Minarets Over Ground Zero

I do not intend to rehearse the arguments for or against the proposals to build a community centre, incorporating a place of worship, in lower Manhattan, but I think that the entire thrust of the Palin and Gingrich arguments against it is extremely dangerous.

It is not a matter of taste, decency or respect to the slain (at least 50 of whom, besides the hijackers, were Muslim), but of the right strategy to deal with the threat of the sort of militant Islam that drove the attacks.  Defuse or detonate.

Militant Islam is a bundle of loathsome repressive doctrines, cloaking in religious justification ideas – such as, but in no way limited to, the systematic suppression of feminine equality – we thought we had nearly vanquished. We need none of that loathsomeness in either New York or London, but we are strong enough to let those ideas float and perish or flourish freely on their own merits.

Hundreds of millions of people around the world identify with Islam, but most don’t identify with the militant strands. Last night I was in a pub in Brixton, talking to a group of young men and women. Some of them were Muslim, and had been fasting; others had not, and admitted a grudging admiration for those that had managed the feat. There was banter as they ribbed each other, but respect for each person’s choice whether to fast and whether or not to drink alcohol.  In that pub, showing each other that respect, these Londoners were helping to defuse the threat, and though we might not consciously have articulated it, we knew what we were doing.

America has a choice: it can either welcome, adapt and assimilate Islam, fostering a liberal environment in which Islamic thought and practice can develop in the image of a free society,   or it can exclude, alienate and provoke it, driving those hundreds of millions into opposition to American ideals of liberty and so feeding the cancer of terrorism.

Most of New York seems to understand this,  most of the hinterland doesn’t. Let’s hope New York prevails.

The Blair-Brown Years

I am prompted to write this after reading the statement of Ellie Gellard, aka Bevanite Ellie, whom I follow on Twitter, that she is proud to be a supporter and member of the Labour Party and proud of all that they achieved during their 13 years in power.

I, however, think that those thirteen years were a colossal betrayal of the ideals of the progressive left – particularly Bevanite ideals – and the only explanation I can give of Ms Gellard’s position is that she is blinded by tribal loyalty. This, of course, is not unusual in politics, on any side of the spectrum, and it is one reason I choose not to join a political party.  For most of us on the progressive left, the single greatest betrayal was the war in Iraq, but I think that even without that ghastly error, the Blair-Brown years represent the biggest lost opportunity for the left in my lifetime.

Ancient History: the Clause IV moment

Mr Blair’s path to power was carefully planned. Labour had been in disarray since its defeat in 1979, and had slowly tried to pull itself together since the disastrous election of 1983, exorcising the far Left whose rhetoric looked increasingly irrelevant as the socialist dictatorships of the Soviet bloc unravelled into economic stagnation. Neil Kinnock and John Smith laid much of the groundwork, but the awkward Clause IV(4) of the constitution remained.

Whether Clause IV(4) really was the barrier to power that it was portrayed to be is a matter of debate, but its replacement of a clear principle (“the common ownership of the means of production”) with the meaningless fudge of the new  clause should have set the alarm bells ringing.

Hollow Branding

Mr Blair and those around him were very smart political operators, and they recognised that in the television age they needed to present Labour as something radically different to the failed socialist parties of the Eastern bloc and of its own, somewhat chequered past (chequered, at least, in the eyes of the media and the electorate). But it was a matter of presentation, not of substance, which led to the New Labour brand.  This branding paralleled developments in the commercial world, where “designer labels” had become divorced from the underlying quality on which their reputations had been built and licensed to apply to any old tat. The brand, without substance, seemed to work in the commercial world, and it worked too for New Labour, which was a political brand without substance, other than the fact that it was different from the tired old Conservatives. There was no clear underlying aim or principle in the Labour Party at the time, other than gaining power.

1997

It had long been the habit of Conservative Chancellors of the Exchequer to “mess with the money” in the months before a General Election, particularly an election they seemed unlikely to win. Before 1997, the Bank of England was under Treasury control; the Bank Rate was decided by the Chancellor, and Nigel Lawson (in 1986-7) and Norman Lamont (in 1991-2) both loosened monetary conditions to create a “feelgood factor”, for which the price would later have to be paid. To his great credit, Kenneth Clarke in 1996-7 did not do so, because he was committed to taking Britain into the Euro as soon as politically practical and he was trying to keep the monetary and economic conditions favourable. This had the effect of leaving the incoming government with a much sounder economy than might otherwise have been the case.

