What I did on my holidays (a long time ago)

One of the standard tasks that traditionally faced children when they returned to school in September was to write an essay called ‘What I did on my holidays’. I remember writing several such essays - what I do not remember at all well are the holidays that were their subject-matter. My earliest memory is from a holiday in North Wales when I was two. I remember being led by the hand over a railway line. My parents had rented a cottage with another family, but I recall none of that.

The first holiday I really remember was in Brynmill, in a boarding-house by the seaside just to the West of Swansea City Centre. This was particularly exciting for a small boy because getting to the beach involved crossing the Swansea and Mumbles tramway, and then passing under a tunnel which carried the British Railways branch line to Mumbles. To make things even more exciting, we were warned about a nearby unexploded bomb, left over from the War.

After that, family holidays involved trips to the seaside in North Devon. I can not remember how many times we went, but I do recall the ordeal of getting there. My father was an industrial worker, and therefore had the same two week break in August as the rest of Birmingham and the West Midlands. Each city in Britain had its usual holiday destination, and for Birmingham this was Weston-super-Mare and points further South-West. This meant that the holiday fortnight began with a massive migration in the same general direction by train, bus and car. My parents did not own a car until I was about 16, but for holidays they either shared a car with friends, or hired a car. There were no motorways, and all main roads led from one high street to another. Travel therefore involved a sequence of traffic jams of a scale completely unknown today, even with four times as many vehicles on the road as in the 1950s. Strangely, the worst such jam was on one of the few by-pass routes, around Exeter. Cars might wait here for hours - thirsty motorists brewed up tea by the roadside, while salesmen walked along the queues of cars selling ice-cream. Journeys were also prolonged because the cars of the time were unreliable. As a result, a trip to North Devon from the family home in Shirley near Birmingham could take from early morning to nightfall. I remember one journey ending one night as the car we were travelling in broke down trying to climb Porlock Hill in Somerset.

Our holidays in North Devon included a stay in (I think) a boarding house in the attractive village of Combe Martin. But later, we stayed in caravans further along the coast near Woolacombe. I did not like caravan sites, with their grubby toilets and showers, while some sites involved a long walk along the edge of muddy fields to get to the beach. Once on the beach, we spent our time doing very little. We made sand-castles, swam in the sea and used surfboards. It never occurred to us to stand on them. As I got older, I became bored with beach holidays. I remember wandering into the cinema in Woolacombe by myself to see Carry on Nurse. I was much taken with Shirley Eaton, and remember a growing frustration that I did not have a Shirley Eaton of my own.

In my later teenage years, our holidays changed after my parents bought a car. However, they were not intrepid travellers, and the limit of their ambition was to visit Scotland, which they regarded rather as Australians view the outback. This focussed particularly on touring what they called the ‘real Scotland’, by which they meant the Western Highlands. They were thereby immune to the glories of Edinburgh or the wonderful scenery of the Borders. While travelling in Scotland, my parents developed what in hindsight seems a strange daily routine. After a full fried breakfast, we would drive on the next stages of our tour and eat sandwiches for lunch. After a further drive, there would be a search for a bed and breakfast for the night. After that, we would drive to some lay-by or parking place and cook a meal on a primus stove, using food from tins. We had several windswept and generally unsatisfactory meals by this method.

After I finished my A-levels, I went on holiday by myself, although I did travel again with my parents once or twice thereafter. I do not of course write any essays on what I have done on my holidays, but I store photographs and retain the urge to write the occasional blog post about my travels.

Won’t vote, don’t care.

Another round of local elections in England have finished - this time coinciding with elections for the European Parliament. As usual, only a third of the electorate voted. This is less than in national elections, where turnout in 2010 was 65%. But this still means that after intense publicity in television, radio and the press, the distribution of leaflets and polling cards to every household, and meetings by candidates with hundreds of thousands of potential voters, a third of the adult population chose not to perform the minimal tasks of switching off their television, leaving their settee, and walking a short distance to cast their vote. 

There are a few people (mainly Jehovah’s Witnesses) who do not vote for strongly-held religious reasons. But most non-voters seem to explain their inactivity with a limited range of rationalisations, including the (manifestly untrue) statement that the political parties “are all the same”, or that politicians “are all in it for themselves”. Political commentators have more sophisticated explanations for non-voting: that the political parties are failing in some way to communicate with voters, that the voters are disgusted by the expenses scandal involving some Members of Parliament, and that voters dislike politicians.

