From the ridiculous to the scary

Welsh politics was taken over a few weeks ago by the introduction of a new law. The default speed limit in urban areas was reduced from 30mph (miles per hour) to 20mph. Local councils were left with the power to exempt major wide major thoroughfares with good visibility to maintain as 30mph zones. The reason for the policy was to reduce road accidents and make urban centres more livible. Many small villages in Wales have a major arterial roads running through the middle of them, indeed many of these villages spread along these major thoroughfares, and modern fast noisy vehicles speed through these villages, not how things used to be at all.

The law was voted though parliament in April 2023 with support from all the major political parties, and 20mph zones had already been implemented in parts of major towns and cities and in other countries. There wasn’t really much fanfare about this law, until a week or so before implemetation day and the hard right Conservative party suddenly U-turned and started a major campaign seeking to overturn this law; a law they had voted for and senior members of the Conservative party had promoted pictures of themselves supporting the campaign of “20’s Plenty”.

Welsh Conservative Leader Andrew RT Davies [left]

This kicked off Welsh media into a frenzy. For many it seemed this was the issue of utmost importance. I was a little baffled. To me, a centre-left Social Democrat, it seemed like a sensible enough idea to reduce road accidents and make urban centres more livible with a relatively low inconvenience cost. If it works, great, if it doesn’t scrap it. I can understand centre-right folk being a bit more sceptical and as they value individual liberty a little more highly and social cohesion a little less highly and tend to be more averse to social change unless there is a very clear case fot it. However for those on the hard-right this was the number one issue, loudly proclaiming how ridiculous and somehow viscious an attack on individual liberty it was to drive slightly slower where there are children and the elderly people trying to live their lives. When the right to protest or human rights to be taken away, these people were not bothered about, iso it’s not freedom as such that they care about? It made me wonder what was going on. How has our political world become so emotive and divisive?

I believe it’s understanding the difference between centrists, whether they lean right or left and the hard right and the hard left. The left generally support the 20mph law, as it intention is to improve road safety, to improve society, so it ticks the boxes of the key principles of socialism. For the hard right it ticks the boxes of restricting individual liberty and and an overly-prescriptive “nanny state”.

This is perhaps the key difference between centrists and the extremists. For centrists the pragmatic solution, of what works, of policy where the benefits outweigh the costs and this can be tested by data. Centrists only support a law like this 20mph law if it actually reduces the cost of road accidents more than the cost of slightly increased journey times. Or at least to then modify the law so it targets where it does have advantages and leaves areas it doesn’t at 30mph. Whereas for the extremists, what actually works in the real world is of less importance than whether the policy aligns with key facets of their beliefs, whether the policy chimes with their worldview or not is mnore important than whether it is a policy with measurable benefits. That it is more important if something feels right rather than is demonstratably right. So to the hard-right this 20mph rule feels wrong and even if it actually saves many lives, or even improve traffic flow in congested urban centres.

The hard right don’t acrtually believe in liberty, freedom and democracy, just the parts that they like or the parts that affect them as a social group, it’s th enature of th eright to be selfish perhaps. In reality, freedom for us and not for everyone else, which to an expert or an academic is not a definition of freedom or liberty that stands up to scrutiny, as liberty only works if everyone in a society has freedom and liberty.

The difficulty of this ‘common sense’ approach, with ideas feeling right and a belief in principles that don’t actually hold up to close scrutiny that can be a real problem. I’ve used this example before, pre-Copernican people believed that the sun orbits around a flat Earth because that’s what you see in your everyday lives. Once you send cameras into space you can then see that the Earth is a sphere that spins around with a daily day night cycle. If humanity had never embraced abstract thought we’d still be banging flint together to make sharp stone edges to use on axes as the ultimate expression of human endeavour as we did for millenia

It was even pointed out that during the fuss they campaigned for 20mph zones only near schools and hospitals, the fact that most urban areas are near schools and hospitals and that it would cost far more and be less productive for towns to me a mess of 20mph and 30mph zones, that a default law was the cheapest, easiest and lkikely most effective way of making this change, with local democracy able to opt the roads out where it didn’t work. The objectors hadn’t thought it through, but that didn’t matter, the rabble rousing rhetoric was all of what was important.

Politics wasn’t always like it has been for the last 10 years or so. We used to kind of operate with a political consensus. Change didn’t happen unless a majority were convinced or that experts would be the ones making the case and the arguments for policy. This doesn’t happen as much now, particularly in the UK and the US. Centrists are now vilified as politics has moved to the extremes. We are now ruled by those who don’t trust expertise, don’t test ideas and rely on ideas and policy matching the dogma of political ideas from generations ago that were created to resolve particular problems of the time, that are not universal truths and simply damaging to the world we now live in. The politicians have worked out that reason and logic don’t get you very far, educated people have worked things out for themselves, of far greater political probity is rhetoric to appeal to the uneducated about politics, and this shift has proved successful for politicians. The UK and the US thus elected buffoons like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump.

How does this rhetorical game work. You start off with a truth, somethind hard to dispute, but also something that chimes with people’s gut feelings or “common sense”. For Trump it was that the political class are corrupt and don’t represent ordinary people’s interests, For Putin that NATO and the Western Alliance are really not good guys. Truths that are hard to dispute and of course not mentioning that Trump, Johnson and Putin are all very much a part of the establishment they claim to despise.

The next stage is to pretend that your big idea follows logically from that truth, even if the logic falls down under scrutiny, but their target audience isn’t people interested in philosophy or abstract concepts, so it works. For example: Politicians are educated and corrupt, climate activists are educated and corrupt, therefore climate change doesn’t exist, it’s just suits these educated folk to make money out of it. This isn’t logical as it falls into the pattern of: Brian is a bad cat who likes sleeping , Megan is a bad cat who likes eating fish, therefore fish do not exist.

It’s also that pursuing the divisive policies of the extremes of the political spectrum, also divides society and creates social unrest. Turning society into an us and them, rather than a people with a common cause and this is dangerous. The Hard Right are playing these divisive culture wars, because it works to convince the socially conservative majority (and people are naturally socialy conservative I believe) that they need to support them because it feels right, that homosexuality is a sin, that war against Bongo Bongo land is fine as they are all bad people there, that children in poverty deserve to be in poverty because their parents are not exactly like us and don’t live in “our” neighbourhoods.

How did this become socially acceptable? My other thought recently was that is is due to the decline of the church in our lives. For me going to a church does a couple of things. It gives everyone a space to think. The material given to attendees to think about comes from an educated person, the priest, who has plenty of time to think and reflect on events affecting the members of their church, that they are too busy working or raising children to consider and find a way to present these ideas in a thoughtful way and join everyone together for a bit of a sing song. This is the Episcopal Church of Wales I grew up with and attend now. We don’t accept the dogma of a religious text written 2000 years ago as being literally true but is a path to guide us to God’s truth, wisdom and peace that we seek to understand. To accept science and other academic disciplines and use those truths to also inform how we understand the world.

I mention this as when I was a teenager a lot of people left the church behind, I did too, Wales is now a very secular country, because it didn’t seem relevant, we could work this stuff out for ourselves and make our own decisions as confident young people without the church. Yet we’ve grown up into a society that doesn’t reflect, that just accepts dogma whether religious or political without thinking things through, without scrutiny and the decline of attending religious services in the UK may not be such a good thing.

All this is scary. Most of the time whether we drive at 30mph or 20mph doesn’t matter as we rarely knock over other people and many of us have never hit someone with our vehicles. Whether the staistics for next year show a percentage decrease in road accidents or not isn’t all that important (well unless the numbers are huge!).

However this media frenzy was overtaken by events, by the tragic escalation of the conflict in Israel-Palestine. I was deeply saddened as the reports came in daily of the mounting thousands of deaths that have been part of this escalation by extemists. We pray in church every week for the victims of war, whether Israeli, Palestinian or in wars that are ongoing elsewhere. It is such a human tragedy that we should reflect on that in 2023 there are still people firing bullets and flying drones and missiles at other people, killing children, destroying hospitals, destroying lives.

