On Sir Terence Conran, RIP

Sir Terence Conran has died.

I knew him vaguely – he once put the phone down on me during an interview because he thought I was being rude. Probably rightly. He did not suffer fools, such as me, lightly.

It comes to few people to change the lives of a generation and more. We all make fun of Habitat – “Shabitat” – but much of our stylish furniture, when we were first married 35 years ago, came from there.

Conrad understood that when people have more money, as in the early 1960s, they want to improve their lives in ways that cannot be measured economically. They want a better environment, better design, better stuff around their homes. The pleasure of a piece of furniture that does not look like it was owned by their parents.

He provided goods, for the home, that were far more aesthetic and pleasing than the drab, grey utilitarian rubbish that endured in the 1950s and the early 1960s. A touch of Scandinavian/Mediterranean light and colour to enliven the lives of a generation that were about to discover the same, at least in the Med, at first hand.

You have to have lived through those times to understand how important that was. The awful food, the drab streets, the sense that nothing in your home could ever be a statement of your own personality and be the creation of designers working through traditions not your own.

Conran grasped instinctively, not through some business plan but like all great retailers do, not just what his customers wanted but what they didn’t know they wanted.

RIP. That Habitat furniture has moved on elsewhere. But we felt better for owning it.

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On Despair

I despair. I despair.

The words “race to the bottom” were coined by Justice Louis Brandeis in 1933 to describe the behaviour of large US corporations who would behave as badly as they could, within the parameters of what was permissible.

We need to revive the concept.

We have a Prime Minister, and I know some of you find this boring but please do not normalise this because this is what he wants, who has:

1) fathered an unknown number of illegitimate children, by some mothers who did not want necessarily to be pregnant.

2) conspired to have a fellow journalist beaten up or worse with a fellow old Etonian, subsequently done for fraud.

3) been fired for laziness and dishonesty from at least two employers. (One my former employer.)

4) had £126,000 of public money diverted to a business run by a former lover.

5) lied persistently, shamelessly and obviously. Not even seen as a problem any more. Just normal.

6) taken a Caribbean holiday off an unknown benefactor, lied about his or her identity. Value an estimated £25,000 to £30,000. We do not know to this day where the money came from. A Russian oligarch? Those are who his friends are.  We know this. What favours were awarded in return?

7) that Jenrick/Desmond affair. Money to the Tories in return for planning favours?

8) the biggest cash donor to the Tories is the wife of Putin’s former finance chief. She funnels the money legally because she is established as a UK citizen. Why? What in return?

9) the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, lied on camera on her stance on capital punishment within several days of taking office. These lies were never challenged. And other lies by Gove, Hancock – who claimed lockdown started on March 16. On the record, he said it. It is out there. Look at your diaries.

10) the latest awards of political honours. Peerages for a Russian oligarch, just days after a formal report suggested Russian oligarchs had too much influence over our political system. Someone Johnson has taken favours from. And for an IRA apologist. And forJohnson’s brother. Why?

11) a Brexit fanatical loyalist, and we all know

who it is, do we not, is accused of rape. The defences circle around. No whip withdrawn because he is a Brexit loyalist. Get sacked, though, for standing up to Johnson on anything.

12) and where is the lying charlatan? Been seen recently?

We just shrug, don’t we? It is just the way it is. What do you expect? It is just Boris being Boris. It’s just Trump being Trump.

This is how democracy dies.

It is the race to the bottom. How badly can we behave, and get away with it?

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On Masks, Parachutes And The Virus

 

I have just gone into a shop. I have worn a face mask. This is as a courtesy to those people serving there, who must interact with hundreds of people a day. They would prefer me to do so. If it makes them happier and feeling more secure, I will do so.

Let us look at the science, and parachutes. The only practical way of testing parachutes is to take, say, 500 people and equip them with parachutes. Take 500 more and do not. Throw them all out of a plane and see who survives.

If the ones with parachutes are still alive, then parachutes work. We know this.

We can’t do that experiment, never could, so we rely on the theoretical science. Air drag, and on the fact that the kinetic energy released on collision with the ground is a function of the velocity of the descending object, a human, and his or her mass. Cut the velocity by air drag and the kinetic energy released is insufficient to kill. Basic physics.

To prove that masks work and lessen the spread of the virus, we need to take a sample of, say, 20,000 people and equip them with masks, then take another 20,000 without masks. Leave them to do  what they will. Come back in two months and compare the relative infection rates between the two sample populations. This will tell you if masks work or not.

This study has never been done.