All of these explanations for non-voting have one thing in common: they assume that the public are passive consumers of politics. They are no longer to be viewed as citizens, sharing responsibility for the governance of their society, able to stand for elections or organise and campaign on issues that concern them: instead, they are seen as purchasing political parties with their votes, as if the parties are products on the shelves of a supermarket. If none of the products appeals, they will leave the supermarket without voting. This all resembles much of the debate about education: failures of students to learn are attributed to the incompetence of their teachers - never to the lack of desire for learning among the students themselves or the unwillingness of their parents to encourage them to study.

The replacement of the active citizen by the passive consumer can also be seen in the behaviour of national and local governments. Some years ago, my son and I were on a road trip through Yorkshire. We stopped in Ripon, an ancient city with a cathedral and a fine market square. But although it has a population of over 16,000, Ripon no longer governs its own local affairs: it is instead part of the ‘borough’ of Harrogate - in reality a conglomeration of many towns and villages. The borough’s noticeboard referred to the local inhabitants as ‘customers’, as if they were purchasing their libraries, cleansing, planning and so on from a commercial enterprise.

This coincidence of political consumerism and the loss of local autonomy may not be a coincidence. The act of voting has generally been not just a choice, but also a statement of allegiance, to a religion, a social class, a set of ideas, or a local community. The ties that have bound people to each other through religion, social class and even marriage have greatly weakened in recent years. The local government ‘reforms’ of the 1970s and onwards added to this social disintegration by depriving many communities of their local leadership and the chance to select it. Instead, their councillors have become petitioners of distant and very large authorities, run by professional managers. This has weakened people’s allegiance to their local authority and their sense of community. No-one feels passionate about what happens to such arbitrary geographical conglomerations as ‘Malvern Hills District’, ‘Mole Valley District’ or even, I suspect, the ‘Borough of Harrogate’.

See also:
The rise of X-Factor politics

Overheard in the Turk’s Head in Penzance last week

A waitress approaches elderly American couple and asks them what they would like to drink. The American woman asks what beers they have. The waitress describes the various real ales available (including one brewed on the premises). A long pause follows. Eventually, the American woman replies “I’ll have a glass of water”. After bringing the drink, the waitress asks the couple what they would like to eat. The American woman asks what fish dishes they have (even though the menu and the daily specials blackboard lists these in detail. The waitress goes through the various options. This takes some time because the Turk’s Head has an excellent cook and the meals use a diverse range of fish and ways of cooking them. Another long pause follows. The American woman then orders: “I’ll have fish and chips”. 

This American woman, needless to say, is not typical of other Americans my wife and I met during our brief holiday in Penzance this month. As a group, these (mainly elderly) Americans were well-travelled and adventurous. The woman in the Turk’s Head is more a representative of the phenomenon of choice-exhaustion. This is when, presented with a bewildering range of unfamiliar and complex options, we resort to the simple and familiar. Choice-exhaustion occurs when we go to very large supermarkets, and see 20 different brands of mayonnaise, or 30 types of vinegar. We are daily presented through the mass media with an endless range of food, sofas, cars, holidays, bank accounts, clothes, and products which reverse the signs of ageing, and make us slimmer and more attractive. To help us make appropriate choices, there is another and increasing range of websites and publications which compare and rate financial products, consumer goods, motor cars and so on.

Rather than revel in this wonderland of choice, many people experience a sense of inadequacy and threat. How much easier if someone could make the choices for you. This, in fact, is the strategy used by some wealthy people - they employ ‘lifestyle advisors’ and ‘personal shoppers’ to make choices on their behalf. These will usually choose whatever is fashionable at the moment, and, more especially, whatever can be recognised as expensive and fashionable. By these means, the wealthy become a kind of walking assemblage of brands, ever sensitive to how their personal appearance and possessions compare with those of other wealthy people. Spouses and partners can also come to be regarded as a kind of brand, to be traded in when they age or cease to be fashionable.

In the absence of paid choicemakers, the rest of us struggle along as best we can, relying on our own personalities, being loyal to familiar people and places, living the way we have always done, occasionally venturing to try something new.

