Fuel panic-buying: a prisoner's dilemma for the 21st century

The panic buying of fuel and subsequent shortages in the UK have given the Prisoner's Dilemma a new political twist, and it turns out that modern free market economics has a real problem with one of the key political tools of right-wing populists.

The fuel-buying version of the prisoner's dilemma goes like this: imagine a situation where a fuel station supplies 100 customers. There is a temporary slowdown in supply, such that if all 100 customers top up their tanks immediately, fuel will completely run out, whereas if they all wait until their tanks are nearly empty then there will be plenty for all. Now picture one of those drivers (X) whose tank is half full. There are 4 possible scenarios:

A) X refrains from filling up yet, as does everyone else, so supply is maintained. 

B) X fills up but everyone else refrains, so again supply is maintained,. 

C) X refrains from filling up but nobody else does and the fuel runs out, leaving X in real difficulties.

D) X fills up, as does everyone else, and the fuel runs out, but at least X's tank is (temporarily) full.

How X behaves (assuming they are a perfectly rational being) will depend on her/his degree of trust in others. If she/he believes that everyone else will behave with a social conscience and refrain from filling up until they need to, then unless they are an exceptionally selfish person (scenario B) they will refrain from filling up also (scenario A). However if X does not trust their fellow citizens then they will assume it is a choice between scenarios C) and D), in which case, clearly they should opt for D) and make sure they top up immediately. Which means that other drivers (seeing X at the fuel station) are more likely to make the same calculation, and the fuel runs out.

The problem is that a key technique right-wing populists discovered long ago is to turn citizens against each other, increase polarisation and decrease trust in order to scapegoat minorities and harden ones political base. In the US the polarisation is of Trumpers v never-Trumpers, but here in the UK we have, if anything, gone one better: brexshitters v remoaners. The referendum may have been years ago, but Johnson and his like have, if anything, sought to fuel the fires of mutual distrust by condemning the negativity of anyone who opposed Brexit. They did this with other issues too, such as the wearing of masks. To a large extent the UK government abandoned responsibility for containing the Covid epidemic some time ago, suggesting that it was down to 'individual common sense' to decide how the population should behave. Which was of course a recipe for turning us citizens against each other, but let the government off the hook.

So what is the relevance to the fuel shortages? Well, we have in this country (as, I believe in the US) a higher degree of mutual distrust than I can ever remember. People are quicker to get angry with each other over matters of what used to be seen as abstruse political jargon (before 2016 who even knew the European Supreme Court existed?) and certainly less willing to trust in each other's common decency and social conscience than ever before.

No, nowadays it's everyone for themselves and to hell with the [brexshitters, remoaners, anti-vaxxers, snowflakes, etc etc]. And the problem is, without a degree of mutual trust and social cohesion the modern sophisticated just-in-time supply chains collapse rather easily.

Could it possibly be time to just stop weighing the pig?

About the only upside I can see to the covid pandemic is that it has thrown a lot of things up in the air and forced us to reexamine some long-held assumptions. Nowhere is this more the case than in education. For instance, with home-schooling, millions of parents have been confronted with the reality of getting students through the post-Govian National Curriculum, and have come to see what a soulless task it is in some areas. It is no coincidence that fronted bloody adverbials have come under such attack and ridicule over recent months.

Even more significant though is the way that the GCSE fiasco last year caused many people to ask themselves quite fundamental questions about the whole purpose of that tier of national examinations. There have been those who have been posing those questions for years of course, but until the pandemic they were dismissed as soft liberals seeking to avoid accountability for schools. Now, at last, the question is being seen as a genuinely valid one - should we have GCSEs at all?

