Whilst the movie 'Avatar' (2009) may have attracted record breaking takings at cinemas, there have been rather desultory comments that 'well, the story is too simplistic', 'it will not look any good on your television at home'. Not all of us can afford to go to the cinema, the woman who lives in my house cannot sit comfortably on the seats and her son cannot sit in the same place to get through the average cinema advertisements let along a full-length movie, so for all of us in our house, seeing the movie, 'Avatar' at the cinema was not an option. So we rented the DVD. We have an average non-high definition television which I bought from Asda about two years ago for £179 so we certainly do not have a 'home cinema' set-up. However, all three of us, utterly enjoyed 'Avatar'.
The merging of the CGI generated characters and the live action ones was seamless and consequently you suspended your disbelief almost immediately that you were not watching a credible world. Of course, the planet, Pandora, is utterly beautiful, which is the point. It subscribes to many fantasy staples such as a 'home tree' in which the members of one tribe all live in a single vast tree; there are flying mountains like you encounter in 'World of Warcraft' and there are dragons. However, all of these elements are given narrative validity and are incredibly well portrayed. Even watching these things on a basic home television they draw you in. I think thought has gone into the ecology of Pandora, with for example the indigenous people being larger but more slender than humans because the gravity of the planet is less than that of Earth. You see different elements of the fauna and flora including predators and scavengers and a range of different plants. The ultra-violet aspects of the spectrum seem important there as they are for insects on Earth.
As to the story, well, the accusations could equally be levelled at movies such as 'Dances with Wolves' (1990) or 'The Last Samurai' (2003) with the added advantage that not knowing the history of Pandora you cannot be certain of the outcome and especially who will live or die. The story, as in those two movies, is of a soldier who has suffered from the wars he has been in, sent into a kind of military role, but one in which he encounters a set of indigenous people (in this case the large, blue-skinned, Na'vi) and is won over to the way that they approach things to the extent that he fights alongside them. It might be an established story, but 'Avatar' brings a freshness to it. There are reminders too of the movie, 'Dune' (1984) especially in terms of an outsider becoming a kind of messiah for an indigenous people and leading them into battle riding a particularly strong creature which has religious aspects for those people.
'Avatar' references lots of different elements of the Hollywood back catalogue, whilst seeming to bring a fresh approach. One element is stories about interaction with Amerindians (the riding of horse-like creatures, the use of bows and 'war paint' in particular), and I would point to 'A Man Called Horse' (1970) as a classic point of reference. There is also a lot of referencing to Vietnam war movies, with the Colonel Quaritch being like colonels from most Vietnam war movies (though of course, in 'Apocalypse Now' (1979) it is a colonel who goes over to the locals; Quaritch is more like Robert Duval's Lieutenant-Colonel Bill Kilgore from that movie), and especially Lieutenant-Colonel TC McQueen in 'Space Above and Beyond' (1995-6) and in particular the use of helicopters flying over jungle references so many Vietnam scenes.
Sigourney Weaver's presence as the lead scientist allowing the downloading of people's consciousnesses into their grown Na'vi avatar bodies is interesting as in the environmental themes the moves seems to reference her 'Gorillas in the Mist' (1988) and with her character smoking, the presence of large humanoid appearing robots that users ride and the role of a corporation in leading dangerous exploitation to her role in 'Alien' (1979) and especially 'Aliens' (1986). Giovanni Ribisi as Parker Selfridge as the corporate man is very reminiscent of Paul Reiser as Carter Burke in 'Aliens'.
The movie naturally does portray the damage that seeking out resources in wildernesses results in and we can all see parallels to gold prospecting in the Amazon and even at a distance seeking control of oil in Iraq in this movie. Perhaps this is why the story has caused more ructions in the USA where it seems to be trying to win you over to the side of those the US military tends to stamp all over and so somehow is 'unpatriotic'. The Papacy has seen its references to the connectivity of all life on the planet, the Gaia principle, as ungodly, but then, again, it reminds us of The Force in the 'Star Wars' movies. The ability of Na'vi to 'interface' directly with certain creatures is a novel approach. As the environmentalist perspective is one seen as having been shown before, we do not actually hear about this take on stories a great deal these days. As fighting the baddies is seen as the norm, no-one challenges yet another movie in which characters who are parallel to Arabs or the Chinese are again battered.
I think 'Avatar' handles the issues more subtly and also brings up the fact that there will be people who do not want to be Westernised and that does not make them deserving of destruction. The progression of the lead character, Corporal Jake Sully played by Sam Worthington, to an appreciation of the environment is steady and credible. The fact that he cannot walk is an interesting element, obviously making his transfer into a non-disabled body appealing, but this must be the first time in a while that I can remember the hero in a movie being disabled, only Tom Cruise in 'Born on the Fourth of July' (1989) about a wheelchair-bound Vietnam veteran, comes to mind; and I suppose the super-hero movie, 'Daredevil' (2003) which features a blind lawyer as the hero.
The concept of downloading yourself into a body, well clearly there is 'The Matrix' triology (1999-2003) in that, but the shift into a physical body rather than a virtual one is another step. With series like 'Code Lyoko' running on UK television and 'Cosmic Quantum Ray' too, the 8-year old viewer in my house was more than happy to accept people being up or downloaded into other forms and DNA was not a mystery to him either when it was said the Na'vi avatar bodies were grown from this, so that they resemble the people who 'drive' them. This allowed him to get into the story quickly without having to analyse how it all was possible.
I would suggest that if you have not seen 'Avatar' that you are not put off by desultory reviews, certainly if you could get into 'Dancing with Wolves' or 'The Last Samurai'. I think in terms of story and how it engages you it is certainly better than a lot of movies being pumped out at the moment. I recommend you go and rent it and I am sure many of you will enjoy it.
Sunday, 2 May 2010
Feel No Shame - Call Bigots What They Are: Bigoted
This election campaign seems to be moving into the realms of the surreal. Some mornings I wake up and think I am in 1906 or at least 1922 with the election seeming to be about the Liberals versus the Conservatives with this marginal party, Labour, attracting minimal interest. It is a fantasy, of course. I agree the Liberal Democrats represent a progressive voice and I support a number of their policies, but, as I have noted before, even with a 6% swing to them against both Labour and the Conservatives they will at most receive ten or twenty new seats. Yes, they may hold a balance in a hung parliament, but Nick Clegg as prime minister is only going to happen in some alternate reality, not this one. Much of the media, want us to think something very different. Even 'The Guardian' has defected from supporting Labour to backing the Liberal Democrats and in sharp contrast to 1997 no newspaper now supports Labour. Of course, this is not surprising. Newspapers have not, in reality, supported the Labour Party since the 1970s. What they backed in 1997 was the Christian Democrat Blair Party. Brown's problem is actually to bring the Labour Party back to being the Labour Party and there is no support among the elites for that and there has not been since the era of the Thatcherite/Washington consensus came into British politics from 1974/9 onwards.
More on this in future postings as I feel certain that if Cameron comes to power we will enter one of the darkest periods in British society since 1979, not only in terms of mass unemployment but also in discrimination and associated violence, ironically further fuelling the 'broken society' troubles continues to whine on about, plus a further step in the eroding of civil liberties. For the moment, however, I will look at the incident which was portrayed as seriously damaging Brown's campaign. However, at present much of the right-wing media are frustrated that Brown has battled on so well and that Cameron has not had the walk-over that was long predicted, so they light on anything Brown does to condemn him. Brown, out on the campaign trail on Wednesday was brought a 65-year old woman called Gillian Duffy, who said she was a Labour supporter. She went on about the immigration of East European people into the UK. This is not unusual, there have always been Labour supporters who have been as opposed to immigration as right-wingers, often from a misguided view that they would lose their jobs to them, unaware that it is always business leaders who bring in the immigrants to keep wages low and to unpleasant work. Anyway, Brown had been wired up for recording and was recorded complaining, quite accurately that Duffy was 'bigoted'. In this he has suffered many politicians. US President Ronald Reagan in similar circumstances was recorded as saying, in 1984: 'My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.' President George Bush made many such gaffes. Perhaps because US politics has always been so much more about television and recordings they have suffered more.
Anyway, unlike much of the media that saw Brown's comment as a mistake, I was very pleased he said it, I wish he had told her to her face that she was bigoted. I have noted before how the racists in our society make their comments seem as 'common sense' and seem to think they are acceptable conversation. Tax drivers constantly try to force feed me their racist views as if they were commenting on the weather. This normalising of bigoted comments leads to the normalising of racism itself and means that people are insidiously led down the path to backing discriminatory policies. Of course, many people support racist policies right out, but if we are going to have a healthy civil society there is a need to challenge the easy falling back on racist statements. When there is a mindset that discrimination is somehow 'common sense' and 'acceptable' this allows day-to-day behaviour which prejudices people and leads to damage to their health and wellbeing. The focus is currently on immigrants, but from that there is an easy extension into discrimination against British people of ethnic minorities. The BNP is already seeking to define people who are not Caucasian as not being able to be British. Though a majority of the population, attitudes to women's rights and opportunities also seem to be being eroded. Portrayals of women now are that they should either be demure housewives (the current John Lewis advertisement is an example of this) or sexually available and whorishly dressed. I have encountered social class discrimination in recent months, the assumption that someone from a non-middle class background should not even aspire to be a manager let alone hold a job of that status. We open the door to bigotry at the risk of opening floodgates. I believe at present a lot of what has been established in post-industrial Britain's civil society is now at risk. There is a desire to rush us back to the policies of the 1950s in which most people, except the wealthiest elites who were white and male, had opportunity.
Whilst David Cameron is not outlining policies suggesting this explicitly, his emphasis on Distributist policies of Philip Bond, which have echoes of John Major's approach: i.e. small town and village, nostalgic Britain with social welfare run by volunteers and not the state. This has no relevance to the bulk of British people who live in large cities and certainly not to those dependent on benefits. It does fit nicely with Cameron's pandering to the owners of large businesses and of the banks, because such a small horizon Britain would not bother itself with how big business makes it money and would be stoic in the face of the damage their methods do to our shops, services and jobs. What Cameron's vision does is promote exclusivity, whether from the small town community, from opportunities in education and careers or to challenge economic policies that damage us. In the shadow of such an attitude comes bigotry: keep out the stranger and keep those of a particular background, whether it be from an ethnic minority, from lower social classes or a woman, let alone disabled people, from rising up the levels of work.
If we are to have a tolerable, let alone tolerant, society in the UK, we need to challenge bigotry whenever we encounter it. Speak out when people start force-feeding you bigoted views, at least refuse to listen to them. Indicate that you are unhappy with people saying such things, tell them that they are not 'common sense', they are, in fact, based on a distortion of reality and are damaging to the very society these people think they are trying to strengthen. The UK is on the cusp of facing severe problems in terms of divisions in society. As rioting in the 2000s showed, these already have violent outcomes and we need to stem this slide into bigotry and all the nasty consequences it brings in its wake.
I was proud of Gordon Brown this week. When you witness bigotry: name it, shame it.
