Lifeboat Politics

So, the Home Secretary Ms Patel has gotten her wish, even when her underling the Immigration Minister explicitly denied last week otherwise; the plan to dump asylum seekers in Rwanda so basically, we don’t have to have them. This is different from say the ‘Australian model’; this isn’t a ‘go to Central Africa while we process your application’ (which would be bad enough), this is a ‘here’s a one way ticket, please fuck off, beggars can’t be choosers’ model which has been attacked not just from the predictable ‘bleeding hearts’ but even the rather hard-nosed types who are objecting on grounds of ‘value for money’ (it appears we’re going to be paying more for Rwanda to take them than actually doing it ourselves), legality and the fact Rwanda is not even granting asylum for them either – in fact, the seekers are merely allowed to request it.

Now, much of this is fag-packet territory (as it normally is with the Johnson Government) but the reason for doing this policy is obvious; it’s to cater to the xenophobic Brexiteer demographic; particularly those living in the old ‘Red Wall’ seats in the British Rustbelt. The areas of the country which, completely coincidently were the ones which got Johnson over the electoral line in the 2019 election. A bit of ‘red meat’, so to speak. Unless it’s all simply yet another distraction from the level of stink coming off this incompetent, corrupt, lying, degenerate ToryKip government. Which is possible.

No… wait. It’s a shitty little attempt to influence both the coming local elections and the Wakefield byelection! Which as Caroline Lucas, MP points out, may actually be illegal. But rules are for the ordinaries, not them.

Storm In A Teacup?

This is in fact a good question to start with – just how serious is the issue? Well, as of 2021 it was around thirty thousand. Well, three quarters of the applications for asylum are accepted, which means last year the UK had to accommodate around twenty-two thousand. Which depending which measuring-stick you’d prefer, is 0.03% of the total UK population, a town the size of Potters Bar, equal to the amount of people who died in just over two weeks in the country in 2019 or accepting a couple of busloads of new people every day.

Now, folks can say (with some good reason) that this is just the numbers of folks ‘caught’; though more accurately the folks who are attempting to claim asylum (illegal ‘economic’ migration is a different issue entirely). And remembering (which many don’t) is the simple fact there is no fucking way to claim asylum in the UK without actually getting here (Patel lied! Who would have thought it!).

So… why do folks care so much about something so statistically small? Part of it is the graphics of it; crappy little barely-seaworthy dinghies braving trying to cross one of the busiest sea-lanes in the world. But the main aspect of it has to be the simple over-coverage of the issue vs the reality; if you went on Hate Mail, Scum etc coverage alone, you’d think the numbers were hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. And the vast majority of them bogus asylum seekers.

Well, that answer is simple; right-wing media stokes up a controversy which then suits right-wing politics. Farage built a whole political career off the back of xenophobia (which until late managed to deftly avoid falling into obvious racism) and like a vampire, UKIP managed to bite and turn the Conservative Party into a clone of itself. Thus ToryKip shall scare you with visions of boats to vote for them, and the only way to be ‘tough’ on it is to be maliciously, stupidly evil.

The real question is why the hell people fall for this. And that answer, is frankly depressing.

Conditioning?

I’m obviously not talking about the racists, closeted or not. Or the simple xenophobes. Just the ‘normal folks’ who in other respects seem sane and reasonable. Why are they so worked up about a few thou of people of which it is unlikely they’ll even meet one of, and even if they did meet one, wouldn’t realise it?

The answer is simple; despair, fatalism and apathy.

These are the people who are the net losers from the ‘neoliberal era’. They’ve had perhaps forty years of having the myth of ‘trickle down economics‘ rammed down their throat; even now we have that haunted mannequin called Rees-Mogg plugging his ‘cheap shoes for peasants’ line, hoping that that shall appeal to said peasants who haven’t had a real pay increase for decades and trick them into supporting policies to make him richer.

However, Austerity helped really grind in that despair. Cut cut cut. Take from those who already have little. Trim your sails, make do with less, lower your standards. Watch the standard of life – never really that high in the first place – slip downwards. However hard you work, despite every effort to ‘get on’, you’ll count yourself lucky if you simply manage to tread water. See services in a never-ending circle of decline; as social housing stock decays, waiting lists balloon and staff become ever-more overstretched.

It was this mentality Jarvis Cocker tried to show in Pulp’s Common People; a land where you ‘watch your life slide out of view’. That of the belief that things cannot improve, there’s nothing you do about it and at best you can hope that you can avoid things getting shittier than they are already. A land of low ambition and even lower success, where high hopes are nearly always ‘delusional’ in nature. The land of the zero-sum game, in fact.

Lifeboat Mentality?

A zero-sum game is simple; it’s one where a ‘gain’ has to balanced by a equal ‘loss’ somewhere else. A game of poker is a good example; no person can win a sum larger than the pot of cash put in by the group.

Now, replace ‘pot of cash’ for ‘a nation’s resources’. Hospital beds, council houses, school places, jobs and so on. If you’ve been so conditioned by a lifetime’s failure and kick-downs to believe that that pot is unable to be increased – a belief reinforced by the British ‘Lost Decade’ – you have a zero-sum game. Or as I call it, ‘lifeboat politics’.

In the lifeboat, one can only gain at the expense of another. And when a migrant gets in the boat, it means a bit less of everything for everyone already in it. Now, that wouldn’t be so bad if the boat had ample supplies and space. But the UK lifeboat doesn’t. It’s already on short rations, and our Brexit-loving working class are in the worst seats, getting covered in spray every rock in the sea, feeling hungry and cold.

That’s what a migrant is. Less for me, to accommodate you. So you’re hurting? Look at me, mate. I’m not living the life of fucking Riley. Any change is bad, all developments mean less for you and your family and friends, without fail. Immigration. Climate change. Globalisation. Affirmative action. A black person getting a slot means a ‘normal’ person is denied and so on.

Dare To Dream?

The fact that this is a mentality mainly seen in whites is not down to racism. Well it is, but not due to the racism from the white working class themselves. It’s merely that traditionally they’ve been treated better than this. They in fact, did decently well in the previous era but their prosperity juddered to a halt in the 1980s and never picked up again.

This is important because people perform comparisons not from national statistics, but their own personal ones. The older white remembers the higher ‘base rate’ they enjoyed thirty, forty years ago – even I can remember ‘the Cheapskates’ managed to raise five kids on one, not huge salary in the 1990s (though our SoL was kinda shit, thus the name). Part of the lack of belief in the future is the one which doubts that their kids will ‘get it better than I did’. Hell, I think many don’t even think the kids will get it as good as they did, let alone better.

Minorities don’t have this nostalgia because in most ways, their lives were shittier. Many are perhaps at best three generations removed from a subsistence farm, urban slum or a mediaeval village. Overt discrimination has almost vanished, covert has drastically declined. In comparison terms, they have more ‘opportunity’ to rise than they did in say, the 1960s. In fact, for many groups, the much-maligned ‘affirmative action’ programmes help overcome some of the historical imbalance which is the lack of ‘accumulated capital’ which keeps you stuck to the bottom floor.

Which is the remedy for ‘lifeboat politics’. That we on the left cannot simply talk in generalities, or promise more cake in the future. We won’t be believed, and I don’t blame this disbelief one second. Nor should we deride or attack such feelings as racism, xenophobia etc. In fact, much of the their disbelief is perfectly justified due to the fact the pale-pink ‘New Labour’ types have generally failed to live up to almost all their promises. And are unlikely to buy the same old things again.

What we have to do is talk less about the redistribution of the current supplies and more about how we can increase supplies. Without resorting to pushing people off the boat. Even if there are a tiny group on the boat sitting on the supply-chests with a shit-eating smirk telling us ‘there’s no money left’ and doing all they can to get us to turn on each other.

As everything on this blog, merely my own thoughts and opinions. Part of my Essays series.

An End Of An Era

‘The Post Cold War’

[August 21^st 1991 – 24^th February 2022]

A clunky name, yes; but I’m not sure what future historians shall call that era yet – that slither of thirty and half years between the collapse of the attempted coup in the Soviet Union which heralded the effective end of the ‘Second Russian Empire’ and the invasion of Ukraine which makes it plain to all that the current Russian leadership desires to build the third one.

Like such things, we can dicker over the dates; on one end you could push it further back, to October ’89 when Gorbachev told Honecker that Soviet troops wouldn’t be available to put down the anti-Communist protests in East Germany, and on the other shunt it to February ’14 when disguised Russian forces invaded the Crimea. Perhaps future historians shall use the outbreak of Covid as the bookend. But said dickering does not deflect from two simple facts; that this was a particular ‘era’ in global history… and it has now ended.

Zeitgeist?

All you need is a half-decent memory to take issue with my premise; the Europe of 2018 was very different to the one of say, 1993, and that’s even before the rest of the world, no? For folks of my vintage, that includes the entirety of our personal memories – you telling me that things are the same? Of course not. Yet… we do speak of ‘eras’ in history, even when a moment’s consideration tells us that it’s kinda stupid – like ‘Victorian Era’. A period of 63 years, two ‘generations’. How can 1845 be the same as 1890?

Part of this is simply down to shoddy history teaching and popular culture; much easier to portray as a series of millponds than a flowing of a river. But even historians do this, but in their case it’s to accept the common threads which run through the age; be it people (‘Victorian’), events (‘Age of Nationalism’) or a space between events (‘Interwar’).

So, what are the threads of this ‘Post Cold War’ era?

Fukuyama’s Folly?

If only one example shall be our era’s thread, it’s his 1992 ‘End Of History’ text. The triumphalism of ‘the West’, dancing on the grave of ‘the East’, which had rusted away and fallen apart, it’s bankruptcy clear to all. The arrogant belief that ‘liberal democracy’ was the final and highest stage of human development, that it shall in time defeat all the remaining ‘isms’ which shall continue to wither away due to their own patent obsoleteness, leading us to the promised land of a capitalist paradise.

Okay, he was a bit more nuanced than this, but sometimes an individual either manages to capture the ‘spirit of the age’ or even manages to score adherents who then shape the world in their master’s (imagined) image. And of this, I shall put Fukuyama in the first category.