I do not propose to weigh into that debate here, because who cares what an ex-Head thinks anyway? Instead, I would like to pose an even more fundamental question: is it time to take the focus off weighing the pig entirely? I recognise that this is a rather radical question, and easily pilloried, because for as long as a national education system has existed, the idea of testing, and ranking, the children within it has been central. Indeed, tests are often seen as the end product or even the purpose of education. Each key stage (or, Key Stage, more recently) has always been defined by some sort of terminal assessment that sorts the wheat from the chaff and determines subsequent progress, whether these be the 11 plus, O-levels/GCSEs or A levels. And it is important to remember that, in the UK at least, these tests are not seen as diagnostic (used to determine the sensible next stage) but hierarchical (used to decide who deserves to progress to a higher tier of the next stage and who does not). Tests are there to be passed or failed.

This thinking permeates all of our attitudes about education, so that judgements about schools and teachers depend on them as well. These judgements too have become hierarchical rather than diagnostic: an inspection of a school determines whether it has passed or failed, and its place on exam league tables decides whether it is better or worse than others. And that, of course, determines the popularity of the school and hence the nature of its intake, because the market is king.

But surely this is inevitable, isn't it? Life is about success and failure, and education exists in the real world, not in a Utopian fantasy of lets-be-nice-to-everyone, doesn't it? Hence the need for those Govian watchwords: toughness and rigour.

That is a reasonable argument in a sense, and it derives from a fundamental human competitiveness that has driven progress for centuries. The problem is, it is an approach to both education and life itself that is becoming more and more problematic, and is being increasingly questioned. It is not just that the price of failure within such a system is becoming more of an issue - endemic drug addiction, the creation of an underclass, and right-wing populism might all be traced back to some people's sense of having lost the race, and the bleak life-chances for those who fail within the education system certainly can be - it is also that people are beginning to understand that competitiveness and meritocratic hierarchies don't always yield the best results. Forward-looking and successful businesses now put far greater emphasis on collaboration, teamwork and creativity than on goal-driven competitiveness.

There is another grave price to be paid for the competition-focused approach to education, namely the effect it has on the curriculum. I used to work in ILEA, and was part of what now seems like a renaissance of thinking about education. The focus shifted from a knowledge-based curriculum (recite the dates of accession of the Kings and Queens of England) to an enquiry-based one (examine these historical sources and ask how reliable and/or biased they might be). An enquiry-based curriculum was much harder to test, and so this approach led to the development of innovative approaches such as Assessment for Learning and 100% coursework GCSEs. However the problem for Gove and his like was that systems like AfL were no good for putting the screws on teachers or 'bog-standard' comprehensives, so back we went to a nice, simple, factual (and in my view largely pointless) knowledge-based curriculum that could be tested in 'rigorous' exams and Key Stage assessments.

I wrote a post some time ago posing the question of whether education should be 'tough', and I think it is even more valid now. Another lesson that the pandemic has taught us is that notions of winning and losing are often illusory and unhelpful in this context. There have been, for instance, surprisingly few reports of people cheating or jumping the queue to get vaccinated. Why? Because it is largely irrelevant where you come in that particular race: nothing much is going to change for anyone until everybody else gets vaccinated too. It's an analogous situation to a group project in school, or a small start-up company in the real world: the performance of the group as a whole is far more important than any individual's position within that group.

And the point is, that sort of focus is actually much more likely to yield concrete beneficial effects in the real world than a dog-eat-dog, competition-focussed one. What is the point of beating your co-workers in every conceivable test, if your company goes bankrupt because of the whole teams' dysfunction?

In a sense, too, this is a pretty uncontroversial view for most teachers. There are very few who believe that the most effective learning comes when students are pitted against each other. Ask any teacher, or any inspector, to pick a lesson where learning was at its best and I can almost guarantee that they will choose one where students were working collaboratively rather than competitively. Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with competitiveness (it is a natural impulse in young people), but we learn best when we spark ideas off other people, and we do that best when we are working with, rather than against them. The controversy comes when we start thinking about ways to measure how successful teachers (and schools) are being, and whether they are enhancing or damaging students' life chances. We need assessment for that, don't we? And assessment means competition, surely. Which means tests of some sort and establishing of rank orders.

