Democracy

 

 

I feel that the type of democratic liberal systems enjoyed in the West are having a bad time just now. One reason is that a big chunk ( more than half ) of the world’s population live under totalitarian systems. Many are failing but some, particularly in the Chinese case these are doing rather well. Over the recent years the Chinese economy has performed much better than any in the West. The Chinese Covid response has been more effective and life in China has responded well to the “new normal” with economic life more or less returning to its previous growth rate. The Chinese regime is busy pointing out its good performance.

However I think the main failure lies with the governments of America under Trump and the UK under Johnson.

To take America first. I am praying that electors at the forthcoming presidential election get rid of Trump. It is almost redundant to cite his shortcomings , his egocentric behaviour, his racism, his division of society, his climate denial and his dishonesty. The big change which affects us all is that he has completely forfeited any effort at world leadership. While the USA was far from perfect it did proclaim high ideals and often attempted to live up to them.. All through the post war era the enemies of democracy and freedom accused America of failures. Now Trump has amply justified the critics of America by proclaiming nationalism and lauding the Russian strong man tactics.  His blatant lying such that he unashamedly says truth is “fake news” equates to the lies of the totalitarians.

There has been an attempt by economic journals who really should know better to suggest his economic policies have been successful. What these have amounted to is an enormous one off tax cut mainly favouring corporates. Rather than increasing investment these have fuelled stock market rises that Trump is happy to claim as success. These cuts are unrepeatable because they increase government debt so much.

More seriously still Trump has thoroughly infected the Republican party. While the Republicans were responsible for some very shoddy tactics such as blatant gerrymandering of constituencies this has extended to some blatantly anti democratic practices. An example is restricting ( attempting, as it has been stopped in the courts ) postal votes to one centre only in an constituency. This meant many thousands of voters would have to travel and queue at one centre. Since is poorer people who would be most affected Republican politicos  felt this in their interest. This voter suppression is a gift to critics of democratic society and sadly is just one example of the shoddy behaviour Trump has reduced his party to accept as somehow fitting behaviour. The hypocrisy over Supreme Court nominations is another example as Trump tries to pack the court in his favour.

Part of democracy is the necessity of working together. Trump demonises the opposition and his aggressive attitude has led to a near break down in public life. Not all is down to Trump. There has been an increasing “winner takes all” attitude rather than realising minorities have rights and interests.

The UK presents a slightly different situation. The election of Corbyn and the extreme influence of fanatics represented a big failure in the Labour party albeit one which has now been corrected. The correction happened only after the Johnson Conservative party won big in the general election. While not on the Trump scale Johnson is unfit to be a democratic leader. His attitude to the truth is poor. He has a background of unashamedly lying whenever it suits him. His total invention of some reporting from Brussels when in fact he wasn’t even there got him fired as a journalist. He has continued in this vein right up until his “ following scientific advice”  when he was in fact ignoring it over Covid response. His lies over his relationship with Jennifer Arcuri ( which she has now admitted ) were kind of excusable as a private matter, but his corrupt behaviour was not.

Far more serious is the contempt Johnson has shown for parliamentary norms as in his attempted prorogue of Parliament last year and his willingness to flout law by reneging on international agreements. The latter is most puzzling as it appears to gain little while showing that he is willing to disregard agreements he entered. As he , himself, engineered the agreement he is showing that he is not to be trusted. On both occasions we have had characteristic bluster but no sign of shame. One gets the impression he feels these were good “wheezes” of which he is proud

The need going forward is to get rid of these two chancers and put somebody more respectful of democratic norms in their place. The damage Trump has done will not be easily rectified. It is arguably too late to regain leadership, moral or otherwise, of the liberal democracies. However the democratic decline will not be cured by replacement of two bad actors. Division preceded them as did decreasing election involvement.

It is hard to see improvements. Some kind of proportional system would allow smaller groups to have a parliamentary impact rather than the extra parliamentary tactics they are forced to employ at present. This would prevent or at least limit the kind of capture of a major party that Corbyn and his cronies attempted. It is a long running scandal that the Liberals with wide support have such a pitiful parliamentary representation. The usual argument is that this tends to lead to insecure governments who must rely on support outside of one party. One could argue this would be a very good thing.

Another possible route forward is by proportional conventions. The idea is that a group is chosen proportional to the demographics of the whole population and asked to examine and advise on a particular issue. Hopefully a small group will not show the sharp polarisation that occurs now. Obviously the idea is fraught with risks of capture by some extreme view but it apparently worked well when tried on climate change. The resulting recommendations are regarded as sensible and could provide “cover” for uncomfortable political decisions.

