Me And Asperger's

It is interesting the impact that genealogy (tracing family trees) can have.  A friend of mine once said that all the people he ever met doing that (and he spent a lot of time in local record offices) were convinced that they were somehow related to the Royal Family.  I met one women who certainly was not convinced of that, as she knew that for many generations her family had served royals on a particular estate.  Finding out genealogical information is the second greatest use of searching on the internet after seeking out pornography.  My own family got into tracing their family back in the 1970s long before there was a public internet and anyone had even thought of computerising censuses.  There were certainly on online discussion groups around particular names or database software to lay it out sensibly.  They managed to get back into the mid-19th century before the paper-based resources ran out.  Of course, most of us are descended from labourers and only occasionally some ancestor who was interesting pops up, usually for doing something that would have been condemned at the time, such as committing a crime or adultery or running away to London.  One friend of mine found out his mother had lived on estates in India where her father was a manager and then moved to Mesopotamia (now Iraq) where he oversaw road building.  Despite a range of photos from the 1930s she would not talk about it and now she is dead that slice of a colonial life is gone.  Another friend's relative was a female script writer who left Scotland to work in Hollywood in the 1920s, presumably given some credit on some silent movies, maybe under a pseudonym at a time when very few women were in that line of business.

Anyway, this is not a posting about genealogy though it does touch on inheritance and discussion of what now seems clear that I suffer to some extent from Asperger's Syndrome, was triggered by a cousin of my mother's exploring her family tree.  I had absolutely no memory of her, though apparently we had met when I was a child in the 1970s.  It turned out that we lived 48Km apart and for five years I had been working in the town where she lived; if I had been able to secure a post I was interviewed for late last year, her son would have fallen into my remit, totally unbeknown to either of us.  I have not ascertained her age, but there has to have been some generation slippage as she is far closer to my age than that of my mother, but I guess that happens when one sibling marries early and has children young and another does it much later, especially if this then repeated by their children.  When at primary school I had friends who were already uncles.  Anyway, she had been carrying out genealogical research and emailed me to ask if I was interested in seeing what she had uncovered.  I have no memory of meeting her mother but knew the woman by reputation due to her three marriages and her involvement with political movements abroad, things that enter the folk memory of a family far down the different branches of the tree. 

We got into discussion about common ancestors and she also spoke about her children, ranging from grown-up to primary school age.  She mentioned a number had conditions on the autistic spectrum, which encompasses things such as dyslexia, dyspraxia, Asperger's and autism itself, all with varying degrees.  This brought back to mind an informal diagnosis I had had three years back in which it was suggested that I had Asperger's.  I did not want a formal diagnosis as I feared it would count against me in job applications.  Mental health issues still seem to remain a taboo subject and one for which covert discrimination is rarely challenged.  When raising the issue of me possibly having Asperger's with my immediate family, I received completely no response and a kind of metaphorical awkward shuffling of embarrassment that I might be daring to say that such a condition could have been passed down to me. 

Bascially, the characteristics of someone with Asperger's are as follows: at least average and often high level of intelligence but difficulty with high-level language skills including reasoning and problem solving as well as taking things literally, a challenge in our coded and euphemistic society.  They may lack of empathy with others partly through an inability to see another person's point of view.  This can hamper close relationships with people.  The emphasis on focused tasks is a commonly known trait of people with autism with people referencing Dustin Hoffman's autistic character in 'Rain Man' (1988).  People with Asperger's might find it difficult to chat or have 'small talk' because in many ways there are far more important things to be thinking and talking about.  They may be unable to control anger, depression and other worries.  Though, saying that, seeing all the road rage and anger which you witness on a daily basis, I do wonder if that is now a trait of the bulk of the population.  Perhaps the challenge is that they cannot articulate their concerns well or through lacking empathy with others, see these challenges as being just for them alone.  The adherence to personal rules and rules set by others is another well-known trait as is a focus on a particular pastime or activity.  Again, many people like to structure their lives and in certain jobs and in studying these are in fact real strengths.  The challenge for others is the stress the individual experiences when their routine is broken.  However, I have also seen the positive side.  Having worked occasionally with people with degrees of autism, I know how hard they work. 

Another trait is talking at length on a subject.  In the past that would have been less of an issue, but these days when everyone wants everything communicated very quickly, the enjoyment or the need someone with Asperger's gets from outlining on their favourite subject, is actually seen as unacceptable.  People with Asperger's often tend to misinterpret body language or other cues.  However, I believe that they also have a different valuation of what is in fact important or the truth.  Often today, many people put much emphasis on very frivolous subjects and present themselves as things they are not, things which are an anathema to a person with Asperger's. Thus, while there is more recognition of the condition, how it manifests itself may now be less acceptable in society than it would have been 50 years ago when someone with Asperger's would have simply been put down as a 'windbag', a 'bore' or 'eccentric'. 

Reflecting with my distant relative about my grandfather and his generation of the family, we certainly can now see rather obsessive traits that were seen as cranky at the time, as traits of Asperger's.  Apparently men are three to ten times more likely to manifest Asperger's than women are, though given that the symptoms are different between the two genders the ratio, as yet, is not clear.  However, with current knowledge it certainly seems that with my mother and her cousin it could easily have skipped a generation going through women.  Examples of my grandfather's Asperger's-type behaviour include his inability to empathise with anyone else's situation even that of his wife and child; his obsessive driving across Europe in a matter of days; his ability to retain large amounts of information by memory.  Until the 1960s the ability to recite poems from memory or play a piano with no sheet music were admired, but are now skills that are seen as rather 'odd'.  Asperger's is hereditary and given what my relative from that side of the family has experienced as well as my own circumstances, suggests it has gone down through the blood line.

I certainly seem to tick many of the Asperger's boxes.  I went to university at a time when only 6% of the UK population did which suggests that I have above average intelligence.  I am very focused on my hobbies, over 700 postings to my blog in under 4 years probably shows that.  My postings show my focus on 'the truth' and insisting that it is heard, often at length.  When looking at the Changing The Times website I saw just how much more I write about a counter-factual than the average contributor.  Being able to expound on a topic sometimes very complex ones and see its structure, has helped me when running staff training sessions.  I have become aware of not overwhelming people and keeping it bite-sized chunks.  Ironically, I usually use far fewer Powerpoint slides than my colleagues.  However, it might have come from me having to work at such things in the past where as these colleagues have never questioned their approaches.  I have turned my focus on topics into an enthusiasm which is often infectious, so that has turned it into a positive.  My standard structuring of content and slides, probably fitting the issue of routine, has meant some people find what I produce repetitive.  Certainly in my daily life I did adhere when living alone to a pattern, doing the same chores on the same days, and eating the same meals.  Living with a woman and her child has helped bring variety and when we part I will probably go back to my set pattern, though with more ideas, certainly for recipes, if not for doing laundry on another day to Monday.

Asperger's sufferers' tendency to adhere to certain rules, probably explains why I made so many mistakes when dealing with women and that I had no sexual partners until I was 34. It is interesting as at the time, when I was walking away from a potential relationship I could almost step outside myself and seeing I was doing something that was going to make me unhappy and yet was not able to take the step and make myself say the right thing. Issues around avoiding embarrassment and also, importantly, having low esteem after all the derogatory remarks I received over the years from teachers, my parents and other children, which I can recall word-for-word even today, made me feel I was not worthy of going out with that woman.

The greatest problems for me have come in the workplace.  I have to tell the truth, I recognise that now.  In addition, if I am asked to research something and report, I try to do this as thoroughly as I can and most people working in offices cannot cope with that.  They simply want short answers that confirm the view they already hold.  I know having to accept that is actually physically uncomfortable for me as I have to let it lie.  The focus on brevity is also a problem, as the tolerable length of phonecalls and emails seems to fall every year and I am racing to keep up as to just how far I need to cut down the information I am providing.  In many ways as I have posted recently, I do not think this is a useful approach in business as it leads to people overlooking any conflicting or challenging information and ignoring potential pitfalls that they could be alerted to.  We need a culture shift in which those seeing potential problems are not condemned but rather seen as protecting the company from making mistakes that could have been foreseen. 

In terms of empathy I believe I am out of step with the standard Asperger's profile.  I can often connect with people facing stresses.  This often makes me unpopular with management that sees me as 'having gone native'.  However, I believe all workers of every level need respect and an appreciation of the stresses that are being imposed on them especially at times of upheaval in the company or more broadly in the economy and society.  It may be because I have a very accurate memory of many incidents that often occurred 35 years or more ago.  I have been through so many embarrassing and stressful situations that I cannot only call to mind but often haunt me, that even if I cannot understand what the individual is precisely experiencing I can recall my feelings during a similar situation.  So, maybe, my empathy is second hand, but it works better than those who seem to shut down any empathetic sense they may have as a 'weakness' inappropriate for business.  Perhaps if you are a loan shark or an assassin then it is inappropriate, but for the average office or shop job, it certainly is not.

