What If Prussia Had Been Annihilated In 1759/60?

My views on this topic can be found in my e-book ‘Down Other Tracks: Alternate Outcomes of the 19th Century’ by Alexander Rooksmoor.  It is available for purchase on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Down-Other-Tracks-Alternate-ebook/dp/B0087QDK88/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1338820140&sr=8-1

UK readers might prefer to access it through: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Down-Other-Tracks-Alternate-ebook/dp/B0087QDK88/ref=sr_1_5?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1338820087&sr=1-5

Canadian readers might like to access it through: http://www.amazon.ca/Down-Other-Tracks-Alternate-ebook/dp/B0087QDK88/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1376043896&sr=8-3&keywords=Rooksmoor

The US Empire Expands - 19th Century Imperialism Lives On

Just when I thought we were beginning to witness a bit of maturity in US politics with the primaries for the Democratic candidate which seemed to suggest parts of the American public were putting aside some of the bigotry and narrow-minded attitudes that they have become renowned for, suddenly we find that with the last gasp of his regime George Bush is busily expanding the American empire. Of course the Americans have never liked to be categorised as imperialists because they feel they were the first nation to throw off imperial rule when they defeated the British in the American War of Independence. However, they were really no different from Japan which came from at least a degree of imperial control in the mid-19th century to begin carving out their own empire in China and elsewhere in East Asia. Of course a lot of people assume that imperialism is all about colonies with the country being totally controlled by the imperial power and settlement by that power. The old empires like the British, French, Belgian, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese did this across the world, but what people forget is that there are many forms of imperialism and it is some of these other forms that the USA carried out and is still, it seems carrying out today. Of course the USA still has clear imperial control over Guam in the Pacific and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean as those countries have their laws made in Washington, but the empire is expanding elsewhere in less controlling forms.

Before looking at different forms of imperialism, it is important to note one issue that I will come back to later that tends to be common to anywhere which is coming under any form of imperial control, that is 'extraterritoriality' which means that if you are from the imperial power or one of its friends, then you are immune to local laws no matter what you do in the country. This applies to all diplomats, but when there is imperialism going on it is extended to soldiers, business people and so on. This is always controversial as it means that people from the imperial state can commit what would be seen as crimes and get away with it or only be punished by the rules of their home country. Having extraterritoriality removed was a goal of Chinese nationalists and Communists right through the first half of the 20th century.

Imperialism breaks first of all into 'informal' and 'formal' imperialism. Informal imperialism is effectively economic dominance of a country and this was what tended to happen to developed societies in the 19th century for example in China, the Ottoman Empire and South America where states had shaken formal imperialism of Spain and Portugal by the 1820s only to come under informal imperialism from Britain and the USA. Informal imperialism is very common nowadays. Developing countries have their economies distorted so that they provide the resources that the Western world needs at cheap prices. Once it was things like fruit, sugar and coffee, increasingly it is becoming bio-fuels. Until they asserted their autonomy in the 1950s-70s even the rich oil countries of the Middle East were under such control. Interestingly like the Japanese 150 years ago, the Chinese are now turning from exploited to exploiters and carrying out informal imperialism not only in Africa but also Australia and Canada. The advantage of informal imperialism is that it is pretty cheap and does not look like imperialism, but this was the form that the British and the Dutch East India Companies began with in the 18th century in India and Indonesia, only later did it become more formal, state-run imperialism. The USA was carrying out informal imperialism in Central and South America from the 1820s onwards and moved into East Asia during the Cold War. Alongside states it ran informally there were ones like Cuba, Panama and the Philippines which it controlled more formally. In China whilst none of the colonial powers conquered the whole country in the 19th century they did rule directly over small areas or particular cities, especially the treaty ports, where their law rather than that of China prevailed.

Formal imperialism is when a country takes over the other country and runs its economy and foreign policy, though as I discuss below this may leave a lot of autonomy in the hands of local elites. There are various grades of formal imperialism.

Spheres of influence: with these you are not far away from informal imperialism. An example was Persia (now Iraq) in the 19th century and up to the end of the Second World War. Neither Russia/USSR or the UK actually took control of Persia but it was accepted that the Russians would be dominant in the North and the British in the South; Russian and British companies would be the ones getting all the contracts and in the case of trouble it would be the Russian or British who would intervene in their respective areas. To some extent the French still have this kind of relationship with much of West Africa and the French military intervenes if there is unrest. The British do this on a smaller scale, as with former colony, Sierra Leone. It is argued that during the Cold War Western Europe was effectively the US sphere of influence and Eastern Europe much more clearly the Soviet sphere of influence.

Dominions: this is a very British mode of imperialism and is often a legacy of tighter control. It is for countries like New Zealand, Australia and Canada, that were heavily settled by Europeans so that the indigenous cultures almost disappeared and they are now considered 'White' countries. These states though independent in domestic and foreign policy retain the British monarch as their head of state rather than having their own president and they refer

Dependent Territories: these can be defined differently and have a particular technical meaning when talking about the UK. These are countries, often small ones, which effectively cannot subsist without the economic input of the imperial power. They run their own affairs but are heavily dependent on trade with the imperial power and may be compelled to be guided on things like defence and foreign policy. They may also provide military bases for the imperial power. Ironically this is what Cuba had become for the USA before Fidel Castro pulled off the revolution in 1958 and even then the US base at Guantanamo Bay remains a legacy of that imperial relationship that even Castro could not remove.

