Out Of The EU. But How Far Out?

To me it seems probable given the high level of hostility in the UK to membership of the European Union (EU) that in 2016 at the promised referendum, a majority of voters will opt to remove the UK from the union.  I no longer mix with politicians but do come across middle and working class members of the public who seem happy, especially at this time of the year, to talk about politics.  They assume the EU is a bad thing and that leaving it will 'free' the UK from all its rules.  I was speaking to such a man just before Christmas and for me he summed up the next difficulty that the UK faces which the government does not seem to have considered, but I imagine (I hope) that civil servants are working on contingency plans for even now.

I said that the question of whether we left the EU seemed settled.  However, the question of what relationship we would have with it afterwards had to be hammered out.  I used the example of three countries which are outside the EU but have very different relationships with it: Norway, Morocco and the USA.  He dismissed this as any serious concern, because he said the referendum would simply be in/out.  I accepted that that was the case, but said that someone had to work out the precise details of the relationship.  I asked him what he thought the relationship would be like and he seemed to believe he could have his cake and eat it.

Norway is often cited as the model that Britain would favour, but it is a member of the European Economic Area (EEA) which means that while it has no right to vote on any EU legislation, it still has to accept the free movement of EU citizens into its country.  Now, the free movement of EU citizens is one of the key reasons why parties like UKIP and fellow travellers want to leave the EU.  Consequently the UK moving into the EEA would not remove that aspect.

Morocco is an associate member of the EU.  This might be the model most favoured by those seeking UK exit from the EU.  There are a range of associate agreements; they were started in 1961.  However, typically they allow the country to have access to specific markets, e.g. in agricultural or industrial goods or more recently free trade with the EU.  They have been focused on the Mediterranean littoral, the Balkans and Eastern Europe, but there are agreements with former colonies and states across the world.  Interestingly even this kind of relationship implies that the country works towards political, economic, trade and human rights reform to bring it in line with the EU.  Given that the UK is not a full democracy (the House of Lords is unelected as is the Head of State) and is seeking to abandon human rights legislation, we might find it difficult to get an agreement.  However, this one seems to be the status that people would favour, retaining the trade privileges without being bothered with the mobility of people or quotas.

The USA is friendly to the EU and has some bilateral agreements such as on extradition and on airline ownership.  There have been efforts at tariff agreements but anyone who has bought anything from the USA or tried to sell stuff there knows you get customs duties slapped on them at one end or the other.  It is the administration of these which is as painful as the actual cost.  If the UK wants to be out of the EU as much as the USA does, then this would be the model for selling even to France or between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, where much more stringent border controls would have to be introduced.  The UK could close its doors to anyone under this model just as the USA does and we could insist even daytrippers from France needed a visa if we so chose.

The thing is, no-one is yet speaking about the model that the UK will end up with, no doubt at the end of a lot of discussion.  You cannot simply walk out of an organisation you have been tied into for over forty years, especially if you want to keep many of the privileges that a majority of the anti-EU Britons seem to think are their right and not the result of that membership.

We spoke about the need to disengage from EU legislation in the British legal system.  The UK would be free from EU quotas on farming and fishing, but human rights legislation which is at the top of the list for many of those opposed to the EU, does not come from the EU, it comes from an often forgotten body, the Council of Europe which is entirely separate.  Unlike the EEC (the European Economic Community, the predecessor of the EU), the UK was a founder member of the Council of Europe in 1949.  The EEC was not established until 1957 and the UK did not join it until 1973.  The Council of Europe has 47 members; the EU only 28.  Thus, if we are to purge human rights from British law, the UK will also have to leave the Council of Europe and, as yet, that is not on the cards.

I asked the man whether he knew how difficult it is for people from outside the EU and EEA to travel to countries in the EU.  Anyone in the UK who has relations from Australia or South Africa or a host of other countries (though US citizens do not need a visa for tourism) knows how difficult it is for them to simply 'pop over' to France from the UK.  Generally it means 8 hours being interviewed at the French Embassy in London in order to be issued for a visa lasting 6 months.  The man said he was sure the French would not impose that on the British and surely we would go back to the situation in 1972.  I said that was making big assumptions about the willingness of the other EU states to tolerate the British leaving perhaps even the EEA but still making use of the benefits.  I also pointed out that the world of 2016 is very different from the world of 1972 in terms of protecting borders.  Given that those who want to leave the EU want to close the gates on EU citizens coming to our country, why can we assume the French and others will not simply do the same in return?

From this I moved on to how many Britons live outside the UK in other EU countries.  There are 761,000 living in Spain alone, probably augmented by about another 200,000 who live there for part of the year.  200,000 Britons live in France and again many others own property there; 115,000 live in Germany; 44,000 in the Netherlands; 28,000 in Belgium; 26,000 in Italy and 18,000 in Greece.  There are around another 48,000 in other EU countries.  This does not include UK students who study in EU universities; 9,500 UK students study in France, Spain, Germany and Italy.  Many of the Netherlands 41 universities have hundreds of British students.  With free movement of citizens Britons can apply to these universities and in some countries like Denmark have to pay no fees.  With numerous courses taught entirely in English (as these appeal to Chinese students as well) it is very easy to do.  However, once we leave the EU this will stop.  I know many who support the UK leaving the EU have no time for students anyway, but is is just another factor.  The man I was talking to said he did not think Spain or France would eject Britons resident in those countries.  I said: why not?  Given that UKIP has spoken of sending EU citizens home what is to stop these other countries doing the same in return?  An influx of over 1 million Britons being sent home, many of those from Spain being elderly, is going to be worked out.  Remember, before Greece joined the EEC it did not permit foreigners to own property in the country and Australia does not allow this either.

This is one challenge for those pressing for exit from the EU.  They assume that the rest of the EU will let the UK go quietly and to retain many of the privileges that it has in relation to those states, unchallenged.  No-one seems to be thinking this through and simply making assumptions that it will be all very nice for the UK and that EU states will not be resentful to Britain.  I know Britons think their country is special, but they have to recognise that other countries see it very differently.  The UK has long been a troublemaker in the EU and is exacerbating this situation at a time when the EU has enough to deal with handling terrorist attacks and the refugee situation.  The UK is making no concessions but in return expects the EU to just go on allowing tens of thousands of Britons to live, work and own property and to travel freely back and forth even when the UK is trying to stop that for EU citizens coming in.  To expect the rest of the EU to tolerate such treatment of their citizens and not seek a balance against UK people, is incredibly naive.  If we must leave the EU we need to be far better prepared for the consequences than is currently the case.

My Changing Views Of Anger

I suppose many blogs show a 'journey' of the person blogging.  I had never intended that for this blog, it was simply a way for me to relieve myself of many of the thoughts and particularly irritations in my mind.  It was also an outlet when I have felt powerless against what seems to have been an incessant chain of bad landlords and bad managers causing me such grief.  However, recently I read a quotation from Buddha that said 'You will not be punished for your anger, but by your anger.' and I realised that I now understood that statement.  In addition, in doing so I could see a great change from the attitude I had about anger back in October 2008: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/10/anger-reasons-i-have-it.html

Do not worry, this is not going to be some pitch about how I found God or Buddha or anything like that, it is simply me reflecting on why and how I came to hold an opposite opinion to one I held before.  Regular readers will know that it is rare for me to shift my opinion on anything which is what makes this case unusual.  At the time I could see the reasons for having anger and it did make me feel good.  I felt just as powerless as I do these days facing up to the weight of the economy, finding sustained work and maintaining a place to live.  Constantly I seemed to encounter people who wanted to rub my face in the mud and I had no ability to get back at them.  That has not changed, I have a manager who treats me as some combination between a rude idiot and an aggressive threat and picks me up on rules she has made up after the fact.  That is the second manager I have had like that and between them they have ruined my career.  I was able to get away from landlords in 2007 but since being made redundant in 2009 I have regularly faced the worry of having the house repossessed and have only be saved by loans from my family and HM Revenue & Customs accepting that it had wrongly taxed me £16,000 back in 2007.  Thus, problems have not gone away from me and, in fact, unemployment is far higher now and the economy in much a worse state than back in 2008 making the near future appear even bleaker.

What has changed is that I realised that anger was a drug.  Some people facing the difficulties I was facing and feeling so powerless of oppose them would have turned to alcohol or narcotics or over-eating, perhaps to violence or self-harm.  Some people are able to buckle down and simply tolerate what is being inflicted on them, but they are rare.  We live in a society where public anger is now incredibly commonplace.  Every time you drive, every time you go to a supermarket or try to check in for an aeroplane or to catch a train there is a good chance in the UK that you will see unbridled fury.  Typically it is not over anything major, usually the reverse, that someone is driving at a different speed to you or will not let you into a queue or is simply in the wrong car or you cannot find the product you want or it has sold out or the company has made a mistake on your ticket or the flight or train has been cancelled.  These are nothing compared to the anger you should feel against a government which is destroying opportunities, education, pensions and the health service and telling us we should be glad about it.  Yet, while we know we can do absolutely nothing to change David Cameron's mind, we feel, however unlikely, that if we shout and make a fuss, we can squeeze out some change to our benefit; the car driver will feel ashamed or we will be 'bumped up' on to a flight or a train.  Over the past decades we have been tutored to believe this by what we witness in public and on television programmes.  It is strength by the sense that is so powerful of resentment against those who are getting some that we are not.

