Doomism and the doomists

The greatest change in politics in my lifetime has been the replacement of hope and fear by gloom and despair. When I was a teenager in the 1960s, there was fear of imminent nuclear war. But set against that was a hope that a better society could be created, with a comfortable life for all people, free from the fear of poverty and free from the cruelty and humiliation suffered by many. This idea that people could hope for a better world was a creation of the 19th Century. Before then (and still in some parts of the world today), the lives of most people were short and hungry, at the mercy of the powerful, and with the probability of watching half your children die. Not surprisingly, most people believed that their only hope for a better existence would be after their death.

Yet despite living in an appalling century of war and mass murder, many people in Europe in the middle of the 20th Century voted for political parties that held out hope. This was true of the right as well as the left. The left held out the promise of personal security against illness and poverty through the creation of a welfare state, government action to maintain full employment, and restraining the economic power of the wealthy. The right promised to achieve more or less the same aims by facilitating home ownership and rewarding economic enterprise. One side emphasised social solidarity: the other personal responsibility.

Both these routes to a better world now seem blocked. It is proving increasingly difficult to fund the welfare state because of population change. Most people now join the labour-force five or six years later than was the case in the 1960s, while greater life-expectancy has produced an increasing proportion of elderly in the population. As a result, there are fewer people in work to fund a comfortable retirement for the elderly, whether this be through public provision (taxation or social insurance) or private means (personal savings or annuities). The right-wing promise of a property-owning society is also threatened. Rapid rises in house prices make purchase out of the reach of most people, particularly since many young people are also paying off student loans.

This has led to two typical responses. One is to abandon politics altogether and resort to fantasy. The fantasy is that wealth and happiness will be achieved by winning the lottery, being recognised as a new singing star on the X Factor, or having a son talented enough at football to be signed for the Premier League. An alternative fantasy is that the purchase of some new consumer good will transform your personality and very identity. This is exploited by advertisers, who now offer mystical experiences or at the very least utter bliss as the result of buying a new car. Driving a BMW or an AUDI has now become the modern equivalent of attending mass.

The second typical response is ‘doomism’. This is the belief that our current way of life will end catastrophically within our lifetimes, and that only a few will find shelter in some distant retreat. There have, of course, always been people who predicted the imminent end of the world based on their reading of the Bible, with survival in paradise available only to the select few who joined their particular version of Christianity. While awaiting the apocalypse, believers often gathered in Godly communities here on earth, perhaps so that they could be easily identified when the end came. They attempted to make their Godly communities very models of the just society or heaven. Some became cruel habitations of conformity. But others, like Rhode Island or Pennsylvania, became tolerant and progressive societies.

Belief in an imminent apocalypse is still strong in parts of the USA, but in Europe it has been supplanted by a new secular doomism, based on the belief that the natural life of the planet is fatally imperilled by over-population, pollution or, alternatively, by the excessive consumption of natural resources. Doomists attribute these problems either to capitalism (now labelled as ‘Thatcherism’ or ‘neo-liberalism’), or just to the innate greed and stupidity of human beings. For this kind of doomist, shelter is found in small self-sufficient communities away in the hills. And so they gather to await eco-doom in towns like Totnes, Stroud, and Machynlleth. Like the earlier religious doomists, they try and implement their ideas, in this case with local currencies, community gardens, recycling exchanges and cycleways. In the process, they turn their shelters into some of our most desirable and innovative communities.

Tadeo Cumella: the great all-father

Doing family history when you have an unusual surname should be a bit of a doddle. There have never been many people called ‘Cumella’ living in the UK, and all of them, as far as I can tell, are descendants of one man, Tadeo Cumella. Tadeo was a native of Barcelona and ‘Cumella’ is a Catalonian name, although it is also found in Western Sicily. This probably results from migration during the centuries in which Sicily and Catalonia were united under the Kingdom of Aragon. Most people called ‘Cumella’ in the Americas seem to be descendants of migration from Sicily.

The name ‘Tadeo Cumella’ is a shortened version of the rather more splendid ‘Tadeo Joseph Torebso Cumella y Alsina’. The ‘y Alsina’ suffix, in common with the usual Spanish custom, adds the maiden surname of his mother. If our family had followed this practice, I would be called by the less splendid name of ‘Stuart John Cumella and Smith’.