Gratitude inflation? Absolutely!

Once upon a time, English people expressed their gratitude by saying ‘Thanks’. As a child, I would also sometimes say ‘Thank you’ on more formal accessions, such as when my brother and I were paraded in front of relatives to express our gratitude for the Christmas presents they had given us. Over time, ‘Thank you’ completely replaced its abbreviated version, and was eventually replaced by ‘Thank you very much’. This in turn gave way to ‘Thank you very much indeed’. As English people frequently express their thanks (even when receiving change in a shop!), this all became very tiring. But lo! The last year has now seen the arrival of the phrase ‘Thank you so much’. This usually has a stress on the ‘so’, but some people contrive to also add a stress on the word ‘much’.

These changes do not mean that English people are more grateful than they were in the past. Instead, they can be seen as examples of verbal inflation. This is when words are added to our speech like barnacles to the hull of a ship, perhaps to impress or possibly for no reason at all. For instance, we now live in an era in which all tragedies are ‘Greek’, and in which all opportunities come equipped with windows. There has more recently been the trend to add ‘up with’ to the word ‘meet’. It is no longer possible to meet a friend, one now has to ‘meet up with’ him or her.

Even the word ‘Yes’ has been replaced - in this case by the unnecessarily affirmative word ‘Absolutely’. Whole conversations take place in which each participant exchanges their absolute agreement with each other. This is of course after they have met up with each other.

Thanks for reading this blog.

See also: A cliche rears its ugly head

Smelling the past

There are memories not just of sights and sounds, but of smells. My childhood in the 1950s was full of smells that I encounter much less frequently today. On the way to school each day, I would smell coal dust from the fires that heated every house. Coal dust made winter days foggy and old buildings blackened with soot. It was easy to dismiss the architecture of the past because it was so filthy.

The other memorable smell was from people. This was usually a combination (among men especially) of tobacco and sweat. Tobacco because most people smoked cigarettes most of the time. They scattered nub-ends, used packets and used matches around them. The top decks of buses and public buildings usually had a layer of this detritus on the floor. One of my first summer vacation jobs, in 1965, was as an airport hand (temporary) at Birmingham Airport. I spent most of each day pushing a broom, cleaning up after smokers.

The smell of sweat was because deodorants were regarded by many men as being unmasculine, and because people bathed and showered much less often than now. This was more a matter of attitude than opportunity. When I became an undergraduate at the London School of Economics in 1965, I moved into digs with a family in Streatham. I was shocked to find that they (father, mother and daughter) would share a bath serially. When one had finished, another would then occupy the bath. This all occurred quite quickly before the water got cold. Like most families I knew at that time, they bathed once a week.

When I became a social worker in the early 1970s, there were new smells - of filth and neglect. I visited houses where my feet stuck to the carpet, where a choking smell of dog faeces would emerge when I opened the door, where unwashed nappies were piled in a corner. I suspect that these smells remain and are suffered by a new generation of social workers and health visitors.

There were better smells. I remember especially the perfume of the first girl I took to an Italian meal in London (appropriately in Sicilian Avenue, Holburn), and the wonderful smell of olive oil, garlic, tomatoes and pesto sauce. I last saw that girl in 1968, but the Italian food has thankfully remained one of the continuing pleasures of my life. 

New political fantasies for old

The most striking change in politics in my lifetime has been the turnover of political fantasies. By ‘political fantasies’, I mean those visions of a better future which are proposed as being the ultimate aim of a political movement, and which have the following characteristics:

1.    The fantasy proposes not only a better world than the one we live in, but also one that is much simpler. The nature of this desired simplification varies from one political movement to another. Nationalists look forward to their nation being free of its irritating ethnic minorities or immune to the external power and cultural influence of an overweening neighbour. Communists and socialists wish for a world free of the immense complexity and demands of the market economy, to be replaced by one in which the rewards of society are allocated rationally to those with greatest merit. Islamists envisage a world living in accord with Sharia law, organised on lines resembling the first Muslim empire.

2.    The fantasy involves a belief that, once attained, it will result in a fundamental change in human nature, in which a new kind of person will emerge. Depending on the particular political fantasy, people in the new world will be fitter, kinder, more supportive of each other, prouder of their heritage, more devout, or more entrepreneurial and self-reliant.

