View from Trevadlock Cross

Happy New Year!

2012-01-02T03:01:00.000-08:00

It's important to be happy. Not just for our own wellbeing, but for others'. A line from an Advent Bible reading comes to mind: "Keep your light shining brightly as the darkness covers the earth." For many, the global economy brings gloom, as economists predict further recession, and even those drivers of global economic boom, the Chinese, find their own economy faltering. It seems likely that the euro will fail, and that the leaders of the EU, with their focus on closer integration, in defiance of their people, who value the sovereignty and cultural difference of their own countries, have no idea how to prevent this from happening, or how to deal with it if (or when) it happens. There seems to be a long shadow cast by the credit crunch, and the financial folly that led to it, and that shadow is creeping gradually across the world, blotting out the sun of prosperity. And in other places, the shadow of tyranny brings another and perhaps worse kind of gloom, to places like North Korea, Iran and Syria, where opposition is crushed and freedom repressed. The Arab Spring may yet bring more tyranny not less, if elections such as those in Egypt throw up Islamist rule on the Iranian model. Indeed, there is much gloom, and if we focus on the gloom, much to fear.

But the reading I started with goes on: "For the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light." At Christmas we get a chance to remember who the great light is, and why the light we draw from Him, reflecting His light, can shine brightly in the darkness. A friend wrote to me about her trip to Burma/Myanmar, where she saw Christian faith burning brightly in adverse circumstances. And in spite of the most dreadful persecution, it is still alive in North Korea and in China. This light comes from within, and poverty cannot touch it. Indeed, the church seems to grow more strongly in conditions of material poverty. For spiritual health, Bust seems better than Boom. So let us in the West not worry too much about the economic outlook, grim though it is for many. For the Light of the World also said: "Don't worry what you are going to eat, or what you will wear; your Father knows you need these things." I think we can trust Him. And as Amnesty International's emblem reminds us, it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness. And the great Christmas gospel from John 1 tells us that "the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out."

I wish you all a truly Happy New Year.

Poverty and Riches - and Priorities

2011-10-18T01:33:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed that at the bottom of this blog I've pasted in a link to ONE, a campaign organisation that works to eliminate poverty worldwide not by charitable giving but by political pressure. I'm not by nature an activist (quite apart from hating the word, which it seems to me is jargonistic and means nothing) but I do feel that a lot of the problems human beings face today are to do with a lack of political will to make things better, rather than to do with intractable problems about which no one can do anything at all. So I thought I would support this idea, and see what happens. If anyone wants to join me, you can press the red button below. But no pressure - we all have different ways of doing things.

I worked out last night, as I thought about poverty and deprivation, that the amount it costs us every month to send our daughter to independent school would pay for two children's education for a whole year in many poorer countries. I love my daughter very much, and we sent her to independent school for good educational reasons and not for any considerations of social status, but it made me think. Can one really justify taking so much for oneself, or even for one's child, when others have so little? There are times when it is right, and I don't feel guilty about the time she has spent at that school, because when she left her state primary school she really needed to make the change to somewhere that would give her a learning experience geared to her Giftedness. But as she comes to the end of junior school, I've found myself looking at the local comprehensive to see whether it would meet her needs at senior school. I don't say we would give all the money we saved away to educate poor children, but we might be able to give some.

And the same applies to other things, doesn't it? If we are really to care about the poor - who sadly are "always with us", as Jesus remarked in another context - perhaps we do need to go down to the roots of our own will, as well as pressurising governments. For many people, these more straitened times have shown up where luxuries were taken for granted, where debts were incurred for no good reason, and most of all, where the priorities should be. I am not advocating the blanket abandonment of all worldly goods - I think you have to be specially "called" to do that, as it requires particular grace! - but only that we should share more, and that we should make a reasoned and clear-eyed judgement of what we actually need, not in comparison with others in our town or village, but in absolute terms. Like most mothers, I want my child to be happy and to have what she needs not only to exist but to live and grow and develop interests and aptitudes. If I am able to earn the money for her to have these things, I want to give them to her. But if I am unable to earn them comfortably and spare plenty for children in poorer places, then perhaps it is better to look at my priorities again. Children value family life, secure relationships, friendship and love, just as much or more than they value material goods - and giving them Nintendo games, iPads, and other digital goodies will not replace the security and happiness of time spent with their parents. And if they are encouraged to do so, they will be able to see for themselves that children in deprived areas, whether in the poorer countries of the world or in our own country, should have their share of the important things of life. Extreme poverty destroys the non-material valuables of secure childhood and family life, as well as the more material ones of education, toys, books and games. Famine is an obscenity at which we in the 21st century should be offended, wherever and for whatever reason it occurs. But don't blame drought, degraded soils, or typhoons. We human beings have a lot to answer for, whether it is war (easy to start but very difficult to end without leaving a greater mess than before), greed (which leads us in the West to think that we deserve to have more than we need to live on without extravagance), negligence (through which we turn our backs and don't want to know what is going on elsewhere, in case it disturbs our comfortable existence) or intolerance (which sees people of some ethnicities, or religions or cultures as beneath contempt or not worth bothering with).

It is the feast of St Luke the evangelist today, I learned from my Bible diary this morning. An interesting man, by all accounts. Traditionally thought to be a doctor, and showing, in his writings in the Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles, a great compassion for people and their sufferings. He went to Rome with St Paul when he was taken there as a prisoner, and was one of the few who stuck by the saint through all his journeys and tribulations, including shipwreck and deprivation. Both of them thought that the possession of material things was an irrelevance, and that giving was more important than acquiring. I am minded to follow their example, as far as I can.

Law and Persuasion

2011-09-19T02:58:00.000-07:00

First, apologies to any of you who have been following this blog for the long gap between this one and the last. School holidays, as anyone who works freelance from home and has children will probably agree, tend to be a blur of activities requiring a children's taxi service, conversations about all manner of things, visits by other children, and outings, into which the necessary minimum of work tasks to keep projects running has to be crammed, leading to the normal 'extras' such as blog writing, and in my case fiction writing, being consigned to the back burner for the duration.

However, I haven't eschewed all rational thought in the interim, and one of the things I've been thinking about is the relationship between moral dilemmas and legislation. There are a number of entrenched moral issues that are more or less continually under debate in the media, and indeed to a greater or lesser extent among the citizenry of most societies. Abortion and its timing, artificial birth control, IVF and cloning, drug abuse and the legalizing of drugs such as heroin, cocaine and marijuiana, suicide and especially assisted suicide, and religious rights such as the wearing of the burka or freedom of worship and the right to practise minority religions - the list could go on.

Conclusions on these issues vary across the world, of course, partly for cultural or religious reasons and partly for historical ones. In some parts of the EU veiling one's face is now illegal; in others abortion in all but the most extreme circumstances is a criminal offence; those who assist loved ones to commit suicide may be prosecuted; drugs are categorized, and possession of them may lead to imprisonment; in some countries, including the UK, there is now a ban on smoking in public places.