More on this in future postings as I feel certain that if Cameron comes to power we will enter one of the darkest periods in British society since 1979, not only in terms of mass unemployment but also in discrimination and associated violence, ironically further fuelling the 'broken society' troubles continues to whine on about, plus a further step in the eroding of civil liberties. For the moment, however, I will look at the incident which was portrayed as seriously damaging Brown's campaign. However, at present much of the right-wing media are frustrated that Brown has battled on so well and that Cameron has not had the walk-over that was long predicted, so they light on anything Brown does to condemn him. Brown, out on the campaign trail on Wednesday was brought a 65-year old woman called Gillian Duffy, who said she was a Labour supporter. She went on about the immigration of East European people into the UK. This is not unusual, there have always been Labour supporters who have been as opposed to immigration as right-wingers, often from a misguided view that they would lose their jobs to them, unaware that it is always business leaders who bring in the immigrants to keep wages low and to unpleasant work. Anyway, Brown had been wired up for recording and was recorded complaining, quite accurately that Duffy was 'bigoted'. In this he has suffered many politicians. US President Ronald Reagan in similar circumstances was recorded as saying, in 1984: 'My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.' President George Bush made many such gaffes. Perhaps because US politics has always been so much more about television and recordings they have suffered more.
Anyway, unlike much of the media that saw Brown's comment as a mistake, I was very pleased he said it, I wish he had told her to her face that she was bigoted. I have noted before how the racists in our society make their comments seem as 'common sense' and seem to think they are acceptable conversation. Tax drivers constantly try to force feed me their racist views as if they were commenting on the weather. This normalising of bigoted comments leads to the normalising of racism itself and means that people are insidiously led down the path to backing discriminatory policies. Of course, many people support racist policies right out, but if we are going to have a healthy civil society there is a need to challenge the easy falling back on racist statements. When there is a mindset that discrimination is somehow 'common sense' and 'acceptable' this allows day-to-day behaviour which prejudices people and leads to damage to their health and wellbeing. The focus is currently on immigrants, but from that there is an easy extension into discrimination against British people of ethnic minorities. The BNP is already seeking to define people who are not Caucasian as not being able to be British. Though a majority of the population, attitudes to women's rights and opportunities also seem to be being eroded. Portrayals of women now are that they should either be demure housewives (the current John Lewis advertisement is an example of this) or sexually available and whorishly dressed. I have encountered social class discrimination in recent months, the assumption that someone from a non-middle class background should not even aspire to be a manager let alone hold a job of that status. We open the door to bigotry at the risk of opening floodgates. I believe at present a lot of what has been established in post-industrial Britain's civil society is now at risk. There is a desire to rush us back to the policies of the 1950s in which most people, except the wealthiest elites who were white and male, had opportunity.
Whilst David Cameron is not outlining policies suggesting this explicitly, his emphasis on Distributist policies of Philip Bond, which have echoes of John Major's approach: i.e. small town and village, nostalgic Britain with social welfare run by volunteers and not the state. This has no relevance to the bulk of British people who live in large cities and certainly not to those dependent on benefits. It does fit nicely with Cameron's pandering to the owners of large businesses and of the banks, because such a small horizon Britain would not bother itself with how big business makes it money and would be stoic in the face of the damage their methods do to our shops, services and jobs. What Cameron's vision does is promote exclusivity, whether from the small town community, from opportunities in education and careers or to challenge economic policies that damage us. In the shadow of such an attitude comes bigotry: keep out the stranger and keep those of a particular background, whether it be from an ethnic minority, from lower social classes or a woman, let alone disabled people, from rising up the levels of work.
If we are to have a tolerable, let alone tolerant, society in the UK, we need to challenge bigotry whenever we encounter it. Speak out when people start force-feeding you bigoted views, at least refuse to listen to them. Indicate that you are unhappy with people saying such things, tell them that they are not 'common sense', they are, in fact, based on a distortion of reality and are damaging to the very society these people think they are trying to strengthen. The UK is on the cusp of facing severe problems in terms of divisions in society. As rioting in the 2000s showed, these already have violent outcomes and we need to stem this slide into bigotry and all the nasty consequences it brings in its wake.
I was proud of Gordon Brown this week. When you witness bigotry: name it, shame it.
Saturday, 1 May 2010
Is R.S.V.P. Dead?
The fact that historically people have written 'R.S.V.P.' (standing for the French phrase Répondez S'il Vous Plait, i.e., Respond, Please) on the bottom of invitations suggests that even in the past, ages which we think had greater manners, people could be neglectful of telling their host if they were coming to an event or not. However, certainly in my life of forty years, I have seen a decline in this basic courtesy. It seems to occur at all levels. In the workplace the advent of electronic systems has actually reversed this tendency a little. Send an electronic invitation to a meeting and the recipient is often compelled to click if they will attend or not. If you do not use such a system, though, then people sending apologies, or probably more accurately, Apologies, has declined severely even in the period that I have been in full-time work since the early 1990s. I suppose there are things like emails and even online conferencing to fill the gaps, but it is not only an issue of knowing who has been involved in a debate at a meeting and who has had their voice heard, but simple professional courtesy. I suppose such 'non-productive' activity has been frowned upon since the era of 'lunch is for wimps' that came in during the 1980s, in fact to make under-staffed offices seem dynamic.
Of course, companies not contacting you after you have attended an interview to tell you that you have not got the job has been going on for many years now. It leaves you hanging in doubt for a number of days, hoping that you will get a call. How hard is it, as with my last interview, when there have only been four candidates, to telephone and thank you for attending but saying you have not got the job. They do not have to telephone, they could send an email, putting you out of your misery far quicker. No-one seems to spare a thought for the fact that applying and being interviewed for jobs is tough enough and the lingering hope that you might have got it, just makes it feel even more bitter. Clearly I cannot comprehend that for companies recruiting, a quick phonecall is something that they have no time for or no willingness to do. Perhaps they do not even give it that much thought, once the candidate is out the room they give no consideration to the fate of the people who did not get the job. In this, however, they do not realise that they might be dissuading someone they thought was good enough to interview from ever applying again and also might be attracting unnecessary bad publicity from someone working in their sector.
I suppose the fact that I cannot understand this off-hand behaviour shows how out-of-step I am with current business culture, which, certainly where I am now working, seems to have gone back to the 1980s. I get accused of being 'unprofessional' because I keep my workforce informed about developments, rather than concealing what I know. The attitude of my superiors is often incredibly patronising, they seem to believe that the average office worker has no idea about the broader business and lacks the intelligence to guess about it. They also seem to assume that people are only concerned about having a job or being unemployed, that they are not interested in the own job, its quality and how it fits into the broader scope of the company's activity.
Another criticism I have levelled at me, is that I 'waste' too much time on niceties. I guess perhaps living in Britain with culture so influenced by the USA I am in a society far removed from what I see as courteous. When I faced frustration from colleagues that meetings did not start the moment everyone was seated, I began to characterise the introductory conversation as the 'Bedouin tent coffee conversations', i.e that before you start business you show interest in the people you are meeting with, as humans. Having worked in Germany and especially in Spain and Portugal, I know business people there put a lot of store by such interaction. It was incredibly embarrassing to be at a series of meetings across a number of days in Portugal involving representatives from France, Germany, Hungary, Spain and Portugal, to find we had to turn down the events we had been invited to because my company had booked us to fly out two hours after the last meeting was scheduled to finish. The company seemed to have no idea how rude that seemed to our hosts and the fact that we missed out on the informal networking. I know that people on expenses and 'junkets' earn a bad name, but in British business culture we seem to have gone too far the other way and now seem terse and cold towards international business partners.
Such terse verging on rude behaviour is not confined to the business world, it is now embedded in our social contacts as well. It seems ironic that people feel that if they cannot raise you on your mobile phone that something is wrong. Using Twitter and Facebook people update their acquaintances and even complete strangers to their state of mind, even their whereabouts. However, send out an invitation, electronically, or particularly on paper and you receive a completely different attitude. Of course, two hours before any event you are hosting you receive a flurry of people pulling out. This is the stage when they realise that if they actually are going to attend they need to stop what they are doing and begin getting ready and setting off. This is pretty rude especially for events that need catering, but these days I am glad for even this last minute courtesy. What is more common is people simply not turning up and not informing you of that fact. Given the range of communication devices we have these days there is no excuse. You can text or call from a traffic jam, you can send an email or a tweet from the railway station where you are stuck or even from the wireless laptop you have with you on the train. You can telephone. Even if your mobile phone has been stolen or run out of charge you can still use the remaining telephone boxes. If I am not able to answer, then simply leave a message. None of this is difficult. For those people who have decided not to come long before the actual day, it is even easier. However, these days it is rare to receive any communication that the people are not coming.
It seems ironic given how much 'rage' we have in public life that people actually find it difficult to engage with people, even their friends, over 'challenging' or 'difficult' issues. They are quite happy to bellow or hoot someone or swear vigorously at them as that is all one-way communication, they have no real emotional engagement with it and can stomp or drive away if they do not like the response. People cannot deal with 'I am sorry, I cannot come to your party' and the 'That's a shame I was really looking forward to you being there'. That is too much of a burden for so many adults these days. They would rather be rude and saying nothing at all. This unwillingness to even face a slightly discomforting conversation feeds back into business and I have a manager who complains 'I don't want to know that' when people make even constructive criticism about the company and tries to have every meeting artificially jolly even when people are at loggerheads. Part of the reason is that too many people in work cannot process the concept that others see their company and people's behaviour within it as different from how they see it themselves. Often these days I hear people say that it is a 'lie' when people express a differing opinion. This tunnel vision allows people who do not respond either way to an invite, to see themselves as being polite and in the right.
It is not that I accept that my event may not be the most important thing on a person's agenda, I am quite happy for them to say 'no, I cannot come', whatever their reason. What is more difficult is hearing nothing at all, especially when buying food and drink is an issue. It is infinitely worse when the event is not an adult one but a child's. This is the situation in which rudeness begins to result not just in too much food being bought or people sitting around waiting for someone to turn up who never comes, in such circumstances it is far more unpleasant. For the past five years I have been involved each year indirectly in a child's birthday party. Given that with funds tight, children these days are usually limited to the number of people they can invite, they carefully select who will receive an invitation. The day of the party comes and you have heard nothing back from half of the parents even though you have left reminder messages on their answerphone and sent texts. You dare not tell the child that half of their friends may not come, just in case, as often happens, some of them actually turn up, even though they have given you no indication that they are attending.
Another percentage will show up at the wrong time. Two of the families this year, despite saying their child was attending had gone shopping, one lot to London and then only realised they were supposed to be coming to the party. One showed up near the end and one never came at all. I feel discouraged when people do that to me as an adult, but to a child with all the issues about having their friends around and the presents they will receive it easily turns what is supposed to be a happy day into a stressful one as they cling on hoping a particular friend will show and the adults are no better informed than them.
