In my garden we have a couple of decorative mirrors. That makes it sound grander than it really is but they’re just a couple of wall mirrors re-purposed to create interesting reflections and an impression of space. Each morning this week, a blackbird has flown down, seen his image in the mirror and embarked on a furious squawking fight against his reflection. He fights himself with ever-increasing desperation as his opponent refuses to back down. It must be like that scene in a horror movie where you fight a monster that just keeps getting back up, impervious to your blows. Anxious that he’ll flake out from fear and exhaustion, we intervene and shoo him away.
He’s probably telling the story to the other blackbirds even now. “It was like something from Hitchcock” he’ll be telling them.
Isn’t this almost a perfect metaphor for the British Conservative party today?
The more they see themselves in the mirror, the more they find to hate and the more violently they attack. The infighting is like nothing we had previously seen in British politics – and that’s saying something, because we have a pretty tasty history of sharp knives and betrayal.
With luck, it’s the death rattle of a government soon to be voted into oblivion. After all, in some cultures, blackbirds do symbolise death.
It would be nice to think this incarnation of the Conservatives will be booted out of government for a long time, after taking the piss so engregiously. Sadly, I’m not so sure it works that way. The shameless greed, corruption and disregard for the national interest should alienate an entire generation. We have certainly never had a government this bad in my lifetime. Unfortunately other more decent folks may be tarred with the same brush and the damage done to the whole political class may be irreparable.
This is the bit where I conclude with a quirky bit of .. but looking on the bright side….ism. Maybe something whimsical or Wodehousian.
Or maybe, like that monster in the horror movie, they’ll get back up, zombie-like, and return.
Have you ever been to a car showroom and expressed interest in a car?
Did the salesman take you back to his desk and offer you a coffee?
And did he return with a cup of something scaldingly hot?
So you were trapped for twenty minutes, listening to his spiel, unable to escape because it would be rude to leave with your drink unfinished?
A few years ago I worked for an advertising agency and, assigned to a big car manufacturer’s account, I found myself shadowing a car salesman to learn the nuts and bolts of the motor business.
I especially enjoyed learning about the sales person’s tricks of the trade. Like where he or she seeks to befriend the potential buyer over coffee. They are specifically taught how to create a cup so hot, you will be a captive audience for as long as it takes to deliver their sales pitch. Genius.
What I absolutely loved about this was not just the sheer skulduggery (though as a deep cynic around everything capitalist, I did enjoy this) but rather the fabulous insight about Britishness. Surely no other nationality would feel so obliged to sit tight, enduring who knows what, while they wait for their drink to cool down – for fear of causing offence.
It reminded me of the wonderful passage in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where Arthur describes the true nature of Britishness by the medium of motorway services and biscuits.
Do schools still study ‘Lord of the Flies’? I hope so. Every time I look at the modern world, it seems more relevant.
William Golding’s morality tale (is that what it is?) describes how humans, in this case a shipwreck of schoolboys, separated from the civilising influence of society, descend into a brutal barbarism. It has been described as a ‘Hobbesian’ state of nature where the strongest survive and the weakest are preyed upon.
Hobbes, writing in the 17th century famously described a state of nature, meaning a state prior to social or political organisation. It’s a state of war of all against all where the life of a man was ‘solitary, poor, nasty brutish and short’
Looking around at the current state of the world, it very much seems like we’re heading in that direction.
At an individual level, trends and events are becoming commonplace, which would have been unthinkable twenty years ago – or so it seems to me, from my, admittedly rather privileged middle class, first world vantage point.
How can there be such a thing as white supremacism? People literally living their lives and writing down their opinion that white people are better than black people. How is that even possible?
Toxic masculinity – what on earth is that about? I read the accounts of women trying to do their jobs as journalists and being trolled by online thugs. Who on earth believes this is an acceptable way to behave? Yet they have thousands of followers on Twitter and they inspire support, retweets, likes and all the rest. People like Jordan B Peterson have legions of followers. And the whole grizzly spectre of Donald Trump – where to start?
