K & Z Weinersmith: Soonish

When I actively think about it, I have to be astonished at the rate of technological change in my lifetime (I almost wrote ‘technological progress’ there, but paused…): from the black bakelite ‘push button B’ telephone to a miniature computer in my pocket, from being taken to visit the first electronic calculator in the district by our school maths teacher to… my laptop, from a black and white television with two channels to streaming almost anything on demand, from a children’s encyclopaedia to the internet.

This was an unexpected book – a birthday present – and I do like being surprised. The authors review and explain changes in various areas of technology that are in development and may affect our lives sooner or later… hence the title. They are very good at explaining why current ideas, machines and materials work, what their limitations are, and where it may be possible to go next. A good deal of very serious and hard science is presented and explained pretty clearly, with some humour, in a way that a non-scientist like me can usually understand (though not always without feeling a headache coming on). The chapters are helpfully arranged in size order, as the authors move from technological developments in space down to the micro-level, within the human body. The difficulties involved in automating certain complex processes are explained, and various routes and solutions are evaluated.

What surprised me quite a lot was the remarkable overlap between where science currently seems to be heading, and science fiction that I’ve read over my lifetime, for example everyday objects that can communicate with the user, such as abound in the novels and stories of Philip K Dick. You may be thinking, well, isn’t it obvious that SF would foreshadow what is coming up in reality? but not so. Much of what has happened in the recent past SF did not foresee, especially the incredibly rapid progresses in computing power and miniaturisation. You can read novels set a century in our future where they are using computers we would have found obsolete in the 1990s…

It may well be related to my age, but a good deal of what is up-and-coming scared the daylights out of me, particularly in the area of food; augmented reality (AR), which I’m quite interested in along with VR, also seemed pretty scary in terms of its full potential. As an arts and humanities person first of all, I’ve always been a little unsure of whether scientists are fully aware of the complexities and implications of what they are doing. We shall see – or rather, it’s probably the next generation that will…

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Newspapers: do they have a point any more?

Today my newspaper of choice, which I’ve read daily for nearly half a century – The Guardian – became a tabloid. It looks okay, but no longer has anything which makes it stand out from any of the other dailies. The short-lived bold Berliner experiment ran out of steam and money: no-one could have foreseen how rapidly so many people would give up print for online news… and I found myself thinking: is there any real point to newspapers any more?

Once, newspapers were the only news; first radio and then TV scooped them. And now the internet offers instant updates. Once newspapers offered news; now they try to offer everything: a whole range of features, opinion, columnists trying to be funny, cookery, lifestyle, advice on relationships. Once newspapers had relatively few pages and were readable on the day of publication in a reasonable space of time; now there are pages to plough through. Once the Sunday paper was a treat to gorge on.

I only occasionally buy a print Guardian at a weekend, and when I do, it’s frustrating, because I’ve read half of it before, at different times during the week: online articles aren’t attached to particular days, and the overall effect is to make it even less likely I’ll bother with print. And I suspect I only look at about a quarter of what appears online, anyway.

I could never have imagined life without my daily dose of print, and yet, here I am, reading the paper online every morning – no more cold and wet trips to the corner newsagent. It comes rather cheaper, of course, and this is an issue for all newspapers: where’s the money? The Guardian seems, slowly, to be finding its way with a subscription and donation model, helped by the web broadening its world readership. And I grind my teeth about the random and irrelevant US and Australian stories. But they get some cash from me because I love the online crossword app.

The Times disappeared behind a paywall, but I won’t give money to Murdoch on principle, end of story. The Daily Telegraph, which I used regularly to look at to see what the enemy was up to, has developed a ‘premium’ (ie give us money) label for an ever-increasing number of its stories, and this has led to a bastardisation of good journalism, in that most stories now begin with a couple of paragraphs of knitted words that tell you nothing, in order to tempt you to stump up money to read the real article just as it disappears behind the paywall… ha ha, fooling no-one there… On the other hand, I do have access to far more titles, whereas I only ever bought one print newspaper a day.

As I grow older I regularly have to remind myself that I’m not the regular or average punter that most newspapers (or shops, for that matter) actually want; I’m on the margins, looking for something that doesn’t really exist. When I began reading newspapers, I wanted (and found) the news reported clearly, fully and intelligently, and some detailed and thoughtful analysis to develop my understanding of issues. That’s pretty rare now, particularly the analysis, for which I’ve gone to a French publication, Le Monde Diplomatique (there is an English edition) for the last twenty years. English newspapers are full of rent-a-scribe columnists paid by the yard to pontificate, to provoke or to try and be funny, none of which is terribly useful in terms of trying to understand an increasingly mad world.