Are our lives so busy; do we and the children around us have so much going on that we simply forget all invitations? In fact, those families who fill their children's weekends with sports and music activities are often the ones best at responding to invitiations even if it is with a constant 'no'. If we lived in primative times when communication was difficult there might be an excuse, but these days when we walk around with communication devices that can send a movie to the other side of the world in seconds, why is it so difficult to use such tools? I am probably coming at this from the wrong end. How did it become acceptable to not respond to an invitation at all, and yet see no difficulty in speaking to the people you have so snubbed, again? How is it acceptable to ignore an invitation and then turn round and invite the people you have just snubbed to some event? I suppose it is this breakage in people's minds between their actions and the consequences of those actions. I suppose when people see nothing wrong in speeding then I should not be surprised that they see nothing wrong in ignoring an invitation and expecting you to be happy about it. We have become so utterly selfish that other people's feelings count for nothing compared to our desires and our apathy. Have we so lost empathy that we cannot see that if we treat someone else's child in such an off hand way someone will treat our child just the same? It seems so.
One reason why I like Goths is that all, I think without exception among those I have met, have 'old fashioned' manners. If they cannot attend they phone or text or email me and say 'sorry, I can't come, maybe next time'. This is a rarity in modern UK society where people think it is acceptable simply to ignore an invitation whether they want to attend or not. People wonder why our society is so fragmented and it is because despite all the technology that allows us to do it, we have developed an antipathy (maybe simply an apathy) to simply communicating with people.
Of course, companies not contacting you after you have attended an interview to tell you that you have not got the job has been going on for many years now. It leaves you hanging in doubt for a number of days, hoping that you will get a call. How hard is it, as with my last interview, when there have only been four candidates, to telephone and thank you for attending but saying you have not got the job. They do not have to telephone, they could send an email, putting you out of your misery far quicker. No-one seems to spare a thought for the fact that applying and being interviewed for jobs is tough enough and the lingering hope that you might have got it, just makes it feel even more bitter. Clearly I cannot comprehend that for companies recruiting, a quick phonecall is something that they have no time for or no willingness to do. Perhaps they do not even give it that much thought, once the candidate is out the room they give no consideration to the fate of the people who did not get the job. In this, however, they do not realise that they might be dissuading someone they thought was good enough to interview from ever applying again and also might be attracting unnecessary bad publicity from someone working in their sector.
I suppose the fact that I cannot understand this off-hand behaviour shows how out-of-step I am with current business culture, which, certainly where I am now working, seems to have gone back to the 1980s. I get accused of being 'unprofessional' because I keep my workforce informed about developments, rather than concealing what I know. The attitude of my superiors is often incredibly patronising, they seem to believe that the average office worker has no idea about the broader business and lacks the intelligence to guess about it. They also seem to assume that people are only concerned about having a job or being unemployed, that they are not interested in the own job, its quality and how it fits into the broader scope of the company's activity.
Another criticism I have levelled at me, is that I 'waste' too much time on niceties. I guess perhaps living in Britain with culture so influenced by the USA I am in a society far removed from what I see as courteous. When I faced frustration from colleagues that meetings did not start the moment everyone was seated, I began to characterise the introductory conversation as the 'Bedouin tent coffee conversations', i.e that before you start business you show interest in the people you are meeting with, as humans. Having worked in Germany and especially in Spain and Portugal, I know business people there put a lot of store by such interaction. It was incredibly embarrassing to be at a series of meetings across a number of days in Portugal involving representatives from France, Germany, Hungary, Spain and Portugal, to find we had to turn down the events we had been invited to because my company had booked us to fly out two hours after the last meeting was scheduled to finish. The company seemed to have no idea how rude that seemed to our hosts and the fact that we missed out on the informal networking. I know that people on expenses and 'junkets' earn a bad name, but in British business culture we seem to have gone too far the other way and now seem terse and cold towards international business partners.
Such terse verging on rude behaviour is not confined to the business world, it is now embedded in our social contacts as well. It seems ironic that people feel that if they cannot raise you on your mobile phone that something is wrong. Using Twitter and Facebook people update their acquaintances and even complete strangers to their state of mind, even their whereabouts. However, send out an invitation, electronically, or particularly on paper and you receive a completely different attitude. Of course, two hours before any event you are hosting you receive a flurry of people pulling out. This is the stage when they realise that if they actually are going to attend they need to stop what they are doing and begin getting ready and setting off. This is pretty rude especially for events that need catering, but these days I am glad for even this last minute courtesy. What is more common is people simply not turning up and not informing you of that fact. Given the range of communication devices we have these days there is no excuse. You can text or call from a traffic jam, you can send an email or a tweet from the railway station where you are stuck or even from the wireless laptop you have with you on the train. You can telephone. Even if your mobile phone has been stolen or run out of charge you can still use the remaining telephone boxes. If I am not able to answer, then simply leave a message. None of this is difficult. For those people who have decided not to come long before the actual day, it is even easier. However, these days it is rare to receive any communication that the people are not coming.
It seems ironic given how much 'rage' we have in public life that people actually find it difficult to engage with people, even their friends, over 'challenging' or 'difficult' issues. They are quite happy to bellow or hoot someone or swear vigorously at them as that is all one-way communication, they have no real emotional engagement with it and can stomp or drive away if they do not like the response. People cannot deal with 'I am sorry, I cannot come to your party' and the 'That's a shame I was really looking forward to you being there'. That is too much of a burden for so many adults these days. They would rather be rude and saying nothing at all. This unwillingness to even face a slightly discomforting conversation feeds back into business and I have a manager who complains 'I don't want to know that' when people make even constructive criticism about the company and tries to have every meeting artificially jolly even when people are at loggerheads. Part of the reason is that too many people in work cannot process the concept that others see their company and people's behaviour within it as different from how they see it themselves. Often these days I hear people say that it is a 'lie' when people express a differing opinion. This tunnel vision allows people who do not respond either way to an invite, to see themselves as being polite and in the right.
It is not that I accept that my event may not be the most important thing on a person's agenda, I am quite happy for them to say 'no, I cannot come', whatever their reason. What is more difficult is hearing nothing at all, especially when buying food and drink is an issue. It is infinitely worse when the event is not an adult one but a child's. This is the situation in which rudeness begins to result not just in too much food being bought or people sitting around waiting for someone to turn up who never comes, in such circumstances it is far more unpleasant. For the past five years I have been involved each year indirectly in a child's birthday party. Given that with funds tight, children these days are usually limited to the number of people they can invite, they carefully select who will receive an invitation. The day of the party comes and you have heard nothing back from half of the parents even though you have left reminder messages on their answerphone and sent texts. You dare not tell the child that half of their friends may not come, just in case, as often happens, some of them actually turn up, even though they have given you no indication that they are attending.
Another percentage will show up at the wrong time. Two of the families this year, despite saying their child was attending had gone shopping, one lot to London and then only realised they were supposed to be coming to the party. One showed up near the end and one never came at all. I feel discouraged when people do that to me as an adult, but to a child with all the issues about having their friends around and the presents they will receive it easily turns what is supposed to be a happy day into a stressful one as they cling on hoping a particular friend will show and the adults are no better informed than them.
Are our lives so busy; do we and the children around us have so much going on that we simply forget all invitations? In fact, those families who fill their children's weekends with sports and music activities are often the ones best at responding to invitiations even if it is with a constant 'no'. If we lived in primative times when communication was difficult there might be an excuse, but these days when we walk around with communication devices that can send a movie to the other side of the world in seconds, why is it so difficult to use such tools? I am probably coming at this from the wrong end. How did it become acceptable to not respond to an invitation at all, and yet see no difficulty in speaking to the people you have so snubbed, again? How is it acceptable to ignore an invitation and then turn round and invite the people you have just snubbed to some event? I suppose it is this breakage in people's minds between their actions and the consequences of those actions. I suppose when people see nothing wrong in speeding then I should not be surprised that they see nothing wrong in ignoring an invitation and expecting you to be happy about it. We have become so utterly selfish that other people's feelings count for nothing compared to our desires and our apathy. Have we so lost empathy that we cannot see that if we treat someone else's child in such an off hand way someone will treat our child just the same? It seems so.
One reason why I like Goths is that all, I think without exception among those I have met, have 'old fashioned' manners. If they cannot attend they phone or text or email me and say 'sorry, I can't come, maybe next time'. This is a rarity in modern UK society where people think it is acceptable simply to ignore an invitation whether they want to attend or not. People wonder why our society is so fragmented and it is because despite all the technology that allows us to do it, we have developed an antipathy (maybe simply an apathy) to simply communicating with people.
Friday, 23 April 2010
2010 Election: Keynesianism vs. Deflation?
Many commentators have suggested that the recent recession is in the same league of the Depression of the 1930s which began to enter its direst phase in October 1929 with the collapse of the US stock market and came into full effect in 1931 with the folding of the Kreditanstalt bank in Austria and the subsequent weakening of the global banking sector. The Depression affected different countries in different ways but generally led to mass unemployment, in some countries only peaking in 1936 and really only came to an end with rapid rearmament in many states in the period 1938-9. The Second World War disrupted the global economy but also provided stimuli. However, in 1945-7 it looked like many states would continue to suffer low production and consumption and so continue to face high unemployment. The Marshall Plan in 1948 providing millions of dollars to states of western Europe helped to pick up demand which stimulated the US economy and in turn other economies across the world, not simply in Europe but late Japan and South Korea too. Other factors such as the decline of colonial empires so freeing up markets to a wider range of states, organisations such as OECD and the EEC fostered trade, consumption and production. This was aided by low oil prices sustained in part by neo-colonial relationships between the industrialised powers and the oil-producing states.
In the 1930s there was a clear lack of ideas about how to deal with the Depression. For the dictatorships the drive for rearmament and related infrastructure, notably road building, did stimulate certain sectors of the economy but at the expense of light industry and consumption of domestic items. Unemployment was ended by effectively drafting workers into state projects and in many cases throwing certain people out of jobs, for example, Jews, Socialists and Communists in Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union underwent a massive programme of industrialisation combined with collectivisation of agriculture. The country was starting from a lower industrial base and the consequences of the programme was the starvation of millions, though, by 1939 the USSR had become more industrialised than a decade before. In the democracies the only real approach to combating the Depression was deflation and protectionism. This involved particularly cutting back government expenditure, making more government employees unemployed and restricting welfare payments. Currencies were freed from the gold standard and allowed to float but economies put up tariff barriers to protect their internal industries and those states with colonial empires developed trade with their colonies but firmly shut out other providers. With the dictatorships also pursuing a policy of autarky, i.e. to make themselves self-sufficient for raw materials and markets whether through direct control or bilateral, often barter deals, trade was choked off. This tendency was the one which Marshall Aid and initiatives such as the Bretton Woods process on currencies aimed to address after the Second World War.
