As we perch on the edge of the abyss, along comes Harry and Meghan to take our minds off things. Is this pair the first to become republicans and actually do something about it since Charles I was beheaded? Now the news has emerged that they’ve been separated from the rest of the Windsors in Madame Tussaud’s London display. On the orders of the Palace presumably. To their credit, they want to earn their own crust. Harry could start by becoming a director of Harry’s Razors ™ although this would necessitate a change of appearance. Not to their credit is their professed desire to live equally in the UK and North America. This would constitute a high carbon lifestyle, running counter to all the greenwash royals of a certain ilk are prone to.
There was some jerk from the Daily Mail on the radio this morning spouting off about how it was all such a shock to the Firm, and essentially how disloyal the ’Sussex’s’ were to all and sundry. It must be the fate of all royal correspondents to keep their dream of a gong alive, even if they are seen as a pathetic herd of ungrateful lickspittles by their subjects.
0 Comments
Back in early December I complained to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) about the fact that their launch of an investigation into alleged anti-Semitism in the Labour Party could be seen as lacking impartiality. This reflected the fact that complaints about alleged Islamaphobia in the Tory Party were rife at the time. Why single out one party for an inquiry into racism? I received the EHRC’s response a couple of days ago. After a lengthy discourse on their strategic aims and concerns for a civilised political discourse, one paragraph towards the end got round to telling me that my complaint was not upheld. This is one of those non-explanation explanations:
The current investigation is defined by its Terms of Reference. The type of inquiry you are suggesting, including all political parties, would clearly be very different to the current investigation in scope and timescale. We therefore do not consider it would be appropriate to widen it in the way you suggest. So change the bloody terms of reference! Oh dear, the 11th commandment decrees that Thou Shalt Not Change The Terms Of Reference. Transparency and balance doesn’t come in to it. Consequently I am forced to pursue my own investigation into the EHRC. This begins today with an FOI request: a) Between 1st January 2015 and 31st December 2019, how many complaints about racism has the Commission received for each of the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat Parties, broken down by month and by the form of racism complained of (e.g. anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, etc.) b) Over the same period, how many complaints about racism has the Commission received about other bodies, public or private, broken down as in (a). c) Over the same period, how many investigations into allegations of racism (broken down as in (a) above) has the Commission launched regarding other bodies, public or private. d) The terms of reference of the Commission's investigation into the Labour Party states (Paragraph 8) that the Commission 'may' have regard to the IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism whilst recognising that this definition is not legally binding. Please provide the legal definition of anti-Semitism the Commission WILL use in this investigation whether or not it chooses to use the IHRA non-legally binding definition. I note that this investigation is being carried out by the Commission using its legal powers provided by the 2006 Act. We haven’t heard the last about this. In my mother’s final months, when she was totally immobile and couldn’t read, she asked me to read to her from Dante’s Divine Comedy. I chose the recent translation by Clive James, hoping it would not be dry and dull. We got well into Paradise before she went on her final journey, so I hope that turned out well. Thus I have a lot of time for the late Mr James.
But I have just discovered that something was missing from his obituaries: he was a prominent climate change sceptic. To be precise, he was sceptical of there being anthropogenic climate change, and perhaps entertained the possibility of ‘natural variations’ in the climate system. At least that is what I have divined from an essay he wrote in 2017 and which has been republished by the comic Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF, prop. Nigel Lawson). This essay was originally published by the right-wing Australian ’think tank’ the Institute of Public Affairs in a collection called ’Climate Change: the facts 2017.’ Sadly, Clive’s contribution though lengthy was short on facts and long on his trademark sardonic take on life, with an overly emphasised look at how the subject of climate change is treated in the media. This can be summed up with the suggestion that supporters of the science of anthropogenic climate change are making a mint out of their media prominence and this necessarily relies on their overstating the case—in other words, being alarmist. All this is well and good if you are a comedian, but I doubt that there will be that many people in Australia at this moment in time happy to find relief in a bit of knockabout Jamesian humour whilst their house is in danger of burning down. But Clive is dead, so we won’t know what his analysis is of the worst fires in Australia’s history. And so far, we don’t know what the Institute of Public Affairs has to say about it either. Judging by their website, they’re all still on holiday. The Clive James essay is here. Let Dante have the final word (The Divine Comedy, Canto 29, tr. Clive James, Picador 2013 p139) [Virgil] “The time permitted to us now is short, And there is more to look at than will meet Your eyes here.” I said, “Had you given thought To why I looked, you might have granted me A longer stay.” If only. After weeks of development, I have finally come up with Labour’s election slogan for the 2019 general election: ‘Take Back Control.’ It is so blindingly obvious I wonder why no-one else has thought of it. I know it was used by the Brexit crowd during the referendum, but I don’t think they copyrighted it. Why would it have been good for 2019? So far as Brexit is concerned, Labour could have portrayed the Tory Brexit mess in a different light, and inter alia our solution—a second referendum. But the slogan’s use could have extended well beyond Brexit. At every opportunity Corbyn could have prefaced his answers with take back control—of rogue landlords, or chaotic rail services, multinational rip offs—the list is endless and would under this single motto have demonstrated what real control means. Particularly so since in the last three years Brexiteers have signally failed to show what ‘control’ really means. More power to people or more power to elites? Thinking about it, it should be the driving mission statement of Labour in this coming year. Now we can’t stop Brexit, so we must define what taking control means—and contrast that with the pro-elite version which will be pursued by Johnson (with or without his bribes to the North).
