Tribalism in politics

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

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

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

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

The 1964 Shakespeare exhibition

This year is the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s first folio. This was prepared by two of the late bard’s colleagues, and includes the text for 36 of his plays. This anniversary has been celebrated by programmes on television but is not the first or most important commemoration of Shakespeare’s life that I remember. In 1964, the 400th anniversary of his birth was marked by an exhibition in Stratford-upon-Avon, located on the meadows in front of the Memorial Theatre. This was an easy journey from my home at that time, and I visited the exhibition several times. ‘Several times’ because I found it an overwhelming experience.

The exhibition followed the life of the great man describing his life in the first person. Attendance meant walking through a series of rooms, each prepared by a different set of artists. Two rooms in particular stay in the memory. The first was a long gallery, decorated in Elizabethan-style wood-panelling with portraits on one side and a view through windows of the City of London across the Thames. The second was a reproduction of the Globe Theatre, with the voices of famous actors reading select speeches from the plays.

A modern version of this exhibition would no doubt use CGI and other technologies to impress its audience. But the exhibition in 1964, like theatre itself, reaches us through our imagination and through the power of words. Many years later, I went to a performance of The Tempest in Vancouver. This may have been Shakespeare’s last play, and there is speculation that he himself acted the role of Prospero. Near the end of the play, this character reviews life and art thus:

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And — like the baseless fabric of this vision -
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep…”

I found this speech, like the exhibition all those years ago, emotionally overwhelming. Our little lives pass into history, but some words live forever.

Too many cars?

 

I recently returned from a holiday in Jersey. This is the largest of the Channel Isles, a compact 46 square miles with a landscape of lush rolling hills, surrounded by numerous sandy beaches. The most recent census recorded just over 103,000 inhabitants, a third living in the capital St Helier. Apart from a short stretch of dual-carriageway, the island’s roads are the kind of narrow lanes similar to those found in rural England and France. Travel is made easy by an excellent bus service. Bus routes all leave from the Liberation Square Bus Station in the centre of St Helier, and reach all parts of the island. Buses are frequent, punctual, clean and cheap, supplemented by many well-regulated taxis. There would seem to be little need for people living on Jersey to own a car. But own them they do. There are over 124,000 registered motor vehicles on Jersey, more than one per inhabitant. It is therefore not surprising that there are daily traffic jams in St Helier, with all the resulting pollution and nuisance. Car travel in Jersey can hardly be a fulfilling experience. The speed limit is 40 miles/hour throughout the island and 20 miles/hour in St Helier. Why, therefore, do so many people in Jersey go to all the expense of buying and maintaining a car?

The reason is the same as in most other European countries. The car is purchased only in part because it is it useful and convenient for everyday life. A major reason for owning a car and for the type of car owned is that it is a positional good. A car, for many people, defines their status in society, and generates the pleasure in being superior or at least as good as those of their neighbours that they compare themselves to. This can mean buying cars that are far too large and/or expensive for their needs. So some wealthy people in cities buy large ugly (and usually black) four-wheel drive vehicles that are inconvenient to park in and manoeuvre around narrow urban streets. These successfully assert an important personal presence, so that is usually disappointing to see the rather insignificant people that alight from them. Owning a car has also become a marker of adult life, so that it is common to see rows of cars outside a house, one for each member of the household.

The mass ownership of motor cars has had a devastating effect on ordinary life. Pleasant villages, towns and cities have been torn apart to create broad roads and parking spaces. Yet new roads built to alleviate congestion rapidly become noisy and congested. Children can no longer play safely outside their house, and are driven to schools because their parents see walking and cycling as dangerous activities. People walk less than in the past, and are prone to obesity. Their solution is to go to a gym, usually in a car. Motor vehicles are major sources of pollution and hence illness and premature death. These pollutants include particulates, hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and airborne particles of soot and metal which cause skin and eye irritation and allergies, while very fine particles cause respiratory problems. Increased air pollution may also be associated with dementia. Other dangerous pollutants from motor vehicle exhausts include carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, benzene and formaldehyde. in the UK, motor vehicles generate 24% of greenhouse gases and are therefore an important factor in climate change.

