Occam's chainsaw

I loathe Michael Gove, but I have to say I am often grateful to him for clarifying what it is I do and don't believe. It isn't quite as simple as saying that 'Gove says it therefore it is wrong' (though that is an entirely reasonable starting point), it is more a question of the faux-reasonable and pseudo-intellectual style in which he pontificates provoking a stronger than usual reaction in me.

Take his recent performance as chair of the new commons 'Brexit' committee in which he "pressed experts on how the UK could achieve a “quickie divorce” with the EU regardless of the economic consequences, as he raised concerns that civil servants were over-complicating the process." Clearly proud of his erudition he invoked the image of Occam's razor as the tool to be used in this sort of debate. And something about the posiness of that reference really got me thinking.

Occam's razor (named after the English Franciscan friar of that name) is the scientific principle that simpler hypotheses are preferable to more complex ones, and that therefore scientists should seek to reduce rather than increase complexity in their hypotheses. Michael Gove, clearly delighted by this idea, sought to apply it to the Brexit process, and why not? Throughout the referendum campaign he and his colleagues sought again and again to reduce the complexity of the arguments involved until they essentially came down to one sentence: "Take back control." Control over what was never clearly defined, and neither were the mechanisms by which this amorphous control was to be regained, nor the other consequences that might ensue. Occam's razor, see! Everything else could be left as vague and unspecified assertions about immigration, £350 million a week, new trading opportunities, return to pounds and ounces... anything you want really.

The thing is, of course, that that is not remotely how William of Occam intended his philosophical razor to be used. The point for him was that simpler hypotheses are better because they are MORE EASILY TESTABLE. Gove and his cronies have used their version of the razor to achieve the exact opposite. By airily dismissing any discussion of any of the intrinsic complexities of the questions in hand they have come up with sweeping generalisations that almost by definition can never be tested. When will we know that, as a country, we have 'taken back control?' The only way literally to achieve that would be to remove ourselves from any and all trans-national agreements (the UN, NATO, the International Criminal Court, the Commonwealth...), banish any and all multi-national companies from the UK and replace parliament with a system of rolling plebiscites, with everything from tax to street-lighting decided by referendum.

Is that what the Brexiteers were arguing for? Who knows. Maybe some were, but there is no way of knowing, and that's the point. Once a political aim becomes so simplistic and general that it is completely untestable then you can read into it whatever you want.

And it isn't just in the Brexit debate that this distorted Occam's razor has been weilded. Trump' campaign was all about simplistic, generalised and utterly untestable statements like "Drain the swamp" or "Make America great again." Even the apparently testable ones like "Build the wall" and "Lock her up" were really there as rallying cries rather than statements of intended policy, as Trump's rowing-back since the election has made clear.

And there is a wider seam of this sort of stuff that goes way beyond election politics. I happened to come across a Facebook argument between my brother (a mathematician and scientist) and various climate change deniers. My brother's posts were long (sometimes overlong, to be fair), thorough, nuanced and well researched. What he was often met with was memes. I happened across the same phenomenon in the bizarre world of the flat-earthers and wrote about it here.

But what Michael Gove, with his faux-philosophical intervention on the subject, prompted me to realise was that occam's razor remains a very useful image in these circumstances. A razor is a tool one uses with circumspect precision to remove hairy irrelevances to reveal the living essence of the person (or issue). Once a razor has been applied properly (and carefully) one can see clearly who or what one is dealing with, and so come to sensible and robust conclusion about them. What Gove, Farage, Trump, the flat-earthers and their like are wielding is what I would like to call occam's chainsaw. By recklessly destroying all complexity, relevant or irrelevant, from an issue and reducing it to puddle of minced flesh suitable to be formed into a meme they remove any possibility of any further debate. How are you supposed to argue with "take back control" or "make America great again"?

However the converse of this is also clear. Just as one should never, under any circumstances, use a chainsaw to shave with, so one should immediately reject any response to a complex issue which reduces it to a meme.

Or, to express that as a meme:

So, are Trump and Brexit the internet's fault then?

It goes without saying that there has been a troubling sea-change in the way politics is done (in the UK and the US anyway) over the last few months. The question is, why? Of course, populist demagoguery and the appeal to the lowest common denominator of mysogyny and racial and religious prejudice are hardly new, and neither is the phenomenon of post-truth politics . It's just that in the past it has taken conditions like the collapse of the Weimar Republic to bring them to the fore. And though there has been an economic downturn since the global financial crash, people aren't yet having to take a barrowload of banknotes to the shops to buy a pound of potatoes.

So why have the electorate turned their faces so vehemently against 'experts' and 'the establishment' that they are prepared to support people who are saying things that would not long ago have been unthinkable? And I don't just mean Trump's offensiveness towards women, the disabled, muslims and even PoWs, Johnson's racial slur on the President of the USA or Farage's Breaking Point poster. There is their utter disregard for normal standards of truth and honesty and their willingness to threaten political violence if they don't get their way (both Farage and Trump have explicitly warned of, and even encouraged, people taking to the streets if their agenda is frustrated). There is their willingness to talk in ludicrously broad terms of what they are going to achieve without the slightest attempt at formulating policies for doing so. Their willingness to whip their electorate up with promises they have absolutely no intention of delivering on.

Not so long ago these people (Trump, Farage, Johnson, Gove and others) would have become political pariahs for the way they have behaved - banished to the wastebin of political history like Nick Griffin, Jean-Marie le Pen or Ross Perot (all of whom would probably in 2016 be seen as rather conservative with a small c). So what has changed?