The so-called ‘War on woke’ – how can someone be actively anti-woke, when the very idea of what they call woke is simply about avoiding offence to others – perhaps to a fault?
Social media seems to fuel the very worst in hate-speech and vitriol (though, to be fair there are also some nice landscapes, how-to videos and cute baby animals).
It’s all very grim.
Unfortunately our leaders have set the worst possible example.
There are wars in Europe and in the Middle East. Noticeably these are driven or fuelled by leaders who are by any standards, pretty despotic.
Politics has become characterised by a machiavellian backstabbing and blame. Truth or honesty have become an irrelevance.
Populist leaders are openly undermining democratic systems.
Even the UK government, once bastions of best practice are openly flouting international law when it seems convenient.
I’m particularly interested in the demise of the ‘good chap’ school of British government. The “good chaps” theory was coined by political historian Peter Hennessy, and describes how people in positions of power will abide by an understanding of good behaviour in public life — rather than needing clear rules to police them. It’s a peculiarly British thing, wouldn’t you agree?
A recent report by ACOBA (The UK government’sAdvisory Committee on Business Appointments – they supposedly set the rules for parliamentarians’ outside interests) pointed the finger for its demise clearly at Boris Johnson and his Conservative administration.
ACOBA Chair Eric Pickles — a former Conservative Cabinet minister — said Johnson’s own behaviour “marked an illustration of how out of date the government’s rules were” – “they had been designed to offer guidance when ‘good chaps’ could be relied on to observe the letter and the spirit of the rules,” Pickles added. “If it ever existed, that time has long passed and the contemporary world has outgrown the rules.”
In the 1980s and 90s there was much written about the demise of traditional institutions – the diminishing influence, currency and relevance of the Church, marriage, The BBC, the Monarchy and even Parliament. In the noughties, we talked of how the Internet was heralding a shift “from the age of deference to a new age of reference”. This was going to usher in a more egalitarian world, where the little people had influence, where we could all have our fifteen minutes of fame and the world would become a better place. Sadly, it has brought us a world of ever greater inequality, where the bullies are unchecked in the playground.
It’s survival of the fittest. Three centuries apart, Hobbes and Golding both saw it in their different ways. But it was meant to be a parable. It wasn’t meant to be a documentary.
In the mid 1980s, the British marketing fraternity stood at a crossroads.
For decades, the Procter and Gamble (P&G) model had dominated. They believed in selling the best product designed through market research to meet consumer needs. It’s an approach which treats people as rational, well-informed utility-maximisers. We use advertising to announce and explain the benefits, simply and concisely with hard facts. It’s not art. It’s science.
In the 1980s new brands emerged adopting new and different approaches. Lever Brothers championed it. Their brand, Persil, competed with P&G’s Ariel. The product was not great at removing stains or whitening whites but Lever had a better understanding of what people really valued. Their advertising wasn’t about product performance but about how it felt to be a busy mum, caring for your family. Brands like this succeeded, despite being functionally inferior.
Increasingly we talked about the USP ‘unique selling proposition’ being replaced by the ESP ‘emotional selling proposition’.
For other brands, competing with an established brand leader meant getting creative with new, sometimes less tangible, benefits. If Cadbury owns ‘creaminess’ maybe there’s a gap for Mars with a chocolate that’s the crumbliest. Or the most exotic. Or the most filling. Or the least filling. Almost anything really.
Take Radion Automatic washing powder. It was launched in the mid 1980s by Lever Brothers to take on P&G’s Bold. Its proposition was that it removed the odours other washing powders left behind. Here was a new brand looking to grow the market by solving a problem which nobody had ever encountered. It was pretty successful for about a decade, peaking at about 7% market share
This is what marketers call brand positioning. Owning a distinct, ownable space in the market.
It’s essential for packaged goods like detergent.