Any government action to limit the use of motor cars in response to these problems faces major obstacles. People’s identities are now so attached to car-ownership that restrictions are experienced as personal insults. There are angry reactions to official attempts to tax the most polluting vehicles or to limit speed limits and restrict access in urban streets. Governments’ responses are therefore timid. Instead of proposing policies to reduce the number of private cars, they support the introduction of a different kind of car. Electric cars do have lower rates of dangerous emissions than petrol or diesel-powered vehicles, but will require a major expansion of electric power supply, a massive new infrastructure of charging points, and the large-scale mining of rare earth metals which are shipped around the world in large polluting cargo ships.

Humanity’s obsession with private motor vehicles will come to an end one day, probably as a result of catastrophe rather than action by governments. Until then, we will continue to drive to our holidays in picturesque villages with narrow pedestrian streets, free of fumes and the noise of traffic.

The Coronation before last

Like almost everyone in Britain, I spent some time last month watching the Coronation. But I am one of a diminishing number of people who remember the previous Coronation, in 1953, when Elizabeth II was crowned. Few people at that time had televisions, and so the event largely took place through street parties. I was six years old, and the family then lived in a rented semi-detached house in Stroud Road, Shirley, Solihull. My memories of the event are uneven. The weather was cold and wet, but I can not remember if there were any tables laid in the street or any party food. I do remember that there was a children’s fancy dress competition and that I won first prize. I was dressed as what we then called a ‘chinaman’, complete with traditional robes that did indeed look Chinese. I carried a pole over my shoulder, holding what I was told were two genuine Chinese lanterns. Second place went to a girl dressed as Britannia, who shivered from the cold. My younger brother and the girl next door were three years old and carried a bucket between them, as Jack and Jill. This was the last time I ever went to a fancy-dress event.

I have better memories of my later years in Stroud Road, which I eventually left at the age of 11. Street then had few cars, and children played outside at any available time. It was possible to walk to woods and open countryside and fish for sticklebacks in a local stream. Shirley still had some quirky older buildings, inherited from its time as a country village. In the next few decades, the fields became housing estates, and the older cottages were demolished. I became an inhabitant of the staggering blandness of the English suburbs.

At this most recent Coronation, I live in a country village in a neighbouring county. But suburbanisation has followed me. A new estate of suburban houses has just been approved by the Planning Inspectorate. This, like all the others, will be a group of breeze-block houses on minimal plots, arranged in cul-de-sacs, with patches of ‘green space’. It is promised that the latter will be landscaped, but we have had promises of this kind before. What the residents of such estates usually end up with are mowed lawns, with some fitful planting of trees, most of which soon die. There are fortunes to be made in developing such estates, in planning and promoting them. But those who make such fortunes choose to live far from what they have created, in land they have yet to despoil.

This (not very) old house

The oldest construction in my village is an iron age fort, which now resembles a series of mounds on a hilltop. The oldest building, the parish church, is much more recent, dating from the 12th Century. The oldest house, called the ‘Old Hall’, started life two hundred years later and was extended in the later Middle Ages. Dotted round the parish are several farmsteads and cottages built from 1500 onwards. This might give the impression that the English build to last. But of course most houses in the past were insubstantial hovels, most of which fell down before they were demolished. This tradition persists with modern housebuilding in England.

My wife and I moved into our house in 1983. We were the first occupiers of a three-bedroom bungalow on a recently-completed estate. The house was constructed of breeze-block with a brick outer layer, and low-pitched tiled roof. The low pitch meant that there have been longstanding problems with leakages and the resulting damage to ceilings. The windows were single-glazed and there was only a thin layer of loft insulation. The bathroom suite was an awful orange colour (‘sunburst’) and there was a gap between the bath and the wall, and a hole in the wall between the bathroom and the kitchen. The en-suite toilet had a toilet and washbasin in a grim brown colour, and the basin did not sit properly on its plinth. The tiles in the bathroom and in the en-suite began falling off the wall in a matter of weeks. The internal walls were plasterboard and provided no sound-proofing. The front door had a simple lock and could easily have been kicked in. All the floors (even in the bathroom and en-suite toilet) were covered by a cheap bottle-green carpet. There were persistent problems with condensation. The garage, like almost all those that were and still are built in England, was too small to house a car.