Over the past few years, even before I went into counselling as a result of mistreatment in my current job, I came to realise that anger achieved very little, no more than getting drunk would do.  It made me feel good for a short time but the come down in terms of high blood pressure and constipation were just like a hangover after alcohol and actually made it harder to deal with the problems the next day.  Being angry you see things only from your own perspective.  You know your limits and forget that those around you do not.  This was the impact on the woman and boy who lived in my house.  They saw me shouting and hitting the furniture and wondered if it would be them next that I would hit.  They saw me revving the car engine and felt powerless as they had no control over whether I rammed into the car in front of me or not.  Reassurance and even repeated examples when nothing dire occurs makes it no less frightening to them wondering if 'this time' something more severe would occur. 

This links to the next issue is that even in a life when everything seems a battle there are scraps of light.  Not going all religious, this is simple things like having a good meal or just all of you sat in front of the television or just laughing about something silly or remembering a good day.  They may only be scraps but I found these were being over-shadowed literally by the 'fear and loathing'.  In turn this meant that I did not even have these scraps of happiness to fall back on so meaning that I then lacked the kind of resources I needed to deal well with all the nastiness I was facing, especially at work.  The two worlds were contaminating each other and that meant there was no refuge.  It was easy to get into a vicious circle.  Whilst unemployment dropped me into new problems it gave me the time to change things.  Partly it was because I was freed from having a nasty manager waiting to pick up any new imagined example of an error in order to hound me with it.  Instead I was in my home all the time and had reasonably behaving job centre staff to deal with once per fortnight rather than malicious colleagues every day.  In between applying for jobs, I also took the opportunity to look at anger management.  This came in part from prompting from the woman who lived in my house, but also from having just one too many anger hangovers - constipation concentrates the mind very well.

Then I found that it is incredibly difficult to get help with anger management.  My experience in this respect was very much the same as when I tried to seek help as I came closer to being unable to pay my mortgage.  I contacted the building society when I had enough money to pay three months' mortgage payments and they would not discuss  the issue with me.  They said I had to be down to the final month's payment before they could even talk about it.  To me this seemed ridiculous.  They did not seem to realise that talking about the situation would have taken some pressure off me and most likely would have meant better performance at interviews and so the chance of getting a job to pay the mortgage.  The same situation occurred with anger management.  I found that in my town the last courses in anger management had ended two years earlier and that nowadays they only train counsellors in anger management for counties around; I would have had to travel to London for such help.  Anger management in my town is only available to people who have been referred to it by the courts or social welfare.  Thus, as with defaulting with the mortgage, it was only at the final stage that help became available.  To me this seems short-sighted, but I guess it comes from targeting money at those who need it the most rather than preventing problems from developing.

Given that I could find no groups or individuals to help, I thought 'well, I am an intelligent man, surely there are some books or something I can use'.  Well it turned out that I could find no books on anger management, again except for professionals counselling people rather than for those suffering from anger problems.  I guess the sense is that someone suffering anger will not be able to see that they need help.  However, I was able to find bits of references from extensive internet searches to Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).  This sounded rather alarmingly like some pseudo-science, but actually turned out to be something legitimate.  It would have been the approach I would have been exposed to if I had applied for one of the courses two years earlier.  What I liked was that looked to treat causes rather than symptoms.  There is a lot on the internet about methods to reduce anger such as meditation but these did not seem feasible when you are driving and experience 'road rage'.  The NLP advocates likened most anger management to fixing a tyre when you had driven over broken glass and their method as being one that took you down a road without broken glass.  Anyway, from various sources I found exercises that I was able to do on my own.  Surprisingly, I found I quickly got into a 'virtuous circle' as being able to break the narcotic pleasure of anger I saw it was only doing harm and as anger became rarer it lost the psychological 'high' and feeling of power it had once given.  I was then able to recover those scraps of life that made me happy and in turn the two people living in my house felt more reassured so a feedback loop developed,

I have not reached a situation in which I am never angry, especially when dealing with computer games.  However, I can identify the symptoms so much faster and change what I am doing.  Probably the largest change has come in driving, knowing that I am giving power to worthless people if I get worked up when they hoot or flash or shout at me.  They are dangerous drivers and I need to get away from them, typically slowing down helps in that situation.  I think I felt I had a 'right' to anger something which was exacerbated because I was told I had other rights, no right to work, no right to enjoy a house without hassle, no right not to be treated as an idiot/inappropriate/to be dismissed, no right to drive my car without being forced off the road and so on.  However, I see now that the anger actually just made the things that I had under-valued, have less value.  Anger contaminates everything it touches and you need to be going in the opposite direction.  If you can derive happiness from lots of small and simple things then you become more robust.  You do not need a god to show you that, you can do it yourself.  Once you do, you then build up a reserve of some sort of energy that allows you to resist the trouble people seem so intent on pressing down on you, much more effectively.  Another trick that I have learnt since from counselling is to keep home and work in different silos, but that is a story for another day.

The University Market

Back before the election in May 2010, I commented how it appeared that the Conservative Party had very little stated policy.  Wrongly I thought that this was because basically they were not far in policy terms from the Labour Party, especially in its Blair Party incarnation up to 2008.  I was wrong in this.  It is now clear that the Conservatives were planning an extreme New Right version of Thatcherism and knew that if they were open about that fact it would lose them votes.  Given that they did not win a majority anyway, in terms of electoral strategy they were right in terms of making electoral gains to keep quiet about their real intentions.  What I, and other commentators tended to overlook, was that there was policy out there being stated not only in the right-wing media but even in more liberal output.  None of the speculations were as harsh as the policy that has in fact been introduced, but if you look back at what was being discussed while Gordon Brown was prime minister, you see the desires of commentators, and, by implication, influential people behind them, that encouraged the kind of policies were are now seeing enacted.


Two trends I did pick up on and comment on, though did not really understand how they would form the basis of future government policy, certainly in the way we have seen it were: the desire for the return of the 'whip of unemployment' - http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/09/cracking-whip-of-unemployment.html and also the desire to have a far greater demarcation in university education, so that the privileges the already privileged are gaining were not lost among the fact that more people from ordinary backgrounds were getting degrees - http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/02/uk-universities-snobbery-and-decay.html  That second posting was prompted by comments in 'The Guardian' which though it gave its support to the Liberal Democrats during the election was hardly a supporter of the harsh monetarist, small state policies that the coaliton involving the Liberal Democrats has introduced.

Universities have always been a challenging issue for political parties.  Higher education until the 1990s remained the preserve of an elite, with in the 1980s, only 6% of 18-year olds getting to it.  Before 1992 there were two classes in higher education: universities which were funded by the central state and polytechnics, in the UK more vocationally focused and funded by local authorities; these were seen as 'second class' despite the good courses many of them ran, many of which contributed far more to the economy than university degrees.  Even with this small percentage with the population rise and the desire to cut public spending the grants to students were reduced and removed and loans were introduced in 1990, though at this stage they were not to pay fees which were still paid for by the state, they were to give money to live on.  Universities were expanding but not at a massive rate and so generally could balance income and expenditure.

In 1992 polytechnics and many other institutions were allowed to become 'new' universities.  This upset many people (it still does) who felt that the elitist nature of universities was being watered down.  Coming from a smaller scale, more industry-focused background many former polytechnics were actually better equipped to deal with the growing 'market place' of higher education than the more established universities that had been used to students automatically turning up.  Many of the new universities moved quickly into research which is what had distinguished universities previously, and in certain areas became very leading in this respect.  However, they were more alert to the fact that the students were effectively their 'customers' and whilst they may have had less space than universities they actually paid attention to what students wanted in a way that the older universities had often been neglectful of.

The big change came in 1997 with the government of Tony Blair coming to power with the slogan 'Education, education. education'.  The goal of that government was that 50% of 18-year olds would go to university.  One driver for this was how low our level of graduates was compared to other states in the EU and competitors across the world.  The high level of pupils leaving school with no qualifications was another factor but received less attention.  The post-1992 universities had grown and now grew even faster as many of the students from 'non-traditional' backgrounds often went to their local university and on to courses that could offer them a better chance of a job than studying English at a traditional university.  The increase was incredible and I now find that universities that friends of mine went to in the 1980s now take four or five times as many students than they did 25 years ago, though often jammed into much the same space.  Expanding universities so quickly, with all the new demands for computer facilities and students not tolerating the kind of accommodation we put up with, meant that universities found it hard to sustain the growth.  It seems most of it was funded not through taking more UK students (or even students from elsewhere in the EU who by law could not be charged more than British students) but taking students from Asia and to a lesser extent the Americas and Africa.  The big supplier of students is China.  Students from outside the EU pay fees three times higher than what English students pay.  Here it is important to note 'English' students because when tuition fees were introduced for students in 2006/7 they did not come to Scotland for Scottish students studying there and there were reduced rates in Wales and Northern Ireland, already a differentiated 'market' was appearing.