Protectorates: this was a common form of imperial rule over much of the British and other European empires in the 19th century, notably the Netherlands over Indonesia. It is not as expensive as a full blown colonisation and in theory the protectorate enters into an agreement for protection though in reality it was generally forced. Some people use the supposed voluntary entry into being a protectorate to compare that form of imperialism positively compared to the formation of 'Mandates' by the League of Nations at the end of the First World War which was imposed on these countries when they were removed from control of Germany and allocated to other colonial powers. However, the treatment was much the same in both cases. What distinguishes protectorates and mandates from colonies is that local rulers stay in control, though they have to deal economically with the imperial power like dependent territories and have their defence and foreign policy and often many other policies determined by the imperial state. Large areas of India such as Mysore, Hyderabad, the Rajput States and Baluchistan (now inPakistan) were such protectorates, under local princes rather than direct British control like the rest of India.

Colonies: in the British Empire these became 'Crown Colonies' to designate that control moved from the hands of companies, notably the East India Company which lost control of its parts of India in 1858 and they were run by the British government. The Belgian and German governments were also obliged to take over colonies started by companies in Africa in the late 19th century as it proved impossible for anything less than a state to run colonies. As the name suggests, the aim was generally for settlers from the home country to colonise the imperial territory. This generally happened far less than was expected as people preferred to emigrate to the Americas. However, there were notable exceptions such as South Africa, Kenya, French Indochina and especially Algeria, where by the time of independence 1 out of 9 of the population was European. In colonies the imperial power ran everything replacing government of the country by governors and the military and large chunks of the economy came under direct control of the imperial state. In extreme cases, as with Algeria for France, the colony effectively became part of the metropolitan country; in 1945, 12% of the members of parliament sitting in Paris were elected from the colonies. Other countries did not engage so closely with their colonies, though there were discussions in the 1950s about Malta returning MPs to parliament in London.

Right, so with terms established, why do I think the American Empire is expanding. Well, we all know, as I was predicting last year, that it is in Iraq. This is a country which was under the Ottoman Empire until 1918 but the Germans were attempting informal imperialism there in the 1900s. After 1918 it became a mandate of the British until gaining seemingly gaining independence in 1945 when it became a full member of the United Nations. The British had re-invaded the country in 1941 to suppress uprisings and presumably fearful of the country's oil falling into German hands. As we know the USA invaded Iraq in 1991 following its recapture of Kuwait (a state Iraq had claimed sovereignty over as early as 1961) and then again in 2003 to overthrow Saddam Hussein. It appeared that there were steps to Iraq again becoming independent, but it seems that it is not the level of independence it had up until 2003. Bush is negotiating for the USA not to just have a single military base in Iraq but 50 bases across the country. In addition US troops would have extraterritoriality but not simply to go about their business but to carry out arrests and military activities without referring to any Iraqi government. This is the kind of power Austria-Hungary asked Serbia to give in July 1914 and the Japanese demanded of China in 1937 which in both cases led to war. It is like the power foreigners had in Japan in the late 19th century which led to unrest in the country and a coup in 1867, the so-called Meiji Restoration. A new twist for the 21st century is that the USA wants control of Iraqi airspace below 29,000 feet (about 9700 metres). In addition to all this, US companies since the war have been the key economic players in the country and will continue to be so even if this so-called 'Strategic Alliance' is not signed and you can guarantee that the US will have an effective monopoly on sale of Iraqi oil.

Iraq is already a dependent territory of the USA and the agreement would solidify that. The ongoing military presence and the extraterritoriality plus the supposed 'agreement' smacks very much of a protectorate being formed. One could envisage this being 1888 rather than 2008 with the USA having overthrown some local despot, restoring some local elites but effectively running the country as their own. Certainly the influence of any other power, notably Iran, is being excluded. The USA has seen the Middle East as to some extent in its sphere of influence since the Eisenhower Doctrine of the 1950s, but what we are now witnessing is not a kind of 'new imperialism' talked about during the Cold War, this is simply reheated 19th century imperialism. People argued that the Cold War was a natural development in history and when it ended a certain phase was concluded, but to me, it appears that the Cold War was an aberration and in fact there are more continuities between the world in 1908 and 2008 than there ever were between 1948/58/68 even 1978 and today. Predictions of American, Russian (notice their colonial moves on the seabed of the Arctic and the UK doing the same in the mid-Atlantic) and China as dividing up the world seem more accurate now than ever. Imperialism is not dead, we are witnessing it occurring this very moment.

The Strange Death of eBay

Though there are millions of websites there are names on the internet which stick out, things like Hotmail, Google, Amazon, YouTube, ITunes, Wikipedia and eBay. One day, perhaps Blogspot will become such a name, it is probably on its way there now. Of course sites come and go and I remember when no-one had heard much of Google and use Alta Vista instead, but aside for Babelfish who goes there now? Another site that I feel may be about to begin fading is eBay. This is not because of competition, there are numerous other trading sites, but as yet none has been able to rival eBay which has been in existence since 1995. However, current policies seem to lack an understanding of basic capitalism and in the end, probably slowly, but perhaps faster than I anticipate it will begin to fail.

eBay on the surface appears simple, it is effectively a glorified message board on which you list items, people either bid for them in an auction over a series of days or increasingly just purchase them direct. The big difference of course is that I can see goods not only from right across the UK but from across the world. As long as I can understand or be understood (and sometimes even if this is not the case) then I can buy. The other thing specialist items which have a potential custom base of a few people in each country are potentially exposed to all countries and so raises the chance of people find obscure things or of selling them. eBay straddles from individuals selling unwanted gifts as they would in a classified advertisement in a local paper through people who do it as a hobby like those who go to sell at car boot sales, through small businesses right up to full-scale companies who may have their own websites but find eBay a decent shop window to attract custom.

