Diplomacy in Dreamland

Last night I dreamed of Vladimir Putin. I had left my home, as usual each morning, to walk to the village shop to buy my newspaper. I remembered that our village fete was being held that day. When I returned, I found Vladimir Putin and various other people inside my bungalow. Putin was very genial and told me that since he now lived in England he would need a home for his disabled father. He believed my house was suitable. I demurred, suggesting that my bungalow is too small, but recommended that he apply to Fortis (the local housing association) who would probably be able to find a very nice flat nearby. As the neighbourhood volunteer for Citizens’ Advice, I would be able to help with the application. Putin seemed very pleased with my comments, and left with his entourage. I reflected that since this probably counted as work for Citizens’ Advice, I would need to keep this referral confidential and would not be able to tell my wife when she returned. Fortunately, it was all a dream, and I could tell her of my unique role in improving Anglo-Russian relations.

See also: Living the Dream

Going to the Outdoor

I was born just after the Second World War in Shirley - once a village but by then a suburb of Birmingham, on the edge of the countryside. At the time of my birth, home confinements were still common, and so I came into the world in lodgings behind a shop on Haslucks Green Road. My life until the age of 11 was spent almost entirely within about half a mile of that shop. I remember playing with the curtain that divided our lodgings from the shop, and being brought home in a car from hospital after I had had my tonsils removed. Then, at the age of 4, the family moved to a rented semi-detached house in Stroud Road. This had (it seemed to me at the time) a very long garden which ended in a sandpit. Behind the garden was a track and waste ground. In the distance was the railway line from Birmingham to Shirley. At the age of (just) 5, I started at Haslucks Green Primary School, which I would walk to myself when quite young. I would return home at midday for dinner, cooked by my mother, before walking back to school for the afternoon. When I was aged 11, my parents bought a semi-detached house in Haslucks Croft, where my mother still lives. This coincided with starting secondary school in Birmingham, and my life as a commuter began.

The shop that was my birthplace now sells fish-and-chips, but was then (I think) a grocer. It was therefore one of a great many types of shops that have almost entirely disappeared except in the smallest market towns. Down the road was a greengrocer and a butcher, and a post-office/tobacconist/newsagent. The strangest local shop was the outdoor. This sold alcohol, which could not be consumed on the premises. It was bare but clean, and consisted of a wooden counter on which were pumps for beer and a barrel of ‘wine from the wood’. Customers would arrive with jugs to be filled with beer. The shop had a distinctive smell of beer and vinegar, which I can still summon in my memory. The name ‘outdoor’ presumably derived from the back doors in pubs at which you could buy beer for home consumption. I would go to the outdoor to buy sweets rather than beer, which I do not remember my parents ever drinking.

A rival to the outdoor was home delivery, by a firm called Davenports. This had a large brewery in Birmingham and delivered to households in lorries painted bright red. There were daily home deliveries of milk (from the Co-op) and bread (from Hawley’s Bakery). Both used quiet electric vehicles. Coal was also delivered, but coalmen were regarded as untrustworthy, and I was always told to count the number of bags delivered.

This kind of retailing was all replaced by supermarkets, which began to spread in the 1970s. These were cheap because they offloaded some of their work to their customers. Instead of customers asking the grocer to collect their order and pack it, customers in supermarkets wander round the lengthy aisles themselves, selecting the goods they need (and some they do not need). Customers then pack the goods themselves and, increasingly, also check them out with a scanner. Much of what they ‘save’ (ie spend less) is cancelled by the cost of driving to and from the supermarket. Now of course, this is changing. People can select goods through the Internet, which are delivered to their homes by the supermarket companies. This has become so popular, that it is possible to imagine the supermarket buildings eventually becoming vast ruined cathedrals of commerce. In the meantime, I propose to take my jug round to the village pub and see if the landlord will start an outdoor service.

See also: What we ate and what we called it

A shared life

On Tuesday last week, I spoke to the All-Party Disability Interest Group in Parliament about shared-life communities for people with a learning disability (intellectual disability). This was organised by the Alliance for Camphill. For the record, I include a synopsis of my talk, on the research evidence for shared-life communities.

"Public policy in the UK has sought to attain a fulfilling life for people with a learning disability by placing them in dispersed housing schemes after they leave their family home or hospital. These are houses or flats mainly in urban settings, with support staff employed by private and voluntary-sector agencies to work in the home or visit on a regular basis. This became the dominant type of accommodation for people resettled from the former mental handicap hospitals, although some were also placed in ‘residential campuses’ of homes managed by the NHS on the sites of the former hospitals. By contrast, few former inpatients moved to intentional communities based on shared-life principles. These are a diverse group of settlements and networks in which ‘co-workers’ (Camphill) and ‘assistants’ (L’Arche) are motivated by a personal calling to work alongside people with a learning disability, sharing their homes and family life. Shared-life communities of this kind vary in size and location (rural, small town or urban).

"However, research which has compared the quality of life of people with a learning disability in different types of housing has found that shared-life communities have similar outcomes for their residents as dispersed housing schemes. In some respects (especially friendships with other people with a learning disability, employment and personal safety), shared-life communities are superior. Shared-life communities also provide a better quality of life on almost all measures than the NHS-managed residential campuses, even though both characteristically comprise clusters of small houses dispersed across a shared landscape. This indicates that the size of a residence and its location is less important in determining quality of life than the pattern of social relationships within each residence or network.

"Studies which have explored the distinctive pattern of social relationships that exist in shared-life communities have found that residents appreciate the diverse range of employment and leisure opportunities, their wide friendship network with other people with a learning disability, and their sense of being part of a community in which they have an important part to play through shared decision-making and rituals. Friendship is facilitated by the availability in the community of several other people with a learning disability and by the sense of personal security it provides. Living in extended families with co-workers/assistants enables people with a learning disability and their supporters to acquire and build skills in each others’ pattern of communication - the essential step if a person with a learning disability is to learn of the world and express choices about what they want to do in it.

"Shared-life communities are therefore an appropriate option for people with a learning disability who prefer this lifestyle. The choice of how and where to live has in the past often been denied to people with a learning disability, but is defined as a right under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Disabled People. It should therefore be respected by public agencies in how they assess, commission, fund and regulate residential support."