Yet it seems that not everyone shares this view of these events as human tragedy. My social media feeds are full of people condeming Israelies and sharing the tragic tales of Palestinian families. Others share the stories of the Israeli families who have sufferent and condemn the Palestinians. I don’t get this need to pick sides, this isn’t football, it’s human life and death. I also don’t get why the Hard Right side with Israel and the Hard Left with Palestine. or indeed that the Hard Right are more sympathic to Putin’s war on Ukraine and everyone else solidly backs Ukraine, it just feeds into more extremism. In Wales people have been so incensed that they are taking things out on the Jewish and Muslim communities in Wales. This just makes the conflict worse for everybody. I know decent Russian, Jewish and people from the Levant, it’s not these people’s that are to blame for this, but people don’t think it through.

Extemism isn’t helpful, it doesn’t resolve conflict. You need to instead work on solutions, because they exist or can be found. To do that you need to understand why there is a conflict and what will end that conflict and those answers don’t come from a gut feeling, a political principle or “common sense” they are complicated.

Authoritarianism and Wales

Regular readings of this blog amy be aware of my continuing journey to trying to understand why on Earth people in the UK still support the Tories, or how people completely unsuited to be in positions of government like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump managed to win elections. Especially in the context of a series of economic crisis they have no answer for or even an apparent understanding of.

I’ve written about how I am not a Tory or Right Wing inclined person, I kind of get the principles behind Thatcherite Reaganite laissez-faire “free market” economics that have dominated the Western world for some 40 years now. The principle that capital is king and labour and government are economic pillars to be kept weak. The idea being that with lots of capital being available to rich individuals, investment banks, and pension funds, they provide capital [funding] to entreprenurial start-up businesses and establashed busineses to invest to improve their economic productivity (new machines, better IT systems, staff training etc). This then feeds into an increasing productivity of the economy as a whole and economic growth.

Ok, I have issues with this [like shouldn’t more than a tiniest bit of thr wealth go into at least maintaining infrastructure and standards of living of the populace] , but it is a system that kind of worked for a while. The issue is that now, and for the past twenty years have seen mean wages stagnant and more recently falling in real terms. This was perhaps caused by the banking crash of 2008 and more recent economic shocks of Brexit, the Covid pandemic and Putin’s war on Ukraine. However with interest rates at near zero, according to theory this should have encouraged investment in the economy. However this hasn’t happened, and labour and government are too weak to replace the investment provided by capital.

All the capital, the wealth, still exists, but it isn’t going into economic investment. It’s doing what capital seeks, the best possible return on the wealth. Capital has found this in land and property markets, capital now gets a much better return from renting out land rather than investing in the business sitting on that land. This is a huge problem, as lands cost continue upward, it makes that business less competitive as not only is it not growing, it’s costs increase as it’s rent to the landlord exceeds the general rate of inflation. Not only that but the employees or workers also have to pay more and more for their housing, labour gets more expensive without increasing workers disposable income. The effect of this is lower productivity and less consumption (less people buying the products of the business), two things that are vital to economic growth, because people not only have less disposable income to spend in the economy, their poverty makes them less less productive at work, for example by having a longer stressful commutes from there just affordable housing all the way to the place of work reduces their energy for work.

So why are people, the electors, not up in arms about this, or at least switching their votes to centrist or left-wing political parties? It’s not that most people have a very poor understanding of economics at a national economy level. It’s perhaps the Authoritarian Disposition.

The Authoritarian Disposition was a theory espoused by Adorno et al back in 1950. It’s another spectra, where as individuals we exist somewhere on a line between ‘freedom loving, open-minded lovers of diversity at one end and on the other those that like and respect Authority figures, value conformity, tradition and whom accept simple explanations of complex phenomena. These authoritarians fear change, the unknown and most importantly threats to their status. work on the theory suggests that around 40% of people are towards the authoritarian disposition end of the spectrum. a 40% that will prove crucial later.

Human Beings are a social species and as such have developed personality traits that have enabled us to survive to pass on our genetic and cultural inheritance. The authoritarian disposition is biologically useful to a population. In a bronze or iron age community, having advocates for improving defences against attacks from neighbouring tribes or roving groups of bandits was useful. Useful because those on the other end of the spectrum would more likely advocate improving agricultual systems or developing better tools as more useful than building soemthing with no real economic value such as a bigger wall. The tribes that get the decisions wrong will either starve to death because raiders stole their winter food supplies or starve to death behind their gargantuan walls.

Western society has largely managed to eliminate these existential threats by simply having huge military forces and banded together to make an invasion or robbery of national resources unthinkable. I mean noone is about to invade and take over the United Kingdon or the United States are they?

So how have the Authoritarians like Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin managed to secure positions of power? The argument is that they use psychology: they play up the importance of the established dominant culture (a white Christian heterosexual patriarchy) that then plays into the fear of this dominant culture losing it’s privileged status, by creating threats, even if none exist. Threats such as brown people, people with a different religious faith, people who speak a different language, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, labour (trade unions) and government itself (bureaucracy). We’re all a little bit authoritarian, we still have primeval fears of monsters under the bed or losing our hard earned social status. In FPTP (First Past the Post) electoral systems you really only need about 40% of the electorate to back you to gain power (or to put it another way the vast majority of those with the authoritarian disposition).

What seems to be the outlier for this theory is Climate Change, surely the greatest threat to humanity we face. Even the freedom loving liberals are scared about Climate Change. However the Authoritarians seem less concerned by this existential threat. this seems to refute the whole argument. Until that is, that it is not Climate Change that is feared, instead what is feared is the solution to Climate Change, a radical shift from capitalism to green economics. Those with capital who benefit from ever increasing wealth in the current system will likely lose the power and status they have, this is their greatest fear, so powerful it trumps the destruction of most of humanity.

It seems I have a new theory for why Authoritarians have gained power and why England still votes Tory, how does this affect Wales, or why even bring Wales into this discussion at all?

I’m Welsh and what I really fear most as a Welshman, rather than Climate Change as a human being, is the destruction of my culture, Welsh culture. Someway somehow, Welsh culture has survived being part of the largest Empire in the world , survived speaking the language that became the world’s lingua franca, English whilst keeping our own language, Welsh, alive. We’ve survived being culturally distinct from Englishness, despite numerous attempts across our history to integrate us into the dominant English culture. The English television presenter, Richard Osman, summed up how the Welsh have achived this ‘because the Welsh like to be left alone to enjoy themselves’. This means that when Wales was threatened we have fought back, but once that is done, we’ve gone back to being ourselves with no desire to impose ourselves on other cultures. It is a glib potted summary, but kind of explains where and why Wales is now.

When the UK regime tells us that immigrants, brown people or transexuals are a threat we are confused. To the Welsh the one and perhaps only theat is dominion by the culture of the English elite. The Tories in recent times as part of their Authoritarianism frequently have attacked Wales and this gets our heckles up. Everytime this happens we see a surge in support for Welsh independence, such as the current threat of a Liz Truss UK prime ministership pushing support up from 25% to 30%. We do, sadly, very much have racism in Wales, but my point is we don’t view people who are different to us, or don’t have Welsh as their prime identity as a threat. In fact we often view them as fellow minority communities under the dominant English regime in the UK who have it harder than we do. The Welsh national movement thus finds support from both Authoritarians and Liberals with any cultural identity, the prospect of a united nation next door to a bitterly divided one.

The entire modern history of Wales has been as a fairly willing tolerant member of the United Kingdom. For most of that time the London regime hasn’t directly threatened Welsh culture, the upper stratus of Welsh society has been welcomed into the UKs corridors of power. Wales has provided the coal, the steel, the soldiers for the British Empire’s wars. I believe we see England as our neighbours, friends and allies, yet that threat has never entirely gone away, not a threat from the people of England but those they put in power. The reason we never support an English team on the sporting field is because we sense that it diminishes our support for Welsh teams. When Wales plays England in any sport, those games are always the most intense and passionate, perhaps because we feel an instinctual need to remind England ‘Yma o hyd’ [We’re still here], don’t forget about us, don’t assume that we’re the same as you and then join up with our English pals for a pint or two after the game is over. It’s a complex relationship.

However with a UK regime pushing these Authoritarian threatening buttons, it’s hard not to just see it as empty electoral rhetoric, that they might just be crazy enough to action these threats, to attack Wales because there is a logic to it.