But (and I think you know where I’m going with this….) not a great way to formulate government policy.
So my heart sinks when I hear the term ‘wedge issues’. It represents almost everything that is wrong with British politics right now.
The current PM, Rishi Sunak, wants us to support him for reversing the “tax on meat” and the “seven bins for recycling” – two things which do not exist and never did. Problems nobody has ever experienced. Supposed bias in the BBC? Not an issue unless you’re some kind of culture warrior or one of their competitors. Gender reassignment? Affects virtually nobody. Nigel Farage’s bank account? Don’t get me started.
I know defeating imaginary enemies has been a mainstay in political rhetoric since before the Nazis, and it featured high among the tactics of previous PMs, Theresa May and Liz Truss. But this is something different. It’s actually driving mainstream policy formulation.
Sunak identified opposing ULEZ (ultra low emissions zone) as a potential ‘wedge issue’ after it seemed polarising in a recent bye-election campaign. As a result he has shifted policy away from various measures essential for Britain’s decarbonising commitments. ULEZ is an issue which affects hardly anybody – at most a couple of percent of car drivers in a few places in the country. On the other hand decarbonising the economy is the single biggest long term issue facing the next ten, twenty, thirty governments. Even the second worst Prime Minister in our history, Boris Johnson, decried this shift as foolhardy. Hmm.
I know I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s coming up to a general election and campaigning now takes priority over everything. But this goes beyond the short term. It has become the norm.
Government policy is now created with virtually no regard for the actual issues it purports to address.
The worst example of this is also the highest profile – immigration. At no point in the acres of news coverage about the government’s Rwanda scheme, is there any serious consideration of the problem we are supposedly trying to address.
The Tories immigration policy is Radion Automatic. Even if it achieved what it was intended for (which it won’t) it solves a problem that nobody has ever experienced. Because there isn’t one. Nobody is out of a job because of illegal immigration. Nobody is unable to find affordable housing because of asylum seekers. Nobody is unable to see a Doctor because of illegal immigrants. These are all convenient myths which are staggeringly widely believed and which hardly anyone seems interested in refuting.
Is immigration a problem? No, immigration is the essential mechanism by which we prevent the UK economy collapsing under an ageing population and unsupportable dependancy ratio.
According to a recent YouGov poll 45% of Brits believe most immigrants enter the UK illegally. It’s actually more like 1%. Probably less.
Yet ‘Stop the Boats’ is top government priority and the ‘Rwanda policy’ is the headline in every news bulletin.
In a population so badly informed, maybe it’s understandable that political parties are selling us policies like detergent or chocolate bars.
The tone and content of political coverage has followed with tragic inevitability. Nobody is talking about th content or impact of public policy. It’s as though we’ve all become too clever by half all of a sudden and we’re no longer satisfied with the content. We have to be analysing the motives and rationale behind each nuance. We’ve stopped talking about public policy and focused exclusively on political tactics. Which means the actual policies themselves escape any kind of meaningful scrutiny. hence we get nonsense like ‘stop the boats’.
And here’s a big problem. We can blame the right wing press and online misinformation to an extent. But there is also a new generation of political commentators who have emerged seemingly with a brief to hold the government to account. These are the folks we should be turning to for some context and good sense.
Brilliant and well-connected podcasters like Alastair Campbell and Emily Maitlis are often outspoken in their criticism of the Tories. And yet, much as I admire and enjoy The rest is Politics, The News Agents etc, they are often complicit in perpetuating an irrelevant agenda, which does little for ordinary people.
It’s ironic because Campbell’s book ‘But what can I do’ is all about reconnecting ordinary people and addressing political disillusionment.
I really want these people to help move us towards a better informed politics with a bit more truth and genuine debate.