The interesting question, to me, is why some of these issues are covered by legislation, and some are not. The criterion may be whether the action harms others - the smoking ban is justified, for example, on the grounds that others' health and wellbeing, especially in confined spaces, is at risk; illegal drug use fuels crime as addicts truggle to pay for the drugs they 'need'; abortion destroys human life; assisted suicide may turn into pressure on the terminally ill or even the elderly, to remove themselves from our midst because their problems are expensive or inconvenient. But sometimes there seems to be a strong element of justice, or even punishment, in our desire to make these actions illegal. So drug abuse, suicide and abortion are believed by many to be morally wrong, but so is adultery, which is only illegal in the more extreme Muslim states. Smoking is seen as unpleasant and its effects cause large-scale expense for the health services (but the same applies to binge-drinking, which is not currently banned in the West, though drunken disorder is illegal). Banning the veil and the burka in public places is justified on social grounds, since it isolates those who wear it and ghettoizes some female members of the community (but other extremes of dress such as low-cut tops and pelmet-length skirts, which reduce some young women to the status of sex objects, are acceptable). The denial of freedom of religion and religious expression in theocratic states is usually justified on the grounds that it offends not only God but the religious majority (e.g. blasphemy laws in Pakistan and Iran deriving from Sharia).

In order to make such laws work properly there must be a consensus in society that they are necessary and useful. This does not have to be an absolute consensus, but it needs to command a very large majority. As soon as this consensus breaks down, there will be challenges to the laws concerned, but the legality or otherwise of these moral offences does not in fact in any way 'prove' the correctness of the moral position taken up. In some cases there may not in fact be one 'right' argument on these complex questions, and in such case legislation rarely works effectively.

But there is another way to bring about change, although it is slower and less certain, and thus less acceptable to those who feel strongly about a moral issue, and it is essential if legislation is to work in the long term. I'm talking about persuasion - making the argument so as to bring about consensus, and if necessary a change in the law. For example, few people would now accept the arguments put forward by the pro-slavery majority in Western countries in the 18th century, because the anti-slavery campaigners won the argument and changed minds to such an extent that there is no longer a moral issue, and it is hard to see how this could be reopened. It may be that a time will come when no one will see assisted suicide as problematic, or when abortion will carry no stigma, but this doesn't primarily depend on how the law stands but on how the argument has been made; in other words, whether or not the citizens of society are convinced. From today's standpoint it is just as likely that the current movement away from the sanctity of life, and particularly away from long-held safeguards such as the Hippocratic Oath (see previous blog, Mercy killing, abortion and the Hippocratic Oath) will be seen as an aberration as terrible as Nazi eugenics or nineteenth-century racist scientific notions. We cannot tell. But discussing the issues openly is important if we are to have laws that reflect sound moral positions that command wide acceptance. Sometimes laws have to change to accommodate new moral positions, but the law itself cannot make morality or change hearts. Only persuasion can do that.

And in order to have an informed debate we must have facts, and real solid ones, not statistics and opinions manipulated by extreme opinion on either side. Pro-abortion and pro-life antagonists must be willing to look at the science as well as the moral or religious positions they hold - and in this case science is not a one-way street. Those who would keep drugs illegal must take on board the depth of deprivation, whether social and economic or emotional that often leads young people to become addicts or pushers, or use drugs recreationally, and come up with solutions that won't fill our prisons to overflowing, while those who would legalise heroin, cocaine or marijuiana need to check out the possible consequences; and both should accept that their opponents may also be motivated by a care for society. Better palliative care and a more positive attitude by society as a whole towards terminal illness and disability might help some of those considering suicide to find the courage to face life, which perhaps should be recognized by those who wish the law on assisted suicide to change as a valid alternative to assisting sufferers to escape by ending their lives.

What I am suggesting is that we don't rush for the statute book in an attempt to solve every moral or social problem. Some crimes have always been crimes, and probably always will be: murder, and theft, and in recent centuries such things as grievous bodily harm, and serious cruelty to children or animals. The consensus on these is both ancient and enduring. But on other matters we need to engage with those who transgress, or disagree with, those moral imperatives we hold dear, whether they are traditional or liberal, rather than beating them over the head with the law book. Persuasion, the kind of education that gives a factual basis to an argument, and a helping hand to those whose failures have landed them in trouble - these will benefit society more than the heavy burden of criminal law. And our prisons might also be a little emptier, and perhaps our hearts a little lighter, as a result.

Courage and suicide

2011-06-13T07:34:00.000-07:00

Following on from last month's post, I found myself thinking further about euthanasia, and particularly about the current admiration for people who 'have the courage to' commit assisted suicide rather than endure prolonged suffering. And whilst I have great sympathy for people who are terminally ill or terribly disabled or dreadfully disfigured, I do feel that courage is the wrong term for this response to such difficulties. I have a friend who has suffered from Motor Neurone Disease (MND) for more than five years, and still holds down a full-time job as a consultant even though he can't speak clearly or even feed himself, such is the nature of the disease's progress. He never complains, and simply fights the battle every day to continue living. He is a husband and father of six children, the youngest of whom is a teenager, and beloved by all his family, who perform miracles to keep him functioning. To me, this is true courage - not to give in to a disability and either moan about it or, worse still, decide that life isn't worth living and therefore anything is better than continuing to do so, but to get up each morning - with whatever help is required - and do as much of your work as you are able. His family have made it clear to any medical practitioner that he is to be resuscitated if his breathing stops, and that they will not see it as a merciful release if he is allowed to die.

There should, I feel, be a better balance in the media, to take account of breathtaking courage like this, rather than focusing on, and lauding, the more negative responses that lead to assisted suicide. This is not the same as suggesting that people should be prosecuted for assisting a suicide, or calling for a return to the unenlightened times when suicide was a crime and if you failed in a suicide attempt you could be prosecuted. Suicide is often an unpremeditated and impulsive response to life challenges that have overwhelmed the person in question. But the response of the rest of us must surely be to encourage people to take a positive view of life, and to give them whatever help they require to rise above the difficulties and suffering - is this not part of what makes us human?

Think of the alternative for a moment. Just suppose that every human being responded to adversity (I mean, for the sake of argument, true adversity, not just the little ups and downs that we all have to deal with in everyday life but serious disability, terminal or agonising illness, etc.) by deciding to commit suicide, whether directly or with assistance. How would this culture of death benefit us? Would it inspire great deeds of compassion and altruism, or campaigns to better the lot of humanity, to serve the poor and to combat evil? Would we as a species long survive with such a culture, if it became widespread and all-encompassing? To embrace it will not in the end lead us into life-enhancing philosophies and actions, but into resignation, apathy, and an unwillingness to help others except in their efforts to die. It is a descent into darkness that I for one am determined to resist.

Although there are certainly degrees of suffering and difficulty, and for some people the degree they are subjected to seems beyond anyone's ability to cope, yet for every man or woman who gives up the struggle, there will be others, like my MND-sufferer friend, who will bloody-mindedly grit their teeth and fight on. Which should we admire and emulate? Which will bring us a stronger, more positive society where people care for each other. That is the question we must answer.

'Mercy killing', abortion and the Hippocratic Oath

2011-05-04T08:05:00.000-07:00

I started to write this blog a couple of weeks ago, then got terribly busy (amid all our UK bank holidays the past two weekends) with an over-running work project, and missed my self-imposed deadline of the end of April. Never mind. Here it is now.

It came to my attention recently that the Hippocratic Oath, which for centuries was seen as the touchstone of medical good practice, and to which all doctors signed up without demur, not only promises that 'I will use my power to help the sick to the best of my ability and judgement; I will abstain from harming or wronging any man by it', but also specifically promises not to practice either euthanasia or abortion.

I feel sure that many people do not realise the extent to which Western medicine has departed from the Oath, nor appreciate the slippery slope on which medical knowledge and practice has now embarked. The activities of Dignitas, the prevalence in the UK and some other countries of abortion thinly veiled by the cloak-all device of 'threat to mental wellbeing of the mother', the sympathy for 'mercy killing' by a relative of a sick person for whom pain or other suffering has removed any joy in living - all these are now a commonplace of so-called 'liberal' thinking. But the question is, should they be?