See also: Denying disability

The perils of being nice

When I was at school, we were warned against using the word ‘nice’ - a word, we were told, which was milk-and-water, signifying the bland and the inoffensive. Being told to ‘Have a nice day’ was therefore hardly a blessing, which may explain why most English people wish you have a ‘good day’ instead. Nevertheless, niceness is a real and important phenomenon which shapes day-to-day behaviour, particularly in large organisations. The most important part of niceness is an extreme reluctance to say anything which might possibly cause offence to another person, and a corresponding fear of being the subject of complaint by another. Niceness consequently means remaining silent when people do something wrong, refusing to challenge another person’s opinions however wrongheaded they may be, and avoiding any action that might possibly be attributed to you personally.

Niceness is often confused with good manners, but they are different. The core of good manners is consideration and respect for others. This means that you take the opinions of others seriously, disagree where appropriate, but do so in a way that does not humiliate or intimidate. The difference between niceness and manners can be shown in this example. Some time in the 1990s, I was asked to give a presentation at an NHS conference in Birmingham on ageing in society. I was due to speak in the morning session after several other speakers. There were the usual rules in such matters - 15 minutes for each presentation, followed by five minutes for questions. All the speakers kept to these rules until the one before me - a woman who had recently completed a PhD. Her presentation was a description of her research, set out at length, with one tedious detail after another - all spoken in a dull flat voice. Before the talk, she had placed a sheaf of paper copies of her overheads on each seat, and the audience realised after half an hour that she was still less than half way through her intended talk. Despite this, the chairman failed to act until a member of the audience (the local political activist Dave Spilsbury), asked “Mr Chairman - when is this talk going to end? Some of us would like to hear the next speaker”. The chairman, with obvious reluctance, asked the speaker to draw her talk to a close. She droned on with no sign of concluding for another five minutes, until he finally told her to finish. There were of course no questions. It was then my turn. I spoke for ten minutes in as punchy a manner as I could manage. After that, the audience inevitably applauded with great enthusiasm.

As I let the room for lunch, I heard one woman say to another: “That man was so rude”. She meant Dave Spilsbury, not the nice and ineffective chairman, who had failed to exercise the very simple task of keeping a speaker to the allotted time and had therefore shown a lack of respect to the audience and to the next speaker. His behaviour was therefore an example of bad manners combined with niceness.

I had even worse experiences at two other NHS conferences, when the chairmen allowed the speaker before my presentation to drone on for twice their allotted time and then asked me whether I could possibly shorten my talk “because we seem to be running over”. The three ineffective chairmen at these conferences were all senior managers in the NHS, and their niceness may have been a factor in their career success. Niceness was indeed the dominant culture in NHS management and the other public sector organisations in which I have worked, and those who conform to the dominant culture tend to be the most successful.

When I worked in the NHS, one general manager (who later rose to great heights) would look concerned whenever disagreement broke out in a board meeting, and then immediately suggest that the issue should be considered by a subcommittee. This ensured that a nice atmosphere could be preserved at the meeting and that all disagreement (or difficult decisions) could be avoided. One consequence of this tendency is a preference for reacting to events rather than anticipating them. In this way, conflict can be avoided and decisions presented as fait accompli. When I was a member of the same management board, the monthly accounts at the start of the financial year showed a substantial operating deficit. I pointed this out and suggested we start planning how to re-organise services to reduce costs. But this view was dismissed, the deficit accumulated until at the very end of the financial year the general manager announced to staff that the board had reluctantly been ‘forced’ to close a ward.

A second consequence of niceness in organisations is a futile obsession with secrecy. Since criticism is to be avoided at almost all costs, all decisions are inspected for any possible embarrassment they may cause, and a major effort is put into keeping them secret. Keeping things secret is thereby given greater priority than challenging incompetence and dealing with abuse. Staff who abuse patients or clients are therefore quietly re-located instead of being dismissed. The culture of niceness among staff means a lack of respect for those in their care.

See also:The rudeness of strangers

The original sin of babies

Many years ago, I worked as a social worker in Scotland. I lived in a pleasant village in Clackmannanshire under the lea of the Ochils, and I worked in a miserable town in West Lothian. But in both places I heard several parents say the same thing about their babies: that when they cry, they should be left to do so because it helps ‘break their spirit’. I do not know how common this view is in Scotland or whether it is unique to Scotland, but it seemed to me then to incorporate a strange and harsh idea of the nature of children and how best to respond to their needs. It is harsh because it seemed to attribute a baby’s act of communicating distress or discomfort to a desire to manipulate and control its parents. It is, in other words, a belief in original sin.

This belief, as conventionally developed by Christian theologians from St. Augustine onwards, is that human beings inherit sin from Adam, who committed the original sin of disobedience (ie eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge) in the Garden of Eden. All human beings are therefore deemed to be depraved in their nature from birth, and to lack the freedom to do good or respond to the will of God unless they receive His grace. The idea of original sin was especially favoured by the first Protestant clerics like Martin Luther and John Calvin, but would seem to have little to do with the expressed statements of Christ or the Book of Genesis.

Three of the Christian gospels have similar texts in which Christ tells his disciples not to prevent children coming to see him, and saying that “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18: 1-6). He therefore regarded children as innocent beings, not as innately depraved.

The Book of Genesis reports that God punished Adam and Eve and their descendants for their disobedience, but the punishment comprised the pain and suffering of toil, childbirth, illness and death (Gen. 3: 16-19), with no mention of the inheritance of sin. According to the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden to prevent a challenge to God who said: “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever”. (Gen. 3:22-23).

Sin therefore arises because Adam and Eve’s acquisition of knowledge provided them with the capacity to choose rather than act on instinct. This choice created the possibility of helping or harming others, and it is a choice we have all inherited because of our intellectual capacity as human beings. That we can choose evil is emphasised in the following chapter in the Book of Genesis, which tells the story of Cain murdering his brother Abel.

The doctrine of original sin involves a distinctly pessimistic view of human nature - of children as well as adults. It leads some parents to see their children as innate sinners who must be disciplined from birth, rather than innocent and curious souls driven to respond to the attention and love of their parents.