Ian Dunt has expressed it well (and suitably angrily) in his blog Striking 13:
“Beneath all this, there is the journalistic failure. The entirety of this year has been spent following the trials and tribulations of the prime minister and his Cabinet. Who is up and who is down? Will Braverman challenge the leadership? Can Sunak manage the perpetual grievance culture on his backbenches? Is he being criticised by his predecessors? But how much did we read about the actual reasons that HS2 was formulated, or the consequences of scrapping it, or the breakdown in productivity in the asylum system that leads to the use of hotels?
Sunak is able to operate with extreme superficiality in his policy-making because the national political narrative also operates at that level. There’s little assessment of why something works or why it doesn’t, what the consequence of its reform would be, or whether it’s a sensible idea. It’s like trying to design a nutritious diet based on the froth in a cappuccino.
Sunak is not something that has been inflicted on our political culture. He is an encapsulation of it: empty, vacuous, superficial, lacking in coherence or consistency, inward-looking and redundant.”
Ian Dunt Striking 13 review of 2023
Many years ago, I made a presentation to a room full of PR executives (yes I know, I was young and we all need to earn a living). I said:
“Politics is a sub-set of the PR industry now”
It wasn’t an original thought. I got it from Matthew Parris, in a speech he gave at The RSA. I was also recalling the exhortations of the old socialist stalwart Tony Benn. He would get exasperated by chat about personalities and speculation on who was up and who was down. “But what about the policies” he would exclaim.
I had never really thought through the implications of politics as PR fodder. Now I see.
Public policy reimagined as marketing positioning. It’s very ugly.
Bring back Proctor & Gamble. At least Ariel did actually get your clothes clean.
If so, are you offended that I call them conspiracy theories? Or do you pity my naivety?
I had a call today from a friend who was worried about their house guest. The guest has gone full Truman Show. They believe the moon landings were faked. Space isn’t real, it’s a painting on the sky. Moreover the end of the world is coming soon, as foretold in biblical writings.
I didn’t get into the whole covid vaccine question, but I’m guessing they see the hand of Bill Gates in there somewhere. Or is that just my chip talking? Sorry.
For people with my background, it’s too easy to be dismissive or patronising when we hear people who buy into conspiracy theories, big time. ‘Poor misguided people’, we say, ‘led astray by bad folks on the Internet with nefarious agendas.’
But surely it’s much more interesting than that.
What could inspire people to believe in a narrative that is completely at odds with everything we have ever experienced?
Many of the popular theories share some basic characteristics.
1. Things are not what they seem. They believe there’s something going on behind the scenes that most people don’t know about. I get this – the world is way too complex for any individual to understand. It requires faith in others, who understand these things – scientists, doctors, politicians, businessmen etc. If faith in these people breaks down, we’re left groping for some facts we can believe and without that faith, anything could conceivably fill that void.
2. The world is, according to the theory, run by a shadowy elite. To an extent I actually believe this too, though I would addd there are many elites and some are not shadowy. When we feel powerless – and who doesn’t at least some of the time? – it’s tempting to see someone else as running the show. It also helps to be able to point the finger – they’re to blame when my life doesn’t go the way I wanted.
3. The conspiracy explains the oblique or complex parts of life. That’s a powerful motivation to buy into a theory. Much of life is a bit impenetrable and defies a simple explanation. We just have to believe. Hence many of our mental processes are concerned with making sense of the world around us despite the complexity. It echoes the way we learn as children and continue to process information as adults.
4. It’s ‘us and them’. Not only do ‘they’ either not get it or they pretend they don’t get it, but they will persecute us because we do. They are the enemy. We all need to belong.
5. It’s a joined up ‘theory of everything’. We can see that everything is joined up somehow. But how, exactly? Any theory that can answer that, is immediately attractive. It also works like multiple supporting pillars.
Of course everything I have just written about conspiracy theories, applies exactly to organised religion. Yes I know, you saw that coming a mile off. Congratulations.
Despite bearing no relation to anything they had ever experienced, and flying in the face of all real world evidence, generations of perfectly intelligent, well adjusted people followed the teachings of the church without, I am told, too much dissent. We clearly have a need which is satisfied by this sort of thing.