People with Asperger's are supposed not to realise when they have made social faux pas.  I have the completly opposite problem.  I am often unable to make myself avoid saying things which are going to cause embarrassment, but am immediately aware of the embarrassment caused, it is almost a physical thing, I can sense the wave of embarrassment sweeping through the room.  Subsequently such incidents will haunt me and something I said wrongly back in the 1980s will be replayed vividly in my mind, pricking me with the embarrassment yet again as if it had happened only moments before. This has made me a very cautious person and very nervous of getting into any situations that have the potential to lead to embarrassment. 

I know we all blush when embarrassed but I feel distinctly uncomfortable through my entire body, with my stomach screwing up and I feel very nervous when witnessing other people in embarrassing situations, even if it is simply a character on television.  I cannot watch scenes in which people have no chance to get out of a situation or they suffer simply as the result of the caprice of someone else.  In real life I hate seeing people arrested and will walk away or in one case gave a stranger £20 so he could pay his train fare rather than me having to witness him being fined.  To some degree I have an over-empathy even with complete strangers and can see myself precisely in their situation.  This seems counter to one of the standard traits of Asperger's but as all the advice notes, the symptoms vary a great deal between individuals.

Possibly more characteristic were other phobias that used to be strong in me when a child.  One thing I loathed, again with an almost physical reaction was being compelled to wear a badge or a sticker with any writing on it. Even now I avoid teeshirts with designs on the front and though I can tolerate a small logo over the breast pocket, I am physically conscious of it being there as if it was on my skin rather than my clothes.  Another one was what friends and I called 'ticketaphobia' the fear that I would lose a train ticket (usually envisaging it falling down that crack between the train and the platform) and so would get into trouble.  I also avoided going into shops just to browse, convinced that I would be accused wrongly of shoplifting.  If I had nothing to buy in the shop I would wait outside; some shops were worse than others, I remember I would stay away from one local toyshop in particular, I believe, because I had seen them accuse people of shoplifting when I had been in there.  When at university, asking among a group of 15 friends, I found out I was the only one who had never shoplifted.  I once witnessed a friend do it and was very distraught.  These days with electronic tags it is far harder back in the 1970s it seems that shoplifting by children was endemic, but not for me, I could not even stomach others doing it let alone myself.

Since looking into Asperger's I have become aware that I probably process information differently to other people.  When reading about how autistic people tend to believe that anything they know must be know universally even if it is kept concealed, I realised it showed a different way of processing.  I think the one example of this I have been aware of longest is that when I read some information or a story, I immediately associate it in my mind's eye with an image of a location, usually one I have visited.  Now, the place may have nothing to do with the details or the information or of the story but it becomes a kind of 'tag' which is triggered when I come back to the book or article.  I realise that trying to stop that happening missed a trick when I was at school.  I should have developed it and developed a kind of visual library in my mind, a quite reference system back to the information or story.  I find now that a lot of my writing is triggered by images rather than other input such as sounds or smells.  Certainly the focus on a task and ability to keep details in my mind often for years, really helps doing creative writing and that is one aspect of the condition that has helped my hobby and may explain why I started doing it in the first place.

Another issue though, is other things I obsess about.  Perhaps this is why people with Asperger's have a tendency to get so angry or depressed, we cannot let the thing triggering those feelings, go from our minds.  There are a few examples of useless things that worry me regularly that are unlikely ever to happen so simply just waste my brain power.  One is that I keep considering what would happen to me if I was thrown back in time.  It has two formats, either I worry about driving on roads in the 1970s or finding work in the Victorian period or surviving with diabetes in the Middle Ages or I reflect if I was taken back 5 or 15 years in my own life and begin thinking of all the different decisions I could/should have made to lead to a better life.  These are regular thoughts in my mind which come back like a sore muscle.  It was naturally exacerbated by watching 'Life on Mars' and 'Ashes to Ashes' especially as they sent the characters back in time to periods I had lived through.  If I could relive my life I would have avoided watching those series however good they may have been. 

A similar example, when using things like biscuits, bread or milk is I begin to worry about being in a nuclear bunker and dealing with the situation when one particular item ran out.  I blame this on all the depressing programmes I had to sit through in my youth about what would happen to us if there was a nuclear war.  Those worries were thrust so forcefully into our lives as children that is probably not surprising that someone like me with my condition, still is concerned with then 20-30 years later.  I have certainly avoided watching the movie 'Blast From The Past' (1999) about a man coming out from having lived with his parents in a nuclear bunker all his life.

The other trait is having empathy for inanimate objects.  I know that I am not alone in this, it was a trait of the character Monica Geller played by Courteney Cox Arquette in the long-running comedy series 'Friends' (1994-2004).  She kept bottles of milk next to each other because she was afraid of upsetting them if she separated them in the fridge.  I do precisely the same, seeing 'families' and 'couples' among products on supermarket shelves and even among biscuits in a jar.  I know it is a ridiculous concept, but it something I have lived with all my life and cannot seem to shake.  I guess this stems from people with Asperger's wanting to adhere to a routine, as similarly I used to always wash out a glass three times to symbolise the Trinity even though I was not at all religious.  Similarly I tap biscuits on the table before eating them, as if I was a sailor from the time of Admiral Nelson.  Back in the 1970s when there was a lot on people remembering former lives, I thought I must be a reincarnation of such a sailor still adhering to old habits.

I think my great difficulty in learning foreign languages, in sharp contrast to the rest of my nuclear family may be explained by Asperger's.  I certainly have a very poor short-term memory and have to flick back and forth between one page or one webpage and another to get information across.  I think I package up foreign words in my brain in a way which means I forget them quickly.  I certainly can only retain one foreign language in my brain at one time.  Travelling to France after having been in West Germany for four months back in the 1980s I found myself almost entirely unable to speak French any longer.  I had no problem speaking English but when I tried to address a French person all that came out was German.  Most notably was the immense difficulty I had in remembering any Chinese characters even in simplified format.

The same problem applies to people's names, I can forget them within a matter of seconds of hearing them.  This makes it very hard when being introduced to a group all at once.  It was one reason why I failed as a school teacher as generally you have to learn 240 pupils' names in the first week of teaching in a secondary school.  That and the fact that I gave them more information in a class than you would get these days on the topic in a university lecture.  For some reason I have never been able to translate my association of novel-with-place to name-with-face.  Recently I have noticed I have even forgotten people's faces if I have not seen them for a while and have been surprised to meet someone again who I had remembered as looking very differently, and even of a different height.  This packaging of information and difficulty in getting certain information to stay in my short-term memory long enough to make it into my long-term memory, I believe also explains my inability to remember martial arts moves.  Perhaps also it is an issue of lack of physical co-ordination, an issue when I played sports as a child and balancing on a bicycle.  Given my clumsiness, I suppose I get no 'muscle memory' either, making it harder to recall the move.  Twelve years of studying Aikido and eight years of studying French have shown me that I am never going to have the mind that allows me to engage with either and, in fact I have forgotten all but a few crumbs of either skill.  It is frustrating given how well I can remember embarrasing incidents from the 1970s; why cannot I at least remember some of my French lessons as well?  I guess it is because they lacked the emotional discomfort that the incidents had to imprint them in my memory. 

I do not know if the diagnosis undermines what I have said on here before about British people having difficulties with languages and martial arts being far harder than the clubs make out.  However, even if you exempt me from the equation, I cannot remember the last time I actually met a British person who could speak any foreign languages, certainly not well, probably back in the early 2000s, so they cannot be that common even among the non-Asperger's British public.  Similarly, you do not meet black belts or even brown belts in Aikido or Karate down every street, so it must be pretty hard.

So, how does this stronger confirmation of what I have help me?  As readers of this blog know, anger and depression are things I have wrestled with over the last few years.  However, I do not think I suffer from them any more than the average person in the UK in these times.  Perhaps bringing me out of these situations needs a different approach from myself and those around me.  Working on anger management through Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) methods seems to have helped me a great deal.  Apparently looking at behaviour can help people with Asperger's avoid making blunders in social circumstances.  Despite everything that has been going wrong for me since really December 2009, I am more positive than I was even three years ago and certainly better able to cope with the challenges of computer systems not working and idiotic behaviour when on the road.  I also think I was in a spiral, because not being able to do much about either issue, getting angry was a narcotic that gave moments of relief and became pretty addictive.  Certainly now, I do not think I am simply out-of-step with 'normal' behaviour in the way people tell me basically when I will not kow-tow to  them.  I think differently, I accept that, but that does not mean I am wrong.  In fact it seems to help me to address people who also find themselves wondering what the rules are in the UK context, hence working well with people from China and other states outside Europe.  I think if I can assign certain behaviour to 'oh, that is the Asperger's speaking' then I can challenge it without feeling that I am challenging my whole approach to life.  I can categorise different elements and filter them accordingly.  I do not think I will ever shed my commitment to speaking the truth and I support all who do.  I might have a different way of engaging empathetically with people, but I do feel passionately that everyone's voice is equal and no-one should be shut down simply because of what they are.