As fellow-humans it is natural to feel sympathy for the terminally ill person who wishes to die with dignity rather than surrounded by acute patients in an overstretched NHS hospital, or the teenage girl burdened with an unwanted pregnancy from which the baby's father has simply walked away, or the spouse, partner, son or daughter of a disabled person whose perspective has been distorted by living with their incapacity. But where should we divide this sympathy from a recognition that a permissive attitude to these actions actually undermines the respect for life that the Hippocratic Oath was designed to promote and protect, and which we lose at our and our society's peril. For it is a short step from allowing euthanasia and abortion to promoting it - and we are already some way along that path. Sympathy is a great human emotion, but it has to be underpinned by a robust sense of moral values, or it becomes a dangerous thing. Should my sympathy for the young man whose childhood was ruined by his mother's alcoholism lead me to condone his taking out his very understandable anger on the old lady he meets in the street? Should my sympathy for the mother with post-natal depression lead me to allow her to neglect or harm her baby? Most of us would say "no", but in fact these scenarios are not so very different from the actions that we are permitting, sometimes even promoting.

Surely where someone is in trouble, we should seek to get alongside and help them, not stand back and condone or approve of their crazy, destructive, desperate attempts to help themselves. We can help the disabled person whose incapacity takes away all sense of independence to find ways of living a real and useful life, using modern technology, personal carers, their own indomitable spirit - for this is how those disabled people who do manage to live such a life have managed to overcome their problems. That terminally ill patient who fears the process of natural death needs to be put in contact with the hospice movement, or with doctors who specialise in palliative medicine. Not all pain can be removed, but the support makes a big difference, as those who have encountered Macmillan Cancer nurses will agree. The pregnant teenager needs someone she can trust, someone to talk to her parents and teachers, help her with practical and financial support, talk to her about the options for keeping the baby or finding a foster or adoptive parent (and the mess that is called an adoption process in this country will be the subject of another blog!)

This helping is in fact much more demanding than the sympathy-on-the-sidelines approach, and too often is seen by our peers as 'do-gooding' when it is nothing of the kind. The do-gooder seeks to bolster his (or more usually her) own sense of worth, not primarily to get alongside another person and find out what can be done to improve their situation. But does it really matter what other people think of what we do, when something so important is at stake? If we do not reverse this trend towards 'mercy killing' we shall soon have 'killing for convenience', as some abortions already border on, and then perhaps 'killing for a purpose', as the Nazis did. As I said, the slope is slippery, and we would do well to turn round and haul ourselves up to the top again, to the high ground where there is some philosophical and moral safety, before we find ourselves down among the pariahs of history who thought that relative morality made sense, and tailored their ethics to match.

Thorium and the Nuclear Future

2011-03-31T03:41:00.000-07:00

I had an e-mail from a friend last week recommending that I buy up some of the fast-dwindling world stocks of potassium iodide, to keep in my bathroom cabinet in case levels of radiation in the UK became high enough to threaten our thyroid glands. I replied rather severely (sorry, Eldo!) that I thought this quite unnecessary and indeed unfair to the Japanese, who might actually need some of these stocks for themselves. I've probably lost a friend, but the continuing (and apparently deteriorating) situation at Fukushima, thrust before us in almost every news bulletin, as well as causing panic among some members of the public, has led to qualms among the policymakers, and the question of nuclear safety has become a live issue yet again. The debate seems to be sharply divided into those with a 'green' perspective, who oppose nuclear energy and back 'alternatives' such as wind, wave and solar power, and those with a more pragmatic approach, who back nuclear energy as the only non-fossil-fuel option that can deliver the substantial energy generation that we need for the rest of the century. Both points of view have their merits. There is clearly much to be done to make renewable energy able to deliver sufficient power for today's needs, never mind tomorrow's. Although my solar panels deliver h ot water very effiiciently, I've recently been put off photovoltaic energy and small-scale wind turbines by advice from an expert that both are green but neither are economic. On the other hand, as a longstanding opponent of nuclear energy on the grounds of its inherent dangers, particularly the unresolved issue of how to deal with highly radioactive waste, some of it with a half-life measured in thousands of years, I have not felt able, up to now, to support the commissioning of a new generation of nuclear reactors, whatever the apparent safety precautions built into them. When David Cameron, and others, say that it isn't likely that we will suffer a 9.0 earthquake or a 14m tsunami, we have to say 'yes, that's true, but the Japanese didn't plan for this level of disaster either, and how do we know what may happen with storm surges or geological collapse offshore'. Earlier this week, however, my daughter Christina alerted me to an article in the Daily Telegraph that explained the benefits of a different kind of reactor, one based on thorium salts rather than directly on enriched uranium. Among other things, the article mentioned that the Chinese have already decided to take this route for their new nuclear industry. I did some further research on this matter and have become convinced that thorium liquid-fluoride reactors do indeed provide a real alternative to water-cooled ones. It seems that there are historical reasons why this type of reactor was not developed in the early days of nuclear power, some of them to do with its inability to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. Since we are now attempting to reduce our reliance on such weapons for security, and encouraging other countries not to develop them at all, it surely makes sense to reassess this choice. Thorium reactors are much safer than water-cooled ones, since the fission process simply stops if bombardment with neutrons ceases. They are also much better able to deal with and re-use waste products. Thorium-based reactors can be used to replace coal- and oil-fired facilities using the same turbines. If you want to know more, go to http://energyfromthorium.com for more information. I shall certainly be taking part in any campaign to put thorium reactors back on the agenda when the UK commissions new nuclear reactors to replace our ageing ones. I have the nasty suspicion, though, that the momentum built up by more than forty years of solid-core reactors may be too great. After all, the QWERTY keyboard was originally the slowest to use, chosen for manual typewriters because it reduced the number of times keys clashed and tangled, but it is still the one everyone uses today, though modern electronic keyboards don't need it as they don't have a key-clash problem. And everyone knows that the Betamax system was better than VHS, but volumes of trade and the need for compatibility led to the latter's victory in the marketplace. Let's hope that the same phenomenon doesn't work in this case. If nuclear power is the future, let's make it the safest future we can.

Changing the clocks

2011-02-25T08:06:00.000-08:00

I read just recently that the government is considering changing our time so that it is an hour later all the year round than it is now.

This strikes me as the worst of all possible time zone scenarios.

Firstly, changing the clocks in autumn and spring is completely unnecessary any way. We used to be told that it was for the farmers' sake, so they had more light in the morning in the winter. But down here, surrounded as we are (literally) by farmers and their fields, we know that this is a complete myth. If farmers want to work out of daylight hours, winter or summer, they turn on the powerful lights in their barns or on their tractors, and work away. It is not uncommon for us to be woken at 2 a.m. by farmers trundling down the road in their tractors to harvest, cut hay, or otherwise till the soil.

Secondly, changing the clocks is a nuisance, especially if you have young children who cannot easily adjust to the time being different. When my daughters were younger I spent ages either trying to stop them getting up at an unearthly hour when the clocks went forward, or waking them for school when the clocks went back. For weeks we struggled with this, to the distress of all concerned.

Thirdly, I find it difficult enough to get up on a winter morning in the dark when it's only for three months or so. I have to be up early in order to get my younger daughter off to school on the bus by 8 a.m. If the government decide to harmonise our time zone with that of France, for example, by my reckoning I shall have to get up in the dark for most of the winter. As I find light extremely helpful for dragging my bones out of bed, I view this prospect with horror, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this. It is simply unnatural to get up in the dark. Our ancestors didn't do it, and neither should we.

