The politics of "it's not fair" - welcome to the New Toddlers

I'm angry, rage-filled, cross. The little tic above my left eye is twitching, the axe in the shed sings its siren song. I'm close to having had enough. All this has been prompted by an appointment - something I might write about later. Put simply, however, it is time for those of us who like free speech, free markets, free enterprise and a free society to stop putting up with the sort of world where a TV anchor who went to one of Britain's poshest school and then to Oxford can, in all seriousness, say to an academic that he 'doesn't have the right to offend'.

Indeed, as many have already pointed out, the entirety of Cathy Newman's interview with Jordan Peterson consisted of straw men, non sequiturs, misrepresentations and the repeated use of the words 'fair' and 'unfair'. These two words are now the most abused words in the English language - from "it's not fair" being the exclusive cry of the toddler in mid-tantrum, it has now become the mantra for an entire political movement. OK, so some folk like to point at Corbyn's politics and say it's 'Marxist' but frankly this is a bit of an insult to Karl who at least tried to construct a coherent set of theories about history, society and economics. The New Toddlers don't do this, they just scream "it's not fair" ever more loudly. Sometimes, as in the case of former broadcast journalists, they scream "it's not fair" and misquote Gramsci.

These New Toddlers are joined in their screeches by the likes of Cathy Newman who refuse to let sensible things like actual research evidence get in the way of them shouting "it's not fair". Everything from Jessica's uni fees through to Grandma having to cash in some of her three-quarters of a million of housing asset is not "fair". Don't have a job - or better still the precise job (very well paid, of course) you think you deserve - scream "it's not fair" and, as if by magic, some left wing politician or right-on news reporter will appear with the soothing words "something must be done" followed by dragging one of the few remaining grown ups in and accusing them of not being "fair".

The New Toddlers have been weaned on the idea that everything is somebody else's fault - often a strange and nebulous thing called 'neoliberalism'. You're fat and you drink too much? It not fair is it but rest assured something will be done - the bad people who made you fat and forced you to drink a bottle of white wine every second day will be punished. Maybe you've moved to London because that's where all the action is and you can get a great job in a new media design start up or, better still, in some NGO, QUANGO or think-tank. But it's not fair that you can barely afford the rent, let alone buy a house (something the thickoes you left behind in Ormskirk seem able to do from their crappy little warehouse or call centre jobs) - never mind, those politicians and pundits will be there echoing your cries: "it's not fair, it's not right, something must be done, give me more money, stop them charging me so much, tax fat cats more, what about those big companies, we'll have their money, it's not fair."

Hardly a day passes without another screechy, evidence-free campaign: windfall taxes on this, give free things to this group, stop that group, nationalise this, take over that, regulate, intervene, manage, control, fuss, bother...it's not fair, it's not fair. Twitter memes are fired off, clickbait articles written, petitions launched - anyone daring to oppose is ridiculed, abused, piled onto while any, even mild, kickback results in more screams of "it's not fair, stop the nasty abusers". Every women, every disabled person, every gay man, every minority, folk with mental health problems, fat people, drunks, drug users - everyone except smokers - is a victim. It's not fair.

This ever more infantilised society - the world of these New Toddlers - is exploited by those, whether they call themselves Marxists, Fabians or 'social justice campaigners' who want to exercise power by seeming to be kind and caring. These exploiters don't really give a stuff about whether anything is fair (so long as they're running it and getting well paid), what they really hate is that, out there, there are still people who think it's not a bad idea to take responsibility for your own life, who think we should be allowed to say stuff even if some people think it's not fair and get all offended. We're the problem you see because we don't think we need great and good people on public boards and bodies to make life fair. Mostly this is because, unlike Arthur Dent, we listened to what our Mother said all those years ago when we had that toddler tantrum and screamed, "it's not fair".

"Life's not fair. Get used to it."

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Friday Fungus: Squatting on Planet Mushroom

Us humans think the planet we live on is ours. A plaything gifted to us by gods filled with good things for us to use. We've colonised much of Earth, built great cities, roads, walls, canals - the world is shaped by humanity. We dominate. Or that's what we believe.