Living in the 2010s is probably one of the worst times for people with Asperger's and we would have done better back in the 1910s.  This is because of the growing emphasis in society on how things appear rather than how they are in reality.  Someone with Asperger's will always have something to say about the difference between the two.  The emphasis on everything fitting into a tweet rather than being a proper exposition is also going to make it hard for us.  Empathy is increasingly seen as a weakness, though I think that the issue of empathy differs between what the person feels and how they express it and people with Asperger's are just as human(e) in their feelings as anyone else, often more so due to the prejudices they have suffered.  The positive aspects are that we can blog and we can find people who share our hobbies right across the world, very easily, so isolation is not a problem.  Given how poor so much social behaviour is, social faux pas made by people with Asperger's will be far less obvious.  Having Asperger's does not make you call a woman a 'whore' or a man a 'twat', that is done so commonly and derogatively by 'normal' people.  Our problem solving skills may be different, but I believe they are strong because we can hold an idea in our minds for long periods and look at it from so many sides and that is a useful if overlooked skill.  Knowing that I have Asperger's to whatever degree I do, makes some things make sense.  I know it does not hamper my ability to do a job well, in fact, in many tasks it helps.  However, for now, it is probably safest to appreciate that for myself and not risk sharing it with family and (potential) employers.

P.P.  Having drafted this posting and spoken, in passing, to my parents about my plans to go for an official diagnosis (so far I have had advice from professionals dealing with the condition but nothing written on paper) I was stunned by the reaction of my father.  He rung up and bellowed at me that the condition does not actually exist; denied that the genealogist relative was actually any relation of mine, saying that her father was not in fact her true father and then accusing me of living in a 'fantasy world'.  I said that I accepted he might have a different viewpoint on Asperger's.  I have worked with people who have denied that even dyslexia exists and have treated sufferers simply as malingerers, despite all the evidence to the contrary.  I said he was entitled to hold that opinion though I disagreed with it, I would not insult him in the way he had me.  I did challenge him for ringing up simply to insult me.

I think his problem is that he has always believed in a eugenic approach, that people born with particular conditions should not be helped to survive.  He does not go as far as to say that people with genetic conditions should be sterilised or killed, but he is clearly on the path to old-fashioned eugenic views.  I remember that he was incredibly upset when I was diagnosed with diabetes until it was revealed it was from a virus I had caught, not a condition I had inherited.  Now I feel he cannot cope with the fact that he might have passed on some condition like Asperger's even though, from the limited evidence I have it seems more likely to have come from my mother's side of the family.  I note this to warn people if you reveal you have a condition like Asperger's which is often not diagnosed until adulthood, you might get an unexpected and hostile reaction especially from your parents and perhaps other family members too.

The Myth Of An Alternative To The Bank Bail Out

Last month I was particularly angered by a comment from Defence Secretary Dr. Liam Fox when he said that the main reason for the cuts in defence expenditure was no fault of the coalition government rather it was the consequence of the sustained damage Dr. Gordon Brown had inflicted on the economy as prime minister 2007-10.  Among leading Conservative politicians, Fox has been one of the most vocal in attributing the blame for the UK's economic problems on the previous Labour governments, more so even than Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osbourne.  Cameron and Osborne use the large deficit created by bailing out the banks at the onset of the recession as the excuse for their harsh public spending cuts, which would have been imposed even if the UK was in a boom because the current batch of Conservatives believe that the state is too large and needs to be culled as abruptly as possible.  Fox, however, takes it a step further and peddles the idea that for some reason Brown and his government deliberately 'wrecked' the economy for some unknown motive.  Fox, in many ways, is a throwback to the 1970s and 1980s seeing some Communist conspiracy at the heart of British government trying to do the worst for the decent British public.  The reality was that whilst governments do and pursue a particular agenda, and Brown less vigorously than the prime ministers that bracketed him, a lot of their activity is responsive rather than proactive, particularly in the age of the globalised economy when the demand from copper in China leads to thieves in the UK disabling electricity sub-stations and sections of railway in order to get the scrap copper.

All governments say that they could have done things better than their rivals.  There is an implication in everything that Cameron, Osborne, Fox, et al say, that if, for example, rather than Tony Blair handing the premiership to Gordon Brown in June 2007, there had been an election and David Cameron had come to power, then the banking crisis and the recession which came the following year, would have been handled so differently, so much 'better', if Fox is to be believed, that, in fact, we would not now be facing such a large deficit and the consequent 'need' to slash so much of public service.  So let us look at what the Conservatives might have done differently.

The first thing to establish is what would have happened if the government had done nothing.  Even before the global recession had started, in the UK, the Northern Rock bank ran into problems.  It lent 18.9% of all of the mortgages in the UK and handled deposits of £24 billion compared to loans and assets of £113 billion.  In the summer of 2007 it found it difficult to borrow money to cover its lending.  As the US sub-prime market began to stagger, lenders became reluctant to lend on any mortgages even though British lending was generally on a far more restricted basis.  I was not surprised that Northern Rock was struggling having had much anecdotal evidence of its poor customer care combined with its aggressive marketing of products including very high percentage mortgages; this has raised its market share from 14.6% in 2006.  Rapidly fading faith led to a 'run' on the bank with £1 billion in deposits being withdrawn on 14th September 2007. This was the first run on a British bank for more than a century.  To stop the bank from collapsing, the British 'lender of last resort', the Bank of England lent the company £27 billion and in 2008 bought up £3 billion of effectively worthless shares in the company.  In February 2008 the bank was de facto nationalised. 

At least ten other offers to buy the bank were rejected because these potential owners were unable to repay the public money loaned to the company.  Interestingly, the US company Lehman Brothers which was soon to collapse in a spectacular way was one of the bidders.  Others were equity funds such as Terra Firma Capital Partners, J.C. Flowers and Ceberus, investment companies like Olivant and other banks like Bradford & Bingley and Lloyds-TSB.  If Terra Firma's bid is anything to go buy, some of the equity fund purchases would have been de facto asset stripping processes.  Interestingly, before Northern Rock was effectively taken over by the state 40% of its best business accounts was transferred to a company called Granite based in the Channel Islands which have different tax laws.  Though Granite does not receive new business, this effectively meant the cream of the bank's business (and profit potential) remained free of state control.

Now, if the state had not stepped in, then we would have seen the run on the bank continue, reducing the amount of deposits even further than before in relation to its loan commitments. There was one incident in which one bank manager was barricaded in their office because two customers were unable to withdraw their £1 million after the online banking facility of Northern Rock collapsed.  It is likely that violent scenes would have continued as the bank would have found it impossible to cover all the withdrawals with the relative low level of reserves it kept. At this stage the bank would be compelled to foreclose on its mortgages, i.e. insisting lenders immediately repay their loans or lose their homes to the bank.  This would not have helped the bank much as they would have had to dispose of the property quickly to recoup funds and in many towns the housing market would have been utterly disrupted as numerous properties were auctioned off.  As it was some borrowers, including charities, accused Northern Rock of pursuing aggressive repossession especially in 2007-8.

Some borrowers could have transferred their mortgages to other banks but this would have brought pressure on to them as they would increasingly have faced the challenges Northern Rock had already faced to raise loans to cover the mortgages they lent.  Thus, even before the main recession started, not bailing out Northern Rock could have become a crash in the UK economy. The issue for many was that the total support to Northern Rock came to £100 billion which was added to the National Debt meaning it was equivalent to 37.5% of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) close to what is seen as the highest permitted level of debt by a state. 

I suppose that the difference that the Conservatives would have done, is being so averse to nationalisation, they would have allowed Northern Rock to have been sold to another bank, with no guarantee that the public funds put into the bank would ever be returned.  Under the de facto nationalisation, by August 2008, the bank had already paid back £9.5 billion of what it had been given, so reducing its part of the National Debt.  It seems unlikely, given that so much Conservative support comes from property owners that they would have allowed Northern Rock to collapse, it held too large a market share.  Thus, there would have been addition to the National Debt just in the way the Conservatives complain about.  In addition, there approach would have meant that the government would not have had a chance of ever seeing the money it had provided returned at some date in the future. 

The key difference would have had to have occurred back in the 1990s when regulation of banks and The City financial bodies was far too lax.  The Blair government like the Major and Thatcher ones that had preceded it, seemed beholden to the financial institutions and was happy for them to act recklessly and earn big profits.  The 'invisible' trade of financial products has been Britain's strongest industry since the 1980s and no prime minister seemed to have the will or the wish to temper the behaviour of not only merchant banks but also high street banks too.  The conversion of mutual building societies into banks after 1986 and their focus on shareholders rather than customers did not help the situation in the mortgage sector, because they were prone to take more risks.  A lot of this could be foreseen, the Bank of England had apparently been working through scenarios of such difficulties as early as 2004 and like many others saw Northern Rock and Halifax/Bank of Scotland (popularly referred to these days as HBOS) as likely candidates.

