The new diplomatic revolution

 The ‘Diplomatic Revolution’ of 1756 was a major change in the alliances between European powers. Britain allied with its former enemy Prussia and went to war against its former ally Austria. Austria allied with its former enemy France. The Dutch Republic dropped its alliance with Britain and a few years later became its enemy. We are now facing a similar diplomatic revolution, with the USA moving away from its longstanding membership of NATO into a de facto alliance with Russia. The remaining NATO powers will probably respond by moving closer to China, initially in the form of an economic alliance.

These changes are happening because of an alignment in the moral values of the leadership in the USA and Russia, and, to a lesser degree, because both countries are experiencing similar problems. Trump and Putin are both crudely-spoken amoral gangsters, who portray themselves as upholders of ‘masculine values’, and depend on the support of a coterie of favoured and very wealthy oligarchs. ‘Masculine values’ for them involves despising women in any but a supporting or procreative role, glorifying the bullying and humiliation of the weak, and preferring religion or ‘common sense’ to scientific knowledge. Both leaders have undermined democratic institutions, and their regimes depend for legitimacy on the actual or threatened use of military force. The USA has of course a far stronger culture of legality and democracy than Russia, and these traditions may well survive Trump’s attempts to undermine them. But the USA and Russia have encountered similar problems that make authoritarian rule attractive to many of their people. Both countries are vast land empires that have expanded through conquest and the extermination of indigenous populations. Both have disproportionately large military forces which are regularly used to display the might of the country by invading foreign states. Both have seen a radical decline in industrial employment and the concentration of the wealth of the country into the hands of a few. This has created an understandable resentment and a longing for an imagined golden age, which authoritarian leadership has directed against foreigners, immigrants and the educated ‘elite’.

The other great territorial empire, China, has chosen a different route. Instead of the erratic economic policies favoured by Trump, China has successfully built its industrial base, becoming the world’s largest economy in all but name. It is challenging the technological lead of the USA, which is being undermined by Trump’s cuts to research funding. Again in contrast to the USA and Russia, it has expanded it influence through trade and the development of infrastructure in many parts of the world. This is usually funded by loans, making China the world’s greatest creditor nation. It even holds $769 billion of the US national debt, the USA now being the world’s largest debtor. China’s increasing domination of world industrial production makes it committed to stable and tariff-free trade. In this respect, its interests coincide with those of the European powers rather than the USA, where Trump is imposing an unpredictable range of tariff restrictions on trade.

We can therefore expect China and Europe to become ever-closer trading partners, but itt is not yet clear whether this will develop into a more formal defensive alliance. But Europe and China have few reasons for conflict. They do not have common borders or any territorial disputes, or any other conventional reason for conflict. By contrast, Russia has vast empty lands bordering China, while the USA regards the Pacific Ocean, right up to the Chinese seaboard, as within its own sphere of influence. A new Russian-USA alliance would therefore be united in regarding China as both an immediate and a long-term threat.

There is of course already a cold war between Russia and the rest of Europe, with Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, its occupation of parts of Moldova and Georgia, and its attacks on European maritime and electronic infrastructure. The new cold war is driven by the Russian leadership, which regards Europe as an existential threat because it demonstrates a more successful and appealing alternative model of government to its citizens.

We may therefore see a new diplomatic revolution in the next few months, although predictions of this kind can rapidly fall apart with unexpected changes of leadership.

Profiting from disaster

 The most successful growth industry in the UK is the public enquiry, and there are no less than 17 of these in operation during 2024. These typically arise in response to media exposures of the various blunders, malfeasance and cruelty by public bodies. After a period of resistance, governments agree the need for a ‘full public enquiry’, which usually begin their work several years after the events they aim to investigate.

Public enquiries are usually headed by a senior judge and are staffed by a large squad of lawyers. These can take immense care and effort to establish the facts of what are often complex and ill-recorded organisational decisions. But that care takes time, and reports always emerge many years after the original malfeasance. In their day-to-day work, public enquiries resemble courts of law, but no-one is found guilty and no-one is punished. The public may be gratified by scenes of senior figures being humiliated and occasionally in tears, but these senior figures are rarely prosecuted, never go to prison nor even lose their generous pensions. None suffer as much as the victims of their misdeeds.