There were some voices in the democratic states arguing for a different approach to the Depression. Democratic forms of economic planning were advocated by centre, centre-left and centre-right groups, in the UK by the Liberal Party and people such as Harold Macmillan, later Conservative British prime minister. Most notable was the work of economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946). Keynes's principles developed following the First World War. He opposed the harsh reparations imposed on Germany seeing a weak German economy as being damaging to the whole European economy and thus much of the global economy. He opposed the rigidity of returning to the gold standard for setting currency exchange rates as happened in many capitalist countries in the 1920s. With 'Treatise on Money' (1930), 'The Means to Prosperity' (1933) and 'The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money' (1936) he outlined his policies for counter-cyclical economic approaches. Basically he felt that depression could only be combated by stimulating consumption rather than reducing it through deflation. He believed in the 'multiplier effect' that if the state pumped money into the economy to create work, often through major infrastructure project, then unemployment would not rise and with more people in work they would continue to consume products which, in turn would keep consumer good production going so keeping even more people in work. In contrast to the balanced budgets, i.e. government receipts and expenditure were generally equal, Keynes was happy for the state to borrow in the short-term to fund the projects to keep employment levels higher, believing in the long-term that the maintenance of the tax revenues which would rise as the economy revived, would pay off the money borrowed.
Though there is some dispute about how directly Keynes's ideas influenced US policy, the New Deal, started 1933-4, introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), president 1932-45, seems to be based on the kind of assumptions that Keynes's ideas used. Roosevelt established a swathe of government agencies many of which produced public works projects to provide employment. Examples include the Civilian Conservation Corps for agricultural workers, the Works Progress Administration, which included units for employing actors and writers and the vast Tennessee Valley Authority for public works building hydro-electric energy generation dams and facilities.
In Britain Keynes's approach was seen to be adopted in the 1941 budget, though of course, with the war in full force at the time, stimulus through arms spending and borrowing to fund the war, were likely steps anyway. After the war the Labour Government initially pursued economic planning which was seen as a more Socialist approach to the economy compared to Keynes's Liberal (in the British sense of the word not the US meaning of it) economics. However, by 1948 and certainly by 1950 they were moving more to Keynesian assumptions. France pursued economic planning up to the 1980s but had things such as tax breaks to stimulate certain sectors of the economy and unlike British nationalised industries, large state-owned companies such as Electricite de France (now EDF Energy) strove to stimulate other sectors. Other states in Europe such as West Germany worked on Keynesian assumptions, keeping a predominantly capitalist economy but stimulating it with government regulations and funds, especially for regional development. Partly Keynesianism, though forming the basis of economic assumptions after the Second World War was not really needed as there was an economic boom until the mid-1970s when the US economy became recessed in the early 1970s and then the sharp oil price rise in 1973-4 brought the boom to an end. Though there were some minor differences from 1950-1974 no-one in British politics really challenged Keynesian assumptions; they did not even challenge the mixed economy with a sizeable state-owned sector, which had been a Socialist rather than Keynesian policy. Keynesianism was not used in a sophisticated way. By the mid-1950s credit controls had generally been given up and the UK tax authorities eschewed tax breaks in the way they were used in many continental countries. The basic tool was simply manipulating the base rate, the basis of the interest rates that banks charge.
In 1976 the pound was put under so much pressure that the British government went to the IMF (International Monetary Fund) for money to strengthen the currency (in those days the exchange rate with the dollar was reported on a daily basis and any move was seen as a source of concern, probably equivalent to falling house prices in the UK nowadays. It is interesting how the British makes a fetish of particular economic indicators rather than looking at the broader economic picture; before the currency, the balance of payments had been the key focus). The IMF demanded a deflationary approach to the economy, which had about 20% of industry under state control at the time. From 1976 onwards there was consequently a move from Keynesian stimulus approaches in times of recession back to deflationary processes. In the US there was the rise of monetarist economic approaches, which after 1974 gained ground in the British Conservative Party, though even after 1972 under Conservative prime minister Edward Heath there had been some minor steps in this direction until he fell in 1974. Monetarism sought a strong control of the availability of money as a way to combat inflation, which was a key problem once oil prices had jumped, something they would do again following the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Monetarism was wedded to 'free market' economics perceiving the end of state involvement in the economy through privatising state-run industry and reducing regulations on companies so allowing them to impose the pay rates and conditions that they wished.
Margaret Thatcher embraced monetarism and her regime 1979-90 saw it pursued increasingly vigorously with privatisation of the state sector, removal of regulations and reduction of the state, including dismissing a third of the civil service. Private business was lauded and allowed to make as big profits as it liked and to move capital from the UK whenever it wanted. The impact for the average person, however, was mass unemployment and an abrupt ending of established British industries. In the move to a post-industrial economy after 1973 in the USA and 1974 in the UK, this was going to have happened anyway but monetarism made it more brutal and sudden. Workers were encouraged to make themselves employable by taking lower pay and working longer hours, so reducing their ability to consume. This seems to run counter to Keynesian approaches. By the end of the Thatcher period, as I have noted on previous postings, the assumptions had shifted towards continued acceptance of monetarism. In 1995 the Labour Party abandoned its objective of nationalising any industry. When it came to power in 1997 it granted independence to the Bank of England to set the base rate so giving up the remaining Keynesian tool. The Labour governments, bar in minor cases, before 2008, did not take back into state control industries that have been privatised. This is apparently now called the Washington Consensus.
The financial crisis from 2007 onwards has led to what some have termed a Keynesian 'resurgence'. It is fascinating how the faith in monetarist approaches dropped away so quickly. In Germany and India both of which had retained a strong state role in the economy, but also the USA and the UK which had been at the forefront of monetarism, leading economists, bankers and politicians began talking about stimulus. The President of the World Bank advocated developed countries pledging 0.7% of their GDPs to stimulus. In January 2009 President Obama passed a US$787 billion (£512. billion: €589 billion) stimulus bill. In November 2008, the British government launched a £20 billion (US$30.6 billion; €23 billion) package equivalent to 1% of the UK's GDP. Much of this has gone into supporting banks rather than stimulating the economy through public works and there has been a challenge in that the supposed 'easing' of lending has not risen to the extent that the governments hoped. This reflects that during the Thatcherite/Washington period financial institutions were given so much freedom that it is now impossible really to get them to do anything governments want, for example, even reducing bonuses. Inadvertently the British have effectively nationalised two banks, but as was typical with British nationalisation of the past, they have not asserted much control over their behaviour and kept an 'arms length' approach. In addition, in the face of claims of 'unfair competition' from other banks the government has not used its banks to drive certain behaviour by example or provide freer lending to stimulate business. The state is not as strong as it was in Keynes's day and mulit-national companies and banks are often more powerful than governments as we have seen in resistance to various 'windfall' taxes and attempts to restrain bankers' behaviour. However, stimulating (parts of) the economy through borrowing, now at £152 billion (US$232.6 billion; €175.1 billion).
Thus, it seems for the first time ever that Keynesianism is being implemented to combat what it was designed for, i.e. a depression. In British politics because in the 1950s up to the mid-1970s there was consensus of the need for Keynesian economics and it was just over the details rather than the economic approach. By 1979 even the Labour Party had stepped away from Keynesianism and whilst it did not embrace monetarism in the way the Conservatives did, it was no longer a strong advocate of an alternative economic path, partly because the economics then were focused on wage and price inflation which had not been a characteristic of the 1930s depression when there had often been over-supply depressing prices rather than excess demand or at least excess demand for income whether from sales or pay as was the case in the 1970s and overall was stimulated by the artificially raised oil price, oil being vital for freight of all kinds at that time and things like plastics at a time when plastic packaging was growing massively.
In 2010 we do have a difference between the continuation of Keynesian policies under Gordon Brown and with David Cameron, the revival of not even really monetarist but in fact deflationary policies as pursued by Conservative leaders such as Stanley Baldwin in the 1930s and overseen by the cross-party National Government set up in 1931. Cameron's emphasis on the need to reduce public borrowing so reducing the available stimulus to the economy (though no-one would envisage a balanced budget these days) and swingeing cuts to public services is text-book deflation; it will cause unemployment not least amng public sector employees and raise unemployment, increasing social welfare payments and suppressing domestic consumption and through fear of job losses, domestic demand even from those still in work. Keynesianism is not simply about stimulating consumption but with it the confidence to consume. Cameron is pretty old fashioned in his approach to the economy even in Conservative terms. Perhaps this is because the Thatcherite approach of the free market now seems so debased with constant reports of vast profits for those in big business at the expense of jobs and homes for ordinary people. This is the first time in British history that the two key economic approaches of the 20th century are being brought face-to-face and as a consequence Britain stands at more of a crossroads that this lacklustre campaign suggests.
In the 1930s there was a clear lack of ideas about how to deal with the Depression. For the dictatorships the drive for rearmament and related infrastructure, notably road building, did stimulate certain sectors of the economy but at the expense of light industry and consumption of domestic items. Unemployment was ended by effectively drafting workers into state projects and in many cases throwing certain people out of jobs, for example, Jews, Socialists and Communists in Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union underwent a massive programme of industrialisation combined with collectivisation of agriculture. The country was starting from a lower industrial base and the consequences of the programme was the starvation of millions, though, by 1939 the USSR had become more industrialised than a decade before. In the democracies the only real approach to combating the Depression was deflation and protectionism. This involved particularly cutting back government expenditure, making more government employees unemployed and restricting welfare payments. Currencies were freed from the gold standard and allowed to float but economies put up tariff barriers to protect their internal industries and those states with colonial empires developed trade with their colonies but firmly shut out other providers. With the dictatorships also pursuing a policy of autarky, i.e. to make themselves self-sufficient for raw materials and markets whether through direct control or bilateral, often barter deals, trade was choked off. This tendency was the one which Marshall Aid and initiatives such as the Bretton Woods process on currencies aimed to address after the Second World War.
There were some voices in the democratic states arguing for a different approach to the Depression. Democratic forms of economic planning were advocated by centre, centre-left and centre-right groups, in the UK by the Liberal Party and people such as Harold Macmillan, later Conservative British prime minister. Most notable was the work of economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946). Keynes's principles developed following the First World War. He opposed the harsh reparations imposed on Germany seeing a weak German economy as being damaging to the whole European economy and thus much of the global economy. He opposed the rigidity of returning to the gold standard for setting currency exchange rates as happened in many capitalist countries in the 1920s. With 'Treatise on Money' (1930), 'The Means to Prosperity' (1933) and 'The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money' (1936) he outlined his policies for counter-cyclical economic approaches. Basically he felt that depression could only be combated by stimulating consumption rather than reducing it through deflation. He believed in the 'multiplier effect' that if the state pumped money into the economy to create work, often through major infrastructure project, then unemployment would not rise and with more people in work they would continue to consume products which, in turn would keep consumer good production going so keeping even more people in work. In contrast to the balanced budgets, i.e. government receipts and expenditure were generally equal, Keynes was happy for the state to borrow in the short-term to fund the projects to keep employment levels higher, believing in the long-term that the maintenance of the tax revenues which would rise as the economy revived, would pay off the money borrowed.
Though there is some dispute about how directly Keynes's ideas influenced US policy, the New Deal, started 1933-4, introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), president 1932-45, seems to be based on the kind of assumptions that Keynes's ideas used. Roosevelt established a swathe of government agencies many of which produced public works projects to provide employment. Examples include the Civilian Conservation Corps for agricultural workers, the Works Progress Administration, which included units for employing actors and writers and the vast Tennessee Valley Authority for public works building hydro-electric energy generation dams and facilities.