Labour should now promote with vigour some of the key elements of its manifesto, e.g. the green transformation, some re-nationalisations (particularly rail and water) and the housing agenda. It should discard policies which no matter how desirable did not convince voters of our seriousness. Very expensive pledges on WASPI women, tuition fees and free broadband did not sound thought out and were presented half heartedly. No-one believed in them. Some policies will unite the party quickly, particularly on housing. After watching a clip of a recent, post-election speech by Tony Blair, predictably excoriating Corbyn’s Labour (despite the fact he did better in votes than in 2005 when Blair won) I thought I would take a look to see what magical remedies the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) was coming up with. Here’s one proposal for housing: ‘A new Sovereign Property Fund to support property acquisition by local councils for the express purpose of housing construction and rehabilitation.’ That appears on the TBI website and was dated 2017. What appeared in Labour’s 2019 Manifesto? What a co-incidence: [in the first 100 days] ‘Set up a new English Sovereign Land Trust to buy, assemble and co-ordinate the delivery of new homes.’ I suspect that sprinkled though the 2019 manifesto there may be other examples of such policy sharing with bodies like TBI. There is room here to create a dialogue which does not rely on simplistic criticisms, in which I include Blair’s reference in his speech to voters not liking Corbyn’s alleged dislike of ‘western values’ (whatever they are) or his parroting of the anti-Semitism smear. Well, we can live in hope. The Pope delivered his message. The Archbishop of Canterbury delivered his. Many other patriarchs have put their self-serving hopes for the new year ahead to bed. Now, if you’ll forgive me, it’s my turn as we come to the end of the second decade of the 21st century and look forward to what the 2020s and beyond beckon. Yes, I’m being a little presumptuous here, placing myself alongside such notable personages, but since they’ve only generally spouted their usual platitudes, it’s fair game. Let me say first of all, happy new year to all of you not only here in the UK but arrrrround the worrrrld! I have chosen as my inspiration for this missive Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, a work of science fiction penned nearly one hundred years ago which made a lasting impression on me as a teenager. In a nutshell, it considered the future of humanity not just in the near future (which is the next ten thousand years, maybe?) but in millions of years’ time, to the point when whatever humans might be so far ahead had left planet Earth. The singular point of the book and perhaps what made it revolutionary for me is that it looked so far into the future, well beyond our temporal parochialism. Today (by way of contrast) as the latest Star Wars iteration demonstrates, popular science fiction has only modernised eighteenth century concerns with a dose of souped-up technology. Or to look at Star Trek, whilst acknowledging ethnic diversity, its star kit was still the USS Enterprise, captained of course by an American. Do we think nationalities will survive the next five thousand years? Even another hundred? That’s a good question not just about some long distant time in the future but about today, when nationalism seems to be the flavour of the month on this little planet of ours, and of course threatens our continued existence for the daftest of reasons. So to take the Stapledon long view, what will humans be like in one billion years’ time? To ask the question assumes our species will survive climate/biosphere change (many times), asteroid collisions, earthly ruptions, resource depletions and so on. I feel quite sure our species will not resemble anything like we are today, and our existence will likely be extra-planetary. The resource we will need most—energy—will be found elsewhere. Perhaps ‘humanity’ will have morphed into a nomadic floating gassy cloud, without a destination, pointless in fact, but living in an intelligent form. Naturally I acknowledge that the physics of this possibility do not currently exist, but science has a long way to go. If we think we’ve nailed all the laws of the universe after 10,000 years or so of civilisation, the next billion years are going to be quite boring on that front. How we develop will be more down to sentient evolution rather than the rather accidental kind posited by Charles Darwin. Evolutionary development relied on probabilities and connections which were nevertheless purposeless—one development could always be outmatched or destroyed. Dinosaurs were for hundreds of millions of years perfectly evolved for their circumstances, but they couldn’t adjust to circumstances they couldn’t foresee and consequently were wiped out. Sentient evolution makes it possible to conjecture how we could develop, and make allowances for unintended consequences. We can now envisage how we might avert that asteroid strike (but without Bruce Willis would it work?). This is not to say every possible retrograde development could be avoided. Sentient evolution is struggling with climate change for example. But if we survive this, and many of our species will, then our evolutionary path will accelerate. An important component of this which seems inevitable is the spread of artificial intelligence (AI). Stephen Hawking and others have seen in AI an existential threat, in contrast James Lovelock has seen positives. We are at the very dawn of this revolution, but if it does play out positively then AI will become a chief tool of sentient evolution. It will not remain external to humans, but will become part of our very being, just as all sorts of bits and pieces of our body can be replaced today. AI one day will make a grand entry into that last bastion of our organic structure—the brain. Not in our lifetimes though, so no need to immediately worry. Having said which I predicted 20 years ago (to a meeting of the Morley Labour Rooms luncheon club) that the reduction in the size of mobile telephony would lead to mobile phone implants inside the skull, in effect creating real telepathy. It hasn’t happened yet (so far as I know) - probably the right connections have yet to be sussed out. Technology as we know develops at a much faster pace than the legislation required to regulate it. This is especially so today, when so many politicians simply do not understand the technology and because of the power of the tech giants are prone to imagine that ‘self regulation’ is sufficient. One possible approach to dealing with this ever present time lag is to pass a ‘public good’ test, which is to say that any technology brought to the market must demonstrate its value (or harm) to the public good. This is no more revolutionary than the rules already in existence which are designed to ensure drugs are safe. As ever (c.f. the US opioid crisis) such rules are not a panacea but they do provide the foundations for enforcement, if they are enforced. One of the tests humanity will have to grapple with in the not too distant future (in perhaps just a few hundred years) will be living in a more mono-cultural world, which is to say as is already happening, with the decimation of species, resources, land, crops, water, borders, living space and whatever else we think this planet is super-abundant in. This will be the next big test for sentient evolution, all things being equal. Will serious preparations begin in 2020? Once again, happy new year! |
Archives
March 2024
|