The ongoing sub-prime mortgage crisis in the USA and the subsequent tightening of loans to banks meant that many UK banks beyond Northern Rock began to experience crises.  The Bank of England offered £4.4 billion in relief in September 2007 and it was drained by banks within hours. In October 2008, the Bank of England offered £37 billion to Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), Lloyds TSB and HBOS who were struggling to cover their loans and certainly to grant new ones.  Would the Conservatives have refused to offer such funds to the banks and so, having avoided the collapse with Northern Rock, have seen even greater problems as these banks collapsed?  RBS had assets of £2.5 trillion in December 2008 and Lloyds Banking Group £1.195 trillion, thus the scale of their demise would have made that of Northern Rock seem minor.

RBS had had difficulty in raising funds from April 2008 and in the end first 60%, in March 2009 70% and in November 2009, 84% of the bank was taken over by the state.  RBS has been shedding assets since early in 2008 but did not close its tax avoidance department until March 2009 and in December 2009 stood by plans to pay £1.5 billion in bonuses to staff in its investment arm.  Lloyds-TSB already an amalgam of an old bank and a building society turned bank, took over HBOS in September 2008.  Like these other banks, through 2008 HBOS itself an amalgam of a bank and building society turned bank, saw rapid falls in its shares.  The government approved of the combination of Lloyds-TSB with HBOS even though it was effectively counter to competition as the 'super-bank' has 38 million customers, compared to a UK population of 61.8 million people.  This buy-out effectively relieved the government of having to take over HBOS itself.  However, the continued difficulty in banks raising funds meant that in 2009 the government bought 43% of the Lloyds Banking Group.  EU rules means that by 2013, it will have divested itself of the TSB brand and hundreds of branches of the retail group.  Now, it seems unlikely that the Conservatives would have overseen the nationalisation of any bank.  They certainly would have backed the buy-out of Lloyds-TSB of HBOS, but then in 2009 what would they have done with this super-bank running into difficulty given that so many people and businesses were dependent on its stability?  The likely solution from their view would have been to sell it to a consortium of equity funds.  Given equity funds' desire for fast profit, it is very likely that we would have seen even faster shedding of staff than the 15,000 made redundant by the company in 2010, a fifth of the total workforce.  By November 2009, RBS has similarly shed over 19,000 jobs.  Again, if the state had not stepped in and the only remaining source of support had been equity funds or perhaps foreign banks, then this figure is likely to have been higher. 

The Bradford & Bingley bank's mortgage book in was bought by the government in December 2008 whilst the savings and bank network was bought by Abbey National, itself owned by Spanish bank, Santander. Without UK state intervention, the only way to have avoid collapse of banks, many far bigger than Northern Rock would have been to hawk them to equity funds or to institutions from other countries.  Spain with its insistence on higher reserves being held by its banks almost inadvertently put its banks in a stronger position to weather the financial crises of 2007-9.

Aside from the state taking over banks, the British government, following the US model, but leading the way in Europe also provided funds that could be used by other banks, 'quantitative easing' to stand in for the lack of available funds on the commercial market. In October 2008 the government made available £500 billion but only RBS and Lloyds-TSB took any of these funds.  Barclays (with £2.3 trillion assets at the end of 2008) refused assistance and turned instead to the Qatari government for funds.  So, even though it would not accepted one government's funds it was happy to take them from another government.  This may have been a model that a Cameron government coming into power in 2007 would have promoted more widely for UK banks in the place of the British government nationalising or providing funds.  HSBC (with £1.736 trillion assets), the other key bank in the UK, was able to weather the financial crisis in the UK through share issues and that unlike the other banks discussed it was a multi-national bank on an already large scale.  A second package of another £50 billion in January 2009 and an increase of state ownership of Lloyds-TSB shares to 65% was announced due to the bank suffering from having taken on HBOS's losses. 

Now, the Conservatives may argue that there was no need to come forward with these funds, especially by 2009 when things seemed to be settling.  To them, no doubt, it all appears far too Keynesian in approach, stimulating the economy through state intervention.  However, much of what happens in the financial world depends on confidence.  A key problem for British banks was not that they had so many bad loans (though some did have a sizeable number) more that international lenders lost confidence in lending to any business engaged in lending mortgages no matter the quality of them.  Thus, the extra funds put forward in the latter stages were important in rebuilding this confidence, not only of lenders, but vitally of savers.  Banks have moved far from when they were dependent on depositors to provide the funds for their businesses, but what is saved cannot be ignored.  In fact, banks that weathered the situation were those who tended to have more deposits and reserves.

In total, the government paid out £131 billion in funds to keep banks from collapsing; including £107 million in fees for financial advice from companies from December 2007 to December 2009.  Other potential expenses such as borrowing support, money put into increase liquidity and protection for savings, brought the total costs to £850 billion, though of course with the easing of the situation not all these funds were called upon.  In addition, through nationalising banks, the government to some extent ensured they would get some of their money back; having them sold to private companies especially foreign ones would have meant that the government's investment to bring stabiliy, and, vitally, to try to increase the amount of lending needed by businesses and house buyers, would have never come back and in fact would have left the UK economy.

To blame the Labour government for the size of the National Debt resulting from the support it gave banks 2007-9 is false.  No government would have been able to allow Northern Rock let alone RBS or HBOS to collapse.  Even the folding of Bradford & Bingley would have had severe consequences beyond just those who saved with or borrowed from that bank.  The Conservatives, many of whom come from banking backgrounds, would not have let their friends go to the wall.  Thus, billions of pounds was needed and this would have gone on the National Debt.  I accept that rather than nationalising, the Conservatives most likely would have encouraged buy-outs by private equity companies and foreign companies.  Whilst this would have saved funds in the short-term, it would have meant that any money paid to banks most likely would never have come back, and, particularly with the private equity companies, the stability would be short lived as the banks would be broken up for what assets they could release.  The UK since the 1950s if not longer has had a real focus on privately-owned housing as a core element of its economic life, much more than any other country.  Instability in the housing market impinges widely in the UK economy and society.  Thus, the closure of banks, the foreclosure of loans, even just a greater restriction on lending than we see now, would all have dented this important sector of the economy, having a knock-on effect on purchasing and in turn jobs and economic activity.  Perhaps the Conservatives could have save a few billions by now bailing out the banks to the extent they were, but the cost would have been more instability and in turn falling tax returns, so reducing any saving they may have made.

The increase in the National Debt was a responsive policy not a proactive one as Fox and other Conservatives pretend.  If they had been in power they would have been compelled to do very much the same.  The alternatives would have only saved some small sums and at a cost to longer-term stability that many would have baulked at.  If seeking blame, one focus has to be on the freedom which financial institutions have had since the years of the Thatcher governments, though, of course, this has been a global trend, especially in the USA from where so often the UK takes its lead.  The Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, in line with other Conservative governments throughout the 20th century but boosted by New Right attitudes that appeared in the 1970s, believed in deregulation and the state standing back in many sectors of the economy, not least in the banking world.  Allowing building societies to become banks was one element in this trend building towards the UK aspect of the crisis of 2007-9.  However, on coming to power in 1997 under Tony Blair, Labour was beholden to the Thatcherite attitude.  Blair was a Thatcherite, making the Bank of England independent was an element of this.  Gordon Brown as Chancellor of the Exchequer was prudent, but in many ways was simply lucky.  No-one during the Blair years tried to rein in the behaviour of the banks and it was only sheer good fortune that meant the crisis did not hit in 1999 or 2003 or some other time in that period. 

Of course, the current government is a clear advocate of deregulation, unsurprisingly as it has been an unchallenged political trend of the last 30 years.  However, it means that the banks remain as free as ever to behave irresponsibily.  It is right that protestors from UK Uncut go into banks and turn them into libraries or woodland.  We could not let the banks collapse, it would have led to a social and economic crisis in the UK unlike anything we had seen.  The taxpayer provided the funds to bail them out after their mistakes, driven by pure greed for massive profits.  We have paid twice because now to fund that the government says it has to be taken out of public services with huge cuts, not by getting the banks to pay back what they received and in this I mean not only funds but also the steps to boost confidence and stop runs.  They do not even have the grace to curtail their vast earnings, they just behave as they did before, uncowed by what happened.  There is nothing to stop a similar crisis manifesting itself this year, next year, sometime soon and then where will be the funds to save the banks this time? It is not a scare story to recognise that in the life of this parliament we could see the end of a banking system that we have become familiar with in the last 40 years and a return to something very dated and very out of step with the rest of the world. 