In Britain Keynes's approach was seen to be adopted in the 1941 budget, though of course, with the war in full force at the time, stimulus through arms spending and borrowing to fund the war, were likely steps anyway. After the war the Labour Government initially pursued economic planning which was seen as a more Socialist approach to the economy compared to Keynes's Liberal (in the British sense of the word not the US meaning of it) economics. However, by 1948 and certainly by 1950 they were moving more to Keynesian assumptions. France pursued economic planning up to the 1980s but had things such as tax breaks to stimulate certain sectors of the economy and unlike British nationalised industries, large state-owned companies such as Electricite de France (now EDF Energy) strove to stimulate other sectors. Other states in Europe such as West Germany worked on Keynesian assumptions, keeping a predominantly capitalist economy but stimulating it with government regulations and funds, especially for regional development. Partly Keynesianism, though forming the basis of economic assumptions after the Second World War was not really needed as there was an economic boom until the mid-1970s when the US economy became recessed in the early 1970s and then the sharp oil price rise in 1973-4 brought the boom to an end. Though there were some minor differences from 1950-1974 no-one in British politics really challenged Keynesian assumptions; they did not even challenge the mixed economy with a sizeable state-owned sector, which had been a Socialist rather than Keynesian policy. Keynesianism was not used in a sophisticated way. By the mid-1950s credit controls had generally been given up and the UK tax authorities eschewed tax breaks in the way they were used in many continental countries. The basic tool was simply manipulating the base rate, the basis of the interest rates that banks charge.
In 1976 the pound was put under so much pressure that the British government went to the IMF (International Monetary Fund) for money to strengthen the currency (in those days the exchange rate with the dollar was reported on a daily basis and any move was seen as a source of concern, probably equivalent to falling house prices in the UK nowadays. It is interesting how the British makes a fetish of particular economic indicators rather than looking at the broader economic picture; before the currency, the balance of payments had been the key focus). The IMF demanded a deflationary approach to the economy, which had about 20% of industry under state control at the time. From 1976 onwards there was consequently a move from Keynesian stimulus approaches in times of recession back to deflationary processes. In the US there was the rise of monetarist economic approaches, which after 1974 gained ground in the British Conservative Party, though even after 1972 under Conservative prime minister Edward Heath there had been some minor steps in this direction until he fell in 1974. Monetarism sought a strong control of the availability of money as a way to combat inflation, which was a key problem once oil prices had jumped, something they would do again following the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Monetarism was wedded to 'free market' economics perceiving the end of state involvement in the economy through privatising state-run industry and reducing regulations on companies so allowing them to impose the pay rates and conditions that they wished.
Margaret Thatcher embraced monetarism and her regime 1979-90 saw it pursued increasingly vigorously with privatisation of the state sector, removal of regulations and reduction of the state, including dismissing a third of the civil service. Private business was lauded and allowed to make as big profits as it liked and to move capital from the UK whenever it wanted. The impact for the average person, however, was mass unemployment and an abrupt ending of established British industries. In the move to a post-industrial economy after 1973 in the USA and 1974 in the UK, this was going to have happened anyway but monetarism made it more brutal and sudden. Workers were encouraged to make themselves employable by taking lower pay and working longer hours, so reducing their ability to consume. This seems to run counter to Keynesian approaches. By the end of the Thatcher period, as I have noted on previous postings, the assumptions had shifted towards continued acceptance of monetarism. In 1995 the Labour Party abandoned its objective of nationalising any industry. When it came to power in 1997 it granted independence to the Bank of England to set the base rate so giving up the remaining Keynesian tool. The Labour governments, bar in minor cases, before 2008, did not take back into state control industries that have been privatised. This is apparently now called the Washington Consensus.
The financial crisis from 2007 onwards has led to what some have termed a Keynesian 'resurgence'. It is fascinating how the faith in monetarist approaches dropped away so quickly. In Germany and India both of which had retained a strong state role in the economy, but also the USA and the UK which had been at the forefront of monetarism, leading economists, bankers and politicians began talking about stimulus. The President of the World Bank advocated developed countries pledging 0.7% of their GDPs to stimulus. In January 2009 President Obama passed a US$787 billion (£512. billion: €589 billion) stimulus bill. In November 2008, the British government launched a £20 billion (US$30.6 billion; €23 billion) package equivalent to 1% of the UK's GDP. Much of this has gone into supporting banks rather than stimulating the economy through public works and there has been a challenge in that the supposed 'easing' of lending has not risen to the extent that the governments hoped. This reflects that during the Thatcherite/Washington period financial institutions were given so much freedom that it is now impossible really to get them to do anything governments want, for example, even reducing bonuses. Inadvertently the British have effectively nationalised two banks, but as was typical with British nationalisation of the past, they have not asserted much control over their behaviour and kept an 'arms length' approach. In addition, in the face of claims of 'unfair competition' from other banks the government has not used its banks to drive certain behaviour by example or provide freer lending to stimulate business. The state is not as strong as it was in Keynes's day and mulit-national companies and banks are often more powerful than governments as we have seen in resistance to various 'windfall' taxes and attempts to restrain bankers' behaviour. However, stimulating (parts of) the economy through borrowing, now at £152 billion (US$232.6 billion; €175.1 billion).
Thus, it seems for the first time ever that Keynesianism is being implemented to combat what it was designed for, i.e. a depression. In British politics because in the 1950s up to the mid-1970s there was consensus of the need for Keynesian economics and it was just over the details rather than the economic approach. By 1979 even the Labour Party had stepped away from Keynesianism and whilst it did not embrace monetarism in the way the Conservatives did, it was no longer a strong advocate of an alternative economic path, partly because the economics then were focused on wage and price inflation which had not been a characteristic of the 1930s depression when there had often been over-supply depressing prices rather than excess demand or at least excess demand for income whether from sales or pay as was the case in the 1970s and overall was stimulated by the artificially raised oil price, oil being vital for freight of all kinds at that time and things like plastics at a time when plastic packaging was growing massively.
In 2010 we do have a difference between the continuation of Keynesian policies under Gordon Brown and with David Cameron, the revival of not even really monetarist but in fact deflationary policies as pursued by Conservative leaders such as Stanley Baldwin in the 1930s and overseen by the cross-party National Government set up in 1931. Cameron's emphasis on the need to reduce public borrowing so reducing the available stimulus to the economy (though no-one would envisage a balanced budget these days) and swingeing cuts to public services is text-book deflation; it will cause unemployment not least amng public sector employees and raise unemployment, increasing social welfare payments and suppressing domestic consumption and through fear of job losses, domestic demand even from those still in work. Keynesianism is not simply about stimulating consumption but with it the confidence to consume. Cameron is pretty old fashioned in his approach to the economy even in Conservative terms. Perhaps this is because the Thatcherite approach of the free market now seems so debased with constant reports of vast profits for those in big business at the expense of jobs and homes for ordinary people. This is the first time in British history that the two key economic approaches of the 20th century are being brought face-to-face and as a consequence Britain stands at more of a crossroads that this lacklustre campaign suggests.
Monday, 19 April 2010
The Nick Clegg Factor
People said they have found the current UK parliamentary election campaign to be dull. I suppose after the big changes that happened in the USA it must seem a little downbeat, not helped by the fact that people have been talking about the election for so long. The Conservatives' haranguing of Prime Minister Gordon Brown to call the election may have backfired on all the parties as we feel we have been in the midst of the campaign already for six months if not longer. To some degree, the mudanity of this campaign conceals how much of a crossroads we have reached in British politics. Whichever party comes to power it is going to be tough for them as we attempt to clear up the mess in the economy left by the greedy bankers, who of course are already back to their old dangerous tricks, though it was nice to see Goldman Sachs, the leading investment bank in the USA being charged with fraud. I do hope they suffer harsh penalties for their criminal behaviour, but as yet am not confident they will. However, the key point in the UK is how we cope with the recession. It is clear that both Labour and the Conservatives want to cut public expenditure, it is just an issue of in which areas and how fast. What has become apparent from the speeches of David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader is that if he comes to power with a majority we will see economic policies of a harshness not witnessed in the UK since after the 1983 election.
This will mean sustained high unemployment and a damage to British industry, let alone to those dependent on social welfare. Such an approach will increase the divisions in society as people will look for easy scapegoats and will blame people from abroad or other parts of the UK. This is already what many employers are looking for as they feel the 'whip' of unemployment to get long hours on insecure terms and bad conditions out of workers on frozen or depressed salaries has become too weak in recent years. High unemployment, they feel, works in their behaviour. Partly they are right, because given the UK has long been a low income economy and yet people have high levels of consumption based on credit, they can afford to reduce the domestic demand without impinging as heavily on domestic sales in the way you might expect to be the case.
Given the nature of the MPs who would come in with Cameron, we will see the House of Commons with an very elitist flavour with apparently 68 of these MPs coming straight from the banking sector that needs to be reined in. Brown will have a challenge in restraining outrageous bank behaviour, but Cameron and his MPs will have no interest in even attempting to do this. Like many people of my generation and even younger, we really fear a return to the 1980s which is not the big hair, cocktail glamour that it is portrayed as now, but millions of people suffering years of unemployment, low incomes and whole swathes of the UK simply being wastelands of boarded up shops and houses, as a result. Thus, this is actually a very important election. There is the other factor of preventing the rise of the racist BNP (British National Party) and their watered down equivalent UKIP (UK Independence Party), both of which seem perched on the edge of getting some representation and no doubt will locally in the areas with local elections on the same day as the general election.
Another factor which makes this election interesting is the possibility that it has suddenly become a three-party race. That has not been the case, probably, since 1923 when the Conservatives had 234 seats, Labour 188 seats and the Liberals 183 seats. The eclipsing of the Liberal Party by the Labour Party in the 1930s was very rapid. The Liberals struggled with single figures of MPs in the 1950s. Whilst holding the balance of power March 1977 - July 1978 when there was a minority Labour government in power (a minority government is one which does not have a majority of MPs over all the other parties combined in the House of Commons; it is usually still the largest party though). The 1990s and 2000s saw a renaissance of the Liberal Democrats, the latest version of the Liberal Party, though Tony Blair's vast majority in 1997 meant that plans for having the Liberal Democrats in with Labour in the 'big tent' cabinet were shelved. The Liberal Democrats rose from 20 MPs in 1992 to 46 in 1997 to 52 in 2001 to 62 in 2005. This is more seats than any combination of Liberal parties has had since 1935. Of course, they are still behind the Conservatives with 198 seats and Labour with 356 seats.