But there’s one extra crucial element to religion – meaning.
And this is where I think I get where the conspiracy theorists are coming from. Explaining everyday science is one thing but we also want to give it some kind of meaning. Science is all a bit unsatisfactory in many ways. There’s no really good explanation of ‘why’.
A god-like creator is one way of resolving that. Another is to attribute everything to a man-made conspiracy. It’s an alternative version of ‘intelligent design’.
In the eighteenth century, the philosopher David Hume tried to address the ‘skeptics’ who claimed “you can’t prove anything”.
He concluded that, even though we could not prove the basics of the world through reason, we were so conditioned to accepting science and nature that we cannot stop believing in it. Basically you can’t believe in nothing at all. It’s just not something humans can do. We need that meaning. So when we lose faith in the things that gave meaning, we have to find something new that works for us.
And point 4 above – the need to belong – is crucial here. It’s that mix of meaning and belonging that fuels the deep desire to believe. In …..something.
Your football team. Your family. Your political leader. Your god. Anything.
There’s a scene in the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where a delegation from the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages and Luminaries confront Deep Thought, the universe’s greatest super computer. Deep Thought has been tasked with answering the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything but the Philosophers insist that task is their job and theirs alone.
Deep Thought wins them over by explaining it’ll take him millions of years to compute the question and in the meantime, philosophers can milk the publicity and enjoy the circus created around his deliberations.
“Yes,” declaimed Deep Thought, “running a programme like this is bound to create an enormous amount of popular publicity for the whole area of philosophy. Everyone’s going to have their own theories, and who better to capitalize on that market than you yourself? So long as you can keep disagreeing violently enough and slagging each other off in the popular press, you can keep yourself on the gravy train for life.”
Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Disagreeing violently? Slagging off in the press? Gravy train for life?
I am reminded of this when I hear the debates among football pundits, commentators, managers and others around VAR – the video assistant referee. VAR is actually a team of three people who work together to review certain decisions made by the main on-pitch referee.
A kind of consensus seems to be emerging around VAR, best expressed in The Guardian on 1st December 2023:
“Having off-pitch officials who could replay match incidents was supposed to help referees. But technology is changing the sport, critics say, for the worse.In football, the video assistant referee (VAR) was brought in to reduce the number of controversial decisions. Many fans, with good reason, think the opposite has happened”
Guardian Opinion 1st Dec 23
In November, Jonathan Lieu wrote:
“Too much controversy, too much pointless squabbling, too much bad blood and bad faith.”
Guardian 7th November 2023
He is arguing that it’s VAR that is responsible for this (a bit disingenuous since he’s one of those doing the squabbling) but these are exactly the disputes we previously had about bad refereeing decisions. Come to think about it, bad refereeing decisions have taken up the biggest chunk of football chat for about ten years. Now we’re having those disputes about VAR. Plus ca change. I rest my case.
But there’s more. Much more.
The case against VAR firstly rests on the contention that its offsite deliberations hold up the game, sometimes for several minutes, while decisions are reviewed. This spoils the spectacle, especially for fans in the ground, who may not know what is happening. It is further argued that many decisions in football refereeing are subjective so getting them all “right” is an impossible goal. In any case, even if we do agree on a “right” decision, VAR sometimes gets it wrong. Above all, football is a tribal game. The cut and thrust and post-match debate is an integral part of the experience. If that includes disputes and blame games over refereeing decisions, that’s part of it too.
I could not disagree more.
