In, Out, In, Out, Shake It All About

It’s a month to R Day. The most momentous date in the British political calendar since 1975. The date that will decide whether Boris Johnson’s all-in gamble pays off and we get a different Old Etonian as Prime Minister. The date that will decide whether there will be another vote for Scotland to leave the UK. The date that will bring out the very worst in modern journalism. And we might just decide whether to leave the European Union or stay in for another forty years.

I was 18 in 1975. The referendum that year was the second time I had voted in a national ballot – the first being the autumn re-run of the previous year’s general election. I voted for staying in, along with two thirds of the people who cast their ballots that day and the rest is history. At that time I had “been abroad” only four times, twice to Spain and twice to West Germany. All of them on school trips. My actual experience of the rest of the Common Market, as we knew it then, was minimal but already I knew that I liked the idea of having a wider horizon than these off-shore islands could offer.

The intervening forty years have been interesting to say the least. I grew up in the days of the cold war and the Iron Curtain. Fifteen years after that referendum the Iron Curtain rusted away. A world order that seemed set in stone proved to be as ephemeral as any that had gone before and the European Community, as it was by then, found that its scope had been more or less doubled. Expansion duly happened and to nobody’s surprise the countries joining from the east were somewhat less developed than those that had received Marshall Plan aid in the post-war period. This led to imbalances in both financial and human capital within the expanded community. The rebalancing, which is still going on, has led to a certain amount of tension and opened the door for countries like the UK to rethink their commitment to the European Union. Which brings us to the forthcoming referendum, and the shouting match that passes for debate which is dominating the airwaves and press today.

When I look at the antics of both the Leave and Remain campaigns I am immediately put in mind of the dying Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet as he calls down “A plague on both your houses!”. It appears that there is no possibility whatsoever of rational debate and the political heavy-hitters on both sides have resorted to appeals to base emotion and fear - not to augment their arguments, but in place of having any. On the one hand Johnson, Farrage, Duncan-Smith and the rest are pandering to the worst ugly, myopic, little-Englander mind set exemplified by the Daily Mail and other elements of the gutter press. Sadly the so-called opposing arguments are nothing of the kind. Cameron and Osborne are basically making the same points but claiming that their vision is better because we aren’t really full members of this odious institution. We can still keep Johnny Foreigner out because we didn’t sign up to Schengen and we don’t need to offer solidarity to our southern European partners because we never joined the Euro.

The economic arguments proposed are more or less vacuous. Will house prices rise or fall as a result of a vote this way or that? Will jobs be created or destroyed? Will the currency fall? Frankly the case on both sides is weak. Economic theory is barely better than examining entrails as a means of predicting the future, and when the models in use are predicated on pre-existing beliefs it is probably worse. For what it is worth I am unconvinced that there will be any substantial economic difference to the lives of most British people whatever decision is taken next month.

So, if the economic arguments are at best suspect and the leaders of both campaigns somewhat (or extremely, take your pick) odious how then to decide which way to vote?

For me it is simple. The question is whether my horizon is large or small. Whether I want to belong to a small community living in fear behind its secured borders or be part of something bigger and broader with a richer culture. Whether I am content to see Westminster and Whitehall govern every aspect of my life or whether I want to see decisions taken at an appropriate level. We don’t need Whitehall Mandarins to decide how much my local authority can spend on children’s services or street lighting, but equally no national government on its own can take meaningful action on climate change, the refugee crisis or the framework for global trade. Above all the seventy years since the end of World War Two have seen the longest period without a war between European nations since the nation state was invented in the Treaty of Westphalia. The European Union as currently constituted is far from perfect (really, really far from perfect) but in my view it offers a more positive and hopeful path to the future than a collection of 28 squabbling, and occasionally warring, nation states. The simple fact of its people having the freedom to live, work and contribute to society anywhere from Galway Bay to the Black Sea seems to me to be most important political achievement of the last hundred years.