We therefore fall back again on the theoretical science. This tells you that if you strap a piece of Laura Ashley fabric to your face, the pores within the fabric are several orders of magnitude larger than the virus. You might as well strap a colander to your head.

Proper medical masks work fine but there are not enough to go around for the doctors and nurses who need them. You should not use one to go to your local Tesco.

Sorry, and I am not a mad anti masker on political grounds. Far from it. This is where the science, as I understand it, takes me.

“But if you wear  a mask it must do a bit of good.” Indeed: to pursue the analogy, if you wear a parachute a tenth of the size needed, it must do a bit of good. But not enough.

I will wear a mask where necessary, as a courtesy and to prevent social friction. But can some scientist explain why, if it was deemed essential to wear masks in shops, it took ten days for the Government  to implement this?

On Voting, And Emma Nicholson

“If voting could change anything, they’d make it illegal.” Old saying, from the 1960s counterculture.

The latest eruption in the ongoing culture wars, fuelled by Twitter as ever, is against Baroness (Emma) Nicholson of Winterbourne, who has been stripped of her largely honorary post on the committee that awards the Booker Prize. Her late husband set up the award many years ago.

Her crime was to vote, again some years ago, against the legal establishment of gay marriage, as I understand. Various authors, one of them gay, say this now makes her unsuitable.

Not entirely clear how this connects, especially as this is an honorary post, as I have said. I know a little about Nicholson. She appears to be a typical Shires Tory lady. I doubt she and I agree on anything much but I have to respect her views. She has done a lot of good work for the disabled.

The key point here, and one largely missed I think, is the word vote. Nicholson has been vilified and sacked because, in a democratic vote some years ago, she voted in a way that some now disapprove of. This is how democracy is supposed to work, a free and fair ballot on any subject, and to punish someone for voting the wrong way, some years later, negates the whole concept of democracy, then. And sets, I suggest, a very dark precedent.

For a fair discussion of all this, see today’s column by my fellow Suffolk resident, former colleague and a very brave journalist, Janice Turner. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-righteous-anger-train-is-out-of-control-0zq3cgdkk

ECONOMY, EU, POLITICS

On Cummings, And The Things You Learn On Twitter

There was a woman on Twitter yesterday making a telling point. Not a natural Tory voter, she was in a constituency where the Tories were in the majority. She was discussing Dominic Cummings with her Tory neighbours.

She was astonished by the sheer amount of rage coming over the garden fence. These people hadn’t seen their grandchildren for months because they had obeyed the rules. As people like them do. And now they learn that only the little people are expected to obey those rules.

Note, this was well before Johnson’s apparently ill-judged defence of his aide, a time when we all assumed he would be sacked. Tory MPs will be receiving heart-rending letters from angry constituents in their hundreds – you will have seen some. That elderly relative that died alone in pain because they were not allowed to visit. Two months spent in lonely isolation. The new grandchild they have yet to see.

Some of those Tory MPs will be running scared, especially those in the former Labour constituencies. (The job of MP is one of the few from which you can be removed at random because of events beyond your control. Think of it as a zero hour contract.)

So why did Johnson back Cummings, a stance which has attracted vitriol and outrage from even the Daily Mail?

Three factors. As I suggested here the other day, the two are locked in a cycle of co-dependency. Cummings does the work Johnson is too idle to do. He runs Number 10 and handles the press.

The second, largely unappreciated, is that if Cummings is ousted he could pull the temple down around him. He knows where the bodies are buried. There will be a diary. He could walk into any newspaper office, even those now pouring out the vitriol, and walk out with a column. Or there could be a hastily assembled book.

It would suit his faux Machiavellian style if stripped of power to take down the powerful.

There is a third factor here. I think Johnson is looking for an exit strategy. This is not the job he signed up to do – bumbling around Being Boris, the adoring party conferences, Getting Brexit Done, that was it. Beating the virus requires a level of commitment he conspicuously lacks. It threatens his place in history, how he will be viewed, something of huge importance to him. He must be aware he is failing.

He has a new family, a long way from his first, true, but this must exert its emotional pull.

I doubt he is fully recovered from the virus. He must be aware that affects his performance and threatens that historical legacy.

The final and I think clinching point is the EU. Negotiations appear to have broken down, largely unnoticed in all the kerfuffle over Cummings. The EU is tearing itself apart which does not make it any easier.

This means a hard crash-out and all those things written off as Project Fear. A hard Northern Ireland border seems certain. Queues of lorries outside Dover. A shortage of vital pharmaceuticals. None of these can feasibly be blamed on the coronavirus.

