A Radical New Government? An update.

This morning, I listened to The Laura Kuenssberg Show, featuring Labour leader, Kier Starmer, and I have slightly moderated the views I outlined in my last blogpost. In that post I attacked the Tories for their ideological stance on the NHS and Brexit. The opposite position to ideological dogma is pragmatism, which is the idea that we don’t impose ideas onto reality but respond to the world as it really appears to be.

In his interview, Starmer said that his values, in respect of the NHS, were to oppose further privatisation, but that the practical reality he is likely to have to engage with, if he became Prime Minister, would be that he would have to reduce hospital and doctors’ patient waiting times, and that would mean having to use private health services. I can’t criticise the Tories for their idealism and lack of pragmatism, while at the same time insisting that Starmer stick to his principles. So perhaps I should give him more of a chance.

Not sure that his pragmatic approach to Brexit was quite so convincing though. When the British people voted for Brexit, they weren’t given the option of whether they thought we should leave the Single Market, the Custom’s Union or whether they thought we should allow free movement. Yet we left all of these, which were driven through by the Tory ideological zealots with, a kind of, winner takes all mentality, regardless of the impact they might have on ordinary peoples’ lives or on the economy. Why did Brexit happen? The only possible driver for Brexit could have been the intuitive drive to promote British sovereignty and its perceived status in the world, underpinned by feelings of patriotism, but what is patriotism and why is it there?

As human beings we seem to have an instinct for what scientists call in-group/out-group behaviour, and patriotism is a manifestation of that fundamental human instinct. We divide us, Britain, from them, the EU and all those other funny foreigners. The problem is that the instincts that underpin our behaviour evolved during the emergence of our species, when we were living in tribal units in a world very different to the one we live in today, and under the auspices of the mechanistic forces of nature, like Darwinian natural selection, and selfish genes, that have no moral dimension nor any bearing whatever on what we want, or should want for ourselves. The consequences of the behaviour of the simple-minded ideologs, like Brexiteers, could have even more profound and dangerous consequences:

We evolved; we are a species of social primate with a suite of behavioural attributes. If we are to understand what it is to be human, we must learn what these instincts are, the context in which they evolved and to confront them where necessary. This has important implications for philosophy, our view of ourselves, and by extension politics.

In the final episode of my series of podcasts, I pose the question “Could our species be terminally ill with the genetic disease of patriotism?” In a world bristling with nuclear weapons, it may turn out that Brexit is the least of our worries.

Find out more by listening to my podcasts: https://podcast.peterdfisher.com/share

A radical new government to deal with radical problems?

We are indeed living in strange times. The National Health Service is on its knees, or as in the words of Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer, “it’s not just on its knees, it’s on its face”. People are dying on hospital corridors, or in their homes waiting for ambulances that don’t arrive on time, or sometimes not at all, while all the main stories in the press, on the BBC and news channels is what Harry said about Wills. What is going on? Don’t ordinary people matter anymore? When did we lose perspective? Has human life somehow been sneakily devalued?

The undermining of the NHS, and by extension the value of human life itself, seems to have happened directly as a result of the failure of successive British governments to understand what is important.

When the Tories were elected twelve years ago, they had a clear vision of how things should be run. No one doubts that they had a plan, a clear and simple ideology, that they “knew” would provide the answer to the problems of the British economy. Simple minded ideologies are wonderful things, and they have special appeal to the simple minded. In the clear-cut Tory doctrine, if they focussed on creating economic growth, they would be better able to fund public services, and they claimed, paradoxically, that by cutting back spending on public services with swinging austerity measures, that the economy would be freed from the cost burdens creating a boom time, and that these “jam tomorrow” policies would eventually produce benefits for all. A less kind interpretation of their aims, given that all during the austerity period they cut taxes for the better off, was that they and their supporters had an antipathy about paying their fair share of tax, and just wanted a better income for themselves. Why put their hard-earned income into the pockets of ordinary folk, and especially the subset of the “poor” who they deemed workshy benefit scroungers?

Now, I am not an economist, and the following comments must be seen in that light, but as I understand it, economies are driven by supply and demand. And what the Tories wanted to do was to support the supply side of the economy: the small businesses, the producers, entrepreneurs and multinationals (their people), who, in their mind, produced the wealth. Unfortunately, the deficits of poor ideologies, whether clear-minded or not, are soon revealed. As soon as simplicity collides with the complexity of reality things start to go wrong. As I see it, there are two problems with the Tory approach, one is that if the better off do well they tend to filter much of their money into offshore tax havens so that tax revenues are reduced, and this money is effectively lost to the economy, reducing the effectiveness of their policy. The second is that for a supply/demand economy to work effectively there has to be a balance between the two parts, and by imposing pay restraint on vast sectors of the working population, this necessarily reduces demand. The supply side cannot make big profits, grow the economy, and pay their taxes if no one can afford to buy their products, which is where the impoverishing of the majority in an austerity driven economy inevitably leads.