I give my vote to Greenwich Mean Time - i.e. British Winter Time. Let's be on that all year. It has the virtue of being simple - noon is when the sun is at its height; it gives us more light in the morning for getting up; and it's British. How many people actually need to b e in the same time zone as our friends on the Continent? I can see it might be useful for business and trade, but is this important enough to give the rest of us these problems to live with?

Banks and Lending: Optimism and Denial II

2011-01-28T06:53:00.000-08:00

This is my first post of 2011, so Happy New Year to anyone who is reading this. I have made a resolution to post a blog at least once a month, so hopefully this will be the first of a more regular sequence of political, moral and spiritual reflections.

I've called this posting Banks and Lending: Optimism and Denial II. In February 2009, under the title Optimism and Denial, I pondered the fact that most people, including most economists, appeared to be in denial over the state of our economy in the wake of the Credit Crunch. For a while in 2010, there seemed to be something approaching a recoery in the economy, and doomsayers such as myself looked to have been a little over-pessimistic. It seemed to me, however, that all the ingredients were in the mix to create a really bad recession, either all at once or in two or more sections, and I didn't (and still don't) see how we could escape. And the latest economic figures are dire, and suggest that there really is a double-dip recession in the making.

It really isn't any use blaming the pre-Christmas weather (surely most people shopped online instead?) or the Coalition's policies (which are necessary to save us from the situation Portugal, Greece and Ireland have faced). George Osborne is probably correct to lay most of the blame at the door of the spendthrift Labour government of the Noughties, though to be fair to the latter they were fools rather than knaves - not least in believing their own rhetoric about the end of Book and Bust. However, the ingredient in the mix that I hear very little about is the part played by the Bank of England.

Low interest rates and quantitative easing were (or should have been) a short-term emergency' fix' to steady the economy after the Credit Crunch, and to prevent the very series, Twenties-style recession that loomed in 2008/9. But two years later surely it is madness to continue with this policy, particularly in the face of fairly alarming inflation figures? Higher interest rates would at least help to control this incipient rise in prices, even if some of it is being driven by external shocks such as higher oil and food prices. One of the reasons the Bank of England was given independence was so that it could concentrate on keeping the economy balanced between Boom and Bust, using interest rates among other tools - a role it seems in danger of forgetting.

In addition, what we need, and what the government recognises that we need, is access to crredit for businesses - and especially small businesses, that bedrock of growth, which often cannot expand without borrowing. No private-sector recovery such as the Coalition is banking on will be able to proceed without this credit, which is why David Cameron and his cohorts exasperatedly berate the banks for not lending more freely. But all investment, whether bank-led or not, requires a return. Without a good enough return, lenders will put their money metaphorically under the bed. And an important prerequisite for investors getting a return on their money is to have interest rates at a reasonable level. Push them too high, and you choke off growth by making credit for business too expensive. Let them get too low, as they are now, and lenders will not invest because they cannot get a decent return on their money. In the situation we now have, banks are struggling to provide products for savers that will attract money, while borrowers are paying ridiculously little for their loans - itself a source of banking income. Meanwhile those borrowers are cushioned from the harsh realities of today's economic conditions, and would-be savers, along with pensioners living off investments put by during their working lives, are discouraged from investing their money where it would be most needed. No amount of haranguing wil make banks lend more money than is financially sensible and in their own and their shareholders' interests - and indeed, if we want them to learn the lessons of 2008/9 it makes no sense to ask this of them.

This brings me to the question of Western versus Eastern economies, particularly Europe and the USA as against China. The main difference (put very simply) between these two economic blocs is one of credit and thrift. In the West we have become used to spending more than we earn and borrowing the shortfall - and both governments and individuals have become so used to this that we don't realise that the era of Big Borrowing has come to an end, perhaps for a generation. The bubble has burst, but we are still pretending that recovery can be retail-led, that if interest rates are low this will encourage people to spend more. On the other side of the world the oppositye is true. Chinese entrepreneurs have made large sums from export production, and banked it. Thus the Chinese economy is in surplus, its currency overvalued, and enjoying double-figure growth.

Surely there is a straightforward and obvious lesson to be learned from this? You can only borrow so much before the debt comes back to haunt you. Working hard and saving the profits is the way to make an economy grow. The mechanisms are complex, but the conclusion obvious, and for us in the West, stark too.

What happens, then, if we continue as we are? The first thing we shall get is Seventies-style stagflation - always a danger in the wake of such fiscal policies as quantitative easing anyway. I suspect that this cannot now be avoided. But if we do not quickly get the economy back into balance, even if it means a double-dip recession, we risk another crash. And this time there isn't a country in the West that can afford to pick up the pieces. Iceland's experience should be a terrible warning, but have we taken heed? Are we really so blinded by the terror of change that we cannot see the greater disaster brewing in front of our noses?

Ordinary people, in the main, are trying to be sensible. They are saving rather than borrowing, paying back debts, restraining their buying, trying to live more simply and cheaply. This should be encouraged by government and economists, not criticized or bemoaned. Raise interest rates a bit and the prudent would be better off, because they could get a better return from their savings. The over-indebted, to be brutally honest, are in trouble in any case, and staving off the evil hour for them will not help the rest of us. It will only make that hour, when it comes, much harder for everyone.

So George, I beg you, stick to your guns, and Mervyn, please persuade your fellow conspirators at the Bank of England to raise interest rates. In the end it will have to be done. For the moment we are keeping our heads above water, out of our depth, by swimming very hard. But if we don't find a place to put our feet down on the bottom - which means accepting the Cuts, and cutting our own individual aspirations to match, changing our mindset so that we save rather than spend, the lesson that has to be learned may be more painful than we can yet imagine. It is not too late for the Coalition to lead us in the right direction without a further disaster - but one day it may be. And that day may be sooner than we think.

The Spending Review and the Big Society

2010-10-26T03:02:00.000-07:00

So we've had the Spending Review and the big speech by George Osborne in the House of Commons (very nicely delivered, I thought, in the face of not much in the way of heckling from the Opposition, who were clearly out of their depth). Everyone had the jitters beforehand, it seemed, and now the Press, various pressure groups and other organisations seem to be keen to tell us that the brunt will fall upon 'the Poor', which makes it all (as they point out stridently) a travesty of fairness and social cohesiveness.

This all sounds dreadful, and if it were really true in the literal sense, would indeed be dreadful. I don't think anyone (including the Coalition) wants us to go back to some Victorian scenario where orphaned children are imprisoned in the workhouse or sent up chimneys, or worked into an early grave by cruel masters, simply because their parents left them penniless and there is no safety net in place. No one wants, either, to see hordes of homeless people living in cardboard boxes in the arches of London, as was seen all too often thirty or forty years ago, nor do we want to have miserable families without enough to feed and clothe their children properly. But on the other hand most of us realise that the welfare state has not produced the Utopia that its founders longed for and expected. The NHS does a reasonably good job, and so does the education system (could do better, both of them, but a long way from failing). But the payment of benefits is a shambles, and an expensive shambles at that, one we as a country can no longer afford. It isn't surprising that when everyone is finding their incomes having to stretch to meet higher costs and prices, those who are working and paying taxes are not happy to see those taxes being used to support in idelness people who could be economically active - many of whom would in fact prefer to work but are better off on benefits. This is a central plank of the Spending Review, that work should be rewarded, and it is an important one in terms of justice and the encouragement of a work ethic, as well as in the realm of debt reduction. If it is, as I suspect, mainly the welfare benefits cuts that lead some groups to think that the poor will be poorer as a result of the Spending Review, then we need to consider what the alternatives might be. Whilst the economy is still teetering on the brink of recession, the Coalition have declared their support for the wealth-creating potential of business, and small businesses among them. Not everyone in receipt of benefit is an adequate whose employment potential is small. Some are keen to break out of dependence, and a small business start-up would be a great way to do that. There is lots of part-time work around for which income support is still available as a back-up, and the freelance and informal economies are booming. Having earned my own living (including three years as main breadwinner for our family in the early 2000s) as a freelance, I know that whilst it looks insecure, it doesn't have to be, if you work hard and are good at your job.