Well no, not necessarily. In the last paragraph I actually referenced an assessment that teachers and inspectors carry out all the time: the assessment of the quality of learning. Because that for me is the crucial measure of success of any education. And note, I said the quality of learning, not teaching. Where students are empowered with the ability to learn, to question, to be creative and to work with others they are given a gift that is of incalculable value, not just to themselves but to society as a whole. If you were setting up an innovative start-up, would you prefer somebody with those skills, or somebody who had used more fronted adverbials in a piece of creative writing than any other student and scored nineteen out of twenty in a test of the dates of accession of the Kings and Queens of England?

Trump's support is cratering - not because he tried to mount an insurrection, but because he failed

 I wrote an essay years ago entitled Radicalisation and the Fifth Column that threatens to undermine America from within, but though it looks prescient today, I don't think I had the faintest idea what was going to ensue once Donald Trump was elected president. That essay was about the (now very tame looking) move by Tea Party senators to use a government lockdown to stymie Obama's healthcare reforms. In it I argued that Ted Cruz, a strident voice at the time, represented a sort of radicalisation that had its roots in the Dirty Harry/Hans Solo/John McClane trope of Hollywood action men. Hollywood, I argued, has long promoted an image of a maverick lone wolf who alone can see through the corruption and ineptitude of officialdom and indeed government itself. They therefore choose which laws to follow and which to break, and in doing so are lauded as heroes. A large swathe of Americans, I argued, have become radicalised by this incessant diet of anti-establishment machismo to the extent where they regard destructive rulebreakers as more worthy of respect than the forces of law and order themselves.

Well, it seems now as if that process of radicalisation was both deeper and broader than I suspected at the time. My tone then was one of wry amusement at the quirks of a society that spent too much of its time watching movies. Ted Cruz and his like seemed a bit of a joke - an irrelevance in the brave new post-racial world that Obama's election had summoned up. How wrong could I be?

Trump's presidency, viewed from over the pond, was disturbing for two main reasons. The first (and truly terrible) reason was the substance of what he was doing - reinforcing white supremacy and brutal prejudice against immigrants and Muslims; destroying international collaborative structures; and giving aid and succour to dictators across the world. The second reason was almost as bad though. In all this time it was clear that for all his stupidity, narcissism, misogyny, ineptitude and racism, nearly half of the population of the USA liked what he was doing. And then, when he capped his four years with the most callously ignorant mismanagement of a global pandemic, the response of 74 million of his fellow Americans was to attempt to give him four more years as president.

And then the final act. An attempted insurrection that, had it not been hamstrung by its own ineptitude, could have led to Trump being installed as permanent dictator (he often promised to his rallies that he would serve 8 or maybe 12 more years). Shortly after the failed invasion of the Capitol, Trump's allies began turning against him and his popular support collapsed, to the point where (according to Pew) it now stands at a mere 29%. Leaving aside that even that figure represents near enough 90 million Americans who still reckon Trump is the man for the job, one might assume that this is evidence of the US finally coming to its senses.

Well, yes and no. It is worth remembering that the defection of Trump's allies was nowhere near immediate. Even after being shut away for their own protection whilst an unruly mob stormed the Capitol, 147 Republican lawmakers continued the attempt to defy the will of the People by voting against the certification of the electoral votes.

Since then the mood has unquestionably changed though. Ten Republicans voted to impeach and a growing number of senators are suggesting that they might even vote to convict. And in the wider population, though Trump's aggregated popularity still stands at 38% or so, it is plummeting at an unprecedented rate. One might assume that this is because of the emerging understanding of just how potentially terrifying the Capitol invasion was, and I am sure things like the death of Officer Sicknick have disgusted many. However I would argue that the main feature for Trump's falling popularity is not the realisation that he is a narcissistic sociopath (that surely was always obvious) but the fact that he is also a proven loser. 

Just for a moment imagine that the mob had seized and destroyed the electoral votes, had maybe taken some prominent Democrats and 'turncoat' Republicans hostage and had then been called off by Trump and instructed to hand their hostages over to the authorities. Imagine then that Trump had declared a state of emergency, cancelled the election results as fraudulent and instigated martial law (he has packed out the pentagon with sycophants and clearly has supporters in the armed forces, if not at the highest level).