I can’t see print newspapers existing for much longer; I can see them shrinking to weekly publications focused on analysis rather than news, although I suspect the ‘infotainment’ angle will still dominate. There will be far fewer of them. Someone will eventually sort out how to make micropayments work, I hope.

The thing that depresses me more than anything is the large number of people I see picking up and paying for the Daily Mail, imagining they are buying a proper newspaper, rather than a nasty, right-wing propaganda-sheet. It says something about the very sad state of this country at the moment.

On avoiding Marx

Although I’ve always been on the left in terms of politics, I’ve managed to avoid engaging with Marx for most of my life. I may have read The Communist Manifesto at some point in my student days, but I can’t remember. I did have to read some chapters that Marx wrote about literature when studying for my MA, and we also grappled with some other Marxist critics such as Lukacs, but I remember very little of what they had to say on the subject. Marx is difficult, and the doorstep tomes are off-putting.

And yet, I’ve always been drawn to what I’ve known and understood of Marx’s analysis of economics and history, because what I have known of it has seemed to make sense, and because some over-arching theory of how our world works is needed in order to help us to change it, if that is what we want to do. I’ve been interested, throughout my adult life, in sexual politics, and also environmental politics, but also aware of the Marxist notion that the class struggle is the primary one, and all the others are sidetracks, which get in the way of changing things, and which, of course, the dominant class is very happy for us to get sidetracked down: those energies that might be used in demolishing the system are dissipated…

This has come to seem ever more true to me in recent years, as the world has appeared, over the course of my lifetime, to have become ever more stuck; I am struck by our inability to learn from our horrendous past, by our ability to destroy our environment without a thought, by our ability to be seduced by consumer trash, by our acceptance of politicians’ and economists’ lies….

A few years back I came across the writings of David Harvey, who has been teaching Marx for about forty years or so; his book The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism provided a useful introduction, and then I discovered that a series of his lectures on the first volume of Marx’s Capital was available for download (here). I’ve recently discovered that lectures on the second volume are available too…

It’s taken me a while to get round to listening to them. They were recorded, not very professionally, in actual lectures, so the sound quality isn’t brilliant – there are frequent pauses and he rambles at times as lecturers do, and students’ questions are largely inaudible – but Harvey takes you through what Marx is saying in detail, explaining and clarifying, pointing out the salient points of the analysis, and most helpfully, relating them to the present day economic situation. It’s not easy listening, and I did find myself zoning out at various points, but I saw how Marx’s analysis fitted together and made sense, and I saw the totality of its scope. I found myself thinking not, ‘here is the answer, Marx says it all and this is what we need to do’, but ‘this is a clear and comprehensive analysis which makes sense as a whole, and is better and clearer than anything else I’ve heard or read… here is a template for viewing and understanding the world’.

What comes across is the inter-relatedness of everything, and the enormous difficulty of changing things. There are more questions than answers, it seems to me. Is democracy the best form of government, for a start? Because if you want to get on with making the world different, it will certainly take more than the maximum five-year time-frame of democracy. And perhaps democracy is only a bourgeois concept anyway, actually serving the interests of relatively few people? Maybe the Chinese, who can take the longer-term perspective, will have greater success in addressing the challenges the planet faces… What do you do with the small groups of vested interests who will fight tooth and nail to retain their power and privilege, even if outvoted in a ‘democratic’ election? Though I do not for one minute approve, I can understand why the Bolsheviks behaved as they did… HG Wells imagined world government, and surely change would have to be planet-wide to address humanity’s problems, but I see no signs of that happening…

Currently then, I’m still stuck with my feeling that we are not a very intelligent species and that there is probably no way, at the moment anyway, of us all coming together to build a better world, without a great deal of violence… and that is a contradiction in terms. But Marx’s analysis makes sense to me, and until someone does better, it’s the best we have…

Cynical Wednesday

Recently I read a thought-provoking article which presented data showing that from the mid-1970s the wealth gap between rich and poor in the West began to widen, and the standard of living of ordinary working people began to stagnate; the article suggested that the reasons for the shift were not clear. And, of course, I cannot now recall where I came across the article…