3.    The fantasy is coupled with a programme of political action, presented as the initial steps on the road to the new world. As a result, these measures are invested by supporters with a sort of sacred quality which over-rides any consideration of their effectiveness. Socialists believed that the nationalisation of the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy were the essential first steps to achieve a socialist society. The 1964 Labour Government was therefore committed to renationalising the steel industry as a statement of faith rather than as a calculated measure to improve the organisation or efficiency of this industry. The process by which the fantasy is to be achieved beyond this initial programme is never made clear. As a result, political movements often seem to run out of steam once their initial programme is complete. Fantasy is postponed, then redefined, then forgotten.

4.    Some land (preferably one of which we know little) is seen as either embodying the fantasy, or at least leading the charge towards it. This usually involves a good deal of wishful thinking, followed by disappointment. Communists at first regarded the Soviet Union as the land closest to achieving their preferred fantasy. Disillusion was prompted not by the mass murder of ‘collectivisation’ or the show trials of the 1930s, but by the admission of its leader in 1956 that mistakes had been made. Many communists then became refugees of the mind, looking for a succession of beacons, from Yugoslavia, China, Cuba and, for some, even Albania. Scottish nationalists provide a less dramatic example, when their leader spoke in the 1990s of a future independent Scotland becoming part of an ‘arc of prosperity’, including Ireland and Iceland.              

Political fantasies, for all their faults, provide hope (or an array of alternative hopes) for ordinary people. They appeal particularly to the young because they have the most to hope for. But they also speak to people who have suffered poverty, discrimination, or a sense that their familiar world is under threat. The political movements that are committed to fantasies therefore have an energy and an appeal not found among political parties committed to implementing gradual improvements, whose language is boringly technical and pragmatic.

In my teenage years, the dominant fantasies were those produced by communists, social democrats (such as the British Labour Party) and by various sorts of nationalists. Since then, the social democrat and communist fantasies have become almost completely extinct. There are still various socialist and communist parties in power in various countries, but they no longer offer any prospect of a brighter future beyond a (very limited) redistribution of personal wealth. Nationalists, however, continue to offer fantasies. The SNP proposes that, if ‘independent’, Scotland would be an immeasurably better place, full of hope, yet also reassuringly unchanged, retaining the monarchy, the pound, the BBC, and a place in the European Union. The equivalent of the SNP in England is UKIP, which offers a simpler world, without the European Union, immigrants, decimal coinage, comprehensive schools, working mothers, recycling, and metric weights and measures. This is an appealing fantasy to all those who feel the world has been passing them by for several decades. But other people’s fantasies can be hell for the rest of us.

See also: Where have all the Marxists gone?

Dawlish and the need for redundancy

On the 4th of February 2014, a major storm destroyed the railway along the sea front in the town of Dawlish in South West Devon. Rails were left hanging over an abyss in front of a raging sea. This event cut the only rail connection to a large area distant from the capital. There is a 100 miles of peninsula to the West of the City of Exeter, while Penzance (the Westernmost town in Cornwall) is further from London than Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

The railways have long been aware of the vulnerability of the line at Dawlish. In 1937, the Great Western Railway secured an act of Parliament to authorise a new inland by-pass line. Work began, but ceased at the outbreak of war. There were, however, at that time two other inland alternatives: the Teign Valley Line (just West of Dawlish) and the Okehampton Line across Dartmoor. Both were closed in the 1960s, the latter as part of the major programme of closures proposed by Dr Richard Beeching in his notorious reports of 1963 and 1965. The Department of Transport is currently considering the need to re-instate the Dartmoor Line at a possible cost of £100 million. Meanwhile, repair work continues in Dawlish, probably also costing several million pounds. The business lost to the South West because of the closure of the line has been estimated at £20 million/day.

How was it that a seemingly-rational accountant like Dr Beeching (supported by assorted politicians, senior civil servants and media commentators) implemented the closure of the only alternative to a strategic but vulnerable railway line? The answer, I believe, lies in the kind of flawed rationality dominant in political decision-making both then and now. The key flaw is to equate ‘efficiency’ with the maximum possible use of resources. Resources that are not being used are regarded as costly and redundant, and are to be stripped back. For Beeching, this  involved eliminating railway lines that duplicated routes between cities. The Dartmoor Line was one of the two lines remaining between Exeter and Plymouth, and was therefore deemed redundant.