So it seems to me that the government are trying to create the conditions where national debts can be paid off and the 'real' income-generating private sector can flourish. I've no doubt they haven't got everything right, and there are obviously compromises between fairness, affordability and political reality that George Osborne has had to make - but is it fair or sensible to expect everything to be perfect in a government policy? Imperfections in the Spending Review shouldn't give us an excuse to sit on the sidelines and snipe, as it seems to me that both the Opposition and some charitable bodies are keen to do - an attitude which is at present earning them my contempt. We all need to take responsibility for our own lives and communities including our fellow-citizens. Check your neighbours are okay; get to know them so that you can help when they need you, and see the favour returned, possibly in some quite surprising way. Get involved in your community, even if it's just by shopping locally and going to local events. (I cheered when I heard George Osborne say that the network of local post offices would be supported.) These are the things that David Cameron means by the Big Society - at least, I think that's what he means. It's a difficult idea to get over, which is why I can't be sure. But it's really quite a simple idea in the terms I've used for it, and the social concept has economic corollaries. To take a small personal example: babysitting for us is helping a young woman of my acquaintance to save up for her driving test, an absolute necessity in a rural area like this if she is to access the employment market. In the process she has become a friend, with her own individual contribution to our relationship, and my daughter loves her. The contact didn't come from an impersonal employment agency, but via our involvement in the local church.

The Big Society is in our hands now, not the State's. That is the point of it. This is the way we can pay off our national debts without causing greater hardship to the poor. This is how we can be 'all in this together', as the rather irritating Coalition catchphrase has it. In other words, George and Dave and Nick are doing their bit. If the country now falls apart as a result of social unrest, or there is deep suffering among the poorer sections of society it isn't the Coalition's fault, it's ours. We have to look after each other, and in doing so we will become stronger, as well as quite possibly happier and more self-reliant both individually and comunally.

It's up to us now.

The New Era of Coalition and Consensus

2010-05-12T04:02:00.000-07:00

I’m relieved. It seems the Lib Dems thought better of their flirtation with Labour (see my acerbic comments on that yesterday) and have come to an historic agreement in coalition with the Conservatives. It is clearly the most sensible thing to do, and I applaud it. Both sides are to be congratulated on their willingness to compromise and their understanding that the much-vaunted National Interest will best be served this way – as I’m sure it will.

I shall be interested to see the detail – for the “devil will be in it”, as usual. But the discovery of common ground between the two sides must have been a revelation, and the fact that all the Lib Dem MPs and peers voted for the coalition is a testimony in itself. The opportunity had to b e taken, not only in the National Interest but in their own. Experience of government, at ministerial rank, is a prize to be treasured, and very good for the Lib Dem CV in five years’ time!

I'm fast becoming a David Cameron fan. On Friday afternoon he outlined in his speech the broad outlines of the coalition he was offering the Lib Dems. And lo and behold, when we come to the policies they have agreed on, they are very similar. This is a man of great promise, I feel. He can broadbrush an outcome, and deliver it. He has steel underlying the charm, the command of his party, and last night we saw his ability to deliver with humility a simple, note-free little homily on the steps of Downing Street. Now for the real challenges of government...

The Pursuit of Folly...

2010-05-11T06:02:00.000-07:00

Well! Just when it seemed the obvious thing to do for the Lib Dems to take up David Cameron’s offer to join a formal or informal coalition with the Conservatives, thereby at a stroke creating a government with a working majority, the support of more than 50% of the electorate, and the chance to prevent the markets going into meltdown and our losing our AAA financial rating – the Lib Dem senior MPs pull the rug from under Nick Clegg and try to act like little Labour acolytes. What a shambles! What a wasted opportunity! As I write this, I’m still hoping that Clegg & Co. will see the error of their ways in time and make the right decision, but I think even if they do their much-vaunted integrity is in the dust. To have secret talks with Labour, resulting in Brown’s last-ditch resignation as a prerequisite for any further negotiation, at the same time as they negotiated apparently upfront with the Conservatives, seems underhand in the extreme. The country (and I) will not forgive them lightly. I think it will be the last time I vote Lib Dem, even for the sake of my good local MP. Activists and MPs in the LD party may feel more comfortable with the Left, but the 23% of the electorate who voted for them may well feel very differently.

And in any case, it’s madness. The numbers don’t add up, for a start. Labour have 258 seats and the LDs 57. Added together this comes to 315, only nine more than the Conservatives have on their own, and 11 less than an absolute majority, never mind a working one. This would inevitably mean instability and the inability of government to get through the House any measures except those on which everyone agrees. This sounds nice, but in practice it would mean no hard decisions, no unpopular cuts to bring the deficit under control, no new beginnings, just a hand-to-mouth existence with the primary function of keeping Labour in power.

Why should that latter function be so attractive to the Lib Dems, I wonder? If it’s just about PR, then it isn’t worth it. The voting system isn’t perfect as it is – everyone including the Conservatives agree about that – but PR won’t necessarily make it perfect. Has PR become such a Holy Grail to the LibDems that they must achieve it at all costs? Or are there enough of the Old Guard former SD types in the background of the party for whom an alliance with the Conservatives would be anathema?

In any case, if all the LibDems want to be is part of an anti-Tory coalition of some kind, then PR will do nothing for them. Above anything else, what PR would deliver is a permanently hung parliament. If this is the best the LDs can do when they do get such an opportunity, many people will be confirmed in their suspicions that a two-party system is the best way to go. I have a horrid feeling that instead of being the Beginning of Better Things, an LD choice to support a discredited Labour government which will fail within months may mean the Beginning of the End. And that would be a pity. For there are some good ideas in their manifesto, some of which might have been put into effect in a Lib-Con coalition, especially as Cameron seemed willing to compromise, and with a third of his party new to parliament, he might have been able to deliver on those compromises. There is a phenomenon known as ‘the pursuit of folly’, where leaders continue to pursue policies that are plainly leading them nowhere. It has been seen throughout history, as Barbara Tuchman’s excellent book of that name narrates. Perhaps this is one more instance.

Election time really is here now - it's today!

2010-05-06T02:19:00.001-07:00

It's been a fascinating election campaign - dull till the first TV debate, then electrifying for a couple of weeks, but dying down for interest in the final week, which is a bit sad. It was good to hear the Lib Dems air their policies properly, and have them investigated and tested thoroughly by other parties and the pundits, too. Mostly they stood up quite well, I thought, considering the fact that the party has only local council experience of actually running anything. Nick Clegg's experience as an MEP seems to have stood him in good stead, though, and he was beautifully relaxed in that first debate - no wonder people warmed to him. He did seem different. Perhaps later in the campaign he didn't seem quite so different, and that would explain the falling-off in the Lib Dems' share of the vote in the Polls.