But what did he mean by ‘liberal democracy’? In a nutshell; individualism, multiculturalism, neoliberalism and legalism. That ‘individualism’ would grant social freedoms to, well individuals to do and be what they desired, without being pressured to fall into what ‘the group’ says, working seamless with the multicultural ‘melting pot’ where everyone’s able to be whatever without pissing off others. Neoliberalism was to be economic route to the projected capitalist paradise, while legalism – the protection / enforcement of the global and national laws and norms – was to be the framework which made it all possible.

So… he told us about this ‘Good News’ (literally, his term for it) – but where’s this delicious cake he promised us all? Surely, literally thirty years later, we should at least have smelt some alluring wafts from the kitchen, no? Why the hell can I smell burning flesh, concrete dust and burning propellent coming from Ukrainian cities instead?

We know the answer to this, really. There is no tasty cake for all because his whole theory was shit – at least as any sane road-map.

Now, he would complain at this; that he didn’t mean cake was immediately around the corner, or that the ‘path to cake’ was going to be the direct one. Only that ultimately, all roads shall lead to cake. That we shall suffer diversions from cake, some of which could last centuries. Ironically, here his tone is almost identical to the likes of Lenin; in that ‘historical forces’ meant that worldwide Communism was the ultimate destination for the world – whether it liked it or not.

That last line is the important bit. For the whole ethos for this era has been a ‘it’ll be alright in the end’ baseless optimism regarding all problems. It was held as faith that neoliberalism would cause autocratic regimes to democratise and prosperity to miraculously increase for all; it has not. It proved unable to promote individualism without elevating and excusing callous selfishness. There was no reply to the charge that ‘liberal multiculturalism’ was not much more than a figleaf for lack of societal cohesion and ghettoisation. And it never dealt with the obvious problem that you cannot have true ‘rule of law’ when you have societal stratification in which the elites used said law as a weapon.

The failure to answer these has led to the bankruptcy of both political proponents – both on the Right and Left. In this, Fukuyama’s ‘crime’ was to merely voice the massive hubris and lack of ability to view the future as something different, not really create it.

Nothing New Under The Sun?

Though truth be told, it was increasingly clear our drive to cake has been faltering for some time; and I don’t think it’s controversial to say the main ‘diversion’ came from after the Great Recession. Democratic backsliding, surging economic inequalities, increasing corruption and societal stresses; all topped off with a deteriorating global situation.

With hindsight, there’s a good historical parallel here; with the ‘Interwar Era’. Our first half was our ‘roaring 20s’; exuberant, naïve and shallowly optimistic. Then we had our ‘Wall Street Crash’, and entered our 1930s; austere, suspicious, cynical. Then, as now, we got to learn that the new ‘glues’ didn’t really hold up much when put under real strain, but the old, derided ones still seemed to work. That several events cut across traditional loyalties, shaking up the political scene – which unlike before, was becoming increasingly ‘interesting’. The certainties shook and buckled, while both the mainstream ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ were devoid of answers.

I am sure that future teenagers shall sit in history lessons a century hence and pronounce judgement on us; calling us stupid, naïve, cowardly – ‘why didn’t they see this coming, why didn’t they do something earlier when it would have been cheap to do so?’ – in the very same terms that we derided both the leaders and led of the 1930s in failing to deal with Hitler.

And the answer is – as far as I could tell – about the same. We didn’t see the coming threat because we didn’t want to. We deliberately deluded ourselves that the threat was being way exaggerated, cherished the idea that ‘they wouldn’t dare’ or ‘that sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore’ (here’s Prime Minister Johnson, 2021 telling us that ‘tank battles are a thing of the past’). The best way to deal with an issue is to deny it’s existence; and without the issue, we saw nothing wrong with allowing our muscles to weaken, our organs to become tainted while our eyes were fixed on our navels and with hands busy with our genitals.

It was not ‘Western power’ which was deterring Putin from misbehaving; it was the memory of it. And like Hitler in the 1930s, Putin has slowly pushed his luck further and further with us and each step of the way the opposition presented was between ‘laughable’ and ‘non-existent’. And even now while Russian ordnance rains down on Kiev, the response has now been upgraded to ‘lacklustre’ – while Putin himself boasts to his cronies that any sanctions will only be temporary because we cannot do without Russian cash and resources.

1939, Redux?

Two things can be deduced from the above. One, that Putin thinks we are too lazy, timid, self-absorbed and fearful to actually stand up to him. And the second is that his goals shall never be satisfied. If his desire to make a puppet Ukraine is achieved he shall simply move onto his next target. The Baltic States? Poland? Finland, perhaps? And the price and costs of resistance shall cost more each step of the way. And the Ukrainians are already paying the price for our long history of appeasement.

Now, I am not blind to the fact this situation is not all of Russian making, that we – as in, ‘the West’ – made a series of both strategic and tactical mistakes, some dating back to the 1990s. But the whos and whys of how we ended up at this juncture is irrelevant now. We are at the juncture, and it’s decision time. And it’s ultimately quite simple, really; do we resist the Third Russian Empire, or do we surrender to it? It’s that simple, really. There is no third option here.

Shape Of Things To Come?

Nor is the path of resistance going to be either easy, painless or quick. There are many people – some of them in positions in power and influence – who due to reasons fair or foul will do their best to bamboozle us into thinking the acres of shit have been cleaned and/or never really existed in the first place. They are going to have to either sniff that shit or be scraped out along with it.

Then there will be the quislings, hirelings and plain old idiots who will do their best to convince us that my above analysis is wrong in the principles. Those on the Right, like Trump and Farage, who shall do their best to lull us back to sleep, to tell us Putin is a decent man who’s good word has never been tested, that all this is a one-off.

On the other end of the horseshoe come our left-wing Tankies. Their disagreements with Fukuyama’s cake is so strong, they cannot help but to at least play the ‘bad as each other’ line, which if nothing else hides the simple fact that at least our societies, as debased as they are, still allow considerable freedom of thought, expression and independence.

Lastly, the folks of no real political hue; the ones motivated by cash, telling us that it’s ‘wrong’ to sized oligarch assets and to put in trade embargoes. Those wishing to preach the gospels of isolationism taken to stupid conclusions; that we can ignore the flames unless directly within our own front room. Lastly, the plain old folks preaching selfish individualism; that any sacrifice is wrong.

Though sacrifice is never a popular sell, and shall be even less so after three decades of being told ‘you’re worth it’ and ‘you can have it all’. But it has to be done. We shall have to say no to those trillions of pillaged wealth from Putin’s oligarch cronies, which is sloshing around our banks and institutions. Even more importantly, we shall have to say no to Russian oil, gas, wheat, coal, nickel and so on – there is precious little point in banking bans when Europe alone is giving some 650 million dollars daily in trading. And we will have to drastically beef up our defences; troops, weapons, spies, police and hackers – this shall cost us money and effort.

Lastly, this is going to be a generational battle. Putin isn’t going to ‘go away’. In fact, it’s quite possible that the totalitarian system he’s constructed will outlive him. Nor is he going to ‘change’; in fact, all change seen in him over the last two decades has been for the worse. That like the ‘last’ Cold War, we are going to have to construct defences strong enough to deter and to never for a second stop watching him like a hawk, to never let anything slide.

Despair Event Horizon?

Despite all the above, I am cautiously optimistic that we’ll prevail eventually. Putin has been ‘such a great game player’ partly because we did not realise (or more correctly, didn’t want to admit) he was playing for keeps. This isn’t wishful thinking either; Putin’s Russia is not the USSR in terms of power, influence or even attractiveness. And while we have quite a few serious internal issues to deal with, generally speaking he’s got those too. What’s more, the unveiling of Putin’s ‘true nature’ is bound to cause a rupture in the Anglo Right; hailing him as a ‘great leader’ after all this shit shall appear to be much more like treason. And lastly, while our system of government has many flaws and weakness, it at every least allows us to reform and develop to meet the challenge – something that dictatorships find generally much more difficult to do.

But it relies on us accepting the truth of the situation and then doing what needs to be done to combat it as quickly as possible. For I do not think he can openly defeat us, but he sure as hell may be able to trick, bore and/or corrupt us into surrender, in a manner we only realise we’d signed everything away afterwards.

The first signs are, in fact a long-neglected backbone is being discovered. Ukrainians are generally speaking, firmly telling Russian forces to ‘go fuck themselves’. European states are moving closer by the day towards overt, meaningful opposition – and dragging a rather reluctant America and Japan in their wake. We can do it again; those folks who beat Hitler seventy-five years ago were made of flesh, blood and nerves, just like us.

Not that we have a choice. It must be done again.

As everything on this blog, merely my own thoughts and opinions. Part of my Essays series.

The Arrogance Of Power

If the myriad of ‘Partygate’ scandals which have repeatedly hit Mr Johnson and Downing Street in the last couple of months have taught us plebs only one thing, it’s this: our views do not matter one jot. Unfortunately, they’re – generally speaking – correct.

There’s no way for us Big Public to remove them until the next ‘permitted event’ due in a couple of years time. The ‘independent report’ will be landing on Johnson’s desk and then he shall decide what is done about his own wrongdoing. The police have – rightly or wrongly – decided not to intervene. We are unable to force him – or his minions – to tell us the actual truth of the affair. To paraphrase Scooby Doo; ‘I got away with it despite you meddling public’.

Well, what other reason do you think he was smirking in that interview?

However, as with these types of post, I’m not actually that interested in the whole ‘Downing Street parties’ thing as a topic of discussion – more about what led to first the parties and then the response to it – the ‘culture’, so to speak. For I feel that it’s this which is the true, embedded problem in British society and thus worth talking about.

I shall call it ‘the arrogance of power’.

Lords & Masters

To say Mr Johnson is a ‘deeply flawed character’ is the truth – however, it is not the whole truth. The seeds of Mr Johnson – and the whole system which would allow him to thrive to the point of becoming Prime Minister – lay not down to quirks of fate or accident, but the very socio-economic system which dominates this country. I speak, naturally that of the class system – a beast who’s death is constantly predicted but never confirmed.

