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”.

Resolving conflicts

Following the news has become an increasingly a depressing experience. There is the well-publicised conflict in Gaza, and the much-less publicised but equally brutal conflicts in Sudan, Ukraine, Congo, Somalia, Myanmar, Syria and Yemen. A murderous regime in Iran cloaks its terrorism in the robes of religion, while the head gangster of Russia sees to the extermination of a neighbouring country and the assassination of his political opponents while posing as a pious Christian. Meanwhile equally pious ‘Christian conservatives’ in the USA enthusiastically support a man who disdains their faith and by his behaviour trashes every single Christian value. All of these malevolents know the great truth: that the road to personal power lies through the generation of conflict, the demonisation of enemies and the pretence of being a saviour.

There will, however, come a time when conflicts can be resolved, and we need to work out how to do this most effectively. There is one rule here: avoid identity issues and concentrate on solving the practical problems that are shared, even by those in conflict. Identity issues must be avoided because, by their nature, there is limited possibility of compromise. Peace was arranged in Northern Ireland after centuries of hostility and a decade of sectarian murder because it did not require either side to renounce their identity. Contentious symbols were confined to the tribal heartlands of each side rather than being used to symbolise the state, and more neutral symbols were developed. The Royal Ulster Constabulary became the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The Stormont Assembly became an enforced coalition between the parties that represent each identity.

Practical issues, by contrast, tend to be more amenable to negotiation and compromise because they do not challenge identities. Their resolution requires the conflicting parties to meet and hopefully experience a shared sense of success, providing some demonstrable benefits to take back to their constituents. A succession of successful compromises of this kind can gradually create a belief that the two sides are part, to some degree, of a joint enterprise, and a set of procedures and understandings that can be applied to fresh problems. The most outstanding example of this is the development over the last 70 years of the European Union. After two wars which cost millions of lives and vast destruction, representatives from a small number of states in Western Europe met to agree rules for trade in coal and steel. This was gradually expanded over succeeding decades to include trade in agricultural products and the harmonisation of industrial products. The name ‘European Economic Community’ explicitly denied a desire to challenge national identity.

After a long period of time, a new combined identity might be generated. This has been the hope among many people in Europe, with the consequent renaming of the EEC into the European Union at the Treaty of Maastricht. The adoption of shared symbols like the European Parliament, flag and currency all have the effect of creating a system of two-tier identity. In this respect, the EU follows earlier and rather different multinational states like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union. But the history of these states shows the limitations of multinationalism and the way in which they can disintegrate as nationalist politicians use identity politics to promote fragmentation and attain personal power.

Why have some longstanding conflicts like those in Ireland or in Western and Central Europe been resolved, while others such as Israel/Palestine have not? A factor in the former cases was that all sides in the conflicts were exhausted and recognised the catastrophic failure of violence as a solution to longstanding grievances. But another factor was the availability of supervising powers with some ability to enforce agreement. In the case of Ireland, these were the British and Irish governments, with the USA pushing for agreement. In the case of the European Union, the USA (and to a lesser degree the UK) wished to see greater co-operation to promote greater prosperity and thereby avoid Western Europe falling into the Soviet orbit.

There was a time when the USA had a similar role in the Israel/Palestine conflict. Serious attempts were made under Presidents Bush Senior and Clinton to bring the Israeli and Palestinian authorities together to agree mutual recognition and the resolution of conflicts. This failed because the USA focussed primarily on resolving identity issues rather than solving the practical problems of security. Identity issues were particularly difficult because mutual recognition was seen as zero-sum (ie one side could only gain if the other side loses). For Palestinians, it would mean the end of their dream of eradicating Jewish occupation (and, for some Palestinian factions, the Jews themselves). For Israeli nationalists, it meant losing the dream of a Jewish state across the historic heartlands of Judaism in the West Bank. The security issue, by contrast, could have been resolved. For Israel, ‘security’ meant an end to border raids and the random killing of civilians by Palestinian forces. For Palestinians, ‘security’ meant an end to the settlements Israel continued to build in the West Bank and an end to the oppressive Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.  

