC about the appearance of Nick Griffin of the BNP on BBC’s Question Time.  There is soemthing ironic about a group allegedly demonstrating to preserve democracy by attempting to censor a TV programme.  Perhaps these anti-fascists who’ve ‘fought the dragon’ are in danger of becoming that which they fight?  In George Steiner’s novella ‘The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.’ – written in 1981 – a trial in teh South American jungle allows the 90 year old Hitler, who in this novella survived the fall of Berlin, to explain himself.  One comment made is that those who fought agaisnt him have taken on board many of the characteristics of his regime – in other words, by peering in to teh Nazi abyss and fighting the dragon, they’ve fought for too long and brought parts of the abyss back with them, and have now become the dragon which they once fought.  Defending democracy is a delicate balancing act; you should not get so involved in the way of the enemy that you forget that you fight against that you forget the positive characteristics of what you’re fighting for.

    In his novella, Steiner has a character say:

    “There shall come a man who […] will know the grammar of hell and teach it to others. He will know the sounds of madness and loathing and make them seem music.”

    He was, obviously, referring to Hitler in the book but today there are many such people in the public eye and those who we personally may be aware of who might be described in the same way.  Modern people of the abyss who’ve been there and returned with a little more than they bargained for, and who’re determined to further expand their view of the world, and widen the abyss further, expanding the geography of Hell further in to our daily lives.

    I’m a Christian – I think that colours my opinions on a number of topics, and makes me address them from a particular moral and ethical standpoint.  Whether you have an religious beliefs or not I’d simply suggest that you at least become aware of the place of the abyss in your own life; what you choose to do with it when you find it’s location is up to you.  Just remember that having gazed a little too long and deep, you may find that even if you leave the abyss, it may not entirely leave you.

  • Book Review – ‘Mere Christianity’

    Mere Christianity cover from Wikipaedia
    Mere Christianity cover from Wikipaedia

    When I used to commute between work and office I used to do a regular(ish) item on here called ‘The Bus Book’ in which I reveiwed the book I’d been reading whilst on the commute.  One book I intended to review as part of that series, but never managed it because the commuting finished, was C. S. Lewis’s ‘Mere Christianity’.

    C. S. Lewis is probably best known for his children’s classic ‘The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe’, part of the ‘Narnia’ series of stories about a fantastic land in which magic has true power.  The books are also deep Christian allegory, reflecting Lewis’s great abilities as a writer on the topic of Christianity and Christian apologetics.

    ‘Mere Christianity’ grew out of a series of radio lectures that Lewis was asked to do in the Second World War.  The BBC approached a large number of writers and artists to develop radio programmes in the war – Orwell and Priestley were amongst Lewis’s fellow contributors to the literary war effort – and Lewis contributed a series of programmes describing the ‘guts’ of Christianity – the common issues that the Christian Faith of all denominations has to deal with.  And these programmes, after the war, became the basis of ‘Mere Christianity’.

    I’ve often commented that the mental processes that led to my eventual Confirmation in to the Church of England were started by two men – Johnny Cash and C.S. Lewis – both of whom came to their belief via what’s best described as a ‘non-standard’ route – Cash through feeling the presence of God when he’d decided to give up and die in a cave, and Lewis coming back to belief after many years as an Atheist.

    ‘Mere Christianity’ is a relatively slim book, but heavily laden with ideas.  Stylistically it hasn’t aged well in the 60 years since the material was originally written, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  The style is best described as ‘no-nonsense’ and the book approaches Christianity from, in my opinion, a very Anglican perspective, although the theses within are applicable to all Christian denominations.  The Anglican faith is often said to be based on three cornerstones – Faith, Tradition and Reason – and it is this statement that Lewis uses as the basis of his ideas in the book.

    The book is split in to 4 sections –

    1. Right and Wrong as a clue to the meaning of the universe
    2. What Christians believe
    3. Christian behaviour
    4. First steps in the doctrine of the Trinity

    Central to the arguments of the first part of the book, where Lewis puts the case for Christianity, is the idea that there exists a general ‘law of morality’ – a rule about right and wrong known almost implicitly by all humans.  Whatever our beliefs, most people would argue that the Holocaust was wrong at any number of levels, that child-murder is abhorrent, etc.  (This was written 60 years ago – I guess it says a lot about the changes in morality in the last 60 years that I had to think hard when writing that last sentence!)  Lewis argues that for such a universal rule of right and wrong to be known to people irrespective of culture, there must be something above and beyond us to impose such a rule.