The market in 'international students' as they are called is not infinite and with China building more universities and other EU universities teaching courses in English, plus continued competition from the USA and Australia, only briefly dented by their difficulty with foreigners following the 11th September 2001 attacks, UK universities can no longer rely on these students as a 'cash cow'.  Also these students only want to study particular courses, especially in business rather than the full extent of the curriculum.  Talking to one lecturer they said that on some business and management courses the classes are 90-95% Chinese students now.  Universities have expanded faster than their revenue base has done.  Some have balanced this well, some badly, and, of course, the current sharp cuts in public spending, cutting the grant universities get for teaching by 40%.  Apparently from 2012 only science, engineering, mathematics and foreign language degree courses will receive funding, other subject areas will have to generate their own income.

Up until last week universities were limited in what they could charge UK students.  This limit has been raised to £9000 (€10,600; US$14,400) per year, i.e. £27,000 for a three year course. Effectively this brings the charge to UK students in line with what international students were charged.  In fact some so-called 'premium' courses especially in business have had exemptions and been charging such high fees already for everyone.  Students will be loaned this money and will only have to pay it when they start earning £21,000 per year.  Given that unemployment of recent graduates is around 25% at present, many of them are not going to be repaying for many years to come.  The so-called graduate 'premium' of earning more because you have a degree only really applies to sectors like banking in which most people can become rich.  Remember these days that nurses have to have degrees and yet the starting salary for them is just on £21,000, which is around £10,000 lower than the national average salary.   Now, with the current fees, most universities charge the maximum, they need the money.  However, there is an expectation that with the £9000 some universities will charge less, the implication being that those 'lesser' universities so perceived last year will become cheaper universities; they will attract poorer people to do cheaper courses and leave the 'proper' universities to the wealthy and privileged it is clear that a lot of commentators feel should be the only people to go to university.  As Margaret Thatcher said about studying Anglo-Saxon in the 1980s, I believe at the University of Oxford, 'what a luxury'.  A 'good' degree from an 'elite' university is now going to become something the wealthy can indulge in.  By the back door, the polytechnic segregation has been re-introduced.

We cannot avoid the fact that if we want universities as large as we have them now money must come from somewhere.  This current government is unwilling to provide it.  I favour a graduate tax, but this was ruled out a couple of months ago by the government, one which is averse to anything called a tax.  In many ways, however, the tax is effectively a private one as students will pay back the money with 'real' interest rates.  Up until August 2010, student loans were repaid at a nominal interest rate, which with recent low rates had actually fallen to a negative interest rate of -0.4% on loans taken out before 1998, which meant that even if you made no repayments your loan decreased.  Now, however if you took the loan out before 1998 you pay 4.4% and if later, 1.5% unless the bank base rate rises which if it does the interest rate will rise to a maximum of 4.4%.  Before August the rate for these later loans was 0% which meant students just paid back the capital.  Now, even before the cap on fees was taken off and even before a more market-orientated interest rate was introduced the average undergraduate was leaving university with debts of £25,000.  There is a whole issue about how high rents, food and utilities are in the UK anyway, which obviously contributes a lot of what students spend.  Many supplement their state loans with bank loans, at commercial rates of interest.  Even if fees had not been permitted to rise, student debt levels would have risen.  Student debt has meant that people from social categories 4-7 (i.e. the old working class categories) going to university has not risen at all since 2002, the ongoing rise has been in middle class people and even they now are feeling the squeeze. 

The government is saying that universities charging more than £6000 per year on a course must put in steps to assist working class students to attend.  In fact they were compelled to do this from when fees were first introduced and most have a sliding scale of help, though this then annoys the middle class students just out of the support band and allegations of parents splitting up so their children can get funding.  There is no evidence that since 2002 such assistance has raised working class participation in universities, but perhaps the level has not fallen in the way it would have done if such university grants were in place.  One factor that is constantly overlooked is how people are actually averse to getting into such vast debt even if help is offered.  This tends to affect people from working class backgrounds more than other social groups and men more than women which is one reason why there are no 6 women studying at UK universities for every 4 men.  Knowing that you will have £27,000 of debt just for fees, let alone the debt for living costs which we can estimate is around £16,000 for three years (obviously depending where you are studying, which is why so many students stay at home with their parents now), you are looking at £43,000 of debt, which even on the magic £21,000 is more than two years' salary.  With the interest rate of just 1.5% and taking 10 years to clear the debt, just for the fees, you will pay £31,334 by the end, that is a lot to clear in 10 years, so we will most likely see people stretching it out over 25 years like a mortgage (perhaps meaning they cannot get a mortgage as well, taking the best educated people out of the market for buying houses) and this would cost you £39,175.  If the rate is 4.4% then it is over £41,000 over 10 years, again, note, just for the fees.  It will be very easy for students to rack up more than £100,000 of debt by the time they have paid it off, with even currently very low interest rates.

People are going to be very critical of what they get for their money.  I have heard students on public transport pricing up individual lectures, and complaining while the snow was closing roads, that they needed a refund for the lectures cancelled when staff and students could not get in.  They will demand courses that will give them jobs.  This is what the government want.  They want ordinary people only to study a narrow range of vocational courses and places seen as 'cheap' or 'second rate' and leave the rest to the already wealthy.  It is clear universities will have to close many humanities subjects let alone things like art and even pure sciences such as astronomy.  If there is no clear occupation at the end of the degree it is going to be off the curriculum.  In addition, you will find the only people who become researchers in social sciences or astronomers are people from very rich backgrounds, just as was the case in the 18th century, the kind of society it seems apparent David Cameron wants to engineer.  Even in the Conservative Party he is turning back the clock from the culture of the days of Heath, Thatcher and Major in which hard working people from ordinary if not poor backgrounds could get on in the party, now you have to already be from the elite.

Some universities, probably led by the London School of Economics and the University of Cambridge, will become private.  It makes no sense for them to chase after the measly sums the state is giving them, with what they might see as restrictions when they might as well charge their students the same fees and get to have it all on their own terms.  Some UK universities are already struggling, in some towns lay offs have been in their hundreds.  People do not seem to realise that universities employing 5000 or more people are like large factories and when they close it ripples out through the local economy as expenditure in local shops, on rent and public transport, as well as a cheap supply of labour disappears.  Closing a university will take thousands of previously well-off people out of the local economy, plus all the tens of thousands (most universities now have over 20,000 students) of students.  I know many towns loathe students but they will miss the money they bring especially during this recession (or is it bad enough yet to call it a depression?)

These institutions will be absorbed by others or private companies or may simply collapse.  I imagine we will see mergers and ironically, those post-1992 universities who have had a more robust market model actually buying up parts of more established universities who have had a not as tight an economic model during the boom years.  At many universities students from outside the UK will become the majority as they already are in some subjects.  As unfunded courses are dropped and the focus is purely on the most profitable, those courses which already attract lots of foreign money will become dominant.  UK students will become a minority on many campuses.  There will also be lots of redundant academics swilling around in the economy, especially from arts, humanities, social sciences and pure sciences.  Given the commercial sector's aversion to anyone from an academic background, it is very likely you will have a lot of unemployable but highly educated people and what they will do as they fall into poverty is an interesting question, especially as the public sector where they might have previously found work also contracts. 

I envisage some imaginative students will leave the UK.  Apparently the University of Maastricht is happy to take students at equivalent to £1500 per year fees at present and teach them in English (knowing that most British people have no grasp of any language bar their own) and with lower living costs than the UK.  British university students are perhaps going to move into the position that Chinese and Indian students have held coming to Europe and the USA in the past.  Clever American universities would also tap into this market, if they need to.

In David Cameron's shockingly vigorous drive to make the UK a far more divided and elitist society, universities which, since the 1960s, have been seen as a way for ordinary people to advance themselves, are clearly going to come under attack.  The thing is, our competitors are still turning out more graduates than the UK and right across the subject spectrum not just in very limited areas.  It seems likely that in the future the government will find it difficult to find any British people qualified to advise it on the economy or social development let alone cultural issues, it will have to rely on Chinese people.  Students often stay around the university town they go to, Sheffield in particular has benefited from this.  The UK now will be exporting intelligent people to the Netherlands and other EU states many of whom will not come back.  I imagine many more will flee the UK to escape the huge debt burden on their heads.  As with so much of the current government's policy, this is being done for extreme ideological reasons, to smash meritocracy and return British society to the control of the privileged.  All the stuff about the deficit is just a front to cover such ardent ideology. 