55 years and counting

 

 

One recent morning Annette asked me what day it was. I replied Friday. This type of question wasn’t too surprising because the days blur together and on one occasion I was convinced it was Wednesday when in fact it was Thursday. I had a modicum of excuse that some TV programs had been postponed a day and I was using them as a reference point. No what date she insisted and I realised it was our wedding anniversary. Furthermore it was 55 years since our wedding.

We were just starting to leave the house post lockdown  and I suggested coffee at the local garden centre ( outdoors ) as a ( very) modest acknowledgement. As we hadn’t visited there for many months it was interesting to see all the changes

Looking back it very clear the high points were our children. Martin was born in 1973 and we were absolutely thrilled. His conception had not been trouble free and he was an interest and delight from day 1. Alison born in 1974 only 20 months later which wasn’t ideal timing but we were very pleased nonetheless. This did mean that Annette,, who had given up work, had the onerous job of raising two small children. Fortunately they got on very well together. In fact Alison’s first word was not mama or dada but buffer as she couldn’t quite say brother. We were so convinced that we had completed our family that we disposed of all our baby gear.

Even when courting we had thought the ideal number of children was three and after a few years we decided to go for number three with Frances born in 1978. She fitted in straight away. Martin was very proud of his baby sister and insisted she was taken to his school, which he had just started, to exhibit to his teacher.

Maybe we were fortunate but the children have remained close to each other and a great source of interest to us as parents. We now delight in grandchildren as they each have a boy and a girl. Both our girls were outstanding students and gained high academic honours .Martin had a terrible time at university as I recount below and is a tribute to his character that he managed to finish his course, albeit a year late.

I had issues with redundancy twice in a year but this was surmounted until I had a stroke in 1993. Fortunately although a massive blow I had great support from my wife. It was unfortunate that at the same time I had a nodule on my vocal chord. Full anaesthesia is dangerous for stroke patients so I had the minimum necessary for the vocal chord op. I wasn’t quite at the stage of drinking a pint of rum and then biting down on a stick as in Napoleonic era naval days but it certainly wasn’t an experience I would wish to repeat. I was working for Castrol at the time and I had magnificent support. My boss ensured that a colleague visited me every few weeks during the seven months I was away. I had just been allocated a portable computer which I had with me and it proved invaluable not least because my handwriting had become very poor. Although not Internet enabled I could communicate with colleagues without talking (with poor speech ) and remaining sitting.

I returned to work for nearly two years. I used to joke it was the best paid therapy in the world. Even so I retired early from full time work. I volunteered for early retirement and was only slightly miffed that nobody argued that I should stay because I was so valuable.

I had only just returned to work when Martin, our eldest son, was diagnosed with Hodgkins disease , a type of cancer. It was fortunate in retrospect that Martin was at Salford University and was referred to Christie hospital in Manchester with its superb reputation. The cancer staff worked closely with the adjacent cancer research centre. Martin had to suspend his course of study and undergo 6 months of chemotherapy followed by a short and intense course of radiotherapy. Annette assumed heavy burdens during this time..

In hindsight returning to University days after finishing treatment wasn’t a good idea. Following a long standing undertaking his girlfriend had gone to Australia on a one year working visa. This, and all the accumulated stress, made completing his studies difficult and he wanted to drop out. I was able to persuade him to finish only by promising his fare to Australia  to see her. This worked extremely well as he joined her for the final few months of her year and also on a working visa. They worked together in Sydney and later were able to make a trip to New Zealand.

I have rarely felt so proud as on his return. I had gone to meet him at Heathrow and I was quite bowled over by the smart, bronzed man I met. I really felt his few months in Oz had cemented his cure. His smartness had earned an airline upgrade to business class. As for the girl; he married her and they now have two lovely children themselves..

We celebrated our half century by a trip to Australia and New Zealand. Both marvellous countries and a shame they are so far away, we found the journey forbidding. I shall need to think of a suitable Diamond wedding gift. ( Yes, I realise diamonds are obvious )

1965

 

 

I’m inspired to write this post after reading the book by Christopher Bray with the title 1965. Bray regards 1965 as pivotal in the making of modern Britain. As he points out it is the midpoint not only of the calendar sixties but the historians long decade from 1956 and the Suez crisis until 1973, the Yom Kippur war and the oil price shock.