The most interesting aspect of the British ruling class – as noted by the likes of Orwell some eighty years ago – is it’s ability to change just enough with the times to avoid becoming a fossil and to co-opt just enough of the successful upstarts per generation to avoid being deposed. In recent decades this primarily took the form of absorbing the top rungs of our ‘nomenklatura’; those professional and managerial elites which increasingly ran the country on their behalf and were predicted by some to become their usurpers.

The key meeting-point of the two groups was ideological; they both have what I shall call ‘the master ethos’. That they believe – for good reasons or not – that they are inherently superior to us oiks; in intellect, learning, culture, drive and discipline. They possess a kind of warped meritocratic justification; they are on top because they’re the best, for if they weren’t some folks from the Lower Orders would have supplanted them long ago, right?

Worse, a large segment of the British public buys into this bollocks too. Deference – to a plummy voice, verbose glibness and patrician arrogance – has been bred into our very bones which causes our knees to bend and heads to jerk downwards when in their presence. How else can you explain the popularity of such period drama escapees such as Rees-Mogg?

I can. That we British have been groomed over centuries to equate said ‘master ethos’, or more correctly it’s outward signs as ‘leadership’. And that this view has become so ingrained that some of us actively recoil when we see one of our masters not conforming to this – as seen as all the hate shown for Reyner for her working-class accent, or Corbyn’s refusal to be impeccably groomed and suited at all times.

Consider that, for a moment. That even now, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, many Britons still apparently buying into ideas that are in reality a load of crap.

A Second Look?

Now I’ve planted ‘the master ethos’ in your head, let’s go back to ‘Partygate’. Johnson had his ‘drinks meetings’, because he was working ever so hard and he deserved it. It was okay that he broke the rules because he was intelligent enough to make sure it was done safely. In fact, the rules were wrong here so it was fine to break them. And he apologised for our inability to understand the ‘special circumstances’ which involved him, because we are too thick to get it otherwise.

I actually think Johnson was telling ‘his truth’ when complaining to Tory MPs that he’d ‘done nothing wrong’. And I also believe that the majority of MPs would have agreed with him too.

That’s part of the problem.

Acton’s Maxim

I could have called this post ‘the arrogance of privilege’ but I didn’t for one reason; the problem is wider than that. This has already been vaguely alluded to with Johnson; a ‘toxic culture’ within Downing Street.

The reason for this is simple; that even after you take into account the sorts of people who could hack working for a man like Johnson, their very proximity to him had a malign effect on their judgement. Despite not being ‘of’ the ruling class (as a rule), they grew to act according to their mentalities; that they too were special, that they also deserved exemptions. It’s not like Johnson was ever a ‘details man’, and even if he was I strongly suspect he wouldn’t have enquired too deeply into the doings of his servants.

I shall argue that the smug superiority, the entitlement writ large from of our masters rubbed off on the underlings; ‘taking their tone’ from them, with others falling into line ‘because everyone else was doing it’. The arrogance rubs off; nay, the arrogance is seen as part of having power in this country, the way to act, ‘leadership qualities’. It’s the true strength of the British ruling class; it takes hirelings and moulds them with elements of the master ethos unawares, which not only makes them better servants but is good ground-work in case they rise far enough that ‘absorption’ is worthwhile.

The whole ‘Owen Paterson affair’ makes more sense when you look at it this way. For truth be told, not many of the Conservative MPs are actually of the ruling class – partly due to the simple fact Parliament is too ‘low-status’ an occupation and only a limited number of safe seats come open each election. This means it’s mainly the ‘hirelings’ and the socially ambitious which try this route; which if done ‘right’ can lead to the end of the rainbow – pots of gold, ermine and sinecures.

Anyway, these MPs took their cue from their masters, which in this case was ‘there is nothing wrong with using your position to further oneself’. To this light, Paterson did nothing wrong. His ‘crime’ was not to be caught, or even to complain about the slap-on-wrist he got as punishment either. It was merely that he caught the public’s eye on it. This meant he was promptly thrown overboard.

Wicked Or Stupid?

Was the question Orwell asked of his own ruling class eighty years before, and I’ve generally come to the same conclusion as he – it’s mainly the latter.

That they do not understand the point that leadership comes from example, that we’re not so dim we don’t remember you said the opposite thing last year, last month, last week. Or that your words and deeds are on different planets, that your promises to us never come true. That your rule is mainly through gaslighting, fear and nonsense, mainly done as your group continues to run the county into the ground, while you treat it like it’s your own piece of personal property.

That the truth of the matter is more alarming; your class has decayed so far that you’ve lost your brains, your morals, your patriotism and even your sense of duty. That all it is now left is the entitlement, superficiality, greed and immaturity.

I wouldn’t mind so much if they simply honest about it all; to baldly state ‘we are in charge, and by jove we’ll do anything and everything to remain so’. But Orwell also tells us why this cannot be so; because not only does such an action make it obvious to us plebs that weaponry may be required to throw them overboard but it also requires them to be honest with themselves regarding their position. And this would require a clear view of the true state of the country, as well as an objective look on their classes’ actual abilities and ethos.

Then everything becomes so much harder to justify. Wilful ignorance is a warm, fuzzy blanket to wrap yourself in, which is a vital attribute for the ‘master ethos’ – it only works if you genuinely believe yourself to be superior.

‘Save Big Dog’

As I sit here, I hear about the Conservatives’ ‘fightback’; mainly based around pandering to some of the hobby-horses of the base. This, I predict shall be successful; for it’s being tailored to the only people who matter – backbench MPs. Keep them sweet, keep this shit clown-show on the road a little bit longer so they don’t vote him out today.

Bound by ties of corruption and lacking any ‘better offer’, I predict most shall remain… for now. But they’ll throw him into the mincer the second they do get said offer. For in the degraded sense of their master ethos, ‘loyalty’ is something you speak of so to lure into a false sense of security the folks who are about to be thrown under the train to save your skin.

I wonder if Johnson shall weep bitterly when they finally do this to him?

As everything on this blog, merely my own thoughts and opinions. Part of my Essays series.

The Right To Offend?

I am about to do something… naughty. An action that until perhaps a week or two ago, would have led me open to getting police attention of an unfriendly nature. In fact, might still lead to it. But I’m going to go ahead and do it anyway, for it is vital to illustrate the issue.

*Clears Throat*

I disagree with the acronym ‘LGBT’ and all it’s variants. In fact, if I had my own way, it would be abolished. Forever.

(Me, right now).

*Pause*

I have just committed a ‘non-crime hate incident’, of which many English police forces – including my own – record. Now, as I am pseudo-anonymous, it is unlikely any police force would go to the lengths to try to ID me, but for all I know there may be a special list for such nasty, hurtful cowards such as I who hide behind pseudonyms.

I have grounds – quite good ones, I feel – for saying the above. Perhaps I’ll one day do a post laying out my argument. But not today. Firstly, the argument is not relevant to this post and secondly, at 119 characters my ‘offense’ is easily imaginable as a post on Twitter, Facebook or whatever. That’s important, because this post was inspired by the antics of a Mr Miller on Twitter around three years ago, and the long, drawn-out aftermath.

The Non-Crime?

The full story is here, but I’ll quickly recap now – it’s one which got lost in the combination of Christmas and Omicron, but feel it’s worth covering even this far ‘after the fact’.

In late 2018, Mr Miller was on Twitter discussing transgender issues and he did a variant of the clichéd ‘I self-identify as an attack helicopter’. Someone took offense to this, enough to the point he was reported to the police. It seems he had made several other comments which were judged to be transphobic, which led to a visit by members of Humberside’s finest. There he was interrogated, and threatened with – amongst other things – possible future difficulties with employers due to it being a stain on his DBS (‘police check’) record.

The problem was, he had not committed any offence, either criminal or civil. What’s more, the police knew this at the time. Unfortunately for the police, so did Mr Miller. For he was an ex-policeman himself. And they’d picked a fight with the wrong person, which led all the way up to the Court of Appeal, where Mr Miller finally won the right to be offensive (somewhat). Now and then the Grumpy Old Man stubbornly digging in his heels to prove a point benefits us all, and I’ll argue this is one such event.

What Issue?

Now, before anything else, I’ll make this clear – I think on the main Mr Miller was mainly wrong on the transgender issue(s) being discussed (in fact, I think we’d have a bit of a bust-up on it). Yet I won’t say for sure because I’ve not been able to read all his comments and/or had the chance to actually question him on them, so I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt there.

But my opinion on the correctness of his comments is irrelevant here. Or even the issue his comments were ‘the most part, opaque, profane or unsophisticated’ – for I do not believe being rude and/or crass are crimes in themselves. No, my beef is with the whole manner ‘non-crime hate incidents’ were handled. And we need to focus on that bit, and that bit alone. Which is why I didn’t explain why I don’t like the acronym ‘LGBT’.

The Premise

…is simple. That there’s a myriad of actions which by themselves do not constitute an actual offence, but are felt to need to be recorded. I’ll let the College of Policing explain further;

“They [Non-crime hate incidents] may also be the precursor to more serious or escalating criminal offending. Non-crime hate incidents may form part of a series of incidents that, together, may constitute a crime, such as harassment. Retrospective review of crimes will often highlight earlier non-crime hate incidents that could have presented opportunities to intervene to reduce the threat.”

(Website, ‘Responding To Non-crime hate incidents’)

This, in fact makes some sense. It’s the pain of many a bullied person; when the Authority Figure is sitting there, peering at you and saying ‘well, did they actually do anything?’ the ‘do’ meaning ‘something we can actually book’. As a person who’s been bullied before, this can be really hard to actually prove. And many a bully knows exactly how to dance on this line, leaving the complainant looking petty, thin-skinned and/or nuts. Which can be almost as bad as the bullying itself.

What’s more, police record non-crime incidents all the time (not just the hate ones). It’s part of their constant intelligence-gathering systems. It helps identify problem areas, times and people; that (for example) when the Drug Squad turns up at 5AM with their door-knocker, it’s always because a case has built up to a critical point, and much of it would have been ‘non-crime’ in nature (at least at first). To deny the police their ability to record such things would be to cripple their powers of investigation, to understand patterns of behaviour and to spot warning signals.