I have long been interested in the shift from community and collective to the individual, and I’ve often wondered about the late 1960s and early 1970s and the various hippy movements, focused on self-actualisation, freedom, independence from constraints and so on, contrasted with the perhaps more stratified and conformist tendencies in societies in the West before then. Society wasn’t going to tell us what to do and how to behave: that was to be our decision, our choice. And those were very liberating times, for many people and groups, in many different ways. But I have also come to wonder how so much else got thrown away…

The literature of the time focused on pleasure, often through sex and drugs: what mattered was what gave us pleasure, what we enjoyed; we didn’t think much further. I could have happiness, and if I didn’t get it one way, I was free to try another. I think back to the now slightly twee fiction of Richard Brautigan or the novels of Tom Robbins as a couple of examples – hedonistic, unrestricted, totally Western. And slipping back into the past, to Hermann Hesse, much beloved of readers back then: Siddartha, Narziss and Goldmund: all about finding oneself, though perhaps not so self-indulgent as we were; in Narziss and Goldmund two radically different journeys of self-discovery are revealed. Which is the happier, the more fulfilling?

Writers in other countries did not look at things in quite the same way; again, for the sake of illustration I’ll pick a couple of novels I’ve mentioned before: Vassily Grossman‘s Life and Fate, and Anatoly Rybakov‘s Arbat Trilogy. The boot was on the other foot in the Soviet Union; one’s duty to the collective, to society, was more important than the individual’s personal or private happiness. And the heroes and heroines of these books work out the tensions between living their own lives, and their duty to the society to which they belong, of which they are a part.

And then I consider one of the writers whose books I have come to know and love, Ursula Le Guin, who in her Hainish stories, above all perhaps in her novel The Dispossessed, explores the utopian possibilities inherent in striving to get the right balance between individual and society.

Is this where everything started to unravel in the 1970s? Along with the individual drive to self-realisation, the search for happiness, we unleashed the worst kind of selfishness on a massive scale… what matters is me…me…me! If discovering myself means becoming filthy rich, there’s nothing wrong with that; I’ve done it through my own efforts. If you’re not happy, if you’re poor, if you’re ill – do something about it, it’s not my problem, I’m busy being happy myself. And why should I have to pay taxes to help other people? Why should the state interfere in my life? And the politicians and the economists of the times supported and encouraged this approach, for their own selfish ends – Thatcher’s Britain. I know I oversimplify rather, but I think there is something here. In the quest for happiness, wealth, ourselves, everything else becomes disposable: friends, relationships, family – we just tear it all up and start again, convinced that with another attempt we will get it right at last; others may have to live with the consequences of our self-focused decisions, but that’s their problem, not ours.

And, of course, along with all this searching for ourselves and our happiness and fulfilment, have been created endless possibilities for businesses to make money selling us things: sex, drugs, consumer durables, holidays, experiences… because money brings happiness… and shiny-shiny stuff takes our minds off what’s really going on out there. Don’t get me wrong: I’m for freedom and self-discovery and happiness, but not at the cost of steamrollering everyone and everything else out of the way.

Today, as you can see, I feel very cynical. I do feel we threw out the baby with the bathwater in the 1970s. And I, along with millions of others, had the wool pulled over my eyes, was misled. What is to be done, as someone once asked?

Literature and terrorism

Recent events in Spain and else where turned my thoughts to this topic: pretty nearly everything in real life has been the subject of fiction at some point…

When I think about how terrorism has been portrayed in novels I’ve read, I instantly go to Joseph Conrad, whose The Secret Agent is the best example I know. Written a century ago, it’s still a masterpiece of the suspense genre, as Conrad uses his technique of non-sequential narrative to great effect. So, from the outset we know there is a terrorist outrage in London, but we don’t know who carries it out, or the consequences, until much later in the book, and it’s the narrowing gap in our knowledge that draws us ineluctably and frighteningly forward. It’s hard to say much more without ruining the plot, so I won’t… but the interplay between the plotter and his wife is marvellous.

The time when Conrad was writing was the epoch of nihilism, as well as that of plots against the Russian monarchy, so terrorism and its consequences rears its head in other of his novels, too, perhaps most notably in Under Western Eyes. And Conrad’s attitude to terror and what it seeks to achieve seems to mirror ours today: the perpetrators are warped and deluded people, devoid of conscience and humanity, expecting their outrages to change people’s minds and bring about some kind of momentous change, which it never does: the innocent die and life goes on.