Think again. We're squatters on Planet Mushroom:

Fungi are present almost everywhere, in a spectacular array of shapes, sizes and colours, and performing a wide variety of different activities. In 1991 David Hawksworth, a mycologist at Kew estimated the world's fungal diversity at 1.5 million species (equal to the estimated number of all known other living organisms). This was thought at the time to be a radical over estimate, but now other researchers have proposed figures in excess of 13 million. Fungi perform essential roles in every terrestrial, and many aquatic, ecosystems, eg. decomposing dead organic matter to release nutrients, supporting plant life on poor soils by improving the absorption of nutrients when they form mycorrhizal associations with roots, living inside plants as endophytes and forming symbiotic partnerships with algae to form lichens. Any deterioration in fungal populations and diversity can therefore have a considerable impact on ecosystem health, in fact, the loss of lichens from an area is often used as an indication of poor air quality.

We wouldn't be here - there'd be no life - if it weren't for fungi. Plants and animals depend on fungi - without mycorrhizal symbiosis many of our tree species would die. The forests, the grass steppes and even our gardens are grown atop a network of mycelium. The grandest example of this mushroom world is Oregon's honey mushroom:

Next time you purchase white button mushrooms at the grocery store, just remember, they may be cute and bite-size but they have a relative out west that occupies some 2,384 acres (965 hectares) of soil in Oregon's Blue Mountains. Put another way, this humongous fungus would encompass 1,665 football fields, or nearly four square miles (10 square kilometers) of turf.

The discovery of this giant Armillaria ostoyae in 1998 heralded a new record holder for the title of the world's largest known organism, believed by most to be the 110-foot- (33.5-meter-) long, 200-ton blue whale. Based on its current growth rate, the fungus is estimated to be 2,400 years old but could be as ancient as 8,650 years, which would earn it a place among the oldest living organisms as well.

We have a pretty negative relationship with our mushroom masters - they cause disease, they rot things, they poison us and are a symbol of dark, unpleasant places. If you set a google alert for fungi, you'll get a pile of stories about fungal infections complete with gory detail and hard-to-look-at pictures. Plus stories about how bats, frogs and bananas are heading for extinction - destroyed by fungi.

But then without fungi there's no bread and no beer, no blue cheese and your salami rots. Wherever we look, inside and outside, there are members of the fungal kingdom - molds, lichens, yeasts and mushrooms. They are the dominant and most significant lifeform on the planet, they clean stuff up, cure illness and keep plants alive. They even help store carbon:

"Natural fluxes of carbon between the land and atmosphere are enormous and play a crucial role in regulating the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and, in turn, Earth's climate," said Colin Averill, lead author on the study and graduate student in the College of Natural Sciences at UT Austin. "This analysis clearly establishes that the different types of symbiotic fungi that colonize plant roots exert major control on the global carbon cycle, which has not been fully appreciated or demonstrated until now."

We truly are living in a world filled with fungi yet we know so little about them and treat the presence of this great kingdom as something to be fought against rather than something to be understood. Sadly there are no undergraduate courses in mycology and precious few postgraduate courses (mostly medical mycology - pretty damned important given the issues with antibiotics). With the result that we're literally running out of mycologists.

Here we are squatting on Planet Mushroom and we know next to nothing about our kindly hosts!

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I'm a Conservative, for nearly all of you I'm on your side

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My Conservative colleague Nicky Morgan (she's never met me but I guess we're on the same side) thinks us Tories "hate" too much:

The minister said that people are frustrated “with hearing politicians talk about who we hated - we're anti this, we're anti-that, we don't like them, we don't want them here, we don't want them doing this”.

“We never say actually we are on the side of these people, we want this to happen and we think this is great,” she added. 

I thought for a few seconds about my sort of Conservatism - the right-wing sort that we're told Nicky is having a pop at - and concluded that my colleague both misunderstands and also spectacularly misses the point.

The truth is that we don't hate at all - it's what makes us so much better than the left. They love to judge, to condemn and, yes folks, to hate.

Nor are us right-wing Conservatives simply anti this or anti that. We're in favour of allowing ordinary people to go about their ordinary lives, living, loving and laughing without idiot, fussbucket politicians egging on interfering jobsworth bureaucrats to get in the way of that living, loving and laughing.