My Twisted Knickers

So, why do I object to the ‘non-crime hate incidents’? Again, I’ll let the College tell you.

“Where it is established that a criminal offence has not taken place, but the victim or any other person perceives that the incident was motivated wholly or partially by hostility, it should be recorded and flagged as a non-crime hate incident.”

(Emphasis Mine)

In this, there is no burden of proof. The complainant’s word is taken as gospel, with zero questioning. What’s more, the definition of ‘hate’ is pretty wide; ‘causing distress’, ‘dislike’ and ‘unfriendliness’ all falls under this. And some people feel ‘distress’ when they see views which clash with their own; they’re ‘distressed’ by the fact they’re not completely comfortable, despite the fact that they have no right to be as such at all times.

Which is why I am guilty of a non-crime; for there are people out there who identify so strongly with ‘LGBT’ they take any criticism as homophobic and/or transphobic. I know this because I’ve been entrapped/punished for it online and some of the crowd applauded because I had ‘started to make them uncomfortable’.

Clearly, this is wide open to abuse. The most touchy of complainants are reinforced in their belief they have a right to never be threatened by contrary views or questioned, while those wishing to wage vendettas can happily do so. Even the plain weird are pandered to; like when (as a test) a barrister said on Twitter she thought her cat was a Methodist and a colleague reported it to the police – because they implied that Methodists were ‘wandering pests that defecate in other people’s gardens’. It is now on their file, perhaps evermore.

Which is the second strand – these ‘non-crimes’ appear on DBS checks. Yes, a teacher, doctor or youth worker (and many more) may be declined for employment or even lose their current job because some crazy grassed them up because they made a comment on Facebook they didn’t like. Like for example, stating a medical fact such as ‘it is currently impossible to change your biological sex’. (Question: would you trust a medical doctor who didn’t accept such a basic fact?)

The last strand is the worst of all; there’s no easy way to discover what ‘non-crime incidents’ have been logged about you, and no way you can dispute them either. The guidance says the criminal individual is meant to be informed, but I suspect many are not – on the simple fact some 120,000 were logged in five years and I had not even heard of this until today.

We Have A File On You…

Let’s recap the situation. A person or persons unknown can make an allegation against you for making socially disliked (but legal) comments, which are not questioned, the defendant is not often aware of, is clearly unable to defend themselves on and may drastically damage their life.

Often the right-wingers are very quick to start making the usual, tired comparisons with the KGB, 1984 and so on – but in this case, I say they’ve got a point; if the above isn’t a decent description of a Chinese-style ‘social credit’ system in embryo, I don’t know what is.

For that’s how such things work. You may have committed no crime, but at some point you did something which caused the ‘bad’ stamp to be put on your file, causing doors to silently close on you and you don’t even realise it. Overlooked for promotions, forced to wait in line longer for goods, more perfunctory service from officials and so on. Or in the modern British sense, having employment issues because the police tacitly warn your probable employers you might be ‘trouble’ and they’d not want that – the enforced conformity of social media (and spying on new hires) is bad enough, but now the state is in on the game too. Or more correctly, has been for some time and we’ve only just found out, like the Snowden mass leaks a decade ago.

Enlightened Self-Interest?

Now for the secret question – why the hell you should care about this. After all, I don’t generally agree with Mr Miller. In fact, it’s in my immediate interest to have folks like him silenced. But that relies on you having a very myopic, short-term view of things. Because once such a system is constructed, it can easily be turned on you.

What’s stopping the system designed to silence Mr Miller being turned against pro-transgender commentators (for example)? It’s grown in the dark, in the dark bowels of police procedure, not actual law. How about if Ms Patel at the Home Office starts writing this definition? Or someone even worse? We’ve been here before. And when you connive at suppression of views you simply don’t like, you’re sharpening a blade which might slice your arm off later on.

Remember the definition; the offence is in the eye of the beholder and it’s not questioned. This very blog is littered with ‘non-crime hate speech’ towards Mr Johnson and other Conservative Party members, for example. Posts by Another Angry Voice detailing their aura of corruption is also ‘hate speech’. And so are articles in The Guardian criticising the Government’s actions in general. What’s stopping the police from padding their way to ‘agin the government’ critics and trying to bully them into silence over threats of it getting out to their employer’s HR people, like they did with Mr Miller? The term ‘chilling effect’ is also overused, but correct here. And couple this with the fact the government desires to remove the anonymity of online accounts…

With the final ruling partly in favour of Mr Miller, the guidance has been updated – with the apparent introduction of the old legal principle of ‘the reasonable person’; a concept which is the whole justification for trial by jury (for starters). What’s more, the police are allowed to start judging whether there is actual ‘hostility’, rather than simply taking the accuser’s word for it, however clearly demented it may be. Context is also now permissible; such as during a debate.

* * *

Yet it leads me to ask; why did it take a long, expensive legal case to for Humberside Police to quit active resistance to the idea of ‘introducing common sense’ to the guidelines? Didn’t anyone think of this in the two years of legal action? Or when the College of Policing was writing said guidelines? Did nobody think the conclusions through?

My conclusion: crappy British management strikes again; our own ‘nomenklatura’ more interested in defending their own arses and institutional reputation than doing the right thing. Believing it could bully Mr Miller into surrender, or then bankrupt him with crippling legal costs if he tried to fight his corner. It’s frankly unbelievable – no, unfortunately it is believable that they’d allow this to go on right to the bitter end. And the buck-passing non-apologies from both the Humberside Police and College of Policing show that despite this minor setback, they are utterly unrepentant.

In my book, one of the reasons this country’s going to the shit, and no, it’s not because of ‘enforced wokeness’ or some right-wing drivel.

As everything on this blog, merely my own thoughts and opinions. Part of my Essays series.

Hoarding & Poverty

This tale starts with a humble shoelace. I was making a pair of makeshift draft excluders, and required said shoelaces to tie-off the fabric. Found a couple random ones in the cupboard drawer, completed excluder #1, was happy with the result. Then a problem arose.

I had no more odd shoelaces.

Oh, I still had shoelaces. Six pairs, in fact. Issue was, all six were still usable, in lengths and styles which suit most of my current footwear. All were equally worth keeping. But once I used one for the excluder, it couldn’t be used as a shoelace again, because I had to cut it. I also only needed one more, meaning that I’d be left with an odd shoelace.

This was a serious enough dilemma which flummoxed me for around two minutes until I realised the complete stupidity of the whole affair. That I clearly had a squirrel mentality; laying up stores of items which might prove useful ‘one day’. Yet, said mentality wouldn’t let me actually use it for something out of a pathological fear of not ‘using it right’ and then needing it, but not having it for use (clearly, I was an army quartermaster in a previous life).

The ‘Poverty Mentality’

It has to be pathological, as I’m fearing an event which happened once, around a decade ago. By that reckoning, chances are the stock will outlast me. I also get through a pair of shoes about yearly, meaning I’ll be able to replenish my reserves very soon – I mean, how many shoelaces will break in a single year? And it’s not like they’re either difficult or expensive to purchase new.

Yet that’s irrelevant, for facts and logic are fighting the poverty mentality, which is ingrained within my unconscious mind, mainly due to a life of varying levels of, well poverty.

The easiest way to describe it is akin to eternally living in your personal ‘shortage economy’, like in the old East Germany or the Soviet Union. You hold onto things – like my shoelaces – in fears of not being able to get hold of them when you actually need them. I also allowed poorly-fitting clothes to accumulate in my wardrobe out of fears of being unable to afford replacements. I bought dead-cheap a load of powdered protein shake which proved rather nasty but it’s still here, just in case I go through a (cash-caused) protein famine. And non-routine cash purchases requires me to overcome my desire to simply stuff said cash under the mattress to allay my fears of future economic catastrophe.

That is the poverty mentality – when you always think tomorrow will bring a torrential downpour, so it’s best to stock up on umbrellas today. And as we go though most things in life on autopilot and it doesn’t rain half as much as we think, our squirrel-caches can grow rapidly, unawares.

…And Hoarding

While we’re loathe to admit it; the vast majority of us follow a kind of Parkinson’s Law of possessions; that it shall expand to fill all the space realistically available – that only when it gets past that point shall something be done about it. Or when we’re forced to confront the amount of crap you’ve accumulated, like on major ‘life changes’ (such as a new partner, or moving home) and you’re wondering how you ended up with such an amount.

The issue is, the majority of hoarders of this type will deny it even when the ‘accumulations’ reach critical levels; after all, they don’t (usually) possess mounds of yellowed ancient newspapers, larders filled with expired food and/or piles of rusting appliances. Basically put; they’re unable to be a subject for that freak-show which is accurately-named Hoarders; where we can gape at the clearly disturbed wade through seas of crap while explaining why a blown rusty tin of beans was still ‘perfectly fine’.

And that’s the problem.

‘Poverty hoarders’ don’t have obvious shit à la Mr Trebus (non-obvious is another matter, and generally subjective) and nor do they show the classic symptoms such as compulsive shopping, having a front room akin to a papery tomb or a kitchen home to rats and maggots. But the most important issue is that perhaps more so than any other genus of hoarder, they’re most commonly proven right.

After all, I did end up using those shoelaces, didn’t I?

Reinforcement

To continue the analogy from above, yes it does rain sometimes, and when you’re poor that seems to be more frequently. Spare parts are often artificially expensive, labour sometimes prohibitively so. Older / poorer quality items often need more frequent attention too. Often, you’ve either got to DIY it or simply put up with the issue indefinitely. Result; the accumulation of items for parts cannibalisation, random bits of wood, assortments of screws, sheets of fabric, off-cuts of lino, bags of old chargers and power packs…

Unfortunately, ‘project hoards’ (also known as ‘man-crap’) often do prove their worth… eventually. Like when I needed a sturdy cutting board and filched a piece of sturdy MDF off a relatives’ hoard for that purpose. Or my improvised workout station / storage unit from a pair of dining chairs, several bath towels and the back off an old wardrobe. Who thought that salvaged toilet handle would prove useful one day? (or last week, in my case).

