February Fill Dyke

There are paintings you admire and paintings you want to hang on your wall at home. February Fill Dyke by Benjamin Williams Leader falls in the first group. This is a painting of the utmost realism. No other picture or photograph depicts with such accuracy the damp cold misery of the English winter. This is not the bright sunny cold of the Alps or North America, but the damp clammy cold that creeps into your bones, that is with you even after you have gone indoors, and which can only be driven away by a hot bath. February Fill Dyke also shows the mud and the darkness of winter, when days on end are spent without sunshine or hardly any light, and when the sun has set at four o’clock in the afternoon. What makes this picture particularly important for me, however, is that it may be of my own village. Leader came from Worcester and specialised in local landscapes. The square church tower and the scattered houses of the village could all be Martley in the late 19th Century.

February Fill Dyke is probably the most famous painting by Leader, but it is not widely-known or particularly popular. This is because it does not fall into the second group of pictures, that you hang on your wall at home. Leader does not show a chocolate-box fantasy of rural England, all village green, neat thatched cottages and duckponds. Nor is it the Christmas card cliché of snow, stagecoaches, and quality street. How much better to put on your wall pictures of poppy fields in summer, sunflowers, dancers near the Seine, and so on. The impressionists were no better painters than Leader, but they were better at judging the market.

Is Fox News a Zombie Death Cult?

If you have never been to the USA, you still know what to expect from films and television. The East Coast comprises New York (full of young people leading entertaining lives in Manhattan apartments) and Baltimore (corrupt police and gruesome crimes). The West Coast consists of Los Angeles (film stars and more crime), and San Francisco (gays and more crime). Things are different in the South: long dusty roads, prison gangs and everybody drenched in sweat (apart from New Orleans, which is inhabited by vampires). In the middle of the USA, most of the small towns have been taken over by zombies. These stumble around looking to bite as many people as possible and hence increase the zombie population. Zombies don’t appear too cunning, but are effective because they are driven by an overwhelming and irrational anger.

After you visit the USA, you realise that the films and television programmes are not very accurate, apart from the zombies that is. In the real USA, zombies do not stumble around in blood-soaked rags: they work as radio and television commentators, most of all on Fox News. Here, they can infect people through the airwaves, massively increasing the zombie population. Despite their more normal appearance, Fox News zombies are easy to spot - driven by the same overwhelming and irrational anger, they emit rage at normal people (who in zombietalk are known as ‘liberals’), and worship death. Death-worship takes many forms: there is an urgent desire to spread death among foreign lands; to execute criminals in large numbers; and, most of all, there is adoration of the bringers of death - of guns and weapons of all kinds. Zombies wish that all should carry guns and become death-bringers.

In the films, zombies can only be destroyed, if at all, by extreme violence. Fortunately, real world zombies can easily be tamed. Just change channels, and they will not infect you. If enough people do this, the zombie death cult will disappear.

The Great PowerPoint Disaster

One of the frequent complaints about academics is that they are only interested in their research and neglect their responsibilities to their students. Academics of this kind undoubtably exist, and I have no problem with them. Universities would be a lot more efficient if staff were allowed to specialise in what they do best (or, more precisely, in areas where they have a comparative advantage). There is no point in getting top class researchers to run courses or carry heavy teaching loads. They do, however, have a responsibility to tell the rest of us what they are up to. The best way to do this is to a plenary lecture once a term on new developments in their field. Other academics should be allowed to specialise in teaching if this is what they do best. Teaching, rather than the commercialisation of research, is the most important form of ‘knowledge transfer’ in higher education: without effective teaching in universities, the quality of professional skills in society will decline generation upon generation. We will have wonderful technologies, but no-one able to use them.

Whether academics are more effective in research or teaching is in part a matter of personality. Research usually involves long hours of solitary work and therefore tends to attract more introverted people. Teaching, on the other hand, appeals more to extroverts and the best lectures are a sort of performance art. Extrovert or not, it requires great skill and commitment to lead students into a complex field so that they understand not only its complexity but also the areas in which knowledge is still uncertain. There have traditionally been several ways in which good teachers have achieved this. One is to start by posing a question, and then to look at alternative explanations, their strengths and weaknesses. Others may use a narrative approach, or start by presenting a simple overview of the topic and then progressively adding more complexity.

