Twitteretter

It has started, people. This morning I read an article about Sir Keir Starmer’s charisma, or lack of it. The charisma nonsense is the process by which a politician is targeted by the opposing faction of the media, which, irrespective of the actual charisma the politician might have, start writing about his lacking it. Since most voters do not actually meet politicians in person, the media is the way in which they evaluate their charisma and thus the media decide who is charismatic, and hence electable, and who isn’t. Other, in my mind more important qualities, such as honesty, integrity, morality, determination and intellectual acumen seem unimportant by comparison. Don’t panic, Sir Keir. Mess up your hair, awkwardly ride a bicycle, tie your tie too long, lie through your teeth, become corrupt, cheat on your wife and your voters and speak like someone pulled out from the Victorian era. You might, if you do, still win the charisma battle and become acceptable as a Prime Minister Length:...

The title is one of my favourite quotes, which I have tried to live my life by. It is from ‘The Miser’, a great Moliere classic, incisive and thought provoking, as all his work. The meaning is clear. What one promises does not matter, only what one delivers does. What got me thinking about this, specifically, was the Chancellor’s announcement of a 1% pay rise for NHS workers. I remembered the famous, or I think we now can really start calling it infamous, Brexit bus. An extra 350 million per day for the NHS. The pay rise equates to 450 million per year. Then I realised, maybe we misunderstood and Boris Johnson and Co never meant pounds, but rather, pence. But even then, this week’s pay rise would only be a third of that downgraded promise. The trouble is that politics and government are based on a promise to delivery premise, on the citizenship voting on the basis of promises and, those benefiting from that vote, delivering on such promises. Something in this cycle seems a tad broken L...

Many of you may remember the heady days of ‘Clap for the NHS’, the times of the first lockdown, when many regularly came out of their houses to express appreciation for the doctors and nurses on the front of the battle against coronavirus. Health workers, as we call them, were immensely popular and hugely appreciated by our society, happy to dispense with profligacy cheap, empty, rewards. Clapping, after all, is free. The UK Chancellor, a member of the government elected by a majority of those doing the clapping has revealed a meagre pay increase of 1% for health workers, adeptly borrowing the oft repeated slogan and, by changing a letter, delivering ‘Crap for the NHS’. We will soon see whether this, missed real opportunity to show meaningful appreciation, is a government miscalculation or whether the rest of society, the clappers, will shrug their shoulders, get on with paying as little tax as possible, and join the crappers. I hope I am, but do not expect to be, pleasantly surprised ...

The inability of conservatives to run health or education systems, nowhere more apparent than in the UK, may be baffling but it is, in fact, logical. Two insidious ideas sustain conservative thinking. First, success is understood in economic terms, your bank balance a perfect proxy of your productivity and value. Second, lack of success is a choice, due to laziness or lesser morality. Conservatives are ideologically incapable of seeing failure as lack of opportunity (for people) or funding (for systems). Without this most obvious explanation, what is left? Failure by choice. Inefficiency, laziness. Our underpaid, unsuccessful nurses and teachers are lazy and will cheat if possible. The solution? Fill the NHS with unproductive management layers to improve efficiency. Use an algorithm ill designed by consultants to correct for the cheating by our teachers when issuing grades. If you wilfully eliminate the obvious cause of problems, your solutions will appear, and be, wilfully stupid Leng...

We are over four weeks into the Brexit reality, as some choose to call it. It is full of surprises, at least for those who believed the propaganda of Vote Leave in the referendum, firstly, and of the current Conservative government, later. In four weeks, we have seen significant movement restrictions, the loss of Erasmus, long queues at Channel crossings, an incredibly fast, extensive erosion of food and environmental standards in the UK, the new phenomenon of vaccine nationalism, pitching the UK and the EU in an unedified battle for stocks and, as many consumers are now finding out, customs duties. Goods we used to receive from Europe without a second thought, now require us to engage with the transport companies to clear customs and to pay the duties, certainly significant. I guess, seen the pace of the deterioration of our standard of living in the UK, the only consolation is the thought that, surely, it must slow down. It is not possible to keep this breakneck pace up for long Leng...

This is a Spanish word, coined by one of Spain’s most famous writers, Don Ramón María del Valle Inclán, at the start of the XX century (its first appearance, I believe, was in the great ‘Bohemian lights’). It is not easy to translate to English, something like distorted caricature of reality would be as close to the money as I can get. Valle Inclán used a metaphor, concave and convex mirrors, to describe what he perceived as the deformity of Spanish society at the time. It was brutal and beautiful. I can only imagine what he might have come up with, what metaphor he may have elicited, had he witnessed the events we have in the last few years. The systematic, short sighted destruction of the environment by many governments. The systematic, short sighted destruction of US democracy by its ruling party, the GOP, as they call themselves. The destruction of UK society and social rights by the Conservative government, with the complicity of UK workers. I somehow feel mirrors would not cut it...

My recent post 284 referred to the start of the slip in standards in the UK post Brexit. The Independent informs us now of plans by the UK government to scrap the 48 hour maximum working week limit. This fits with Conservative neoliberal ideology, let the market fix working hours, let workers work as much as they like, which works (sic) just dandy for business in what will be a employers’ market. Many will have to work more than 48 hours and, as a result, lower the value of labour and relinquish rights gained in the social battles of the XIX and XX Century. Since Brexit was fuelled by fond memories of Britain’s global position in the Victorian era, a return to Victorian conditions is perversely fitting. Thus, the completely predictable progression towards a UK whose competitiveness is based on the erosion of food and environmental standards and of workers rights will continue as expected. It would all make perfect sense, if workers had not voted for it. Turkeys and Christmas come to mi...