    Lewis then posits what is now known in theological circles as the ‘Lewis Trilemma’ – an argument that is now a little dented by modern theological studies but that stated that Jesus was either divine, lying, or insane.  As His behaviour didn’t seem to indicate insanity, and his works did not indicate the moral turpitude associated with lying, Lewis was left with the conclusion that Christ was indeed divine.

    He explores the virtues and the sins – I have to say that on reading this book for the first time the idea of  ‘pride’ being a sin – maybe THE sin -came as something of a shock to the system but when Lewis explores the idea that extreme pride is often at the back of the other sins, such as gluttony and lust – then perhaps it’s not such a long shot.  He then points out that Pride was what separated the Devil from God in the first place, so that rather put the hat on it!

    Lewis’s exploration of virtue, sin and morality from a Christian perspective are interesting and well grounded.   He states very clearly that his intention with the book is to bring people who might be intrested in becoming Christians in to a sort of spiritual ‘waiting room’ where they can determine which particular branch of Christianity their calling will be for.  And it works very well on that level.  he does not intend the book and the ideas within it to be a doctrine of their own.

    I think the only issue I woudl take with the book is the language and general style – it’s a little ‘stuffy’ and in a couple of places distinctly politically incorrect – and whilst that doesn’t bother me one jot I can see some people being put off.  My advice would be to persevere – the book was written 60 years ago by an upper-middle class male academic, but the issues it deals with are eternal.

    I agree wholeheartedly with Anthony Burgess’s comment about the book : “…the idea persuader for the half-convinced, for the good man who woudl like to be a Christian but finds his intellect getting in the way.”  It’s a great and useful book – I wish I’d come across it earlier in my personal spiritual journey.  An excellent companion for Lewis’s religious novel in ‘letter’ form, ‘The Screwtape Letters’.

  • Meanwhile, back in June…..

    Originally a Facebook Note, June 8th 2009, after the EU Elections….

    The problem with democracy is that sometimes it allows people to vote for folks that you personally don’t want to gain any sort of power. Unfortunatley, that’s democracy for you. She can be a total bitch. FWIW, I voted for the Socialist Party inspired ‘No2EU – yes to democracy’.

    There is an old latin saying – Ut sit magna, tamen certe lenta ira deorum est – the wrath of the gods may be great, but it is slow – that we can perhaps borrow and replace gods with people. To everyone saying how disgusted they are with their regions, their countrymen, stating people are idiots, etc. I ask them to think about the following.

    From 2003 (beginning of the Iraq war) through to this weekend, the major parties in the UK have singularly managed to ignore or disregard the concerns and criticisms of voters. The Government has thundered on, ignoring calls for inquiries on numerous issues, ignoring the fears and concerns of voters on a number of issues, whilst keeping their “heads down in the pig bin, saying ‘Keep on digging’”, in the words of Pink Floyd. I’ve lost count of the number of people and groups who’ve asked the Government to reconsider their policies on things like immigration, ID cards and personal privacy, civil rights and freedom of expression in the UK. Phillip Pullman put it better than I can… http://www.joep.communityhost.org.uk/?p=71

    We’ve recently had the financial debacle and then the site of MPs ignoring repeated requests for over 18 months to release details of their expenses.

    And people wonder why voters voted the way they did? After the Government and major parties have acted with such hubris and contempt?

    To be honest, we’re lucky this morning that we don’t have a handful of BNP and far-right groups holding seats all over Europe.

    Voters used the only power left to them to get the attention of their leaders – the one thing that, as yet, New Labour haven’t removed from us. The power of the ballot. And when people used it they no doubt considered how they’d been ignored, taken for granted, treated as idiots and generally regarded as sheep who would quite happily vote for the famous ‘rosette on a dog’ representing the major parties.