Is it ludicrous to suggest that the growth of the internet and social media holds part of the explanation? You see it used to be that the general electorate had an extremely unequal relationship with the political establishment. Political leaders were part of a secret world to which we, the electorate, had no real access and whose denizens knew far better than we did what was wrong with the world and how to put it right. You could protest of course, and many did, but you would never really know what went on in the corridors of power and never fully grasp the hugely complex levers of power that these people wielded.

The internet has changed all that. There is wikileaks of course, exposing the soiled underwear of that political establishment for all to see. But there's also Twitter and the like. Time was that political leaders pontificated on the BBC news and all you could do was shout at the television. Now political leaders have twitter accounts and your tweets are allowed exactly the same number of characters as theirs. It's like the scene at the end of the Wizard of Oz when the curtain gets pulled back to reveal the funny little man operating the machinery.

But the other thing that twitter does is allow (encourage even) strident and simplistic comments to be instantly disseminated with no real challenge. Time was, if a politician wanted to say any of the things Trump has put in his tweets they would have to do it either on TV or in parliament, and there they would be subject to more or less effective questioning and made to explain or justify their remarks. On twitter, that simply doesn't happen in the same way. Social media operates as a series of 'echo chambers' within which people generally hear repeated and amplified messages with which they are already inclined to agree. And if there is any voice of dissent it can quickly descend into a 'he said, she said' twitter storm that really doesn't hold anyone to account.

And it seems to me that this provides fertile ground for the dissemination of the sort of populist, demagogic politics we see from Trump and the Brexiteers (now there's a name for an apocalyptic Death Metal band...). And once a movement like that starts in social media world it can be very hard both to gauge accurately and to stop. The normal standards of decent political discourse simply don't apply in social media echo chambers, and anyone interjecting with rational, fact-based or expert counter-arguments can easily be dismissed (and/or personally attacked) as establishment stooges or even 'enemies of the people.' And the left-wing liberals would never set foot in these sort of social media echo chambers anyway (they have their own) so such a movement can grow virtually unchecked.

So what can be done?

I have always felt that, in the long term at least, an increase in the ability of people to communicate directly with each other must be a good thing. However recent events have shown beyond doubt that removing too rapidly the governing mechanism of respect for political establishments has been extremely dangerous. And now the only thing to do is somehow offer and disseminate an alternative discourse with which at least some of the people currently caught up in demagogic populism can engage. We won't do it by lecturing either (which sort of rules me out!) The liberal left needs to develop memes and (non-sarky) tweets and snappy one-liners about the empowerment of ordinary citizens and the benefits of cultural cross-pollination and the enormous benefits that liberal democracy has brought.

We need clever people and young people and people whose minds haven't atrophied or solidified around crass simplifications about immigration and scroungers. Thankfully that's just what we've got. But they need not to disappear into their own comfortably outraged echo chambers but get out there and start repairing the damage.

Good luck with that.

Spare a thought for the Leave voters

There has been a lot of commentary in my particular social media echo chamber since Thursday on the topic of the despair felt by Remain voters since Thursday's EU referendum. However it is worth considering also how cheated and baffled many of those who voted Leave will be feeling over the next few weeks.

For the moment, leave aside the vague and aspirational promises made by the Brexiteers during the campaign (that the UK will proper as never before once freed from the shackles of Europe). Admittedly the signs are not looking good, but three days in it is far too early to say that these were false promises. Instead, focus on the definitive 'factual' commitments given to voters prior to the vote.

If the country voted Leave, we were told, then the following would certainly occur:

1) The UK would 'take back control' by acting immediately to initiate the process of separation from the EU.
2) £350 million pounds a week, freed up from EU budget contributions, would be spent on the NHS (and other like causes).
3) Immigration would be 'controlled'. The clear implication was that this meant bringing net migration figures down to the current government's 'tens of thousands' target.

So now that the country has voted leave, what now? Already it has been made clear that none of these commitments will be met.

1) Far from the UK (meaning, presumably its PM) initiating the process of separation immediately this will not even begin for at least 3 months, and then will be in the gift of the UK's first unelected prime minister since Gordon Brown.
2) This commitment was a 'mistake', as made clear by Farage withing hours of the announcement of the result.
3) 'Control' of immigration will not mean reduction, according to both Boris Johnson and, more explicitly, Daniel Hannan.

Numbers 2) and 3) are where most anger is being generated, but actually 1) is a very significant issue. Whatever you do or don't think about its merits, the core Leave case was pretty straighforward: leave the EU and we regain control. Yet Cameron's refusal to invoke article 50 means that, for at least the next three months, the UK will have surrendered control entirely over its future, in a period of unprecedented global uncertainty.

We will still be in the EU of course and still subject to all of its 'control' but will have no power or influence within it whatever. Cameron will be a totally 'lame duck' leader and the other countries very motivated to rally together. It is not hard to imagine the mood in next week's Council of Ministers' meeting.

So far from gaining control, the UK has now put itself in a position where it has sacrificed any real influence in the EU whilst not even beginning the process of leaving it until at least October. And what must Leave voters be feeling about that? They were promised a brave new world of renewed power, sovereignty and authority and will get the opposite. They were promised better funding for public services and reduced immigration and will see no sign of either. And that is presuming that the economy doesn't tank!

If I were a Leave voter I would be bloody furious already. But do not make the mistake of thinking that this is an optimistic post. In the history of European democracies it has not generally gone well when a populace has realised that they have been cheated and lied to by their political leaders, when their livelihoods and the country's prosperity have collapsed and when hatred has been whipped up against the immigrants in their midst.

Why?

So Britain has voted by 52% to 48% for a course of action that experts lined up to tell them was unwise, while its proposers responded that "people have had enough of experts."

Why?