We're on the side of everyone who just wants to get on with their lives. That's the ones who aspire to wealth and success as well as the ones who want to coast along through their time just enjoying life. Which, if you think about it is nearly everyone.

There are a few we don't like. The ones who think they know better and who want to ram that knowing better down our throats. We're not keen on them.

And the ones who think everyone else owes them a living and that we should sacrifice living, loving and laughing to allow this to happen. Not fans of them either.

Then there are the ones who believe that only state-approved methods of living, loving and laughing should be allowed with everything else taxed to the hilt, controlled, regulated and often banned. We hate all that.

We don't want to fuss and bother over your choices and your lifestyle. We don't want to indulge in some sort of whiggish obsession with a mythical 'aspiring class'. We don't want more rules just to appease busybodies and fussbuckets.

Above all we want to say to you all that it's your life, go and live it. Enjoy it, make the most of it, do as many of the things you want to do. Throw parties. Drink. Smoke. Skydive. Ski. Set off fireworks. Build sandcastles. Eat fish and chips at the end of the pier. Sing. Dance. Write novels. Create new games. Embroider cushion covers. Climb mountains. Study beetles. A million and more ways to live a life.

And our job as politicians? It's to help you have the best chance to do all the things you'd like to do.

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The consumer society is a consequence of freedom

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Earnest folk - whether they are slightly puritanical "traditional conservatives" or frothing left-wing greens - tell us that the consumer society is wicked. This is either because it harms our souls or because - in some unspecified manner - in harms 'the planet'.

Well I've news for you both, the consumer society is here to stay just so long as we keep hold of the idea of liberty. I am reminded:

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.  The maxim is so perfectly self-evident that it would be absurd to attempt to prove it.

Yet we hear always of production as the positive, pundits talk earnestly of exports as if they were more important than imports and of how we must work harder. We are enjoined to be more competitive - an utterly meaningless term. And all the while the greenies are urging us to 'consume less', to adopt a trajectory towards the rude hut and digging stick, away from the evil and sinful electrical society in which we live (and which we love).

But worst are those who would drag us back to protectionism, to industrial strategies and to a unionised labour force - to a less free society. These are the ones who fulfil the second half of the Adam Smith quote:

...in the mercantile system the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer; and it seems to consider production, and not consumption, as the ultimate end and object of all industry and commerce.

It isn't. We live to consume, to enjoy the bounty that our world and our creativity has made for us. To condemn 'underemployment' as some sort of curse rather than realising that it means more time for other things is the summation of this obsession with work and production.

So we must produce so we might consume. We may get pleasure from that production. But it is not our purpose here...

...our purpose here is to have the best time and the most fun we can, To eat, drink, drive fast cars, smoke cheroots, bungee jump, jet ski, knit, paint, sing, drum and throw balls. Or just to sit on the bank in the sunshine watching the world around us.

This is the consumer society. And we have it because we are free.

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The case against euthanasia...

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...is a practical argument not one wrapped up in specious argument about life's purpose or value. To allow euthanasia is to licence the killing of another human. And that person may be in such a pit of despair and mental anguish that the mutter those terrible words: "will someone rid me of this misery and end my life".

For all the agony of seeing someone's pain dragged out before the courts and in the columns of the newspapers as the seek the 'right' for someone else to kill them, there still is that problem. A risk eloquently put here by Chris:

A few months ago, curled up around the toilet bowl, chest sore from dry heaving for days on end and every single fibre in my muscle aching from low potassium levels, those words have left my lips. “I wish someone would put me out of my misery,” I moaned. As my intestines failed, so did my strength to bear the pain and indignity of nausea, constant vomiting, pain and the side effects of heavy medication to control my symptoms (and cause new ones). It is difficult for me to live with those words in retrospect, but they made sense at that very point. I understand, perhaps not the depth, but the kind of emotion that can lead us to wish for death.

Every day people who work with the elderly, with the mentally ill and with those suffering painful disability hear these words. And rather than a tidy little injection and an end to it, they give comfort, provide an ear of understanding. We can write a million words of justification for creating a rule allowing someone to kill another but we can never bring back a life ended on the justification of words cried out in anguish. And that is why the so-called 'right to die' is really just a 'right to kill'.