But today is the day, and who knows what will happen? That's the fun this time - no one really knows. Will the electorate turn off again and not bother? Will they believe the scare stories from both left and right and scuttle for the safety of old allegiances? Will they spoil their ballot papers in protest at the fact that their votes won't translate into seats? Or will they decide on a real change and vote Lib Dem in large numbers - it's possible though not probable, and would certainly rewrite the political landscape radically, not least because a large Lib Dem vote would not translate into a proportional number of seats and the inequities of our current constituency boundaries combined with the First-Past-the-Post system of voting would be very apparent. It will probably be fairly apparent anyway, since there seems more than a possibility that the Conservatives might win the popular vote without winning most seats in the House. Will that change their minds on proportional representation of some kind, I wonder? I've been surprised that they've stuck to the old system so faithfully when it works against them. Perhaps they really are ideologically conservative after all....

Poor old Labour look dead in the water, and Gordon Brown ploughs on, playing bravely like the orchestra on the Titanic, not understanding that he is a large part of their problem - perhaps the most unpopular prime minister since the War, at least so early in his tenure. It so easily could have been different. A better relationship with Tony Blair, recognizing that his strength was as second in command rather than leader, might have saved them both. Though perhaps TB would have had to take a different line on Iraq, too. It was really that piece of dishonesty, chicanery and subservience to a foreign power (the US, I mean) that sank him. No one will ever forget it, I think, whatever the Inquiry says. However, you can't discount the reds, who have proved remarkably resilient in the wake of the failure and discrediting of international socialism in Russia and Eastern Europe. They reinvented themselves in the 1990s. It remains to be seen whether they can do it again in the 2010s.

We have a sitting Lib Dem locally, and while I respect what David Cameron and the Conservatives are trying to do, and like the idea of the Big Society (and a much smaller State), I don't think our local MP has deserved anything but my support. He has been honest and hard-working for the constituency, and had no scandals of any kind attached to him. So I think it would be ungrateful to desert him. Good luck, Dan Rogerson! You shall have my vote.

I must remember to cast it, too - there was one election when I very nearly forgot....

Election time is here!

2010-04-23T00:49:00.000-07:00

I re-read my February blog, and I don't have much to add to those thoughts, except to say that it has turned out really interesting since we had the first Prime Ministerial debates. I wouldn't like to see Clegg as Prime Minister, I must admit, though I think Vince Cable would make a good chancellor - better than George Osborne, who is a clever man but I'm not sure has the necessary bottle if things get tough (Cameron undoubtedly has - there is real steel beneath that smooth exterior, as we saw on the matter of Conservative expenses last year, and before that when he was campaigning to be leader of the Tories). A hung parliament is a gamble, as the Conservatives rightly point out, but it isn't surprising that the electorate want real change, something radically different - ironically just what the Conservative campaign posters offer us, but I suspect they didn't quite have in mind what has turned out to suit the public mood!

I don't think anyone except the truly committed activists knows what will be best for our country in the next few years, and perhaps the hung parliament option is something we have to try. If it doesn't work, a few months will have been lost and we will have to have a new election (which may of course bankrupt all the parties...). But it's an experiment worth making, if it's what the electorate choose. Maybe the time has come for us to find out what coalition is really about. It has worked at times of national emergency before, and there is going to be a national emergency quite soon, I think - whoever wins, and even if no one wins outright. We could do with making use of the best of the talent from all parties. And we might get proportional representation, which would at least be fairer. Does it make sense to have a breakdown where the Tories on 32% would get around 250 seats, while the Lib Dems on 31% would only get 110? And the Labour Party, on 28%, would get even more than the Tories. Surely that can't be right.

Here's to a Hung Parliament

2010-02-19T05:48:00.001-08:00

I find it's nearly a year since I posted a blog, which is extraordinary. This one will be short, but if anyone is reading - which I doubt - I would like to say that I still hold by what I said last year on the subject of the recession. It may look as though we are coming out of it, but I don't think we are - and the level of public debt is going to pull us back down again. "Double dip" may be an understatement. I think we'll be lucky if the country avoids bankruptcy on the Icelandic model, never mind the Greek one. We shall all have to tighten our belts before this is over.

So which political party is telling us the truth? Both Conservatives and Labour are hinting at the pain to come, in their different ways and with slightly different emphasis. But no one is really owning up to the swingeing cuts, tax rises, and general economic doom that is actually going to have to come if we are to avoid the bankruptcy I spoke of above. Do they think that people can't cope with reality? Add that to the public distrust of politicians in the wake of the expenses scandal and many years of shifty dishonesty over the Iraq war and other policies, and I wonder who exactly will vote in the May election. Will the parties tighten up their act when the electioneering proper begins, or will we continue to see this failure to tell us the truth? All in all, perhaps we shall be better with a hung parliament, a government of national unity. Never since the Second World War have we needed one so much. And of course there is the bonus of the Lib Dems' Vince Cable - the one man who might be able to carry our trust as Chancellor.

Roll on, May. At the very least it will be interesting.

Optimism and Denial

2009-02-24T03:30:00.001-08:00

I read in the news this morning that nearly half the UK population are optimistic about their personal finances. Yet the experts predict nothing but gloom for the next year or two, and all the evidence (for once) seems to be on the experts' side.

Why is this, I ask myself. Why this unwarranted optimism - if unwarranted it is? And the only answer I can think of is denial. Everyone agrees that the recession is bad, and likely to get worse. But until it strikes us personally, in the form of a credit squeeze or unemployment or a falling-off in sales or client requests, we don't want to believe that it's going to be as bad as the experts tell us. Because that would mean engaging with the possibility that we too will be affected. For some, of course, that's fair enough. If you work in a business that isn't directly affected by the downturn, or in a job that's always struggling to find enough people qualified and experienced enough to do it, personal optimism is justified. And while interest rates are low, many people will continue to spend (that was part of the idea, wasn't it, Bank of England?), and to feel safe - their mortgage payments and their credit card bills are smaller, and so they can pay for what they need.

But wait a moment! Aren't those with debts, whether mortgages or credit card owings, the ones who for a while felt so panic-stricken and under threat when the Credit Crunch bit? And aren't at least some of them the people who lied about their income to get a bigger mortgage, and spent money they had no hope of repaying? All they have as economic actors is a willingness to spend. I suspect that in the short term this may be useful, and stave off the looming recession - which is of course exactly what the government want. But in the long term we need those who have prudently saved their money for a "rainy day", and who are now being penalised by those same low interest rates, many of them older people who depend on income from investments to raise their pension to a reasonable level. Banks need these savers, to provide the capital with which to lend - they can't rely on government bailout for ever. And unfreezing lending is important, if only to prevent more viable businesses going under simply because they have done what the taxation system and the zeitgeist encouraged them to do, and become over-leveraged for their everyday financial needs. If banks don't pay higher interest rates on savings accounts, the savers will go elsewhere, and the banks will be reliant on inter-bank loans (currently non-operational) and government help (soon to be unaffordable in terms of public debt). And the savers themselves may give up saving and start spending on their credit cards (for their credit rating will be high). But can a recovery be based entirely on credit? Isn't that what we did before, with such spectacular failure? Doesn't this recovery need to be based more securely, on real money, real savings that represent stored wealth? All of us are going to be paying for the current mess via taxation for many years to come. Once the existing savers have spent their capital because it isn't worth saving it, hard-pressed younger people will have to take their place. And the more public debt is created by bailouts, the longer the economy will take to recover, and the longer it will be before savings levels recover, too. Or have I missed something somewhere?