There is the usual information about Tadeo from censuses and other public records, but one unusual source is his application in 1874 to be naturalised as a British subject. This is now kept in the National Archives in Kew, and includes a summary of his life to that date, together with testimonials from various ‘natural-born British subjects’, and a statement from the Chief Constable of Liverpool that during his time in this country Tadeo “has borne a good character and moved in a respectable position in life”.

The biographical details on the application reveal that Tadeo was born in Barcelona on 16th April 1836, and worked from 1861 as a storekeeper to the engine room on a Spanish ship called the ‘Tajo’, which plied between Spain and England. He was married in June 1863 and in February 1865 finally settled in Liverpool. The application does not give the name of his wife, but other records identify her as Matilda Jane Davenport. The application notes that his wife was English and that they were married in St Brides Church in Liverpool. A marriage in the Church of England suggests that Tadeo had dropped any allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church by this time. This is in line with what I know of my family, who are not noted for their spirituality. By the time of the application, Tadeo and Matilda had five children: Tadeo Robert Hugh; John William; Ezra; Daniel; and Matilda Jane.

Tadeo’s first job on land was as a shipsmith with Caleb Smith & Co. But in November 1868, he went into partnership with a Basque living in Liverpool named ‘Juan Bautista Marcelino De Abaitua’. Their firm was known as ‘Abaitua and Cumella’, described as ‘shipwrights’. 1874 was an eventful year for Tadeo. After the naturalisation process was completed, the partnership was dissolved and Tadeo set up in business independently as a ships’ chandler. His wife and his son John William both died, but a new daughter, Ruth Davenport was born. It is possible that his wife died in childbirth, but I will need to get copies of death certificates to confirm whether this was the case. Tadeo married again, to Hannah Roberts, in 1877. They had one child, John Cumella, who was my paternal grandfather. Tadeo died on the 21st May 1900, and Hannah in 1904.

Beyond these records, I have little information about the Cumella family. My father was born after both his paternal grandparents had died, and I was born several years after the death of John Cumella. There was therefore no opportunity for the fruitful discussions across the generations that can take place between grandparents and grandchildren. I must therefore rely on any other records I will find in future.

I would like to thank the compiler of the de Abaitua family history on Ancestry.com for the photograph of Tadeo Cumella. I would also like to thank my son Andrew for gathering material at Kew and finding the de Abaitua website.

See also: Antoni Cumella: the greatest Cumella of them all

Planning in Wonderland

Last week I went to a seminar on neighbourhood planning organised by our local Conservative MP, Harriet Baldwin. Like her previous seminar on rural broadband, it aimed to promote the achievements of the Government, but also revealed a great deal about how decisions are really made in our country.

The first speaker was John Howell, the Conservative MP for Henley-on-Thames and the man who had developed his party’s proposals for neighbourhood planning and ‘localism’. He told us that, thanks to the Localism Act, the top-down planning associated with the previous Labour government had been abolished. Thousands of pages of detailed planning guidance had been replaced by the 60 pages or so of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). Districts councils were no longer bound by the targets for new house building in each district set out in the Regional Spatial Strategies drawn up by civil servants. Instead, each district council can now specify the numbers of houses it needs, based on its own estimate of population growth. These are then written into the district council’s local development plan. Any neighbourhood plans within the district have to conform to the strategic objectives set out in the district’s plan, but can vary the details. They can, for instance, change the recommended locations for new housebuilding.

After a few more speakers enthusiastically promoted neighbourhood planning, the seminar ended with Councillor Paul Swinburn, also a Conservative and the Deputy Leader of Malvern Hills District Council. I suspect Paul has never been a fire-breathing radical, but he spoke with a polite sort of anger about the real world of planning as experienced in our district. Our version of the district development plan has been developed in co-operation with two other district councils and is called the ‘South Worcestershire Development Plan (SWDP). After an elaborate series of consultation meetings, it has been forwarded to the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) for an assessment by a planning inspector. A planning inspector is a civil servant acting in a ‘quasi-judicial capacity’ (ie he pretends to be an independent arbiter). The planning inspector will oversee an even more elaborate consultation process, until the SWDP is finally approved in about a year’s time. Paul said that while this process is underway, Malvern Hills and the other two district councils are receiving numerous planning applications from developers who propose to build houses on sites not specified in the SWDP. When the district councils turn down these applications, they are approved on appeal by a planning inspector on the grounds that the district council has failed to identify an adequate ‘five year land supply’.