See also: No sympathy for the devils

The dangerous mythology of computers

Last year, my aged laptop ceased to work and I so I went to the local PC World to buy a new one. I discovered that it had the new operating system called ‘Windows 8', in which the main screen resembles that on a mobile phone. I managed to find out how to make this work by trial-and-error, and eventually modified it so that it resembled the earlier version of Windows with which I was familiar. I do not use the programme Microsoft Word and prefer Corel Wordperfect, which I re-installed on the new computer. However, I do use PowerPoint , and so I decided to buy the Microsoft Office suite, which also includes Word and the Excel spreadsheet programme. Instead of getting an installation disk, PC World took my money and gave a product key on a card, so that I could download the Office suite from the Microsoft website. All went well until this week when I finally needed to use Microsoft Word. As soon as I loaded the programme, an error message informed me that it had ceased working and it closed down. The same thing happened, I discovered, with Excel.

So I phoned Microsoft technical support for help, and was told that they could solve the problem if I took out a support contract. In other words, Microsoft had sold me a product that did not work and wanted more money to make it work. My next step was therefore to contact PC World, who as the retailer have a legal obligation to sell goods that are ‘merchantable’ (a legal term meaning that goods should be reasonably fit for the ordinary purposes for which such products are manufactured and sold). Their technician told me that such principles could not apply to computers because of their complexity, and the possibility that different software applications can conflict with each other. However, they could sort it out for me if I paid them a £50 repair fee. Not being a complete mug, I went home and checked the Internet. It became clear that my problem was a common one, and occurred because Word and Excel are incompatible with a programme called ‘Finereader’. I have never used Finereader, and do not remember installing it, so it was probably supplied with the computer. Anyway, I deleted Finereader, solved the problem, and saved £50 plus whatever a Microsoft support contract costs.

All this illustrates an important part of the mythology of computers and their software: that they are complicated and that they are expected to be fallible, and that their failure is somehow not the responsibility of those who made them. Complexity and fallibility were once expected of cars. Up to the 1980s, brand new cars would often break down and old ones frequently so. Car-owners would expect to spend a lot of their time attempting to repair them or waiting for a roadside recovery service. All this ended when Japanese manufacturers began to make cars that were highly-reliable. A similar transition has yet to occur with computer systems and so there is still a common belief that computer systems are inherently unreliable. This suits the corporations that make and market them. They can continue to produce poorly-designed products like Windows 8 and expect supplementary payouts from customers when their products prove unworkable. The sum of repair fees and software support contracts from millions of customers must amount to a tidy sum.

Even better profits are generated by the failure of large contracts for public computer systems. This month, the National Audit Office has reported that the General Practitioner Extraction System (GPES) has utterly failed to operate. This is not failure in the sense that the system is unreliable or slow, rather it is failure in the sense that it has never managed to generate a single piece of data for general practitioners. The GPES failed to operate when it cost £19 million, which resulted in a further large input of public cash so that it now fails to operate having cost £40 million. But that is chickenfeed compared with some other public procurement systems like the NHS patient records system abandoned after costing at least £10 billion. In any rational economy, the companies responsible for wasting public money on this scale would be out of business and the civil servants responsible for procurement and management would be in prison or exile. I suspect, however, that they have retired with a good pension, a lucrative ‘consultancy’ post, and the award of a medal from the honours list.

The horrors of planning 3: local plans

It took some time after I became a parish councillor to realise that planning departments of district councils do not actually do much planning as most of us would understand this term.

In everyday use, the word ‘planning’ means the activities of setting out an objective to be achieved at some defined point in the future, identifying the steps needed to achieve it, and specifying the resources required for each step. Effective planning does a lot more: it investigates the possible threats to the implementation of the plan and the preferred response to them, it estimates the scheduling of the various steps so that resource costs can be minimised, and it considers how the people involved in implementing the plan should be informed and trained. A lot can change after a plan is made, and so delays in implementation may result in action being based on obsolete data. So good management involves rapid planning followed by a timely implementation. There should also be review stages, so that the planning team can check progress and adapt the plan if this is required.

How much does the work of planning departments correspond to this definition? Planning departments have two main activities: they produce a ‘local plan’ for their area, which specifies where and what type of development should take place; and they recommend what should be done about applications to build, modify or demolish buildings. The two activities are related - permission to build is not usually recommended in areas not so specified in the local plan, while the local plan also defines some places as being ‘conservation areas’, in which there are tight restrictions on what can be built and what changes can be made to existing buildings.

The local plan-to-be in my part of England is called the ‘South Worcestershire Development Plan (SWDP)’ and covers the area of three local councils: Malvern Hills and Wychavon District and the City of Worcester. I call it a ‘plan-to-be’ because it is still being formally examined by a planning inspector appointed by the Government, after which, if he finds the plan ‘sound’, it will have the full legal force of a local plan. But until then, there is actually no local plan in force for the entire area, which means that, according to Government policy, almost anything can be built almost anywhere.

This situation has come about because of the inordinate time taken to complete the SWDP.  Work seems to have begun in 2010, followed by publication of a draft in 2011, followed by lots of consultation, followed by a new draft, followed by the planning inspector indicating that insufficient sites for new housing had been included, followed by another revision, followed in 2015 by the current round of ‘examination’ by the planning inspector. This length of time does not seem to be unusual for local plans. However, all this shows that the process of planning has become more important than the actual plan itself.

Why these delays? The problem lies in the way in which planning law now operates. Gaining planning permission to build houses on farmland results in a massive increase in the value of the land. The designation of areas for development in a local plan and the consequent granting of planning permission therefore has the effect of donating large sums of cash to selected individuals. This creates a sense of injustice among those refused planning permission, anger in communities which see their neighbourhoods despoiled, and a temptation for corruption among councillors and planners. As a result, planning has become a prolonged quasi-judicial process, with extensive periods of consultation, appeals, and examinations.

What of the contents of the SWDP? Well it certainly looks like a plan - there are high-sounding statements of objectives, maps, lists of ‘policies’ (ie quasi-laws which define what development can be permitted), and various estimates of population growth. But it fails the definition of ‘planning’ as set out above for several reasons. In particular, it is concerned only with ‘spatial planning’ - the allocation of land for specific purposes. This means that although the SWDP analyses the growing number of older people in South Worcestershire, it has nothing to say about the implications of this trend on local health and social services, the potential impact on the need for public transport, or how local communities can best cope with a larger elderly and infirm population. This is a product of ‘departmentalism’, or the way in which governments partition inter-dependent activities between different departments and agencies. Each of these then avoids trouble by keeping within its own area of responsibility. So healthcare is planned by the various local agencies of the NHS, social care and transport by the County Council, and spatial planning by the district councils. Each then generates their own separate sets of plans and strategies for their particular topic.