Two things seem clear enough: a high proportion of leave voters were c2de (the lower socio-economic classes) and the issue with most traction in the leave campaign was immigration. In other words, a lot (though not all) of the leave voters were people whose lives are shit and who blame immigration for that fact.

If we accept this interpretation (which seems a fairly widespread one) then we still have to ask ourselves why the 'disenfranchised working class' put the blame for their ills on immigration and immigrants rather than elsewhere. Was it racism, a rational response to the destruction of their security, or somewhere in between?

The lives of the poor, the low-waged and the otherwise disadvantaged in this country are pretty shit these days and showing no prospect of getting better any time soon. Theirs is a world of zero-hours contracts, of overpriced and/or unavailable housing, of unobtainable benefits, of vanishing pensions and of bewildering social change. So who is to blame?

Most people, I reckon, would put it down to four groups: the bankers who gambled away our prosperity and financial security; the Tories/Lib Dems whose punitive austerity made the poor pay the price; the corporations that took advantage of the financially vulnerable to rob them further through zero-hour contracts and unpaid internships; and the Eastern European immigrants who saw even that sort of pitiful employment as superior to what they had at home and so took (at least some of) the jobs on offer.

Of that list, it seems pretty clear from all the analysis that I have seen that the group whose impact was the least damaging was actually the last. So why is it that they have emerged as the chief scapegoats?

Partly I believe this is an issue of power imbalance. The poor and poorly-employed may recognise that a lot of their problems are down to the banks, the government and the big corporations, but what the hell are they supposed to do about that? The banks have all of their money, which sort of gives them the upper hand, and without the big corporations there would be no jobs at all. As for government, not only they are aloof and powerful, but what option have you got anyway in terms of getting rid of them? The parties are all as bad as each other and/or incapable of running a piss-up in a brewery.

Immigration and immigrants though are a different manner. Like Bob Ewell turning on Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird it is far easier for the disadvantaged in society to look down on swarthy Bulgarians in pleather jackets queuing for casual labour outside Wickes than it is to join Occupy and picket major financial institutions. And in the EU referendum the 'disenfranchised' were suddenly given a large stick to lash out at at least one of those four factors that they considered to have ruined (or at least threatened) their lives. And in retrospect, are we surprised that they used it?

The leave vote was largely fuelled by anger, I am in little doubt of that. And when you are angry and armed with a big stick it doesn't really matter much whether the person within range is your real enemy or not. It still feels good to hit him.

And of course it wasn't just immigration and immigrants that the leave voters hit out at, it was the EU itself, and this is where the other explanation comes in too. Because it seems to me that what made both immigration and the EU into appropriate targets was what they have in common, and what sets them apart from the other major factors in the working poor's problems: they are both clearly foreign. Immigrants are visibly and audibly foreign, particularly in communities with no historical tradition of immigration, and the major problem with the EU is that it is political leaders and civil servants from other countries, like Germany, Belgium or France, that can determine our future, and they are by definition foreign.

It is easy to see the desire to lash out at that which is foreign as synonymous with racism and therefore anti-social and deviant, yet in some ways the impulse is the opposite of anti-social. To define a group as 'them' you have to first define an 'us', and that is increasingly difficult these days. In fact of course, the typical member of the working poor has almost nothing in common with the financial futures traders in the city or the ex-Etonian trust-fund kids in cabinet, but it doesn't FEEL like that when you can tell yourself that what you are doing is fighting to get your country back. People want and need to have some sort of sense of an 'us', and that certainly is the language one is hearing from the triumphant Leavers today. "This is our independence day," they say. "Now Britain can be great again." There'll be street parties soon.

The point is that, to many, both the immigrants who they fear are about to 'flood' into their towns and the 'Brussels bureaucracy' with its mythical banana obsession are unmistakable more foreign than the bankers, the government, or even the multi-national corporations. Particularly to the generations and populations that grew up in a largely mono-ethnic community and have never lived in another country.

And that is the other interesting thing about the leave voters. There was a strong direct relationship between average age and likelihood of voting Leave. 18-24s seem to have voted overwhelmingly to remain. Could it be that the young, who have had so much more exposure to ideas and people their parents and grandparents see as 'foreign' do not make the divisions in the same way? Some of the young certainly do seem to regard the bankers and the big corporations as 'the other' just as strongly as their elders see immigrants and the EU.

So is there hope for us all after this?

Of course there is. If Brexit leads to the diminution in the power and influence of Britain in the world that many commentators seem to expect then maybe that's not a bad thing. And if our young people start seeing more clearly who the authors of their misfortune are then that certainly isn't.

The only problem is that from here on in it is pretty clear that one of the major authors of the future misfortunes of the young is the generation who voted to take away their EU citizenship from them. My generation.

At breaking point? Yes Nigel, maybe we are.

On the day Jo Cox was murdered, Nigel Farage unveiled a poster so vile that even the Daily Mail condemned it. He didn't intend the coincidence of course, but it was striking nonetheless, and what the reaction to it suggested to me is that maybe the country is at breaking point with the facile, little-england nationalism of UKIP and the Brexiters more widely.

The poster depicts hundreds of Syrian refugees queuing at the Slovenian border, with the words "Breaking Point" in red over. What it suggests is two things: first that Europe is at breaking point from the numbers displaced by the Syrian conflict and second that Britain should therefore break away. In other words that when Europe is faced with the biggest existential crisis since World War 2, we should Put Britain First and leave them to it. That the poster echoes Nazi propaganda just strengthens the parallel. And the fact that the upcoming Chilcott report will almost certainly show the link between the ill-advised Anglo-American adventure in Iraq and the current crisis adds just another layer of irony.