I lived through a period of growing opportunity, with higher education a core element of that.  It is being killed off very quickly.  Before the next election we will see a fall in university students, the closure of some universities and a new elite, high-priced band of institutions, some of them private, and even these teaching a far narrower range of subjects than before.  Other institutions will be offering what are perceived as second or third rate degrees, still necessary to get a job whilst being disparaged, and coming at a huge financial cost to individuals who as a result will be unable to contribute to the economy.  The choice will be to join private business and scrape enough together to buy a house or study and rent for the rest of your life.  Both models favour the kind of society that the government wants: one in which landlords and banks make vast profits, even beyond their previous excesses, for the crumbs they provide to ordinary people.  It will be a society in which study will be reserved for the rich not the intelligent.  This will naturally mean that talent will go abroad and the UK economy will be weak compared to its rivals, but if the city merchant bankers can still make their profits, the government's view is that the rest of us should be humble and grateful for what we can scrape and have no right to protest about the lack of opportunity and penury the rising generation face.

Camping in the 'Me First' Era

In many ways I am a middle class person.  My parents were certainly middle class, having risen from the skilled working class through study and hard work.  I did not go to private school, but I went on foreign holidays through my childhood and attended university at a time when probably a seventh as many people did as do these days.  My parents were certainly not wealthy middle class, they always drove a second-hand car and owned a black-and-white television when many neighbours had moved over to colour; most of their furniture was second hand and refurbished.  They grew their own vegetables at a time when this was a predominantly working class activity, despite the popularity of the television series 'The Good Life' (1975-8) [about a couple trying to live a self-sufficient life in suburban Surbiton] and certainly not filling the prime time television programmes and bookshelves that it does today.  Despite being a graduate, through bad luck, bullying landlords and bad judgement over buying a flat, my income is far lower than my parents' equivalent was back thirty years when they were my current age.  Being made redundant twice in twelve months has not helped this, especially at a time when we are rushing headlong into a even more unpleasant remake of the 1980s. 

I have always subscribed to E.P. Thompson's view that social class is not a structural thing but a relative thing.  We define our class by comparing ourselves to our 'referents', the people we think we are like, those we want to be and those we want to avoid becoming.  I do have middle class aspirations: that I can replace the things that wear out, that I can own a car newer than 15 years' old and especially that I can continue to have the foreign holidays that I had in my youth, but none of these things seem likely.  According to 'The Guardian' the middle class is dying, though the attributes that the newspaper sees as being the defining ones for that class are well above anything I could aspire to, let alone possess.  Maybe I misplace myself, I am just bumping along certainly in the lower middle class (though eschewing the aggression and chauvinism still associated with such people) and in terms of income, worse of than many working class people.  Of course, skills these days are very different and are as much about computers as using a lathe.  In addition, we have 'labouring in a suit' or 'machine minding at a desk', in other words a lot of jobs look middle class but in fact are just the modern version of factory work; most notably in call centres.  Of course, even in revolutions, a class does not disappear as a mass, it is made up of the failure of family-by-family, individual-by-individual as we each lose the fight to retain what we need, let alone what we want under economic policies which seem to be charging headlong in destroying huge swathes of economic activity in the UK just because it is felt by Cameron and his henchpeople that Thatcher did not impose monetarism hard enough for the good of the wealthy.

Anyway, this is the socio-economic context of now.  What is interesting is how in the past decade at a time when we were all supposed to be becoming middle class and leaving working class jobs to migrants, the middle class may have lost some of its traditional attributes, but has also absorbed much of what was once the preserve of poorer people.  The classic examples have often been commented upon: football and large families.  Large families were once the reserve of rural people and the poorest in cities and yet since the 1990s it has been the sub/urban middle class that has started having the large families and 'family' has become a middle class hobby in a way it was not, say, in the 1970s, when private schools and nannies/au pairs were there to deal with the children while middle class adults went on foreign holidays, to cocktail parties and 'wife' swapped. There has been so much said on the gentrification of football spectating that I will leave it to others.

In 2010, we encounter another example of middle class absorbtion of working class culture.  I am not the first to notice it, all I am doing here is highlighting my personal experience of it. As you will have guessed from the title the 'in' holiday this year is not to go to a Tuscan villa or a small Greek island, but to camp in the UK.  Of course, there has always been the 'nerdy' strand of the British middle class, quite often teachers and civil servants (and their conscripted children), who have been the backbone of camping (in the UK this means staying in tents) and caravanning.  However, their ranks, this year, have been swelled by a much broader slice of the British middle class and this is where a lot of the problems are beginning to appear and this stems from a clash of ideologies.

Having laid the background at length, I will explain how I ended up camping.  Like many young British people I experienced camping predominantly as an adjunct to attending festivals (ironically never in the UK) and in the back garden.  I did have friends whose parents were of the 'nerd' middle class who camped as well and my parents experimented with one year of using a tent and one year of using a caravan before settling on renting holiday houses instead.  When I used to cycle on holiday I had enough cash that I stayed in youth hostels rather than camped.  Given how I would struggle with my panniers, I imagine my holidays would have been even more constrained if I had had to lug a tent around as well.  So, that is my personal background with camping, not overly experienced, but not a total beginner either.  The woman who lives in my house, is extremely experienced in camping on two continents and the 8-year old who shares our house, had camped in a rear garden but was certainly up for a proper camping experience.

One reason for picking camping is because it is cheap.  We had managed to get a tent to accommodate us for £35 in a sale and had picked up odd items throughout the year, at a price far less than the travel insurance for just one of us would be if we had flown abroad let alone an aeroplane ticket.  The campsite space cost us only £15 per night, about the same as we would spend for burgers for all three of us.  We had inflatable beds, but no luxury sleeping bags (we took bedding from our beds, pretty necessary to have a lot of it, plus thick socks and jumpers as the woman in my house knows from experience in a British summer it can become bitterly cold at night) and the most high-tech piece of equipment was a wind-up torch and radio.  We drove for an hour to reach our campsite in Dorset.  The one we had intended to visit (which you could not book ahead at) was full and the next one could not accommodate our 3-person tent.  The third site, however, one of four new ones in the area, could fit us just precisely for the period we wanted.  Despite battling the wind while putting the tent up, we got it all sorted and felt immediately to be on holiday.

The camp site is attached to a working farm and it certainly appears that for some little investment a farmer can kit out some fields and then have a solid revenue through the summer.  I think the field of possibly 100 tents probably, even at the rates, we were paying brings in far than a herd of sheep or cows on the same plot.  What was striking was that we so soon felt on holiday.  I realised that having had four days of diarrhoea in Bath and two stressful days in Belgium in the past five years was an insufficient quota of holiday for a properly healthy life. 

The other thing which struck me immediately, though I do not know why I forgot it, given my sensibilities, especially seeing it has been discussed by the commentators of the new middle class enthusiasm for camping, was the communal nature of the activity.  I suppose it is more the surprise for Britons, used to keeping behind closed doors and only interacting with our neighbours when they do something 'wrong'.  However, on a camp site, you cannot avoid having to collaborate with the society around you.  Even on the best equipped you have to share the communal facilities.  I know many caravans have their own showers and toilets but they still have to come out to replenish water supplies, and certainly anyone in a tent has to go and use the communal toilets, showers and dish-washing facilities.  You have to take your rubbish to central points and these days sift the recycling.  No-one seemed to be needed to regulate these activities.  People waited patiently to take their turn with the each particular facility, not elbowing in.  There was sharing of washing up liquid, scrubbing sponges and anything else others seemed to have forgot.  Perhaps simply not having so much of everything was in itself healthy.  It was incredibly easy to slip into this manner of behaviour and I found it incredibly relaxing, though in fact, having to walk 5 minutes to urinate should have made it tiresome.

Unsurprisingly there were an immense number of children in the camp.  That may have been a facet of the particular site which had facilities appealing to children.  The first one we had visited had more teenaged people and the second one seemed almost purely adults.  Camping for children will always be a challenge.  There is the excitement of doing something different, going on an adventure, but there is also a lot of sacrifice.  In one big leap they are suddenly cut off from their television programmes (though most caravans seem to have television aerials) and their games consoles (bar the odd Nintendo DS or other hand-held), their own beds with most of their soft toys, the place where they usually wash in favour of one with tens of strangers in it, food cooked in an unusal way and probably tasting pretty different, and generally new smells and noises.  However, bar a few tears, usually from people not taking turns properly in the games or children falling over, there did not seem to be despair.  I could imagine teenagers being less impressed which may explain why most of the children there were younger than 13.  Certainly for the one child in our party it was an excellent adventure and he seems to have come back seeing the experience camping as different, but not less than the delights at home, and perhaps, more appreciative of those things.  Not a bad lesson in this age of consumerism.