However, despite the best efforts of academic staff, I have an impression that our lectures have deteriorated in the last decade. I think this is because they have become dominated by PowerPoint technology. No other single invention has done as much to destroy learning as this accursed programme. Instead of analyses and systemic explanations, lectures with PowerPoint have become lists of bullet-points read from a screen. Some teachers enliven their slides by inserting pictures and animations, but PowerPoint has produced a generation of graduates who think knowledge comprises lists of facts. I can see the impact of this in the various government reports I read in my area of study. Where there was once coherent analysis and argument (in sentences and paragraphs), there are now repetitive bullet-point lists. For instance, the most recent Government policy report on intellectual disability (called ‘Valuing People Now’) includes nine bullet-point lists in its Executive Summary and 70 in the main text, all in 136 pages. Bullet-points are interspersed with pictures, personal stories, and examples of good practice. These are all entertaining, but the report glosses over the problems involved in living with a severe disability, and the dilemmas experienced by those who support disabled people on a daily basis. Bullet-points, however neat they look on screen and page, provide a weak basis for effective government action.

A Europatriot speaks

The European Union is, without any doubt, the most successful political creation in human history. Countries which have fought and massacred each other for centuries are now members of the same confederation. The most terrible and destructive wars in history have been replaced by the free movement of peoples, opportunities to live and work unhindered in different countries, a free trade area and (for most members states) a common currency. The Union is continuously expanding. Its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of €12,256.48 billion makes it now the largest economy in the World, and its population of over 500 million is 50% larger than that of the USA. There is a queue of countries applying to join, all changing their political institutions to meet the high standards set by the Union for the human rights of its member states. The Union also runs the most successful space programme in the world.

The European Union has had a profound effect on how its citizens live. People move freely across borders that once involved queues and passports. Lorries drive down motorways where once they would have waited for hours for customs clearance. The once fortified and suspicious borders of Europe have become as permeable as those between US states or Canadian provinces. EU citizens increasingly live and work in each others’ countries. There are more than three-quarters of a million British people living in Spain and 200,000 in France. There are even more French citizens living in the UK. The EU promotes common patterns of work qualifications to ease the movement of labour, while schemes like Erasmus and Socrates make it easy for students and academic staff to study in universities in other EU countries.

This all constitutes an extraordinary change for the better in European history, and should be good reason for rejoicing. In most of Europe, the EU is indeed regarded as an essential part of political life. For smaller members states, it provides a welcome means of making an impact in a world otherwise dominated by the USA and China. Separatist movements like the SNP and Plaid Cymru look forward to their countries becoming full members of the EU. Even in the largest states like France and Germany, politicians accept that the EU enables these countries to exercise greater influence while at the same time allowing their economies to benefit from a massive free trade area. The exception to all this approval is England, whose politicians are silent about the benefits of the EU, while a large part of the political right-wing is ‘eurosceptic’ (a code word used by those who wish to leave the Union). Why has this happened?

The key reason is that the European Union has become a bogeyman for eurosceptics, blamed for all the changes in English life that they find unwelcome. In this respect, they resemble sections of the right-wing in the USA who see the ‘federal government’ (which is also mysteriously part of the ‘New World Order’) as the source of all their ills. The press in England has often supported this nonsense, with silly stories about the EU akin to those invented in previous years about the Greater London Council, trade unions, the Labour Party and all their other enemies. Stories of this kind fill a void created by legal bans on racism - newspapers can no longer abuse people of other races or religions, so the EU has become a substitute representative of unwelcome otherness. Needless to say, the media rarely makes any attempt to explain the institutions of the EU and how they work, thereby supporting the myth that the Union is run by ‘bureaucrats in Brussels’ rather than the more complicated reality of power shared between the European Council of member states, the Commission appointed by national governments, and a Parliament elected by the people of Europe.

Unnecessary venom is a problem in politics because it impedes effective debate, and can lead to terrorism. The Oklahoma bombings (against the US federal government and the New World Order) may one day see parallel attacks against EU institutions in this country. Opposition to the EU is also a distraction from the real causes of our present discontents. British soldiers have died in Iraq and Afghanistan not because of the EU, but because of the subservience of UK politicians to US foreign policy. The dreary standardisation of English towns and cities, and the undermining of rural life are the products not of the EU, but of the centralisation of power within England itself and the close alliance between governments and the large supermarket retailers and construction companies. Economic collapse is the result of the power of the financial sector over UK government, which has resisted regulation (including more effective regulation by the EU) and gained a series of favourable tax concessions which have enriched senior staff at public expense. The present system of government in England thus suits some people rather well, and it is convenient to shift the blame to the European Union.

Speaking for myself, I am proud to be a citizen of Europe. If my house had a flagpole, it would fly the 12 gold stars of the EU as well as the St George’s Cross of England.