The Tories do not need a single vote from Wales to remain in power, nor do they need one from Scotland or Northern Ireland for that matter, it means Wales has no real influence over the ruling regime. However as long as Wales isn’t threatened we are relatively and perhaps paradoxically content with this arrangement. However the Tories are clinging on by pushing these alien Authoritarian agendas to gain support in England. The demographics show that the young, the under 50s (I know this isn’t ‘young’), I mean the children after Thatcher, who aren’t triggered by the threats suggested, they need to do something to keep those percentages up as their supporters die off and an assault on Wales or Scotland to rouse the forces of patriotism in England may be a way to do it. They are fingering those buttons right now. It’s scary.

Of course the alternative would be to set Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland free, it would make imposing the dominant English culture on England only and winning power easier, allowing them to hold on for a further decade or two, which would be terrible for England, a nation built on diversity.

We don’t yet know what will happen, but I do sense a rising of tensions between Wales and the UK regime in these troubled times and it is concerning, especially as this Authoritarian agenda seems to care so little for Britain or it’s economic future to insist on pushing these cultural war buttons of conform or die, not realisng that such threats only work on 40% of the populace.

The Queen’s Jubilee 2022

When I was growing up, I would on occasion see pictures of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee of 1977, of street parties, Red White and Blue bunting and people across Britain coming together for a party. The impression I have is there was great excitement about the event marking the Queen’s 25 years on the throne. I do not sense this excitement about the forthcoming Jubille next weekend to celebrate the rare event of a sitting Monarch’s 70 years on the throne. What has changed in Britian since the 1970s?

Events that unite nations are rare, partly because we all have different views and opinions on everything. Yet as individuals we often join in with celebrations that are not of significance to us as individuals partly out of a sense of obligation, but mainly because we all enjoy a good party.

The last event that bought the nations of Britain together as a unifying force was the London Olympic Games of 2012, now some ten years ago. It has perhaps been these last ten years that has seen so little to unite Great Britain and scant little to celebrate. The UK has not really recovered from the Banking crisis of 2008, Individual living standards have fallen year on year, we had the divisive Brexit referendum in 2016, the Covid pandemic of 2019 onwards and now the Cost of Living crisis exacerbated by war in Europe. All of which presided over by the Tory party which has increasingly taken an Authoritarian bent that grates harshly against the Lefts view of the British social contract.

This contract runs something like this: Having a Constiutional Monarch and maintaining vast palaces at tax payers expense and the pomp and pageantry associated with such an institution is fine if the British people get something in return for this. Much of these institutions are supported with a big healthy dollop of British irony. They are supported because there is value in having a non-political Head of State, as someone that everyone can rally behind regardless of political views, provided the Monarch keeps completely away from politics, and in general we are happy with the monarchy in spite of some of the cruelties associated with such an aristocracy, in particular the lives of the Queen’s sons and grandsons; Prince Charles tragic marriage with Lady Di, the more recent sexual deviancy of Prince Andrew and the failure of the Palace to keep Prince Harry and Meghan in the Royal Family Firm. However there is also a strong sense of not liking the idea of an elected president as the head of state, an appreciation of the soft power the monarchy gives the UK internationally and that tourists to the UK in general seem to love all the bizarre ceremonies linked with the UK being a monarchy.

There is also the heavy irony of the UK national anthem, God Save the Queen. It’s an odd anthem about how the UK wishes for the person of the Monarch to be saved by God and wished to live forever. Yet as Britons it has been a unifying anthem in the past, partly because it’s almost impossible to sing it without a sense of irony. Because the purpose of the anthem is not to celebrate the monarchy or the individual King or Queen but to simply be an anthem that unites people without saying anything at all about the UK and Britain is perhaps united in it’s appreciation of deep irony. It’s the celebration itself that is important rather than the words of the song itself. For are we not in Britain not like these Nationalists in other countries who bizarrely think their nation is more important than anythign else?

However I do sense a desire for a big celebration, we have suffered Covid and now the Cost of Living Crisis and do need to let out hair down. Yet there is some discomfort about this Jubilee. I think this discomfort comprises of two main elements. Firstly there is a growing confusion of what the UK is for, what it’s purpose is? Why maintain a divisive centralised unitary government of a multi-national state in a continent where other such states have divided into their constituent nations, such as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, in a world where nation-states have waning power compared to large multi-national companies, is there any advantage anymore in being a relatively large unhomogenous nation state, especially one with the trappings of having been a major world power. A nation State determined to keep hold of an arcane electoral system when the evidence from continental Europe is that more democratic systems do produce stronger economies and determined to keep it solely because it keeps the current lot in power, it has lost the democratic argument. Secondly that the Jubilee is being promoted by the Hard Right (who like the institutions of the Monarchy much more than the Left do) and in a context of a UK government determined to pass divisive authoritarian laws without majority consent, taking away the freedoms valued at least by the Left that were very much part of the Social Contract [we tolerate the Monarchy and paying taxes to support it as long as the State defends our individual freedoms and this hazy concept of “British Values”] And getting rid of or threatening the British instiutions and freedoms the Left cherish a lot pushes us away from support of the Union itself. It is this promotion of division by the government and our generally Right wing popular media whom are then promoting the Jubilee as ‘unifying distraction’ that just grates. It creates the impression that this is their party and the rest of us are not invited.

Nation states are unified when everyone gets something out of the arrangement. The UK had the divisive Brexit referendum and has left the EU. Brexit was very much a project of the Hard Right. Fine, it won the vote, but there was an expectation that an olive branch would be offered to the Left as was promised ‘Take Back Control” was very quickly dumped and forgotten about wasn’t it, for a way to be found to make Brexit work for everyone, this has not happened.

I think the main disincentive to celebrate the Jubilee is entrenched privilege. The cost of living crisis, where ordinary folk have less to spend and much less with war raging, many are struggling to pay taxes, essential bills and put food on the table despite working full-time jobs, whilst those with capital assets are profiteering from the situation, those who rent out their second homes and from investments turning out increased profits. Unfortunatly the Royal Family are very much viewed as part of this landed class, the people increasingly viewed as the problem to what ails Britain in 2022. So even though it’s just an excuse to party, the ostensible reason for the celebration is problematic. Either the jubilee is about Her Majesty or about the UK and it can’t be both at the moment whilst the UK is still divided.

The UK is very divided, but I feel there is a deep desire for normalcy to return, it’s been a while, to just have a party to forget our troubles. However I’m not sensing that this Jubilee will be it. I may be wrong, I do live in a Left leaning, Remain in the EU voting Welsh town where there are no events planned and just a small amount of Jubilee tat available in the major retailers. There is a sense of not wanting to spend the little disposable income we have on such a frippery when there are deep problems with the economy to find solutions for, war in Europe and we simply have other more pressing concerns right now.

Prosumers

I wrote recently about the Other People Problem. It was the piece I have been least satisfied with. Perhaps it’s prosumers that cause the problem.

The graphics card on my laptop has died, which has made watching video streams on it a little clunky at times in HD and I’m probably wearing out my processor quite quickly by placing huge demands on it. I really like my laptop, it has a nice keyboard and 4 USB ports, but it is rather an old dear now so I thought it time to consider replacing it. So I had a quick look at what’s going on with laptops and ended the session very disheartened. Firsty I noticed the lack of ports on many models, how thin laptops have become and horror of horrors, no Ethernet port on many models!

I do of course have Wi-Fi in my home, but usually use a LAN connection to my router because it’s faster than Wi-Fi and more reliable. So I looked for explanations as to why manufacturers have done this. It seems to be to allow this thiness to new laptops, as the Ethernet port is the deepest port on Laptops. Is this a case of style over practicality?

For me thinness is not an issue, saving 1/2″ of space in my laptop bag would be nice but I’d rather not have it at the expense of being able to get a faster network connection and easily connect devices without the need for adaptors. My broadband speed isn’t great as I live in an urban area and a lot of people share our bandwidth via the old copper-loop telephone wires to the local hub. I mean during the Covid Lockdowns when there were no students or other visitors in town it was amazing, but it’s now back to 10-15 MBPS. I also value having lots of ports so I don’t have to keep swapping USB’S out all the time. The whole point of me having a laptop is to be able to use it in various places around the house when I don’t want to be in my home office, so it needs to connect to Stereos, TVs, ‘phones and so on. I also take it with me when I travel to have a computer and be able to work when on trains (though it’s been almost 2 years since I’ve done any of that!). So why reduce the ports and hence funtionality for the sake of being slightly thinner?