There are challenges. eBay was keen for people to use the associated system PayPal which makes transactions easier but does not come free to the sellers and moves away from payment by cheque which was common before. PayPal is also utterly useless when you have complaints about anything, any comment about responding effectively to complaints is false. They are now the same company as eBay so this is unsurprising. It also seems the world ignores the fact that millions of eBay transactions violate trade agreements and customs tariffs. They have effectively created a global free market far quicker than GATT or WTO could ever do. Another problem is that wherever there is money to be made there will be criminals. eBay has always worked on trust. If it did not you would have to enter into complex contract law that even the countries of the EU cannot agree about let alone if you start bringing in countries like the USA and China. There are people pulling scams. It is not only people advertising things they do not have to sell, buyers can pull off scams too to get refunds or goods for funds that do not clear or people using other people's credit cards or debit cards. eBay has a terrible complaints policy, it sends people to its list of questions and I have never had a direct complaint answered. They limit their liability and then anything that falls beneath that level seems insufficient to warrant an investigation. At the end of the day what can they do? Both buyers and sellers may not be who or where they say they are and without a massive eBay enforcement squad with the ability to act across international and local jurisdiction there is nothing they can do to bring people to justice. Of course there is the old Roman warning: 'buyer beware' though with the sophistication of crime it should also be 'seller beware'.

Scams on buyers are well known. The easiest is to increase profit margins by charging high postage and packing, but eBay has pressurised sellers to stop doing this. Selling defective goods or simply not sending the item are easy with little come back on the part of the buyer. There is the other side too. I have never been a seller but have encountered some things that really dent traders' profits. eBay sales are generally dependent on postal services and we know that even the best are not 100% unreliable and some, especially in Europe, are even worse than that. The seller sends off the item, the buyer does not receive it and expects a refund which the seller is compelled to give so they lose item and money. Of course the buyer may be lying and have received the item and got their money back. Another one is when they use someone else's credit card. If this is found out then the money to the seller is stopped and returned to the card's owner by eBay so they say (which is odd because the bank usually compensates cardholders who have suffered anyway) and yet the criminal has got the item, again the seller is out of pocket.

So, all of this has been going on for many years and yet eBay continues. Why now do I think it is going to begin dying? It comes down to feedback. This is lauded as the way that eBay overcame all the issues around contract law, it built a system based on reputation. After every transaction it used to be that the buyer rated the seller and the seller rated the buyer. As a buyer unless you were careless if there was more than one person selling what you wanted you would look for the one with the best rating. As a seller you would get a warning about the likely behaviour of the buyer and some buyers are moronic. Many people seem to click to purchase something they actually do not want. Others change their minds. The click through PayPal system has not helped this. Living in the UK it seems people think our currency is either US dollars or Euros when it is pounds sterling. You see sellers' pages with so many warnings and caveats about bad payers and people trying to back out that they might as well be using international shipping contracts for their business.

A few months back eBay made it so that buyers gave more complex rating on buyers for example on speed of delivery (I had one seller who took 1 month to send a compute disk from two counties away), postal and packing charges and so on. This seemed fine, making the system more sophisticated. Now however, they have banned sellers from giving negative feedback on bad buyers. This seems to have opened the floodgates for people to go on a spending spree, 'buying' things they have no intention of paying for so clogging up the sellers' supply. No-one can signal a late payer or someone who demands repayment for 'lost' items repeatedly or has unreasonable expectations (next day delivery always seems expected but at normal postal rates), allowing them to go on and screw up trade for other people. The big problem is though that if a seller gets two neutral feedbacks, not even two negative ones, then they are frozen for a month on eBay with no consideration of whether the feedback is fair or not. For big companies a month's lost trade can be coped with but for people working out of their bedroom or shed or lockup, making money off the internet as we are often advised to do, this is commercial death. If I was a seller with rivals on eBay I would get together with a friend and each of us would make a purchase from each of my rivals and then simply with two of us leaving negative feedback all the rival sellers would be knocked out, potentially within a few days.

Of course sellers have become aware of how vulnerable they are. Apparently 40,000 people in the UK make a living off trading on eBay, in the USA it is 260,000. In Australia, 17,500 people 0.003% of the working population lives off it. Many of these people may be unable to work in other jobs. Now globally it does not seem much, but it is like the UK laying off the staff of 8 of its universities if these people go out of business. There was a sellers' strike on 1st May and numerous seller protests have been recorded on YouTube. A US spokesman has said that the eBay was always a buyers' site. However, this is where they miss the basics of capitalism. There will be nothing to buy if sellers are driven off. By definition sellers who make a living out of it supply the large majority of items on eBay, month after month. A private individual may list ten things at most when clearing out their loft but an eBay 'shop' may have hundreds of items. I can understand eBay was worried about sellers scamming, but given that they do not and cannot police the system they are to blame for their prevalence not the normal traders who now can be driven out of business by being blocked every month just because a package took two days to reach a buyer or it is the shade was slightly different to what they thought or they have decided they do not like it (I have heard from eBay sellers of worn items being returned like that) and they want a refund. There are other rival sites, which at the moment are not a fraction of eBay, but if it continues with its imbalanced policy it will slowly strangle itself and eBay will be replaced by some other trading site in the near future.