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Life's too short to worry about its purpose - just enjoy its magic

My life is but an instant, a passing hour.
My life is but a day that escapes and flies away.
O my God! You know that to love you on earth
     I only have today!...

St Therese was sure of God - her song doesn't record doubt or allow for any questioning of purpose. For the Saint, her only purpose was to love God - and I've no doubt that this gave her joy.

If you doubt - and doubt is the essence of the human condition - you cannot live St Therese's life. So you must live your own - knowing, as St Theresa did, that today could be your last. This is not to argue for the libertine's despairing indulgence or to do nothing purposeful. But it is to say that we do not know the purpose of life.

For sure, some will tell you, with their dry, scepticism that life's purpose is mundane - eat, drink, procreate, survive until you die. That this is the "scientific truth" - as if such truth is the only truth. I know that life is magical - not a spell cast by some benign wizard - but something that gives pleasure, joy and, we hope, contentment.

Like Paul Gallico's magical boy we should set aside the prestidigitation, the clever hubris of spell-casting and should look out at the world - for there is magic. There is the dew of the grass, the wind rustling the tops of the trees, the buzzing business of insects - a whole system of magic that we should look on in wonder.

If we spend our time in purposeful, human concerns we miss all this magic. Even worse we try to break the system of magic into its components - to miss that the magic is Nature's whole not Nature's parts.

So when you set about each day, seek something of joy and pleasure - and hope that, as I hope for you, that such search brings contentment.

What is our life? A play of passion,
Our mirth the music of division,
Our mother's wombs the tiring-houses be,
Where we are dressed for this short comedy.
Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is,
That sits and marks still who doth act amiss.
Our graves that hide us from the setting sun
Are like drawn curtains when the play is done.
Thus march we, playing, to our latest rest,
Only we die in earnest, that's no jest*.

Go out and savour the Magic of the World. It is as close to our purpose as we can get.

*Sir Walter Raleigh showing his renaissance man tendencies

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Fly High!

We're flying high, singing. Everything seems perfect. There's blue sky and sunshine broken only by the occasional fluffy white cloud - you know, the ones that look like you drew when you were five.

And bang! It's all over.

It doesn't matter how well liked you are, how good you are at your work, how clever your ideas. The shadow of the man with the gun is always there.

And bang! Your dreams die.

Would you rather fly high, revelling in the breeze, your feathers shining in the winter sun? Or cower in a dark corner, hiding, scuttling, avoiding the heights, the sunshine, the sheer pleasure of soaring into the sky?

Fly High, my friend. Fly high!

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"Healthy Lives, Healthy People" - welcome to the land of nudge, to Lansley's Brave New World

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I have been reading “Healthy Lives, Healthy People”, the Government’s ‘strategy for public health in England. And a fine read it is too, reflecting as we might expect the current obsession with ‘behavioural science’ and the nudging of people into making the right ‘lifestyle choices. Mind you some of those ‘nudges’ are more akin to a robust shoulder charge than a gentle shove!

As you know, dear reader, I am not enamoured of this approach to public health. Indeed, the entire conception of ‘public health’ has moved from ensuring a safe environment to influencing individual choices – up to and including bans. However, this little piece isn’t about all that – although my observations are pertinent to that aspect of debate. It's more about missing the point!

The most striking thing about “Healthy Lives, Healthy People” isn’t just the dominating obsession with smoking (a word that appears on nearly every page) but with a recurring observation about the ‘causes’ poor health:

“People living in the poorest areas will, on average, die 7 years earlier than people living in richer areas and spend up to 17 more years living with poor health. They have higher rates of mental illness; of harm from alcohol, drugs and smoking; and of childhood emotional and behavioural problems.”

Not exactly a surprise really. So why, instead of targeting our efforts at the ultimate cause of health inequality – poverty – do we concentrate instead on whether people make the right or wrong lifestyle choices?

People living in these places have a pretty low quality of life – to put it bluntly, their lives are crap. And they know it so they indulge – booze, smoking, drugs, reality telly, McDonalds, fizzy drinks, chocolate bars plus, of course, sex. Plenty of sex.