If our minds unconsciously turn to the Middle East when someone mentions terrorism, then perhaps we should go back further in time, reflecting on the Western interference in other nations’ affairs, which is allegedly the prime mover for many of today’s attacks. In the Sherlock Holmes canon, John Watson is an ex-army doctor who has served in Afghanistan and been invalided out because of an injury from a ‘Jezail bullet’. So we’ve been interfering in that country for a century and a half, and still haven’t learned our lesson. In Naguib Mahfouz‘ brilliant Cairo Trilogy, for a vast part of which we are unaware of British rule in Egypt, a demonstration against it suddenly intrudes with powerful and tragic consequences when the beloved son of the family is killed. Remind me again, exactly why the British were ruling Egypt?

A more modern example I’m aware of is in Michel Houellebecq‘s novel Platform when Islamic militants attack a holiday resort favoured by Westerners; Julian Barnes, in A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, recalls an actual incident when hijackers took over a cruise ship in the 1970s 0r 1980s, I forget which…

I’ve mentioned before how much of the world that was open to us to travel in my younger years is now closed to us because of the risks and dangers: no more hitch-hiking along the hippy trail through Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan to India. And it’s rather more perilous for travel writers to make their way through such countries, too. Gone is the physically arduous but not politically risky travel of the 1930s; people still make their way through the territory, but always looking over their shoulder, aware of the possibility that some group may find their presence unwelcome and challenge it, or worse.

I know that hindsight is a wonderful thing, but I can’t avoid the knowledge that the world is a dangerous place largely because we in the West think we have the right to do what we please where we please, economically and militarily; equally, it’s perfectly possible that if we weren’t behaving like this, maybe some other nation would. Lines we drew on maps over a century ago are still wreaking havoc on lives in the Middle East and by proxy here at home, and it seems to me that very few people are minded to ask the right questions about what should be done.

On honour, duty, loyalty and patriotism

I’ve been thinking about these topics as a result of the previous book I read, about Major-General Sosabowski’s loyalty to his country, and where it got him. I’ve never felt in the least bit patriotic, shocking as this may sound, and I’m aware that some of this lack of feeling may come from being neither fish nor fowl, half-English and half-Polish. But somewhere I’ve always agreed with Johnson’s adage that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Looking rather more seriously at the issue, I have always found it almost impossible to understand why men marched to their deaths in the Great War in the way they did. I have stood at various places on the former western front, where the British climbed out into no-man’s-land on the first day of the battle of the Somme and looked into the distance at the crest of the hill some hundreds of yards away where the Germans were entrenched, and thought, my God how could anyone bring themselves to do that? And, when teaching the A level English Literature paper on Literature and the First World War, students and I would agree that we could not behave like that now, we would not be prepared to die like that…

Writers and poets of the time were clearly doing what they felt to be their duty, including rebels like Sassoon who threw his medals into the Mersey and brought much opprobrium on himself by writing in protest against the way the war was being conducted. He felt loyalty and a duty of care to the men under his command, as did Wilfred Owen, who also protested against incompetent leadership in his poems, and who ultimately gave his life.

I’ve also wondered about what creates and fosters a sense of loyalty to one’s country. Shakespeare creates a marvellous picture of ‘this sceptred isle’ in the famous speech in Richard II, and I agree that England is a beautiful country that is very fortunately situated… but to die for? And because we are an island, unconquered for nearly a thousand years, we do not perhaps understand what happens in the thoughts of others. French casualties in the Great War were horrendous, and a huge proportion of the deaths came in the first months of the war as the French strove desperately to drive the marauding German invaders from their country. I can see that men like Sosabowski felt great loyalty to their nation which, having only regained independence in 1918 after over a century of non-existence, was snuffed out a mere twenty years later by the combined treachery of Nazis and Soviets, and why thousands of men like my father volunteered for the 1^st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade that Sosabowski set up in order to train men for the liberation of Warsaw (which never happened). And having read his book, I am now clearer about the enormous sense of betrayal all those men felt as a result of Churchill’s machinations after Arnhem and in the closing months of the war.