We spent our first few years getting repairs done under the NHBC guarantee, and every year after that in making the house more habitable. We have employed squads of roofers, followed by a plasterer to repair the ceiling. We have replaced all the windows (now all double-glazed) and had a conservatory built. The boiler, front door, internal doors, garage doors, soffits, barge boards, kitchen fittings, curtain rails, bath, toilets and washbasins have all been replaced. We have installed wooden floors and ceramic tiles and a much thicker layer of loft insulation. We replaced the paving along the side of the house and all the fencing in the back garden. We installed a dehumidifier to cure the problem with condensation.

Why did we not just move house instead? Mainly because short-term contractual employment made it risky to increase debt. But there were other reasons. We have had good neighbours, the house faces woodland but is still close to the centre of a small rural village surrounded by hills. We can walk to the shop, the garage, the bus stop, and the GP clinic. The village has a good primary school, a good high school and a large sports centre. My children always walked to school, at first accompanied, and then proudly independent.

An estate of new houses has since been completed in the village. This has an attractive layout, and building regulations have improved considerably since 1983. The houses all have double-glazing, better insulation and central heating. The kitchens were fully-equipped on completion, and all were decorated in the currently-fashionable black, white and anthracite. But there were still problems with the construction, requiring residents to move out for a short period while corrective work was carried out. One major change from our house is the diminished size of the gardens. New houses, apart from the most expensive, now have just a small patch of front garden, and a back garden only large enough for a trampoline and a barbecue. The total plot size is sometimes half that found in interwar council houses.

In place of proper gardens, new estates have ‘green space’. This is a planning requirement that 40% of the land area must be allocated for open space. In the past, this would have been looked after by the district or parish council. But to cut costs, district councils now allow developers to set up contracts with maintenance companies which charge the residents a monthly fee. The fees keep increasing, but most green space usually amounts to little more than flat plains of mowed grass and a few short-lived spindly trees. This is so much less than could be achieved, and a challenge to those of us who believe a house is characterised by its setting as much as by its contents.

A new dictionary of bad politics

Politics is the art of persuasion, building coalitions of support for particular policies or for people seeking office. Politics can take place in an open arena (such as in Parliament) or by a secret backstairs conspiracy. At its best, politics involves argument and debate which can identify the strengths and weaknesses of a particular policy or person. At its worst, politics becomes a shouting match or a parade of devious ways to avoid honest debate. Here are some new terms which categorise bad politics of this sort.

Avoidism
‘Avoidism’ is a pretence that a preferred policy is devoid of shortcomings. Most public policies involve a complex balance of gains and losses and require a detailed consideration of evidence. But this does not make for the drama beloved by many commentators, while members of the public (and many journalists) lack the time and skill to assess anything longer than half a page of information. One way to manage this complexity is to pretend that there are only gains from the policies you support and only losses from the those you oppose. An outstanding example is how supporters of Brexit used the phrase ‘Project Doom’ to designate any opposing arguments. Sadly, Brexiteers came to believe their own arguments, which meant that the Government was utterly unprepared to meet the numerous problems this country encountered after leaving the EU.

Betrayalism
This the belief that the leaders of one’s party or political movement are always about to betray the cause, taking any of their statements as irrefutable ‘evidence’ that this is so. Betrayalists typically have their own idea of what the ‘cause’ truly comprises, and this may radically differ from the preferences of a party’s voters.  Betrayalism has always been an integral element of the culture of the Left in British politics, but is now also common among Conservatives. One result is that betrayalists prefer leaders (such as Jeremy Corbyn and Liz Truss) who concentrate on re-stating banalities to the faithful.

Christofascism
Christofascism combines a simplified version of Christianity with support for authoritarian government. The Christian component is usually reduced to a few simple ideas asserting male dominance and hence denigrating female autonomy. These include opposition to abortion and birth control. Homosexuality is also opposed because it is regarded not only as a symptom of liberalism, but also because it is seen as a feminisation of masculinity. Although ostensibly Christian, christofascism actually involves the worship not of God but of an authoritarian leader, to whom supernatural powers are attributed. These include a belief that the leader can communicate spiritually with the nation, and thus has no need for intermediary institutions such as political parties or parliaments.