Using these cosy middle-class nudges to change behaviour is an insult when we leave them in poor housing, we fail to educate their children adequately and we provide a debilitating drip feed of benefits. So you take the nice stuff away, the things that make the crap life a little more tolerable – either by manipulating the price or through bans and controls – and these people will live a few years longer. Another couple of years living in a damp council flat or worse being spoon-fed in some tatty old people’s home. Now that really is something to look forward to!

And yes, my Conservative friends, pretending that it isn’t poverty causing the problem is just as bad as moralising about people’s behaviour. Here are some samples from “Healthy Lives, Healthy People”:

“Rates (of maternal depression) are nearly twice as high among mothers living in poverty and three times as high for teenage mothers.”

“Smoking rates during pregnancy are much higher among lower socio-economic groups and teenage mothers.”

“Rates (of childhood obesity) are higher among some black and minority ethnic
(BME) communities and in lower socioeconomic groups.”

“There is evidence that mental ill health disproportionately impacts on people from the black and minority communities, the homeless and other socially excluded groups.”

I could go on with quote after quote – being poor is a disaster for your health. But out masters see it as a matter of persuasion rather than of action to reduce levels of poverty:

“The latest insights from behavioural science need to be harnessed to help and guide people’s everyday decisions…”

All a bit, ‘Brave New World’ it seems to me. And it gets worse:

“At the same time, we do not have total control over our lives or the circumstances in which we live. A wide range of factors constrain and influence what we do, both positively and negatively.”

So my choice to drink or abstain, to smoke or moan endless about its smell or to eat a great big, fat, juicy burger with loads of chips and not a lettuce – these choices aren’t made by me but by a set of environmental influences. I am entirely a victim of advertising! Not only wrong – and dangerously wrong – but irresponsible and immoral to boot.

The report on public health makes just one brief mention of housing, ignores the importing of diseases like TB and says nothing about wider environmental contributors to disease and ill-health. Although reference is made to how those in work have better health outcomes (duh?), the authors seem more concerned with time off work through ‘smoking-related’ or ‘alcohol-related’ problems than in getting those poor – and more likely to be sick – people back into work.

It seems to me that directing the £4bn spent on 'public health' into making houses drier and warmer, helping people get into work, providing community mental health support, and giving people some practical independent living skills - budgeting, cleanliness, cooking and so on - would be of more value to both the health of the nation and wider society than all the smoking cessation clinics, 'alcohol strategies' and obesity campaigns put together.

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The stuffed hedgehog principle...

There you are having a nice pub meal - steak, chips, onion rings plus maybe something green to show willing. And, looking across the bar, you spy something odd. Not quite sure what it is - might be a stuffed hedgehog. You put it down to experience - I mean what kind of establishment would litter its fireplaces with stuffed hedgehogs?

Yet you return - drawn, fascinated, absorbed even - to view the mystical stuffed hedgehog. OK so it's not all that great a stuffing (on closer examination) and it's trying to crawl up a badger's backside. But, wonder of wonders, it is definitely a real stuffed hedgehog.

Such is the essence of modern life. We are faced with things we don't expect to see - Wayne Rooney studying Latin, the Beckhams pigging out on steak and chips at a Harvester and Jeff Stelling singing plain chant - but never a stuffed hedgehog.

I guess my life is complete now.

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The Glade....

The moment when we spy the break in the gloom is a time of magic. Not - as so many say - the instant when we step into the glade but the time we see the sunlight through the trees. A ray of light that catches the bracken, glints off the young leaves of a sapling and, if we're so lucky, catches a beast in its place.

It is when we see the sunlight that the change takes place. That's when our shoulders unhunch and we straighten our backs. And a little smile slides across our face as we quicken our step towards the brightness.

That moment will come. There will be sunlight shining on the forest glade. We will relax in a moment of sheer joy. Life will be good.

Before we must plunge once more into the darkness of the wood.

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The mist....

The mist wanders like some slightly inebriated ghost across the water as the sun - what little there was - falls down in the sky. The water is still - unblemished by ripple or splash. Revealed is a new wonderland - there reflected in the mirrored surface.