Similarly, it’s quite clear the sense of pride in their country, in the motherland, in defending their socialist homeland, that the millions of Soviet men and women who died in the Great Patriotic War felt, even in spite of the horrors of Stalinism which they had also lived through. Reading novels like Vassily Grossman’s epic Life and Fate, or the last part of Anatoly Rybakov’s Arbat trilogy, Dust and Ashes, is incredibly moving, and, for me, a learning experience about the meaning of loyalty and patriotism. And Svetlana Alexievich’s book of Soviet women at war was even more powerful, because true…

Sadly, I have to say that very little about the current nation of England (or Great Britain, or the United Kingdom) makes me feel proud, other than our National Health Service, which the current government is doing its best to wreck. And throughout the Cold War I was aware that any conflict with the Warsaw Pact would mean that ‘my’ country would be attacking the country where half my family lived, while ‘their’ country would be trying to kill us… I wasn’t looking forward to the consequences of being a conscientious objector, but mentally prepared myself. And then I discovered that I would have been a ‘security risk’ because of my family on the ‘other side’ and thus probably not liable to service anyway.

Somewhere on the other side of the scales, before I get too serious, I have to put Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk, the story of a congenital idiot who volunteers to do his patriotic duty at the start of the Great War, for the Austro-Hungarian Empire… one of only two humorous books I know of about war (Catch-22 is the other) and remind myself that, like the Irishman asked for directions, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here. In other words, like Johnson, we ought to be stepping back from the issues of patriotism, loyalty and duty to ask ourselves why we got into the mess in the first place, and aren’t there rather better ways of dealing with our problems?

Beware those who offer you easy answers (especially if their names begin with ‘T’)!

On perspectives (2)

Isidore of Seville wrote what is generally acknowledge to have been the world’s first encyclopaedia in the seventh century CE; he is now the patron saint of the internet (!). Athanasius Kircher, in the seventeenth century, may have been the last human to have known everything that was known; today we have the web, billions of pages of… what? I’ve never forgotten a librarian friend describing the internet as an enormous library, with all the books thrown in a heap on the floor.

It’s clearly an aspect of growing older, but I do find myself thinking that there isn’t enough time to read all the things I want to read, to understand all the stuff I want to understand, to visit all the places I want to visit: I find myself mentally deferring things until my next existence…

So, how does one cope with the vastness of the world and its possibilities? The easy way is gradually to retreat into one’s own personal bubble, a relatively narrow, restricted world, and stay in it. It’s the Brexit world to me, for want of a better image. And not only is this an easy choice, it’s also often an unconscious choice. Or one can try to engage with the world in some of its vastness, and attempt to comprehend it in various ways: I read about it, talk to people about it, travel and read about the travels of others.

What sense can one person make of the world? Here one runs into the dangers of moral relativism: let’s try and be as open-minded as possible, accepting that there are very different societies with very different behaviours, morals, customs which we are not part of, therefore let’s not be judgemental… and suddenly we may find ourselves silently condoning genital mutilation or stoning people to death for adultery and other such enormities. By what right and criteria do we allow ourselves then to pass judgements on, to evaluate others’ behaviours? Somewhere way back in my studies of renaissance French literature I remember an adage from someone, which I found wise then and still do now: anything which brings pleasure and does no harm to others, should be allowed. And yet the terms are somewhat elusive, even here… At least this takes us beyond the narrowness of ‘what I like’ and ‘what I understand’.

I do find the world a very challenging place; I know it’s the only place I have to live, though there have been times when I’ve fantasised about moving to the depths of Siberia or somewhere else where I might avoid the rest of the species. I’m astonished at some of the amazing things we have done – such as the exploration of the world and outer space, and travelling to the moon – and some of the geniuses that have emerged from humanity – Bach and Shakespeare to mention my favourite examples – but in my darker moments I do feel that we really are not a very intelligent species, and perhaps do not deserve to survive. Then, when I remember a book like Olaf Stapledon‘s brilliant Last and First Men, which takes humanity several billion years into the future, I sorrow at the vanishing of our achievements in the mists of time, a true Ozymandias moment.

I think I like challenges (moderate ones, at least), and I do like learning new things. The older I get, the less I realise I really know, and I suspect that this is a function of age. The world, and the understanding of it, is a quest that has to go on forever, for me personally at least.