It’s perhaps this other people problem, but specifically Prosumers; people who are in favour of consumption of the lastest things, whether that be the latest fashions in clothes, cars or technology. It is economically useful to have early adopters as pioneers to test things out to see what works and what isn’t a useful improvement. However we don’t have real economies, consumers do not drive our markets. There is no such thing as a free market. Those who understand an issue are alwasy a minority and the vast majority of people don’t really care as long as they feel they are keeping up. There is a need for developers to seek a reurn on their investment to force change whether it was a good development or not.

The technologically aware people will welcome things like USB-C as a faster connection and potentially a more universal port than USB-B. It makes sense that people want these new whizzy things, but why ditch Ethernet if it makes computing slower? Perhaps it’s because most of these Prosumers are not tech people, but fashion followers, maybe people who work in creative industries who don’t care how their computer works as long as it works well enough an ddoes the new whizzy things well.

It is interesting that it seems to be the premium high price tag models that have fewer USB-B ports than the mid-range models. There seems to have been decisions based on an understadning that those seeking the premium models are more likely to be more comfortable with USB-C and switch to newer devices with USB-C connections, then the Non-proconsumers sticking with USB-B for the connectivity with non-new devices.

However does the world really need the extra speed if it means we all have to buy adapters or upgrade devices that have not reached end of life. Expensive tech’, in a world threatened by climate change should not be this disposable nor exclude the poor. I was unemployed last year and had to maintain my broadband connection and mobile phone contract in order to simply be able to look for and apply for jobs, if my computer had died during that period, especially during a period when I was unable to meet people face to face, I would have struggled to get a job and maintain my mental health without the internet.

My point is that consumers do not make rational decisions. This is why we have few genuine markets. Classical economic theory is based on the ideal that consumers make rational choices, but we don’t. There is alwasy this core who understand the implications of economic change and a vast majority who do not. I remember my grandparents beign appaled about how everything in the supermarkets was swapped in plastic and stated that they preferred shopping in the high street with shopkeepers they knew. Yet in Western society most people now routinely buy food wrapped in plastic from all over the world regularly. We are trying to reverse that now we’ve realised how daft an idea that was. My grandparents were right. Globalisation has created huge unsustainable systems. In Wales, supermarkets import beef from Australia, the opposite side of the world, whilst our own local beef producers struggle. Yet the media focus on methane emissions from cows, imply farmers are to blame rather than look at the big corporations, shipping food around the world, creating countless tons of packaging waste and decimating vital environments, seemingly just to make things slightly faster, slightly more convenient, more profitable, but less practical.

The real problem with this system is that the corporate middle-men decide what we consume. These corporations design products to appeal to prosumers, rather than those with practical understanding and the rest of us are forced, reluctantly or not, to replace bits of kit containing toxic chemicals on a regular basis to be good little consumers to serve our great god of modern capitalism.

I do kind of feel like an old fuddy duddy for saying this. Partly because I thought my own grandparents holding onto traditions was a bit fuddy duddy. I’ve said before how it’s odd being Generation X, embracers of new technology, yet also valuing tradition, being the last generation to grow up optimistic about humanities future, the first to have learnt about climate change as we hit adulthood, whilst our parents were still bewildered what it was and the threat it posed. Yet Gen-X despair of all the wrong decisions made, the continuing sheer ignorance of the ruling class of politicians, wedded to the flawed theories of Thatcherism and Reaganism. I’m now old enough to realise that no-one ‘knew what they were doing’ because they didn’t.

Sorry, I was going to talk about football, hopfully you’ll get somethign about football next time!

A Trip to Planet Antiwoke

Let me take you on a trip to the Anti-Woke world. It’s a world I don’t really understand and one I’d like to explore. What strange beasties live there, how does their soceity work? What do they do for work? What are their value systems?

Firstly some definitions. what is this concept of ‘Woke’ we hear so much about these days. The simple definition is “Awake to the injustices of society”. So to be Anti-Woke is to want to sleep, to be ignorant to the injustices of society. Why would anyone want to be Anti-Woke?

Perhaps simply asking this question defines me as being a ‘Woke’ person. To be a member of the liberal educated section of society. Maybe it’s those of us that like asking questions: How does this work? Why are things like this? What would happen if we changed this or took that away? We are the kids who wanted to go away to university, to learn new things to gain new experiences to explore for the sake of exploration. We are the kids who kept pestering our mams and dads with questions, long past their ability to answer them.

Maybe it’s how we deal with unknowns. When we encounter an unknown, we almost straight away want to understand it. When we first hear about thinsg like racism, modern monetary theory, transsexuality, climate change, our response is to want to find out more about it, to ask questions, find out what the alternatives and solutions are, Even feel pangs of guilt for being ignorant about something.

As a teenager I was obsessed with Douglas Adams’ ‘Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy”, the title suggested help in understanding the crazy world I was growing up in. Which is kind of what the book does, which is why I liked it. In this book there is something called ‘The Total Perspective Vortex’ a machine which you enter and are suddenly presented with the entire sum of knowledge of the universe and you and your importance as an individual within it, as an infinitely small dot within another infinitely small insignificant dot. It leaves everyone who leaves it mad… apart from one Zaphod Beeblebrox, because ‘I’m President of the Galaxy, baby”. Maybe Zaphod is simply President of the Antiwoke world.

The thing about being curious and having a limited life span is that it is not possible to know everything, to have read every book, to find every answer. Eventually it’s time for bed or you won’t be able to concentrate on anything tomorrow. You have to go about life, getting food, paying your bills, doing what your body needs to stay healthy enough to find the time to read more books, to find more answers. What happens if you don’t want to do that, to not be endlessly asking questions, to relax, chill out, to not be bothered about not knowing the answer? Arguable this is the function of religion, to help us find peace in a confusing bewildering world. The sense of, ‘We can deal with some of these things and leave the rest to God’. Except now religion is playing no part in it, there is no philosophical guidance to ‘How to be ignorant’. Welcome to the world of Antiwoke.

I was a vegetarian for fifteen years and am now fussy about what meat I eat. I have thought a lot about where my food comes from and done some research. I was in the pub and we were talking about eating fish and a friend said to me “I love eating fish, but I hate it when they leave the heads on, I can’t eat it then” The why was because it reminded him that this was an animal that was once alive, killed just so he could eat it. So rather than understand where the fish came from, make agonising decisions about whether I am happy to eat this particular fish knowing exactly where it came from, he simply chose to be ignorant of all that, so he could just enjoy eating fish in a temporary bubble of ignorance.

So, really, there does seem to be some justification for being ignorant. Moral qualms can be eased by being in the majority, most people do eat fish. Questions can be left for the experts to work out. We live in a complex society where it’s impossible for individuals to know everything. It’s why societies have specialists. We have doctors to spend years strudying medicine to help us when we get ill. We have lawyers who spend years studying our legal system. We have scientists working out how the universe works. Really, we have an option to accept that there is no point thinking about a specialist subject as there are people who are already way ahead of us in studying it. So why not spend out free time doing things we enjoy, helping other people, doing things that make us happy and not worry about the questions?

I have a postgraduate degree. Whilst I was studying for that I had the strangest sensation. I was asking questions and suddenly there were no answers, no books or research articles with those answers in. I spoke to my professor, he said something like ‘Well done, you have reached the limit of human knowledge in this area, you are now a scientist… it’s just our lab and a few others around the world. so maybe 20-30 people”. So soon? No-one has worked this bit out yet? The dawning of understanding of actually how little science actually knows and understands about the world is kind of scary and that we then provide expert advice based on what little we know, that humanity carries on wrecking the planet whilst knowing so little about it.

I was in a Zoom Webinar this afternoon with some distinguished scientists we were putting questions to. The most common answers were ‘I don’t know’ or ‘My hunch is X but no-one has done the work on this yet”. I have worked in some “real world” jobs, but there it seems ‘I don’t know’ is not an acceptable answer, you need to have an answer of some sort. As human beings we kind of don’t like not knowing the answers to things, yet in science it is something we have all learned to do and accept. Having access to a scientific lab and to be able to answer your own questions is fantastic, but also tinged with the frustration of having to ignore some lines of enquiry as you have to restrict yourself to sticking to what your funding is for. We know we cannot answer all our questions or know everything, we have to accept ignorance, that we ‘don’t know’. I suppose scientists accept this state of affairs through the priviledge of being the world experts in some tiny bit of science, that most people don’t even think about. Like the fish eater, we embrace ignorance as part of the job.