There are other problems with this spatial planning approach. By focussing on the allocation of land for specific purposes, local plans include nothing about the appearance of the whole place. So the policies in the SWDP relating to leisure and recreation are concerned with the use of community centres, village halls and playing fields because these all take place on defined bits of land. But the most popular recreational activity were I live (and probably in most of England) is walking in the countryside. This can hardly take place where extensive housing estates are built over fields and where woodlands become thin strips dividing various estates of suburban dwellings.

A further problem is that planning in England has become almost entirely reactive. Planners react to population change (including high rates of immigration), to speculative applications from developers, and, more generally, to the desire of most English people to own a house with a garden in a low-density suburb while also preserving the countryside. This can be seen in the way in which the planning authorities approve individual applications to build. Here is an example from my own village. Our primary school is large by village standards, with 140 pupils. It occupies a site near the parish church (the school was founded by the Church of England) which has gradually been built over as the school has expanded. There is now no room for further expansion on the current site. Expansion will be necessary in the near future because 75 new houses are being built in the village, while some smaller schools in neighbouring parishes will probably be closed and their children transferred to our village school. Fortunately, there is a decent-sized field next to the school that would be suitable for expansion. Good planning would therefore involve purchasing the land for the school or, at the very least, preventing it being used for anything that would impede expansion. However, the land is in private hands, and there is much more money to be made selling land for housing than selling land for school expansion. So the owner duly applied for planning permission for 14 new houses, which the District Council (against the advice of the parish council) has approved.

I do not believe these problems with local planning in England have come about because of any personal shortcomings among our district councillors or our local planners, who I have always found to be capable and willing to help members of the public. But, as I learnt when I was a social worker, the most capable and earnest people can have all their best efforts rendered ineffective when they have to cope within an unworkable system.

See also: The horrors of planning 1
                The horrors of planning 2

The two villages

Where I live in Worcestershire, there are two villages, very close to each other. The upper village has a high population density, packed with hundreds of small family homes. The inhabitants are noisy but lead surprisingly orderly lives. Each morning, most commute to work, leaving some to care for the young. Parents have strong family bonds and rarely divorce. But there is a definite hierarchy between families, and in hard times those with the lowest status starve. Thirty feet below this village of jackdaws is the village of humans, living at ground-level rather than among the tree tops. The humans also commute to work in the morning, but they lead much quieter lives than the inhabitants of the jackdaw village. When the jackdaws return home, there is no quiet evening on the nest in front of the television. Instead, there is boisterous party-going, circling round in formation flying, and calling to each other from nest to nest. The only human activities that match the jackdaw village for noise are football matches - an occasion for shouting abuse and swearing.

Jackdaws were once called ‘daws’ in England: the ‘Jack’ was added as a personal name, in the same way that Redbreasts were all named ‘Robin’ and Wrens are called ‘Jenny’. Perhaps these three species were given Christian names because of all the birds they seemed the most human: busy, loud and assertive. At this time of year (early June), the jackdaw village in the bank of trees opposite my house is sufficiently loud and assertive to wake me up every morning some time soon after 4am.

Dead whale-watching in Iceland

People now prefer to watch whales instead of eating them. But I ate whalemeat a long time ago, and the only whales I have ever seen were dead ones being hacked to pieces in Iceland. This all happened in 1966, when I spent a summer in Reykjavik as a trainee placed by AIESEC - an international organisation which arranges what would now be called ‘internships’ for economics students.

I flew out of Birmingham Airport (then called ‘Elmdon Airport’) on the day of the World Cup Final. The passengers crowded round a transistor radio in the departure lounge to hear the match. I spent the first week staying with an Icelandic family, where I ate quite a lot of fish. After that, I moved to lodgings with some other AISEC trainees in a house with a young landlady. I was based in a firm called ‘Kassagerdin’, which made boxes (mainly for fish) as well as printing all sorts of materials. I began working in the office, working on a complex accounting machine. But later, I had a far  better time on the workshop floor as a member of a three-man team operating a large machine which cut and printed cardboard boxes. The two other workers were the teenage son of the firm’s owner and a teacher working over the summer school break.

The AISEC committee in Iceland did an excellent job, and the group of trainees went on various trips to see the vast volcanic landscape of Thingvellir, the Arbaer Folk Museum, the waterfall Gullfoss, the Great Geysir, and Hveragerdi (where we saw bananas grown in greenhouses heated by hot thermal springs). I took a few days off on holiday to hitch-hike around the coast to Akureyri and from there to the Lake Myvatn. I was given lifts by many friendly and interesting Icelandic people. These included the driver of an articulated oil tanker. At one point on the journey, he turned off the road, and drove the truck along a track through the twisted rocks of a lava field until we came to a half-built bungalow. He unloaded some long planks he had stored along the side of the trailer, placed them next to the bungalow, and then returned to the main road. He was building this house himself, he explained, for his retirement. Later that day, I checked into a hotel in the village of Blonduos. I slept in the hotel annexe, built on the edge of a beach of black sand facing the Arctic Ocean.

Before all this, however, I paused in my journey at Hvalfjordur, just North of Reykjavik. In 1966, the road would around the head of the fjord - the location of a whaling station. From my memory, this comprised a jetty, a slipway and a large shed. The jetty had originally been built by the US Navy, and several Icelandic spectators pointed to the ‘secret American submarine base’ around the coast. Eventually, a small whaling boat approached the jetty with (I think) two whale carcasses slung on each side. The first carcass was winched to the slipway, and as it rose on the slope a mass of blood swelled out into the sea. Some young men, stripped to waist, climbed on the body of the whale and began hacking it to pieces with large long cleavers. In a short time, there was just bones, meat and entrails. There was also the smell - a smell so strong I remember it now almost 50 years later.

Also 50 years later, the Hvalur Whaling Company still operates in the same location, still catching fin whales and bringing them to a whale-abattoir in a fjord named after whales.