In any case, if I were a bank I think I'd be more willing to lend to other banks and to individual customers and businesses if the interest rates were high. Then I might get a return on my money. As it is lending is just giving money away, really. Banks have had their fingers burned doing that with all the invested money that came their way from the booming Chinese and Indian economies where saving surpluses is the norm. If we are to go back to more traditional banking and more transparent accounting, surely we need to start with a sensible set of interest rates and encouraging saving. Anything else risks a continual cycle of consumer-led spend followed by painful economic contraction. Which is what I fear we are in for, unless government policies change soon. The pain is unavoidable, and stimulating consumer spending is only putting off the evil hour.

I'm usually an optimist, or at least an optimistic realist. But not this time. Sorry, folks, but this one is going to be bad. You ain't seen nothing yet.

Where your treasure is....

2008-10-11T05:13:00.000-07:00

There was a photograph in The Times this week of a man buying a strongbox, and the caption invited you to wonder whether this was where you should put your money in these days of financial meltdown. It set me thinking about the wisdom of that unique thinker who once reminded his listeners that it was better not to store up riches, because storehouses (or strongboxes) could be burgled, and material goods were liable to rust and decay.“Invest in the eternal,” he told them. “Because where your treasure is, that’s where your heart will be.” Like most of his comments, that is not only, perhaps not even primarily, a religious formula, but an analysis of how things work for human beings. It’s been very striking these last two or three weeks to see the fear, despair and outright panic of people whose chief security was based on their investments. It was clear that the world of global finance was where their treasure and therefore their heart was; they had no “eternal treasure” to fall back on.
Some people are putting their money into bricks and mortar on the basis that in the end the housing market will revive – which is probably true, unless the whole global economic system collapses, in which case nothing can be certain: for anything that is valued in terms of its status as a commodity, as opposed to its utility, for example, as a place to dwell, is subject to the winds of economic chance when so much depends on confidence. In the end, if people do not have confidence in currency, or currencies fall sharply, money will lose its value too and people may even resort to barter as they did in the Weimar Republic in the days before Adolf Hitler took control of Germany, and as they are doing in present-day Zimbabwe. All this might happen, though I think on balance it probably won’t. But it shows up how impoverished in any non-material sense our globalised liberal existence is, and what shallow foundations it has in the eternal.
The capitalist way of thinking (based on early Protestant work ethics) trains us to store up riches in the form of luxury goods or other high-value items (e.g. antiques or paintings if you live in the West, cattle if you live in Africa), or invest in financial institutions or manufacturing or service industries on the basis of a good return in dividends or interest. That is how the global economy works, and has worked for many centuries. But of course it depends on trust, and when trust is lacking it won’t work. Financial institutions won’t lend, even when the business is a viable one; valuable investments can become worthless overnight if the stock market takes a nose-dive. Oddly enough, the same is true of the eternal treasure: Jesus’s advice was not to hold on to money but to give it away to those who were in need, and in doing so buy into the eternal values, or as he put it, “you will have treasure in heaven”. But this is also a matter of trust – that the eternal treasure is secure and “real” and will sustain us; that there will be people to help us in our turn; that “what goes around comes around”. To live simply and generously deals in non-material riches, and brings non-material rewards. But as Jesus also reminded us (a bit later in the same part of Matthew 6), you cannot serve two masters; you cannot love both God and money.
I know who I’d put my money on. But perhaps that could be better phrased....

Of MBTI and "impossible religious beliefs"

2008-09-19T07:16:00.000-07:00

Of MBTI and the “impossibility” of religious belief

Yet again it seems to be a couple of months since I have written this blog. As I discovered over the summer that one person actually had read it – hallo there, Andy, if you’ve come back again – perhaps I should make an effort to be more regular. But my thoughts don’t seem to work that way. An idea may arrive of its own volition one day, oblivious to the fact that there simply isn’t any time or energy to devote to it that week, owing to pressure of work or family disasters or exhaustion owing to lack of sleep. And the next week, when there is time and energy, no ideas of any worth present themselves. Sounds familiar? Probably – I think everyone has this experience of resources available but no time to use them, or time available but no resources – it happens in the material realm as well, in terms of having money to spend but no time to spend it, or vice versa.

Perhaps it is my Type that is to blame. I am a firm devotee of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, of which no doubt some of you may have heard. This divides humanity into 16 different types, using Jungian ideas of dominant mental function based on four different ways of taking in and processing information. MBTI was developed by a mother-and-daughter team in the United States during and after World War II, and many books and much research has been devoted to investigating it further, as it has turned out to be surprisingly powerful (and for many people, including myself, personally liberating). For those who understand about Type, I am an INTJ, an Introverted Intuitive with Thinking subordinate function. Introverted Intuition is a strange animal. My husband, who introduced me to MBTI and is qualified to administer the Type Indicator, describes it as like a coffee percolator, gently simmering away in the background and sometimes throwing up splendid bubbles with wonderful rich coffee smells. I myself think it’s more like a soup pot. You stir in all manner of ingredients, tasting all the while, and you end up with some unexpected but (sometimes at least) delicious results made out of them. The tastes cannot be predicted, though you can test them and adjust them a bit as necessary.
Thus the ‘soup’ of my experiences and the ideas I have gleaned from a fairly eclectic reading programme – currently I have an Alexander McCall No.1 Detective Agency novel on my bedside table, a book on the Black Death, a book on Islam and a book on the meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls all on the bookshelf in the sitting-room, and have recently finished reading a book on climate change in the Little Ice Age and Pope Benedict’s book on Jesus of Nazareth – can quite suddenly throw up some new idea I want to explore. The Times is also a fruitful source of ideas, often in reaction to its comment pages or some feature or other.
Indeed, there was an article a couple of days ago, somewhat tongue in cheek, I thought (though clearly some readers took it seriously, and perhaps it was intended that way) about the impossibility of intelligent modern Westernised people actually believing in religious dogmas. I found this article so completely wild that I only just managed to engage with it. Was the feature writer (Jamie Whyte) suggesting that all religious believers are liars, who pretend to believe but in their heart of hearts don’t? Does he really think that life today is so materialist that it is impossible to hold any non-materialist belief? If so, it seemed an extraordinary suggestion, reminiscient of Richard Dawkins’ apparent conviction that the fact that he himself has rejected faith of any kind (in favour of an aggressive atheism that seems to me quite as intolerant as any fundamentalist belief) must mean that anyone else who disagrees has to be lacking in basic intelligence. What is it about the over-enthusiastic embrace of ‘science’ that makes it so intolerant? – I don’t mean the real science, which depends on honest enquiry and respects all such enquiry wherever it leads, but a quasi-religious idea of science that invests it with all the trappings that would be unhestitatingly condemned in any recognised religion. Is it the fear, perhaps, in the corner of the atheist’s mind, determinedly shied away from, rigorously excluded from conscious thought, that those who hold a religious belief might just have discovered another dimension to living? Or is it simply an inability to imagine anyone having an awareness of a non-material reality?
It is fashionable these days to scoff at sincely held religious beliefs, to make out those who hold them to be stupid, old-fashioned, or unwilling to face scientific facts as we of the 21st century perceive them. This is a pity. No one would deny that religion can breed bigotry and intolerance, or that religious wars have often been the most bitter. But at the same time almost all of what we now see as enlightened human care for one another has been born of religion – from the Abrahamic faiths in particular. And where they replaced animist and naturist beliefs, those faiths, and Christianity most of all, were welcomed in earlier ages as the rescuer of people from superstition, not as its purveyor.
Some very twisted views of religious belief are being put about in the media just now in this country. I wonder who we might see as being behind that, in the heavenly realm (if you believe in one)? Who benefits – the forces of good or the forces of evil?

Shrink the population or get out!