The big change in how the Liberal Democrats were perceived following the debate between the leaders of the three main parties on 14th April 2010. This was the first televised debate between the party leaders in British history and mimics closely the model used on US television first in 1960 and then intermittently afterwards. There have been regular jokes since 2007 when Nick Clegg became Liberal Democrat party leader than he was 'unknown'. To some degree this is because in our very media-conscious age all the part leaders simply look like different varieties of bank manager. However, appearing on a programme watched by more than 9 million people and which has generated a lot of general media coverage since, has helped massively. Labour and the Conservatives have been pretty successful marginalising the Liberal Democrats and in turn they seem to have shifted steadily from being more radical than New Labour in 1997 to seeming like a pale version of the Conservatives, only really marked out by a pro-European Union stance. Now with the recession they seem to be ready to embrace more radical solutions and whilst not back left of the Labour Party do seem to have some radicalism about them once again. After the lame duck leadership of Charles Kennedy (1999-2006) and Menzies Campbell (2006-7), in part Clegg, slowly, seems to be capturing a little of dynamism of Paddy Ashdown, leader 1988-99.
With the election of Tony Blair to being prime minister in 1997 just before his 44th birthday has made youth appear at a premium in British politics. Brown is 59; Cameron is 43 and Clegg is three months younger. Cameron is very much old fashioned elitist Conservative, his long-term friendship with the moronic Mayor of London, Boris Johnston, does not help. Brown seems to have aged a great deal while in office, though is much younger than some prime ministers of the past; Winston Churchill first came to power in 1940 at the age of 66 and was in office in 1955; Margaret Thatcher was 54 when she came to power in 1979 and was still there until late 1990. So, Clegg appeared to be of that youthful style that is currently in demand. As the two other parties have effectively kept him out of the spotlight, I believe has actually now helped, because Clegg's party's ideas now seem fresh. He also presents them in a clear and logical way. This morning the first poll to put a Liberal Democrat in the lead to become prime minister, came out. There has not been anthing like that since probably 1918-20.
The issue for the Liberal Democrats has always been that the first-past-the-post system in the UK never distributes seats evenly depending on the percentage of the vote the party receives. The classic example was in the 1951 election when the Labour Party received more votes than in 1950 but received fewer seats. At the 2005 election the Liberal Democrats got 22.1% of the vote (but 9.6% of the seats; back in 1992 they got 17.9% of the vote but only 3.1% of the seats), the Conservatives got 32.3% and Labour 35.3% of the vote. On vote percentage division the Liberal Democrats would have got 144 seats; Conservatives 210 seats and Labour 230 seats, making a minority government. This means that the Liberal Democrats need more than twice as many votes as the other parties to get a seat; the Conservatives lose out a little, but it is far simpler for Labour to get seats these days with them securing 126 seats more than they would have get through the proportional distribution. This is why the Conservatives want to redraw the electoral boundaries. The fact that the Liberal Democrats need to struggle harder to get seats, as a lot of their constituencies are in large rural areas on the periphery of the UK, opens them up to the allegation that a vote for them is a 'wasted' vote. If people believed they could get into power, more people would vote for them. This is one reason why the Liberal Democrats do well in local elections. They control 65 local councils, and a total of 4,200 local, 21% of the seats from 25% of the votes, ahead of Labour.
Of course, the political parties know they can no longer ignore or easily dismiss Clegg and you have immediately seen Cameron say that Clegg would simply usher in more years of Labour. Of course, even if Clegg went into a pact with a minority Labour government it could not be the same Labour government that it would be if it won a majority. The Liberal Democrats would bring far more pro-European and electoral reform policies into the mix, something Cameron could not stomach if he had to work with the Liberal Democrats to gain power, especially since the Conservatives in the European Parliament abandoned fellow conservatives for a right-wing extremist bloc. The Liberal Democrats would not tolerate the kind of cuts Cameron is envisaging. He has positioned his party almost as far as he can from the Liberal Democrats, overly cocky that he would not have to work at all hard to get into power, it would be gifted him.
Thus, even if the public now likes Clegg, there is still a long way for his party to go to get the votes, let alone the seats to form a government. As was highlighted on the BBC news over the weekend, with our current electoral system, even to achieve additional seats in double figures, and, for example, lift the Liberal Democrats up to 80 seats would need a swing of 6% against both the Conservatives and Labour in marginal seats. However, there are a number of seats where the non-Conservative support is split between Labour and the Liberal Democrats almost equally and a shift in such seats would certainly make David Cameron's job a lot harder. This is in contrast to both a year or so ago and the day the election was announced when it was assumed that the Conservatives would 'walk' into power. Now they not only face a battle with Labour by the Liberal Democrats too. Whilst it seems unlikely that the Liberal Democrats can win, a loss of seats for Labour and a smaller than previously expected gain for the Conservatives was already being considered, with the Liberal Democrats as powerbrokers for government, even before Clegg's successful television performance. Baroness Shirley Williams a Liberal Democrat peer who was Paymaster General and Secretary of State for Education and Science in the Labour government when the Lib-Lab pact was in force in 1977-8 (she left the Labour Party in 1981 and was in the SDP and then Liberal Democrats), has said the Liberal Democrats would work with a minority government on an issue-by-issue basis rather than forming a pact with one party or the other. Calls for a government of national unity are likely to fall on deaf ears especially as the Conservatives have re-embraced Thatcherite economic policies once more.
The price for Liberal Democrat support of course will be proportional representation, a policy embraced by Labour until it won massively in 1997. As I have highlighted on this blog before: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/03/what-if-proportional-representation.html and http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/02/why-has-it-taken-so-long-to-even-get.html this would change the face of British politics forever. Given the corruption among MPs we have seen this year that is probably necessary. By potentially allowing in a far wider spectrum of parties more people would feel their voices were being heard. Of course, it depends on the model as (West) Germany has had proportional representation since 1949 and yet only the SPD and CDU/CSU have dominated the governments for sixty years. In Britain with a centre party almost already stronger than the FDP in Germany (93 out of 622 seats in the Bundestag) a three-party system under proportional representation would appear to become the norm. Of course, extremist parties are likely to appear (though Germany has seen off extremists like the NPD and Republikaner parties through a minimum of 5% of the vote needed) but then that would challenge the major parties to address the issues these parties raise; the same goes for the Green Party.
So, whilst we may already be weary of the election, 2010 is going to be a year in which we may see a more radical change than even the Conservatives are seeking and we finally see the face of British politics change for the first time in almost 90 years.
This will mean sustained high unemployment and a damage to British industry, let alone to those dependent on social welfare. Such an approach will increase the divisions in society as people will look for easy scapegoats and will blame people from abroad or other parts of the UK. This is already what many employers are looking for as they feel the 'whip' of unemployment to get long hours on insecure terms and bad conditions out of workers on frozen or depressed salaries has become too weak in recent years. High unemployment, they feel, works in their behaviour. Partly they are right, because given the UK has long been a low income economy and yet people have high levels of consumption based on credit, they can afford to reduce the domestic demand without impinging as heavily on domestic sales in the way you might expect to be the case.
Given the nature of the MPs who would come in with Cameron, we will see the House of Commons with an very elitist flavour with apparently 68 of these MPs coming straight from the banking sector that needs to be reined in. Brown will have a challenge in restraining outrageous bank behaviour, but Cameron and his MPs will have no interest in even attempting to do this. Like many people of my generation and even younger, we really fear a return to the 1980s which is not the big hair, cocktail glamour that it is portrayed as now, but millions of people suffering years of unemployment, low incomes and whole swathes of the UK simply being wastelands of boarded up shops and houses, as a result. Thus, this is actually a very important election. There is the other factor of preventing the rise of the racist BNP (British National Party) and their watered down equivalent UKIP (UK Independence Party), both of which seem perched on the edge of getting some representation and no doubt will locally in the areas with local elections on the same day as the general election.
Another factor which makes this election interesting is the possibility that it has suddenly become a three-party race. That has not been the case, probably, since 1923 when the Conservatives had 234 seats, Labour 188 seats and the Liberals 183 seats. The eclipsing of the Liberal Party by the Labour Party in the 1930s was very rapid. The Liberals struggled with single figures of MPs in the 1950s. Whilst holding the balance of power March 1977 - July 1978 when there was a minority Labour government in power (a minority government is one which does not have a majority of MPs over all the other parties combined in the House of Commons; it is usually still the largest party though). The 1990s and 2000s saw a renaissance of the Liberal Democrats, the latest version of the Liberal Party, though Tony Blair's vast majority in 1997 meant that plans for having the Liberal Democrats in with Labour in the 'big tent' cabinet were shelved. The Liberal Democrats rose from 20 MPs in 1992 to 46 in 1997 to 52 in 2001 to 62 in 2005. This is more seats than any combination of Liberal parties has had since 1935. Of course, they are still behind the Conservatives with 198 seats and Labour with 356 seats.
The big change in how the Liberal Democrats were perceived following the debate between the leaders of the three main parties on 14th April 2010. This was the first televised debate between the party leaders in British history and mimics closely the model used on US television first in 1960 and then intermittently afterwards. There have been regular jokes since 2007 when Nick Clegg became Liberal Democrat party leader than he was 'unknown'. To some degree this is because in our very media-conscious age all the part leaders simply look like different varieties of bank manager. However, appearing on a programme watched by more than 9 million people and which has generated a lot of general media coverage since, has helped massively. Labour and the Conservatives have been pretty successful marginalising the Liberal Democrats and in turn they seem to have shifted steadily from being more radical than New Labour in 1997 to seeming like a pale version of the Conservatives, only really marked out by a pro-European Union stance. Now with the recession they seem to be ready to embrace more radical solutions and whilst not back left of the Labour Party do seem to have some radicalism about them once again. After the lame duck leadership of Charles Kennedy (1999-2006) and Menzies Campbell (2006-7), in part Clegg, slowly, seems to be capturing a little of dynamism of Paddy Ashdown, leader 1988-99.
With the election of Tony Blair to being prime minister in 1997 just before his 44th birthday has made youth appear at a premium in British politics. Brown is 59; Cameron is 43 and Clegg is three months younger. Cameron is very much old fashioned elitist Conservative, his long-term friendship with the moronic Mayor of London, Boris Johnston, does not help. Brown seems to have aged a great deal while in office, though is much younger than some prime ministers of the past; Winston Churchill first came to power in 1940 at the age of 66 and was in office in 1955; Margaret Thatcher was 54 when she came to power in 1979 and was still there until late 1990. So, Clegg appeared to be of that youthful style that is currently in demand. As the two other parties have effectively kept him out of the spotlight, I believe has actually now helped, because Clegg's party's ideas now seem fresh. He also presents them in a clear and logical way. This morning the first poll to put a Liberal Democrat in the lead to become prime minister, came out. There has not been anthing like that since probably 1918-20.