So, just as in 1975, I am going to vote to Remain on June 23^rd. I hope that my fellow citizens will decide to do the same. Not because their own economic prospects will be better or worse as a result but because they are able to see beyond the fear mongering and lies and take a view of how the world might yet be a better place for our children than it was for our parents.

Still Scared of Shadows

Last week’s bombs in Belgium were a terrible event. I have spent a lot of time in Zaventem Airport although not so much in the last few years. The 1980s was my Brussels period and I have fond memories of it. I had another small flutter of Belgian activity about five or six years ago and some of the places that I know featured heavily in the TV coverage. I felt quite nauseous at the sight of some of the scenes.

Despite that I would not hesitate for a millisecond if business required me to go to Brussels tomorrow. Similarly, I had no qualms about the prospect of going to Paris in the aftermath of the Bataclan attack. In this I do not believe that I am significantly different to the vast majority of my contemporaries across Europe. We are not super heroes. In fact the vast majority of us are neither super nor heroic, much less both. We are simply rational human beings who understand that life goes on even if it is occasionally interrupted by a tragic event. Maybe we also understand a little about relative risk as well.

How strange then that our friends on the other side of the Atlantic don’t see things the same way. Donald Trump has pronounced that “The UK and Europe are not safe places” following the Brussels atrocities. Where normally we might dismiss anything Trump says as the ravings of a self-interested idiot he has managed to find himself a substantial platform in this strangest of all election seasons. My first reaction to his latest bizarre outburst was one of satisfaction. Maybe it would mean that all the stupid Americans would stay at home and this year’s tourists would be the sane and well-informed kind who are always welcome. Since I live close to one of the major tourist sites in the UK this was really quite a pleasing thought.

My satisfaction didn’t last long. In fact it lasted about four days. That was when I heard from an American friend who will not be attending a meeting scheduled for two weeks from now in a European city that is not Brussels. This is because the company my friend works for has suspended all employee travel to Europe, supposedly because of a State Department warning against such travel. I was sceptical about this alleged warning and when I checked with the State Department web site I found that indeed there was none such. There is actually an “Alert” – a much lower level of notification that includes some sensible advice about avoiding angry crowds and keeping watch on your bags. This is advice that would be applicable in almost any big city in the world.

Now my friend’s employer is a very large company. It is a household name and employs large numbers of people who are very intelligent indeed. So why is it behaving in this way which is not only stupid but is doing the terrorists’ work for them?

I can only think that it comes back yet again to the isolation of the USA from the rest of the world community, exacerbated by the sensationalist and partisan entertainment presented as news coverage in much of the American mass media. In 2015 over 32,000 people were shot dead in the USA. That’s almost a thousand times more than were killed in Brussels. The number of people killed in Europe by terrorist action has been steadily declining for the last twenty five years as this graphic from The Independent newspaper shows:

Even in the darkest days of the 1970s and 80s when the terrorist threat in Europe was much higher than it is today it still killed fewer than one seventh of the number of Americans killed by other Americans with guns last year. In each of the years from 2012 to 2014, and quite likely again this year, the number of terrorist victims in Europe was lower than the number of toddler victims in the USA (one per week on average). And by the way, this doesn’t refer to toddlers getting shot. This is the number of toddlers (under three years old) doing the shooting.

Now this isn’t another polemic about America’s need for some sort of gun control. That case has been made by better pundits than me. This is about relative risk and how a major US corporation can allow its people to move freely around the land of the gun-toting pre-schooler and yet prevent them travelling to what is statistically the safest region on Earth. What are the thought processes? Who influences the decisions? When will rational analysis prevail?

I have no idea.

Scared of Shadows?

Last week the schools were closed for a day in Los Angeles. Almost seven hundred thousand children missed a day’s education because of a threat that was received in an email that apparently originated in Germany. The same email was sent to the authorities in New York and possibly several other cities, who took very little time to determine that it was not a credible threat. Their counterparts in Los Angeles took a different line and ordered the closure of the schools. 1,500 of them were closed and 2,800 law enforcement officers conducted searches of school premises at a cost of “millions of dollars” according to City Councilman Paul Krekorian. And 17 year old Andres Perez who should have been in class was hit by a truck and killed in Highland Park.