The Privileged Strike Back

I have often commented that the UK seems to becoming a more divided society. In the period after the Second World War, there was a sense that the strict social hierarchy of the 19th and early 20th centuries was beginning to be shaken off. Access to free education at all levels and a free health care system combined with a prosperity around 1956-73 that increased social mobility. In the 1960s people began to talk of a 'meritocracy' (though this term was originally a derogative term it was captured to be used in a more positive way) that people could get on it life due to their abilities rather than which social class they had been born into. The hope that was that in contrast to the 19th century and pre-1945 era the UK would never suffer deaths and failure as a result of stupid rich people being in charge as they seemed to have been on so many occasions in British history. You just have to think of the Crimean War, the Boer War and the First World War for starters, in fact most of the Napoleonic Wars before Wellington was put in charge in Portugal in 1808.

In the 1960s and into the 1970s I think we probably got as close to a meritocracy as we ever will in the UK. Of course most senior politicians, government officials, leading military personnel, church leaders, many business people, all still came from very privileged backgrounds and were unmolested by the increase of more ordinary people in positions. In some sectors like the police, hospitals and certainly in the media, popular music, writing, etc., though there were greater opportunities for people to 'get on' than ever before. There was a sense of this in other countries like West Germany, France and the USA too. Of course the privileged remained unthreatened but there was more space and opportunity for people to rise from humble origins. I would argue that despite Bush seeing the wealthiest as his core support, in fact partly due to the public education system, you can still rise in the USA in a way you no longer can in the UK. Financial pressures are making it harder of course right across the Western world.

John Major, the UK prime minister 1991-97, who worked his way up from bank clerk to head of the government despite his nostalgia for the 1950s, would often speak of working towards a 'classless society'. In fact his period of office marked the end of the greatest assault on opportunities for ordinary people. The years of Margaret Thatcher 1979-91 had seen the selling off of council housing, the ending of grants to attend higher education, the smashing of trades unions who were both a voice for ordinary people and a way for individuals to advance, plus she had tried to even end the concept of 'society' denying it existed, to quote, she said: "There's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families." Searching for quotes from her, I have just found so many in which she revelled in a divided society: "If your only opportunity is to be equal then it is not opportunity." Yet interestingly she also said: "Object to merit and distinction, and you're setting your face against quality, independence, originality, genius; against all the richness and variety of life." Of course the merit for her did not come from ability but from societal status.

Thatcher engineered a society which actually would have prevented her a woman who only went to grammar school, not public school, ever reaching the position she did. This is represented by the current leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron and the Conservative Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, both who come from a public school background more like the Conservatives of the past like Sir Anthony Eden or Lord Douglas-Home; even Sir Winston Churchill for all his popular touch was from the family of a duke. Thatcher did ridicule the concept of social class saying "I'm working class, I work jolly hard". For her it was about individuals rather than structures, but she actually barred access to so many opportunities for so many individuals through her policies, that in spite of the superficially inclusive nature of her rhetoric in fact she was dividing society even further.

Blair, of course, more Conservative than Socialist or even Liberal, added to the divisiveness of British society. In this education, which famously was his watchword, has played a huge role. He tirelessly promoted divisive schooling through encouraging grant-maintained schools, grammar schools, faith schools, foundation schools and city academies. All of these were free to put up barriers to universal entry. They received better funding too, meaning those children left to go to what were increasingly demeaned as 'bog-standard comprehensives' had to be taught under tighter budgets. In theory the Blair regime sought to expand access to higher education, but as in my posting last month, in fact the financial arrangements have meant no increase in working class children going to university since 2002 and in fact even middle class families are being priced out of sending their children to higher education. In addition graduates are saddled with £20,000 debt and so are shackled into working in the UK in any job they can get to pay off these debts before they are in their 40s. I was speaking to a man last week who looks at the employment of graduates and he told me that my estimates of what a graduate earns when they leave university, apparently it is not the average national salary of £24,000 (€30,200; US$47,000), but more like £17,000 (€21,400; US$33,200) that they earn in their first jobs no matter what subject area they have studied, though people who have not done business studies courses have a more realistic impression of what they will earn. Those who have done business studies apparently expect to walk into high-paying jobs and are disappointed.

What is now interesting to note is that given the increasing restrictions on social mobility brought about by a combination of sustained government policies over the past thirty years, those in privileged positions are now beginning to voice attitudes that would have seemed a little improper even in 1908 and outrageous in 1968 or even 1978. I am grateful for the BBC Education website for alerting me to these. Education is not the full extent of the issues around privilege and social mobility, but it is clearly a central aspect. The new head of the Independent Schools Council (independent schools are fee-paying schools that educate 6% of the school aged population), Rear Admiral Chris Parry, told a select committee of Parliament that he was angered by attempts to make independent schools more open to access by people from poorer backgrounds that received attention earlier this year. In fact the Blair government gave greater power to independent schools by allowing them to back city academies and create new kinds of independent schools in the form of foundation schools. Yet, this does not seem enough for the independent sector and they clearly now feel strong enough to try to force back initiatives to open their doors wider and share facilities with poorer children. This is a re-assertion of divisive education and also embraces strengthening of the sector in terms of resources and its status in society, so turning away from the egalitarian education approaches of the past. Of course such schools have never been under threat, but what is interesting is now rather than staying quiet and sometimes defensive, they are now being aggressive and clearly feel that the government has created an environment that permits that to happen without them being criticised. Even in the 1980s with Thatcher at her peak there were sufficient old left-wingers and strong liberals who would have contested such attitudes, but they are now generally extinct, especially in political terms.