Five things they didn’t tell you about the 2015 British General Election

1. This is the second-most unpopular elected government since the beginning of universal suffrage. The Conservative Party won 331 seats in the House of Commons (51% of the 650 seats in the House) from only 36.8% of the vote. This is the second-lowest winning percentage since universal suffrage began at the General Election of 1929. Only Labour's 'victory' in 2005 with just over 35% of the vote is comparable. The other winner in 2015 from our grossly undemocratic election system was the SNP. This has 56 seats from only 4.7% of the vote. Compare that with UKIP, which won one seat from 12.6% of voters.

2. Scotland will have less influence in the UK than at any time since the Act of Union.
The claim by the SNP that they will give Scotland a voice at Westminster is a familiar combination of deceit and self-delusion. Scots have played an important part in all UK governments since the Act of Union. This rose to a peak in the most recent Labour Government, in which Scotsmen were, at various times, Prime Minister, Chancellor the Exchequer, Defence Secretary, Lord Chancellor, Foreign Secretary, and Secretary of State for Health. However, membership of a senior post in government, with few exceptions, requires membership of the House of Commons. Since the SNP has all but three of the Members of Parliament who represent Scotland, this will effectively eliminate the Scots from both Government and Opposition front benches. 

3. Rupert Murdoch will be rewarded. One of the fascinating features of the election campaign was the co-ordinated campaign by the Conservatives and the SNP to build up the SNP threat to the Labour Party. Each time David Cameron claimed that a minority Labour government would be controlled by the SNP, an SNP leader would state a new demand they would make of such a government. Both the Conservatives and the SNP received the enthusiastic support of, respectively, the English and Scottish editions of The Sun on the instructions of its American owner Rupert Murdoch. Both parties have invested a big efforts in wooing this evil old man, and he will expect a reward for his support. This will probably be approval for a takeover bid for Sky and the breakup of the BBC.

4. The Labour Party has popular policies but failed politically. The various policies announced by the Labour Party during the campaign (such as ending the tax-avoidance status of non-domiciles, controlling rents, restricting the use of zero-hours contracts and preventing further privatisation of the NHS) all proved to have majority support in the public opinion polls. But the Labour leadership failed to promote these policies over the lifetime of the preceding Parliament, and they therefore had limited impact at the election. Most important of all, the Labour Party failed to effectively challenge the claim that it had ‘bankrupted’ the UK economy by massively increasing the National Debt. The increase in this debt was a result of having to borrow money to avoid the bankruptcy of three of the world’s largest banks, as well as various building societies and smaller banks in 2008. None of the political parties had anticipated the recklessness of the management of so many financial institutions, and all would have acted in the same way as Gordon Brown’s Labour Government to protect the savings of British citizens. But the impression was given of panic and incompetence, rather like Black Wednesday in 1992, when the Conservative Government was forced to withdraw from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Labour failed to defend its actions in 2008, and has failed to do so since. This is a primary political failure, in the sense of being unable to make a case and persuade people to accept it.

5. In two years time, the Conservative Party will fall apart. A referendum will be held on membership of the European Union in 2017 after a supposed renegotiation of the terms of British membership. The Government has never stated what changes it aims to achieve, and any significant changes would in any case require the revision of the various inter-governmental treaties that determine the structure and functioning of the EU. Treaty-revision requires unanimous consent of all the countries in the EU, which is unlikely to be forthcoming since new treaties in some countries require formal constitutional change and/or a referendum . We can therefore assume that any renegotiation will be mainly cosmetic and unlikely to appease the majority of the Conservative Party which opposes membership of the Union. The following 2017 referendum campaign will in consequence involve rival sets of Conservative political leaders on opposite sides bitterly denouncing each other. This will be interesting to observe.

The horrors of planning No. 2: 'Housing Need'

You do not have to be exposed to the English planning system for long to realise that it exists primarily to designate acceptable sites for new housing. In my own area of South Worcestershire, the three district councils have prepared a draft local plan (called the ‘South Worcestershire Development Plan’ or ‘SWDP’), the bulk of which comprises long lists of potential housing sites in individual towns and villages, together with various justifications for their inclusion.

The most important such justification is the concept of ‘housing need’. This involves calculating a target for the number of new dwellings to be completed in the area covered by the local plan over a given period of time. The Government’s National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) requires each plan to identify a ‘five year land supply’, or land which is currently approved for housing development to meet the target number of dwellings for the next five years. The figure for local housing need therefore has the effect of determining how many hectares of (usually) countryside get built on. The job of the local planners is then to approve sites and find some suitable reason (often that the site is supposedly ‘sustainable. 

But how is housing need calculated? There are actually several different methods, but all involve aggregating several quite different groups of people and using census data to estimate future trends. These groups include people who are homeless or in overcrowded or otherwise unsatisfactory accommodation, people who are expected to move into an area to work or retire, and a group termed ‘concealed households’. The latter includes families (with or without children) sharing a house with another family. Census data is used to estimate ‘household formation’, based on expected birth and death rates as well as rates for marriage and divorce. At present, the number of households in England is growing by over 200,000/year, although the mean size of households is falling because of the increasing number of single-parent families and single elderly people.

This is all of course based on a set of social assumptions - that every household should have its own dwelling, even if the ‘household’ is just one lonely adult. A further problem is that housing is highly-differentiated: houses vary in size and type. Some are in a block of flats, a row of terrace-houses, or stand in their own grounds. Most of all, they vary in cost and location - these two often being related. Houses may stand empty because they are in an area no-one wishes to, or can afford to, live in. In fact, there are over 200,000 houses in England which have been empty for more than six months. Some of these, particularly in London, have been left empty because they are an investment by wealthy exiles or foreigners.

However, all this seems to matter little when planners estimate ‘housing need’. In South Worcestershire, the first draft of the SWDP in 2011 estimated a ‘need’ for 20,361 new dwellings between 2006 and 2030. Some of these had of course already been approved or even built by the time the report was published. Local plans do not have any legal force until they are approved by a planning inspector, who is a civil servant pretending to act in a judicial capacity. The most judicial aspect of this whole process of approval is the extraordinary length of time taken to reach a conclusion - comparable to Jarndyce v Jarndyce in Dickens’ novel Bleak House. By 2013, the planning inspector reported that he believed that the draft SWDP underestimated rates of household formation, economic activity among elderly people, and various other factors, which led him to conclude that the figure for ‘housing need’ should be revised upwards. The three district councils then produced a revised figure (together with an expanded list of building sites in the countryside) of 23,200. The planning inspector has now begun a leisurely process of consultation, but has suggested that even 23,200 dwellings may be insufficient. He noted that the various developers eager to build houses in South Worcestershire have calculated a ‘need’ for between 23,500 and 36,000 new dwellings.