    Guess what – they didn’t. They said ‘Listen. We will not go this way again with you. You repeatedly ignore our concerns. You treat as as children and with contempt. Listen. We’re going to take the one course of action that will get your attention. We will vote for the parties that you and all those with a vested interest in the current system don’t want us to vote for’.

    And that’s what they’ve done. Vox populi – the voise of the people. Keep on ignoring that voice – so apparently quiet in Westminster and Islington and the in inner circles of New Labour and the other major parties – and this will keep happening.

    My final question – what are WE going to do about it? Many of you will know I’m a Libertarian – I believe in small government, and maximum involvement of the people in that governance. Wearing badges and shouting slogans and signing petitions is not enough. Wherever you live there are going to be issues in YOUR community that need tackling – social and political issues that left a mess for long enough will provide more grist to the mill of those on the extreme right and left who want to remove freedoms from us all.

    Get out there and start fixing YOUR community and YOUR society. Listen to the people who’ve said ‘Enough’s enough.’ Work with them to address those issues that they’re concerned about and maybe, just maybe, we can collectively remind all politicians that they’re there because we give them the permission to be there.

    If you need to blame anyone, need to feel ashamed or disgusted with anyone – just look to Westminster. Briefly – don’t dwell on it. Then look back to wherever you are and start fixing this mess.

  • Everybody Hurts

    For various reasons, I started really thinking about the REM song ‘Everybody Hurts’ today.  Just in case you’re not au fait with it – here are the lyrics…

    When the day is long and the night, the night is yours alone,
    When you’re sure you’ve had enough of this life, well hang on
    Don’t let yourself go, ’cause everybody cries and everybody hurts sometimes

    Sometimes everything is wrong. Now it’s time to sing along
    When your day is night alone, (hold on, hold on)
    If you feel like letting go, (hold on)
    When you think you’ve had too much of this life, well hang on

    ‘Cause everybody hurts. Take comfort in your friends
    Everybody hurts. Don’t throw your hand. Oh, no. Don’t throw your hand
    If you feel like you’re alone, no, no, no, you are not alone

    If you’re on your own in this life, the days and nights are long,
    When you think you’ve had too much of this life to hang on

    Well, everybody hurts sometimes,
    Everybody cries. And everybody hurts sometimes
    And everybody hurts sometimes. So, hold on, hold on
    Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on
    Everybody hurts. You are not alone
    “Everybody hurts.  You are not alone.”  So very true, and also so  difficult to remember when you are in any sort of pain.

    (more…)

  • Reflections on “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”

    I read this short story again recently; it’s by Ursula Le Guin and is one of the most haunting short stories that I’ve ever read.  The only short story that sticks with me more than this one is Parke Godwin’s ‘Stroke of Mercy’, which is stunning.

    I’d suggest you go and read ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’ before you hit the link below, but, if you can’t, to save the plot summary, here we go:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_From_Omelas

    I guess the question for me is whether I would choose to be one who walked away; I suppose that in our heart of hearts we all like to think that we have in ourselves the courage and self-knowledge to ‘do the right thing’.  For several years after I first read this story – which must have been in the mid 1980s – I guess at one level such thinking was hypothetical and rhetorical; it wasn’t the sort of world we lived in, after all.  But today I’m not so sure that it is rhetorical anymore, and also I’m not sure I’ve got the guts to walk away.

    We in the ‘developed world’ live a materialistic and consumer driven lifestyle, which has had an increasing amount of impact on the state of the world.  For us to have many of our goodies, it could be argued that somewhere else in the world someone else’s lifestyle takes a kicking.  We have an oil-driven economy; if you’re cursed enough to live above rich oil fields then start running now.

    We want high-technology equipment; if you’re a young, female, circuit board assembler in a sweat shop then be aware that some of the processes that are involved may expose you to fertility affecting chemicals.  In order to provide us with cheap electronics, some of the safeguards that we adopt in the developed world are ignored.

    Have a think about it, please.

    I guess my hiking boots and rucksack are still in the store cupboard right now, and I sincerely doubt that I’ll be walking away real soon.  But I do wonder whether I should at least dust the rucksack down and polish the boots, figuratively speaking, for the day when I too start looking to the distant hills of a less consumption oriented lifestyle and choose to walk away from Omelas.