2008-06-27T04:31:00.000-07:00

I seem to have had a long gap since I last wrote this blog, but I don’t suppose anyone has noticed, as I don’t think anyone reads it. I will continue to write it occasionally, though. It is a useful way of putting my thoughts on paper, which I suppose is the point!

It is a strange quirk of history that people, both individually and corporately or nationally, often focus on one problem and miss another, frequently more serious one. I think this is happening at present over climate change and population growth. We are galloping hotfot after controlling climate change, when it is not at all certain whether human activities are the chief culprits, nor whether we can prevent such change simply by limiting CO2 emissions. But meanwhile we are saying and doing little about population growth, which is still an enormous problem in many African and Asian countries and which seems to me the single most important issue human beings face. This is already at crisis proportions, witness the recent food shortages created so easily and quickly by a dip in the amount of grain under cultivation.

Certainly we can back away from biofuels, though these might, in other circumstances, be a useful alternative to oil; we can introduce GM crops that might give better yields (at least for a time), and take the risk that there may be other unforeseen and unwanted effects; we can try to re-educate the population to eat less meat, or to demand that it is produced on land that is unsuitable for grain. But unless we tackle the problem of population increase, “we’re doomed”, as Private Fraser was wont to say in Dad’s Army.

The Earth is a wonderful self-regulating mechanism. Left to itself it has the systems to sort out climate change, and if this takes a few millennia, as it might do (witness the many millennia of cold during the Ice Ages, and the three millennia of warmth experienced during the European Bronze Age), human beings could adjust to different climates if there were not so many of them. But tackling population increase is much more difficult than following up theories and models on climate change, and attempting to limit CO2 emissions. We know what would have to be done: lower the birth rate. Nothing else will do, because the alternative, to let death rates rise exponentially, would be inhuman and create not only swathes of human misery but vast injustices, some of which are already part way to reality in the limited availability of medical procedures and life-saving drugs to the ordinary folk in poorer countries. In the end, that would benefit no one, not even the rich countries who let it happen. Yet lowering the birth rate would demand not only economic, medical and educational resources but also political will. Interfering in the most intimate area of human life, procreation, is not something that governments are very willing to undertake – nor citizens to accept, as the experience of the Republic of China with its one-child-per-couple policy reveals.

But there is another way. We can reinstate the priority in science and technological development of the Space Race. Not a race between two antithetical cultures, like that between the US and the Soviet Union, which ultimately proved futile and indeed barren, except in its very limited aims. Once the Race to the Moon was won, much less money was found to fund other space programmes. But money needs to be found now to fund a different kind of Space Race: one that discovers, as quickly as possible, how to make viable colonies on other planets and transport people there. We know that it will be difficult, and will stretch our resources and our ingenuity. But the alternatives are bleak. Human beings are not ants. We need space. And the Earth is not an anthill. Already the stresses of environmental damage are clear, and if climate change proceeds as the IGCC predict, they will become even more dangerous. Under too much population pressure Planet Earth will not be able to regenerate and heal herself. And if Earth becomes inhospitable to us, and we have nowhere else to go, what then?

Worse than climate change? Oh, I think so.

On myths, perceptions and statistics

2008-01-29T06:44:00.000-08:00

No photo yet, but I will find one, I promise!

A survey of the UK population published this morning relates that a majority of people do not view marriage as being essential to healthy relationships, good parenting or the wellbeing of children. Socially the stigma of unmarried mothers has disappeared, our peers accept cohabiting as of equal worth as marriage, and of course if things go wrong cohabiting couples don’t have to resort to the divorce court to return to single freedom. The Times opined that David Cameron and his Conservative policy-makers might have to think again about their much-trumpeted support for marriage, tax-breaks and all, if they want to be in line with the social mores of out time, and with the perceptions most people have of acceptable social trends with regard to the family.

The trouble is, it seems to me, that these perceptions don’t seem to match with widely reported statistics on a range of relevant subjects, from the mental health of single and married people to the academic and occupational achievements of their children. Cohabiting couples are more likely to separate than married couples (perhaps reflecting a degree less commitment in the first place?); single people are more likely to suffer from physical and mental illness than those who are married, and more likely to be poor; children brought up by single parents do less well in school and by extension in the work-place, and are more likely to be in trouble with the police; the list goes on and on. Yet the perception of the bulk of the UK population is that marriage does not confer much in the way of tangible benefits either to themselves or their children. I find this interesting, and I find myself asking why there should be such a gap between perception and the reality shown by the statistics.

When this kind of gap occurs it is often because what it suits us to believe is running counter to what we would believe if we were being completely rational. And in our individual lives this may be no bad thing. The type of statistics I mean only tell us about a large group of people, and deal with probabilities, not individual cases. Individual decisions have to be made on the basis of our own sense of right and wrong, and what will be best for us and/or our children. Sometimes the right decision for us will fly in the face of the statistics, because of the particular circumstances – violent quarrelling between spouses, for example, or persistent adultery. Sometimes we will want to be sympathetic to the friend who tells you that she has decided to split up with her husband because they have grown apart, especially when it is clear that she is doing her best to keep him in touch with their children. Where this goes wrong is where those individual decisions and sympathies are broadened to make up a social philosophy at odds with the statistical evidence. This is where sympathy and sentimentality turn perception into myth. The evidence of the statistics tells us that it is a myth that cohabitation is just as good at marriage at keeping ourselves and our children healthy and prosperous. We may not want to believe it, and those of us who are married know just as well as those who are single that being married is not a bed of roses all, or even the majority, of the time. But allowing our perceptions to mythologise the situation will not help us to heal the ‘broken society’ of which the Bright Young Men of the new Conservative leadership have been so eloquently and touchingly speaking. To put society right you must believe the facts. The Conservatives may have to take note of the social perceptions revealed in the survey, because they need to have the political support of the electorate to win the next election and form a government: being in Opposition will not allow them to put their policies into effect. But the rest of us should look at our perceptions again. Do we really not believe the evidence about the relationship between marriage and the health of individuals and of society? And if we don’t believe it, we need to ask ourselves why.

First posting, 20 January 2008

2008-01-20T09:43:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone! This is my first ever blog, so I hope it works. I shall try to find a photograph before I write this again, and post it here. But for now my blog consists of just words - and as words are my trade as a writer and desk editor, perhaps that is only right and proper.

So first of all, what can I see as I look out of my window, here on our windy, exposed ridge?At the moment Cornwall, UK, is wet and windy, and it has been like this for most of the year so far. Grey skies, no sunshine to power our solar panels (but we wish we had a wind turbine!), and we get soaked just walking from the house to the garage to get out the car. It's very British to start out by commenting on the weather, I expect, but there we are.

I've called this blog View from Trevadlock Cross because that is where I live, a tiny hamlet (four houses, including a converted chapel) on a crossroads looking south-west towards the peaks of Bodmin Moor two or three miles away. In summer it is beautiful, the hills changing from hour to hour as the light moves across them picking out rock, grass, wooded slopes and heather in flower. Even in winter, as long as the sun shines the panorama is magnificent and clear. But when the clouds come down and the mist hides the hills it is bleak and uncomfortable. Every winter I hate the relatively infrequent periods when it is continuously like this for two or three weeks at a time. But eventually it passes, and the skies clear and the hills hove into view again.

So this is my view from Trevadlock Cross; I promise the blog won't always be about the weather - or at least not just about it. I mean to share my thoughts about issues, too, political, environmental, social and so on. Whether anyone will actually read them or not remains to be seen. If you do, I'd love to hear your comments.

Jane Anstey