All this suggests that calculations of ‘housing need’ are not after all a matter of technical calculation, but rather a way of giving a rational gloss to political and economic preferences. District councils in rural areas are under pressure from their electorate to resist large-scale housebuilding. But once planning permission is granted for new houses, agricultural land can increase in value by eighty times. It is not therefore surprising to find that landowners and developers wish to cover the countryside with houses, presumably so that they can use the resulting profits to move their home to an area that is not similarly blighted.

What makes all the calculations of ‘housing need’ nonsense, however, is that the houses that get built do not meet most people’s need for housing. This is because almost all houses are now built by the private corporations, which naturally build the type of houses they can sell at the greatest profit. Houses prices have risen much faster than incomes in the last few years, and the majority of people who do not own a house can not get a mortgage or loan to buy one (or afford the repayments for that matter). This is of  course most likely to be the case among people with the most severe housing need. As a result, developers concentrate on meeting the needs of people who can get and afford a mortgage, who are usually those with a house to sell and who wish to move to a larger one. The most profit is made if as many as possible of these houses can be crammed onto a site. This rules out bungalows, however much these are preferred by the elderly and disabled.

One Government policy that is supposed to deal with this problem is ‘affordable housing’. This is another deviously misleading term used in planning, and designates houses which are either for sale or rented at 80% of the market rates. A fifth of dwellings in new housing developments of ten or more houses must be reserved as ‘affordable homes’. Developers do not lose by this policy because they can bid for funds from Central Government to meet this subsidised price. Needless to say, most such ‘affordable housing’ is still beyond the reach of most people who wish to buy or rent a home. Some help comes from Housing Benefit (HB), which is paid to people who are not working or who are in work but with a low income. But this is a major policy disaster. The annual amount paid in HB in England has risen by £2.4 billion since 2010. This is not, it should be emphasised, money spent on building houses, but is instead a kind of subsidy to existing landlords, with the largest profits going to those who are most extortionate and neglectful.

To summarise, our system for planning and housing is extremely successful if you own land, are a developer, or are an unscrupulous landlord. It does not help meet ‘housing need’ in any real sense of the term, and is now promoting the destruction of large areas of the countryside. This is truly another horror of planning.

See also: The horrors of planning No. 1. 'Sustainability'

Coffee with cold milk in Telemark

I spent the Summer of 1967 on a traineeship with Norsk Hydro in Oslo. This was arranged with an international organisation called AIESEC, which at that time organised unpaid placements (they would now be called ‘internships’) with employers in different countries for students studying economics or commerce. My first AIESEC placement had been in the previous year with a small printing company in Reykjavik, where all the employees knew each other by sight. Norsk Hydro was a very different enterprise. It was the largest industrial enterprise in Norway, involved in mining and metal-processing, chemicals and fertilisers, and oil. I was based in its headquarters, and supervised by a kindly man called Mr Falkenberg. I stayed at first in the University student village, and later in a room in the Eastern suburbs. I visited the Viking ship museum, the Munch museum and the Holmenkollen ski jump. I swam in lakes and walked through the woods that surrounded Oslo. I also spent a lot of time strolling round the City centre, and was surprised to find that its citizens enjoyed eating in open-air cafes and drinking excellent coffee. Neither of these activities were common in England at that time.

Part of my traineeship involved a tour round the various industrial sites in Southern Norway that were operated by Norsk Hydro. Mr Falkenberg drove, and we stayed in hostels owned by the company. One of the places we visited was Rjukan in Telemark, located in a deep-sided valley. In the Second World War, Norsk Hydro had been taken over by the German company IG Farben, and had produced heavy water, important in the production of nuclear weapons. Norwegian commandos destroyed this facility in 1943.

After we left Rjukan, Mr Falkenberg steered the car along a heavily-potholed mountain road, which eventually led to a rather alpine-looking hotel. We stopped for coffee and a cake. There was a strange atmosphere in the place. After we left, Mr Falkenberg expressed his disgust with the hotel’s owners, who had been notorious collaborators with the German forces. The local authority took its revenge by refusing to repair the road leading to the hotel. What made matters even worse for Mr Falkenberg was the way the hotel served its coffee: “No cream with it”, he said, “not even warm milk - just cold milk”. Ever since then, I have associated coffee served with cold milk as fit only for Nazi collaborators.

Mr Putin takes off his shirt.

In the old days, before television and the Internet, dictators made themselves known to their subject populations by displaying posters and erecting statues. The most extreme example of this form of display was Rafael Trujillo, who ran the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. Posters and statues of the dictator were mass-produced, while his name even appeared on car number-plates. The capital city, the highest mountain in the country and many streets and buildings were renamed after him. Even churches were required to have signs saying "Dios en cielo, Trujillo en tierra" (God in heaven, Trujillo on earth). Needless to say, Trujillo ruled by mass-murder and intimidation, and ensured that most of the wealth of the country was controlled by his family and cronies.

Nowadays, the main visual images of dictators are provided by television, the press and the Internet. But the visual image of the dictator remains a clue to what he intends to say about his country. Rafael Trujillo always appeared wearing the most expensive suits - intended to signify that his regime had brought greater prosperity to his country. Fidel Castro was usually seen in army fatigues, to indicate that his regime was a product of revolution and was still in a state of revolutionary struggle against the USA. Vladimir Putin is different: he is often shown stripped to the waist in various athletic pursuits. Stripping to the waist is of course not practicable for much of the year in Russia, and so there are alternative winter depictions of Mr Putin playing ice hockey, skiing or shooting a rifle in the snow. All these images are intended to display macho strength, and support his political programme of restoring Russian power after the national humiliation suffered with the collapse of the USSR.