Most people in Britain were clever enough to be suspicious about the Tory’s wonderfully clear vision for the future, despite the Tory “friends in high places” right-wing press propaganda. And in election after election the majority of voters voted against them, unfortunately the corrupt first-past-the-post electoral system meant that they won time after time, and in one case with a massive majority.

However, no one can deny that the British public voted for the Tory policy of Brexit however narrowly the result was, even if the suggested benefits of it were grossly exaggerated, and even lied about, and the hard-line extreme Brexit that was eventually implemented seriously damaged the economy, and meant that one part of Britain, Northern Ireland, was left without any government at all.

While the Labour Party have much to be proud of for creating the NHS in the first place, the half-way-house policies of Tony Blair introduced an internal market in the NHS, and we now see the results of that policy as contractors are now creaming off NHS funding for their own private profit, at the expense of the taxpayer, and robbing funding from the cash starved hospital trusts who desperately need the money.

If, as expected, the Labour Party win the next election, they will be faced with a massive task to rebuild the country and repair its devastated economy. Radical action will be necessary. A new EU referendum would obviously be a necessary step, and a recent poll found that two thirds of the British public would favour a second referendum. And, in the massive NHS crisis, where innocent people are dying all over the country, what is the cornerstone of Sir Keir’s message? While he is right to want to increase taxes for non-doms and those who can oppose it, his key policy seems to be… Wait for it… More devolution. Let’s move decision making from Westminster out to the regions. What! Who cares? People want their loved ones to have ambulances available for them. They want to know that if they become ill, they will have the treatment they have a right to expect, they want to know that their wages will be enough to cover their monthly costs. At a time like this, who among the general population is interested in devolution? As for a second EU referendum this also seems to have been ruled out.

Will we get a Labour government the country needs? The signs do not look good.

Where Lord Lamont gets it wrong.

Here is my response to Lord Lamont’s glorification of patriotism in his recent article in Prospect Magazine: (also posted on the Prospect website)

Lamont’s argument is intellectually impoverished. It depends on an emotional attachment to the in-group.  While it is true that human beings are tribal animals and we evolved to form ourselves into distinct entities defined by commonalities such as national, religious and cultural allegiances, it is a mistake to think that this is an reasoned intellectual argument as opposed to an emotional one. Given the devastating consequences of human division throughout human history, it is worth asking whether proper critical analysis of our evolutionary history should be urgently undertaken.  Such an analysis might well reveal the tribal instinct is anachronistic hangover behaviour.  “Noble” instincts like Patriotism are hugely powerful emotions and it might seem intuitively obvious that one should respect and value them, but because something feels good, it does not mean that it is good.    Intuitively we want to feel we belong, and this underpins patriotism, and more questionable instincts like nationalism and its decidedly negative manifestations such as discrimination and nationalistic extremism.  It is this inner emotional connection to our group which may incline people to inadvertent intellectual dishonesty.  If it is patriotic, and therefore desirable, to care about our own people, then it is hard to see why 1930s German Nationalism with its intrinsic emotional attachment to the Fatherland can in any way be distinct from what we today think of as patriotism.

If this view is the correct one, whatever its faults, the EU project, by subverting these deep and dangerous instincts into multiple identities is doing the world a great service. A point understood by its founders who were arguably better placed, in the aftermath of the Second World War, to be aware of the dreadful consequences of the dangers of nationalism.

It may seem intuitively obvious that it is right to love your country, but these are compound instincts. Sitting on top of base nationalism is an emotional spin that glorifies and ennobles it.  It is perhaps time to question the grandiose elevation of extremely dangerous instincts into something they are not, and to confront the blind commitment to misplaced emotionalism that underpins Brexit.

Is it just me?

Is it just me that is ashamed of being British? What happened to our compassion, tolerance and respect for others?  When the hell did we start thinking that we should close our country to desperate refugees, and turn our backs on drowning kids?  After Brexit the number of hate crimes has soared.  Or is it that Britain has always been a nasty, unpleasant nation and I just hadn’t noticed?

There is a simple question that was at the heart of the Brexit debate and it was this:

Is it better to bring nations together or to divide them?  

What else was there to say?

After the Second World War politicians, who all had direct experience of war, decided that it would be better for Europe to be brought together in closer economic and political ties.  What is it with us now that we think that we are so clever that we can disregard all that wisdom and experience?  Even the briefest look at our history shows us that we have been at war with one country or other in Europe throughout during most of the last thousand years.  Very few of us can remember the war now.  It is just a shame we lack the imagination to realise just how bad things could get.  We all have bloody families for God’s sake.   Maybe we don’t even care about them now.

I have become disgusted at what my country has become.  Just me then?

(Readers with overdeveloped tribal instincts may send their death threats to  Peter D Fisher at my usual email address.)