More alarming than the rear admiral's comments were those that came from Dr Bruce Charlton of the University of Newcastle. He stated last week that the reason why working class students were not getting into university had nothing to do with lack of opportunity, it was simply because they lacked the intelligence. This is a shocking return to the attitudes of the 19th century and is a eugenic attitude that would have been out of place in the 1950s let alone the 2000s. Again, such attitudes seem to be increasingly expressed, if you think back to Dr James Watson one of the investigators of DNA. He was banned from speaking at the Science Museum in October 2007 because he argued that Black people will always be less intelligent than White people because of their genetic make up. This is Social Darwinism and racism on a level that I hoped had died with the Nazi regime or at the latest with the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa. These attitudes began as distortions of Darwin's theories in the 1860s and evolved into eugenics. This was an attitude towards race and class that underlay the Nazis' slaughter of millions of people on racial, sexuality and disability grounds. The whole Nazi legal system became founded on people being guilty not by what they did but simply by what kind of person they were.

What these disgraceful men are effectively saying is: if you are Black or come from a working class background there is no point the state even making provision for you to go to university because you will never be intelligent enough to take up your place. That is the ultimate divisiveness in society. Already the government is saying: 'we will make it financially hard for you to get an education' and universities are admitting 'we will make it hard by having all these unwritten codes and social rules that will exclude you and even if you get there you will not understand what we are doing or expect because you cannot know these codes it says now'. Yet the next stage is coming upon us very quickly. The privileged, now freed from what they saw as the shackles of equality are saying openly now 'we are simply going to bar you as we do not like your kind soiling our universities and you have nothing to offer to education or our society and you should just stay in the low-paid jobs we feel you are suitable for'. It seems criminal that all the improvements which people worked and died for over the past two hundred years are being swept aside so quickly. Can it be long before we have the stamp on our foreheads at birth designating which opportunities we are permitted? Brave New World, we are on our way, very quickly.

P.P. This is on 12th June, interesting news that Rear Admiral Chris Parry has been forced to step down from his position in representing 1200 private schools. I doubt those private schools actually think any differently from what he said, but they just want to be more devious about their feelings rather than the head-on approach he adopted.

Hostility to Wind Turbines: Why?

I have seen hostility to the introduction of wind turbines in two locations recently: on posters in a Hertfordshire village and then in a column in 'The Guardian' and it still remains something I cannot understand. People whine on about how wind turbines spoil the landscape and are spoiling the British landscape. I used to cycle a great deal in southern Oxfordshire and for miles and miles across that landscape all you can see is one thing: Didcot power station, well in fact it is two coal and gas burning power stations next to each other. That is the alternative to wind turbines, more of those, not only spoiling the view (the Didcot power station has been rated Britain's third worst eyesore) but also polluting the atmosphere. Now opponents to wind turbines say they only last 25 years, but how long do they think a coal-fired or nuclear power station lasts? Even then a wind turbine can be dismantled whereas other power stations leave radiation and chemical pollution in the soil around making the area unsuitable for cultivation or housing. They say that because wind turbines have to keep turning that they actually use up electricity. This is wrong. I regularly pass wind turbines in the UK and abroad which are actually static without any difficulty. Secondly, what do these people think happens at a nuclear power station when it stops generating electricity? It is not suddenly all switched off and closed up, it takes a great deal of electricity to maintain safely. People's views of coal and nuclear power station have long been misled so that they believe they are ever-lasting systems with minimal impact on the environment. Rather, they were a more or less necessary evil. When did you last hear of a melt-down or a chemical spill at a wind turbine?

Another factor is how beautiful people think the countryside is. You only have to drive or cycle around British counties to see that in fact it is full of what one might term agro-industry. There are tyres and plastic in every corner of Britain, piles of rusting machinery, vast featureless barns housing thousands of chickens or hundreds of cows. I went to a house in Oxfordshire which sat next to a barn which held 400 cows at any one time. They never leave the barn and there is a channel which funnels all their dung down to a huge silo which resembles a white coloured version of the old gas towers in towns. That holds their dung for a year then it is emptied. It sits above a village and even one of the farm labourers joked about what would happen if it began to leak or burst. This is the picture of much of the countryside of Britain. Like towns, it is a working place not a 'chocolate box' idyll. Another thing is, whenever I see wind turbines in Belgium or Germany they are generally along motorways, so the British can easily follow this model. The trouble is all of these residents of these little villages thinking they are going to be overshadowed by wind farms are obstructing the increase of wind turbines in the UK as a whole. In fact, as discussed below, demand is forcing up costs so most of these people who assume they will be having wind turbines in fact will not get any.

The other thing I do not understand is that compared to hydro-electric turbines which flood whole valleys and lead to the drowning of whole villages, why are wind turbines seen as being worse. I know locals who lose their houses dislike the HEP dams, but generally there was minimal opposition to them and in fact many people enjoy the lakes they create. Yet compare the size of a vast dam compared to a clutch of wind turbines: which distorts the landscape the most? Maybe it is an issue of time and because HEP dams have been around seventy years they are accepted. Perhaps by 2078, wind turbines will be as acceptable. Of course by then it might be too late. Possibly it is the marketing. I think the government is very poor at pushing wind turbines.