In this respect, Vladimir Putin resembles Benito Mussolini who could be seen on newsreels stripping off his shirt to join with Italian peasants gathering the harvest. There was the same muscular male body with a surprising absence of chest-hair. Mussolini thereby (like Putin) sought to project an image of strength to a country in which there was a sense of weakness and humiliation. Macho politics went beyond visual display: for Mussolini, it meant authoritarian rule shading into gangsterism. As with Putin’s regime, political enemies were murdered, the resources of the state were sequestered among family and cronies, and there was a particular dislike of homosexuality. Gay men were depicted as the very antithesis of masculine strength - a sign of the weak, feminine, degenerate liberalism of the democratic states.

The problem with macho rulers is that taking off your shirt is sometimes not enough to demonstrate your strength - it is much more effective to invade a weak neighbour. For Mussolini, it was Ethiopia (which bordered Italian-controlled Eritrea) in 1936, followed by intervention in the Spanish Civil War in the same year, the invasion of Albania in 1939, allying with Germany against France in 1940, and then invading Greece in 1941. The outcomes of these wars was catastrophic, for the locals and ultimately for Italy. The Italians used mustard gas in Ethiopia and killed over a quarter of a million people. Entry into the Second World War in 1940 resulted in Italy being the scene of fighting for two years and over 450,000 Italians killed.

Putin has been more politically adept than Mussolini, seeking to build alliances with other authoritarian nationalist regimes and politicians such as Victor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary and Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front in France (which has received a ‘loan’ of 9 million euros from Russia). Putin’s authoritarian nationalism is also much-admired by the leadership of the UKIP in Britain.

He has also exploited the resentments of Russians living in countries outside Russia after the breakup of the USSR, as well as exploiting the various nationalist rivalries in neighbouring states. So far, this has included the invasion by Russian forces of two multi-ethnic parts of  Georgia in 2008 (South Ossetia and Abkhazia), the occupation and annexation of the Crimea in 2014, and the invasion of Eastern Ukraine in the same year. In each case, the disputed area was one with multiple ethnicities, often living side-by-side or in adjacent communities. Russian intervention has involved alliances with local nationalists and criminal gangs, supported by various groups of irregular military tourists. The outcomes have been the usual forced expulsions that are the product of nationalism, and the stripping of local resources. In Georgia, a quarter of a million ethnic Georgians were driven out of Abkhazia and a further 30,000 from South Ossetia. These areas remain some of the poorest places in Europe and have a grim future - totally dependent economically on sparse Russian handouts.

The outcome of the Russian war against Ukraine is difficult to foresee, as indeed is the future of Vladimir Putin himself. He must hope for a better end than Mussolini, who was last seen hanging upside-down from a lamppost in Milan - without his shirt. 

The ring-doughnut of unvisited places

In this country, my wife and I travel to two sorts of places. There are those we can get to and back easily in a day, and those sufficiently far away to require one or more overnight stays. The ones we can visit in a day form a sort of circle around our house in West Worcestershire. The limits of this circle to the North are Birmingham and Solihull, where we visit family. Any further North requires a trip up the grim M6 through the Black Country, and is therefore avoided. The limit to the East is Oxford, which we can reach by (a very slow) train. To the South, our limits for a day-trip are Gloucester and the pleasant market-town of Cirencester, while to the West we go over the Welsh border as far as Llandrindod Wells and Welshpool.

Places which require an overnight stay such as London or Devon are of course about a 100 or more miles away. But between the circle of day-trips and the wider area of overnight-stays is a ring-doughnut-shaped area that we never usually visit. These are places just too far to travel to and from with pleasure in a day, but too close to justify booking and paying for a hotel. In our case, this ring-doughnut of unvisited places includes many locations with much to offer - places like Wiltshire, the Thames Valley below Oxford, Derbyshire, and inland mid-Wales.

Anyway, my wife and I decided that the time has come to visit places within the ring-doughnut, and last weekend we headed for a two-night stay in Lacock, about 75 miles from our home. Lacock is a very picturesque village owned by the National Trust - so picturesque in fact that (together with Lacock Abbey) it has been used as a setting for about 50 films and television programmes. The day we arrived, there was shooting for Downton Abbey just along the street from our hotel. The square in front of the parish church was arranged to look like a country market-place in the 1920s, with cows, sheep and pigs, local extras in hats and long coats, and a vintage van. Most of the shooting seemed to involve standing around, with very brief intervals of action. I wonder how many minutes of television time resulted from the two days of filming.

Our inn in Lacock was the Sign of the Angel - a wooden-frame building said to date from the 1400s. There are low beams, huge fireplaces and creaky wooden stairs. The floors on the ground-floor had stone flags - those in the bedrooms on the first floor pitched in all directions. The inn too has been a filmset - for one of the Harry Potter stories. We ate excellent meals (and especially breakfasts) at the Sign of the Angel, and slept well in one of the inn’s five bedrooms. On the Saturday, we visited Lacock Abbey and the Fox-Talbot museum of photography (named after one of the main inventors of photography who lived in the Abbey). We also took a train to Bath.

We discovered that one of the joys of holidaying in the ring-doughnut of unvisited places is that we are in no hurry to drive there and back. So on the way, we stopped at Stow-in-the-Wold, saw Lechlade and visited Avebury - a village enclosed in a vast prehistoric stone circle and embankment. On the way back, we stopped at Newark Park. This is a much-expanded Elizabethan hunting lodge on the top of the Cotswold Edge, overlooking the wide Severn Valley. This is probably the only British stately home to be restored by a gay American ex-servicemen.

The horrors of planning No. 1: sustainable development

Before I became a parish councillor, I knew little about the world of town and country planning. In the last few years, I have struggled to make good this deficit - essential since the work of planners can protect what we value or, at worst, can result in ghastly edifices which assault the eye, the demolition of pleasant streets or the obliteration of precious countryside. I found that planning, like all professions, has its own language and assumptions. These are rarely questioned by practitioners and little understood by the rest of us. One such term is ‘sustainable development’. In the non-planning world, this has a reasonably clear meaning, inspired by the United Nations report of 1987 Our Common Future (often called the ‘Brundtland Report’). This defined ‘sustainable development’ to mean “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Sustainable development is the stated objective of the key planning document in England: the 2012 National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). This begins by quoting the definition in the Brundtland Report, while the forward by the then Minister of Planning states that “The purpose of planning is to help achieve sustainable development”. In addition, paragraph 14 states that:

“At the heart of the National Planning Policy Framework is a presumption in favour of sustainable development, which should be seen as a golden thread running through both plan-making and decision-taking.”