What was striking at the camp site was the autonomy the children had.  They were running around playing everywhere, conscious of cars coming in and out and often warned about knocking over barbecues with their balls, but there was not that every-second concern that they were going to be abducted or injured.  This created a far more relaxed attitude compared to the usual attitude of mewing up children in suburbs.  I assume it does not work all the time, but it did while we were there.  Conversely, children are also set to work.  They tend to dominate the washing-up facilities in the evening and even primary school children are sent to accompany even younger siblings to the toilet and especially to fetch water.  I am not saying that we should try to get children to ape what their counterparts in the Third World would do nor go as far as my parents did in assigning chores that filled the weekend, but there seemed to be benefit in having children do these little jobs.  I suppose it is the 'all mucking in' attitude that has been commented on in the newspapers, in force.  Certainly it restored the woman who lives in my house's faith in humanity to the extent she now wants to go and live in a commune.

When you are living day-by-day with 'walls' as thick as your fingernail, privacy and respect for those around you becomes vital.  You see this in shanty towns and refugee camps.  Whilst it is good to live communally, you also need to be able to absent yourself from it and not have the voice of your neighbour intruding into your conversation and similarly not to think everyone can hear your discussions.  Thus, in line with camp site rules (well, more guidelines, we later found out), people had spaced themselves out properly, leaving 6 metres between tents.  There were a lot of people there, possibly something over 400, but it did not feel crowded or oppressive.  It worked through 'unwritten' rules and the fact that if some was asked to be a little quieter they did not take offence or turn aggressive, they seemed to know that if they were upsetting people it would put a chink in the dam and the structure they presumably were enjoying could crumble.  It was no idyll, but it worked better than society does in most streets I have lived in (the current one is an unusual exception).

Of course, as anyone who has been a regular follower of my blog, something always goes wrong very soon into my holidays and this one was no exception.  We spent a wonderful day away from the camp site in the town of Swanage which is as much of a time warp place as any I have been to.  It seems stuck not in the Victorian era but something like the mid-1960s.  There are some modern eateries and we had some really excellent sea food at a very unassuming cafe, but a lot of architecture and things like dedicated toyshops seem to date from when I was born.  It only has a steam railway (diesel in the evening) running into it so I suppose that adds to the feel.  Families fish by unwinding fishing line sitting on the hard and there is a punch and judy show on the beach assisted by a PA system.

Arriving back from a day in Swanage and seeking to have a doze before firing up the barbecue for dinner we found that four families had moved right into our area.  Rather than the six metres between our tent and theirs, there was less than 10cm.  They had a wide assortment of tents, two of which could have housed our one inside it three or four times over.  I have no problem with large tents, in the 1970s they all used to be heavy metal framed ones with plastic windows and always high enough to stand up in.  The more pod-like strutures of the 1990s are still the norm, but now have grown so the average adult can stand erect within them.  Some now have an atrium with wings off it; one looked like a chapel.  I imagine these appeal to the new category of middle class campers wanting to bring as much of home to the camp site as they can.  I have no problems with that as long as it is not erected, rather than parallel to the already pitched tents but at an angle which leaves the residents bare centimetres from where my head is going to lie.  I could hear them more clearly than the child in the other part of our tent.  These people seemed to have no understanding of what they had done wrong, they seemed to think that because their door faced in a different direction to ours that was fine.  However, they clearly had not paid attention to the numerous signs about spacing nor the pattern that every other tent in the field was laid out along.  The woman from my house was bitter and complained quietly too them.  One offered a bottle of wine as recompense, the others still did not seem to understand what the problem was.

The camp site authority came and like us, realised that with their four main tents and their smaller storage tents around already they could not be compelled to take them down and re-align.  The regulations plastered on numerous signs were revealed to be only 'guidelines' anticipating expected EU legislation.

There was no option but for us to leave which we did in record time, feeling that all that we had enjoyed about the mutual respect had been violated by people who could not see anywhere beyond their own wishes and certainly had none of the communal spirit everyone else seemed to operate by.  I swore at them as we left, because though I had not wanted to let my temper show, I realised that I had to do something to at least raise some attention that they had upset us.  It seemed to beyond their comprehension that they had done anything wrong that I despaired that they would understand.  It is painful for me that these people probably no doubt the children of very selfish parents, cannot even recognise when they have upset others and broken the rules which made the site such a nice place to be.  I suppose it is unsurprising.  I see it every time I go driving.  No-one signals, they drive around dangerously and park carelessly because their own concern is their own ease.  There is no recognition that when you drive or camp or simply live in a town you impinge on others whose rights (though they fail to even comprehend this) are as legitimate as yours. 

Given that the current political culture based on the creed of a woman (Margaret Thatcher) who said (to 'Women's Own' magazine in 1987): '...you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.'  It is ironic she mentions looking after neighbours, because I think that aspect has been left behind too.  The horizon of far too many people in British people is only 'there are individual men and women and there are families'.  Yes, you see that on camp sites, everyone in their own tent or caravan but they are still inter-linked we cannot live in isolation,  The trouble is that too many take the 'people must look after themselves first' and see that as the justification for not taking any consideration of not only the needs of others but simply how their own behaviour impinges on the human and physical environment around them.

In the space of a couple of days I saw the best and the worst of British society.  I had found an oasis of respect for others and the benefits of communal living and yet it could not keep out the pig-headed inability to comprehend that other people have a right to enjoy facilities too and that means you have to sacrifice a little, just a little of your desires, and think before you act rather than assuming everyone you do, however inattentive it is, is perfectly fine because it gives you the outcome you want.  I hope that next year the selfish middle class move on from camping to some other activity, possibly even one they have not comandeered from other sectors of society to distort to their own tastes and then contaminate with their self-centred perspectives on things.  For myself, realising that I am too unfit to return to cycling, have my eye on hiring a canal boat, but please do not tell the middle class idiots, I want at least one holiday per decade that selfish morons do not stamp all over.

Are Children of Lone Parents Stronger?

I read a headline on a newspaper in a shop recently which blared that 1 in 4 parents in the UK is now a lone parent and the bulk of these are single mothers.  There is an easy assumption that this signals a decline in British morality that started sometime when the contraceptive pill came into common usage and as a result of 'free love' of the 1960s.  Of course, lone parent families are no new invention, just look at the records of 1919 and 1946 to see how many there were.  In the Victorian period when mortality was higher, the average working man dying at 45, there were often widows bringing up children alone.  People say, well, of course, it was different back them, people could draw on the wider family, forgetting that these days many grandparents, about 300,000 in the UK in 2009 are the prime child carers and that if you ever go to poor areas and I can draw on personal experiences from East London and Milton Keynes (which does have a poor ghetto area) then daughters, sisters, mothers, aunts and grandmothers often step in for childcare roles.  I remember standing behind a woman in a post office in Milton Keynes who said 'I was looking after my daughter's step-daughter's daughter...' as showing something of the nature of modern UK families; with longer life expectancy people across four generations can be involved.

You can argue that part of the problem is that people take on children as a pastime that they tire of.  It is certain that in our increasingly horribly sexualised society in which as Natasha Walton noted recently that the media in all forms encourages vigorously boys and men are to be macho and violent and girls and women submissive in a way that horrifies anyone who lived through the era of feminism.  It also means that men do not take responsibility for anything which is seen as 'feminine' and that includes looking after children.  Creating children, spreading your seed is macho, but dealing with the consequences is never seen as needing thought.  It is much the same with attacking men for looking at you in a pub or driving too fast, we have become a society which neglects thought of the consequence of any action, it is saving face that is the only thing that matters.  Thus, I am not arguing that access to contraception is causing lone parent families, in fact it is helping prevent it spreading so far.  The problem is that in the desire to move back to 'Victorian values' we have rapidly moved back to a society in which men of all social standing got women pregnant and left them to the workhouse or begging.  These days the workhouse is social welfare and so many people try to make single mothers feel guilty and grateful for the meagre income they receive.  No credit is given for trying to find work in a society in which child care is prohibitively expensive and no credit is given to those grandparents and female relatives who spare the state of its childcare responsibilities.

Thus, I would argue that we should move from this simple assumption that sees lone parent families as somehow a symptom of immorality, except on the basis of (men) not living up to the consequences of your actions, and again that seems to be something that is lauded in our media rather than condemned.  I also think that the condemnation of lone parent families on the basis that the children of them will be socially dysfunctional is also wrong.  It is far better for a child to be with a loving mother than having an abusive or neglectful father in tow.  I have noticed this many times before when speaking to children from lone parent families.  It is apparent that they are far better equipped for dealing with the world than children who grow up with two parents.  One of the most robust, innovative and well-travelled woman I ever met had had a father and uncle who had committed suicide when she was a girl.  I doubt she would have experienced all that she did unless that had happened in her life, she was a better person for it.