Of course in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland the government and the British people didn't Put Britain First in that narrow and selfish way and maybe it is that spirit of cussed defiance combined with compassionate care for the underdog that we need to combat the Brexiters. I have been heartened by a number of Facebook posts today and yesterday saying "I want my country back" and meaning by that the inclusive, forward-looking spirit of the 2012 Olympics.

What Jo Cox represented was what I like to believe is at the heart of the British psyche. Alongside her passionate commitment to her heritage and place of birth she held fast to the desire to stand up for the underdog, specifically for the very Syrian refugees that that poster seeks to demonise. And she was killed by someone shouting "Britain First," or "Put Britain First." Her killer may not have seen Nigel Farage's poster, but the the echo is uncanny.


Jo Cox wanted the sort of Britain back that those Facebook posters are reminding us of: in fact maybe she believed that it had never left. Let's hope she was right. I shall end with the best tribute I can find to her: her own words on the Syrian refugee crisis. Because I want her to have the last word, not Nigel Farage.

"We all know that the vast majority of the terrified, friendless and profoundly vulnerable child refugees scattered across Europe tonight came from Syria.

We also know that as that conflict enters its sixth barbaric year that desperate Syrian families are being forced to make an impossible decision: stay and face starvation, rape, persecution and death or make a perilous journey to find sanctuary elsewhere.

And who can blame desperate parents for wanting to escape the horror that their families are experiencing. The reality in which children are being killed on their way to school, where children as young as seven are being forcibly recruited to the front line and where one in three Syrian children have grown up knowing nothing but fear and war.

These children have been exposed to things no child should ever witness and I know I personally would risk life and limb to get my two precious babies out of that hell-hole."

The main problem with the EU referendum debate

is that as the arguments run into the ground of futile speculation it is increasingly becoming a matter of the personalities involved.

Do you detest Cameron, Osborne and all they stand for? Vote Leave!
Are Johnson, Gove and Farage even worse? Vote Remain!
Do you not even know which side Corbyn is on? Don't vote at all!

This is ridiculous of course, though given the nature of the UK electoral system, in a sense not surprising. The nearest analogy to the upcoming referendum vote is a general election, and the fact is that, in a first-past-the-post system where one party (with occasional exceptions) is likely to emerge as possessing a majority sufficient to govern alone then in general elections you are voting for people rather than ideas. Yes, political parties produce manifestos full of vague promises that they may or may not seek to implement, but it is not the manifesto that you elect to office, it is the assemblage of individuals who will wield the levers of power.

So a vote in a UK general election quite reasonably comes down to a question of who you trust to govern in your and the nation's interests and who you either detest or would not not trust to organise a piss-up in a brewery. Opposition politicians and the press often make a huge song and dance over governments' abandonment of manifesto pledges but my sense is that that is seldom a key issue with voters. All they care about is, are these lot doing a marginally less bad job than the other lot would have done. If so then, carry on.

Fortunately though, the referendum really isn't a question of personalities at all. The politicians involved are sort of still behaving as if it was, making wild promises about what will or won't happen after the result, but with even less actual expectation of implementing those plans than when they announce general election manifestos. Today saw two classic examples: George Osborne announcing an emergency Brexit budget that he will certainly never deliver and the Johnson and Gove revealing a post-Brexit roadmap that will clearly not be theirs to implement.

What the EU referendum is about is ideas, and large, complex and all-embracing ideas at that: ideas about joint working versus go-it-alone independence; ideas about how to manage the tensions created by the changing nature of the nation state, the economies of the rich West, terrorism and security; and of course ideas about what to do about the unprecedented movement of peoples brought about by the conflicts in the middle East.

And somehow or other we have to separate our thinking about those ideas from our response to the people espousing each of the two sides.

Ronald Reagan was instrumental in initiating a massive programme of reduction in nuclear weapons and the fact that I despised him as a simple-minded right wing ideologue doesn't mean I am opposed to nuclear disarmement just because he promoted it. Similarly, words are probably insufficient to express my contempt for Cameron and Osborne, but that doesn't mean that I want to vote for isolationism at a time when what Europe needs is to stand together.

TTIP and Brexit

So, I've heard an argument recently that progressives in the UK should vote Leave in the EU referendum because of TTIP. OK. I accept that the referendum debate appears to have placed a moratorium on sanity, but really???

Here is the argument, as I understand it:
1) TTIP as it currently stands is bad. Really really bad. Primarily because it cedes power to US mega corporations, allowing them for instance to sue eu governments if they adopt policies that impact on their profitability.
2) Because of the power imbalance between the EU and the US it looks possible that the US will be able to demand the retention of those sorts of clauses despite opposition from within Europe.
3) By leaving the EU, the UK will avoid having to abide by the terms of ttip.

So, 1 and 2 - no real argument from me, though there is thankfully still some doubt over 2 given opposition from the French amongst others. But please! How can 1 and 2 imply 3? Can anyone seriously argue for a second that although unable to resist the power of US corporations as part of the EU, Britain will be able to do so alone? If a post EU Britain wants to make a bilateral trade deal with the US then it had better prepare itself for a far more draconian set of conditions even than those in TTIP.

Time was that the left were the ones with the truly international commitment to workers' rights. Time was, the left would have stood shoulder to shoulder with European comrades labouring under the yoke of a capitalist, neo-liberal governing elite. Whereas now it seems the hard left brexiters are taking refuge in a self-deluding image of a British socialist utopia that is every bit as parochial and little - englander as that of their UKIP foes.

The logical flaw in the Brexit argument (you can't have your cake and eat it)

Martin Lewis, of Money Saving Expert fame, has published this careful assessment of the pros and cons of Brexit and there is little I can add to it, except to point out that it outlines neatly what I see as a fundamental logical inconsistency in the Brexit case (without naming it as such).