New Labour came to power in 1997 with the mandate radically to change Britain; and it had the finances and the economy to do so. My charge is that it shamefully squandered that opportunity, because it really had no idea what it wanted to do. The abandonment of principle in the pursuit of power left a vacuum at the centre.

Soundbites and hollow branding are much easier than building quality from the bottom up. An early example of hollow branding, as meaningless as New Labour, was Mr Blair’s call for a “stakeholder society”, a soundbite Mr Cameron has all but duplicated in his call for a “Big Society”.  In fact, the creation of a stakeholder society would have been in keeping with the aims of the progressive left and could have been a lasting achievement, but very little had been done to take on board the underlying ideas that it represented – including, in fact, some of the broader principles of the old Clause IV, with common ownership implemented not through nationalisation but through cooperatives and wide share ownership. But without this, it was just another soundbite, rejected as soon as the media realised how hollow it was.

Failure to tackle the City

Perhaps the biggest missed opportunity was Mr Brown’s failure to recognise the harm that the City of London was doing to the economy.  The City was an important driver for growth, but it was not difficult to see that its high profitability must have been caused by inefficiencies. It is basic economics: consistently high profits indicate a failure of competition. If the market were competitive, returns would tend to level out. Consistently high profits should be investigated, not celebrated.  Instead, Mr Brown diverted ever more public resources to the City through Private Finance Initiatives and Public-Private Partnerships.  Rigged in favour of private investors, as these unravel they place yet greater burdens on the public purse, costing in the long term far more than a simple bond issue under public management.  The Thatcherite dogma, that private management is intrinsically better than public, should have been thrown out in 1997; but it was adopted by Blair and Brown.

Wrong-headed attempts to reform the Public Services

The public services were (and still are) in need of reform; but the “reforms” pushed by Blair and Brown were essentially Thatcherite dogma in a different guise.  The “private good, public bad” dogma undermines any sense of duty in public service, as public employees are made to seem inferior to private enterprise every step of the way. It denigrates, rather than celebrates, public service; and it is a credit to most public servants that they continue to perform their duties so well.

Even though the reform agenda failed, additional resources were put into the public services. After eighteen years of malign neglect, they were much needed, and it is not a bad thing that most of the extra money in the health service went on salaries: I would much rather be cared for by a well-paid nurse and doctor than a tired, overworked and resentful one.  Yet I do not think that this can be counted as an “achievement”, particularly in the light of the public deficit that ensued. Were those resources coming from a fiscal surplus,  or had the improved morale and the commitment of the staff been achieved by  meaningful and appropriate institutional reform, it would be otherwise. Spending a lot of money you do not have is not really an achievement.

Education

Perhaps the biggest failure of the New Labour project (other than the wars, of course) lies in the education sector.  Education can and should provide a route to social mobility; yet the so-called “sink schools” remain, under-resourced with their committed staff largely unrecognised.   Instead, New Labour imposed micro-management of teaching from the centre, failed to discard the Tory system of league tables that does not recognise the achievements of teaching challenging intakes, and diverted precious resources to faith schools whose very existence divides communities.

New Labour swallowed the idea that education is for employers, its role being to create a supply of willing wage-slaves. In higher education, participation targets and the continuation of the Conservative policy abolishing the “binary divide” led to the erosion of rigour and a generation of mickey-mouse graduates with no sense of independent curiosity, good only for the most basic clerical positions.

So what were the achievements?

I could go on at much greater length listing Labour’s missed opportunities: to reform tax and benefits, to open government properly, to reform the voting system; but it would be churlish to claim that Labour achieved nothing in its thirteen years. There are some positives, though very, very few. Mr Brown’s first act, creating an independent Bank of England, must count as one; but it was the last good thing that he did. Devolution in Scotland and Wales, and the creation of the London mayoralty have been successes.  And despite the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is now, mostly, peace in Northern Ireland – though the credit for that must be shared with Mr Major.