Either concurrently or after the conclusion of the ‘full public enquiry’, a system of compensation for victims is devised. This will often prove niggardly and slow-moving, such that many of those eligible for payments die before they receive any cash. This is not the result of ‘bureaucracy’, but is a deliberate act of Government policy. Some evidence emerges from the Post Office Enquiry, which heard evidence from Kemi Badenoch (the responsible minister for a time in 2023). She had recommended that each claimant receive an interim payment of £100,000 but found this blocked by the Treasury which told her that this would not be ‘value for money’. There was in fact no Treasury budget for compensation to the victims of the Post Office nor for the victims of nuclear tests, nor for the victims of tainted blood, nor for any other people with similar claims against the state.

By contrast, the public enquiries are generously funded, and their lawyers are well-remunerated and paid on time. An example is the COVID Enquiry, which began in Spring 2022, two years after the outbreak of the disease, and is expected to conclude its public hearings in 2026. It employs 250 staff and will probably cost more than £200 million. This is money that would have made a significant difference to those suffering from the disease. ONS data shows that 1.5 million people have long COVID, of whom 380,000 experienced substantial limitations. This large and sudden increase in the disabled population has placed immense strain on the NHS. The Post Office Enquiry began in 2021, over twenty years after the first of 900 sub-postmasters was prosecuted for fraud. This has so far cost over £50 million (plus the cost of legal representation for the Post Office) and will publish its final report sometime in 2026. The Grenfell Tower enquiry reported seven years after the devastating fire, cost £170 million, and delayed any legal action against those at fault. It also delayed action to remove dangerous cladding, although this did of course save the Treasury many millions of pounds.

Enquiries have therefore become treacle-pots for the legal profession, strung out for years and, in some cases, showing no sign of ever ending, let alone producing any change in official policy. The Scottish Child Abuse Enquiry began at the end of 2014, and has been riven by conflict because of interference by the Scottish Government and a refusal by the enquiry chair to investigate allegations against senior Scottish lawyers. Two other enquiries are at least five years old.

There is clearly a need for a better, more expeditious and hopefully cheaper way of investigating government malfeasance. A model for how to do this comes from investigations into aircraft accidents. A team of expert meets to assemble the evidence. Their report aims to describe how the accident occurred, to identify the failures in human and/or mechanical systems that caused it, and to recommend changes in procedures to avoid its re-occurrence. This work must be competed expeditiously to minimise risk for others travelling by air. The Swedish Government adopted this approach for its COVID enquiry. A team of eight experts published their first report in 2020 - the year the virus took hold. Their final report appeared in February 2022 - one month before the UK COVID enquiry even began its work. The Swedes clearly believe the work of governments is to efficiently protect the public and not to fund those who profit from disaster.

Tales from Long Ago No. 1

I have had a career in the sense of careering from one type of work to another. In the late 1980s, I careered into working as a planner in a mental health service in Birmingham. This involved working with psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses to set up a range of innovative services. These included setting up supported housing for people with long-term disorders discharged from inpatient care, a task which required co-operation from local housing associations.

So one day, I went with a consultant psychiatrist to meet the manager of a local housing association in his office in a street of terraced housing. We waited in his office for him to arrive, while the consultant looked wistfully across the street. “I lost my virginity in that house”, he said. The manager arrived and asked his rather glamorous personal assistant to arrange coffee. This she did, using an ornate cafetiere and pouring our cups.

A few months later, I visited an area manager in the Social Services Department. By way of small talk, I commented on her unusual surname and asked if she was related to the manager of the housing association I had met. She went red with rage: “That bastard”, she said, “He dumped me for that bloody personal assistant”.

After that, I have always avoided asking if people are related, however unusual their surname.

Murdering the village

One of my least favourite television programmes is Escape to the Country. This usually features a couple who plan to sell their house in London and buy a larger one in a rural setting. They express surprise at the lack of street lights and corner shops, and distress that the countryside is not as quiet as they had hoped. Cows moo, farm machinery operates, children play, and church bells ring. Their disappointment is that, even in the countryside, it is not possible to escape from people altogether.

Those of us who actually live in a country village see things differently. For us, a village is a community of people who know each other and who help each other out. Help can include things like friendship for the recently-bereaved, advice on how to deal with official agencies, and shared concerns about how to maintain poorly-built speculative housing. My own village has an amazing number of local organisations. In addition to our parish church, they range from sports clubs, fitness classes, groups for mothers and toddlers, friendship groups, the Women’s Institute, a monthly coffee morning to raise money for various charities, a gardening club, a Geology Society, the Young Farmers, the British Legion and several others. A group of volunteers maintains our footpath network, the volunteer who runs our ‘Oil Syndicate’ reduces the price we pay for heating oil, and a volunteer taskforce tidies the place up. Our village hall provides a warm space for people in the depth of winter, while one of my neighbours helps to run the Worcester Food Bank.