People often look back to the 18th and 19th centuries as representing the ideals for the rural landscape. If you were walking or riding around an English county, say, in 1848, what would you see? Hundreds of windmills. Norfolk had 400, Suffolk had 500 (17 of which could be seen from Ipswich alone) and Lincolnshire had another 500. Thus, you were unlikely to travel for more than a few miles in Britain without seeing one of the thousands of windmills that were dotted across the landscape milling flour, throwing it into the air making white factory-like clouds around them or pumping water. These days the number of standing windmills is around 20 per county, a small fraction of what you would have seen in the past. People have no problem with windmills, they want them preserved and restored. Yet, 160 years ago surely they were as much a visual blight as the wind turbines that people oppose now. Maybe the turbine makers have missed a trick and should wrap them up in white wooden slats or have red bricks around the base.

When I was growing up in the 1970s the price of oil rose sharply just as it is today. This was a result of Arab states realising had they had done increasingly certainly since the mid-1960s that they had an economic/political weapon which they could use against Western states who had kept them in an informal colonial relationship and were exploiting these countries for vast financial gain. The situation has different causes but the consequences are much the same. People spoke then about the 'oil shock' and it was seen as ending the post-war economic boom. Naturally people looked around for alternatives to oil and the bulk of the alternatives were the same today. There were biofuels, which people have known for decades can be grown, especially in tropical countries. There was solar, wind, wave and geothermal power just as there is today. Of course technology has advanced in the past thirty years, notably in terms of generating solar power. However, in the 1970s the UK was a leading country for the development of wave power and not bad in terms of wind power. Yet for some reason, because oil prices stabilised or vested interests in nuclear power pressed the government, these ideas did not. Now we are in a situation in which everyone is rushing for wind turbines, forcing up the costs immensely as demand outstrips supply. If in the 1970s the British had properly funded and developed wind power (and wave power where the British government effectively gave away our lead in technology) over the past thirty years it capacity could have risen steadily and at lower cost compared to rushing to do it now. It was not that no-one knew what was happening it was just they lacked the political will to do it.

Whining about wind turbines is foolish. It obstructs their development for yet more decades and in the meantime we will get more coal and oil and gas and nuclear-fuelled power stations, (a new coal-fired one was announced for Kent this March) which will mean in years to come the delightful villages these people think they are protecting will be partly flooded and covered with soot and be surrounded by fields of unhealthy crops and livestock due to the radiation. Of course the average Briton always wants the problem to go somewhere else. They want to fly more often but do not want the airport on their doorstep. They want more prisons but certainly do not want one built near them. They want mentally disabled and mentally ill people to be kept in institutions but would prefer the one close to them to be turned into luxury flats instead. In terms of power, they seem to expect everyone except themselves to be forced to have electricity shortages and somehow revert to the 18th century with all its poverty and early death. The British will reap what they sow and those who love the rural spaces should be rushing to embrace wind turbines as opposed to other forms of power generation, but of course they will not and they will suffer the consequences.

I am the Final Person in My Family Ever to Go to University

I was trying to think of a clear title, what this is about is not the unlikelihood that I would have ever gone to university but the fact that no-one after me will ever get the chance to do so. These thoughts came about from two sources. First I was sitting in a waiting room yesterday waiting for the people I was supposed to be working with and picked up a leaflet for a university close to where I was sitting. It was aimed at parents of students rather than students themselves and clearly aimed to reassure parents about what they were going to be sending their children into. This in itself, I feel highlights how concerned parents are about letting their children out of their sight even when they reach the age of 18. The second thing relates back to my post yesterday that I had found due to the stupid residence laws that some time last August I acquired a common-law wife and common-law stepson of my housekeeper and her son, without me having done anything. This boy is 6 years old, and he says he wants to be a scientist, but reading this leaflet yesterday it was clear he stands no chance of that even now.

Now let us track back a bit. When Tony Blair came to power in 1997 he said his slogan was 'education, education, education' and in contrast to the proceeding Conservative governments rather than trying to make the UK into a low-wage manufacturing base, like the 'Taiwan of Europe' to paraphrase a Conservative MP of the time, rather a better educated, skilled country like our European neighbours. The aim was for 50% of 18-year olds and many others to go to University. Well it started reasonably well. The University sector had been rationalised since my days there in the 1980s when there had been universities and polytechnics, the latter giving more technically-focused degrees and of course with typical British snobbery they had been looked down upon as second class. From 1992 they were allowed to become universities and some have been very successful. Anyway, the idea was to get more people to university especially from socio-economic and ethnic groups that were under-represented in universities. When I went to University in 1987 6% of the UK population turning 18 that year went, now it is 40% but the level of working class people attending levelled off in 2002 so further increases have just been mopping up more of the middle classes. In 1987 you could get a very good job with 2 'A' levels, now with 'qualification inflation' you need at least a BA/BSc or even an MA/MSc. I found when I graduated that having a degree actually made me unemployable in many jobs and it was not until 2000, 13 years after I had graduated that I broke through the £10,000 (€12,600; US$19,200) per year salary level and then that was because I had 4 part-time jobs. Anyway, things have changed a lot since then. Most universities have four times the number of students they had in the late 1980s, in many cases crammed into the same number of buildings as they had back then and class sizes are far bigger. In my day you had 10-14 people in a seminar now apparently it is something like 40-50 people, so the quality of teaching or at least the amount of attention each student gets from a tutor must have fallen or substituted by online stuff. Of course the increase in student numbers have not been made up just by more UK students. All universities have increased the students they take from abroad, who pay three times the fees UK students pay. They are wonderful moneyspinners for the universities and it is unsurprising they bring in more and more. Apparently China is the golden goose for such students at the moment, but is likely to fade and be replaced by India in the next decade.