Have yourself a merry/melancholy/some other emotion Christmas

Christmas looms so large in our minds that it distorts our sense of time. Rather than seeing one day ahead, of feasting and entertaining, Christmas appears like a prolonged season. Women (who in most households are responsible for provisioning, entertaining etc) stock up as if preparing for the siege of Malta. Siege-panic is also driven by the many examples in the media of well-stocked Christmas tables, surrounded by contented families enjoying the most expensive gifts. However, the urge to eat well and buy gifts is driven by more than imitative consumerism. Parents give gifts to bring happiness to their children, and, by seeing the pleasure these gifts evoke, to themselves. The desire for your children to be happy is a recognition that their lives will not always be so. But seeing their happiness pushes from our minds the pain we feel when we think of those we have loved (still love) that are no longer round the table, telling their usual jokes, laughing in the way we remember. There is another source of melancholy, derived from the passage of time. We remember previous Christmases, when we were younger and had the hopes and expectations of life we see in our children.

This mixture of emotions explains the persistence of Christmas songs that express regret and disillusion, like The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York, and Greg Lake’s I Believe in Father Christmas. Another popular song, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas from the film Meet Me in St Louis, differs in being melancholy because the singer looks ahead pessimistically to future Christmases. This made the lyrics unacceptable for those who dislike emotional complexity, and new, more upbeat, ones were devised for Frank Sinatra to sing. This re-writing follows another pattern of Christmas - the hope that over-eating, alcohol and jolly songs will swamp any emotions we find painful. Spending becomes a way in which we can avoid understanding ourselves.

The Privatisation-IT-Consultancy Complex

In a speech at the time he left office, President Eisenhower warned the USA about the power of the military-industrial complex. By this, he meant that US foreign and defence policy was increasingly driven by the needs of an informal coalition between the military and defence contractors. These groups came together because both benefited from an expansion of military expenditure, and were able to generate political support by exaggerating the external threats facing the USA. Since in Eisenhower’s time the main challengers to US dominance were communist states, this meant depicting any foreign leaders not aligned to the USA and any uprisings against foreign regimes as part of a single world ‘communist’ conspiracy. US foreign policy became driven by a kind of collective paranoia, with the USA involved in military interventions and murderous wars in an attempt to fight the incoming tide of this supposed conspiracy. Communism has declined, but the paranoia remains. Imaginary wars on drugs and ‘terror’ have involved real wars against the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and the frontier regions of Pakistan.

New technology is promoted with particular enthusiasm by the military-industrial complex, ostensibly because it offers the possibility of gaining an advantage over prospective enemies. But new technology is usually less reliable and more expensive than the equipment it replaces. The more unreliable the technology, the longer the contracts, which offers the prospect of greater profits since contracts for military equipment are awarded on a cost plus basis. And equipment failure and cost over-runs can always be explained to the public as an inevitable risk required for the effective defence of the state.

In British central government, domestic expenditure is far more important than spending on the military. Our own equivalent of the military-industrial complex therefore is built around on the vast sums spent on health and social care, public order, and transport. Public funding for these areas can be seen as a treacle pot from which members of the complex can feed, and there are three ways in which they can do so.

The first is through the privatisation of what were previously regarded as being government services. This has expanded vastly since a neo-Thatcherite government came to power in 1997, and has been rationalised as introducing competitiveness and the efficiencies of the private sector into public services. A key component of privatisation is the Public Finance Initiative (PFI), which involves public authorities paying contractors high fees to rent from them newly-built hospitals, schools and other public buildings (usually with additional payments for servicing the buildings). Besides PFI, there are contracts for transport, prisons, nursing and residential care, cleaning services in public buildings, employment services and so on. Needless to say, finance raised to pay for PFI and related schemes has involved large transfers of public funds to the banking sector.

The second way is through consultancy fees. These have expanded with the introduction of contractual relationships throughout government, usually following privatisation. One or more of the big four professional services firms (PWC, KPMG, Ernst & Young, and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu) appear in every such transaction, and are even brought in by government to audit each others’ work, and report on each others’ failures. They have managed to sell a spurious technology of management expertise to politicians and the public, such that no major governmental decisions can be made without their engagement.

The third way is through major IT projects. These have involved the world’s most expensive database (the NHS Programme for IT) which will probably have a final cost of £20 billion, plus such projects as the database for identity cards (£12 to 18 billion), ContactPoint (the database recording all children, costing £1 billion), The Libra court management system (£341 million), and the C-NOMIS offender management system (£279 million). All of these systems have spectacular cost overruns, and have failed to deliver the benefits they initially promised. Very large parts of the NHS Programme for IT are hardly even used.