There is something about a child with a single parent that makes them more resilient and though I have long known this, it is has become more observable as my own household has changed.  As I have noted before, I have become de facto father on the eight year old son of the woman who lives in my house.  Now, however, whilst paying the mortgage on the house as an investment, I have moved away to find work and now live in a hotel.  Hence, the boy who has had this pseudo-father for five years, is now back, more consciously to being the child of a single parent.  Have I seen a change in his behaviour?  Immediately.  He has grown up incredibly in the three months since I left.  His literacy skills have leapt on but far more importantly he has shaken off silly, juvenile behaviour and now really contributes to the house, tidying his room, sorting out his laundry and washing up twice per week, all things he would never do when I was in the house.  He has a curiosity about vocabulary and certainly about finance that was also missing until I went.  Very rapidly he is gaining very useful skills that will stop him being one of these feckless teenagers you see trying and failing to live away from home at university and going back to live with their parents well into their 30s.

Why is there this difference?  I suppose because the child learns quickly that with one person if it cannot be done it will not be done.  There is no father to cover when the mother is sick.  There is no-one to mind the child when the shopping or the cleaning or the cooking is done, the child witnesses everything of everyday life which twin parents not really consciously generally shield their children from.  They also learn that if they do not do what they are asked, something is going to go wrong, there is no father to fetch the dishes or pick up the rubbish in their place.  If the child does not do it then it is simply another job for the mother.  In a single parent family there is none of the sleight of hand that occurs automatically in a dual parent family.  This tackles one of the key problems of contemporary UK society, that it is someone else's responsibility to do anything you dislike.  Shirking such responsibility is impossible in the single parent family.

The one drawback of the single parent family is money.  Since the late 1960s in the UK, certainly in southern England, but increasingly elsewehre, it has been impossible for one parent to earn enough to support a partner and two children in a middle class lifestyle, i.e. a car of less than 10 years old, a 3-bedroomed house, a foreign holiday once per year, a television that works, insuring household items and being able to replace things that break, eating out in a restaurant once per month, not a luxurious life but a 'comfortable' one.  Lone parents unless among the very rich cannot have a comfortable life.  Even with me paying into this single parent family neither they nor I can achieve such prosperity.  Some lone parents do get enough money from a partner who has gone but they are not the majority.  Given that the cost of so much, notably entering higher education, effectively precludes it to so many people, this is one drawback for the lone parent family, not helped by women earning 17% less than a man in the same role; women being in the large majority of lone parents.  However, given the efforts in the media to constantly discredit so many of the universities and degrees a large portion of the students whose families are new to higher education have been through, perhaps a more innovative, robust attitude to life that a child of a lone parent develops is going to help them when the Establishment has ensured that so many people's qualifications have been devalued.

Look around at the single parent families you know and you will find their children are more mature and are certainly aware of the consequences of their actions, even if the context they are living in limits their options for the future.  I am not advocating that men go round fathering children and abandoning them, on this blog I have always insisted people should handle the consequences of their actions.  What I am saying is that the media should not see single parent families as an easy target to say something about declining morality and rather see them as actually admirably equipping children for the challenges they are going to face.

Anger - the Reasons I Have It

I have just been watching a two-part programme called 'Losing It' which comedian, writer and yachtsman, Griff Rhys Jones produced for the BBC. It looked at anger and its implications. As many commentators have noted (including myself back in May 2007 and June 2008) the World, especially the UK is becoming an angrier place. We have a 'rage' for everything from the life-threatening 'road rage' to the less dangerous 'trolley rage' in supermarkets. As I have noted, we are tutored in how to behave by what we see on television with sportsmen (and some sportswomen) having fights on the pitch and ordinary people raging at airline check-in desks for us to study. The widespread abuse of alcohol and drugs in the UK just adds to this tendency, especially among the young, not only men but also women. To some degree part of this stems from the fact that in the UK most of us are powerless to change anything in our lives and are constantly reminded of the fact. Politics is so sewn up that we (nor Gordon Brown) can do anything about rising costs or getting a decent school for our children or proper care for our elderly relatives. Consequently we explode at those people we can 'control', the person cutting us up in the car or looking at us in a strange way and it gives us, for a moment, a sense that we can assert some control. Ironically, in that moment we actually lose control but it does make us feel better.

Rhys Jones did note, however, that in making the angry person feel better, it makes those around them feel much worse in particular vulnerable, even if they have no fear that they will be hit or shouted at, it is just the 'electricity' around an angry person that makes them feel uncomfortable. Anger is often a cry to help, which is why we often get angry around people we are close to and love, because we feel we have permission to show our vulnerable side in their presence in a way we would not with strangers. Becoming visibly angry is showing a vulnerable side as it is when you have no rational thought and sometimes even lose physical control. However, often those close to us cannot accept the burden of that vulnerability not being let out bit-by-bit but in an intense way in a short period of time. There are many forms of anger, but for most people, they stem from feeling weak and unable to affect outcome. In this way, we are, as Rhys Jones showed, like toddlers who have tantrums. Toddlers are aware of their vunerability and their inability to alter the people or environment around them and so all they have left is their anger which they have in the most physical and vocal way possible.

To some extent, modern society, stripping so many of us of any control of our lives, infantilises us. People are unable financially to stand on themselves until into their 30s and 40s, and are often economically dependent on their parents for much of their lives, so is it unsurprising that as a result we cling to childish behaviour so much longer? I am almost 41 and without my parents I would still be living in scummy rented accommodation. I do think people do get more angry than in the past, but that is partly because in our youth we are told the big lie that we can 'have it all'. In the past people were told from childhood onwards that so much would be denied to them. Of course, most things are still denied to us, but we are lied to constantly both as children and as adults, by the media, so it makes it harder to accept the truth when it hits us. The other thing, is that we have lost a sense of shame. People flaunt so much of what would have been private once, this is in terms of sexuality, in how we dress, etc., also in terms of our wealth and possessions, but in particular in terms of our emotions. Though British people do not behave to the extreme that Americans do (remember the tennis player John McEnroe's televised tantrums in the 1970s, though mirrored by British comedy versions, notably from John Cleese), but nowadays we are encouraged to express all our emotions whether joyful, sad or angry in public in a way that would have been strongly discouraged in the past. As I have noted before, there is almost a reward for this, as we see those who make the most fuss, winning what they want, so are tempted to follow their lead.

I also think we have a greater sense of pride and take slights more strongly than we would have done in the past. This was noticeable in the programme when Rhys Jones was interviewing Chanelle Hayes who had had a tantrum on the Channel 4 'reality' programme 'Big Brother'. He was talking about the televised trantrum with her, and she said it was a rare occurrence for her, but then began getting upset with Rhys Jones in the course of the short interview because he would not let her drone on with her self-justifying, and clearly untrue monologue, and then she took offence at what she felt was a slur on her character, when Rhys Jones was simply trying to ask her questions about the incident. As there is so little for us to be proud about, we defend even those little crumbs or put up a front of indignation as if we had a lot more to defend than is actually the case.

An interview with George Galloway, an MP who I have met, was interesting. He has 'indignation' rather than anger and clearly distinguished between losing one's temper and having this indignation against wrong. Of course he linked this to big issues not imagined slurs and petty things. However, most of us have lost any connection with the big issues. We know we can do nothing about them so lack the channels in which to put our indignation, say on temperance, religion, Communism, Fascism, unemployment, the poll tax, etc., that our ancestors would have done.

As I have noted before, I do have a temper. The programme showed that I am in the prime category for it on a number of grounds, bar having a raised level of testosterone. In some ways I am de facto in the camp of parents of young children, who are the people most prone to anger, due to the six year old living in my house. Anger is a natural part of not only human nature but also animals such as apes, so it is never going to be eliminated unless we adopt a 'Brave New World' approach and castrate and sedate all men. However, some individuals are more prone to it turning into a more aggressive form than others and I tick many of those boxes.

The first is that I am male and that we cannot shake off the need of anger and violence that meant our descendants survived when many others died out over the millenia. Though women are catching up in the anger stakes, partly because they sense their powerlessness, especially in trying to achieve things for their families. For me anger is not purely mental, it is physical too. I feel as if there is a bug jabbing into the base of my neck and another at the base of my spine and those two bugs are not sated and certainly not dismissed until I have shouted myself hoarse and my heart is thumping so heavily I can feel it against my chest cavity and my stomach is sour and I feel pain down there. This is not good for my health, but surely it is better than having this seething inside me over a sustained period, shouting, swearing, revving the car engine may have consequences, but they relieve the uncomfortable symptoms and when the bugs are jabbing at you that is all you can think of.