The issue for the Liberal Democrats has always been that the first-past-the-post system in the UK never distributes seats evenly depending on the percentage of the vote the party receives. The classic example was in the 1951 election when the Labour Party received more votes than in 1950 but received fewer seats. At the 2005 election the Liberal Democrats got 22.1% of the vote (but 9.6% of the seats; back in 1992 they got 17.9% of the vote but only 3.1% of the seats), the Conservatives got 32.3% and Labour 35.3% of the vote. On vote percentage division the Liberal Democrats would have got 144 seats; Conservatives 210 seats and Labour 230 seats, making a minority government. This means that the Liberal Democrats need more than twice as many votes as the other parties to get a seat; the Conservatives lose out a little, but it is far simpler for Labour to get seats these days with them securing 126 seats more than they would have get through the proportional distribution. This is why the Conservatives want to redraw the electoral boundaries. The fact that the Liberal Democrats need to struggle harder to get seats, as a lot of their constituencies are in large rural areas on the periphery of the UK, opens them up to the allegation that a vote for them is a 'wasted' vote. If people believed they could get into power, more people would vote for them. This is one reason why the Liberal Democrats do well in local elections. They control 65 local councils, and a total of 4,200 local, 21% of the seats from 25% of the votes, ahead of Labour.
Of course, the political parties know they can no longer ignore or easily dismiss Clegg and you have immediately seen Cameron say that Clegg would simply usher in more years of Labour. Of course, even if Clegg went into a pact with a minority Labour government it could not be the same Labour government that it would be if it won a majority. The Liberal Democrats would bring far more pro-European and electoral reform policies into the mix, something Cameron could not stomach if he had to work with the Liberal Democrats to gain power, especially since the Conservatives in the European Parliament abandoned fellow conservatives for a right-wing extremist bloc. The Liberal Democrats would not tolerate the kind of cuts Cameron is envisaging. He has positioned his party almost as far as he can from the Liberal Democrats, overly cocky that he would not have to work at all hard to get into power, it would be gifted him.
Thus, even if the public now likes Clegg, there is still a long way for his party to go to get the votes, let alone the seats to form a government. As was highlighted on the BBC news over the weekend, with our current electoral system, even to achieve additional seats in double figures, and, for example, lift the Liberal Democrats up to 80 seats would need a swing of 6% against both the Conservatives and Labour in marginal seats. However, there are a number of seats where the non-Conservative support is split between Labour and the Liberal Democrats almost equally and a shift in such seats would certainly make David Cameron's job a lot harder. This is in contrast to both a year or so ago and the day the election was announced when it was assumed that the Conservatives would 'walk' into power. Now they not only face a battle with Labour by the Liberal Democrats too. Whilst it seems unlikely that the Liberal Democrats can win, a loss of seats for Labour and a smaller than previously expected gain for the Conservatives was already being considered, with the Liberal Democrats as powerbrokers for government, even before Clegg's successful television performance. Baroness Shirley Williams a Liberal Democrat peer who was Paymaster General and Secretary of State for Education and Science in the Labour government when the Lib-Lab pact was in force in 1977-8 (she left the Labour Party in 1981 and was in the SDP and then Liberal Democrats), has said the Liberal Democrats would work with a minority government on an issue-by-issue basis rather than forming a pact with one party or the other. Calls for a government of national unity are likely to fall on deaf ears especially as the Conservatives have re-embraced Thatcherite economic policies once more.
The price for Liberal Democrat support of course will be proportional representation, a policy embraced by Labour until it won massively in 1997. As I have highlighted on this blog before: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/03/what-if-proportional-representation.html and http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/02/why-has-it-taken-so-long-to-even-get.html this would change the face of British politics forever. Given the corruption among MPs we have seen this year that is probably necessary. By potentially allowing in a far wider spectrum of parties more people would feel their voices were being heard. Of course, it depends on the model as (West) Germany has had proportional representation since 1949 and yet only the SPD and CDU/CSU have dominated the governments for sixty years. In Britain with a centre party almost already stronger than the FDP in Germany (93 out of 622 seats in the Bundestag) a three-party system under proportional representation would appear to become the norm. Of course, extremist parties are likely to appear (though Germany has seen off extremists like the NPD and Republikaner parties through a minimum of 5% of the vote needed) but then that would challenge the major parties to address the issues these parties raise; the same goes for the Green Party.
So, whilst we may already be weary of the election, 2010 is going to be a year in which we may see a more radical change than even the Conservatives are seeking and we finally see the face of British politics change for the first time in almost 90 years.
Sunday, 11 April 2010
Not As Pathetic As I Thought I Was
As anyone who has read this blog over the last couple of years or so, or has more recently dipped into my accounts of cycling in northern France will, know, I have felt that I was a real failure as a touring cyclist. Despite covering 60-100 Km per day I seemed to be incredibly slow, averaging only 13-14.5 kph compared to the 24 kph that my local cycling club expected people to maintain over 80 Km. I remember too vividly the days I would set off from my hotel or hostel only to find myself slumping in a bus shelter an hour later feeling exhausted and the number of times I had to get off and push my bicycle up the middle part of hills, much to the derision of the local young people. I also remember regularly being overtaken by men who were 40-50 years older than me out for local club runs and moving at a pace that I could not hope to match. One reason why I gave up such cycling holidays (and a lot of bad luck was an additional factor, such as getting lost, finding all the hotels full, being robbed and confusions over ferry times) was that I felt I would never be fit enough to be convincing as a touring cyclist.
Having just read 'French Revolutions' by Tim Moore (2001), I realised that I had done myself a real disservice by not having read it nine years ago when I first bought it (I have a shed full of novels to read, most from charity shops, but with the occasional 'new' book, i.e. bought in the year it was published). Moore's efforts put my completely into the shade. In the summer of 2000 he went around the entire route of that year's Tour de France three weeks before the race was run. His climbs of Alps and Pyrenees was in a completely different league to anything I did and I probably never topped 120-140 Km in a single day and quite often it was nearer 80 Km, whereas he managed over 250 Km on one occasion. I remember a tourist office official in Amiens telling me explicitly that 96 Km in five hours thirty minutes was nothing to be proud of. What is striking is how many of the same things we encountered, including dogs leaping out at you suddenly as you rode through villages; wildlife, in my case, two deer, crashing on to the road right in front of you; elderly men overtaking you on bicycles that looked like they had been involved in the First World War; very positive and very dismissive responses from different hoteliers when you turn up in cycling garb; getting lost on ring roads, drawn towards motorways and lost in housing estates; staying in hotels that could be used in an episode of 'Maigret' with no need to adapt anything and above all the physical impact.
What I did not realise at the time was how poorly prepared I was for cycle touring in terms of my health. I had the creams to rub on sore parts of my body. I made sure I bought bottled water rather than relying on bidons which often become the home to lots of bugs. I made sure I had regular meal breaks with a decent amount of carbohydrate (and lugging a huge pack of custard creams - the biscuits containing most energy in a single biscuit around with me, just in case) and between these Orangina breaks to keep me from dehydration and fuel me with more natural sugar. I was ready for the diahorrea common for cyclists and the general 'windiness' coming from having your stomach crunched up over the crossbar for hours on end. I got to bed early and showered every day. However, and this probably stems from being excluded from the cycle club and not mixing with other more experienced tourers I neglected other aspects of the necessary health regime. Foolishly too, I pored over maps and read acommodation guides and downloaded guidance on navigating various routes from the CTC (Cyclists' Touring Club) but overlooked any health advice and also failed to pick up a single account of a tourer's journey. I suppose this was because I was used to setting off on a Sunday for a decent 65-80 Km run without too much difficulty. I made sure I ate well and was protected from the sun and seemed to assumed that with regular breaks and rest days that a cycling holiday in France would be like a series of Sundays (and now I remember that in itself caused fear as I was worried that I would arrive in a town on a Sunday and find everything closed. Being in a locked youth hostel in Dunkerque at night with no water in the taps and having to drink from the toilet as the only way to slake my thirst at that time of night because I had finished my last bottle earlier, probably added to that phobia).
What I realise now is that I had totally underestimated the cumulative impact on my body. Unlike professional cyclists, my muscles were not receiving any massage at night and I had not even done any of the stretching exercises that Chris Boardman's books recommended and that Moore followed pretty religiously. No wonder my muscles complained the next day. At school I had always been told that I would never be a sportsman and given my slowness compared to other cyclists I never even considered myself in that category even as the most amateur of amateurs. However, that meant I did not read the advice for sportsmen or engage with the kinds of activities they do to make their efforts less of a challenge. Even if you are cycling for a day in your local area, you need to think of yourself as doing sport and thus, a sportsperson, however minor. To ignore that fact can lead you into the kind of difficulties I encountered which reduced my holiday's potential for enjoyment.
The second thing was that I had made wrong assumptions about my medical condition, diabetes. I knew from reading and experience that a hazard for a diabetic when doing physical exercise is that the insulin they have injected earlier (diabetes is caused by the body losing the ability naturally to produce insulin which is what breaks down the sugars coming into your body so they can become energy) you would get a 'hypo', i.e. not have enough energy to continue. This happens even to people without diabetes and in cycling is called the 'bonk' which Moore suffered a few times. Being diabetic I was more familiar with this risk, hence, keeping up both the slow and fast burning carbohydrates coming into my system. What I did not do though was have things like the fruit, e.g. raisins and bananas, that are going dripfeed carbohydrates along the way.
Most importantly, it was not until I attended a course in 2008, that I realised a huge blunder that I had been making, in that it is as bad when doing physical exercise not to have enough insulin in your body as then your the sugar is trying to float around in your body as that, sugar, rather than energy your body can use. Suddenly, this explained a lot of the discomfort I had felt day-to-day. It is clear now that fearful of a hypo I was not taking enough insulin and so in fact was wasting a lot of the carbohydrate because my body could not process it and was simply urinating it back out again.
Another factor that I neglected to take into consideration when chasitising myself for my pathetic performance on my tours was the weight of the luggage I was carrying. As I stayed in hostels, bars and hotels I did not have the weight of a tent and like Moore I had only one change of clothes aside from my cycling kit and a minimal number of books to find my way around primarily and keep myself entertained when passing my evenings alone in a hotel in the middle of nowhere (I am absolutely useless at making acquaintances when away from home even when in the UK, let alone when abroad; my language skills are terrible and my social skills even worse). However, with the waterproofs, the cold weather arms and leggings and particularly the tools and spare inner tubes, etc. which did prove extremely useful, as you will get punctures, I estimate now it added up to something like 20-25 Kg. To put this in context the 8-year old boy who lives in my house weighs 26.5 Kg, so it was as if I had a child riding around on the back of the bicycle, weighing over a quarter of my body weight of the time. Of course, this was a big difference to the cycling I had done on Sundays in the UK when I would have a pair of waterproofs, a drink and my camera. Moore notes how much faster he was able to move when he was able to leave his luggage with his family, and I guess I would have been the same. Instead I had to carry everything I had with me, on my bicycle up and down whatever inclines I encountered. If I had had more French I would have given this context to the hoteliers and others who thought my efforts were poor.
It also explains for me, as it did for Moore, why we could not overtake the elderly men no matter how aged their bicycles were. It is not only that you have to exert more energy to move that weight, but it is constantly slowing you down so you have to overcome the friction element. In addition, Moore was riding something a lot racier than my road-mountain hybrid, however light it might be (and great over roads needing resurfacing). This was outlined in Moore's book when a friend of his, riding something like my bicycle, came to cycle with him in Switzerland. Of course, a lot of commentators by the road side, even in France, just see 'man on bicycle' and do not appreciate how many variants there actually are.