But this definition of ‘efficiency’ only makes sense if the demand for resources is constant and unchanging. If demand fluctuates or if some mishap closes down a key resource, then public services fail without a stock of redundant resources that can be quickly deployed. Heathrow Airport experiences long delays when there is a snowfall or extremely cold weather. This is not because the airport is inefficient or badly-managed, but because in normal conditions it is highly efficient in its use of its resources. Its two runways operate to near-maximum capacity, and there is therefore no stock of ‘redundant time’. In very cold weather, it takes longer to prepare planes for flight because they need to be de-iced and swept. As a result, the number of flights/hour is reduced, and delays inevitably increase. A similar problem occurs with the many hospitals which usually operate near full-capacity. During spikes in admissions (often during very cold weather), staff face the option of either transporting patients at great expense to a distant hospital, or discharging patients before they are ready to return home. Failing to allow redundancy can therefore be very expensive.

As well as short-term fluctuations in demand, there may also be long-term shifts. Another common flaw is to assume that any long-term change will be a continuation of the most recently-observed trend (called the ‘extrapolation error’). Dr Beeching had noted the steady decline in rail traffic in the 1950s, and assumed this would continue until rail travel was reduced to a few inter-city mainlines. This assumption was widely-shared among policy-makers at the time, and was based on a belief that the USA offered the path to the future. This vision of apparent modernity was characterised by motorways, cheap petrol and a sharp decline in public transport. The USA is, of course, a very different place from the small crowded UK, and a better model for modernity would have been the other countries of Western Europe, which generally kept their extensive rail networks and urban tramways (as well as building motorways).

In the years since privatisation, there has been a continuing expansion of rail transport in the UK, with a 50% increase in passenger-miles in the last ten years. This has led to major investment in expanding the rail network, and in creating urban tram systems. In many cases, this expenditure restores systems torn up in the 1950s and 1960s. Edinburgh once had an extensive tram system, which was closed in 1956. The Scottish Government has now spent over £700 million to build a smaller (and much-delayed) network. Another, and cheaper, example is the doubling of some of the railway track between Worcester and Oxford. This only(!) cost £70 million, but it involved restoring track that had been removed in the 1970s. There are many other examples.

The closure of the Dartmoor Line shows a further kind of flawed rationality. As a good accountant, Dr Beeching attempted to estimate the profitability of each individual part of the business (in this case, railway lines between specified destinations). But this assumed that a railway line is a self-contained entity rather part of a system. People therefore use one railway line to reach another one. The closure of the Dartmoor Line meant that Tavistock, a town of about 11,000 people, no longer had a railway station. Before the closure, people living there who wished to go to, for example Taunton or Bristol, would have caught the train to Exeter and changed there for a main-line train. After the closure, they could have driven to Exeter and then caught a train. But of course, once in a car, they might as well complete the journey up the M5. Closure of small lines therefore reduced passenger numbers on the main lines that Dr Beeching had calculated were profitable.

This failure to see society as a complex system is endemic in political life. Long-term psychiatric beds are closed, and there is an unexpected rise in the number of homeless people and people with mental disorders in prison. Local authority expenditure on social care is drastically reduced, and there is a sudden mysterious rise in emergency hospital admissions. This complexity marks out public life as a very different matter from running a business. In a business, there is a limited and defined list of products, each of which is targeted at a particular set of customers, while there a simple and appropriate measures of success (sales and profit) can usually be calculated. This simplicity is appealing for politicians and senior civil servants, and a series of businessmen (beginning with Dr Beeching) have been brought into government to ‘solve’ complex problems. Governments have also turned to management consultants, who invariably suggest outsourcing public services so that governments act as a ‘purchaser’ in a sort of quasi-market. In the absence of indicators like sales and profits, endless sets of ‘targets’ are specified, leading to demoralised and confused staff, and simple-minded decision-making.

Needless to say, the contracts for these outsourced services costs millions of pounds to negotiate, for both the government as purchaser and the provider agencies. A substantial proportion of these millions is of course spent on buying advice from the management consultant agencies that recommended the whole system in the first place.

See also:
Not staying focussed