Briefly, the strongest Brexit arguments, as I see it, are these (I honestly think that the democratic deficit argument is of real interest only to politicians and the economic upside/downside argument has left us all baffled):
either
1) Leaving the EU will protect us from the invasion of immigrants who are taking our jobs, lowering wages, swamping services etc. This implies that the alternative to the EU is an economy that is properly regulated by the UK government, with less immigration and more guarantees of jobs, housing and services (health, social care etc) for UK residents.
or 
2) Leaving the EU will free the UK economy up from burdensome regulation on issues such as workers' rights and enable us to make free trade agreements with economies across the world. This implies that the alternative to the EU will be, in Martin Lewis' formulation, "a nimble low-tax, low-regulation, tiger economy. Trading unfettered with all nations across the globe, able to create our own rules and speedily reacting as a niche player to a changing world."

The thing is, I have presented these advantages as either/or because they really are mutually exclusive. A "nimble low-tax, low-regulation, tiger economy" won't limit immigration for long if immigration provides for cheaper labour, particularly if it wants to "[trade] unfettered with all nations across the globe." What's more, the "rules" such an economy will create will absolutely not be rules that hamper business growth by protecting British workers' rights. And "tiger economies" are not generally known for their social protection. No place for an NHS in a tiger economy, not with all those rapacious entrepreneurial multinational healthcare firms out there.

So what I'm saying is, if either of the two arguments above is on its own sufficient to trump the Remain arguments about peace and stability, communitarianism rather than isolationism and the desire to make common cause with our European allies, and on its own sufficient to justify the leap in the dark that Brexit will inevitably involve AND you believe that you will get to choose the version of standalone Britain you like then go ahead, vote leave.

But don't go thinking you can use both justifications simultaneously.

Why the British attitude to immigration is a bit different to other countries'

Immigration is a big deal, of course it is. For years we liberals have pretended it isn't - told ourselves that the obsession with immigration was a creation of the tabloid press and Nigel Farage - but it really is. Across the rich world people are becoming more and more exercised on the subject (with the enthusiastic help of the tabloid press and a range of demagogic populists in every country) and in a sense it is hardly surprising. What mass immigration does, apart from anything else, is remind us in the rich West that we are globally a tiny minority and that our relative affluence and geopolitical influence is the legacy of a colonial past whose influence is waning all the time. Time was if we fucked up in some byzantine Middle Eastern conflict the repercussions were felt there and there alone while we walked away relatively unscathed. Not any more.

In some countries 'concerns' about immigration have led to the rise of genuinely scary neo-Nazi parties and thin-skinned childish demagogues with silly hair, but in Britain we generally don't like extremism. For all that Nick Clegg's description of Boris Johnson as 'Trump with a thesaurus' is a good soundbite, at least Boris isn't advocating building a wall, banning immigrants on religious grounds and torturing the families of enemy combatants.

But to say that the British people are entirely sanguine with the concept of immigration would be to put our middle-class left-liberal heads in the sand. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the tireless efforts of such as the Daily Mail to whip it up, suspicion and fear of 'uncontrolled immigration' have taken root. However it is my contention that that fear and suspicion has a particular British flavour here that isn't quite the same as that encountered elsewhere.

So why have the British begun to react as they do to immigration? Let's examine the predominant theories:

1) Because immigrants will stretch our public services (education, health, housing) to breaking point. This one is often trotted out, and many people clearly believe it to be their primary concern (partly perhaps because it is a view one can hold without bearing any animosity towards any of the individual immigrants involved) but it really doesn't stand up to scrutiny. First, everyone knows that the public services are utterly dependent on immigrant labour (Australian teachers, African nurses, Polish builders) and second, this is a view often held by people who support a government that has taken a flamethrower to public services itself.

2) Because immigrants put downward pressure on wages. Probably second favourite, and it is an argument that has some merit. However again, a moment's thought makes it clear that it is not the immigrants but the combination of a neo-liberal government and global capitalism that have put downward pressure on wages (right on brother!) Seriously, does anyone believe that if immigration were to stop tomorrow, big business would suddenly raise wages and abandon zero hours contracts?

3) Because immigration undermines our country's cultural identity. A bit closer to the bone this one and it may well lie at the heart of some anti-immigration feeling, but to be honest it is hard to argue for the concept of British cultural identity when the films we watch are American, the cars we drive German or Japanese, our furniture Scandinavan (Swedish or Danish, depending on class) and our takeaways Italian, Indian or Chinese.

4) Because immigration dilutes our ethnic identity. Getting more visceral still now, and it's an unspoken argument that probably eats away at the psyche of many a (reasonably) tolerant middle-Englander. The thing is, it is nothing like such a strong argument in Britain as it appears at first glance. First, we never were particularly ethnically uniform as a nation. The mashup of our earliest inhabitants (Picts, Celts and Saxons) led to a far wider range of ethnic types (from swarthy dark-haired Welshmen to pale-skinned, freckled Scots or brawny fair-haired English ploughmen) than was ever the case in, say, Norway. And then our colonial legacy has led to peoples from across the globe becoming far more integrated than in many countries, with third and fourth generation Afro-Caribbean or Asian families now so English that they complain about immigration as much as anyone. Plus the newest waves of immigrants are quite likely to be ethnically similar to 'us', whoever 'we' are.

Arguments number 3) and 4) are probably the root cause of anti-immigration feeling in many (possibly most) other countries, no matter how much arguments 1) and 2) are trotted out. However I don't believe that even they get under the skin of the specifically British reaction to immigration. So what does?

Easy. Language.