The other thing is that I care. If I did not give a damn about how people behave or how our society was run then there would be so much less to get angry about. I think there is a right way that the World should work and that people should behave. In some ways I am seeking to police what I see as unacceptable behaviour. This wish to police is at the root of road rage in particular. I drive with a very moral sense of what is the correct behaviour I want to see and will hoot or bellow at those who I feel are behaving inappropriately. I have set myself up as a guardian of the wider community. Partly this is because there are no other outlets for this attitude in modern society.

This is why there are people always willing to be police informants. Whilst it is not as visible this attitude is what drives people to write letters to the tax office or benefit office, 'shopping' (i.e. highlighting them to the authorities) people they feel are flouting the regulations, or in particular, exploiting the state to their advantage. For me I simply blog and as I have noted before that is the contemporary form of letter writing to authorities, with the added bonus that it can come to the attention of people who feel the same and can sympathise. Message boards, online conferencing, are excellent outlets for this mind set, though even here 'flaming', the electronic form of bellowing at people can become an issue.

I have an attention to detail which is another indicator of someone liable to get angry. This is because we can get offended by minor things being 'wrong' or out of place. I certainly get angered by behaviour which I feel is unfair as if the World must be in perfect balance in terms of justice (some people would say this is because I am a Libran, if you believe that) and at present I feel that the unjust, the greedy, the mean, the bullies, the torturers, the selfish, all have the upper hand to a greater extent than before, so there is even more to fight for than would 'normally' be the case. My attention to detail means there is anger on so many issues that can trigger me off. Also, I am not satisfied by a quick outburst. As I am a reflective person (over 200 blog postings this year alone) I mull over the things that make me angry, literally keeping my anger 'simmering' so it is far closer to the surface when I encounter the next issue to irritate me, than if I could finish off one issue before moving on to another.

The other element which I had not really thought about before was having low self-esteem. I suppose this relates to what I have said about feeling so powerless to achieve anything in contemporary Britain. However, it goes beyond that to say, not only can you not achieve anything in the future, but everything you have done in the past was also valueless. In our 'dog-eat-dog' business world, of course people say that to you. The worst bullying I suffered at work was based on saying that I could take no solo credit for anything I had produced in that job. I am a good team player and will often downplay my role, so to hear that was very hard and really sapped my self-esteem to the extent I felt there was no point in producing anything, and, of course, that was what the bully wanted as he had effectively removed a rival for promotion.

Of course, being someone with suicidal tendencies, as outlined here, I do have low self-esteem, so again that is likely to make me angry. It is, as I say, that when you hit rock bottom, all you have left is your anger, it is the last scrap of self-dignity that you have. It is the one thing that you can fire off which draws some attention and brings some value to you, if only, because you disrupt the lives, even for a short period, of the people moving around you. It literally gets your voice heard even if your words are not heard. Anger is something that needs no other interaction, you can do it alone. This is why it is difficult for others around you, especially those close to you, to cope with, because it unsettles them as it is a very selfish activity. Of course, other people behave equally as selfishly, but because they do it calmly it does not face the condemnation that anger does, thought it is as equally corrosive to relationships and society and is likely to be sustained than over in a short time.

Having watched 'Losing It', I feel I am more normal than I thought I was. I find there were particular character traits which make me more prone to anger and likely to sustain that over a longer period. I see no solutions. I am as powerless to alter my context as any other ordinary person in the UK today. The fact that I will lose my job and my house next year simply adds to that sense. It also reduces my self-esteem, because time after time, I have been shown that no matter how hard I work or how I behave I still can achieve nothing, certainly in terms of the stability I am yearning at this age, and I am simply buffeted from job to job and from house to house with no control over what happens next. I could stop paying attention to detail, but that is an element of my work, so would make me slapdash and less effective as an employee. I think having been this way for four decades, it would be difficult to shake off. So, I will stick with anger, it is the only little bit of pride I have left. After I have lost everything, I know I can still get angry and have my voice heard even if just for half-an-hour. Here is me shouting and it feels a little better.

'The State We're Not': Essay on British Identity

I came across this essay on my work computer. It was my entry for the 2006 Pimlott essay writing prize. You can see by looking at the winning entries which I am sure are available somewhere online, why I stood no chance. Foolishly I went for a jovial, populist tone rather than the serious academic one of the winning entries. However, that tone probably makes this essay more suited to this blog environment. The title set was: 'Who Do You Think You Are? Can History Help Us to Define British Identity Today, or is it Part of the Problem?'. What I titled my essay is 'The State We're Not' a reference to Will Hutton's book, 'The State We're In' (1996) which was about the running of the British state. My essay is more about British culture and identity. Speaking to a woman from the Galicia region (which has its own language and culture and now a degree of autonomy) of Spain recently she was struck by the fact that Welsh people in Britain call themselves Welsh (there was a man present who had just done that) but English people called themselves British. As I have noted before, that is partly due to the difficulties around English identity. Anyway, I did not get to hear much about Galician vs. Spanish identity, but it did encourage me to dig out this essay, which I hope you find interesting.


'The State We’re Not'

Looking around UK society today, it is difficult to find positive examples of an appropriate British identity that you can adopt. How do you show you are British? Do you choose to be emblazoned with the Cross of St. George? Are you a Sunday-morning kilt wearer? Do you robe yourself in the garb that Victorians thought Druids wore? In most cases Britons will answer no. It is no easier when you go beneath such surface details. So how do you define yourself as someone who is British? Is it by the town you live in, even though you dislike your neighbours, let alone the people from ‘the estate’ or those from ‘the posh houses’? Is it by the team which you support, though that too is likely to divide you from more people than it is to link you with them? Is it by your language – one which is evolving quicker in Tokyo, Delhi, Beijing and Los Angeles than it is in Britain? Is it in the sense of what is ‘right’, the moral lead that Britain gives the world, though the more is known of our human rights record the more embarrassing it proves? Is it the ability to complain but not to act; the ability to seek to blame rather than to help? Maybe, but if not, how then do we define ourselves?

I would argue that in an era when many traditional views ‘Britishness’ are dismissed, it is only by defining what we are not that we get a sense of what it is to be British. The highly edited view of history in popular usage provides the tools to determine what so many of us brindle against. A fuller view of British history would provide a different picture, but one which most of us are not interested in hearing. Every country has dark and light sides in its story, and it is often hard for peoples to address the less palatable ones. The British feel we hold a trump card which means that when countries are challenged to tackle their history, we can claim, ‘well, we were the winners’, we decide what goes into the story and how it is told. Yet, I believe this let-out cheats the British of their true identity, something richer and more complex, and thus fascinating. Above all, something that would allow us to think and operate fully in the twenty-first century rather than with one foot still mired in the 1940s.

What, then, do we feel we are not? Stop someone in the street and these days most would say we feel we are not European. Many Britons welcome the proper teaching of History because it shows our young how we beat the ‘Europeans’. Even though Britain’s fighting men and women are lionized and national service would be returned at the drop of a referendum, we contrast Britain’s freedoms with the supposedly or once militaristic states abroad, notably Germany, Russia and Argentina. Somehow the British can love the military without there being anything wrong with it, whereas for others it is an ingredient of dictatorship. Having fought with every neighbouring country, and many others, in the preceding centuries and won, we believe this still equips us to tell them how to behave, whilst making their suggestions to us irrelevant.

‘Europe’ currently provides us with the scapegoat for all that is bad, from the comic regulation of our fruit and veg, to the level of taxes and the influx of foreigners. We expect special exemptions because we were the winners whereas the others were the aggressors or losers; we are the model that they should adopt. Our dismissing of anything European leaves us oblivious to facts like the French retirement age of 60 and that Belgian employees get 14 months’ pay each year to give them summer holiday and Christmas money. We are happy that the Europeans supply us, as they have for decades, with cheap shopping and cheap holidays, without ever asking, why these things are so expensive at home. Even if we do challenge such discrepancies there is always a simple answer: that must be something to do with the ‘EEC’. History can show that the British have had much exchange with the rest of Europe. As we find from among our surnames, despite our aspirations for isolation, there has long been traffic in both directions and connections with France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Greece and Russia to name a few.

We are less certain about this aspect, but generally we agree we not American. As with the Europeans, we feel that the Americans are somewhat naïve and in need of guidance from us, their elders. British history shows that our forces turn up first and stick it out, whilst cajoling the Americans into action. We admire their tough business practices, but would be bewildered if turned away from a hospital for having no health insurance or finding nowhere to ‘sign on’ after a few weeks unemployed.

In other ways we feel the Americans are soft. The ‘we-can-take-it’ attitude through centuries of fighting has meant that, unlike the squeamish Americans, generations of Britons raised on weekly casualty reports from overseas, if even from just across the Irish Sea, means we do not whimper as the death toll mounts. What goes for abroad applies to the home front too. September 11th – what is all the fuss? Who marks the days to remember Brighton, Docklands, Enniskillen, Guildford, Harrods, Manchester, Omagh and more? Is there a day in the British calendar on which some civilian has not been blown apart? The British have been through it and ‘keep on keeping on’. So, however much we would have liked to have our representatives in the Senate and have long preferred a bomb with a US flag on top, anything closer is only going to come once the Americans have matured to our level. Of course if we just viewed our Victorian history, we would know that, first, very many Americans have British roots, though these have been far more quickly lost than those with Irish, Italian, German or Polish connections. Second, that the current actions of the USA would look right and proper to those who had lived under any of Palmerston’s governments. Whilst this may not make them excusable it allows them to be understood and anticipated.