Bray strays well outside 1965 to consider events particularly in the early sixties and he views the year by some moderately famous artists. Incidentally Bray is very opinionated as when he devotes a chapter to a rant against the Beeching railway cuts

I was attracted to the book partly because its contribution to modern history but also because 1965 was a year of great personal change for me. I left University, started work and got married.. As Bray points out unemployment was almost ridiculously low at 1.5%. As a science graduate I had a range of possibilities. I considered doing an MSc in Analysis at the then Battersea College in London, a job with the scientific instruments industry body near London and a job with Unilever at Port Sunlight near Birkenhead. I had applied unsuccessfully to the Atomic Energy authority mainly because everyone else did and they seemed to be hoovering up so many new graduates.

It sounds trivial now but I rejected London because it meant I would have to sell my car.  I had become the proud owner of an old Morris 1000 van. This was a well used example of a moderately up to date vehicle which amazingly stayed in production into the seventies. A car of any sort was becoming much more common. The equally trivial reason for rejecting scientific instruments was the training course they proposed.

My future mother-in-law was infuriated by my job searching. Getting married with no job and no home she grumbled. Looking back she was right and I was confident to the point of being rather blasé. We ( or rather Annette) had the not unusual squabbles over the wedding with her mother. Her mother had firmly vetoed the idea of making the dress herself even though Annette was a highly qualified textile designer. It happened that during a visit to London we saw a dress on sale which Annette bought there and then. I have sometimes thought since that mother-in-law, parent of just one girl  (and four boys ) would have enjoyed wedding shopping with her daughter.

Bray makes much of some the artistic figures of the time. I would have considered myself well informed but I doubt I had heard of Sylvia Plath and had only a very hazy idea of R D Laing. In contrast I was very aware of the spy genre writing. My college friend was very impressed by James Bond but the matter of fact agent of the Ipcress File was a revelation. The cold war rumbled on but had become a backdrop. A great number of pseudo intellectuals espoused, if not communism, then its avowed philosophy. The fact that the philosophy was not followed in Soviet Russia escaped all the fashionable Marxists.

Through my time at university there had been a striking change in male dress. When I started I wore a tie and washed my drip dry shirts leaving them to hang in the dedicated area in our block. Gradually this semi formality ceased and by the end I was wearing dark casual shirts with a pullover instead of a jacket. This was like almost all of my fellow students.

For my final year I lived in the bedsitter that I occupied in my industrial year. By then Annette was in lodgings nearby and although I couldn’t visit her she could freely visit me. This was part of the rather bizarre double standards in boy/girl relationships. Although the cooking facilities were sparse with two gas rings she could prepare our meals with a little forward planning. We lacked the money to eat out although we still frequented coffee bars.

I enjoyed living independently so much that in the summer of 1965 between finishing University and starting a new working life and marriage we both took temporary jobs at a book wholesaler.

Bray cites the “Avengers” TV series extensively for turning to surrealist plots and backgrounds after a mundane beginning. It certainly didn’t hurt having glamorous Emma Peel with her dizzy fashion sense as lead character. He sees this as the mainstream TV equivalent of the LSD fantasies of the super trendy. All this was happening in London and I did not see any evidence whatsoever of drug culture in the provinces. The drug of choice where I lived was alcohol and there was some over indulgence. On the whole in my university of technology there was rather a determination to enter the jobs market at a higher level. Recreational subjects were ignored except for token general studies. Because excellent facilities were shared with the adjacent teacher training college who specialised in future games and PE teachers there was a great emphasis on sports. While girls were not specifically excluded rather few chose science and technology.  My course entry of about 60 contained only two girls.

While I didn’t want to live in London we visited quite a bit. Britain is very London-centric and so much of culture seemed centred there. This was mainly 1965 and onwards when we had a bit of money to spend. Annette had a college friend living in London and we visited her a couple of times.

As Bray acknowledges there is no doubt that the music of the year was by the Beatles. In Help, the film and album there was a debt to the surrealists. In the album Rubber Soul there was a musical sophistication that pointed the way towards their later evolution. Both established their amazing popularity.

It is hard now to summarise the year. Perhaps best described as change coupled with liberation. A great mixture of ideas, some well rooted, some recent, established a feeling of excitement and fluidity. While this led on to the fatuous hippies and yippies of the later sixties I grew increasingly against the whole lifestyle. I was concerned with establishing my career and our home as we bought our first house in 1968. While my environment was liberal it wasn’t permissive.

One side benefit for me was that the working class became trendy or perhaps more precisely the flat classless speech exemplified by Michael Caine playing Harry Palmer in the Ipcress file. I aspired to this but I’ve never quite got rid of a slight “Brummie” twang. At any rate regional accents became much more acceptable and Southern or BBC English voices ceased to be the only possibility short of an upper class bray. Ironically speech was one of my abilities affected by my stroke. For a while I was slow and robotic so I am content with with the current which is pretty close to the original.