But another factor in the failure of peace talks was the very weakness of the authorities in both sides. Israeli governments are a succession of weak coalitions with limited ability to control aggressive settlers on the West Bank. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation was an umbrella body which included several militant groups that aimed to derail any peace process. Neither Israel nor the PLO could enforce a peace deal even if an agreement was possible between them. This means that peace could only be achieved if, as in Northern Ireland, both sides were subject to pressure from more powerful protectors. In the case of Israel/Palestine, this would be the USA and the major Arab states.  

But since the time of President Clinton, US foreign policy in the Middle East has been a catastrophe. The Iraq War of Bush Junior caused more than a million deaths, the destabilisation of Iraq and a growth in Iranian influence. Iran was then able to mobilise a coalition of states and non-state forces against the USA, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Obama’s government promoted political change in Arab states, which led to civil wars in Syria and Libya and the temporary ascendancy of the Muslim League in Egypt. Trump completed the general drift of US policy towards giving Israel a carte blanche to invade and attack its neighbours. Countries which do this essentially empower their smaller ally to drag them into conflict, as the German Empire discovered with Austria-Hungary in 1914.

The gross over-reaction of the Netanyahu Government in Israel to Hamas atrocities may lead to a greater US distance from its aggressive ally. This may be the only hope for achieving some form of security for the Israeli and Palestinian nations.

Tribalism in politics

 Almost 50 years ago, I lived in a council estate in Falkirk in Central Scotland. I was interested to learn that our next-door neighbour had once appeared in the Borough Police Court for assaulting a council workman. It was then common practice for local councils to repaint the doors of all their houses on an estate in a standard colour over a period of a week or two. In this case, maroon doors were being repainted green. But the next-door neighbour was an ardent orangeman and green was the colour of Catholicism. Hence the assault. It is doubtful whether he had ever suffered at the hands of Catholics, took religion seriously, or even knew the doctrinal differences that distinguished the Catholic and Protestant versions of Christianity. Instead, he knew which tribe he belonged to, and which tribe was his enemy.

Tribal identity and consequent hostility to other tribes explains much of political behaviour. Policies and actions are applauded or derided not on their merits, but because they symbolise the favoured or the enemy tribe. Violent actions by one’s own tribe are denied, minimised or excused, while similar actions by the opposing tribe are denounced, even as genocide. An army of compliant journalists exists to support these claims. Crude tribalism of this kind is unacceptable to intellectuals or other sensitive souls, so tribalism is disguised by abstract nouns. So intellectual warriors denounce their tribal enemies by opposing ‘colonialism’ (ie the USA and Britain), ‘multiculturalism’ (ethnic minorities), ‘Zionism’ (the Jews), or ‘wokeism’ (women and gays).

Intellectuals also play a crucial part in converting tribalism into nationalism. They do so by concocting a pseudo-history of their tribe/nation, in which it is usually portrayed as the innocent and gallant victim of an evil oppressor. A key consequence is a belief that the exclusion or elimination of this oppressor will of itself produce ‘freedom’ and wellbeing. The real complexity of historic events and the motives that drive events are thereby reduced to a simple moral tale that can mobilise millions. So convincing are pseudo-histories that they attract people elsewhere looking for a cause. This kind of proxy tribalism tends to shift from country to country. In the early 20th Century, the Left in Britain supported the ‘gallant little Boers’. Later, many people idealised the Soviet Union, with subsequent shifts of the idealised foreign country to China, Cuba, and even Albania. On the Right, support for Franco and Hitler morphed into an admiration for the descendants of the gallant little Boers and then to the ruthless capitalists of the USA.

This can all have bizarre results. There have recently been attacks on Starbucks outlets across the world by people who oppose Israel in its war with Hamas. This might seem puzzling because Starbucks has no outlets in Israel, but has many elsewhere in the Middle East, all owned by a Kuwaiti family. Starbucks is not even on the Palestinian BDS list of pro-Israel firms to be boycotted. But Starbucks is seen as a representative of US culture, and the USA is Israel’s main ally. So local branches of Starbucks are attacked and tribal warriors can feel satisfied that they have struck a blow against their hated enemy.