This alternative view of village life as a participative community is one reason why the most unlikely places proclaim their village status. Manhattan has a Greenwich Village, East Village and West Village. Closer to home, Birmingham has a new ‘Edgbaston Village’, while the St Johns area in Worcester has been promoted as a ‘village in the city’. These urban villages usually have older and more distinct architecture than the surrounding mediocrity, and this contributes to a sense of separate identity.

Quaintness is a factor in defining rural villages too, at least in the mass media. These usually show an ancient parish church, vicarage and manor house, some old cottages, all surrounding a large village green. This vision of rurality appears at its purest in the television series Midsomer Murders, whose villages are almost empty of traffic (apart from people riding horses), and where the inhabitants usually include a snobby family living in straightened circumstances in a grand old house, a wealthy but unpopular parvenu, an unhappily-married couple running the soon-to-be bankrupt local pub, a rather weird local vicar, and various surly adolescents. All village organisations in Midsomer are the scenes of factious and usually murderous conflict.

This should all put people off wishing to move to the countryside, but this is not the case. Our villages are under siege from speculative house-building firms, so that the old village cores (often designated as a conservation area) are increasingly surrounded by estates of suburban-style houses, mostly built on high-quality agricultural land. Developers are keen to build in rural areas because farm land is cheap (at least until it receives planning permission) and does not have the complications of brownfield sites, but also because there is a real demand for country living. Demand is high because the countryside is seen as safer and cleaner than cities and with better schools. The disadvantages of commuting to work are partly alleviated by using the Internet to work from home, for banking, and for ordering home deliveries from supermarkets and other online retailers.

The resulting estates may be located in a country village, but look like they could be anywhere. The same pattern-book houses, usually detached and about two metres apart, all with garages too small to house a car. The estates usually include a few larger and more expensive houses which have two small garages - too small to house two cars. Despite their price, new houses have limited garden space, usually smaller than found in an interwar council house. New estates do have ‘green spaces’, required by local planning policies. But ownership is usually retained by the developer, who then leases them to a management company. These keep costs low by limiting their work to planting a few short-lived trees and mowing the grass, all for which they charge residents a management fee which increases each year.

Planning obligations require that a proportion of new houses (usually 40%) are ‘affordable’, but this only means that the sale price or the rent is 80% of market rates. This is still beyond the means of many families, particularly those in rural areas where there may be limited local employment opportunities. It is not surprising to find that local surveys carried out for neighbourhood plans often find an unmet need in villages for rented social housing. Another unmet need occurs among elderly people who find their homes too large or too expensive to manage, or too far from local services. Building smaller dwellings close to village centres to enable old people to downsize would have the beneficial effect of releasing larger family homes for those who need this type of accommodation.

All this means that we are not getting the type of house that we most need in rural areas, indicating a failure of our planning system. The new Government proposes to introduce changes, but these look unlikely to benefit rural areas.

Roads that were once familiar

There are journeys you make over and over again - to work, to visit family, to go to favoured places. You get to know every turn and feature, the best places to stop for a coffee, a rest or a view, the faces you recognise. The journey becomes so familiar that time becomes abbreviated. And then, you make the journey no more.

From the age of 11, I took buses to school and then to college. These familiar journeys stopped at 19, when I went to university in London and a more complicated life began. But the family home in Shirley, Solihull always provided comfort and continuity. Memories become selective with age, and grow warm in nostalgia. My most nostalgic memories are of my brother and I playing on the mat in front of the fire on a Sunday morning. I also had the job of polishing the collection of brass ornaments. My mother would make the only cup of coffee we drank in the week - made with instant Nescafé and milk. There would be the smell of the Sunday roast from the kitchen. The Sunday sequence of radio programmes would begin.

There are other such nostalgias. My father cooking lunch (we called it ‘dinner’) for my brother and me on the alternate Saturdays when my mother was working at a nearby shop. This was always the same meal: fried gammon steak, mashed potatoes, and peas. It was followed by treacle pudding (from a tin and heated in boiling water) covered in custard.