Racialisation
Racialisation involves regarding every political issue as an example of racism, even in the absence of any evidence. Politicians in the past spoke of the superiority of the ‘British (or other) race’ over foreigners. This has now been reversed, so that any criticism of a black person for any reason is deemed an example of (white) racism. Criticisms of the Duchess of Sussex for bullying her staff and her narcissistic behaviour are thereby discounted as ‘racism’ because she has some African ancestry. Where no black people are involved in a dispute, all arguments can be discounted by mentioning the Atlantic slave trade. Racialisation is a specific example of victimism, which is a belief that a particular group of people are perpetual victims and another group their perpetual oppressors. Members of the ‘victim’ group who do well for themselves are denounced as having betrayed their identity. Thus Kwasi Kwarteng (who is wealthy and was in high office) was said to not really be black.

Re-nameism
Re-namism involves campaigning to rename a disadvantaged group of people. This can become a cyclical process, with some groups (currently known internationally as ‘people with intellectual disabilities’) being renamed every generation. The most prominent re-namist campaign at the moment concerns people who are uncertain of their gender or wish to change it. Re-nameism is popular because it is an alternative to actually taking action to resolve the fundamental problems and the inequalities suffered by a disadvantaged group.

Whataboutery
This involves countering an argument by asserting some unrelated issue associated with your opponent. This can be seen in most developed form in Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons. The Prime Minister at times responds to criticism of the failures of his Government by pointing to some error of the Leader of the Opposition (usually that he was formerly part of Jeremy Corbyn’s frontbench team).

Wokehysteria
One response to re-nameism is to regard any unwelcome change in public policy as ‘wokeism’. This has recently become a major theme among right-wingers and seems to be based on a belief that minor changes to names are a major threat to the order of society. This implies a belief that society is so fragile that any small change will result in disintegration and chaos. The term ‘wokehysteria’ is justified because of the disproportionate anger generated by what most would see as trivial matters.



 

The Commonwealth Games experience

 

On the 6th August, I went to the Commonwealth Games with my wife Marion, son Andrew, and Andrew’s partner Kate. We saw the rhythmic gymnastic competition in the Indoor Arena in the centre of Birmingham. Here are some random observations.

1.    Sport is a form of entertainment, but a key part of that entertainment is the skill displayed by the competitors. Most athletic events are derived from the earliest form of martial arts, based on fighting, running, throwing and jumping, supported by horsemanship and various regulated forms of group conflict such as football. Gymnastics owes more to circus arts: the female gymnasts wore sparkly leotards and were marked for artistry as well as dexterity. But it was impossible not to admire their great skill nor to feel the disappointment with every small error in their routines. The venue enhanced the entertainment of the event, by providing a disco during intervals, and issuing spectators with wristbands which glowed in unison at certain points in the show.

2.    The Games were a model of efficiency. The Commonwealth Games involved over 5000 athletes from 72 countries, taking part in multiple venues in different cities and towns across the West Midlands (including a velodrome in London). Despite having limited notice after Durban withdrew from organising the Games, the venues in Birmingham were all ready on time, the athletes and officials were all housed, the media operated without a hitch, and there was a constant supply of entertainment for the crowds in the City Centre. There were thousands of very helpful volunteers, and public transport to events was free.

3.    There was great pride in the City among local people. UK media is dominated by London, and shows limited interest in the distinctive history and culture of each of the other great cities in this country. The opening and closing ceremonies of the Commonwealth Games was a celebration of Birmingham’s industrial past and its significant contribution to popular music. The City centre looked splendid in the sunshine, and local people expressed pride in their city, albeit in the usual downbeat Brummie way.

4.    Crowds are fun. When we left the Arena, a vast host passed over the canal bridges, through Centenary Square, Chamberlain Square and Victoria Square. There was no jostling, and everyone looked happy. This was my first experience of going to a large public event for some years, and I had forgotten the exhilaration felt by people who are part of a large purposeful crowd. I realise that this must be a common experience among people who go to football matches or festivals. 

5.    The best art is that acclaimed by the public. The highlight of the opening and closing ceremonies was the huge mechanical Raging Bull, which moved and appeared to breathe fire and smoke. During the games, this was placed in Centenary Square, and was immensely popular - so much so that the City Council agreed to find a permanent indoor venue to house it after the Games. The public acclaim for this artwork contrasts with the annual awards of the Turner Prize for art, which are usually known to few and approved by even less. Turner prize-winners do, however, seem to enhance the fortunes of a small number of London art galleries and their patrons who purchase artworks as a form of ‘wealth-protection’. The public have a more refined taste in art because they value it for its appearance and the emotional impact it has, and not for what it does for their personal bank-balance.