It seems that, next time, UK banks will, in large part, stop being owned by British companies but by European and probably Chinese institutions.  A number will be asset stripped by equity funds, the only ones who have the money to afford to intervene.  Say goodbye to your savings, say goodbye to getting a mortgage unless you are already wealthy, say goodbye to free banking, say goodbye to even having a bank account if you do not have a well-paid job (especially once the Post Office accounts are privatised).  The current government panders to its banking friends and uses the myth that somehow Brown deliberately wrecked the economy as the excuse for their reverse social engineering and smashing up of the state.  It is a myth.  In the same position they would have done minimally different and like Blair and Brown, have done nothing to stop the chance that it will happen again, this time with no safety net.

How 'World Of Warcraft' Ruined My Life

Back in 2009 I wrote about how I had started to play the so-called Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, 'World of Warcraft'.  My early views of the hazards of playing the game were posted back in July 2009: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/07/online-behaviour-world-of-warcraft.html   I am still playing it, probably even more because with me being long-term unemployed, losing my house and having no clear idea of where I am going to end up, escapism is vital.  During the Depression of the 1930s and the mass unemployment of the 1980s, consumption of alcohol and tobacco increased and funerals became more elaborate (if you have had a grim life people feel they need to give you a good send off, just witness any funeral in Mile End or Poplar in East London).  People seek escape and I am not exempt from that.

Of course, computer games of any kind have the danger of becoming addictive and you finding the hours passing by quickly.  Rather than doing the housework or the shopping, instead you keep playing even into the early hours of the morning.  With a game like 'World of Warcraft' in which there is not just a single character progressing down a chain of missions, but you can go and produce things like weapons or clothing and market them or go on quests for rewards or duel with other players or take part in the regular seasonal events, such as around the Solstice or Valentine's Day, there is even more to keep you engaged.  You can have up to 50 different characters so even if you tire of running around as a troll hunter you can log on and be a werewolf druid in a different location.  To stop players tiring of the settings and quests, periodically those running the game, a US company called Blizzard, recreate their world.  In December 2010 they launched 'Cataclysm' which saw regions of their world flooded, some split apart by earthquakes or volcanoes and new areas appear from the sea; new races were introduced and players could now rise up to level 85 rather than 80.  There were numerous new missions and even new skills that players could train in.  The game is always evolving and sometimes this is for gameplay reasons (such as no longer needing to buy ammunition for bows and guns or putting more mail boxes in certain cities) and sometimes to develop new storylines.  In such a fantasy continent there has to be lots of drama, invasions and betrayals.

This is all great.  Though I do not always agree with the changes made, and smaller updates and alterations come between the big relaunches like Cataclysm, it certainly keeps my interest which is why I am still playing it 20 months after I started.  The key problem for me and what makes me keep thinking I should turn away from the whole thing, is the people.  Of course, many of them are teenagers, you expect that with any computer-based game.  However, there are also older people with partners and children and work to go to.  Certain 'guilds' only permit people over 18 to participate in their group.  The range of nationalities is diverse.  There are different servers for the main language groups of Europe (and others for China and many for the USA), so being located in the UK I do not mix with French or German or Italian speakers.  However, the British server does have players from many minor states across Europe especially the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark, but also Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece.  I quite enjoy playing with people from such diverse backgrounds.  Though English is the language for the server once in a while people go off into Dutch or Danish and some guilds intentionally recruit people of a specific nationality.  Of course, in this age of semi-literacy among English speakers, a lot of the online discussion is in fact in a hybrid of text speak and simply bad spelling.  'LFG' - Looking for Group, 'JC' - Jewel crafter; one of the professions you can study and the whole range of smilies; 'OMFG' for 'Oh My Fucking God' seems unnecessarily hyperbolic in its anger/condemnation.  However, new terms develop simply because so few people seem to be able to spell, 'Rogue' (a character class) is always rendered as 'Rouge' and now 'give' has been replaced when it is a demand by 'geif' which seems to be turning into some form of German.  Again, being a man in his forties, I recognise that with the English language changing far more sharply between my generation and the one that is following than between my generation and that of my parents or even my grandparents, I am happy to accept that when online I need to use a different language.  I can type far faster than the bulk of the gamers, so accept the need for abbreviations.

What is more of a challenge is not really how discussion is had but what is said and beyond that, the behaviour of the people it betrays.  Someone said that the 'World of Warcraft' was like a Gold Rush town in California of the 1840s.  This is unsurprising, people are doing missions and fighting monsters to win magic items and gain gold.  With such funds they become better fighters or magic users and get access to higher level areas and so on.  This is the basic dynamics of numerous fantasy fighting computer games.  The problem is that many of the people gamers are interacting with are not computer generated they are people with feelings.  In the game two warriors with the same equipment will be equally matched and in combat it comes down to luck and which combination of buttons you press.  A well-equipped person playing for 3 months could beat someone who has been playing the game for 5 years, though the latter generally pretends his/her knowledge somehow makes them stronger.  In fact people who have that attitude often lose because they have no flexibility in their thinking.  So, how do you show you are 'better' than the derided 'newbies' or 'noobs' as it is typically abbreviated to?

Status is clearly important.  People aim to reach that level 85.  However, this can take weeks and months and while your character is rising through the ranks, how do you show you are better than the others around you?  It is by making divisions.  In many ways whilst 'World of Warcraft' is like California of the 1840s it is also like London society of the 1840s, snobbery is rife.  People put out a call to get a group of assorted characters together in order to attack a castle or run through some caves, fighting monsters.  Now, of course, the opponents are of differing levels depending on the location and so a level 10 warrior would die quickly if fighting level 20 dragons.  However, the person soliciting recruits does not stop there in separating out the volunteers, s/he insists that they have equipment of a certain rating, their 'gear score' has to be so high or they are 'kicked' from the group.  They are commanded to go to a location for inspection, i.e. a player looks at all the equipment the character has.  Many players simply preen around the centres of the big cities showing off what they have like so many peacocks or prostitutes.   Those volunteering rather than preening are grilled about their 'dps', from damage per second, how much damage their weapons or spells can inflict.  If it falls below some arbitrarily set figure then the person is refused.  Now that level 85 is the peak, recruitment advertisements in the game often say 'level 85s only' even when going off to a level 70 dungeon.  At level 83 I asked if I could join in as my damage and spells were only a little lower than the level 85 set and, of course, I was refused. 

Once you have got through the equipment inspection, you have to have your 'achievements' checked.  This is the list of successful missions and quests that you have already completed.  If you have not been felt to have achieved enough already, again you are refused.  This is a chicken-and-egg situation, because people often volunteer so that they can win an achievement, and yet because they do not have it, they are refused.  A lot of this reflects the lack of maturity of thinking on the part of the recruiters, no matter what age they actually are.  Even if you recruit a group yourself you are quite likely to find a member leaving mid-way through some battle because s/he feels the rest of the group is not up to scratch.  Even more criteria are piled on to segregate and demean other players.  One is speed.  There are no benefits for charging through a castle quickly.  In fact you often find if you do this then some monsters appear out of a room behind you that you have rushed by and start attacking you from behind.  However, warriors, paladins, death knights, the physical attack people, are very impatient and charge on.  If they upset a whole room of monsters and die due to rushing through it, then, of course, they blame everyone else for being pathetic.  These people should be compelled to play games such as the paper-based 'Dungeons and Dragons' role-playing game and know that to succeed in such fantasy settings bravado has to be tempered with caution and forward planning.

This brings us to 'tactics'.  'Must know tactics' is another criteria often set for volunteers to groups.  This does not mean how best to use your character's particular weapons or spells, but precisely where to stand in a castle room when a specific monster attacks.  Again, of course, if you have never done that mission before then how are you supposed to know that.  If you are even a little wrong then you get a long lecture about how wrong and stupid you are.  In addition, everyone thinks their tactics are the only feasible ones and any alternatives are derided.  This is often how arguments start out in groups.  I have done the same missions with differing groups all insisting that their tactics are the only correct ones and if you do anything different then you are kicked out.  There is a sense of a single truth.  It is not surprising that numerous wiki pages and websites have been created to provide players with very precise details about what to buy and where to stand in a particular room of a particular castle or cave.  Like most computer game players I use walkthroughs and other resources that are not part of the game.  However, because specific knowledge is used to denigrate other players, you end up having to read as much as if you were doing an Open University course, just so you do not 'blunder' when you go on a mission.  You ask for help in the game and are told you must be an idiot for even asking, because, of course, to any intelligent person, the answer is obvious or are told to go off and open up numerous webpages outside the system.  The reason for this is supposed superior knowledge is the only real way that one player can make themselves seem superior to another.

Pride in your achievements is a fair trait.  However, the sense that anything you have achieved or know (however wrongly in fact that information might be) should be constantly used to put down others as vocally as it is in the game is unnecessarily nasty, but seems to be a constant behaviour in the game.  I suppose this is a reflection of our contemporary society, especially in the UK: you can only get on in life if you not only eliminate potential rivals but you humiliate them too.