The NPPF requires each district council to identify a ‘five year land supply’ (ie sites which have been approved for housing development sufficient to meet the estimated need for new houses over the next five years). But who decides the number of houses needed for the next five years? The planning inspectors could use the detailed estimates in the SWDP which, although not finally approved, has been agreed by the elected representatives of over 286,000 people in South Worcestershire. But the decisions of our elected representatives count for little with planning inspectors, who are continuing to use the higher figures from the old Regional Spatial Strategy, even though these have (allegedly) been abandoned by the Government.

Clearly, there are two worlds of local planning: there is reality, as experienced by the residents of South Worcestershire, in which housebuilding corporations can build what they like where they like; and there is the Wonderland of triumphant localism inhabited by some members of Parliament.

See also: How green was my village
Confessions of a parish councillor

Dampened spirits

Last Saturday, I helped man the Parish Council stall at the Village Fete (called the ‘Horticultural Show’ in our village). Both the day before and the day after were warm and sunny, but on Saturday there was a cold wind and a hint of rain. Our stall comprised a collapsible gazebo with a banner tied to it. The banner acted as a mainsail, and the gazebo was soon blown over. Large tent pegs and lines were then used to hold it in place. A gazebo, unlike a tent, has no side panels and so gave us little protection against the weather. We sat at our table, hunched against the wind, trying to stop our paperwork blowing across the field. The gazebo, bought for the occasion, began to tear and buckle. One metal rod snapped after a particularly fierce gust.

Elsewhere on the field, there were stalls organised by the Women’s Institute (cakes), the Horticultural Society (plants), the Geological Society (rocks), the local history society (old photographs), as well as horse-riding, community games, old vehicles, a car boot sale, a dog handling show, music, a barbecue, second-hand books, hand-made jewellery, and a little tourist train. Inside the village hall, there was tea and sandwiches. The whole event was a sign of the remarkable ability of people in English villages to organise themselves, and their determination to carry on in adverse weather. Nevertheless, we all agreed that attendance was lower than last year, and that the predominant mood was one of endurance rather than enjoyment.

It was therefore irritating to read in the local paper that “Despite gloomy weather on Saturday, spirits were not dampened in Martley, near Worcester, when villagers turned out in their hordes to enjoy this year’s village show”. The ‘spirits not dampened’ cliché was used over and over again in the dreadful BBC commentary on the Royal Jubilee procession along the Thames last year. It was an insult to our intelligence then and it remains so now. Of course our ‘spirits’ were ‘dampened’, but we carried on stoically and made the best we could of the experience. In my case, this included several interesting discussions with the people who visited our gazebo, and eating a really good cake from the Women’s Institute.

Persecuting the irritating victim

My career as a social worker began in Birmingham Social Services Department, just after the department had been formed in the early 1970s. I was then an ‘unqualified social worker’, and eventually left after only a year to train for my qualification. But that one year gave me a bookshelf of memories of how some of the more bizarre members of society behave, of the distress and suffering caused by misfortune, disability and mental illness, and of how organisations of well-meaning people can add to this suffering.

The most skilled social workers in the Area 8 team of Birmingham Social Services Department had been inherited from the former Children’s Department of the local authority. They were involved in two sorts of work: fostering and adoption; and child protection. The social workers took great care in assessing the suitability of prospective foster parents and adoptive parents, and placing children with the most appropriate family. Adoption in those days usually meant placing newborn babies with married couples who wanted children but were unable to have them. Where did the babies come from? As far as I could work out, a constant supply of babies for adoption were produced by unmarried teenage girls. Even in the early 1970s, there was a general assumption that teenage girls would be unable to support illegitimate children. They were therefore encouraged to spend time in a ‘mother and baby home’, from which they emerged having given birth but without their baby. Television programmes like ‘Long Lost Families’ show the long-term distress suffered by many of these women, now in their sixties.

Older children in the care of the local authority were usually placed with foster parents, in children’s homes, or, if they had committed offences, in residential ‘approved schools’. Many Roman Catholic children went to the nearby Father Hudson’s children’s home in Coleshill, a large orphanage-type building, where they were sexually and physically abused by a team of priests and nuns. The social workers in my team regarded the home as strict, but would have been outraged to learn of the abuse inflicted on the children in its care. The department at that time was in the process of moving residential care for children into smaller homes and making greater use of fostercare. Father Hudson’s home eventually closed in 1988 and the building was destroyed by an arsonist in June 2013.