On perspectives (1)

The recent election, and the way I followed and observed it, as well as participated, has got me thinking about the question of perspectives, ways of seeing many different aspects of our world. For the first time I was very clearly aware of the bubble from which I was seeing the election: as a left-leaning voter, I got my news from left-ish sources – The Guardian newspaper, and the Independent, and occasionally checked into the Daily Telegraph, as I’ve done for years, to see how the enemy was thinking. And then there was the social media: almost everyone I knew was commenting and discussing from the same left-wing perspective and I had no idea what the enemy were up to unless a friend commented on a Conservative blogpost or suchlike… Rude awakenings came from the occasional leaflet pushed through the letterbox… and I found myself thinking, I have been compartmentalised and also compartmentalised myself. What is going on, what are people thinking out there in the real world?

I wondered how many left-leaning retired teachers there might be, who are also religious-tending agnostic, with a European perspective on everything because they are only half-English? I must be in a very small sub-group. And then I thought, does any of this matter? It seems to me it does when one slips into thinking that my world is the world. At one level, I’m sure that the notions above are common-sense, blindingly obvious when you think about them: the issue really is how often do we think seriously about them, and where do we get when we do?

One of the things I think has changed has been the way we have moved into a fully global era in my own lifetime. I don’t just mean global capitalism, although that is a big part of it, along with the increasing irrelevance of nation states and powerlessness of national governments, but the fact that it’s possible for the human race to annihilate itself through nuclear warfare, which is a relatively recently-acquired ability, as well as the way that we are increasingly trashing the entire planet and most of us are still ignoring the fact that we are doing it.

I’ve found it interesting that these global times have begun to produce attempts at global history, and attempts to look at the entire picture of human society and culture across time and across the world; what I see emerging is also a growing awareness of just how complex and interconnected everything is: if it’s so complicated that no single individual can grasp it all, then what hope do we actually have of being able to address the problems that face us as a species. And yet, in a way because of this globalisation, it has become easier for us to be segmented into smaller and smaller subgroups according to all sorts of interests and preferences; this reminds me of the ancient Roman adage divide et impera – divide and rule – there are plenty of reasons why it’s good to keep us divided according to our differences, rather than allow us to unite according to what we share with others…

to be continued…

On living in Thatcher’s Britain

Unashamedly political post follows: you have been warned.

I had planned to write on this theme before the recent election; I think it’s just as relevant now. I can’t believe I’m watching the madness they call Brexit, reading about the obscenities of the Grenfell Tower fire and countless other craziness. I have long felt that many of the things that are wrong with our country can be ascribed to Thatcher’s Britain: her evil legacy has infected us for years and will continue to plague for years to come.

Let’s be clear what I mean here: she said that there is no such thing as society. I’m not interested in the semantics of what she actually meant by it, because her attitude and the attitudes of those who latched on to her words and have shaped Britain for the last forty years are self-evident. She unleashed a culture of ‘me first’, of the worst kind of selfishness: I have money and I can do what I want with it, so get out of my way…

There is no sense of duty or responsibility to poorer members of society, to the old, the sick, those without work; in the harshest possible Calvinistic manner, it’s all their fault, and they should do something about it. We thought such attitudes had long gone after the post-war settlement and the advent of the NHS and the Welfare State, but instead Thatcherism has taught two generations to despise what was built then, and done incalculable physical and moral damage to our society (yes, society!).

It seems plain to me that if we are expected to feel any sense of loyalty to our state or our country (however you want to look at it) then it should give one the feeling of having something to feel loyalty towards. If the state wants the loyalty of its citizens, then it has a duty to ensure that everyone has access to affordable housing and healthcare, fuel, water, education and modern communications, to enable them to feel secure first… such things as these, which everyone needs, should not be provided by those who put the profit motive before everything else. If the state makes a loss providing these, then taxpayers will pay more to make up the shortfall; if the state makes a profit then we all benefit from lower taxes.

Our national infrastructure is gradually falling to bits; large parts of it have been sold to other countries, who subsidise their countries from the profits they make from us… can this possibly make sense?