If assistance is offered it is never in a constructive way, it is patronising.  I might expect too much of the average 'World of Warcraft' player to know the difference.  It is great to share knowledge, tell people about bargains in the auction house or how to get through a new mission or quest.  However, that is never enough.  The bulk of players who share information (and they in themselves are a small minority) want you to abase yourself before their greatness and acknowledge that you were stupid until they decided to pity you and shower you with their grace.  Trying to find a specific trainer I asked for help and one player decided to advise me.  Initially I was grateful.  However, he felt he had to lead me through the city and if I said something which disagreed with how he saw the world he went 'WRONG' at me in the text.  The one useful function is 'Ignore' which blocks communication from certain characters if you choose.  Unfortunately it does not block it from specific players and I have had some switching from character to character, pursuing me across the continents of the game repeatedly telling me how wrong or stupid I am until I have blocked every character they can spring on me.  Then they send me messages in the in-game postal system continuing their diatribe.

Interestingly, Blizzard tries to engineer the game so as to promote a better level of co-operation between the players.  You can block swear words to eliminate the harshest abuse, interestingly 'Nazi' counts as a swearword but 'wanker' does not, probably due to the game originating in the USA.  Racism does sometimes break through.  Periodically people condemn non-English speakers struggling to phrase things correctly, which is laughable given how many errors they put in their own writing.  However, it is mob rule and if the bulk of players spell 'rogue' as 'rouge' that is acceptable in a way errors from someone using English as their second or third language is not permitted.  A lot of general public dialogue seems to be as if it was between a group of drunken football supporters watching a match in a pub.  The rules can shift quickly, but always to their advantage in denigrating other players not deemed to be part of the mob. 

The sense that it 'that's the way it is, you cannot question it' is all pervasive.  I have seen that phrase or variations of it banded around.  Once I saw a discussion about so-called 'twinking' when people with characters who have a lot of money send it to their lower level ones to raise them quickly through the levels without much effort (sounds familiar behaviour to anyone who lives or works in the UK).  Someone questioned if this was the right way to behave and whether it was fair on other players.  Rather than put forward a reasoned argument for continuing the practice, the response was, 'it happens, live with it' and the player was condemned even for questioning it.  I know it is a game, but these basic assumptions are carried out into the real world and you do wonder if the regimes in Tunisia or Egypt had changed if the bulk of the population had had that attitude.  Perhaps British complacency and pervasive self-righteousness is what makes us behave this way.  It does not seem healthy in a game, let alone real life.  The worst case was a discussion about Hitler.  I have no idea why it came up in the game.  Some realms of the game insist you only speak about in-game things others start debating the football match or the weather or Michael Jackson's death.  What alarmed me was the view that 'well he sorted out the Jewish problem' which seemed accepted without question.  I started pointing out that any 'Jewish problem' had simply been an invention of the Nazis anyway, and yet was being taken here as something that everyone knew and accepted.  I was barred from the game for three days for participating in an off-topic political discussion, but I was proud to be for challenging lazy, dangerous, Fascist assumptions.

To earn money in the game many players auction off unwanted items through one of the auction houses.  This is a bit like eBay fantasy style.  When fighting monsters you are quite likely to pick up armour or weapons or food or even scraps of fur or rock that you have no use for.  Someone else might just need that item to improve their armour or make something using a profession skill like blacksmithing or leatherworking.  You are not supposed to make a loss but the prices many people set are ridiculous.  I remember having a level 20 character, who was recovering tens of pieces of silver from his quests.  I looked to buy a pair of boots from the auction house.  The best pair for my level was a level 19 pair of boots, but the cost was 799 gold pieces.  There are 10 copper pieces in 1 silver piece and 10 silver pieces in 1 gold piece.  I would be unable to afford them until I was many levels higher and by then their strength and certainly any magic on them would be too feeble for the kind of monster I would then be fighting.  Hyperinflation is a real problem in the game which makes it very discouraging when bringing on a new character.  It is exacerbated by 'gold sellers' criminals who sell gold in the game for real pounds or euros.  This allows some players to simply buy their characters everything they need rather than having to earn it the way most players do.  The gold sellers put software into the sysem which creates 'mining robots' or 'collecting robots' which go round scooping up the raw materials in the game, faster than any players can and then they auction it to raise game gold to sell to players.  Of course, this is illegal, but because status-hungry players indulge in it, it helps upset the balance of the game play.

Hyperinflation always generates excessive behaviour.  A key problem is even if the collection 'bots are not around high level characters go into low level areas, able to move around on mounts far faster than anyone of the appropriate level can do, and mines or collects all the raw materials to then take them back to sell them at incredibly high prices leaving the poor low level characters with nothing to practice their skills working on or to make any money themselves.  Very quickly you have an elite of very high level characters whether migrated from another realm or who have bought their standing, simply selling to each other at very high prices, leaving poor lower level characters without a high level character to supply them, struggling to advance.  Guilds are supposed to help lower level characters advance, but as I consider below, this does not really work either.

Blizzard's steps mean that you need groups to run through 'instances' and 'raids' specific missions in castles or caves or wherever that gives good rewards.  Generally you cannot do it alone.  However, as seen above this actually promotes division rather than collaboration.  They encourage 'guilds', collectives of players focused on one or two activities in the game.  You get a guild 'tabard' showing the logo of the guild and access to a guild bank where items can easily be shared between players.  With Cataclysm Blizzard added other features, cheaper repairs to armour and weapons, access to greater funds, specific items, available to guilds that were thriving and successful.  The basic idea is that players help each other and more experienced players and higher level characters help lower-level characters.  Of course, you can be very experienced and yet be starting a new character among the 50 you are permitted to have, though you still seem to be treated as if you are new to the game as a whole.  The guild system does not really work.  There are some decent guilds.  The woman in my house is a member of one, but I have not been able to find one that is like that.

On any given server there are tens of versions of the world, each with a specific name, so that you do not get tens of thousands of people trying to move through the same area mining for ore or picking specific herbs.  When a 'realm' has too many players, people are offered free 'migration' to a new less populated realm.  This does mean you can have hundreds of people in the same 'place' who cannot see each other as they are on different versions.  Nowadays, random groups can be assembled automatically from across realms on the same server and it can be interesting to talk to people who generally play on an alternative version of the world to the one you are on.  Factors such as the cost of items sold by other players, how crowded certain locations get and even the tone of discussion in the realm can vary greatly.

The other element Blizzard introduced to guilds with Cataclysm was that they could attain levels by their members completing missions and other achievements.  I think the idea was to encourage people to become guild members, but it has completely back-fired and has simply added a new aspect to snobbery.  As in real history, large guilds that can offer their members lots of facilities prosper.  There is the snobbery 'I am in a level 10 guild, oh, but you are only in a level 5 guild, you must be a poor player, no-one else clearly wants you'.  As in our society exclusive clubs are yet another way to segregate players.  They have strict entrance criteria and anyone who does not fit with their arbitrary rules or does not carry out their designate tasks in time or simply is no longer liked, is excluded.  Some US companies take into consideration if prospective employees have run guilds on 'World of Warcraft', but from how most are run, the only kind of organisation such experience would really suit you for is working in the mafia.

Blizzard tries hard to encourage players not to behave in the cut-throat way so many do.  The 'hints' when you log on often advise players to be polite when playing with others and encourage them not simply to open a trade with a player or try to duel with them before actually talking with them.  However, walking through a city my character is quite liable to be repeatedly challenged or offered some trade with absolutely no dialogue.  You can see why many of us become 'backwoodsmen' keeping our characters in the less populated areas of the world.  Generally the whole feel from the players I encounter is that somehow conservative if not Nazi values have become the norm.  A lot of discussion is misogynistic.  I suppose you would expect this in a game about battling monsters, but there are female characters and female opponents.  Yet, a female character is often dismissed, even though a level 10 female warrior is no weaker than a level 10 male warrior in the game.  Of course, just because a character is female or male does not mean the player is too; yet that is the assumption so patronising of female characters is quickly translated into patronising of female players.  Some of the races are very glamourous, especially the elves and their accentuated femininity for the females, with tight fitting clothes, large breasts, slender waists, long hair and often large earrings, does not help.  However, saying this, troll and even orc females have a certain elegance but certainly a strength about them.  When you come across male characters named things like 'Hymenripper' then you have a sense that misogynism is not really challenged.