The question is, would his popular support then have cratered? I am afraid to say that if anything it would have hardened. This would have been Trump definitively doing the thing his supporters had been praying he would - taking on the Swamp.

But his support has cratered, so why? I wrote a while back another (then tongue-in-cheek) essay, suggesting that the continued support for Trump could be explained by another Hollywood trope, the High School bully The thing is about bullies, while they reign supreme everybody wants to be on their side, but when get their comeuppance those same people turn against them. And maybe the explanation is as simple as that. For all the grand-guignol theatrics and the violence-and-hate-laden conspiracies, Trump's Great Awakening/Kraken Unleashed/Trust the Plan (other melodramatic terms are probably available) wannabe coup was a failure.

And in Hollywood, nobody likes a loser.

The narrative of conspiracy theories

 I wrote some time ago (here) about the universal nature of narrative in the ways we engage with the world. Just recently I have become aware of a striking illustration of that phenomenon. In the period after Trump's defeat in the election I (unwisely) responded to a Twitter thread about how fishy it was that Alaska and North Carolina had still not been called for Trump, when Pennsylvania and Arizona had been called for Biden.

The responses to my contribution gave me a glimpse of the dark and dangerous rabbit hole that seems to have swallowed up the large numbers of Trump supporters who are buying his 'Big Steal' conspiracy theories. Of course I knew about the prevalence of conspiracy theories in contemporary far-right 'politics' - QAnon anybody? - but it was interesting watching new theories being constructed in real time. I shan't bother with the details - something about pro-Biden states being called too early and pro-Trump states too late, so that the corrupt Lamestream Media could create a false impression of Biden having won - but what I noticed was some of the language, which people on this thread exchanged without feeling the need to expand or explain what, to outsiders, seemed very cryptic messages.

And the word that jumped out most was 'narrative', often used alone. Here is one example: "And they called Virginia with 1% reporting. Narrative." Another: "If you think that matters you haven't been paying attention. Narrative" and a third, simply: "Narrative, you cocksucker."

This got me thinking, and I suddenly realised that narrative is in fact completely central to any conspiracy theory. You see, the creators and disseminators of conspiracy theories face a fundamental problem in that they generally have little or no actual, hard evidence on which to base their claims. So what do they do? They use what in QAnon world are actually called breadcrumbs: little snippets of largely unconnected or irrelevant 'facts' that they suggest are in fact intrinsically and causally related and together reveal a massive, previously untold story.

This is precisely the way narrative works. History may be (in Alan Bennett's immortal words) "One fucking thing after another" but we simply cannot prevent ourselves connecting those things: this happened because that happened. We construct a narrative to make sense of the things, because that gives the world meaning.

But in conspiracy theories the human narrative imperative has a very powerful effect: it draws the listener in and makes them entirely complicit, and in a sense the less clear or relevant the base 'facts' of the conspiracy theory are, the more powerfully they draw people in. Why? Because it is the listener who is making the connections themselves and the listener who is, in a sense, constructing their own narrative out of them. And the more other people say, "That's ridiculous, those facts don't lead to that conclusion!" the more they can say, "you just don't understand. I can see the narrative that connects them but you can't, because you are stupid/ a Democrat/ a Remainer/ blinded by mainstream media etc etc."

In fact, any attempt to persuade a conspiracy theory victim of the absurdity of the narrative they have bought into risks itself becoming part of the same narrative: "You would say that, because you're obviously [insert appropriate insult here]." 

So how can conspiracy theories be combatted? Well, one way is simply not to pay much attention to them. To frame it, yet again, in narrative terms, the despised and rejected truth-teller who fights tirelessly against the hordes who deny his truth (and yes, it's largely a masculine image, I believe) is a heroic figure. The deluded fantasist who walks the streets shouting whilst others simply ignore him is not.

The continuing mystifying support for Trump and the hollywood trope of the High School bully

 I am sure I am not the only one who daily checks Project 538's Trump approval tracker to see whether the latest examples of the US president's stupidity, boorishness, racism, support for foreign tyrannies or attempts to subvert his own country's democracy have 'moved the dial' of the American electorate's approval of him. Only to find that they haven't.