Services for disabled people in the Area 8 team were mainly provided by occupational therapists and unqualified social workers. They faced the usual problem of front-line staff in public services - insufficient funds to provide the services to which people are supposed to be entitled. The most important of these services were the aids and adaptations for people with physical disabilities. These were rationed by waiting-list, modified for some clients who were regarded as having priority need. In a few cases,  modification could work in the opposite direction. One client I remember was of working age but had suffered an industrial injury which had damaged his back. He was intelligent and assertive, and put forward a series of requests for adaptations that were more comprehensive and expensive than the department was used to paying for. This caused great resentment, particularly for my senior social worker, who began to block his requests and even argued that he was demonstrating an obsessional behaviour that endangered the welfare of his child.

The social work team, for all its faults, did try hard to match their response to their perception of their client’s needs. They were ‘person-centred’ in the grotesque phrase now used in public services. But this was not true of all public agencies. One of the worst was the artificial limb and appliance centre (ALAC), which was at that time part of central government. I was allocated a case of an elderly couple in which the husband needed to use a wheelchair, in which his wife pushed him to the shops. She was finding this increasingly difficult, and so I applied to the ALAC to supply one of their new powered wheelchairs designed to make pushing easier. However, this turned out to be faulty and could only move at running pace. The ALAC were unwilling to modify the wheelchair, or even admit that it was faulty. At the time I left the social services department, they had approached my senior social worker to determine how to get the wife categorised as mentally-incapable of operating the wheelchair.

These two clients were examples of ‘irritating victims’, or people who, wilfully or unwittingly, fail to conform to the expected behaviour of the clients of a government or local government department and thereby become subject to retaliation. I do not know how their story ended, but some irritating victims of government departments can endure years of persecution. One example is Omar Mahmoud Othman, a Palestinian who was granted asylum with his family by the Home Office in 1994 on the grounds of religious persecution. The Home Office may have regarded him as a potential line of communication to extreme jidhadist groups, but this changed after the events of 11 September 2001. Governments in the USA, the UK and elsewhere then fell into a great fear, stripping away the legal protections of citizens and identifying all Muslims as potential terrorists. On the basis of hearsay, the British government decided Omar was a ‘terrorist mastermind’. There was no evidence against him that would survive a criminal prosecution, and so in 2002 the Home Office imprisoned him without trial and began proceedings to have him deported. However, Omar gained the support of various human rights lawyers who exploited the incompetence of the Home Office, and the original deportation was dragged through endless courts before it finally succeeded in 2013.

Throughout this period, no evidence was ever presented in court about Omar’s alleged involvement in terrorism. This is probably because his real offence was to have deeply irritated the Home Office and thereby became the subject of prolonged persecution. Another factor, however, was that Omar looked the part of a terrorist, as envisaged by the media pantomime. He had lost a hand and instead had a rather menacing hook. His wife wore the conventional head to toe black clothes of the ultra-orthodox Muslim woman. Omar is of course usually known now as ‘Abu Qatada’. He has been demonised. Time will tell who the real demons are.

See also The curse of the generic

How green was my village

England is the most crowded country on the mainland of Europe, with an average of 395 people/square kilometre. Yet there are still places in England where you can look around and see only hills, woods and fields, and where you can travel down narrow country lanes to small villages clustered round an ancient church. I live in one such village in West Worcestershire, where the flood plain of the River Severn meets the long ridge of wooded hills which reach North from the Malverns. Our village is not picture-perfect: there is no village green or duckpond, the village pub is closed, and we have a small industrial estate, a primary school and a high school. But the village is in a verdant setting of hills, woods and fields that is dear to all who live here.

So much of rural England survives because laws were passed in the 1940s to prevent destructive development. National parks, green belts, conservation areas and local planning authorities all date from this period. Development has of course taken place, but country villages have usually been preserved rather than replaced by speculative housing. All this is changing, and developers can now essentially build what they like where they like. In my village, the district council has approved an estate of 51 new houses on good quality land that has been farmed for over a thousand years. This was strongly opposed in the village, which would have preferred smaller infill developments to meet local housing need. I spoke on behalf of the Parish Council in the public session of the district council meeting to oppose the development. But it was nevertheless approved, largely because the district council has no alternative.