How 'World of Warcraft' ruined my life was not because I spent so long playing it and neglected other hobbies such as writing fiction or swimming.  What it has alarmingly shown me is that the norms of the next generation are focused on segregation of society by status.  That status has to be maintained rigidly by codes and that those outside have to be regularly humiliated.  The best the ordinary person can hope for is to give up their dignity and be told patronisingly how wrong they are and try to ape their 'betters' in the vain hope of being accepted.  It is a society in which people grab all the resources they can and shut out those coming on after them out of the opportunity of advancing themselves unless they can pay.  It is a society which is discriminatory to women who are assumed to be weak and interestingly that it is demeaning to accept assistance from a woman, no matter what your own gender.  It is a society in which bad language is used to show your level of anger at the 'stupidity' of people who have views different to your own.  It is a society in which you always believe you not have the correct answer but the only possible answer.  It is a society in which things should not be challenged and to even dare to question them opens you up to attack.  What I have seen in 'World of Warcraft' players is the very worst of British society distilled.  The government with all its plans for a very stratified society with opportunities for the few and people all 'knowing their place' should look to 'World of Warcraft' players for their footsoldiers.  These people have the perfect attitude to fill the ranks of the 'little Hitlers' that any authoritarian regime thrives on.  'World of Warcraft' ruined my life by not offering me the escape that I yearned for, but rather shoving the worst of everything I encounter in real life forcefully into my face every time I log on.

Unfortunately Feeling Compelled To Be A 'Nimby'

For those unfamiliar with the term, 'nimby' comes from 'not in my back yard' referring to people complaining about developments in their area.  Such an attitude has caused immense problems for the UK and is one reason why we have a shortage of prisons, drug rehabilitation centres, social housing, wind farms and even graveyards.  UK residents despise change.  They do not like 'others' coming into their area.  This was noticeable in the new town, Milton Keynes, where I used to live.  The town is laid out on a grid pattern and one-by-one over the past four decades these grids are filled in with new housing.  The trouble is much of the housing is very middle class, fine for people who can afford it, but it has meant that shops like Tescos have to bus in lower-paid staff from Luton, 27 Km away as none of them can find affordable accommodation locally.  The sensible solution seemed to be to build social housing in one of the grids close to the large shopping centre in the South-East of the town.  This was too much for the residents of neighbouring grids who went and vandalised equipment on the building site in an attempt to stop social housing coming anywhere near their middle class enclaves.  It is fascinating how such residents portray the potential newcomers as feckless, drug addicts, alcoholics, noisy and dirty.  They do not connect them with the people who serve them their luxury delicatessen items in the supermarket or clean up when one of their offspring makes a mess.  The main concern for the residents was that the value of their houses is sliding as a result of these social housing areas.  There is no sense that if the supermarkets close for lack of staff then the price will fall anyway.  In Milton Keynes the districts are divided by dual-carriageway roads on which most of, cars travel at 70 mph, which is as good a ghetto forming barrier as any.

Having seen such a narrowly focused 'nimby' response and utterly despairing over the virulent attacks on wind farms in the place of nuclear or coal-fired power stations, I am always careful not to fall into that trap myself.  Yet, on a small scale, I find I have done and consequently feel like a hypocrite.  My own consolation seems to be that I am not actually stopping progress like most nimbys, but that I am trying to reduce a quite clear contribution to crime in my street.  I have moved the location of the computer in my house so that I now sit in a room facing out over the street.  Dead opposite the window is a detached house built in the 1920s.  It has been empty for over three weeks now.  It was split into two flats, both rented out by a local social housing company.  The residents moved out more than three weeks ago and a few days later all the windows were stripped from the house and the front door was left open.  We had assumed that the windows would be replaced.  However, as time has passed nothing as been done to the house, it has not even been boarded up.  Of course, this offered too much temptation to drunken men coming back from the pub and twice over the weekend they decided to simply walk into the property and trash it.

Despite the house being vacated a lot of things had been left behind including a vacuum cleaner, a fridge and the cardboard tubes from the interior of carpets.  These were distributed all over the street.  Inside the vandals did a pretty good job of stripping the plaster and breaking up interior fittings.  Naturally we rang the owners and they said they had no concern as the property is due to be demolished anyway to provide access to a new close that is going to be jammed in behind the current line of houses.  What this is going to do to the already congested street I live on, though for not much longer, I have no idea.  Of course, if cars went down it at the legal 30 mph, then it might be alright, but no-one seems capable of keeping their speed down that low or wait for people coming on to negotiate around the lines of parked cars down both sides of the road, leading to lots of incidents of shouting and horns hooting.

After the second occasion I telephoned the police on their non-emergency line.  Being a low crime area two officers arrived as fast as they would have done to an emergency in many towns.  The perpetrators had fled.  Despite this nothing has been done to the house, it still remains full of debris (we pushed the stuff that had been thrown into the street back into its front garden).  My concern is less with the damage to the value of the property, as we have already sold it, but the hazard such a derelict site makes.  Are companies not obliged to board up empty houses?  These days the average building site is surrounded by defensive fences and is usually covered in alarms, though I gather that is more to dissuade people from stealing the scaffolding than from discouraging people from trespassing.  I know that development and letting companies are powerful in any town, their kind of people tend to fill councils the length of the country.  However, I have been surprised that there is no legal requirement to make a derelict property secure especially when it is so close to inhabited properties.  The house will be a wonderful refuge for rats and a source of bricks and other debris for vandalism elsewhere; the police officers expressed concern that cars parked within metres of the house would be damaged.  My concern is that the property will be burnt down; perhaps that is what the company is hoping in order to save on demolition costs. Whilst it is detached house, one wall lies less than a metre from an inhabited house, ironically owned by the same letting company.

These circumstances have turned me into a reluctant nimby.  I hoped the police would put pressure on the company, but days passed without change.  I contacted the local forum which seems to be a one-man organisation for complaining about students.  However, the forum's chair welcomed my complaint and it seems he has the ear of at least a few councillors.  The matter has to be raised at committees and so I imagine I will be long gone and the house burnt to the ground before anything is done.  I know that David Cameron's 'Big Society' is simply a sham to explain away cuts in local services, but it is bitter that, in fact, it is so apparent that at a local level residents have absolutely no control even over things that will be a focus of crime.  Developers and property owners are, as they probably always have been, the true power in a town and it allows them to ignore complaints and to adopt an approach that costs them the least even to the extent on saving on buying some boards and nailing them to empty windowframes for a few weeks before they get round to knocking the house down.  People complain that health and safety regulations are too obsessive, but it seems, that they can simply be ignored if that is done by those with money and influence.  Many people opposed the building of the new houses, saying they could not be fitted in.  I accepted that there was nothing we could do to stop the construction, but I do feel that in the meantime the derelict house should be made safe and not a draw for rats and vandals.  However, clearly, even that attempt at nimbyism is a step too far too succeed.

As Iraq Was To Blair; Libya Is To Cameron

I imagine I am not the only person making this comment, but you know me, as I read in 'The Guardian' yesterday when it was talking about bloggers, 'I would rather be right than read'.  I guess most (political) commentators would feel that.  In a world where I feel, like most people, utterly powerless to alter anything about my own life let alone broader society, at least I can testify that 'I contested, I did not collaborate' and that is probably all we can do in the fixed-up society we live in.

For a brief moment it seemed, last week, that David Cameron had retained some standing, that, at last, he appeared to be a world statesman.  It appears, though perhaps less obviously than Tony Blair (though these are still comparatively early days) that our present prime minister yearns for that international recognition that his predecessor-but-one battled so long to achieve.  In addition, Cameron is from a political party which has always drawn strong support from the armed forces, and, in general, has supported them in return.  It is different at present because of the severe cutbacks in the armed services that are already upsetting traditional Conservative supporters and closes off a source of employment for many young men and women in hard economic times like these.

Soldiers like to have a clear purpose, this does not mean a war, but something that gives them action and credit.  The UK has been at war constantly since 2001 and having managed to extricate ourselves from Iraq after seven years, we are down once again to participating in only one war at the moment, Afghanistan.  The casualties seem tolerable, and keep the public in a military frame of mind.  Public support for injured soldiers and families of those killed has reached an all-time high.  Thus, military action is a good way to distract the population.  Margaret Thatcher did this spectacularly well with the Falklands Conflict of 1982 at a time when unemployment was spiralling out of control and many were suffering from her regime.  The battling won enough of the population to her side that she could increase her majority at the 1983 election.  It seems that prime ministers since then, whether John Major in 1991 or Tony Blair in 2001 and 2003 have sought, in vain, to replicate that experience.