We are determinedly not political. ‘I don’t do politics’ has even been legitimised as a kind of catchphrase. We certainly do not see that the changes we desire, whether great or small, will be engineered or prevented by politics. There is a clear division between the outcomes we want and any method of achieving them that we will accept. Never educated about how our state works, we feel inadequate in any discussion of politics and this unease means, as a topic for discussion, politics is banned from dinner tables and sofas the length of the country. Such aversion, plus television, draws away those who once would have filled the ranks of the Chartists, the Suffragists, the Mosleyites and their opponents, and the anti-poll tax rioters. Nowadays we have a single, ineffectual, political weapon, the moan, used as we stand in the queue, as we shout at the television or at the drivers in the cars around us. Being British means being able to complain better than the rest; if it was an Olympic sport Britain would head the table for medals. Of course, Britain has never moved forward relying on simple complaints. Without something more dynamic in the past we would lack votes for many men and for all women; reasonable working conditions would be rare. Not knowing how such things were brought about, breeds both complacency and fatalism.

Anyone can bear witness that we are not merciful. News reports on the arrest of a murderer elicit scores of volunteers to be the executioner. In a country where guns are all but illegal, we would rather have every officer armed and a large portion of the ‘right’ people properly equipped too. Whereas we will not march, or certainly not more than once, to oppose a war or poverty or banning fox hunting, we relish the chance to pick someone else’s fight, even better if it is simply based on rumour and assumption. Rather than the activist we prefer to be the on-the-spot vigilante, to make the streets safe for us ‘decent’ people through our rage. Arbitrary justice is our favoured form with no time for lenient judges and the complexities of proof. We are British because we know what and who is wrong, and what ‘they’ should suffer as a consequence.

Feeling as powerless as we do in this society, the only tool of ordinary Briton is anger. From airport check-in desks to traffic jams we swear and jibe, hoot and jab with righteous indignation and a ‘how dare you!’ It stretches from those whose tack is ‘don’t you know who I am?’ to those who fall back on ‘do yourself a favour mate’. We are united and divided against each other in our ferocity. Our personal anger expelled temporarily, we slump back in our chairs to watch master classes in temper on our television. Reality TV shows us the reality of both our inability to cope with anything that confounds our plans and the force we use to challenge such ‘injustice’.

We are not tolerant. Whilst we may be sympathetic and occasionally reach a short way into our pockets to help, we would rather foreigners’ problems were dealt with in their own countries. For us, the words ‘asylum seeker’, no longer have any connection to persecution and torture, simply designating people who are not us, people who get greater benefits and an easier life than we will ever have, and yet who are at the heart of every local crime. Maybe this should not be surprising, as many corners of British history show where such tensions lead, from the forgotten anti-Semitic rioting of the First World War, through the Notting Hill riots of 1958 to the recent Bradford riots. Many of us define ourselves as not being ‘them’ - those invaders or in turn, not being ‘them’ – our attackers. Forgotten too is the fact that the British Isles are a landscape of settlement from pre-history to today; that the first Arabs arrived as Roman troops and racial legislation appeared in the 13th and 16th centuries. Through the centuries Britain has been a place of refuge. From Huguenots refugees of the 17th century through Jewish ones of the 19th and 20th centuries to the East African Asians of the 1970s, those fleeing persecution elsewhere have injected culture and prosperity, and contributed to the Britain as it is today. Forming opinions from perspectives that lack a sense of history may be a defining characteristic of the British, but it is liable to choke off such input in the future, leaving a society of stagnant attitudes and a stagnating economy.

Despite regular claims to the contrary, it is clear the British are not classless. E.P. Thompson argued that class was not about our place in an economic structure, but about our perceived standing in relation to the others around us in society, especially as consumption is now the basis of how we define our status. We define ourselves against everyone else we encounter; there are not three classes, but millions. I look down on him because his car has 0.2 litres less capacity than mine; I look up to her because her shoes came from that store; I look down on him because he has got last year’s toy; I look up to her because she got the chair by the window in the Television Room. Every aspect of our persona from where we live and work, and especially what possessions we have, separates us. You may argue that other countries are equally as divided, but the British add extra layers based on the less tangible aspects – our accents, our names and our attitudes. Ironically our consumer society means we are united in debt. So many of us teeter on the edge of bankruptcy; we are as vulnerable of a fall as any Victorian character of a Dickens or a Charles Palliser novel. For all our fine distinctions, so many of us are just a few purchases away from penury.

We are not intellectual. We relish the ability to dismiss learning; we are the only nation who can say someone is ‘too clever by half’ as if there is a quota we should not exceed. It is common to laud the self-made man, but such references now neglect that such people were also self-taught men and women as two examples from among the praised show: Brunel went to college, in France of all places, and Stephenson attended evening classes. These men did not despise learning in a way those attempting to be their equivalents do today who somehow assume great business people are born not painstakingly crafted.

Another role model swept under the historical carpet in more recent decades is that of the self-teaching trade unionist, probably best embodied by Peter Sellars in ‘I’m Alright Jack’. Whilst the movie ridiculed, it did note a common type of the 1950s: a man working to advance himself through study. Ironically, now, in a time when more people than ever can access education whether face-to-face or online, you cannot even satirise such people, because they have been wiped from history and a person’s knowledge of a football team’s record or the latest ‘Big Brother’ happenings win him or her higher status than any ability in history or engineering.

We are not lazy. Britons are united in how long they work. How would the Victorian reformers view our work practices now? A century and a half of legislation has not eliminated the long hours and the workplace injuries. Whilst we may have fewer bank holidays and work longer hours than colleagues in neighbouring countries, every employee is made to feel greedy for taking off time that is legitimately theirs. No comment on workplace sickness is unaccompanied by allegations of malingering; no reference to statutory leave is not countered by talk of how many millions each bank holiday costs employers. The history written in the future is more likely detail how many who were made unemployed by the minimum wage than to outline how many chip shop workers, as a result of its introduction, for the first time could afford a portion of fish and chips from an hour’s work.

We are not celebrities. The magical aura that so many Britons grasp for shows how many of us will not attain it. Our voices will never be spurned by a panel of experts, our dressing gowns will never be viewed through Channel 4 cameras, we will never be asked to escape from a jungle, and we will never attend Elton’s or the Beckhams’ bash. Yet, because the day-to-day work of most is so devalued, we aspire for our fifteen minutes of fame or notoriety, as if something not done in front of millions of viewers lacks value. Those of us who fail to become the latest manufactured pop idol, are thus left with nothing but shrieking in public places and condemning anything that we feel is alien, to give us some sense of being worthwhile.

So what is the role of history? The first question has to be – which history? Two decades of schools focusing on the history of wars and ‘great’ people has left so many of us without a history that relates to our present. Just as much as the ‘losers’ like France and Germany, China and Japan are having to address their histories, with all their difficulties, so must Britain. There are too many dark corners that to many have become myths to be denied. Who remembers that whilst Churchill never ordered a miner shot. he favoured sterilising habitual criminals? Who now believes that in 1910 King George V thought the country was on the verge of civil war? Who is familiar with Britain’s ‘punitive’ aerial bombings over Iraq in the 1920s? Who talks about keeping Jews out of air-raid shelters in the early days of the Blitz? Who describes that the Catholics welcomed the British Army into Northern Ireland for their protection in 1969? Who teaches what issues caused the Three-Day Weeks? Who can explain why the Community Charge was dubbed the ‘poll tax’? An incomplete, or even worse, a selected history, makes for an incomplete national identity. An identity for the future cannot be one that has its feet mired in a distorted view of the past. It has to be based on the good and bad of every country, not viewed rosily nor seeking to demonise those of other times and places.

How can history play its part in identity? With so much negativity, who can offer a solution? Where is the focus of pride? Maybe television offers some answers, look to Tony Robinson and to the late Fred Dibnah. These ‘amateur’ enthusiasts were in a position to interpret history to be both interesting and relevant in a form accessible to viewers. The stories they have told are of a Britain in all its complexity, involving all kinds of people. They successfully highlight that the great moments of history have been underwritten by hard slog. The great cathedrals, the burgeoning cities, the glorious victories, the NHS are all built on sweat and ache of millions of hands motivated by an infinity of thoughts and ambitions. There is a place for the rulers and the governors in such stories, but they are not us, they are not the people who actually did the things which have created the Britain and thus the Britons which we know.