Now one thing I have always admired about the USA (and there are very few things) is that they have always valued education and seen it as a way for people to improve themselves. Given how beholden the UK has been to the USA (note current plans for an Armed Forces Day just like the USA) especially Tony Blair, it is unsurprising that the UK moved in that direction and it seems to have worked, though to a lesser extent than had been hoped for, at least more people can go to university than when I did. However, reading this leaflet yesterday it seems that period, of, say, a decade is at an end or perhaps it was shorter lived than that, beginning to come to an end in 2002. Now, it is not that universities have made it harder to get in, it comes down to money and this brings me back to the leaflet.

The leaflet outlined what students have to pay in fees. Fees were introduced for English students in 2006. Scotland and Wales decided that local students going to universities in those countries would not have to pay fees. However a Scot or Welsh person coming to an English university has to pay as does an English person going to Scotland and Wales. Students from abroad have always had to pay. Though non-repayable grants had been phased out in the 1980s and replaced by loans from 1991 onwards, up until 2006 UK students did not have to pay fees to study at university (except at the private University of Buckingham). Now, they have to pay £3,070 (€3868; US$5894) per year. Students from those odd bits of the UK, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, all of which have their own governments have to pay £4,817-£19,267 as if they were foreign students. So, the cost of a 3-year course is now £9,210 (€11,604; US$17,683). Students can take out a loan to pay this and then begin paying it back once they earn more than £15,000 (€18,900; US$28,800) per year, which of course may not be the case for many of them given the average salary in the UK is £24,000 per year and in some regions like East Anglia only £19,000 per year, and 80% of the population earns this or less (which if 40% of 18-year olds are going to university, quite a few must fall into this category).

Of course the £9,210 only covers the fees. The fact that struck me in the leaflet was the living expenses. Now I know the university in question in in the expensive South-East of England, but they reckoned living expenses cost £5,500 for the first year and that is when the students are living in student halls with meals thrown in, let alone when they have to move out into rented accommodation (and all the scams landlords try with taking deposits, etc.). So let us say £5,500 for first year + £7,500 for second year + £7,500 for third year = £20,500 for living. Now, I know students work a lot more these days (when I was at university you were restricted to 6 hours per week, I have heard that limit has been raised to 20 hours per week), but let us say they do 20 hours per week at minimum wage (the kind of service sector jobs they can get in call centres, bars and shops) which is set to rise to £5.73 per hour (€7.22; US$11 - the minimum wage in USA rises to US$6.55 per hour this July; the price of fuel, food and clothing in the USA is far cheaper though, in 2007 the average price of petrol rose to US$3 per gallon [US$0.66 per litre] = £0.34 per litre, whilst by the in the UK you were paying £1 per litre), so paying £114 per week before tax and £5959 per year, before tax. Of course they can probably go up to 40 hours per week over the vacations and may be able to get pay above minimum wage, but this would probably at most add £600-£1000 to the income over the year, and all of this is before tax. With the loss of the 10p tax band it is those people earning around the £4000-£7000 per year mark and unable to claim tax credits (as most young students cannot because they do not have children) who are deemed to be worse off.

There are loans upons loan available and student can apply for a loan of £1,230-£4,510 for the total three years of their study to pay all these living expenses, but as even the university shows that that is not enough to live a boring life for one year at university let alone that this is yet more debt.

So, if students are lucky they can work enough to cover their living expenses, but never go on holiday or buy a laptop or a car or even drink beer as the leaflet's costs left nothing for socialising. Of course if they live like that they will probably do well on their course (though having a laptop seems compulsory for study these days). My bosses' son who went to university in the North-West of England so a cheap area, came away with debts of £10,000, which apparently is seen as two-thirds of what he should have expected. I do not know if that includes the fees debt as well, but I expect not. Once over £15,000 they have to pay back 9% of their income per year, so £1,350 per year on £15,000, meaning 7 years to clear that debt, let alone whatever they owe to the bank.

This is fine for well off families like that of my boss, but coming back to the 6-year old who wants to be a scientist (and science courses can be more expensive, costing a third as much again as a humanities course), where is his mother on £10,000 per year plus tax credits going to find the money? In fact he is better off than if he was my son, because bursaries kick in for families earning less than £38,000 per year, but even this pays only £2,765. So local authorities give loans for families earning less than £30,000 per year and universities are supposed to pay bursaries of £1000 for those on less than £21,000, but how long is this going to last when you have to find housing deposits of £2000?

So, someone from a working class or even a middle class background is going to find themselves with potentially £19,720 of debt when they leave university, and that does not include overdrafts and credit cards and all other kinds of debt that they are facing. Now, they will then be under pressure to get a mortgage and to pay living expenses, all these high rents and utility bills. I earn £34,000 per year and I am having trouble paying this. How can a recent graduate with this much debt even earning the top of the average salary of £24,000 immediately after graduating, afford to pay back all of this money. What do they get in return? They have spent this money for something that now 4 out of 10, 21-year olds will have. It hardly marks them out in the labour market.

The other thing is that loans are fine, paid work is fine, but so much money is needed upfront and even my whole household would lack the money if the 6-year old was now 18, we could not afford to pay his deposits or help him feed himself through the weeks while he sought work. He could not even give up his job when the exams came up for fear of being evicted. So, it might be about education for all, but it soon becomes clear than unless your parents are earning double the national average salary each year, going to university is nearly impossible and even if you risk it, you could be burdening yourself with debt well into your 30s. No wonder so many people are going bankrupt and those turning up for university study is falling.