Situations like that in Libya always put liberals like myself in a dilemma.  On one hand, clearly I want to see the end of Colonel Gaddafi's 42-year long authoritarian regime and the installation of democracy in a country which has basically gone from being a colony under the Ottomans and the Italians, through a brief period of constitutional monarchy 1951-69, it fell under an indigenous dictator who has held power ever since.  Of course, it was hoped that Gaddafi would fall the way the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt, lying to the West and East of Libya had done.  However, Gaddafi has managed to retain the loyalty of sufficient forces to bring about the civil war he had warned of earlier.  Of course, western states have complicated the situation.  With Algerian oil effectively under the control of the French, Libya is the key short-haul oil supplier for Europe.  The relationship with Gaddafi has been confused, ranging from bombing of the country by US aircraft in 1986 to Tony Blair trying to foster good relations.  In the meantime the West has often sold arms to Gaddafi, to some extent pleased that he was not an Islamic fundamentalist, much as they were with Saddam Hussain before 1991.  With China's quest to secure raw materials around the world and its willingness to support dictatorships, the situation has changed again and the West might be hoping for a more liberal regime in Libya which will look to the West, despite the turbulent history of the relationship, rather than to China as Sudan has done.


Intervention in civil wars is always complex.  It is always a gamble.  Of course, most people in the West do not want to see the rebels crushed as this week seemed very likely.  There will always be a humanitarian aspect too.  The view of China and Russia is simple, that no outside power should interfere with internal suppression of uprising, even if the peoples being suppressed claim they are not a true part of that state, as the Tibetans and Chechens do.  For the West it is not so simple.  This is why states hang on for a United Nations resolution, a permit for them to intervene.  This allows governments to appear strong, yet spreading the blame if it all goes wrong.  They also adopt a staged approach.  Remember that no-fly zones preceded intervention in Iraq.  To some degree this is fair as it balances the conflict between government and rebel forces.  There is a value judgement.  Imagine if the situation was reversed and, as in 1969 (and, of course, in Spain in 1936), the rebels were authoritarians seeking to overthrow the constitutional government?  Then, I suppose money and oil access would be the judgement.  There seem to be rules, but it is more a kind of shouting match between the various world powers and sometimes it falls one way and sometimes the other.


Stepping back from the international dimension, this posting is focused on the impact for the UK government.  Like Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France, it seemed David Cameron was eager for an international distraction from domestic economic difficulties.  Controversy over the US arms company brought in to run the census, revelations that the new approach to local authority funding will shift millions from the poorest councils to the richest, concerns over damage to the National Health Service and ill-conceived ideas in education, meaning Cameron and his government remains unpopular across the board.  A friend of mine argued that allowing local authorities to keep their business rates rather than send them to central government will encourage 'lax' councils to put more effort into generating business in their area.  This is fine in principle, but neglects the uneveness of the playing field.  Business will boom in areas of the South East, possibly the West Midlands and the Manchester-Liverpool and Tyneside regions, but more peripheral regions are going to suffer.  Many parts of South-West England lack even a decent dial-up service for internet connection, let alone broadband, so what company will want to locate in those regions.  Other areas have high unemployment, greater numbers of poorly qualified population, higher levels of asylum seekers, poor infrastructure and other issues that may make it hard to compete with the already rich areas of the South East, this approach will simply widen the divide.

Anyway, Cameron has got the war he was seeking.  It seems to be a 'light touch' affair, policing the skies over Libya to stop Gaddafi's airforce bombing the rebels.  However, as was seen with the US intervention in Somalia (and back in Vietnam) these days pilots are not immune to attack from ground forces let alone fighter aircraft.  What will the UK do when downed aircrew are paraded on Libyan television?  Presumably send in George Galloway to negotiate their release? The first British incursion, the SAS team, failed almost immediately, the soldiers being captured, ironically, by the rebels.  Will the UK, France, the USA be able to resist having ground troops sent to the country as well?  It seems likely even if the rebels win, that foreign troops will go in to establish some form of stability.  Islamist groups must already be looking to expand their influence in the country, the one thing the western powers fear.  Once there are ground forces there, then it will just be like Iraq all over again and sometime in 2018 we will be able to bring UK troops home from Libya.

A no-fly zone does not guaratee a rebel victory, and at the end of last week it appeared as if the rebellion was about to be crushed.  Gadaffi controls the bulk of Libya and has extensive armed forces at his command.  Foreign troops above or in the country will play to his propaganda, allowing him to portray the conflict as patriotic.  A victory for him will not only mean the end of the rebellion and presumably refugees fleeing into Egypt, but it will mean that the UK will be spurned by Libya.  In many ways that is no bad thing, I feel we have been too close to Gaddafi in the past decade achieving very little for the UK except more arms deals to equip him with the weaponry to suppress rebellions.  It seems like Gaddafi will turn to China who will have secured their first major supply of oil despite its distance from China.  It will reinforce China's 'footprint' in Africa another level.  As members of the Security Council of the United Nations, China and Russia need to be challenged more.  They need to be involved in peace-keeping, not constantly supporting dictators, pleading poverty (I found it incredible a couple of weeks ago when the Department for International Development said it was ending aid to China; why were we giving aid to the second largest economy in the world anyway?) when they go in afterwards and find a new source of raw materials and yet another market.

I accept that the situation in Libya has put many governments in a difficult position.  However, Camerons bullishness in approach, puts him at the forefront of the blame when things begin to go wrong as so many cases have shown they will.  Remember the liberation of Kuwait in 1991 and how that was supposed to bring Hussain's regime in Iraq to an end?  No, it simply led to even more brutal suppression of Iraqi people exacerbated by sanctions that cut necessary supplies to them.  I can certainly see Cameron before a committee of inquiry in 2019 shuffling awkwardly as Tony Blair did in front of Chilcot.  I guess Cameron saw that and thought 'well, he got off lightly'.  Blair spent a short time answering questions about the intervention in Iraq, got useful publicity for his autobiography, 'The Journey' (2010) adding to his already vast wealth (and he gave £4.6 million to a charity for rehabilitating injured soldiers); he charges US$250,000 (£157,000; €182,000) for a 90-minute speech.  In 2010 it was estimated that Tony Blair received at least £14 million in earnings of all kinds and he bought one house in London for £4.45 million and one in Buckinghamshire for £5.75 million, and, quite accurately is estimated to be the wealthiest former prime minister in British history.

That is the kind of penalty that Cameron can expect when everything goes wrong with the intervention in Libya that he has led.  No charges for war crimes; apparently no cause to regret the ongoing links with yet another regime which has been persecuting its citizens for decades.  The regret will come from those British aircrew and soldiers who are killed or maimed or detained in appalling conditions.  Yet again young British people are going to be sent to die for some ill-thought out cause, poorly planned and even more badly executed.  Yes, it is probably morally correct to intervene in states to help democracy thrive over dictatorship.  However, as yet, the world has not found a method of doing this which does not involve even greate loss of life and hardship lasting for years.  There is an assumption now that the dictatorships of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula will tumble the way that the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe fell so quickly in 1989.  However, while we remember the 'velvet revolution' of Czechoslovakia and the fall of the Berlin Wall, so quickly have we forgotten the model of Romania, which suffered bloodshed in its effort to shake off the regime.

In some ways I am glad Cameron has blundered so badly in this way.  It will provide something to haunt him with throughout this decade.  He has been so active in wrecking so many people's lives in the 11 months he has been in office, it will be good to have something to point the finger at him for, that he cannot squirm out of.  I resent the fact that the intervention will probably do little of benefit for the Libyan rebels.  That will continue to be the case until the United Nations has the funds and the force to oversee countries having experienced regime change, and that is very unlikely ever to happen.  I mourn the ruined lives of British, Libyan and other citizens that can be the only outcome of this current policy.

What If 'The Anarchy' Of 12th Century England Had Turned Out Differently?

My views on this topic can be found in my e-book ‘On Other Fields: Alternate Outcomes of the Middle Ages’ by Alexander Rooksmoor.  It is available for purchase on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/On-Other-Fields-Alternate-ebook/dp/B008LMT9WO/ref=sr_1_8?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1342436531&sr=1-8

UK readers might prefer to access it through: http://www.amazon.co.uk/On-Other-Fields-Alternate-ebook/dp/B008LMT9WO/ref=sr_1_9?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1342436579&sr=1-9

Canadian readers might prefer to access it through: http://www.amazon.ca/Other-Fields-Alternate-Outcomes-ebook/dp/B008LMT9WO/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1375772395&sr=8-4&keywords=Rooksmoor

What If The Gunpowder Plot Of 1605 Had Succeeded?

My views on this topic can be found in my e-book ‘Other Exits: REVISED. 'What If?' Outcomes for Tudor and Stuart Monarchs’ by Alexander Rooksmoor. It is available for purchase on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Other-Exits-REVISED-Outcomes-ebook/dp/B00EBUPSL6/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1376051052&sr=1-1&keywords=rooksmoor

UK readers might prefer to access it through:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Other-Exits-REVISED-Outcomes-ebook/dp/B00EBUPSL6/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1376051222&sr=8-5&keywords=Rooksmoor+kindle

Canadian readers might like to access it through: http://www.amazon.ca/Other-Exits-REVISED-Outcomes-ebook/dp/B00EBUPSL6/ref=sr_1_21?ie=UTF8&qid=1376051289&sr=8-21&keywords=Rooksmoor+kindle