To me, a child of the Welfare State and proud of it, the above seems obvious. But there are many millions who now don’t understand it. As a nation we have always expected to have things on the cheap – firstly from living off the backs of colonies and empire, then from the supposed benefits of ‘privatisation’. I cannot believe that so many people are thrilled with spending considerable amounts of time and energy trying to find the best ‘deal’ when buying gas, electricity, a train ticket, a phone or internet contract, without ever being sure that they have succeeded… saving a few pounds here and there, perhaps, whilst ensuring that the fat cats get richer and richer from the proceeds. I’ve better things to do with my time, and actually long for the days when the state supplied these utilities, and I paid and got on with my life…

We are told that the 1960s and 1970s were a period of chaos, almost anarchy, when the trade unions wrecked the country. That’s not the country I remember; I remember a more caring and rather more unified society, where the poor and the sick and the unemployed were not vilified for what they could not help and often had not brought on themselves. Now I’m living in a time of chaos and anarchy, with big business and the Conservative (ha, ha, fine choice of word, that one!) party busy doing far more harm than any trade union ever did. I’m grateful that my trade union fought for semi-decent working conditions and a reasonable pension which I can now enjoy, and think that rather more people need to take up that fight again today.

I have been heartened by some of the outcomes of the election and begun to think that perhaps almost enough people are fed up of the meanness, the divisiveness, the greed and the squalor that Thatcherism has brought to this country. We shall see; I’m not holding my breath, but it would be nice to spend my declining years in a rather fairer and happier place than today’s Britain.

Do we still want the NHS?

Unashamedly political post follows…you have been warned.

As a nation I feel we’ve shot ourselves in both feet voting to leave the EU; I’m sure it will happen and we will be able to repent at leisure. But, for my money, the biggest error is one we are making through neglect, or ignorance: the loss of the NHS.

Think about this: the Tories have been in power for seven years, during which time they have, in a drip-feed manner, made the NHS less effective through constant re-organisation and underfunding, brought in more profit-making private providers, and under-resourced it. There is a constant trickle of stories about clinical errors, longer waiting lists, people ‘wasting’ NHS time and resources: the right-wing press is doing its bit in undermining a national resource.

Over time, the gradual – and, I think deliberate – effect of this is to make more and more people, especially younger people who have never known anything else, or really had to think about healthcare at all, think that the NHS is inefficient, is broken, and cannot cope any more: if this is the case, then – the next stage of the right-wingers’ proposal goes, surely something needs to be done about it… Increasingly the arguments are, well there are more people to treat (especially immigrants and free-loaders from abroad), people are living much longer and therefore need care for much longer, and treatment is increasingly technological and expensive. Of course, a state-provided service can’t possibly deliver all this, it is suggested…

And so, when the Tories decide they can be bold enough to suggest privatising parts or the whole thing – in the interests of giving people better care, of course – enough people may believe them, and allow them to get away with it. And there will be the mantra that the NHS will always be free ‘at the point of delivery’ (whatever that means. Does anyone know?). Perhaps GP visits and A&E will be free, and beyond that, one will have to pay or take out additional insurance.

The great majority of British people have been born and have grown up looked after by the NHS, and have taken it for granted all their lives. We know nothing about how alternative systems work or what they cost – though again we are often told (by whom?) how much better other countries’ health care is than our own – though we may have heard horror stories from the USA, but we’d never end up with that, would we? Hmm. How much time do you want to spend comparing health plans, costs and so on to make sure you have the right deal? But then, since the privatisation of everything else, we have a generation used to doing cost-comparisons on websites for train tickets, energy, broadband: maybe people won’t mind. And if they can get a bargain…

Should you be worried? Well,if you’re inexorably moving towards old age, if the system that’s looked after you throughout your life disappears, what do you do instead? If you don’t have the disposable income to fund private healthcare? Of course, the pill can be sugared: look, we’ll reduce National Insurance payments when we sell-off the NHS, so you can now choose (magic word, there!) your own provider, and how much to spend…

The profit motive is expensive: profit has to be factored into the cost of everything. Of course, allegedly private enterprise is more efficient (it has done wonders for our railways, after all), so will be cheaper. I have to say, if I were seriously ill, in need of major surgery or intensive care, efficiency would not be my first criterion. Skill, care, empathy, things like those would be at the top of my list.

Declaration of interest: my mother was one of the first cohort of nurses to be trained by the infant NHS, and I have a sister who currently works for the NHS. If asked, I’d be hard-pressed to think of any contemporary aspect of our country that I’m prouder of than our health service. And plenty of other countries actually envy us. Give the Tories another five or ten years, and will we still have the NHS? Do enough people actually care?