And therein lies something of a mystery. Whilst Trump was an insurgent candidate, playing the outsider card, I sort of understood how people could choose to overlook his misogyny, crudeness, ignorance, short attention span... (I could go on) because they wanted somebody to go in there and shake things up a bit. Many Americans' lives no longer come even close to the dream they were promised, and the easiest people to blame are the (undoubtedly self-serving and out-of-touch) politicians who ply their trade within the Beltway.

Trump is no longer an insurgent, however. The big beasts in 'the swamp' are now generally his creatures (even if he spends a great deal of his time deriding and condemning them) and he is making almost no attempt nowadays to present any agenda for change. In 2016 the slogans of 'lock her up'. 'drain the swamp' and 'build the wall' might have been crude, simplistic and fundamentally meaningless, but at least they gave the illusion of an agenda for change, but this time round there isn't even a pretence.

And yet, according to opinion pollsters, at least 40% of Americans (that's 120 million people!) say that they approve of the job Donald Trump is doing and will vote to give him four more years (if not more) to carry on doing it. I could list all of the appalling, incompetent, shameful things that Trump has done or not done, said or not said, but it would make no difference. That 120 million seems to be an absolute floor, of people who (as Trump himself boasted) would carry on supporting him even if he shot somebody dead on Fifth Avenue.

So, why? Some factors are clear of course. Trump's increasingly strident dog whistles towards the overlooked white underclass no doubt have an effect, because they allow the Bob Ewells of 21st Century America to rally behind a leader who can shout their resentment from the rooftops. Another factor is the facebook-enabled siloisation that insulates people from any opinion that challenges their own. Yet another is the appallingly partisan nature of US politics that separates everything into red and blue and blinds many to anything beyond that. There have been many thousands of words written by much more knowledgeable commentators than me on these and other factors.

But still...

One hundred and twenty million people. If they stood in a line, 10 abreast, they would reach from LA to New York. All saying Donald Trump is doing a pretty good job, and we want more, thanks very much. 

Of course, one possibility is that all 120 million are racist, misogynist enablers who simply don't care about the suffering of their fellow Americans or the future of the planet, but might there not be a slightly more forgiving narrative to add into the mix? It's not that I think the well-worn traditional arguments, like those I have listed above, are wrong, it's just that they are all problematic in some way as a means of explaining such a high floor to Trump's popularity, particularly now that he is no longer an insurgent outsider. So my additional factor to consider is this: the experience that many Americans seem to share of having been bullied at High School. I don't know this first hand of course, but you can learn a lot about a society by considering its fairy tales, and in more movies than I care to admit to having watched, the villain is the jock who wields unquestioned power to intimidate and harass in the corridors of a High School.

In these fairy tales the jock is always dethroned, whether by the nerd or the cool outsider, but that is clearly wish fulfilment. In reality, jocks in US High Schools seem to benefit from a high degree of official protection, because of their financial value to the school (High School football for instance is very, very big business) and the only sensible response to their bullying, I imagine, is not to challenge them - indeed to try and get on their side.

If this is indeed the case, then it provides a ready-made reason for millions of (otherwise not vile) people to want to be with Trump rather than against him. Bullying is the very essence of his personality and he has shown many times how vindictive and cruel he can be, to the extent even of saying that 'Red' states which elect Democrats had only themselves to blame for coronavirus deaths and deserved no support.

When a bully that powerful and impregnable is standing with his acolytes in front of your locker, are you really going to tell him you don't like him very much?

Living in Interesting Times

You will almost definitely have been reminded at some point over the last months and years of the ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." If you are anything like me you will probably have responded with a sadly bewildered shake of the head, accompanied perhaps by some comment about Trump, Brexit or Covid-19. "Interesting times. You're telling me," you may have said. You won't have had to ask to have the reference explained, because it is such a well-established truism, with the sort of paradoxical incisiveness that gives saying like this such force.