Yet, this is not the world of Anti-woke, this is merely the Big Bang Burger Chef we’ve pulled into for light refreshments on the way. Antiwoke is a world of choosing ignorance seemingly without a reason for doing so. A world of England football supporters booing their own players for expressing solidarity for those who suffer racism. A world of ‘I’m not racist and deplore those who are, but there is just too much focus on anti-racism these days, that is what I’m objecting to” It’s ignorance as a cultural identity. A reaction against those clever sods who like finding the answers to things. a reaction against being told what to do and what to think.

And I do get that. I’m quite happy to be told I’m wrong, because being wrong is scientifically very useful and maybe non scientists haven’t got used to being wrong so much. A thousand dead ends have to be explored until the path to a solution can be found. However being told that how I think is wrong is much deeper. It’s a criticism that draws on our deepest most primeval fears, of monsters under the bed. Perhaps because the gap between experts and your average chap on the street is so large that a genuine resentment has sunk in. We live in a world where disparity in incomes and education has grown and grown and perhaps a backlash is forming. Expertise, specialism, even science itself is percieved as part of this “do-gooders telling adults how to behave”.

During Brexit we had government ministers saying “We’ve had enough of experts”. During the Covid pandemic scientific advice has been ignored by politicians. Perhaps the difference is the scientists know they are ignorant and the those on Antiwoke don’t know what they don’t know? I think it’s also Social Conservatism, valuing tradition, anything new is by default rejected. A world where value is placed on opposite sex relationships, so when same sex marriage comes out into general society it supposedly diminishes that special status of heterosexual relationships. People convince themselves that their holy books tells them this, it’s not actually there in the text, people just believe someone interpretastion of the text. It seem to take away a pillar that holds up the society of Antiwoke, the traditions that bind us together, so we don’t all go mad from not knowing enough about the world.

As scientists, we’d love to cure cancer, stop climate change, find a way to get rid of taxes, build spaceships to travel beyond the solar system, but we can’t do that in one go. We have to take lots of tiny little steps and sometimes a few paces backwards. Science is kind of telling people, ‘Look there is no magic lozenge we can produce in our lab, you lot just have to stop flying in aeroplanes, eat less meat, shut up and respect footballers kneeling, accept that Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are oafish egotists who should not be even near a position of authority, wash your hands, wear a mask’. The perception that liberal educated people are treating everyone else like spoilt children is real and as if we were a single all-powerful being.

And who created climate change and racism in the first place. It was the educated elite of earlier generations, developing technologies they expected would be replaced by something better long before they started causing damage to the planet. On the world of Antiwoke is a perception that the ‘elite’ are ordering the citizens of Antiwoke to fix the problems created by another elite. “Sort your own problems out” as if todays scientists are somehow responsible for the choices of the long dead.

The people of Antiwoke see a world of them and us, as the Woke world as one speaking with one voice, through a Giant loud-hailer suspended by Art in the atmosphere. They accept ignorance as an integral part of their culture to be defended and do not see that science is not one thing, but lots of different people all working on completely separate little problems, all hoping to persuade the decision making people that their problem is a little bit more desereving of funding than something else. A world where those decision makers are concerned about keeping their university going, even if it means investigating the wrong things or reducing research output to reduce costs.

On Antiwoke it all comes across as one thing, Simply it feels like one voice saying you should be doing this, a list of thousands and thousands of rules, just to keep going, just to survive. The people of Antiwoke just want their freedom to keep their traditions going, to not to be told what to do all the time.

At the very core of the planet AntiWoke, is a desire to just get on with getting along, to ignore the endless rules for this and that which seem to stop people being able to earn enough to get by.

Slartibartfast: On this new Earth they’ve given me Africa to do. So I’m doing it with all fjords again, I think it gives a nice Baroque feel to a continent, but ‘oh no they say, not equatorial enough’. Science has achieved some wonderful things. But I’d far rather be happy than right anyday

Arthur Dent: That’s a terrible philosophy.

Slartibartfast: Is it? I’m sorry I’m a bit out of touch, I have been asleep for 5 million years you know

[Remembered from ‘Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ by Douglas Adams]

One Britain, One Nation?

Today apparently was ‘One Nation One Britain’ day, it’s the first time I’ve heard of it. There is a campaign group running sessions with school children to promote the idea that they are all members of the nation of Britain, regardless of their race, religion or cultural background. Superficially this all sounds like worthy stuff, helping children feel confident in their identities and breaking down barriers.

However two things about this raised concerns. Firstly is the notion that this may be seeking to indoctrinate children with a specific nationalist agenda. So I looked at the website and found this disturbing statement: “accommodates differences without over-emphasising and reinforcing them”. Two questions: What is “over-emphasis” and who decides this? and What is reinforcing differences? I’ll come back to this.

The second concern is about context. In the UK, Scotland are looking at seceeding from the UK to become an independent country, have just elected a parliament in favour of an independence referendum and the current Conservative government have made it clear that they wish to defend the current union arrangement. It reeks of being a political rather than an educational agenda and thus is indoctrinating young children. There are these ideas of “British Values” which is a fairly meaningless phrase in itself as it means nothing, but is powerful as people think it is one thing, when it isn’t. The idea that Britsh values is simply as defined by the government is: democracy, rule of law, liberty, tolerance, fairness and respect is surely what any nation state should aspire to and not specifically British?

The focus of this campaign, from the materials on the website suggests that it is seeking to promote racial and religious harmony, to help children of immigrants and other minorities to feel part of Britain. This is great, however it’s the notion that a ‘British Identity’ is more important than any other identities that someone may have that raises huge concerns. The agenda seems to be promoting one identity over another, one must not be over-emphasised or supported (reinforced) but the other, British identity should be. This makes me feel very uncomfortble. This is not the Britain I grew up in. The whole concept that a nation state is somehow better than others is deeply disturbing. I grew up with the sense that British nationalism is a vague concept, the pageantry of the Royal family, or celebrating British traditions and something not to be taken seriously for fear of the rise of Nazi style nationalism.

A lot of the material seems to be centered on Bradford, a Yorkshire town with one of the highest ethnic minority populations in the UK, sometimes referred to as ‘Bradfordistan’, so it’s wonderful if the communities there get along better with each other, reducing racism and other societal problems. However it’s this notion that people need to be integrated, rather than let it happen as a natural process, or even do what we can to abolish racism, so racism isn’t a barrier to integration. It’s the whole ‘You must be like this’ that smacks of authoritarianism that simply isn’t the Britain I grew up in or a “British Value”

I suspect this organisation have given little thought of how their agenda affects other minorities in the UK, in particular those of us who are Welsh or Scottish. As a Welshman, the idea that Britishness is somehow more important than Welshness makes no sense and is simply seeking to impose a national identity, or rather give an identity a higher status than another. In Wales we have had a long history of this. From Edward I’s ring of castles in Gwynedd to suppress the Welsh, through the tryanny of the blue books, to Tryweryn to today. It does not promote unity.

Being Welsh, I view the UK as a family of nations all of equal standing, sure we may argue all the time, but at the end of the day love each other. This view is threatened by any notion of a British identity being of a higher status, in creates a resentment. It makes me lower in regard a sense of Britishness and Welshness becomes a more important part of my identity. This is problematic for UK unity, you either saw all identitiies are of equal value or you have conflict. It may be the case in places like Bradford where a British identity is below parity of status, so efforts to equalize the identity between relationships is of value, but such strategies cannot be universal unless equality is put front and centre of the strategy and this One Britain One Nation thing does not do that as I have explained above.

I’ve always been comfortable and gained self-confidence from being Welsh and British, there should be no conflict or issues of status between these identities. Just as there should not be any higher status for whites over blacks, or christians over other religions. Such ideas of such superiorities should surely be confined to history and not something actively promoted, particularly to young children. Promoting this particular form of ‘British Nationalism’ in a nation that has for centuries been a multi-nation, multi-ethnic nation state is actually divisive, rather than bringing about the unity they purport to desire.