It would be typical of Johnson to walk away first. He could say, I got you out of Europe. Others screwed up in the aftermath. He, as he so often has in the past, evades the blame.

He needs a reason to go, though. Just resigning would look like cowardice. A point of principle? Supporting a loyal aide all others had turned on? Throw in the lingering effects of the virus, to make him a victim. That would work.

All speculation, but I suspect he will be gone by the end of the year. But who on earth would be insane enough, among that Cabinet of non-entities and no-hopers, to want to replace him? This would require someone devoted to public service and prepared to risk their reputation to get the country out of this mess. I don’t see too many of those.

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On Why Cummings Will Never Be Sacked (For Now)

(This blog could be overtaken by events.)

Let us try to think ourselves out of this. What Dominic Cummings did would have seen him sacked from any other position in any public office, and probably any private one.

Having told you and I we must not see our loved ones under any circumstances, and I know the pain caused by some of our friends, for example, being unable to see their grandchildren for the appreciable future, he drove half the length of the country to reunite his family.

Fact. His supporters, the jackals in the right wing, press pile in – they would, they need him for the usual drip feed of “briefings” by “sources close to Number 10”. A system, the press lobby, that has been utterly corrupted by this government. As they have corrupted so much else.

Why, if he has become such an embarrassment, does Johnson not just sack Cummings? Johnson has betrayed everyone else in his life, lovers, colleagues, friends.

Because they are tied together by co-dependency. Cummings needs to fuel his fantasies of being a Nietzschean superman by being close to power. He has achieved little.

Johnson is irredeemably lazy. His entire career has displayed a need to gain the top job, at whatever the cost, and do nothing with it. Just to be top dog, president of the Oxford Union, London Mayor, MP for Henley-upon-Thames, is enough. And PM, in the worst crisis in 75 years. He has no idea what to do.  So do nothing, run away again. Search the fridges.

Johnson needs Cummings to put in the hours because he is too lazy, too idle, to master the briefs. He feels he is too privileged to do so. Only little people work hard. Cummings fulfils that essential role, so he can never be got rid of.

When Stalin died, the first thing they did was to shoot Beria, Stalin’s enforcer. When Johnson goes, which I suspect will not be long, his Beria will not be far behind.

On How We Get Out Of This

So where are we now? It is hard to assess where we will end up, and I am no cleverer than anyone else in this debate, but two forecasts.

One, there will have to be a huge amount of debt forgiveness by the banks. To be specific, a 25 year old who has lost his or her job and owes, say, £10,000 on their credit card, a debt they have been encouraged to run up by said banks, will not in the immediate future repay it.

There will be few jobs for that person to return to. The banks will never see the money again. They might as well write it off.

The consequence is a hit on those banks running into, in global terms, trillions. 2008 all over again, and central banks’ rescue of said private banks, at a massive cost to the state.

This can be funded by printing money. Issue and purchase of government bonds, eg. This generally fuels inflation, cf Zimbabwe, Venezuela. Except that at a time when the oil price, a big element in any measure of inflation, is negligible and retailers are being forced to cut prices, this is unlikely.

The result, as I understand it and my involvement in economics was tangential, is called stagflation.

The second forecast, and this is where it gets controversial, is that all this can be put right by a one off wealth tax. This is an idea gaining traction – there was a good piece by Edward Conway in The Times the other week about this, though he focussed in the difficulties and rowed back from advocating this.

People like me, retired, sitting in valuable properties and with money in the bank, will have to turn over, say, ten per cent of their net worth to the state. A one-off payment. To even out that inter generational unfairness.

This would pay, on Conway’s arithmetic, for all the above, the bank rescues, the support of employees on furlough, the other measures needed. The paradox is that Corbyn could probably have done this. For Johnson, it would alienate his core supporters.

I think, forecast number three, OK I overrun, that Johnson will not be in place within weeks. His behaviour, that bizarre “Now, now, now we need a virus” the other day, suggests he is unravelling. And I suspect there are other issues, for someone whose personal life has always been chaotic. His successor – Rishi Sunak? – could hammer through such a measure.

It you are prosperous and middle class, or elderly

with a good pension, you are going to pay for this.

There is no obvious other option. Think of it as an investment in our children’s futures.

If any economist wants to tell me why any of the above is untrue or wrong, feel free.

What I Learnt From Robert Heinlein

This arrived yesterday. One of my favourite books from my adolescence, which as some of you know was a difficult time.

This is the version with the author’s preferred ending, when the central character dies. (Spoiler alert.) It makes far more sense. Her younger brother’s trajectory, from brilliant but sociopathic 11 year old to a human, requires the death of his sister. Heinlein’s publisher  would not allow her death in an atomic explosion, protecting another sentient creature.