You see, what really marks the UK out from most of the rich world (Australia and New Zealand apart) is our national unwillingness to engage with other languages than English. Look at our popular culture: even in the US you will occasionally have the gum-chewing detective coming out with a few words of Spanish as he gets down widd da kidz on the dilapidated basketball court. In British popular culture the only foreign language you will hear will be from the mouths of the devilish German, Russian or (nowadays) Arab villains. Across the rest of Europe a huge proportion of popular culture is actually IN a foreign language (English). Virtually everyone in Holland is completely fluent in at least three languages, apparently from birth.

So it is pretty much uniquely in the UK that other languages than our own sound quite so alien and thus disturbing. In most of Europe it is quite normal to see shops with foreign (English) names or even billboards written entirely in a foreign language (English), but here in the UK many see even the occasional unassuming 'Polski Sklep' above a grocer or 'حلالا' on a butcher's door as weird and vaguely threatening. And as for hearing a couple speaking in Romanian on a bus...

So that's my theory. British people worry about immigration because immigrants (generally) speak foreign languages, and foreign languages are alien and scary and FOREIGN. If we'd grown up in Flemish Belgium, where people in our town all spoke a foreign language (French or Dutch or German) and the songs we listened to and the films we watched were in a different foreign language (English) then maybe we wouldn't feel like that (and we'd concentrate on other markers of foreignness like ethnicity and religion). Or maybe even if we had taken language learning seriously at school and not been told that it didn't really matter because everyone speaks English anyway.

But we are where we are, and maybe we need to recognise it better. Especially since English is already only the second most widely spoken language in the world, and may be overtaken by Spanish in the not too distant future.

Of course, in a sense our language-based xenophobia is a lot less unpleasant and scary than the sort of purely ethnic/cultural xenophobia of much of Europe and we should be proud of that. The BNP has died a death here and I can't see troupes of neo-Nazi vigilantes hunting down anyone of an Arabic appearance here in the way they do in much of central Europe. But where the left have been going wrong, I think, is to see all fear and distrust of immigration as being (at root) racist xenophobia. Sure that exists, but our lack of confidence in foreign languages is a genuine cause too. And one that we could, in time, do something about.

Extremism and the concept of righteous anger

I wrote in July 2014 this post about radicalism and extremism and that already seems a very long time ago indeed. Since then there has been a very visible (and audible) growth in extremism in two groups which, for all their apparent difference seem to me oddly similar: Trump supporters and Daesh.

Similar?!? I hear you ask. Well, I am certainly not claiming any sort of moral equivalence between a a conglomeration of brutally fanatical jihadists and a bunch of whooping American bigots but there is certainly one thing that they (and other groups) have in common. They are, it seems to me, fuelled by what they would regard as righteous anger.

So what do I mean by righteous anger?

Society has always distinguished between two different sorts of anger. First there is interpersonal anger of the sort that inevitably arises between people who live in close proximity to each other. Societies have generally regarded this as unfortunate and unproductive and have evolved more or less successful ways to contain it, from ritual and religious practices to systems of law and order. This sort of anger has been at the root of much of the crime and violence in human society from time immemorial (look at Cain and Abel) and civilisation has as much as anything been a means of keeping it in check.

The other sort of anger is what I have called righteous anger. This is anger not directed at someone one knows well and not generated by close contact but prompted by some larger cause or some more abstract concept. It is anger at a group of individuals, a nation, a system or even an idea. When I say 'righteous' I do not imply any sort of moral approval (anti-semitism falls firmly into this category), but am referring to how the anger is experienced by the people who feel it.

In the early days of human society this sort of righteous anger would have been a positive asset to a group or tribe, because its likeliest focus would have been members of an opposing neighbouring tribe so it would have had the effect of binding the group together with a common purpose. Indeed conflicts between neighbouring tribes have often become formalised and ritualised over time, presumably as a way of harnessing and making safe this sort of righteous anger.

Outward-focussed righteous anger became a major asset to national leaders with the rise of the nation state- it was the power-source for the sort of patriotic jingoism that had endless generations of young men sacrifice their lives in pursuit of glory in an a series of pointless European wars for instance. Probably it was the First World War that began its demise, not so much because of the mechanised slaughter (nothing like a few deaths in war to fuel righteous anger) but because soldiers in the trenches began to question the way they had been suckered by the concept of righteous anger into miring themselves (literally) in a futile battle against individual Germans they found it less and less easy to see as their personal enemies. Indeed the clearest focus of anger in soldiers' poetry seems not the German soldiers but rather the British generals and public at large:
"You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye.
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know.
The hell where youth and laughter go."

This was far from the end of state-sanctioned righteous anger of course. It was Hitler's trump card, and the force that transformed 1930s Germany from a broken and demoralised failed state to a hyper-efficient blitzkrieg and genocide machine. Differently expressed it was the force behind the resolve Churchill saw in the British people after Dunkirk and articulated in the immortal lines, "we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."

However the Twentieth Century saw a growth in a different sort of righteous anger too, directed this time by oppressed minorities against their own national leaders. There were the suffragettes in Britain, the civil rights movement in the US and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, to name but three. This is the sort of thing most of us would be happiest to call righteous anger- the struggle for justice in an iniquitous system- but is it really that different to the forms of righteous anger that preceded it? There was a coherence to the groups motivated by it and a clarity as to its target that calls to mind the anti-Bosch jingoism of Britons in the early years of the first World War, and if we now see the latter as lacking a moral justification that is to forget the stories of baby-massacring and the like that were used to whip up fury in 1914.

It is more recently that what one might call righteous anger has begun to morph again into something altogether less clear and immediately comprehensible, and this is where Daesh and Trump come in. Because it seems to me that both islamist jihadism and tea party republicanism are fuelled by a powerful but inchoate wave of anger against someone or something 'out there' that its supporters want to bring down by any means possible.