Let’s take the time delays first. I do agree that reviews sometimes take too long and that we need to speed them up. But painting football as high speed non-stop entertainment is unrealistic, verging on fanciful. It has never been like that. For a start the ball isn’t even in play for about a third of the time. The typical 90 minute match has active play with the ball on the pitch, for somewhere between fifty five and seventy minutes, even in the modern format where stoppages are supposedly recorded and time is added on. Football is riddled with stoppages. Always has been. Moreover, for the vast bulk of football fans who are not at the ground but watching on TV, the game is edited anyway, so it’s up to “us” how much we leave in or exclude. Editors often cut away from the action to feature stuff that’s not football action – a celebrity or ex-manager in the crowd, a goal celebration or a bit of juicy pushing and shoving between players. If you have ever tried watching football without all this “punctuation” it’s a hugely disorientating experience.
There’s another observation about the supposed sanctity of non-stop football action. Some of the greatest and most celebrated players have made their names by slowing the game down, preventing the other team from playing and by generally employing the spoiling tactics we now rather beautifully describe as shithousery. Ironically, killing the game has always been one of the most celebrated dark arts of the ‘beautiful game’.
There was an argument that VAR prevents these cynical spoiling tactics and that this would favour bigger clubs thus adding to the inequality in the Premiership. It assumes “big clubs” are less cynical and more likely to be playing some kind of pure, beautiful, flowing football. I’m afraid I simply don’t buy this. When Eddie Howe managed Bournemouth (a small team in the Premiership context– I think we can all agree), he made sure they punched above their weight by all kinds of chicanery and spoiling tactics. Now he manages Newcastle (a big team, one of the richest in the world, owned by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund) he employs similar tactics. The most successful teams dominating the Premiership have mostly had, in their ranks, high calibre stoppers and spoilers. In Chelsea’s Golden Age, Captain, John Terry was famous for the “dark arts”. Ngolo Kante, Roy Keane, Patrick Vieira etc…. The central stopper hall of fame is populated by some of football’s biggest names from its biggest clubs.
Let’s address the next argument – that there is often no “right” decision in many cases because football is subjective. Unfortunately, if we accept this then there really is no hope at all and we’re descending into the alternative football world of tribal fanaticism. Just like everyone else, I have sat watching football and howled with derision as a decision goes against my team, only to express the exact opposite when the same decision goes for us. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a correct application of the rules in 99% of cases. And it seems very obvious to me that in those cases where it is close, subjective, obscured or too quick to see, that is exactly when you need a video review. The alternative seems to be to say ‘whatever’ and accept that it will often be wrong.
Where VAR itself gets a decision demonstrably wrong, the case is slightly different. Here we have a genuine injustice. But it’s not VAR that’s wrong. An individual (or here team of 3 individuals) has made an analysis, in this case from video showing multiple angles, which we later see to be wrong – just like the case where a referee gets it wrong in the old fashioned way. We should make this as rare as possible – that’s exactly why we have VAR, to make it less likely. Duh.
This is probably the place to mention some more positive arguments for VAR. Take the offside law. Since we started being shown the video replays that the analysts use, it has become plain that it’s patently impossible for a human being running the line to get these decisions consistently correct. The margins are too small and the act of watching the ball and the player simultaneously is not realistic. We now know that many of these decisions before VAR were wrong and that results probably hinged on this. If you think about this for a moment you soon realise that dozens of results every season are determined pretty much by chance.
My biggest disagreement is with the argument that the cut and thrust and the debated decisions are just “part of the game”. This is effectively to say it’s more important to create hot entertainment than to ensure the right team wins. I do get the tribal bit and I understand where this comes from. I have written elsewhere that one purpose of football in modern society is to give us a safe place to vent our anger and frustration. It’s the best place – the most harmless place – to scream and swear and to hurl vitriol. The referee is a key player in this. Blaming “The Wanker in the Black” for your team’s defeat has an honourable tradition going back generations.
But if we accept this argument – that the circus is more important than the sport – two other things follow.