These are warm memories because my mother and father were kind and loving people, taking great pride in how well my brother and I did in our education and careers. 

The family home remained the destination for my familiar journeys after I went to university. I lived in ten different houses between then and 1983, when my wife and I moved to the home we still live in. From then on, the familiar journey would be through country lanes to the M5, onto the M42, the A435, and then country and suburban roads to the semi-detached family home in Shirley. My father died in 2000, many years after cancer of the throat had taken away his warm speaking voice. My mother lived another 18 years as a widow. Over time, her friends and siblings died, and she was not able to access the networks and friendship groups of the kind that provide support for widows in a village such as my own. A botched eye operation deprived her of much of her sight. Nevertheless, she continued to live in her own home until the last two years of her life.

Today (June 6th) is my father’s birthday, and I visited my parents’ grave in Widney Manor in Solihull. I did not go to the old family home in Shirley, a once-familiar road I will never travel again.

Who should choose the prime minister?

 A young member of the Labour Party was nominated for selection as his local constituency party’s Parliamentary candidate. He confided to a more experienced politician his concern about facing the selection panel. “What if they ask me about foreign policy? I don’t know much about that.” The experienced member replied: “That’s easy. Just say with great passion “Comrades, I believe in a socialist foreign policy”, and they will all applaud you”. There are probably similar stories about other political parties, and they emphasise how loyal party members are to their party and what they regard as its principles. Party members at times fear that their representatives in Parliament may lack the same degree of ardour. This is most likely to happen after a spell in power, when party objectives meet the complexities of government. Strong statements of passionate commitment are therefore particularly welcome from people applying to be the party’s candidates for public office.
   
The work of being a party member is taxing and therefore usually attracts only the most committed or the most ambitious of people. It is taxing because election work involves repetitive tasks such as distributing leaflets and confrontational ones such as canvassing. The latter requires party members to meet the actual British people, and discover that many are strikingly ill-informed and contemptuous of those who work to improve their quality of life through politics. Difficult as the work of party membership may be, it has its rewards. There is the opportunity to exchange ideas with people who share your passion for politics, and the chance to select your candidates for the local council and for Parliament. If your party is in power, you will even be one of the small proportion of the population who have a vote to select the next prime minister.

The post of prime minister in the UK Parliament is designated by the monarch according to which Member of Parliament is able to command a majority in the House of Commons. When one party has a majority (as has been the case with every recent election apart from that in 2010), the post of Prime Minister automatically falls to the leader of that party. But who selects the party leader? In the past, this was decided by the Members of Parliament of the majority party. This makes a great deal of sense. The prime minister has to maintain a majority in the House, and thus should be the person who best commands their support. In addition, his fellow Members of Parliament will be fully aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the different candidates for leader and have the kind of information about them that is not usually available to party members.

However, this task of selecting the party leader in the UK is now determined by party members. In the Labour and Liberal Parties, candidates for leadership must be nominated by at least 10% of Members of Parliament, but after that the decision falls to party members. The Conservative Party has a more complex system, in which the Party’s MPs vote in a knockout ballot and the party members then choose between the top two. Either way, the election is decided by a small number of people. In September 2022, Liz Truss was elected as Conservative Party leader and hence Prime Minister in a ballot in which 142,000 party members voted. The Labour Party enrolled four times as many voters, and Sir Keir Starmer was elected leader in 2020 in a ballot of 491,000 voters.

The problem with letting party members choose the party leader is that they have made some spectacularly bad choices. In the 2019 General Election, the three main party leaders were Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn and Jo Swinson. Boris Johnson is a good communicator with a gift of knowing what is popular with the public and how to express this as simple choices. As a professional journalist, he is able to speak in headlines. But he has a remarkable record of dishonesty and disloyalty. His Brexit campaign seems to have been driven more by the opportunity it presented to unseat Theresa May as prime minister than any commitment to the cause itself. The consequent negotiations and ‘deal’ with the EU were damaging for the British economy. This was not helped by the subsequent trade negotiations carried out under his government by Liz Truss. These were essentially photo-opportunities designed to confirm the Brexiteer claim that leaving the EU would be simple. Instead of the months and years of careful negotiation normal for trade deals, Liz Truss quickly gave the foreign governments what they asked for, to the detriment of British firms, farmers and consumers. After Johnson was ousted from the premiership in 2022 following a mass resignation of his ministers, Liz Truss was thus well-positioned to appeal to Conservative members.