And to be clear about how this is different from either the anti-apartheid movement or even Nazi anti-semitism it is important to understand that we seem nowadays to be living in a post-nation state era and enemies are no longer so easy to define. Sure, both groups have their bogey-men- for the Trumpers Obama and for Daesh the Great Satan (ummm, Obama)- but their anger is, in both cases, more wide-ranging than that. The Trumpers can be whipped up into fury on a whole range of issues from Mexican fruit-pickers to muslim women in headscarves or from healthcare insurance to US foreign policy. Daesh direct anger not just against Western interventionists but almost as strongly against Arab Christians, muslim apostates or women without headscarves (what is it about head scarves that seems to prompt such fury?)

Yet for all the differences it seems to me that the fundamental motivation is exactly the same as when righteous anger was used as the justification either to smash windows in Kristallnacht or to march unarmed into the live ammunition of the South African police. Anger, it seems, operates almost independently of morality. Indeed if anger is powerful enough then it provides its own moral justification: if one feels that one's entire way of life- one's existence even- is threatened by some distant collection of unindividualised strangers then one's anger can seem to justify almost any actions against that 'other'.

It used to be that this powerful force was kept under control and directed (for good or ill) by even more powerful social structures- first tribal customs, then nation states and then idealistic movements or causes. But in the interconnected twenty-first century those sorts of social structures have less and less force. We have seen the little man who hides behind the Wizard of Oz's thunderclaps and we no longer care much what he says. Instead, people turn to self-selected groups of the like-minded and there their anger is not contained but amplified; not directed but inflamed.

So anger has (for me) emerged as the most dangerous threat to society today, leading to everything from the brutal death-cult of Daesh to the mainstreaming of neo-Nazi xenophobia on US TV. And the problem is that the populist media, and particularly the tabloids, seem hell-bent on whipping anger up further all the time. What else could be the intention of headlines like "One out of every five killers is an immigrant" (a genuine headline)?

Which is why I am becoming increasingly distrustful of any attempt to whip me up to anger, and that too is a problem. Because righteous anger, for all its dangers, has been an immensely powerful force for good and there are still plenty of issues that are easily iniquitous enough to prompt such anger- violence against women for instance. It is just that so long as Trump and Daesh make so free with it righteous anger no longer holds the attraction for me that it once had.

Donald Trump. What's all that about?

I'm late to the party on this one too. For ages Trump's candidature was seen (at this side of the Atlantic at least) as simply a joke, with that stupid hair being the punchline. However if it is a joke then it is in very poor taste indeed. Here we have someone standing for the leadership of "the most powerful nation. Period" openly advocating religious and racial discrimination of a sort eerily reminiscent of early Nazi party policies while his supporters whoop and cheer with glee.

There have been many explanations put forward for his continuing popularity: that it is simply an expression of protest against the political classes and will soon dissipate; that his supporters are the 'angry white men' whose days in the sun are fast disappearing; that Trump's lack of any sort of vocal filter is a refreshing stimulant in the land of packaged politics; and even (astonishingly) that this billionaire property tycoon (who was set on his way as a lad with a small multi-million pound leg-up from his dad) speaks for the downtrodden and impoverished victims of corporate America.

For me the worrying thing though, potentially even more worrying than the statements he makes and policies he proposes, is the fact that his most endearing feature to his supporters appears to be his utter lack of expertise in or careful consideration of the issues he is commenting on. Foreign affairs in particular seem an unknown field to him (he once said that he gets his foreign policy ideas from Fox news, and see this account of his ignorance for instance) but he presents even this as an asset, saying once in an interview "But the voters want to see unpredictability. They're tired of a president that gets up and says every single thing."

And terrifyingly it is this sort of thing that wins him support, it seems. How? Why?

Part of the reason, clearly, is Trump's 'outsider' appeal. He feeds off a widespread American perception of a cosy consensus between politicians, big business, the media and special interest groups (the establishment) on approaches to every area of policy that ignores the desires of the general population. Even this is worrying of course as it implies a complete loss of faith in the democratic process in America. Politicians, far from being seen as representatives of the people, have come to be regarded (by some at least) as the Enemy. And indeed this study demonstrates that they may have a point.

However the real problem for me is that Trump has gone well beyond simply positioning himself as the anti-politician politician. His brand, and his obvious appeal to a vocal section of the US population, goes deeper than that. The message he gives, time and again, with his impromptu outbursts and his unscripted outrageousness is that he rejects not only the political establishment and all its codes and conventions but the very notion of intelligent, careful and well-informed policy making too.

The world is a complex place and government a difficult, demanding and subtle business to get right. But what Trump is saying to the American people is, forget all that! He doesn't do complexity and is uninterested in nuance. His answers to the most complex problems are simple: immigration, central american poverty and the awful legacy of the 'war on drugs'? Build a wall. The growth of a destructive, anti-western jihadist ideology across the world? "Bomb the hell outa them." A mass shooting (like all those other US mass shootings, only this time carried out by two muslims)? Ban muslims from entering the US.

And the thing is it is precisely that sort of simplicity that seems to be his appeal. It used to be possible in vast swathes of America to live insulated from the complexities of the modern world. For decades life was very good (people said 'have a nice day' as if they really meant it), until terrorist attacks took place on US soil and a generation began to grow up in the knowledge that they might be the first not to be more affluent than their parents. And the internet had come along- a baffling window into the chaotic alien world that existed outside Dullsville Tennessee- and it was all too much.