There is no alternative because the Government’s National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) published in 2012 specifies ‘a presumption in favour of sustainable development’, and requires each district council to identify sites for housing in its local plan sufficient to meet the ‘housing need’ of its population for the next five years. But all the local plans that existed before the NPPF have now been superseded and none of their successors have yet been approved by the Secretary of State. District councils which have refused to give planning permission for unsuitable developments have found that planning inspectors have almost always overturned their decision, and that the building has gone ahead. In such cases, the district council is penalised financially by having to meet the costs of the applicant and by losing access to the funds usually paid by applicants to meet the additional expenditure (roads, schools, village halls etc) incurred by the local authority as a result of the new development. In such a climate, district councils can do little but try and negotiate the best deal they can with the developer and then approve the application.

We therefore have a parody of local democracy followed by a parody of a judicial process, which all works to enrich the corporations that build houses and supermarkets. An essential role for governments is to rationalise all this with hooray words like ‘sustainable’. The development in my village was deemed ‘sustainable’ because it will be built in a village with a reasonable range of local services. Never mind the loss of farming land to build 51 oil-fired houses, or the increase in the number of people who will need to commute by car to Worcester and more distant cities. ‘Sustainable’ has thus joined words like ‘modernisation’, ‘liberation’, and ‘choice’ which serve to cloak the darker designs of our politicians and their masters.

See also: Confessions of a parish councillor
Going local

A self-educated Shakespeare

Behind every event in history, behind every human achievement, there lurks a conspiracy theory. There are those who propose that the twin towers in New York were destroyed by a vast conspiracy of the CIA, Israel and/or George Bush, that John Kennedy was assassinated by another vast conspiracy comprising Lyndon Johnson, the Mafia and the Cuban Government, that all the Apollo moon landings were faked, and that William Shakespeare did not write the plays and poems attributed to him by those who knew him well.

Bill Bryson has reviewed the Shakespeare conspiracy theories in his excellent book Shakespeare: the World as a Stage. He notes that no-one ever dreamt of suggesting an alternative author until the middle of the 19th Century, when an American writer proposed that the Shakespeare’s plays and poems had really been written by Sir Francis Bacon (later Viscount St Albans). Candidates put forward by later conspiracy theorists have included The 17th Earl of Oxford (who died several years before many of the plays were first performed) and the 3rd Earl of Southampton. No direct evidence has ever been proposed to support these bizarre theories, but they usually rest on two assumptions, which say rather more about the conspiracy theorists than about Shakespeare himself.

The first assumption is that Shakespeare could not have been the author because he was not an aristocrat (and therefore could not have been clever enough). However, it is rather hard to think of any of members of the English aristocracy, now or in the past, who have written a decent play or poem. In Shakespeare’s time, members of the aristocracy certainly supported, funded and protected artists, but they would no more have thought of writing plays than of polishing their own brasses or mucking out their own stables. Writing plays at that time was an artisan activity, comparable to writing modern television soap operas. I have speculated in an earlier blog that Shakespeare’s sonnets were written to order as a financial transaction. The idea that only an aristocrat could possibly have written such superb works of imagination tells us that the proponents of this conspiracy theory are appalling snobs.

The second assumption is that Shakespeare could not have written his works because he did not go to university, and therefore could not learnt about the classics. However, he almost certainly did go to Stratford Grammar School where (in common with other such schools of that time), ‘grammar’ meant Latin grammar. Pupils studied the classics in Latin from dawn to dusk in at atmosphere of compulsory and relentless learning backed by harsh punishment. Although these educational methods are no longer in favour, they were probably effective in inculcating knowledge. Shakespeare may have emerged with a better grasp of the classic dramas and poetry than all but a few present-day university graduates specialising in these subjects.

But of course, formal education is only a part of learning. People with active minds go on learning throughout their lives. They learn new skills and improve existing ones, travel to new places, and accumulate knowledge about new areas of interest. Such people, whatever they have learnt in formal schooling, are essentially self-educated. Self-education not only means that people develop new skills and knowledge, but it helps them maintain what they have already learnt. For knowledge is not like a sheaf of papers put in a filing cabinet, available to a person when required. Rather, it is like a channel, which will silt up unless water constantly flows through it.

People who do not have active minds can only absorb what they have been taught in schools or universities, and learn nothing subsequently. They therefore find it incomprehensible that a person can become educated through his or her own efforts - that a glover’s son from a small market town could learn the skills to become an actor, playwright and poet, or possess the imagination to describe the dramas of people in distant lands and far-off times.




See also: Yet another theory about Shakespeare's sonnets