Except there's a problem: there is no real evidence of any such Chinese curse ever having existed.

So why do we like to think that one did? Well, until very recently there was a sector of society who believed at a pretty instinctual level that too-rapid change of any sort was fundamentally worrisome - that the best thing the world could do was to keep pretty much everything as is, except for improving the availability of avocados and consumer electronics. This of course was conservatism, and back then it aligned pretty closely with Conservatism. Agitating for change was what socialists and animal rights activists did, and framing your resistance to change as a piece of ancient Oriental wisdom gave it a sort of solemn legitimacy.

And then, suddenly, in the US and the UK at least, everything went topsy-turvy. Who are the angry ones now, taking up arms and invoking the language of war, their faces red with fury? It is the brexiteers and the Trumpians who talk of American carnage and fighting them on the beaches, whilst the anti-racists and the climate activists and the liberals engage in passive resistance and "take the knee."

So how come? Well, my theory is actually an optimistic one. For decades, the movement of societies across the developed world has been away from patriarchy, white supremacy and parochial nationalism. The process has hardly been smooth or consistent, but just look back fifty years to see how far we have come. I am still shocked watching clips from seventies TV shows to remember how little I questioned the profoundly racist, sexist and xenophobic tone of many of them. But back then, so much existed to support the innate sense of privilege of the white, hetero, English-speaking male and it must have seemed that that was the way it was always going to be. Conservatism and a profound desire not to rock the boat made sense for white, English-speaking males, particularly those with limited other sources of privilege (such as wealth, education or elevated social class). And then, when change did begin happening (women's lib, gay rights, increased immigration, more awareness of other counties, languages and cultures) conservatism was a vital protection against the forces of anarchy.

And then change began reaching a tipping point. The innate privilege that had seemed so permanent began to weaken. The voices of women, people of colour, gay people, foreigners (for God's sake!) began to be heard. Still nowhere as much as they deserved to be heard, but still far too much for the fragile egos of the Donald Trumps, Nigel Farages, Steve Bannons and Boris Johnsons of this world, and certainly far, far too much for their otherwise completely unprivileged, but still White, male and English speaking supporters.

So, suddenly, resisting change was no longer enough. The change had happened, and now it had to be undone, and that wasn't going to happen without a fight. Now it was a question of recapturing rather than just retaining that innate privilege. And so Conservatism (or Republicanism in the US) abandoned the notion of conservatism and became activist. The had to take back control, make america great again, build the wall, send the asylum seekers back. And there was an obvious place to look for the language and imagery they needed - the Second World War. Pretty much the epitome of the 'interesting times' that that mythical Chinese curse evoked, but a time when (at least in the hazy, one-generation-removed 'memory' of the trumpy/brexiteers) the innate privilege of the white hetero English-speaking male was at its height.

So, suddenly, 'interesting times' is what the Trumpians and the Brexiteers seem to want - chaos, division, ripping up of well-established customs and protections and a leap into the economic unknown of twenty-first century isolationism. And why do they want it? Because they know they've lost, and this is their last, desperate roll of the dice.

The trouble is, ancient Chinese curse or not, these interesting times are going to be pretty bloody difficult for everybody.

A strange sort of nationalism

So back in the days of good old-fashioned xenophobia, nationalism was when you believed your country to be superior to any other country and hung your nation's flag over your balcony to prove it. Other countries were sly, untrustworthy, useless or dangerous. THEIR judges were corrupt and/or stupid, THEIR politicians on the take and/or useless and THEIR whole system of government and public service overpriced, weird, ineffective and convoluted.

Somewhere along the line though, that all changed, though it took 2016 (the year of Trump and Brexit) to make that fact clear.

You see, what the brexiteers had in common with Trump was their populist nationalism, to the extent that the two campaigns seem to have come to define nationalism for the 21st Century. And the thing is, it is actually a very weird sort of nationalism indeed when you come to think about it, because to 21st Century nationalists it's not THEIR judges, politicians and public services that are shit, it's OURS!