In amongst the media ruckus around Capitol riots, Trump’s possible impeachment and a rampant coronavirus pandemic, some important news can easily be missed. The UK’s Environment Department has issued emergency use authorisation for neonicotinoid thiamethoxam, a pesticide banned in the EU because of its dangers to biodiversity and pollinators. This is really what is at the heart of Brexit, the desire by neoliberal ideologues to march along the deregulation drive initiated by their ideological matriarch, Mrs. Thatcher. Standards will not slip quickly or catastrophically, but slowly, one small, by itself not significant, deregulation at a time. The economic imperative driving them will win the day at every junction, pushing the UK’s regulatory framework and, with it, its society, slowly right, and ultimately off an inequality cliff. Those who can afford to will live outside the UK society, as many Brexiteers have already done. Those who cannot, after all, don’t really matter, do they? Len...

Hear me out on this. One way to understand religion is as a belief system built on the purported word of a superior authority, a god, mediated through an inner circle, the priesthood. For a religion to survive, when the word of its god and facts contradict each other, the followers of the religion must align with the former. This explains the prosecution of figures like Galileo, who did no more than state clearly observable facts. The god drives the narrative, describing reality in advance, providing a framework for confirmatory and complementary facts to slot into and for contradictory facts to be discarded as fabrication, misinterpretation or lie. Modern politicians are adept at driving the narrative, telling the story before it happens, providing interpretation guidelines for every ensuing fact. This is the reason why Trump started claiming election fraud weeks before the election happened, or why you can predict reality by expecting the opposite to anything stated by Michael Gove ...

We are a few weeks away from the end of the EU withdrawal transition period, and a new YouGov poll tells us that 51% of Brits are against Brexit, with 38% still for it. The anti-European sentiment fanned by the populism of Farage and Johnson, Britain’s pied pipers of Hamelin, is receding. Alas, there is no mechanism for reversal. Even though we know stopping Brexit, remaining, would make us all immediately more prosperous, in the UK and Europe, and more relaxed, and happier, and less ashamed, there is no path for the change of mind. On we march. The Light Brigade. Leonidas’ 300. The wise know not to decide the important in anger, to leave sentiment for leisure. But we were not wise. And the pied pipers keep on playing, leading us to the cliff. We follow, hypnotically , against our will, or rather devoid of will. Tired. Disillusioned. Defeated, after many sang victory songs on referendum day, before we knew the wrong battle had been fought and, vanquished or victors, we all lost  Le...

Last week in UK we learnt of a Conservative government plan to exempt for hedge fund managers, company managers and City dealmakers flying into UK of quarantine requirements. The stated rationale, if you care to listen, is that they are not a risk, as they fly in by private jet, use private cars and do 4-5 meetings in a day and fly out. This is disingenuous. For a start, it shares with Trump the unusual notion that people cannot get infected in a car. Secondly, the exempt will be meeting with people in UK, otherwise, what is the point in coming? And further, 4-5 meetings in a day can be done online. In fact, merger and acquisition activity in UK has been strong in the last 6 months, with many deals completed fully online. The exemption seems based in the very Tory notion that the wealthy are not infectious, that they know better and can avoid contagion, unlike the poor, who are also stupid, as their poverty clearly indicates. The virus is not only part time, but also reversely elitist...

I had a conversation yesterday about the morality of denying poor children free school meals during half term with an indignant, rather beautiful, interlocutor. Her fury was directed at the immorality of such decision by the UK Conservative government and those who support them. But this, more than a moral question, is a perception question. The great majority of those denying school meals don’t want children to starve. The problem is that they have bought into a narrative in which parents can indeed afford to feed their children and, by receiving free school meals, will be able to divert money to other uses, fags, drink, gambling, etc. Framed this way, the decision is no longer immoral. Sadly, the assumption is far off the mark. Many poor households don’t make those indulgences. Some others may prioritise them over children’s nurture. When you imagine, or believe, an alternative narrative from the comfort of your own home, you risk making horrifying decisions with the best intentions...

The coronavirus lockdown and, specifically, its exit, have highlighted significant differences between European countries. Whilst 90% of office workers in Germany, France or Spain have returned to their desks, only around 50% in UK have. The UK government is pleading with workers to return, to reactivate the economy, reassuring them returning is safe. But, alas, workers are dragging their feet. The issue is not safety but rather the daily, very long, expensive commute in overcrowded public transport or on overly congested roads. The economy has not been working for its workers for a long time. The lockdown made them realise and see an alternative, and they will not give this up easily. The time and financial savings are too significant. The government is having to resort to wartime rhetoric to try to get them back to work. Do it for your country. But 40 years of Tory governments undermining solidarity and fomenting individualism are not good preparation for such a call to arms  Len...

The keen observer will have noticed an unexpected, amusing and somewhat shocking phenomenon in the last few days. The plan by the UK conservative party to balance the accounts after the coronavirus economic shock by taxing the rich and corporations. This policy is anathematic to the Tories, who have built their proud electoral record on the opposite, the liberalisation of capital. Their U-turn, the last of many to date and the first of many more to come, is the consequence of a startling fact. There is nowhere else to get money from, no other politically acceptable way to balance the books. The Tories have exploited the working classes to such extent that, on exiting the latest shock, they dare not, despite their fanatically ideologic penchant to do so, tax the rank and file of British society. It is akin to watching the shipwrecked turn to eating each other to survive, when all else fails. We, the no longer targeted, watch in mirthless bemusement as they fall on their neoliberal sword...