The other side of this is the ‘good bargain’. Remember, the poverty mindset is always whispering ‘you won’t be able to get that tomorrow!’ which leads to snap up stuff simply because ‘it’s cheap’ and you might need it one day, or to accept usable cast-offs which are free – this can combine with hobbies/interests to create a powerful variant of ‘Gear Acquisition Syndrome‘.

But like the ‘project hoards’, this type of hoard also proves it’s worth in time. I remember, for example when I moved back out on my own a decade ago some 75% of my non-personal items were off three or four of these hoards, meaning my furnishing outlay was near nil (the other 25% I already possessed). I’ve been conditioned by experience to know that if I need a new X, it’s often worthwhile to ask around to see if anyone has a spare first…

…And Approval

Which is, unsurprisingly used as justification for their hoarding. But hell, that’s not the only encouragement going on – the last decade’s surge in ideas about ‘the circular economy’, ‘upcycling’ and all that is just more fuel for the fire. In this case, I’ll argue that the message has hit the wrong targets; the ‘make do and mend’ campaigns was aimed at folks who’d dispose of a shirt rather than replace a button, not the ones who already had old chocolate tins filled with enough buttons to fill a donation bucket and once made a pair of trousers out of two old pairs.

This has led to the rise of a new sub-species; the ‘green hoarder’. On the surface they look just like the poverty type, but their motivations are different; while the poverty one might hold on to loads of old towelling because it might come in useful, the green one does so because they feel obligated to stop things going to ‘waste’. They’re a phenomenon which I feel require their own post one day, so will leave that topic after giving one simple ‘maxim for identification’ – if your ‘subject’ will allow you to take things off their hoards to use yourself, then they’re much more a green sub-species.

Treatment?

As I’ve hopefully shown, a lot more of us have ‘hoarding instincts’ than we’d personally admit; after all, my own home isn’t packed out with crap yet I still had my ‘shoelace dilemma’. Plus, I bet I have a fair amount of stuff which I don’t think I’d really miss. But like say, alcoholism, we only feel ‘there’s a problem’ when it actually starts to impinge on our lives or more commonly the lives of others.

Problem is, the ‘normal’ hoarding treatments will be not that effective on us. Our hoards are generally not obvious shit, which precludes a ‘skip solution’. They’re also relatively logical; my dilemma was driven by a desire to not waste it, not any warped emotional attachment to it due to not getting any love as a kid or something.

This is why the best self-help I’ve done is to accept I have the poverty mentality. Like some old folks who lived through the era of rationing, I unconsciously feel the need to be ‘thrifty’. A usable, decent item with the line ‘it’s free!’ is difficult to resist (and I normally only managed it in the past because my flat is so small), and my eye is seemingly always on the prowl for ‘bargains’. Being mindful of my own problem means I should be better-able to consciously overrule it. Hopefully.

The other possible solution is to volunteer in the rear of a charity shop for a while. I found doing that to be quite a decent antidote to the mentality; mainly due to the fact some 80% of the items they have are basically, shit, crap and tat and spending long hours in a hugely cluttered, dusty room with poor ventilation can make you hate ‘stuff’ quite quickly.

As everything on this blog, merely my own thoughts and opinions. Part of my Essays series.

Riding The Third Wave!

So, apparently it’s full speed ahead for a complete ending of coronavirus restrictions on the 19^th of July; at this point two weeks and one day hence. The signs are obvious; it’s been leaked, Government Ministers have been talking about shit like ‘personal responsibility’ about masks and Johnson has a big announcement lined up for tomorrow. Yay! It’s all ended, didn’t we do so well? Don’t look at the massive deathtoll, or the fact we seem to have scored worst in the general response in the whole of Europe save perhaps Belarus. But…we’re doing well in the footie! Nice weather is here! Horray for us! Boris, our mate doing a moronic thumbs up at us on a big stonking flag, to ‘connect’ with us plebs! Quite coincidently, I wrote about how this government likes to create false, lying narratives literally a year ago to the day. Which slightly worryingly, was the last time they tried to pull this stunt and well… we know how it turned out last time.

Now, a lot from last year’s post applies again here, so I won’t do you a disservice by recycling content (simply giving you another link to read it yourself instead) so I will merely mention new stuff.

It’s quite clear; we’re in the ‘Third Wave’, but it is a rather strange wave. Deaths are still very low, and hospitalisations are thankfully still low when compared to the level of known infection out there. And the majority of this is down to the vaccine rollout; it’s stopping deaths and hospitalisations and blunting transmission and infection (for vaccines don’t make you immune). Most of the folks being infected now appear to be the young (under 30s and teenagers). Luckily, they’re the ones also less likely to die from the infection.

Plan A, Redux.

This means the emergency is over, in the government’s mind – this much I’m sure of. ‘An emergency’ in this case being ‘something which could cost us the next election’. ‘NHS obviously collapsing’ is clearly one of these, along with ‘the nations care homes turned into mortuaries’. Now these two scenarios have been removed, this means it’s ‘time to live with the virus’.

What’s more, the key Tory demographics – the old, the rich and the suburban – are not only the ones highest vaccinated, but also the ones most likely to be able to continue doing virus-limitation strategies, like homeworking if they so desire. This means that now coronavirus is merely a massive nuisance to them; they want to go on holidays, theatres and suchlike.

The groups poised to ‘take it on the chin’ are the ones who don’t vote Tory anyway, so their opinions are worthless. Let the nations twenty-somethings wheeze and stagger with ‘Long Covid’; I’m sure most are just faking it. Need to keep those kids in classes, ‘cos otherwise their parents might have to miss work to look after them. Speaking of which, our landlord mates are sad, so back to the office for you all cubicle-drones! All the previous support was so massively expensive, and now ‘there’s no money left’ when we all trudge back to the coal-face.

The Tories are back, in all their disgusting glory. Time to ride that wave, back to ‘normality’ where everything is exactly like it was in 2019 and we oiks forget any ‘silly ideas’ the pandemic gave us, like flexible work conditions, not being plagued with presenteeism and public services actually getting decent funding and respect.

Instead, we’ll get more lies, more Austerity, more flags and more culture war. And hoping the Tory voters are either too stupid, too blind or too selfish to notice/care for the damage being inflicted on those ‘other people’.

Yet… I’m not so sure that’s going to work.

As everything on this blog, merely my own thoughts and opinions. Part of my Covid Pandemic series.

Manipulation By: Confected Emotions?

Like all Britons not residing in a hermit’s shack in the Outer Hebrides, I’ve had to live through the recent death of Prince Philip, and the associated aftermath such as the funeral. And as prompted by the coverage, I’ve ‘reflected’ on this. Though perhaps not in the way they were intending.

First, the fact that everyone becomes a ‘good person’ in death, unless you’re a complete shitlord (and the bar is really high here). It’s a kind of personality car-wash; Philip went from being a reactionary, crotchety relic to being a merely ‘colourful character’ by simple dint of becoming deceased. However, at least this phenomenon is pretty common with any public figure on their death, not just a ‘Royal Thing’.

That part was shown by the massive amount of media attention lavished on the man once he’d died. Okay, he had a very long career, yes – but a career as what, exactly? Sixty-plus years as a highly skilled glad-hander, ‘Looker At Things’, playing the host, utterer of (usually) platitudes and wielder of ribbon-scissors and velvet pulleys – to his credit, he made a few self-deprecating comments regarding the last part over the years. It’s not a job that just anyone could do – credit where it’s due – but it’s not a job which nobody else could do either.

There were the charities, of course. Though I’ve long doubted the actual value of Royal ‘contributions’ such as patronage – and well, some others did too, crunched the numbers and it doesn’t look good. Which makes sense, really; when you consider that Philip had 750 of them under his belt at one point – it’s massively doubtful he could have really done much for most of them even with a large, well-equipped personal office to back him up. Instead, it’s noted that the few charities which did actually get any real ‘personal attention’ from their Royal patron were normally the ones they’d set up themselves.

Hey, don’t get me wrong; the charities they’d personally dealt with and bankrolled – they’ve gone good for wider society. Though let us remember that we (as in the taxpayers) are paying them to do that ‘charity’ work. Which in my book makes it their job. But for the others… well, it’s not much more than allowing their name to be on the letterheads of the charity. When you consider that, the average Royal isn’t that different than the celeb doing product placement.

But, all in all – what did Prince Philip mean to me? To be honest, not much. I had never met him, his influence never really touched my life. He was in my eyes a representative of a Britain that I never really liked, certainly never supported and was more redolent of my grandparent’s day than mine. His death did not really elicit any actual emotions.

What’s more, quite a slice of the British people felt the same way.

Unless you got your information from the media, that is.

A Tale From The Minority?

The death showed the British media at their most fawning, servile and biased; performing feats of reporting so one-sided the broadcasters would have been heavily fined if it had been any other time. But no, because it was all about him, it was perfectly fine to present hagiographies masquerading as impartiality, to set out to manipulate the public mood into a more ‘correct’ sombre one. Well, I don’t like being told what to feel one bit, and the fact my opinions were being completely denied just pisses me off.

Now, you can say that my indifference towards the deceased was irrelevant in this case. He was, like it or not, a well-known, important man. His death was news, something not edited to suit your personal preferences. And not only does dumping on the dead look like sour grapes, in the grand scheme of things the opinions of some rando nobody carries almost nil weight.

On this, I’ll retort that much of what we saw was not news, but opinion. There was no counterpoint to the tweed-skinned sycophantic ‘Royal Expert’ bleating on how Philip was the greatest Briton of the modern age. Nor was there much escape from the wall-to-wall coverage on his death; yes, it was news, but not a developing story – did we really need to keep hearing a confirmation that Philip was in fact, still dead every ten minutes? Was there a risk he’d become less dead or something?

That was the ultimate crime. Coverage so thick it was almost impossible to avoid, making me be conscious of an institution I neither cared for or approved of. A decent amount of the continued survival of the Royal Family relies on the ability to easily ignore them if you didn’t give a toss – clearly, the whole thing pissed me off enough to write a post about it.