These are complex issues and teaching children the concept of citizenship is relatively novel and difficult to do in a politically neutral way. The UK is divided in to conservatives (things are broadly fine and don’t need to change) and liberals (there are some clear improvements to be made) Promoting a ‘British identity’ or rather a white establishment class view of Britian is damaging. This campaign seems to be promoting this.

I feel I should make a distinction here between education about and promotion because often the distinction gets blurred. Promotion is encouraging certain behaviours or beliefs, whilst education is simply informing people about an issue. For example, something like homosexuality, should be taught about in school as it is something that exists and awareness of it is useful. However it is often suggested that this education is akin to promotion. It isn’t, telling people that something exists and what it is is not the same thing as encouraging people to adopt something. Schools really are not going ‘Hey kids be homosexual, you’ll be happier for it’. Being aware of something does not promote something. I’ve read about Nazi Germany but I do not want to live in a society like that one.

I’m not saying that the idea of citizenship or belonging as a person who lives on the island of Great Britain should not be discussed in schools or saying that good things about Britain shouldn’t be celebrated, but doing so in a balanced way and valuing the diversity of Britain isn’t simple and having a government, a political party with a clear Nationalist agenda promoting it, is very worrying indeed.

A Fortnight on Brexit Island

The full descent of the UK into self parody has been laid bare these last two weeks.It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so pathetic.

A week last Monday was International Women’s Day, which was nice.

On the Tuesday the interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (Meghan Markle). In which there was only one real shock: No-one had told her what she was getting into by marrying into the British Royal family. The Royal Family has it’s own press office and a is a huge instiution, but no-one told her the reality? She may have been an actress and not entirely innocent to the machinations of the press, but no-one told her that her every public appearance would be scrutinised to the nth degree by the press, a racist press keen to disparage her every utterance, her every dress. Or tell her that most of her life would be stuck in a royal palace unable to do normal things like invite freinds around. How naive were the palace?

The upshot of this was dividing the people of the UK into those on Harry’s side for looking after his woman and those who frown on anyone revealing that the Royal Family isn’t one big happy family.

The next day we learned of the case of Sarah Everard, a young woman murdered on her way home in London. This hit the press as her alleged abductor is a serving police officer. Sadly this isn’t the only alleged case of police officers abducting women. Furthemore in the context of Black Lives Matter, where men have mysteriously contracted fatal injuries whilst in police custody, whilst the police are apparently clueless as to how this occured. Deeply disturbing.

Thursday and Friday were much more positive, women from across Britain took to Social Media to describe cases where they had been assaulted or simply felt afraid every time they walked home. This was wonderful as so many men are ignorant of how much of this goes on without men noticing.

On the Saturday a vigil for Sarah Everard was held in Clapham, South London, where she had lived. The organisers had approached the police asking for assistance in managing the event in as Covid-19 safe way as possible. The organisers were turned down, even after seeking judicial support. They cancelled the event, but this was now a huge national story and many people were asttending anyway, including the Duchess of Cambridge (Meghan Markle’s sister in law). Then at dusk as Clapham Common filled with candlelight, the police noticed that people were gathering too closely at the bandstand and decided to enforce the Covid-19 temporary laws, send in the police, kettling the crowd and hence increasing the risk of Covid -19 spreading, to go in and throw a few women to the floor and make a few token arrests of people at a vigil for a woman murdered (allegedly) by a member of the same police force. Do the Metropolitan Police not have a PR department?

The police doubled down in defence of their actions, but by Monday the story had developed. The UK parliament was ‘debating’ a new Police Bill, one that would effectively remove the right to protest from UK law, but parcelled in with some laws about longer sentences for sex offenders like Prince Andrew (allegedly). Cue more protest marches in London for the right to protest during a Covid-19 lockdown. The vote in parliament was carried but has subsequently been shelved to be passed/ dropped quietly later in the year when everyone is focussed on the latest scandel.

The flag isn’t small it’s just further away.

Boy did we Brits need some light relief at this point. This came from an unlikely source a BBC Breakfast news anchor, Charlie Stayt. Breakfast TV is supposed to be a little more light hearted than heavier evening news programmes, whilst still covering the major news items of the day. First some context: Having the national flag at government departments or drapped in the background when ministers hold press conferences is fairly normal across the world. However with Covid-19 and people working from home, the government decided that ministers should have full size diplomatic flags in the background at their home offices or their living rooms when doing interviews. It looks ridiculous, do you have a flag stand in your living room? Charlie Stayt at the end of an interview made what looked like an off the cuff, light hearted question about the size of a government ministers flag. This wasn’t his finest hour and it was not terribly funny, but this was live TV, one for the gaffs reel perhaps?

But no, the camera cut away to Naga Munchetty, the co-host who had burst into giggles; flag size related to manhood possibly? Instead of the usual British laughing at ourselves in a ridiculous situation, this took on a sinister tone. It wasn’t Charlie, who’d made the gaff who got the Social Media stick, but Naga, a woman of colour from the nastiest of British Nationalists, calling her a traitor and worse.

Ever since Brexit first emerged, the UK has been deeply divided, it’s the same people on the same sides of every argument, on every issue, not just Brexit itself. There is the narrow right wing British Nationalism that hasn’t moved beyond the “Glory of Empire” supported by the UK press in championing it’s cause: Boo for the Duchess of Sussex [a black woman], Boo for these dead troublemakers dying in police custody [black men], Boo to women speaking up for themselves, Boo to people giggling in a situation where the UK flag is involved [especially a black woman], Boo to anyone who suggests that Brexit isn’t such a great idea after all and Boo to people protesting about the UK government… from these ‘not racist but’ British Nationalists? Lets not mention that this Police Bill also makes life impossible for the Romany community, notice a pattern here? And there is the rest of us, ordinary Britons who’ve not been suckered into this mess.

The poor old Union Flag. A flag supposed to represent all of us as Britons, to have a sense of pride in,to wave around when people of the UK do well. A flag that repesents the UK of Monty Python and of great sportsmen and women, something we could happily wave. This flag has been usurped by the far right, the racists, the supporters of an exclusionary narrow British Nationalism of the chronic Stockholm Syndrome sufferers who despite the most incompretent and corrupt UK government, still vote Tory. I want no part of this, this does not represent the Britain I know and love.

So what do the government do? I’m hearing this troubled flag is to be wielded in a new policy in a sham political culture war for their interpretation of the Union. They’ve installed a Tory as head of the BBC, who have forced newsreaders to remove non UK flags from their backdrops on Twitter accounts and reduce topical comedy output. Instead of trying to unite the UK in a tough period, the Covid-19 pandemic, they’re further dividing it, where we ordinary folk have withheld our right to protest, to see our friends and family and been in Lockdown since Christmas for the greater good to just be attacked by this government and their cronies. I’ll wager they beign provocative and are just waiting for someone somewhere to publicly burn the flag to further divide the UK to make a enemy for the ‘British Nationalists’ and their awful cause. Troubling times indeed.

English Nationalism: A Tale of Two Nations

On Twitter today I saw a tweet which went like this:

Scottish Nationalism Good, Welsh Nationalism Good, Irish Nationalism Good, English Nationalism Bad, Why is England the exception?

The answer is that it isn’t. If we re-frame the question:

Scottish Nationalism Good, Welsh Nationalism Good, Irish Nationalism Good, English Nationalism Good, British Nationalism Bad.

There is then a clear difference, in that the first four are not really nationalism whereas the last is, if we define Nationalism as the belief that a nation is superior to other nations and thus is justified in exploited other inferior nations.

The difference is that these first four national movements include everyone in that nation, whether they identify with that nation or not. They seek fairness and a better political arrangement to allow innovation, investment  and economic development of infrastructure and for their nations to not be ignored. Whereas the true nationalism only serves the elite that identify as British Nationalists to the detriment of everyone else in Britain, allowing policies of repression towards those that don’t fit this narrow definition of “British”.

I think that English Nationalism struggles for it’s voice to be heard, because people find it challenging to differentiate itself from British Nationalism, which is racist and often the Nationalists have adopted both the English and British flags and some identify as English Nationalists. I should point out here that this splitting is in itself complicated, as you can identify as British and not be a British Nationalist, it’s this issue which makes the differentiation unclear.