The complex can therefore be referred to as the ‘Privatisation-IT-Consultancy Complex’, or ‘PIC Complex’ for short. As with the military-industrial complex in the USA, the PIC Complex in Britain shapes government policy in its own favour. There is no public demand for identity cards, and security experts see them as having a negligible impact on public safety. The phenomenal cost of the scheme is seen as an argument against it. But the very cost of the scheme is the reason it exists - it will produce an endless stream of public funds from the treacle pot for IT companies, professional services firms, and the financial sector. Few if any experts in child care asked for a child database, but we have paid for one which will almost certainly not work, and will divert resources from services which do protect children. The diversion of resources from services which deal with people into IT schemes which enrich the PIC Complex has already happened with C-NOMIS.

How can this be allowed to happen? One reason is that the concentration of power in English government gives great leverage to the PIC Complex. Its members only need to convince a small number of senior politicians and civil servants to secure multi-million pound contracts. This saves all the bother of selling products to lots of local councils, hospitals schools etc, let alone having to convince the public who ultimately pay for them. This is a symbiotic relationship - privatisation and large centralised databases weaken rival local centres of power and hence maintain this leverage. Convincing small numbers of senior politicians and civil servants has proved easy because some are for sale. This is not traditional corruption in which a contractor pays money and then gets what they want, but a new time-displaced version in which the politician favours a contractor and is subsequently rewarded with a seat on the board, consultancies etc. I would not of course allege such a thing about Patricia Hewitt MP, the former Secretary of State for Health, who is currently earning £12,500/month from BT Group (a major contractor for the NHS Programme for IT), and £4,600/month from Alliance Boots (which is a major pharmaceutical distributor to the NHS and a contractor for privatised primary care services). October was a good month, when she also earned £15,000 from Cinven, which owns a chain of private hospitals which contract with the NHS.

Academics are also subsidiary players in the PIC Complex, providing essential legitimation services, using suitably high-minded and abstract terms like ‘contestability’ and ‘choice’. But more of that in a later posting.

Learning our incompetencies

All men at an early age believe they are talented at football. Some (like myself) realise their lack of talent in the first years of primary school. Others persist in years of hope until the final disappointing realisation that theirs will not after all be a life of Premiership fame, Ferraris, and beautiful but expensive girlfriends.

Learning our incompetences helps us avoid wasting time on activities where there are more talented rivals, and enables us to concentrate on what we can do effectively. However, there are some areas of life in which this learning usually fails to take place. Most people, against all the evidence, continue to believe they are ‘above average’ drivers and lovers. Many people also believe that, despite lack of training or any previous evidence of competence, that they can run a pub or a restaurant.

The results of this delusion can be found in every town. Here is an example. My wife is a member of a group of women (which she calls the ‘ladies’) who have worked together in the past, and celebrate each others’ birthdays by meeting for dinner. The restaurant is usually one chosen by the lady with the birthday. The most recent meal was at a new Indian restaurant in Worcestershire. The ladies met there at 8pm. The decor was pleasant, and there were poppadums and chutneys awaiting them at the table. But no waiter came to ask for their orders for drinks, and there was a long delay before any waiter came at all. When this did eventually happen, the ladies decided to skip a starter and ordered main courses. Nothing happened for a very long time. The group at the next table decided that they too had waited for far too long, and decided to leave. The waiter pursued them into the street and told them the food was ready. The food then came for the ladies. It was lukewarm, indicating that it had been cooked some time ago and then forgotten.

No waiter came to ask them if they wanted to order a dessert, so the ladies decided that they would move directly to coffee. A coffee pot arrived, but no cups. The ladies found some in the restaurant and served themselves. They then seized a waiter, who produced three bills. These included one for £27 worth of lager, which they certainly had not drunk. There followed a process of negotiation to reduce the bills. The toilets were in the basement, but when reaching them, the ladies found they were closed, and they were redirected to the disabled toilet at the top of the building (!) By the time they were due to leave it was 11-30pm, and the front door of the restaurant was locked.

The sad thing is that the ladies could have gone to the Spice Cuisine in St John’s in Worcester and paid rather less for an excellent meal, cooked rapidly and served efficiently. But then, the people who run and work in the Spice Cuisine have discovered an area of life in which they are supremely competent. The staff at the other restaurant could try being footballers.