The need for approval is a strange aspect which impinged on Moore as much as it did no me. I have not achieved anything great in my life and could never afford to travel to exotic locations, so doing something that marked me out even just a little from the kind of people I mixed with, had an important aspect in my self-esteem. Giving that I set off on my first cycling trip from the single room above a chipshop on the Mile End Road, with a bathroom that I shared with seven other residents, getting some self-esteem was important. The fact that I can see the face of the woman in the Amiens tourist office to this day with her sneering comment, is probably not healthy. However, people touring are looking for recognition of what they have achieved and I am sure the same happens for hikers and mountaineers. I loved the fact that I felt I was part of a 'club', that cafe owners truly expected me to come back again in the future (especially on the routes frequented by numerous cyclists, there are favoured parts, inland from Dunkerque was one and there was another such area in eastern Normandy), and other cyclists nodding to me or helping out with the map. I found the camaraderie that I was later not to find in the local cycling club in the UK, and, in fact, more than that, the acceptance that even if I was nowhere near the quality of a Tour de France racer or even a local race racer, I was a cyclist going about his business which deserved respect rather if not acclaim.
Having read Moore's account and his difficulties that, despite, far greater preparation, far better equipment and far more support, were very similar to my own, I am beginning to feel a little better about my efforts. Of course, these days I am not fit enough to run to the end of my road let alone cycle 20 Km, but perhaps if I had come to Moore's book in, say 2002, I can envisage I would have far more cycling trips to recount here and probably a bit more self-respect. I have to remember the morning when a whole class of French school children, probably aged 9 or 10, all dressed in matching cycle helmets, were pulled to the side of the road to let me pass up a hill with their teacher pointing out how properly I was attired in my cycle helmet and bright cycling strip (that year bright yellow) so visible to motorists. Though I struggled up the hill, I dared not get off or slow until I was out of sight. I should also remember stepping into a pristine bar at the top of a hill that was run by a man who clearly (from the numerous black and white photographs around the wall) had been in the paratroopers and asked for two Oranginas and a single glass. I never drank from the bottle for some reason. He knew the steepness of his local hill and seemed please that I had chosen to stop at his bar and sent me off with a real rousing encouragement. I recommend Moore's book to anyone who has battled on a cycling trip. It has made me feel that my efforts were not wasted and that I was fighting against the odds, partly due to lack of the right sort of preparation, but even so, not things that other people had not encountered themselves.
Having just read 'French Revolutions' by Tim Moore (2001), I realised that I had done myself a real disservice by not having read it nine years ago when I first bought it (I have a shed full of novels to read, most from charity shops, but with the occasional 'new' book, i.e. bought in the year it was published). Moore's efforts put my completely into the shade. In the summer of 2000 he went around the entire route of that year's Tour de France three weeks before the race was run. His climbs of Alps and Pyrenees was in a completely different league to anything I did and I probably never topped 120-140 Km in a single day and quite often it was nearer 80 Km, whereas he managed over 250 Km on one occasion. I remember a tourist office official in Amiens telling me explicitly that 96 Km in five hours thirty minutes was nothing to be proud of. What is striking is how many of the same things we encountered, including dogs leaping out at you suddenly as you rode through villages; wildlife, in my case, two deer, crashing on to the road right in front of you; elderly men overtaking you on bicycles that looked like they had been involved in the First World War; very positive and very dismissive responses from different hoteliers when you turn up in cycling garb; getting lost on ring roads, drawn towards motorways and lost in housing estates; staying in hotels that could be used in an episode of 'Maigret' with no need to adapt anything and above all the physical impact.
What I did not realise at the time was how poorly prepared I was for cycle touring in terms of my health. I had the creams to rub on sore parts of my body. I made sure I bought bottled water rather than relying on bidons which often become the home to lots of bugs. I made sure I had regular meal breaks with a decent amount of carbohydrate (and lugging a huge pack of custard creams - the biscuits containing most energy in a single biscuit around with me, just in case) and between these Orangina breaks to keep me from dehydration and fuel me with more natural sugar. I was ready for the diahorrea common for cyclists and the general 'windiness' coming from having your stomach crunched up over the crossbar for hours on end. I got to bed early and showered every day. However, and this probably stems from being excluded from the cycle club and not mixing with other more experienced tourers I neglected other aspects of the necessary health regime. Foolishly too, I pored over maps and read acommodation guides and downloaded guidance on navigating various routes from the CTC (Cyclists' Touring Club) but overlooked any health advice and also failed to pick up a single account of a tourer's journey. I suppose this was because I was used to setting off on a Sunday for a decent 65-80 Km run without too much difficulty. I made sure I ate well and was protected from the sun and seemed to assumed that with regular breaks and rest days that a cycling holiday in France would be like a series of Sundays (and now I remember that in itself caused fear as I was worried that I would arrive in a town on a Sunday and find everything closed. Being in a locked youth hostel in Dunkerque at night with no water in the taps and having to drink from the toilet as the only way to slake my thirst at that time of night because I had finished my last bottle earlier, probably added to that phobia).
What I realise now is that I had totally underestimated the cumulative impact on my body. Unlike professional cyclists, my muscles were not receiving any massage at night and I had not even done any of the stretching exercises that Chris Boardman's books recommended and that Moore followed pretty religiously. No wonder my muscles complained the next day. At school I had always been told that I would never be a sportsman and given my slowness compared to other cyclists I never even considered myself in that category even as the most amateur of amateurs. However, that meant I did not read the advice for sportsmen or engage with the kinds of activities they do to make their efforts less of a challenge. Even if you are cycling for a day in your local area, you need to think of yourself as doing sport and thus, a sportsperson, however minor. To ignore that fact can lead you into the kind of difficulties I encountered which reduced my holiday's potential for enjoyment.
The second thing was that I had made wrong assumptions about my medical condition, diabetes. I knew from reading and experience that a hazard for a diabetic when doing physical exercise is that the insulin they have injected earlier (diabetes is caused by the body losing the ability naturally to produce insulin which is what breaks down the sugars coming into your body so they can become energy) you would get a 'hypo', i.e. not have enough energy to continue. This happens even to people without diabetes and in cycling is called the 'bonk' which Moore suffered a few times. Being diabetic I was more familiar with this risk, hence, keeping up both the slow and fast burning carbohydrates coming into my system. What I did not do though was have things like the fruit, e.g. raisins and bananas, that are going dripfeed carbohydrates along the way.
Most importantly, it was not until I attended a course in 2008, that I realised a huge blunder that I had been making, in that it is as bad when doing physical exercise not to have enough insulin in your body as then your the sugar is trying to float around in your body as that, sugar, rather than energy your body can use. Suddenly, this explained a lot of the discomfort I had felt day-to-day. It is clear now that fearful of a hypo I was not taking enough insulin and so in fact was wasting a lot of the carbohydrate because my body could not process it and was simply urinating it back out again.
Another factor that I neglected to take into consideration when chasitising myself for my pathetic performance on my tours was the weight of the luggage I was carrying. As I stayed in hostels, bars and hotels I did not have the weight of a tent and like Moore I had only one change of clothes aside from my cycling kit and a minimal number of books to find my way around primarily and keep myself entertained when passing my evenings alone in a hotel in the middle of nowhere (I am absolutely useless at making acquaintances when away from home even when in the UK, let alone when abroad; my language skills are terrible and my social skills even worse). However, with the waterproofs, the cold weather arms and leggings and particularly the tools and spare inner tubes, etc. which did prove extremely useful, as you will get punctures, I estimate now it added up to something like 20-25 Kg. To put this in context the 8-year old boy who lives in my house weighs 26.5 Kg, so it was as if I had a child riding around on the back of the bicycle, weighing over a quarter of my body weight of the time. Of course, this was a big difference to the cycling I had done on Sundays in the UK when I would have a pair of waterproofs, a drink and my camera. Moore notes how much faster he was able to move when he was able to leave his luggage with his family, and I guess I would have been the same. Instead I had to carry everything I had with me, on my bicycle up and down whatever inclines I encountered. If I had had more French I would have given this context to the hoteliers and others who thought my efforts were poor.
It also explains for me, as it did for Moore, why we could not overtake the elderly men no matter how aged their bicycles were. It is not only that you have to exert more energy to move that weight, but it is constantly slowing you down so you have to overcome the friction element. In addition, Moore was riding something a lot racier than my road-mountain hybrid, however light it might be (and great over roads needing resurfacing). This was outlined in Moore's book when a friend of his, riding something like my bicycle, came to cycle with him in Switzerland. Of course, a lot of commentators by the road side, even in France, just see 'man on bicycle' and do not appreciate how many variants there actually are.
The need for approval is a strange aspect which impinged on Moore as much as it did no me. I have not achieved anything great in my life and could never afford to travel to exotic locations, so doing something that marked me out even just a little from the kind of people I mixed with, had an important aspect in my self-esteem. Giving that I set off on my first cycling trip from the single room above a chipshop on the Mile End Road, with a bathroom that I shared with seven other residents, getting some self-esteem was important. The fact that I can see the face of the woman in the Amiens tourist office to this day with her sneering comment, is probably not healthy. However, people touring are looking for recognition of what they have achieved and I am sure the same happens for hikers and mountaineers. I loved the fact that I felt I was part of a 'club', that cafe owners truly expected me to come back again in the future (especially on the routes frequented by numerous cyclists, there are favoured parts, inland from Dunkerque was one and there was another such area in eastern Normandy), and other cyclists nodding to me or helping out with the map. I found the camaraderie that I was later not to find in the local cycling club in the UK, and, in fact, more than that, the acceptance that even if I was nowhere near the quality of a Tour de France racer or even a local race racer, I was a cyclist going about his business which deserved respect rather if not acclaim.
Having read Moore's account and his difficulties that, despite, far greater preparation, far better equipment and far more support, were very similar to my own, I am beginning to feel a little better about my efforts. Of course, these days I am not fit enough to run to the end of my road let alone cycle 20 Km, but perhaps if I had come to Moore's book in, say 2002, I can envisage I would have far more cycling trips to recount here and probably a bit more self-respect. I have to remember the morning when a whole class of French school children, probably aged 9 or 10, all dressed in matching cycle helmets, were pulled to the side of the road to let me pass up a hill with their teacher pointing out how properly I was attired in my cycle helmet and bright cycling strip (that year bright yellow) so visible to motorists. Though I struggled up the hill, I dared not get off or slow until I was out of sight. I should also remember stepping into a pristine bar at the top of a hill that was run by a man who clearly (from the numerous black and white photographs around the wall) had been in the paratroopers and asked for two Oranginas and a single glass. I never drank from the bottle for some reason. He knew the steepness of his local hill and seemed please that I had chosen to stop at his bar and sent me off with a real rousing encouragement. I recommend Moore's book to anyone who has battled on a cycling trip. It has made me feel that my efforts were not wasted and that I was fighting against the odds, partly due to lack of the right sort of preparation, but even so, not things that other people had not encountered themselves.
Friday, 9 April 2010
What If The 'Moorish' States Of Southern Spain Had Persisted?
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
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
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