I grew up in rural Powys, in British Wales and whilst most people from there identify as Welsh, they often share the views of British Nationalists, this certainly doesn’t make them bad people, but they are those that divide the people of Britain (the Britons) into them and us. An issue for the Welsh national movement is that we need the support of these people, but their British Nationalism holds them back from embracing the national movement. It is these people who value conformism and that is a very difficult habit to break, which I talked about in my last weblog.

I feel I could have very easily been one of these British Nationalists as it was part of the culture I grew up in. I just didn’t fit in and in being so kind of picked out the bits that made sense and discarded the rest. It was only through being different and an outsider that made me ask lots of questions, rather than accept what was around me as gospel.

What are these specific things you need to be a member of the British Nationalists beyond valuing conformity. You need to be white, you need to be from a Christian background (actual belief in Christianity isn’t important), you need to be a monolingual English speaker, you must have a distrust of intellectuals, you must not value the arts, you must regard those not in the club as inferior, you must not question authority. Essentially it isn’t merely valuing conformity, it’s being sceptical of questioning or exploring of issues.

When I was at school in a history lesson we were looking at the Cuban missile crisis. One of our activities was to have a mock debate, the class was split between pretending to be representatives of the USA and the USSR. I ended up on the USSR side and made that case as part of the activity. I was pretty much the only one who seemed to understand the logic of the USSR position, indeed a friend of mine admitted they they could not have done what I had just done, I think because it was somehow unpatriotic as the British position was to support the USA, even to the point of not trying to at least understand the other side. So, if you are unable to look at both sides of an issue, how on Earth are you supposed to get to the truth?

It’s ridiculous, how some people are now wary of talking about the Welsh language to me, now that I am a speaker of it. I’ve crossed that divide, there is no problem and it’s quite a nice place to be thanks.

I think it is this lack of questioning that is the mark of the British Nationalists, it explains how such awful politicians as Boris Johnson could have “won” the 2019 UK general election. For example, if you point out how awful it is that food bank use has risen so much in the UK, when there had been no need for such things relatively recently as a terrible development, you get the reply along the lines of “These people whilst perhaps deserving our pity are at fault for getting themselves into that position as people like us wouldn’t” When you point out examples of people who got there by bad luck or being made redundant, they can be dismissed as exceptions!

It is frightening, because when I was young I read the history books there were around and they very heavily promote the idea of British history as glorious and entirely ignore the damage that British policy has done to parts of the world. That accepting that interpretation is patriotic and any questioning makes you instantly ‘the enemy’. The idea that you base your belief system on a lie and adopt a position of not questioning anything is very scary indeed.

How can we bring across people from British Nationalism to the national movements of the nations of Britain? The UK has the highest  inequality in Europe, some of the most expensive housing and transport and is an unproductive and innovation averse economy that is falling behind, when there is no need for it to be.

Wales is not a poor country that couldn’t stand on it’s own two feet without the “help” of the “British elite”, we can afford a National Health Service, free education, affordable decent housing and a coordinated transport infrastructure. The UK is just wedded to the Tory party of not questioning why things are not going well and must, as always lay the blame on others, those who are not British Nationalists.

Brexit as framed as a perverse patriotism is causing unnecessary damage. Only yesterday there were anti-Semitic activity in London. In general there seem to be increases in racism, homophobia and even attacks on people for speaking Welsh.

The portents for 2020 in the UK are not good. Brexit seems to have allowed the nasty Nationalists to feel legitimised by the Brexit votes and all these repressed concerns about our society come out not directed at the useless Tories in charge, but at those who do not share this frankly bizarre adherence to not questioning authority, be they Welsh, Scottish, Irish, English, Black, Catholic, LGBTQ+, Jewish, Muslim, from Mainland Europe, Africa, or Outer Space. Why value being in this British Nationalist minority and ignore the great potential of all the people of Britain? It’s just very disturbing and there seems no clear way of getting people to come together as our nations for the greater good, to open minds and get people to think about these things.

Perhaps the question now is what do we want Britain to be? The Britain of national movements to unite everyone together to make things better or the Brexit if British Nationalism that divides us into us and them. Do we want to go down the path of 1930s Germany that my grandfather took up arms against or be nations progressing together to make a better world? Remember that only 36% of Wales voted for Boris Johnson’s Brexit, or 44% of the UK as a whole. We are the 56%, we can do this.

 

 

 

Conformity Rules

Following on from my last post. The other aspect of a socially conservative viewpoint is the value placed on conformity to social rules. Again this is a spectrum, but perhaps the issue with it is that it’s self-perpetuating as it encourages greater and greater conformity to be viewed as a valuable member of a society. This aspect is simply bad.

The ability to follow social rules is important for a society to function, to enable people to come together to do something enriching or useful. For example I went to a Christmas play for young children before Christmas, Llygoden yr Eira (The Snow Mouse) concerning the adventures of a mouse in a snowy wonderland. We probably all know the rule about theatre, musical performances or football matches, that you don’t enter the stage area unless specifically invited by the performers and even then you must do as directed by the performers. However this was a show for very young children who could not be expected to know this rule and it was very tempting to get up and touch the wonders being produced on the stage and so the children did. The company expected this and allowed it up to a point and had a number of crew at hand to herd children off the stage when necessary for safety and coherence of the show. In many ways the show was educational is showing children what was acceptable and what wasn’t. This social rule is there to ensure that everyone can enjoy the performance as intended, it makes sense.

On the other hand the example I gave earlier of homophobia. Repression of homosexuality, because it is seen as a social value of the majority as the majority are almost always heterosexuals. However homophobia is in itself socially damaging and divisive, so there it should not be valued and is unacceptable behaviour.

As I see it, there are some social situations where you need to conform and behave in a certain way and others where such restrictions are much reduced. For example expected behaviour at a Church service and that at a music festival, where social norms are expected to be flouted. Thus society has a good balance, we learn the rules and have space to relax those rules once in a while. However it seems that some  conservatives place a value on conformity above and beyond simply enabling people to enjoy themselves or work together on particular projects.

I grew up in a very conservative part of rural Wales and it was very stifling and there were very few places rules where rules were relaxed. Indeed the popularity of local taverns as the place you could relax those rules perhaps contributed to their popularity. When such a conformity starts to dictate how you dress, how you behave, what jobs are acceptable and which discouraged it becomes painful as the rules no longer make any kind of sense.

When rules don’t make sense and there seems no logic or reason for them to exist you cannot help break the rules, you just keep breaking them as you are unable to internalise their sense. All children break rules as they don’t understand them or why they exist. That is why good parents tell children why a behaviour is wrong, such as playing with electrical wires a sit’s dangerous, but it will be some years until they get taught all about electricity at school, but the rule makes sense, as children do learn what can be played with and what is to be left alone.

As adults we expect to have learnt the rules, that is the mark of being an adult. when some conformity rules get difficult and you have to twist and bend your personality so much to fit those rules, you are no longer in control, you can’t rely on reason or experience to tell you how to behave and it then follows that you cease to be useful, trying to follow the rules takes all your time and energy to the point that you can do little productive work. If you are not naturally inclined in such a way that you are a perfect match for the these conformity rules, you fail socially, you become mentally ill and suffer from anxiety.  The upshot of this is you have a society where a significant percentage of otherwise healthy individuals cannot contribute to that society and this makes no sense. Conformity to rules is there to make social functions easier, not more difficult, that is why I don’t get this obsession with extreme conformity.

Anxiety is a terrible affliction/ Being nervous before going on stage or attending a job interview, is normal anxiety. Seeming to continually break the rules you don’t understand which no-one will take the time and effort to explain to you, makes you constantly anxious and encourage you to withdraw from society and this is not a good thing to do. If you are going to have rules, they need to make sense, and not just be a privilege for those whom through sheer dumb luck are able to naturally conform with arbitrary social rules.