Ships are She

Sometime in the last decade or so, collectively, a terrible change has been wrought on the English language by the guardians of style. Ships were stripped of their femininity.

It is not too late to reverse this dreadful decision, which was certainly made consciously by a few style editors in the major publications.  I was taught that in English, animate creatures have gender and inanimate objects are neuter, except for ships, which are feminine. But somewhere, political correctness crept in and decided that ships would henceforth be “it”.

Other machines, particularly those that carry people, are also sometimes affectionately and colloquially called “she”, like ships, but it is a colloquialism, whereas the femininity of ships is a feature of the language. A car, or a plane or a train can no more be a “she” than a cheese or a potato; but in English, ships are she.

At one level, the femininity of ships is simply a poetic eccentricity of the language. A passage using “it” instead of “she”  invariably seems duller and more prolix; but the preservation of feminine ships is not just a matter of keeping the language attractive. It is a direct reference to our maritime history, and neutering ships cuts out a central part of our linguistic heritage. Whoever it was who decided that ships should henceforth be neuter can never have been to sea.

It was sailors who first gave ships their femininity, not for any sexual reason but because at sea they depend on the ship as a child depends on its mother. A ship – particularly a sailing vessel, and indeed any ship below a monstrous size – becomes alive at sea; she protects her brood, the crew who sail her, from the dark inanimate viciousness of the elements.  Mostly, the crew were men; often, they were deprived of female company for months on end. But their ship is feminine not because she is a substitute woman, but because she is their maternal protector.  She will always be a ship, and never a wife or a woman, but to a sailor, the ship will always be she.

Proud To Be A Republican

But then I’m British. I wouldn’t be saying that if I were American; the systematic looting of the nation’s finances by the Cheney cabal makes anything any of Africa’s tinpot dicators did look like small change.

But in Britain, we still have the monarchy; and, for fuck’s sake, I could theoretically get into trouble for writing this post. It has no place at the centre of a modern, democratic state.

I daresay Brenda has done as decent a job as she might, and I don’t bear a particular grudge against her. Australia’s PM Julia Gillard suggests that they should become a republic when queenie pops it, and what’s good enough for the cons is good enough for the Poms.

The Case Against The Monarchy: a small selection.

(1) The Institutionalisation of Inherited Privilege

Privilege should be earned. We all acquire some of it through birth – by the accident of being born in a relatively prosperous and free nation rather than one ravaged by drought and lawlessness – but  how can we claim to aspire to  “equality of opportunity” if, right at the centre of our constitution, we continue to give extraordinary privilege by the accident of birth to this rather ordinary family?

(2) The Inhumanity of The Goldfish Bowl

The  tragedy of the current heir’s private life owes much to its being lived out in the goldfish bowl of publicity. He was not allowed, when young, to marry the woman he loved because she had some history; so a naive maiden of the residue of aristocracy was sacrificed.  It was inhumane to her and inhumane to him, a ridiculous fairy-tale in a dress by the Emmanuels for the proles to gawp at, which ended with a fiasco in a Parisian tunnel.  No amount of wealth or privilege can compensate for the loss of human dignity suffered by the cast of the soap opera, who are players by birth, not choice.

(3) The abuse of privilege

Inherited wealth and privilege corrupts instead of compensating. The prince has used his privilege to subvert evidence, process and democracy and impose pedestrian architecture and peddle quack cures and sugar-pills.

But a President would be worse, no?

Why do we need a President? The Queen is our nominal Head of State, but constitutionally she has no meaningful powers. Were she ever to exercise any of the few residual powers she may technically retain, the very act of exercising them would provoke a constitutional crisis, so they remain meaningless.  The job of Head of State is thus actually meaningless, so why do we need a human to do it? We could just as easily retain the Crown, as the symbol of the nation, but retire its wearer. If we need a human to kiss the hands of Ambassadors and to entertain foreign potentates, let us select by lot a representative citizen to do it.

The case for the Monarchy

It’s good for the tourist industry. FFS!