This is how he rewrote it. Heinlein is one of the most misunderstood writers of the 20th century. I learn a lot from him. He started as a pulp fiction writer in the 1940s – Beyond This Horizon is pretty staple, The Day After Tomorrow borderline racist.

By the 50s he was writing what we would now call Young Adult Fiction. Heinlein is not a great writer but I would rank him above JK Rowling. Double Star, Red Planet, Starman Jones, Time For The Stars – these are all books I would recommend for intelligent, questioning tenagers.

By Podkayne, he was trying to move beyond into more adult areas, but the publisher didn’t much like it.

He is best known for Starship Troopers, which I read when I was 12. And again and again. He posited a society in which only veterans could vote, and in which public flogging and execution are the norm.

There was the film, by Paul Verhoeven, that turned it around the other way, making it satire. Great film, but not what Heinlein meant.

There is no evidence that Heinlein thought this was an ideal society. He was a socialist in his youth in the 1930s, not an easy thing to be then. He has depicted societies based on anarchism – The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, possibly his best. A hippie utopia, Stranger In A Strange Land, a society where any physical violence is punishable by mandatory therapy, even a theocracy. No reason to believe he thought any one a good idea.

His reputation has been equally sullied by by the books published in his senescence, when he was probably suffering from some sort of dementia. Though I would put in a word for Job: A Comedy Of Justice, a satire on religion involving parallel worlds.

And The Door Into Summer is possibly the most uplifting SF novel ever written.

On An Epiphany, And Anger Management

I had something of an epiphany the other day. Defined as “a moment of sudden and great revelation or realisation”.

We had a street party on Friday. Many of our neighbours are quite elderly, quite vulnerable. Some are showing signs of having difficulty coping psychologically with the lockdown. We do what we can to support each other. This is what, as human beings, we do.

There is a new book out by a Dutch academic, Rutger Bregman. Human Kind suggests we are rather better, morally, than we think we are. Expect to read a great deal about it – some think it will be this year’s Sapiens, a breakout book of philosophy.

I looked at my neighbours at that street party and I realised – these are the people our Government would be prepared to see die in their hundreds of thousands as “no big deal”.

That was the policy. I suspect it still is. We know Johnson is a moral imbecile – just look at his private life. Cummings has views that verge on pure evil. Eugenics, the weak going to the wall. It is all in hios writing.

And these people are in charge of public policy in the worst crisis in several generations.

Perhaps, next time you get the chance to vote, you might reflect on this.

Meanwhile, I will continue to reflect the anger, the rage, I feel. Sorry.

On Self-Isolation, And The Stranglers

Every day’s just like the last/On the ship, tied to the mast…” Golden Brown, The Stranglers, English rock band.

Dave Greenfield, keyboard player with The Stranglers, died the other day. He was 71, had underlying medical problems and succumbed to Covid-19. Never my favourite band; I saw them live once and they seemed to attract a lot of violent idiots.

The above song is generally reckoned to be a paean to brown heroin. A drug which, and I do not speak from experience, changes the perception of time, allowing it to seem to pass very slowly but still disappear unmarked.

You probably see where this is going. I am not the first to point out that the actual days, under lockdown, seem very slow but the weeks, months seem to concertina. We are six weeks away from when time stopped, but it seems like much less.

We try to mark each day with an event to distinguish it from others – a visit to this shop, a walk down by the river. The high point of one day might be a conversation with a complete stranger, from six feet of distance.

I am using social media to try to keep up a point of contact with someone, anyone, who is not immediate family. This means I am in touch more with people I do not know – that writer in Belgium, that former contact from my days in the City, someone I was at school with half a century ago – than with people I used to interreact with on a daily basis.

I put out music or random tweets, which are picked up and commented on by those same near strangers. This is the paradox of lockdown, touching from a distance. We are social animals, and we need that contact, however random. That conversation with that stranger, six feet apart…

When This Is Over, and this will not be for a long time, will we be different? Yes and no. No, because we will doubtless revert to being the greedy and selfish people we were. Yes, because we will appreciate other people more. Not just the healthcare workers we will hopefully never come into contact with, but the people who have made a difference. Our unfailingly cheerfully postwoman, the lady who has been delivering plants and compost to us and our elderly neighbours, for some of whom their gardens are a lifeline, about the only thing keeping them going.

We will understand the importance of such social interreactions, and we will appreciate them more when they accelerate and we approach more normal times. Some of us are learning how to be human.

But at what a cost. Random thoughts in dark times.