Moon, stars, trees, birds, buildings. And around the corner - beyond the edges of your eyes? Maybe there we'll find naiaids, kelpies and the wonderful water dragon. This isn't just the world of imagination - it is the twilight world we glimpse just occasionally when we stop our mad parade, our obsession with numbers, with facts, with the stomping prose of business.

That world contains something of the truth we are missing. The reason we are unfulfilled, unsatisfied by the pleasures the modern world lays out on its counter.

Which is why we look at the South Pennine views - at Ogden Water - take a breath...and feel the strains and stresses of life tumble from our shoulders. We buy the wonder, the magic. Not with the currency of modern commerce but with an older currency. A currency of blessings, of tears, of touching hands. A money we can't see but know is there.

Pennies we can store up but can't spend - except when we stop, take in the view and soak up the magic.

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Finding the secret places...

We built a den once. It was on the bank of a stream hidden in dense foliage. A sheet of rusty corrugated iron, some old fence posts and bits of old tow rope. It was great - we could watch the stream replete with minnows and sticklebacks, nip through the fence behind to scrump in the allotments and discuss the great matters that concerned us as 10 year old children. It was away from the boring world of grown ups - a secret place.

Except today we're not allowed secret places. Such things frighten those who know better - its not just the idea of "young children" playing out on their own next to a stream but the whole idea of the secret. That place we think is just ours - our den, our magic dell, our place of safety.

Today we just assume the worst. If it isn't that the children are indulging in "anti-social behaviour" (which is an unspecified and general allegation describing any noisy, slightly risky activity undertaken by people younger than us) or else that the riverbank is riddled with funny men just waiting to snaffle the passing 10 year old.

But those secret places are still there. We still seek them out - either in the real world or in that fairyland our minds create. And in those places we are free and calm - content to while away time unbothered by the angry, the interfering and the officious. Those secret places are where we dream our dreams. Where we make the armour that protects us from the horrid real world. Where we can experience the magic that makes living tolerable.

In those secret places dwell the things of our imagination - mythic creatures of our choice. And these things are as real as the dusty, dark, dreariness of the world we head out into from the secret place. The world of money, of toil, of anger and of duty. That world of the busybody.

I plan on spending more time in my secret place - when I find it again.

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The stress, pain and anger of a crowded world - thoughts about the future from the past

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“The incidence of muckers continues to maintain its high: one in Outer Brooklyn yesterday accounted for 21 victims before the fuzzie-wuzzies fused him, and another is still at large in Evsanston, Ill. Across the sea in London a woman mucker took out four including her own three-month baby before a mind-present standerby clobbered. Reports also from Rangoon, Lima and Auckland notch up the day’s total to 69.”

So goes part of the first ‘Happening World’ in John Brunner’s wonderful, new wave SF novel, ‘Stand on Zanzibar’. And it’s odd that the events in Cumbria took my mind straight to this matter-of-fact piece of fictional reportage. The banal manner in which Brunner introduces the ‘mucker’ to the reader is really quite frightening – we’re talking precisely about the sort of event that still today causes us such shock.

In part, Brunner was trying to describe how dehumanising mass population becomes – crowdedness breeds more stress, more risk, more chance of someone running amok. And from this event, a feature of the crowded world, comes the idea of the ‘mucker’, a person – young, old, male, female, white, black, yellow – who snaps and runs riot. Brunner does not explain or analyse, he just presents the ‘fact’ dispassionately. We don’t get to explore the details of the individual cases – we just get the event in stripped down form: “…accounted for 21 victims…”

Stand on Zanzibar is intended as a warning that with numbers come more of these (and other) events – partly a simple response to there being more people and partly a greater incidence descending from the impact of those numbers on our psyches. I’m not sure I agree with Brunner’s analysis but his presentation of the dehumanising effect of crowds is both depressing and revelatory.

Crazed incidents of murder have been a feature of human society for a long while – anyone who meander the by-ways of folk music will be struck by just how many songs there are about murder. So when we look at the events of yesterday – shocked, stunned, perhaps angry – we need to ask two questions: firstly, is this just another tragic, horrible murderous rampage or something else – something preventable; and secondly, does the event speak of a human condition stretching back through history – thankfully a rare condition?