Royal Auntie

If the coverage on the other channels was bad enough, nothing beat the coverage by the BBC, perhaps excepting the media of North Korea. All radio stations folded into Radio 4, even local radio. The feed from the News channel simulcast on both BBC1 and 2, while 4 was shut down with a card telling you to watch the coverage. A ticker on CBBC, telling people to turn over. Even the football and cricket coverage was pulled.

Then it continued. Through Friday, into Saturday. Then, to a somewhat lesser extent, into Sunday. Problem was, there was almost no ‘new’ news to tell the people – so it was just looped content. It went from overkill to almost farcical.

And intensely boring. The BBC lost perhaps 24% of it’s entire audience share, not including the secret numbers of BBC4 viewers who could watch a blank screen instead. ITV1 lost some 60% of their usual share with their equally arse-licky coverage, though at least they allowed the other ITV channels to continue unmolested. Channel 4 and 5, both who ran stripped-down coverage of death, actually gained viewers.

It was this coverage which generated the lion’s share of the 110,000 complaints to the BBC. People didn’t understand why three channels had to be folded into one – this was 2021, any TV in the country could show BBC News if so desired. Or the omnipresent looped content. The stats don’t lie; Britons – perhaps for the first time since the 1960s – turned away from their TVs at a time of national ‘tragedy’.

Finding Fault?

Not that this mattered to the blinkered, right-wing hacks in the media and politics. Anyone who complained clearly hated all the Royals and objected to any coverage. It’s hard enough to try to separate the two concepts of ‘patriotism’ and ‘royalism’ in this country, but after Philip’s death it became almost impossible. And that’s why the BBC went with the such demented coverage.

They knew they were acting stupidly – but they’re scared of the Johnson Government, of their legions of ‘anti-Woke’ loons, the shits trying to stir up a ‘culture war’ over anything and everything – for we live in a world where the Conservatives continue to morph into the American Republicans, which is now powered by not policy, but the creation and exploitation of voter’s fear, loathing and anger.

As I’ve explained before, the BBC is one of the final blockages to a completely tame British media-scape, which is why Johnson and his backers/controllers are looking at any way to strangle, starve, geld or silence it – by tactics fair or fail. And they know from Brexit that when it comes to the blinkered flag-wavers out there, things like ‘facts’ are actually rather irrelevant – they will believe what they are told to believe, and not even high explosives will shift them from an idea set in mental concrete.

So they went overboard, as a defence mechanism. To be so arse-licky to the Royals not the most salty of gammon could find fault of Auntie’s coverage as ‘far left / unpatriotic’. But facts are irrelevant in the land of ‘confected outrage’, so they highlighted the fact people could complain as evidence of ‘bias’.

The BBC executives can lean back in their chairs with a secret smug smile at the figures and complaints – for it wasn’t their fault that perhaps the majority of Britons are either indifferent or hostile to All Things Royal. They did their job; pacifying their masters – the Government.

As everything on this blog, merely my own thoughts and opinions. Part of my Essays series.

Is ‘Junk Food’ Actually The Problem?

While all elected politicians do this to some extent, Johnson may be one of the most prolific British giver of what I’ll term ‘drunk promises’ to date; in the ‘heat of the moment’ they’re thrown out, only to be quickly buried and pretended they never were uttered. Case in point; the slurred ‘I love the NHS’ while sick with Covid last year, now sober ticks off the insultingly low 1% rise for said staff (with the implied byline that they should be grateful for that much; okay, it’s a red rag to a bull here, but why should they be grateful to have a paypacket which declines in real value? At a time they’re massively understaffed?).

Anyway, one of the ‘drunk promises’ Johnson is apparently planning to slither out of is the series of restrictions on advertising of ‘junk food’, such as a ban on pre-watershed TV advertising (a ‘totally radical idea’ from people who still think kids watch TV like, well I did in the ’90s) as part of his anti-obesity drive related to said Covid. Call me a cynic, but I suspect the fact it’s being destined for the axe (for this government rules by leak; float the balloon a few days early, and unless it’s utterly destroyed, do it) is primarily from the astute lobbying from said food manufacturers and distributors, who are perhaps one of the most potent of lobby groups in the current age.

Yet I’m not actually that annoyed at that, oddly enough. And I feel I need to explain why; after all, I am one who is interested in politics, sociology, economics, fitness and the interplay between them all.

Sinister Quotation Marks?

Ah, the humble quote mark, rendering the honest into ‘honest’, and immediately flipping it’s meaning. But why use it for junk food, you ask? The answer is simple; the term is in fact undefined, relatively meaningless and a pejorative.

What is junk food? That’s the first problem, there is no set definition. It suffers from a ‘I know it when I see it’ syndrome, which is not that bad when applied to Real Life^TM (if the person has a half-decent understanding of nutrition) but frankly sucks when designing say, government policy.

The issue in a nutshell is that any system designed to target ‘junk food’ ends up creating both ‘false positives’ (‘good’ labelled ‘bad’), and ‘false negatives’ (vice-versa). That is, the things which are assumed to be ‘junk’ and not. Cheese, beef, pork and many nuts are generally assumed to be ‘good’ (or at least ‘neutral’) but often can be dragged into the junk bracket by (usually) it’s fat content, yet ‘zero calorie’ soft drinks manage to dodge that bullet – a situation exacerbated by the crappy nutritional ‘traffic lights’ used in the UK. Yet no sane nutritionist would advise you consume less apples and more Coke Zero.

This whole fuzziness is noted by one of the editors of the book Panic Nation, who pointed out that “to label a food as ‘junk’ is just another way of saying, ‘I disapprove of it’.”. ‘Fast food’ is often conflated with ‘junk’ too; but while a lot of the former is also the latter, the two groups are not identical – and fast food itself is a pejorative term.

Unstated Conclusions?

The above leads to a depressingly predictable situation; once you’ve divided ‘good’ from ‘bad’, you then make the rather short jump to stating that these ‘bad’ consumables are to blame for obesity, diabetes, hypertension and so on – a situation any overweight person as encountered at least once (‘you should eat less cake’ and so on), often frequently. Sometimes even from people who should know better, like medical personnel.

This is a fallacy which is strong within current Western society, even amongst many overweight people themselves. That’s part of the reason for this post; this tendency worries me – and not for the whole ‘health at all sizes’ fat apologia, or even the reasonable issue that fat-shaming itself doesn’t work in getting people to lose weight. Just the simple reason that it is wrong, and it is counter-productive.

I know this, because I fell into this very fallacy myself.

My ‘Nutrition Theatre’

After I came to the point that I recognised that something had to be done regarding my weight and unfitness three years ago, I followed many of the actions the ‘stop eating cake’ crowd would have urged; no more takeaways, crisps, pies, pastry items, sugary drinks and other ‘bad’ things (well, mainly. Nobody is perfect and well, I lapsed). However, I made the assumption that the ‘good’ things were, well good. Naturally, some of the things I thought were good were in fact, not.

The problem with this is the simple fact that a calorie is a calorie. Your body does not overly care that it came from a slice of ‘bad’ cake or a bowl of ‘good’ fruit; if it does not require that calorie right now it will save it as body fat. Which is why I didn’t lose much weight in the first year (in fact, not sure if I lost any); for my portion sizes were all wrong, with far too much calorie dense foods like cheese, nuts, pulses and soft fruits.

This is where the diet comes under strain. If you are following the advice of the ‘stop eating cake’ crowd but are not shifting the weight, not only does this dishearten but also means you’ll continue being harassed by said crowd, who will suspect you buy whole gateaux for secret feastings when out of sight. And this can create a very unhealthy, adversarial relationship with food. And this is an ‘enemy’ which you can’t avoid, either.

Three years later, I still have issues. I’ve only lost between 6-8 kg in weight from my peak (not sure exactly what it was, as I didn’t have any scales at the start), and I’m aware that my portion sizes (of generally ‘good’ or at least ‘neutral’ foods) are simply too large for a weight-loss diet, which is needed because my BMI and other indicators show that I do need to shed another 6kg or so to get out of the ‘overweight’ section for good.

(However, to not be too hard on myself here, the fat/muscle ratios continued to shift, exemplified by the fact I lost a few centimetres around the waist but not weight. I also managed to give up smoking and get through this pandemic without gaining any weight too, which is not to be sniffed at. But better can be achieved!)

Blame & Stereotype

When you look at the situation from this angle, you realise that the whole situation is skew-whiff. That the ‘junk food advert ban’, or even things like ‘fat taxes’ are based on the premise that the ballooning British waistline is primarily caused by overindulgent parents showering their bloated children with sugary treats, ignorant men stuffing themselves with two-gallon cartons of fast food and piggy women sitting on sofas with family tubs of ice-cream. That ‘incessant snacking’ is the primary issue, then ‘too much fast food’.

Yet… have you ever met such people, in the flesh? Sure, I’ve seen child-sized lard-tubs with their hands on packet of crisps, chocolate bars and sugary drinks, but I’ve also seen thin children with them too. That in my experience, for every person demolishing entire packets of chocolate shortbread daily there’s five or more overweight people consuming what appears (to the ‘stop eating cake’ brigade, at least) to be a relatively sane and ‘normal’ diet.

The truth – I suspect – is that these junk-food gorgers don’t really exist. Or more correctly, only exist in small amounts, the 500-pound manatees who are cut out of buildings to see Dr Nowzaradan via flatbed truck (gratuitous images of them getting drive-thru en route shown, naturally) for the freak shows masquerading as television documentaries.

These portray the extreme end of things, not the normal reality of the majority; but people are falling for the ‘script’ shot for them to sneer at – and then assume all overweight people are lazy, lack self-control, needy, whiny and stupid. And in a classic case of cognitive dissonance, a lot of overweight people themselves believe this… in those who are not them.

The Majority Problem

Is simple enough – most Britons simply consume too many calories for our energy needs, and perhaps for the majority of us, it is via not junk or even fast food, but the ‘starchy carbohydrate’ which forms the backbone of most diets – the potatoes, the breads, pasta, rice and so on. That we do not look on them as inherently ‘bad’, for they are neither larded with saturated fat or pumped full of sugar.