The rest of the NPPF instructs local planning authorities (and planning inspectors in cases of appeals against refusal of planning permission) in how to implement ‘sustainable development’. However, in a remarkable verbal conjuring trick, it narrows the concept to the point of disappearance. So paragraph 14 continues by advising that:

“local planning authorities should positively seek opportunities to meet the development needs of their area; Local Plans should meet objectively assessed needs, with sufficient flexibility to adapt to rapid change, unless: any adverse impacts of doing so would significantly and demonstrably outweigh the benefits, when assessed against the policies in this Framework taken as a whole; or specific policies in this Framework indicate development should be restricted.”

So development (not even ‘sustainable development’ by this stage) will be approved unless there is significant and demonstrable reasons for not proceeding. By paragraph 47, any constraints on housing development are removed:

 “To boost significantly the supply of housing, local planning authorities should: use their evidence base to ensure that their Local Plan meets the full, objectively assessed needs for market and affordable housing in the housing market area, as far as is consistent with the policies set out in this Framework, including identifying key sites which are critical to the delivery of the housing strategy over the plan period; identify and update annually a supply of specific deliverable sites sufficient to provide five years worth of housing against their housing requirements with an additional buffer of 5%...”

A footnote defines the mysterious term ‘deliverable sites’ as ones that are:
    ”available now, offer a suitable location for development now, and be achievable with a realistic prospect that housing will be delivered on the site within five years and in particular that development of the site is viable”.

This commitment to what for practical purposes is unlimited development is bad news for rural villages that would prefer to remain villages. Paragraph 55 clarifies what ‘sustainable development’ means in this case:

 “To promote sustainable development in rural areas, housing should be located where it will enhance or maintain the vitality of rural communities. For example, where there are groups of smaller settlements, development in one village may support services in a village nearby. Local planning authorities should avoid new isolated homes in the countryside unless there are special circumstances such as: the essential need for a rural worker to live permanently at or near their place of work in the countryside; or where such development would represent the optimal viable use of a heritage asset or would be appropriate enabling development to secure the future of heritage assets; or where the development would re-use redundant or disused buildings and lead to an enhancement to the immediate setting; or the exceptional quality or innovative nature of the design of the dwelling.”

So a development is defined by the NPPF as ‘sustainable’ in a rural area if it is on the edge of a village, which will apparently ‘enhance the ‘vitality of rural communities’. I have heard councillors and planning officers using this very definition to propose that a large new housing estate is indeed ‘sustainable’ because it is on the edge of a reasonably-sized village.

I live in a rural parish with about 1400 residents. We are fortunate in having a primary school and high school, a shop and post office, a garage, some trading estates, a large sports centre and even a local radio station. So far, ‘sustainable development’ has meant building 51 houses on good farming land, with permission for another 14 on an old orchard. This process is being repeated in villages all over England, and the result will be to substantially reduce the farmland needed to feed current and future generations. The NPPF is therefore a thoroughly dishonest document, which adopts the fashionable terminology of ‘sustainability’ to justify what in reality is uncontrolled and destructive development.

Eating a steak in Glasgow in 1968.

In 1968, I became a student at the University of Strathclyde, studying for an MSc in Politics. I was attracted by the reputation of Professor Richard Rose, a young and enthusiastic head of department with a major public profile. I stayed for the first year in a ghastly postgraduate hall of residence in Rotten Row, very close to the University’s McCance Building - the location of the Department and also the University’s library. There was of course no Internet, which meant that students spent hours reading in the Library, often the back issues of the (then very few) academic journals. Towards the end of that academic year, I met an attractive library assistant who I later married (and eventually divorced).

My income came from a postgraduate studentship, which (just) covered my living costs and allowed me to eat out at a restaurant about once a month. But there was astonishingly little choice in Glasgow restaurants at that time: almost all were steakhouses owned by Reo Stakis, who had come to Scotland from Cyprus many years before. Stakis knew what sold and his restaurants were well-run and produced tasty and economical food, albeit from a restricted menu. There was a Stakis steakhouse just below the McCance Building on George Street, and this was my usual spot for dining out.

I remember this experience well. Like most British restaurants then and for many years after, the steakhouse was dimly-lit. There was an open kitchen and grill, which was used for cooking the steaks. There was a choice of sirloin, rump and rib-eye, in different weights. The restaurant also served gammon steaks and (I think) a fish dish. I would usually start with either a prawn cocktail or egg mayonnaise. The latter comprised two halves of a boiled egg, covered in mayonnaise with some paprika. Both the latter ingredients were at that time quite exotic. For the main course, I usually ate the cheapest rump steak, which would be accompanied by a single large cepe, a grilled tomato and some hand-cut chips. When this was finished, I would be offered a selection of puddings from a ‘sweet trolley’ which was wheeled round to the table. I usually chose either black forest gateau or trifle. After the meal, there was then a fashion for Irish Coffee (coffee with whiskey, with cream floating on top), but I preferred my coffee unadulterated.

I had thus eaten the characteristic 1960s British restaurant meal, now utterly out-of-fashion and even mocked by comedians. But the food tasted wonderful, and the restaurant gave me a warm feeling that I had enjoyed a special treat. Suppose I were to be transported back to 1968 to eat the same meal at the same restaurant - would I still find the food as tasty? In the years since then, my tastebuds have experienced many different types of food in several countries, but I think that a Reo Stakis steak and chips would still be satisfying. This is because steak and chips, egg mayonnaise and trifle can be some of the tastiest food on the planet. This of course involves the radical idea of judging food primarily by its taste rather than by fashion (ingredients which you have never heard of and which are unobtainable outside central London), by arty-farty arrangements of food on the plate (towers, drizzles, foam etc), or by the expensive ambience of the restaurant in which it is served.

Why has taste declined as the main criteria for judging food? The main reason is probably the importance of television and its many celebrity chefs. Television is a visual medium utterly unable to transmit taste or smell to its viewers. To keep the viewers’ attention, its celebrity chefs must generate a succession of innovative recipes, often filmed in exotic locations and using strange ingredients. People thus come to judge food by what it looks like and whether it succeeds in being strange and different.

See also:Dining in yuppieland