For what its worth – and I’ve made no study of these matters – I feel the answer lies somewhere between. Blaming the gun is a fruitless diversion but trying to appreciate – and maybe on occasion notice – how the stresses, the agonies of everyday life can unhinge someone might prove a more purposeful response. Supporting scientific enquiry (and I don’t mean the ‘crackeresque’, pseudo-psychiatry beloved of the media) into the motives, reason and proximate causes of the rampages – these ‘muckers’ – might prove of some value. Although, I guess the chances of preventing some future incident in some other unfortunate place are pretty slim – if not non-existent.

Right now, the best we can do is to give a thought to others suffering – to pray if that’s your thing. And to hope that those damaged by the event can gather themselves and come to terms with what has happened. And, at some point, get on with the ordinary lives that cause such stress, pain and anger.



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Welcome to Will Hutton's cuddly fascism - his Brave New World

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Will Hutton wrote an article in last Sunday’s Observer arguing in his inimitable, terribly reasonable way that “class” still matters. And what a piece!

Dear old Uncle Will starts with the usual left-liberal stuff about private education – all of which is, of course, just like Eton (not only an exceptionally good school but an exceptionally unusual one even for the private sector). But Will says:

“Britain is a chronically unfair and increasingly closed society and private education plays a central role.”

And he’s clever and important so must be right (and can afford to move to the posh places that have good schools – even grammar schools - as well). But all OK so far, just the usual left wing, politics of envy stuff, nothing new or momentous.

But Will goes further he wants to pull down those who have had the luck to be born into families with engaged parents, rich parents or just plain bloody-minded parents who insist their kids get a good education. Why? Because it’s not fair! We have to chop down all the oak trees so the maples can get more light.

The truth about Will’s article is that there is only one way to achieve the levelling he desires – to abolish parenthood. To declare that only the state has the power to make life fair – and to do this by ensuring that all children are brought up in the same environment, unaffected by the positive or negative influence of biological parents. Here’s Will:

“We owe it to them to create social structures that deliver that (fairness), not structures that manufacture good luck for those who can pay for it and close down opportunity and openness for everyone else.”

There are the words – “create social structures” – the social engineering that the left loves. What Will Hutton seems to want is little different from the frightening social control of “Brave New World”, where parenthood is either wholly constrained or de facto abolished, where Government defined “fairness” is enforced by social services, the police and schools. Where a tiny elite – dominated by the likes of Will Hutton – believe they are bettering mankind.

Well Will, I don’t want your 21st Century social model, your cuddly fascism – I don’t want private provision and initiative emasculated because the state has failed. I want a free society where people stand or fall on their own. And I will not allow my choice and my freedom to be removed for the sake of your misplaced idea of fairness.

As I said earlier Will – life’s not fair.

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Wednesday Whimsy: Slow down and savour the magic

Dearly beloved reader, I want you to slow down, ease up, take some time to look around. A little less of this panicky, frantic rushing about doing “important things” would help. And if you did take the foot off the gas a little perhaps fewer things would go wrong?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those silly folk who think we should go back to carts, peat fires and tepid baths twice a year. Nor am I here to give you a lecture about the futility of the “rat race” - because I don’t think it futile for us to put energy and enthusiasm into enterprise.

I want you to slow down so as to better appreciate the magic of the world: as the great Paul Gallico made clear in “The Man Who Was Magic” – being able to unscramble an egg seems magical but compared to the everyday wonders of nature it is nothing. True magic is the sun reflecting off the frosty fields, the great cream-coloured dinner plate of the moon in the morning sky, the mist clinging to the valley bottom...those ordinary things we speed past everyday without even a moments thought.

Magic is the things that happen without us rushing about, organising, cajoling, shouting and bothering – the child’s first word, the blackbird singing in the dawn, the fruit in the orchard, the ducklings on the pond. Magic is the stuff that makes us smile – not laugh, guffaw or bray but smile – the giggling toddler, the cat chasing his tail, the view as we cross the last crest before home. Magic is ordinary.

But most days we’re too rushed to care. Or even to notice.

So slow down and soak up the magic.