Take the brexiteers. British Nationalists they may be, but look at the range of things they are willing to turn against: British judges (aka Enemies of the People); the British civil service (foot-dragging Remoaners, every one); British ambassadors ("emotionally needy", according to Theresa Villiers, and expressing sour grapes, according to IDS); the British Parliament (not to be trusted with any sort of decision on Brexit) and of course the Act of Union with Scotland, hence the United Kingdom itself.

Pretty much the full house, you might think, but still trumped by Trump, who has repeatedly described the entire system of government in the US as a swamp in need of draining. But that's not the weirdest thing. The xenophobic arch-nationalist has then turned on his own country's intelligence services whilst praising the leader of a foreign power who has been exposed as engaging in cyber-warfare against the US. You really couldn't make it up.

So it seems that 21st Century nationalism goes hand in hand with full throated attacks on pretty much every institution of that same nation. So what exactly is it that nationalists these days support? Even the flag is problematic, surely. Even more in the US than in the UK, the national flag is an inseparable symbol of the national institutions that Trump's nationalists attack with such gusto. The stars and stripes flutters constantly over the swamp they chant about (over every State building in the land, in fact), and if Russia is suddenly more to be trusted than the US's own intelligence agencies, then which flag should they be rallying behind anyway?

You see it seems that 21st Century populist nationalism is a very direct and emotional concept that bypasses systems of government and national institutions, so that the 'nation' becomes whatever any individual nationalist deems it to be. It's generally a pretty vague concept, but can be easily conjured by well-chosen three-word slogans, apparently: "take back control", "build the wall", "lock her up", "brexit means brexit" and "drain the swamp." Not that specific maybe, but they clearly work, and certainly a hell of lot simpler than the average National Anthem.

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.

Why do we talk about prime ministers winning power?

I half-heard an item on the Today programme this morning about Jeremy Corbyn needing to "appeal to older voters if he is to win power in 2020," and all of a sudden it was that last phrase that struck me. It is pretty much the universal formulation to describe the process of appointing a prime minister, to the point where I at least have never before questioned it. Why would I? Elections are competitive processes and the office of prime minister carries a great deal of power, so the leader of the successful party has clearly won power.

Except that, if you transpose the phrase to another context it suddenly sounds very strange indeed. Imagine if the newly-appointed head teacher of your child's primary school wrote to parents to announce that she had won power over the school. Even in the private sector chief executives do not win power over multinational corporations: they are appointed by the board (usually these days to rescue the company from whatever scandal its recent actions have embroiled it in).

The point is that both words in the formulation are problematic, and both transfer an inordinate amount of agency in the wrong direction. When a board 'appoints a new chief executive' or governors 'appoint a new head' the successful candidate has clearly won, but the linguistic formulation gives agency in the process to those who have appointed him or her. Not so, it seems, in general elections, where the electorate become not merely passive but absent from the phrase used.

And then there is the word 'power' itself. Yes, anyone heading a large organisation (such as a national government) has power, but is it not hugely more important that he or she has responsibility too? Yet there is nothing in the phrase 'winning power' even to hint at such responsibility. And with the current government in particular that is a massive problem. I have written before about the extraordinary way in which ministers in this government and the last have ceased to take responsibility for the areas under their charge. Time was that if a scandal broke in say, the NHS the relevant minister would take responsibility and resign, even if the scandal related to events that happened before they took office. Now it is as likely to be the minister who breaks (or even engineers) the crisis, to empower them to bring in more and more sweeping changes.

The current government like power, it is clear (which governments don't, once they get it?) and do not have a great deal of time for responsibility. How else could they preside over benefit changes that drive large numbers of their citizens to suicide? The thing is, while we persist in talking about David Cameron "remaining in power" until 2020 then we are, in a small but crucial way, gifting them more of that power and relieving them of more of the responsibility.

So what should we be saying? Pretty simple, in my view. In the early hours of the morning of the 8th of May 2020 I want to hear David Dimbleby say that "The British electorate has given Jeremy Corbyn responsibility for leading the country."

Well it could happen...