Jeremy Corbyn has a pleasant informal manner which initially attracted many voters. But his political ideas were acquired in the 1960s and little changed thereafter. In common with many on the left of the Labour Party, he regarded the EU as a ‘capitalist club’ and chose to undermine the Labour Party’s campaign to oppose Brexit at the referendum. Also like many on the left, he had a perverse choice of favoured foreign causes. These included murderous Islamic terrorists, thuggish dictators like Maduro in Venezuela, and even sympathy for the Russian regime when it poisoned a defector living in England. Corbyn attempted to lead the Labour Party against almost all his members of Parliament, and thus had to rely on a narrow band of less effective supporters. Corbyn’s campaign in the 2019 general election led to the worst defeat for the Labour Party since 1935.

Jo Swinson had little impact on the election and misjudged the mood of the electorate. She became the second leader of the Liberal Democrats in a row to lose their seat in a general election.

But the most catastrophic choice by party members was Liz Truss. Prime Minister for only 49 days, she produced a budget which conformed to right-wing libertarian ideology but rapidly led to the loss of at least a quarter of private savings and the imminent bankruptcy of pension funds. Faced by the failure of her ideology, Truss did what most ideologues do: she resorted to paranoia, blaming an ever-longer list of enemies and ‘elites’. These included (to date) the ‘anti-growth coalition’, the ‘deep state’, and the ‘net zero elite’. After this debacle, Conservatives changed the rules for leadership elections such that candidates needed the nomination of at least 100 M.P.s. This resulted in only one nominee (Rishi Sunak) and froze the party members out of the selection.

This might be the start of a trend towards reducing the role of party members in selecting the leader, at least in the Conservative Party. One possibility would be to separate the job of chairman of the party from the job of being its leader in Parliament, which happens in Germany But it is unlikely that members will surrender their power without a fight, and so we must face the prospect of more ineffective leaders, chosen by a small number of activists because they are best at shouting the party’s slogans. 

Grand Christmas Quiz

In my spare time, I am secretary for a group of Alumni of the London School of Economics. We held a short quiz for our members justt before Christmas last year. There were no prizes, and there are none here. But you can have a go in aswering these questions.

British politicians
1. Which prime minister was booed by the 10,000 assembled members of the women's           institute?

2.   Which two politicians were prime minister on three or more occasions in the 19th Century.

3.   How many ministers for housing have there been since the 2010 general election?

4.   Who is the current minister?

5.   What is the fourth largest group in the House of Commons?

Science
Which of these statements is true?
1.    Short people have on average a longer life-expectancy than tall people.
 
3.    People lose an average of a centimetre height during the day because of the effect of gravity.

4.    Bananas and carrots are radioactive.

5.    The Atlantic Ocean is growing wider by an inch and a half each year.


Connections
What do the following have in common?
1.    Mrs Glum, Mrs Daley, Elizabeth Mainwaring, Maris Frazier..

2.    Robert Peston, David Miliband, Oliver Letwin, Emily Thornberry.

3.    Lagos, Auckland, Zurich, Rangoon.

       
Geography
1.    Which historic English county is named after a river which flows between two different counties?

2.    Which Asian country is named after a river which flows entirely through another country?

3.    Which European country is named after a river which flows entirely through a neighbouring country?

4.    Which country has the largest banana plantation in Europe?


The arts
1.    Which European city is the location (in or near) of five grand operas?

2.    What was the nationality of prima ballerina assoluta Alicia Markova?

3.    What are the national origins of the following dances: the tango; the salsa; the rumba; and the samba?.

4.    Which famous impressionist painting includes the oldest registered trademark in the UK?

5.    What is the more familiar name of Ozymandias, King of Kings?


Wars
Which decades did these wars begin?
1.    The War of Jenkyn’s Ear?

2.    The Taiping Rebellion?

3.    The Grand Chaco War?

4.    The Great African War?


Quotes
1.    Who wrote: “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misdeeds of mankind”.

2.    Who described whom as being: “Mad, bad and dangerous to know”.

3.    Who started a work of fiction with: “It was a dark and stormy night”?


Last words
1.    Whose last words were (allegedly): “Bugger Bognor” or “God damn you”.

2.    Whose last words were these (allegedly) “I am dying beyond my means. I can't even afford to die.” or “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go.”

3.    Which film ends with the leading man saying: “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a dam”.

4.    Which comedy film ends with “Nobody’s perfect”.