Mayor's Ball/ C S Forester

 

 

Annettes’s mother was very proud that her Uncle Ted had become Mayor of Tamworth in the early 60’s after a long slog through local government. Her sole request from him was to provide four tickets to the Mayor’s Ball to be held on December 27^th. Her objective was than her son Ray and daughter Annette would go with their partners, Me with Annette and Pat with Ray.

It happened that Annette’s family had a Christmas routine. Christmas Day at home entertaining Bert and Mays’s immediate family. Then on Boxing Day to May’s younger sister, Nell, who also had their mother living with her and her husband; then on the 27^th to Bert’s brother and sister who lived together at the family home nearby.

So on the 27^th we all met up at the Laurels, the name of the family home. Ray and I wore lounge suits but the girls had gone to considerable lengths to assemble appropriate dresses. Bert was determined to make a record so we were trooped off into the Laurels front room ( only ever used at Christmas it seemed to me ) where we were photographed separately and together.

I was a bit apprehensive that it would be a very formal affair where I would feel inadequate in both dress and dancing ability. Although there were a few in dinner jackets and ladies in long dresses we felt quite comfortable being in the majority of dark suits and short dresses. I had avoided dancing lessons just being taught a few elementary steps by Annette. She was determined that I should be a nearly adequate partner.

I most remember the interval entertainer. He did the “Deck of Cards”. Although I realise now this is quite well known it was the first time I had heard it. There are variations but essentially a soldier is caught playing cards and protests that the cards are his bible. Thus the one reminds him there is one God, the deuce that the bible has two books, the trey of the holy trinity and so on. The culmination is the deathless lines” I know, I was that soldier”

I only ever wore a DJ ( rented of course) to the final Fountains Ball at university. So called because it had been held in a big marquee around a fountain in front of the first hall of residence. For 1965 it was held in the adjoining dining halls of two residences in the, then new, student village. This wasn’t a roaring success as we had what seemed a good idea to provide as partner to my best friend one of Annette’s friends. In the event my friend over indulged in drink and was no company at all for Annette’s friend. To take the ladies back to their lodgings I had to leave my friend to be put to bed by others

This photo shows Pat, Annette, Ray and myself just before the ball.

C S Forester

Forester ( a nom de plume ) was a very popular author writing in the 30’s through 50’s dying in the 60’s. His most famous for his character,  Horatio Hornblower in naval books set during the Napoleonic Wars. There were a series of books as Hornblower rose through the ranks. These are not the well worn thrillers but rather the setting for the complex character of Hornblower. Hornblower is presented as having a confident front hiding an extremely unself confident persona.

The settings in the Royal Navy of the time are precise and detailed. Many incidents described have historical parallels. The major naval battles of the time such as the Nile and Trafalgar are a background as Hornblower was engaged elsewhere in some other mission  It is the Hornblower books which survive today although Forester wrote other famous works. An example is “ the African Queen” a film from 1951.Forester came to the Hornblower series fairly late in his writing career and in the 30’s and 40’s wrote many one off novels mainly on military themes and set variously in the World Wars and the Penisular War.  His extensive research formed the basis for the 1960 film “Sink the Bismarck”. Most recently the film “Greyhound” recently released starring Tom Hanks is based on the 1955 novel “ The Good Shepherd”

When I was a teenage reader I read all of Foresters work I could find.. I always found them enjoyable, readable and informative. His strangest work I found was “Randall and the river of time”. Published in 1950 it depicts Randall as firstly an army officer in WW1 and then his transition into civilian life as a scientist and inventor. Swept along by events he marries, accidentally kills his wife’s lover, survives a court case and is last seen carried off to a new life in America. I can’t recall why my family had this book which is quite unlike his other work with its emphasis on fate. The depiction is of things happening to Randall by chance and directing it down particular paths almost without his own volition.

The naval Napoleonic war theme was obviously popular and was taken up by other writers although mostly of inferior quality. Among better examples the Bolitho series written by Alexander Kent( the pen name of Douglas Reeman ). The most famous of the successor novels are those written by Patrick O’Brian. This massive series of 20 books was started at his publishers suggestion after Forester’s death. O’Brian chose double protagonists in Jack Aubrey, a naval officer and Irish/Catalan naval doctor Stephen Maturin. O’Brian led a strange double life, leaving his wife and child and settling in the south of France with his second wife, changing his name, and making his living as a researcher and translator. The O’Brian books reveal an astounding scholarship of the Napoleonic period not just about naval matters.. So successful was the concealment of his early life that O’Brian spent his final days at Trinity College Dublin although he was not , in fact, Irish as he pretended to be.