These are the staples, particularly in poorer British homes; they are cheap, they are filling and they usually have long shelf-lives. ‘A load of stodge’ can be a fairly accurate descriptor of many of the cheaper foodstuffs made – I have in my mind a ‘frozen chicken pie’ where the filling was two tiny cubes of meat, five peas and lots of gravy. Or my ‘year of pain’ when I lived on £7.50 a week.

In this case, converting from the processed, polished whiteness to the ‘naturalness’ of the higher-fibre, ‘wholegrain’ options is of limited utility; switching from white to wholewheat fusilli (for example) offers a doubling of fibre (to 10%) and a reduction of calorific intake (per 100g) by around 15%. Yet only four handfuls of the stuff still tots up to be 7% of the energy requirements for an ‘average’ person – and we may be tempted to have more of it than normally because it’s ‘got good fibre’ and is ‘low GI’!

I have seen many a health advice telling us to switch to wholegrains, for good reasons. But I’ve seen not enough stressing that if weight reduction is desired, chances are these will need to be trimmed. That bit of extra fibre does not make those calories vanish.

Not Scot Free…

Now, I am not saying that snacky crap, takeaways and premade meal ‘solutions’ are blameless from the issue of obesity – in fact, they are a major contributor to it – merely arguing the case that it is wrong to vilify them as the sole cause of it. That in many cases, they are the ‘low hanging fruit’ which can be targeted first if weight loss is desired. But that they can have a part of a good, wholesome diet as long as they are merely occasional.

But we must go beyond the monochrome ‘bad’ and ‘good’ labels for foodstuffs. To realise that it’s as possible to get fat on ‘good’ as much it is to lose weight on ‘bad’. To get away from the dated assumptions, biased stereotypes or just plain bollocks which is leading us to have a kind of ‘nutritional myopia’ where we’re getting hung-up on a bar of chocolate but ignoring everything else.

And to realise the truth of the matter; when it comes down to it, the ‘bad’ foodstuff is the one which is delivering the nutrients you do not need.

As everything on this blog, merely my own thoughts and opinions. Part of my Essays series.

How Physical Education Failed Me

When I close my eyes, think ‘PE lessons’ and let my mind freewheel, the first memory is always ‘changing rooms’. I suspect it’s this way for a lot of people; for while your school PE lessons usually involved different sports and/or teachers, the seemingly mandatory fitness rituals started and ended here.

The sweaty fug, the echoey walls, the slightly sticky floors with the overlay of mud and dirt, haphazardly swept. Worn wooden benches, not enough space – reminders that your school is double the size it was originally designed to be. The smell of feet and cheap deodorant, sight of parts of youthful body. Teenagers talking, banging of boots, the background dripping of that shower-head which is forever leaking, the yell of Jones the teacher, chasing out the laggards with all apparent pleasure of playing the martinet. Glances at a few of your compatriots; the kid having to wear the crap out of the lost property box, that one you vaguely find attractive, the one you’re jealous of and that ‘oddity’ – the one really tall / short / fat / hairy / whatever.

From the distance of twenty-odd years, the ‘problem’ that the changing-rooms posed doesn’t seem that bad. But then I remember the lengths I went to; making sure I wore ‘right’ underwear, doing my best to get the peg in that spot which offered a bit of privacy, developing a manner of changing which led to the minimum of shown flesh and so on – I wouldn’t have done these things unless if the young me had felt it necessary to do so. Which leads to the questioning on whether the ‘mature perspective’ is nothing more than personal revisionism, where we edit our memories to provide a narrative which isn’t so depressing or painful.

One memory – or more correctly, series of memories – is firmly rooted in my mind, however. That I hated PE and all it’s works. The fact that this loathing still echoes over two decades showing me just how much I despised it at the time.

A Collage Of Failure

From balancing on a beam to catching a ball, via running a race to skipping; I sucked, bad. As a young kid, I wasn’t particularly unfit, but my physical body wasn’t really conducive to athletic performance; left-handed (this is more a cramp than you’d think), poor eyesight, crooked toes, weak ankles and a poorly-healed injury. In a way, it was the worst of both worlds; defective enough to make sporting accomplishment a non-starter, but not actually in a diagnosed manner which would stop Mr Jones and all his ilk from shouting at me for being crap, lazy or whatever. Or simply get me off ‘games’, period. (What a load of propaganda, that is. Making it sound like fun of some form).

I’m not mentioning this for any sympathy bollocks, but to make a point; that if I’d been a poor performer in a ‘real subject’ like maths, any remotely competent teacher would have looked to the reasons for the continued failure (or should have), instead of simply blaming the kid. Having old Mrs Smith bellowing at me to ‘do the reading, try harder!’ like any problem can be surmounted by sheer willpower alone is both stupid and counter-productive – yet we seemingly consider this acceptable behaviour from a PE teacher.

Teaching Fails

In fact, there’s a quite a lot of the tradecraft of the PE teacher which is objectionable in some form. The first glaring one being the general absence of motivational skill. Teaching is both a science and an art form, and much of it is to get kids who don’t overly want to learn to do so. This is an attribute which is seemingly lost on the average PE teacher, who’s attended the ‘Drill Sergeant School of Persuasion’ and is pissed off when smart-arse students learn how to do the bare minimum but they’re not allowed to belt anyone.

Then there’s the lack of teaching skill. That is, when they actually tried to teach you anything – all I got was the rudiments of perhaps a half-dozen competitive sports and a few ‘field events’ thrown in at the end of summer term as a kind of pièce de résistance. That’s about it. Oh, and ‘cross-country’; the ultimate ‘filler activity’, doing laps of a muddy field, normally while Jones is standing there with a cup of tea and a clip-board.

Looking back at this now, I can honestly say that my PE teachers didn’t impart a single item of information which proved useful in my adult life regarding health or fitness. Not even how to warm up properly. They can’t even take the credit for teaching me how to swim.

What’s more, their teaching was pointless. The ‘athletic types’ already knew how to play, say football so making them repeat rudiments was generally futile. The ones who did need the lessons were the kids to ‘didn’t care’ and thus, wouldn’t use it. The only good point about this was that the constant re-learning the same thing ate large gobs of time, which put off the day of reckoning. (And this wasn’t a ‘good’ point for the sporty kids who’d have loved to simply spent the whole lesson actually playing a ‘proper match’.).

Playing The Game?

Losing a game; well, it happens. Constantly losing games is bad. Constantly losing games because you’re crap is even worse. Having said crapness rubbed in your face on a weekly basis was the point I started to bunk off. Nobody finds constant defeat fun, and when you worship at the altar of the ‘competitive ethos’, you wonder why those who cannot compete simply withdraw from even attempting it.

This isn’t ‘snowflakery’ or some bollocks about wanting to ‘coddle kids from failure’, just simple common sense. Yes, I’m crap at [sport name] and what’s more, your half-dozen barely-taught ‘lessons’ are not going to impart enough either physical ability or technical skill to make me much better. Yet, you still expected me to run out there all bright-eyed and with a grin on my face? My memory is a touch hazy from the passage of time, but I’m sure I wasn’t either doped up with happy pills or a masochist.

Apparently, all this shit is ‘character forming’, at least at the public schools (yes, them!) much of the modern PE syllabus was copied from. Yet it doesn’t hold up at loser look because the very preachers of said lessons – the teacher – was usually rather suspicious types.

Of Questionable Character

The clear favouritism towards the athletic, for starters. Okay, I get (now) that you like sports and therefore will like others who also like sports and are good at it, but you’re supposed to be the teacher, not a rando fan who’s only got eyes for ‘people of the match’ or whatever.

Often this ‘blind eye’ is extended to include ignoring bullying; PE lessons being one of the best times to cause a bit of physical pain and then have it minimised or dismissed as ‘competitive spirit’ or ‘an accident’. Some of these are genuinely overlooked; after all, two eyes can’t watch all things at all times and if in a sporting event the context can be much more confusing. But I’ve also had teachers stare me down and announce my ‘story’ was in fact, a hallucination. In public, so everyone else knew I was a grass. Nice one, Jones.

Then there’s the pernickety obsession with rules. I’ll tell you this now; if my PE teachers had diverted the energy they expended on chasing up kids who didn’t shower or those wearing non-regulation kit and put it into actually teaching us, we’d have all been better off. What’s the lesson here, Jones? It’s more important to look the part than actually exercise? That athletic performance is directly linked to the colour of your socks? (think I’ve found the cause in designer gym-wear…). Or that it deeply wrong to want to wear a tracksuit instead of that horridly thin vest and shorts while doing cross-country in January?

Speaking of showering, did PE teachers ever actually think these things through? That having a communal showers with zero privacy (not even stall dividers), non-adjustable temperature (scalding hot or tepidly cold) and a smell of a urinal cake was bad enough for self-conscious teens in a country with little tradition of public nudity – but the kicker was that we students never had enough time to shower.

If I go full-pelt and cut all optionals, I can ‘turn-around’ in fifteen minutes after a workout session. Time allotted in lesson for this? Ten. Let’s also factor in that of the schools I was at, there was never a shower-head = student ratio better than one to four (often more). Therefore, the unlucky sods at the back could end up waiting the best part of thirty minutes (at least) for a shower to free up. That by this time, you’re already late for the next lesson (and the next PE class is already in the changing room) – or you’re eating into your own time. Like missing your bus home. Or your lunch-spot. Or just the pointless time-neurosis schools love to instil in their charges.

As you’ve kinda guessed; nobody had ‘proper’ showers. The teachers would check, but as this was done by looking at hair, this was easy to fake by simply wetting it a bit. I think I had one single shower in five years of compulsory PE – I do remember that my prop towel which lived in my locker got more use from hair-drying from rain-storms than it’s intended purpose.

Superficiality…

With the benefit of hindsight and a little bit of knowledge, I realise now just how shallow the PE ‘concepts’ were – that like it considered constant failure to be ‘character building’, it seemed to think that a half-hour of whipped, lacklustre physical activity twice a week to be the sufficient to stave off the ballooning obesity epidemic (which American studies have shown to be of minimal to no effect on the fighting the flab in kids). A situation which not only breeds stagnation and disinterest in the subject, but is so obviously stupid and devoid of logic that even the victims pupils point it out.