Of course my brother has no children and lives in Belgium anyway where things are very different. I have lost contact with my three cousins, but they all have 2-3 children each and it is unlikely given that they are predominantly farmers and gamekeepers than any of their children will ever be able to afford to attend university. Even my pseudo-son, it is clear, 12 years before he could even go, will never be able to fulfil his dream of being a scientist and probably will not even be able to afford a course to become a plumber or an electrician. The rhetoric has been about widening access, but when you begin to dig, you find in fact it is just about the same control of society as always. The rich can still study, the poor are increasingly kept out, not by visible barriers but by less visible economic ones. Of course that is just the way the super-rich of the UK want it. They do not want an educated population that may question their grip on power. They want people to be excluded from education so they can remain the cheap, flexible labour force dreamt of by the Thatcherites in the 1980s. Even those they let into universities will be so shackled by debt that they have to buckle down and accept the work they can get rather than trying to shake up the system. Unsurprising for Blair, under his populist rhetoric he has actually engineered another tool of societal control, an additional element in his desire for an authoritarian UK. No wonder people from the North of England are buying houses in Scotland. What we have seen with higher education is an expansion but so that more wealthy middle class people can go and Britain can draw the most intelligent and rich from across the world to come to the UK, rather than what Blair seemed to promise in 1997 which was an education system which provided a decent chance for anyone with the intelligence. In the 1970s with grants and no fees, there was actually a better chance for people from poorer backgrounds and certainly average middle class ones than there is now, even with limited numbers of places. Nowadays intelligence does not come into it, it is all about money.

I Now Pronounce You Inadvertent Husband and Wife

I was reading today on the BBC website, that 70% of people aged 20-35 and 79% of people living together hoped to get married. Despite social acceptance of unmarried couples, in fact the large majority of people who are probably in a position to find a spouse want to marry them. The main thing preventing them is the cost, with the average wedding in the UK costs £14,000 (€17,640; US$27,440) now, more than an average car (ten times what I paid for my last car), that is no surprise. The website did not say whether the survey question same-sex couples now that they can effectively marry though in the UK for the sake of old fashioned people it is called a civil partnership. I know at one time some gay men I knew saw marriage as the realm of the heterosexual and something they should not aspire to, but now that they can do it, it seems that many welcome the opportunity to sort things out legally in terms of their partner, for example in terms of dividing up property when they split, who inherits in the case of no will and things such as requests to turn off a life-support machine, rather than in the past this falling into the hands of quite often distant blood relatives. So, despite all the stuff about this being a promiscuous and thus immoral society, in fact, as for millenia, most people want a long-term established relationship.

Of course you can find yourself inadvertently in a marriage as I did this week. I do not mean in the sense of the current movie 'What Happens in Vegas' (2008) in that you wake up after a drunken night to find you have married someone. Rather, that in the UK under tighter 'common law' rules, if you live with another adult for two years you become their common law husband/wife. I assume it is two years because that rules out students who usually only share a house for one academic year. The woman who lives in my house despite her partial designation as my housekeeper and her other part as a business owner, is now apparently my common-law wife. Presumably that makes her son my common-law step son. I can understand that the law wants to give protection especially to women and children who come to depend on men who then disappear, but it is pretty insidious that you can sit there and become someone's husband/wife. In particular 'common law' is a pretty ugly term for people of my generation as in the news it used to often talk about men as having killed or assaulted their 'common law wife', when it would be better to say 'girlfriend', though I suppose the former term may have indicated that the man's access to the woman in question was easier as a girlfriend could live apart.

There do seem to be some difficulties with this common law arrangement. Putting aside that you miss out on a nice wedding and gifts, what happens if there are more than two people in the house. If I have a common law wife but then am actually having a relationship with a woman living elsewhere do I become a common-law adulterer? In the past elderly brothers and sisters often lived together, what does that mean now they get encompassed by this blunt rule? If I had two women in my house that I lived with for more than two years would I automatically become a common-law bigamist? What if they were a lesbian couple but not been through a civil ceremony, would one or other of them still be considered my common-law wife even though they actually wanted to be with each other. What if I happened to have another man in the house, would he be deemed my common-law civil partner even if I am not gay?

I suppose these rules come about to stop people claiming to be single parents and claiming benefit and then in fact being supported by someone else. When a civil servant I had a friend who had got in this position when his housemate had become redundant and they had to agree to having their house inspected, looking at things like beds, bedding, toothbrushes, etc. to verify that they were not a couple. It was like the reverse of those green card marriage scams in the USA, as in the movie 'Green Card' (1990) in which immigration inspectors who think the couple are simiply in a marriage of convenience to secure immigration rights into the USA question the couple extensively and search their house in order to check if it is actually a love match.

The trouble is, in most house shares, you have to share the bills, so become economically entwined even if you are not emotionally connected. As house prices and rents rise so fast in the UK it will be far more common for all kinds of combinations of people to live together and it is rather crude of the state to simply match them off in couples, especially as 6 million people in the UK live alone and many others would probably want to, but for financial reasons have to share. So, here is a warning, keep a careful check of when you move into a house share and make sure you or the other person moves out before two years are passed otherwise you may find yourself with a common-law wife/husband or possibly even more startling, a common-law lesbian/gay civil partner you never asked for.