We’d still have history, Wren, Shakespeare, Newton, Stonehenge, Stratford, the Lakes, the Highlands, and most of all sixty million of us in all our fantastic colours and characters, free finally to be citizens and subjects no longer.

So one day, some day not so very far away,  a few years, a decade or even two from now, when nature takes its course on her life, let a cry go out: “The Queen is dead. Long Live the Republic”.

The (un)reliability of wind power

People who oppose wind power point out that it is unreliable. The wind is unpredictable; there is power available on averagely-windy days, but on calm days and very windy days (when the turbines have to furl for their own protection) there isn’t. We, on the other hand, are used to being able to plug something in and find the power available.

The village of Fladbury, near Evesham in Worcestershire was one of the first in the country to have domestic electric lighting. Power was generated from the River Avon, by turbines fitted into Fladbury Mill.  But as the denizens of Fladbury turned in at night, they turned off their lights and the current drawn fell.  What was supposed to happen was that the turbine operator would see the voltage rise on the voltmeter by the generating shed, and accordingly close the turbine sluices. This wasn’t reliable enough, so instead they put in a bank of electric fires in the turbine shed which were switched on to absorb the current no longer being drawn by the lights in the villagers’ homes.

These days, that complex operation is handled by the National Grid who switch in generators as required, just so as we always have 240 volts at the socket. They do this in response to fluctuating demand; and they will be able to do it with the fluctuating supply from wind power too, but it isn’t very efficient. If there’s a flat calm at half-time on Cup Final day (when there’s always a surge in demand as people put the kettle on), they’ll have to fire up a bank of inefficient generators; but, instead, if everyone switched off their fridge and freezer for the time it takes the nation to brew a half-time cuppa, there would be enough power without firing up the backup.

Smart Meters and Smart Tariffs

Oh, and the laptop could switch to battery, too – just a few watts, but it helps. What we need are smart meters and smart plugs, which tell our devices when to switch off; and the effective way to get us to switch off is to make high-demand electricity much more expensive. After all, it is much more expensive to generate.  The network knows when the demand is going up: not only does the voltage start to drop, but the frequency changes: as the generators have to work harder, they slow down, and the current alternates at slightly less than fifty cycles a second. Modern electronics can easily detect this, so smart meters (and smart tariffs) should charge more when the frequency starts to fall – and less when it’s running free.

Smart Plugs and Smart Devices

So a smart plug, or a smart device, will know from the frequency of its electricity supply the price of the power it is using.  Freezers, say, could be programmed to draw current if either the price of juice is below a certain point, or the temperature inside the cabinet is getting too high; and laptops would charge up when the juice is cheap or the battery is really flat and needed urgently.

Electric Cars

There’s a good chance that when we replace our current car in a few years’ time we’ll buy an electric one rather than a diesel one. Most cars spend most of their lives parked up, and if they were electric they could be plugged in. Cars, unlike laptops, have big batteries.

Let’s say an average electric car has a battery capacity of 25kWh. There are about 25 million cars on the UK roads, so were they all to be electric (in few decades’ time), there would be 625 GWh of storage capacity available to the network. OK, so not while they are actually driving, but let’s assume that half of them are driving while the other half are parked up and charging (it’s probably much less than that). So that gives the network, say, 300 GWh of storage capacity.  Current peak demand for electricity is about 65GW, but widespread use of electric cars will increase this – by how much will depend on lots of factors, including how much we use cars rather than public transport or bicycles and the efficiency of new cars; but assuming that there isn’t much further increase in car use, and that  the average efficiency of future electric cars is about the same as the new Nissan Leaf, 15% is a reasonable guess.  Even so, a plugged-in fleet of electric battery cars could provide as much 6 hrs backup capacity for the whole grid: but frequent charge-discharge cycles reduce the life of present-day lithium-ion batteries. Nevertheless, advances in battery technology are now proceeding apace, driven as much by the demands of portable electronics as by electric transport.

All of these technologies reduce the need for instant power now, which makes wind power’s unpredictable variability much less of a problem.

Braces in Brixton

In my other blog, I write about transparency in politics and economics as The Transparency Extremist, but not everything I have to say sits comfortably under that heading, so this is for the rest of my obsessions. Music, fun, technology, religion and Brixton, for a start.