The obsession with ‘metrics’ – measurable results and so on – is also dangerously shallow. How fast, how long, how far etc. Is there even a point for the measuring? Normally, neither the teacher or pupil gives a crap about it – so why does it persist?

…and Harmfulness?

In fact, I would go as far to say that it is directly harmful for the pursuit of physical health. That it makes all too many people loathe ‘PE’ and all it’s works – not just at school, but for their whole adult lives. This ‘programming’ of hating fitness, fit people and anything that remotely resembled a PE teacher was a serious mental cramp which I had to get over before I started making real progress in This Thing Of Ours.

Even worse, Jones and their ilk failed to even impart any knowledge regarding health and fitness, the sort where even if I did not follow when 15, may refer back to when 35. No, Mr Jones – you left me completely ignorant of the subject. Your subject. Which was called ‘physical education’. You not only failed as a teacher and a coach, but also even as a cheerleader for the subject. In fact, my views of fitness would have been more positive if you’ve not existed at all.

And I know I’m not alone in this feeling.

Advocatus Diaboli?

Now, many of the above problems are out of the control of even the best PE teacher in the country. In times of budgetary squeeze, the curse of the ‘syllabus lock-in’ is even worse than usual; leading to schools offering the same old sports and activities because they cannot afford to buy new equipment, adapt facilities or offer ‘off-site lessons’. The classist result is obvious; the poor kids in the ‘sink estate’ schools miss experiencing the more ‘expensive’ or ‘specialist’ activities such as swimming, climbing, cycling or hiking – instead, ending up with the same four / five group sports again.

Even if an enterprising school is able to find the cash, it then runs slap-bang into the issues of Whitehall diktats; one which labours under the delusion that the above crappiness works. Then there’s the issue of efficiency; kudos is gained by winning on exam league tables, and PE achievement barely gets a look in on that. As a headteacher, I have all the incentive in the world to not only not invest extra into PE but to in fact, cut it back to the legally mandated minimum and focus my energies on ‘where it matters’.

Between these two, they become unsolvable headaches; PE doesn’t have enough time in the week do achieve much normally, will find it’s time cut further ‘when required’ (such as exam preparation) and there’s not enough staff to try to teach in ability groups, provide anything approximating ‘individual attention’ or merely give the students anything like a real choice of activity.

No wonder that we invariably end up with the lowest common denominator, one size fits none, statutory minimum, bargain-basement lessons – represented by the half-hearted jogging around the perimeter of muddy fields in the cold drizzle, while Jones shouts ‘encouragement’ under his umbrella warmly-dressed.

The Logical Conclusion?

Which may ultimately explain why Jones, his mentor Sudgen and all the others of his ilk continue to ply their ‘craft’ – because they do – even into the current age in schools throughout the UK and (I suspect) beyond. They survive cause few care about this state of affairs and even less can do anything about it.

This general lack of caring has allowed the incompetent, the burnt-out and the sociopathic teachers to remain (tainting the reputation of the subject), while their defects would have caused their dismissal years ago in any ‘important’ subject. In fact, the only thing we really care about from Jones is the assurance he’s not a paedophile. You’d think most parents would care more about their kid’s physical condition, but there you go.

Upwards, this ends up being replicated within government itself. The subject is not a ‘vote winner’, so it doesn’t get much priority on the ever-tightening budgetary constraints, unlike say, exam results. At best we can usually expect a tokenistic, symbolic ‘strategy’; – a spending announcement (which usually turns out to be peanuts or no ‘new’ money at all), a week’s PR campaign (a speech or two, and the obligatory shot of the Minister at a sports academy or something), a ‘pack’ which will usually combine the anodyne, the current fads and the party’s predilections, then quietly buried when the news cycle moves on to something else.

The biggest issue is perhaps the fact of governmental ‘compartmentalisation’ and buck-passing; Education doesn’t want to spend cash on an issue which ultimately benefits the health of adults, Health reasons it’s not their job to spend cash on schools, Youth Services explains their relatively minuscule budgets are already ‘too tight’ to fund these things and the myopic cost-benefit analysis from the Treasury makes extra cash a non-starter.

Zombie PE?

The combination of all the above factors leaves physical education in a kind of undead state; too ‘liked’ to be killed off, not liked enough to be given the resources it desperately needs to do anything properly. The ‘liking’ of it is not even true; more the principle of PE is liked, rather than the reality. To paraphrase Sir Humphrey; spending on school PE is symbolic of the government’s desire to increase fitness and tackle obesity amongst the youth – it’s not really expected to actually achieve much.

And the vast majority of PE teachers know this. Chances are, they’re taken for granted, skills disrespected, assumed that as they ‘don’t teach a proper subject’ they’re free to do the thankless tasks and more than anything else, their goodwill is exploited. And whenever you end up in situations like this, the most skilled people are the ones who leave for greener pastures – for fee-paying schools, health clubs, sports academies, gyms or out of the sector entirely.

The Moral Of This Story…

Is that Jones and his ilk survive because not because they’re any good – but because they’re the only ones who’ll stick it out, which means they’re tolerated. The toleration comes because not enough people care about it enough to really change the situation. And that as in anything in this world, the rule ‘you get what you pay for’ is pretty accurate.

Jones is the symptom, not the cause. To improve PE, you would need to not just remove the Jones of the world, but to construct a system where you employ people better than him.

As everything on this blog, merely my own thoughts and opinions. Part of my Essays series.

Right To Repair?

So, in a action which independent repair staff, greenies and frugalities will all celebrate, the European Union’s new ‘Right to Repair’ legislation will come into force; which the UK had agreed back in 2019 to copy (though it’s somewhat irrelevant even if the UK hadn’t, as we’re lumped under the ‘European bloc’ with supply chains).

Normally, I don’t cover news reports but this one I feel is both of sufficient interest and was lost within the noise of a rather busy news weekend to be worth talking about. Plus, what reports I saw weren’t that great in the first place.

So, What Is It?

These new regulations, in a nutshell stipulate that consumer products – such as TVs, washing machines, refrigerators etc – must…

– Not be made in a manner which can’t be disassembled using ‘normal tools’. Example; no more sealing product within a plastic case which can’t be removed without breaking it.

– Have repair manuals made freely accessible.

– Spare parts to be supplied for at least ten years.

Naturally, these are regulations which the appliance industry fought tooth and nail against – with good reason. And the ultimate reason is utterly predictable.

In It For The Money

Firstly, most companies have a vested interest in you buying more of their product, and to be frank well-made, durable items simply don’t carry the margins, like I noted with disposable razors last year.

The main problem is of reverse ‘false economies’; the person who pays £40 for a pair of cheap shoes that last a year isn’t usually going to spend £400 on a pair that lasts ten – let’s say they only spend £300. If the ‘profit margin’ for both shoes are equal (say 10%) this means the ‘cheap shoes’ generate £40 of profit in a decade, while the ‘expensive shoes’ generate £30.

Bad for the planet, bad for you – but good for business, no?

The other side is that of the very lucrative ‘aftermarket’. That when the company deigns to make the product repairable (which is a must for some big-ticket items, like say cars) it looks to ways to limit or completely eliminate the competition. Warring against the independent repairer, making stupid warranty claims, having private supply chains, making all the parts proprietary and so on. Meaning that you’re forced to trudge to the ‘authorised service’ people, who more often than not will leave you with a massive bill only marginally less than the original cost of purchase. Or to be told it’s ‘uneconomic to repair’ (as in; the company has made it so).

This is predictable, when you end up with a free market without the aspect of free competition.

A Limited Victory?

I’m not going to dump on this victory – for it finally enshrines a principle of the ‘right to repair’ in EU law – but it is very limited in scope.

There’s a myriad of products – most notably phones and laptops – not covered in the directive. It doesn’t say that the spare parts need to be of reasonable cost, or does it allow generic copies of said parts to compete on price or quality. Lastly, it doesn’t actually demand that the product’s designed life-span (ie before repairs are needed) must be increased.

Unintended Consequences?

One thing which nobody in the professional media noticed is the fact that this directive will make unit costs for said appliances higher at the bottom end of the market. Good products – like my £300 shoes above – are usually already made in a manner which facilitates repair and are usually long-supported by the manufacturer. However, it’s de facto made my £40 shoes illegal as they aren’t designed to be repaired.

Naturally, this will hurt people on low incomes disproportionately, similar to when the energy-efficient lightbulbs came along around twenty years ago and they found their ‘lighting costs’ going from around 50p a bulb to £4.00. This is an classist aspect of the coming ‘green revolution’ which has not been really addressed yet which I discuss in more detail here.

On the other hand, this directive may in fact rejuvenate the second-hand consumer goods market, something which has generally been dying for some thirty years – I mean, when was the last time you saw a TV repairman? The car market can be cited here; build quality has generally improved hugely in said decades, but even then not that many people buy new cars and run them all the way to the scrap-heap – in fact, the normal life-cycle is usually three or four owners before it’s in auto heaven.

A Changing Model?

This is the ultimate goal for the ‘circular economy’; in which items such as appliances are maintained, repaired and upgraded over their lifetime, which is measured in decades. A world of more hand-me-down appliances, used emporiums and the independent repair personnel.

The problem is that this is in direct contradiction of consumerist capitalism, and it cuts a lot of corners to make it ‘affordable’ for poorer consumers, such as sweatshops and planned obsolescence. Even something more ethically neutral as ‘economies of scale’ will be hurt in a world because it’s obvious that if you extended the standard lifespan of televisions from 5 to 10 years, the yearly demand for them will be half than before.

Yet, consumer mindsets need to change too. There’s so much stigma regarding second-hand items (generally) which means that, say a company trying to sell used white goods would have a rather tough job of it right now. And not all of this is due to consumerist propaganda stoking demand for ‘new stuff’ – but genuine scepticism of quality, remaining life-span and product support.

And while the European directive won’t sort all this out alone, it’s a start in the right direction.

As everything on this blog, merely my own thoughts and opinions – save the paragraph regarding shoes, which is adapted from Terry Pratchett’s ‘Vimes Boots Theory‘. Part of my Frugality series.