I think it’s going to be one of the biggest challenges of the next years. The world is facing devastating climate change. Every person and organisation will need to make big changes to how we do things. It’s going to effect what we eat, how we shop how we work and how we travel and so many of the conformity rules that exist in Wales and throughout the world are going to have to change. In particular the quantities of unsustainable meat society consumes. I was vegetarian form the age of 15 and so many people didn’t understand  my reasoning or the importance of sustainability. I think this is partly as this social custom was rigidly enforced “If you don’t eat your meat, how can you expect to have pudding!”. Getting young children to eat healthily is hard work, but there is no need to enforce rules, purely because they are the traditional conforming rules to older children who may know a lot more about nutrition than their parents.

To tackle climate change the world needs to become a lot more liberal in it’s worldview. However it’s then even more important to identify and protect the things we genuinely care about as positive values.

Until the cows come home

Greta Thunberg set off this week to sail to New York to deliver a speech about climate change at the United Nations. People have attacked her for this. Not attacking why she is doing it or issues of climate change. They are attacking her for being a sixteen year old girl. Mature adults criticising a sixteen year old girl for being a young girl. What on Earth is going on here?

I remember being sixteen. I was utterly confused by the world. The crazy way society is organised, the sheer amount of plastic starting to appear in the supermarkets and simply how inefficiently the world was organised. This had already led to huge losses of forests and space for wildlife in the world. Surely, this is crazy, I thought, how is the world in general not aware of this and why aren’t things being done to sort these things out.

I could have devoted my life to raising awareness and getting these things sorted out. I didn’t because the messages as I was getting was that I was too young to understand and in any case my peer group in the farming community I grew up in thought my views were weird. I was the exception, I was the minority. I was also suffering from social anxiety, partly because I was different. However I can completely understand Greta’s position and thoroughly admire it. We really do live in a world where sixteen year olds can be right and fully educated adults can be wrong.

Nonetheless I became vegetarian and tried not to produce too much waste and kept voting for politicians who expressed a commitment to sorting out the environment and making society a little less crazy and kept talking about the issues. This isn’t enough, it’s a drop in the ocean, the actions of one strange person are not enough. To make big societal changes you have to grow a movement, find a way to get your message across clearly and fight and fight and fight until the cows come home.

One problem is that I grew up in a society that encouraged compromise: You have to behave a certain way to fit in, you have to dress a certain way, you need to do certain activities and not do others, you need to get a well-paying job and then if you do all these things you may be in a position of authority and then you can do something about it.

To get there or even just to get any job, you have to compromise for example by commuting, wasting the resources of 2 hours of car travel everyday or helping an organisation you don’t like. You have to buy plastic wrapped bananas, because you can’t afford the unwrapped bananas in the posh shop.

However this doesn’t work, it took me a long time to realise this. Firstly you end up twisting your personality into knots to try and act the “right” way, you can’t trust what you think and thus lose access to your natural abilities and do some very strange things. All these compromises stack up, you try to justify them all and and up with some very strange positions and being objective about any issue becomes more difficult. Secondly, all the authority figures aren’t doing anything useful and their ability to change things, even they really want to, is minimal.

There has been a growing awareness of these perils of conformity. Society in Wales and across Europe has become much more accepting of difference, whether it be sexuality, mental illness, race, religion, language &c. Fortunately it is now much easier to be a minority and be accepted. When I was young people people hid themselves so much more for fear of being “found out” and probably beaten up for it. BAME families had to be constantly demonstrating exceeding the highest moral standards to be accepted in society, whereas any lapses from white people were quickly ignored and forgotten about. To get to this better position took a lot of fighting, campaigning organisations, pride festivals and so on. We have started to live in a world where being in the privileged class is no longer a pass ob to a position of authority. It’s a lot less likely that by sheer luck you happen to be someone who matches the prevailing conventional personality and attitude traits so have some authority. People who cared about the environment were sidelined, fortunately that is becoming less the case.

Now that we live in a world where difference is much more in the open and that is much healthier. However  it has created a opposing reactionary force. A force that seems largely composed of those that were able to conform, that being in the privileged group no longer makes things easier for them and they don’t like it. This has created division and turned things into black and white issues. It seems that it’s no longer a question of how much of an issue climate change is, but rather that people that advocate much more needing to be done as the goodies/baddies and those that advocate not doing anything about it as baddies/goodies. The skill of being able to view arguments form the other side seems to be being lost. This ignores all the complexity inherent in the issue.

There just seems to be so much ignorance of the advantages privilege confers. Perhaps largely because if you are lucky enough to be privilege you don’t notice the advantages you have. In Wales, we are fortunate in that our history gives us an insight into both sided. Wales benefited hugely from being a part of the UK, as a country close to the heart of the British empire. Conversely Wales has also suffered from being a “England’s last colony”. Arguably the Welsh suffer both from the guilt of imperialism and the exploitation of a subjected people. As a Welsh white male I have benefited from being regarded as a member of the dominant group and suffered from being an outsider at the same time. Yet there must be a lot of people who don’t have this dichotomy or are even aware of it.

My social media feeds have almost been flooded by posts like the above about agriculture being unfairly attacked for the contribution of methane from ruminants to climate change [I don’t know how they got to these figures, would question them, I’ve included them for illustrative purposes]. This is largely because I know a number of small family farmers who are worried about their future. Methane is ‘bad’ as it’s a terrible greenhouse gas, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have any, we all fart. There is evidence that suggests than grass fed cows produce a lot less methane than grain fed cows, which small farms specialise in. So the ‘all the cows are bad’ rhetoric is overly simplistic. It’s getting worse as small farms are going to the wall as they can’t compete on price with cross-subsided big [unsustainable] ag’.

On the other hand I also see the posts of the type ‘Everyone should go vegan’. Again this is overly simplistic. Maximum sustainability includes some farm animals. Also in sustainability terms having meat from a local animal is better sustainability wise than shipping something from the other side of the world where it’s grown with stupid amounts of fertiliser on heavily degraded soil.

The sustainability answer lies somewhere in the middle, where nothing gets banned, there is just some things humanity needs to do a lot less of. The problem is that measured arguments don’t get a full hearing and drowned out by the simple messages that resonate with people: ‘Eating animals is natural’ ‘Veganism will save the planet’ ‘Welsh is a dead language’ ‘Let’s take back control’.

Such easy slogans are easily debunked and have long been debunked, yet still they somehow persist. Humans eating animals is natural and has been done since pre-history, but modern intensive agriculture of the last hundred years is not ‘natural’ by any definition. Reducing land devoted to growing food will help the environment and will probably improve many people’s diets, but won’t by itself save the planet. I think reducing average meat consumption in the Western world to something like 10% of current consumption is something like this part of the answer, but it’s how we do it that matters, not the headline figure.  Os mae’r iaith cymraeg wedi marw sut medra i sgwennu hwn [If the Welsh language is dead how am i able to write this?]. Greater localised democratic control to reduce negative impacts of large scale global solutions is a way forward, this was the phrase that arguably won the Brexit referendum in the UK. Yet no-one has yet suggested any democratic or constitutional reforms for after the UK leaving the EU that will achieve this.

I’ve written before about how Brexit is divisive and lumped people into being Leavers or Remainers. The ‘Take Back Control’ phrase was more about a general despair with the crazy world we live in  (remember my second paragraph), for traditional values and communities where everyone could relate to each other (apart from the outsiders who know how to keep quiet) because the actual Brexiteers are against electoral reform (perversely in my view). I think there is also an element of wanting life to be simpler, more traditional and this view is most heavily supported by those losing privilege; the white, heterosexual, conservative older generations who did what they were told.

Maybe there is simply a frustration as people who have sacrificed parts of themselves to conform, put up with plastic and long commutes to try to get some control over their lives. Was all this personal sacrifice for nothing? I share this feeling as someone who overly tried to conform and still do to some extent to stay in employment. It could simply be that this young girl comes along who isn’t compromising. She’s travelling the world without using an aeroplane and has become an authority and has helped raise awareness and put pressure on those with power, by not compromising. This kind of breaks the conformist contract, many Western cultures have, that the feeling is she doesn’t deserve influence as she hasn’t done all the horrible compromising, so shouldn’t have a voice. The ability to conform is highly valued and gives people solace. However, she is right in my view, as I was at 16 and we all need to get over ourselves and not criticise people for being right, but instead support them and help build momentum behind sorting out the horrible mess our economy and society is in. We need to unshackle ourselves from our personal hangups to enable humanity to make it to the next century until the cows come home.