First, you may remember the furore around Anders Frisk – he was the referee who famously denied Chelsea several penalty appeals in their Champions League match with Barcelona in 2005. Chelsea lost and went out of the competition, but in the ensuing blame game Frisk was targeted with a horrendous hate campaign and death threats. He retired from refereeing as a result. This kind of thing is more common than we imagine. Even Wayne Barnes, the highly regarded international rugby referee, describes, in his autobiography, how his family received death threats after some controversial decisions he made at the Rugby world Cup. And that’s rugby. a nice gentlemanly game compared with football. The Frisk saga was nearly twenty years ago now – the online hate industry was in its infancy. Imagine the implications of leaving football referees hung out to dry nowadays without VAR to at least share some of the responsibility.
And it could get worse. If we do allow that the correct result isn’t the most important outcome then how long before we discover that results are being bought. It has already happened in Italy. Ahh but that’s Italy, not the same. Ask Bruce Grobelaar. Couldn’t happen here. Not in the Premier League, where a huge slug of the multi billion pound sponsorship comes from…..checks notes ….. the betting industry.
My friend Sam is an intellectual. His words, not mine.
It’s a blessing in so far as he was able to get a good degree, have a successful career and generally get by in a world which seems to reward that sort of thing.
But he tells me that being an intellectual, far from defining a higher purpose, is in fact a curse.
Most people can happily chat about things that don’t matter and make observations that have been made many times before.
Weather looks promising for this week, no? It’s fine to say that Manchester City are odds on to win the league this season, since Arsenal have slipped up. It’s OK to note that last year’s weather was harsh, which has decimated plants that would normally have thrived. Donald Trump is a bit evil, right? Boris Johnson is dishonest. Jose Mourinho…narcissistic?
It’s perfectly all right to state the obvious.
But not for Sam. He feels like a fraud if his comments aren’t brilliantly original or insightful. He’s continually fighting an internal critic, accusing him of banality.
What should he do?
Try harder and keep up the good work or learn to live with the mediocrity of the everyday?
It’s a question that was dragged into my thoughts as I read recently about the sad story of Sheila Seleoane, the medical secretary who died in 2019 in her fourth floor flat in Peckham, but whose body was only discovered more than two years later.
Nobody had noticed she was missing.
It’s hard to know what’s most disturbing about this story.
Early reports homed in on the sordid and macabre nature of the discovery. The Metro newspaper ran this headline:
The Mail Online reported the ‘macabre claim’ that footsteps had been heard in the flat many months after the occupier had died, supposedly alone.
Other reports focused on attributing blame:
The negligence of the Peabody Trust housing association, who had continued to collect Mrs Seeoane’s rent for the whole period, but had not had any contact with her, despite repeated concerns raised by residents worried about the overpowering smell.
The incomprehensible incompetence of the local police. Prompted by another neighbour’s concerns, police were first persuaded to visit the flat in October 2020. According to this neighbour, officers then reported they had ‘made contact’ with the occupant and established she was ‘safe and well’. The report is confirmed by Peabody. This certainly raises some questions.
But surely the most disturbing angle to this whole sad tale is what it tells us about the world we are creating. Automated systems now allow the rent to be paid automatically, for our bills to be paid, for every element of our lives to continue seemingly as normal – even when we are no longer there.
Perhaps if I get clever with ChatGPT I’ll be able to set posts to this blog to automatically appear well into the future, so you won’t know if I’m here or not. Or if I’m still here now.
Do you remember ‘clap for carers’? When Brits stood out on their doorsteps to cheer on the heroic efforts of NHS staff and care workers in the pandemic?
Do you remember the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics? With its celebration of all Britain’s proudest achievements – the NHS being the proudest of all?
Well that seems a long way away from the crumbling system we have today. Nurses are still striking over pay which has been eroded steadily from ‘undervalued‘ to ‘insultingly undervalued‘ to ‘so undervalued you might as well go and work at Amazon instead‘. Hospital Doctors are striking. Ambulance workers and paramedics are striking. GP numbers are shrinking. In surveys more than a third of NHS workers say they are planning to leave. Record numbers are indeed leaving. Unfilled vacancies are at the highest levels ever – over 133,000 equivalent to 10% of the workforce. Has anyone noticed there might be something wrong with the way we organise and pay our care workers?