It's not just Trump who offers simplistic anti-intellectual answers to problems too complex for most Americans to have had to consider until recently. I happened to stumble on a bizarre phenomenon recently: the modern flat-earthers. Their discussion tool of choice is the meme- a perfect way to present a simplistic and anti-intellectual argument in an easily digestible form. Here are some examples (there are thousands). Climate change deniers work in much the same way, until it becomes as though reasoned argument is of itself to be distrusted. If you can't reduce your approach to a meme then it's some sort of establishment conspiracy.

Is this a legacy of too much affluence and too much insulation from the world outside for too long in the US? Quite possibly. Affluence and security build a sort of self-obsession that does not set you in good stead when that affluence and insulation dissolve. But it's probably too late to do anything about that now. So what can we do? Distribute Trump memes of course. Du'uh.

What happened to the Labour party?

There have probably been thousands of well-informed words written by those in the know (and millions of ill-informed ones by those who wish they were) about the latest apparent slow-motion suicide of the parliamentary Labour party and I suspect there is little I can add to the sum of human knowledge in that regard. However that has never stopped me in the past and I have my own angle on the current situation born of my personal experience, that may be worth sharing.

Briefly, for anyone who is not aware, the narrative over the last few months has been (or the version promulgated by the UK media at least has been) one of open warfare between Jeremy Corbyn and his 'team' (the corbynistas) and large and vocal sections of his party's Westminster MPs. There have been off-the-record and even live on-air complaints by Labour MPs of everything from bumbling inefficiency to Stalinist ruthlessness and a steadily simmering air of dissent, dissatisfaction and dislike. The person most often absent from all this has been Jezza himself, whose pronouncements (such as they have been) have generally sounded reasonable (non-contentious even), conciliatory and non-aggressive. At least they have sounded like that until deconstructed and spun by a range of commentators inside and outside the PLP, seeking to interpret them as confrontational and/or naive.

So what the hell is it all about and why are the PLP behaving like this? There is no realistic prospect of them ousting Corbyn and having him replaced by a leader more to their liking, nor is there any possibility that this sort of internecine strife will do anything but damage the Labour party's chances of electoral success (on which their future careers depend). So why?

Perhaps it is less to do with political and ideological differences (does anyone actually, really, want to see billions and billions of pounds spent on a missile system designed to ensure that if the world is destroyed in a nuclear holocaust at least plucky Britain will have got to play its part?) and more to do with the nature of institutions and the relationship between staff and their bosses. Labour MPs may be the democratically elected representatives of their constituents, but they are also members of a small to medium-sized enterprise operating out of dilapidated premises in SW1 and as in all such institutions the relationship between staff and boss is a complex one.

Very rarely a charismatic boss (and one who is in the right place at the right time) can transform an institution, or at least be the figurehead who catches a process of transformation and makes it his or her own. In a political context Tony Blair pulled that trick, and before him Maggie Thatcher. True, in both cases the party they became leader of was ripe (desperate even) for change but arguably without them that change would never have come to fruition.

Much more often though, it is the institution that transforms the boss, much as the boss may believe otherwise. So David Cameron, shallow, plausible, untroubled by detail and human cost and able to articulate a vague vision of a 'stronger Britain' that covers a multitude of sins is the perfect leader for a Tory party that wants to dismantle the state and not feel guilty about it. Gordon Brown and Ed Milliband on the other hand were both troubled, ineffectively sincere, occasionally prone to impotent petulance and overshadowed by more successful and charismatic mirrors of themselves. They were the leaders the PLP expected and in a masochistic sense wanted because they gave MPs an excuse to
feel sorry for themselves.

Jeremy Corbyn doesn't fit that mold though. Habituated for so long to being on the losing side of any given argument he is no longer phased by voicing anti-populist sentiments. Unlike Brown and Milliband, both of whom appeared to have lived Labour party internal politics for so long that it had replaced the blood in their veins Corbyn seems endearingly out of touch with the complex shenanigans that clearly occupy most labour insiders' every waking moment. The bottom line (which is an ironic one in the situation) is that the PLP has evolved into an archetypally political (with a small as well as a big P) organisation and its new boss does not appear to be a political operator in that institutional sense.

So what happens when an institution acquires a boss who does not appear to be singing from the unwritten hymn sheets the staff have all memorised over years? Well, that is where my personal experience comes in. As head teacher I inherited a school that was obsessed with its own internal politics and I am simply not very good at (or very interested in, come to that) that sort of politics. And it seems that when an institution acquires a boss who does not fit its expectations then the reaction is confusion and (for some) something like hatred. It doesn't really matter what the boss does or says, or whether the staff involved agree with or even like him or her. It is more that they aren't playing the game by the rules the staff have internalised and made their own.

Some of my staff, I am convinced, never forgave me for not fitting the image they had of a 'proper' head. They might have complained about my predecessors- called them dictatorial bullies- but at least they knew where they were with them. I disorientated them. I asked them what they thought and believed in and told them that I didn't have magic top-down solutions for every situation and some of them hated me for it.

Of course I am not comparing myself with Jeremy Corbyn. I was head teacher of a secondary school, not potential Prime Minister of the UK, but in a sense I can empathise with him. And perhaps what he is doing is the right thing: rising above the vitriol and simply doing his best to keep a clear head (its is what I did in a similar situation).

However quite possibly it isn't. If I had my time again I wouldn't have been so high-minded about internal politics. Labour MPs (like my staff) are human beings who have dedicated a significant portion of their best years to serving in an institution that they may hate, but also identify with and have made their home. A leader who tells themselves they are above their staff's petty vindictiveness and squabbles is no sort of leader in fact. And if Jeremy Corbyn is to transform the Labour party then he has to engage with it. All of it. And that includes the MPs who are currently running him and themselves into the quagmire.