Meanwhile waiting lists continue to hit record levels and staffing targets are missed and morale across healthcare plumb new depths.
And inevitably health outcomes for people using the service have measurably declined.
It seems as though the NHS has gone in a few short years from our greatest achievement to our most embarrassing liability.
I worked in and around the healthcare industry for many years. The official line was that, even though opinions of the system itself were declining, people’s feelings about their local service – the one they had real life experience of – were still solid. This was dangerously complacent.
Truth is the NHS was never the amazing service we imagined. Even before the current crisis, in the real world, it didn’t provide for many essential health needs. In theory NHS provides some level of dental care but in real life it doesn’t. It does not provide basic eye care for people who need glasses. There are effectively no services for mental health across large parts of the UK, especially for young people. Physiotherapy and musculoskeletal services are largely inaccessible and patients are pointed to private providers.
Our success rates in treating cancer have consistently been among the worst in the developed world.
More fundamentally, the NHS only really deals with illness, not with preventative healthcare which would be infinitely more effective economically speaking.
All this, at a time when medical insurers and Big Pharma have never been more successful. Hmmmm.
It’s not so surprising that the UK is shifting towards a private health insurance model. As those who can afford it opt for private care, the NHS will be limited to the poor and to those services too difficult or uneconomic for the private sector. This isn’t a prediction. It is already happening.
Before the pandemic 60% of FTSE100 companies provided private health insurance for employees. It’s now 70% and rising. It is a creeping privatisation. And it has happened, not by direct government action, but by employers’ and employees’ choices. Of course these choices have been prompted by decades of policies which either intentionally or by accident, turned the NHS from our greatest achievement to our worst nightmare.
The US experience should worry us. It’s a terrible system and it costs a fortune. The average cost of employer-sourced health insurance was $6400 in 2000. Last year it was $22,400. Real wages have hardly increased in that period.
During the nurse’s pay dispute, on strike days, official advice is to avoid any hazardous activities so we wouldn’t end up in A&E. Forget strike days. I fear that advice may apply universally now.
The British political system is a wonderful and mysterious thing. For most of my lifetime we have had Conservative governments. The received wisdom is that they are, and they certainly believe themselves to be “the natural party of government”.
Which is weird because the most cursory inspection shows that they govern in the interest of a very small minority of Brits. Any party which seriously proposes something euphemistically described as ‘trickle down economics” is sort of admitting that it is making policies which are designed for an elite.
And it has become increasingly obvious to anyone paying attention that it is normal for policy decisions to be ‘bought’ by vested interest. There are too many examples to mention, to the extent it’s surely not in doubt.
It is what Dye and Zeigler described as ‘the irony of democracy’ in one of my political science textbooks. The way, a bit like some competitive markets move inexorably towards monopoly or oligopoly, a democratic system veers uncontrollably towards rule by interest groups. They were talking about the USA in the 1980s but it is equally true today, or so it would appear.
So how is it that people vote for a government which basically screws them time after time? It can’t simply be that the comms machine is so smart it convinces them that black is white and good is bad, can it?
That’s what people said about Brexit, where Brits voted, like turkeys for Christmas directly against their own interests but that was surely also more complicated.
And why aren’t people more angry about the increasing inequality in Britain? Or the way ordinary folks are facing a cost-of-living-crisis while corporate profits are booming? Or as the Unite trade union calls it the profiteering crisis?
Well, I think I have found the answer.
As, so often, it was discovered by Douglas Adams:
“[Ford said] “.. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.” “Odd,” said Arthur. “I thought you said it was a democracy.” “I did,” said Ford. “It is.” “So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?” “It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.” “You mean they actually vote for the lizards?” “Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.” “But,” said Arthur, going in for the big one again, “why?” “Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in.”
The Aspidistra 