This is just one incident of many that prompt the question – “What are Americans so scared of?”.

The United States is by an enormous margin the mightiest power the world has ever seen. Partly that is a function of timing. In their days the Roman and Chinese Empires and even the British Empire were all as dominant as the USA is today but they didn’t have the sheer economic and military muscle that has resulted from two hundred years of the industrial revolution. On the other hand those earlier empires appeared much stronger than the USA of today in the confident manner with which they confronted the world.

The Los Angeles school closure is just the latest example of fear-driven behaviours that have changed life for the worse. Many of them are irrational and actually cause more damage than the problems they are supposed to solve. The most obvious of these is the complete political impossibility of restricting the availability of deadly firearms. Many people in the USA – and I have met and talked to some of them – genuinely believe that they need a gun for “protection”. It doesn’t matter how much evidence is accumulated that owning a gun makes it much more likely that you will be killed by one. The belief persists and is acted upon.

Some of the behaviours are genuinely risible. For many years whenever I entered the USA I had to fill in a form that asked a number of questions about me and my intentions. Did I intend to overthrow the government? Had I been guilty of moral turpitude? I understand that the questions are mandated by Act of Congress and would require another Act to change them. They are still stupid. But in terms of costly stupidity they pale into insignificance compared to the antics of the Transportation Security Agency. This panic response to the 9/11 atrocities now employs 55,000 people at a cost of $7.5 Billion per year and has so far caught not a single terrorist. It is a colossal waste of resources and the source of enormous frustration to millions of travellers forced to endure the indignities it visits upon them. And yet it is politically untouchable. Like the pistol in the bedside cabinet of otherwise sane Americans it is there “just in case”. Just in case the next terrorist attack uses exactly the same methods as previous ones. Just in case the completely impracticable process of producing binary liquid explosives proves to be a real threat despite all the analysis that has demonstrated that it isn’t. Just in case an evil-doer might be such a convincing actor that a flight crew would mistake a child’s water pistol for a real gun.

The fact is that the TSA is untouchable because of fear. The fear of 435 Members of Congress and 100 Senators that they will lose their seats if they vote to get rid of it or even to moderate its stupidity. Given the current state of US politics the fear is probably well-founded.

All of the current candidates for the Republican presidential nomination are running campaigns based on fear. Fear of “terrorism” is the most prominent although there seems to be little agreement on how to actually define terrorism. In the rhetoric of Trump, Carson, Fiorina and all the others only Islamic terrorism seems to count – in 2015 at least. Another fear is economic. The fear that other parts of the world are achieving economic success at the expense of the United States. Fear that living standards are depressed by an influx of cheap manufactured goods from China and cheap labour from south of the border. And then there are the truly irrational fears that improving the lives of historically oppressed groups such as women, ethnic minorities and gay people will necessarily make things worse for the previously dominant sections of society.

All of these fears are demonstrably based on falsehoods but all of them appeal to a certain narrative that is strong in US society. It is a narrative that will drive the USA down the path that is familiar to any student of history, the path of the declining empire. Time and again through the ages a dominant power has faded away because it was unable to adapt to changing times. Persia, Greece, Rome, Spain, and of course Great Britain all enjoyed their time of dominance and all faded away when the times changed. In every case the rulers and the privileged were the last to understand what was happening.

In the 21^st century the rules of engagement have changed compared to the ancient world or medieval times. Obtaining an empire by military conquest is no longer desirable. The development of nuclear weapons has made the dream of world conquest in the style of Alexander or Napoleon infeasible. Extending influence by economic means is the name of the game today. The most influential great power across Africa today is without doubt China – a country that has never put a combat soldier in the field outside its own region. And yet the USA continues to spend more on its military than the combined total of the next seven major powers. Even if the USA reduced its military expenditures by 75% there is still zero possibility that its homeland could be conquered by any conceivable military force. It is said that generals are condemned to be always ready to fight the battles of the last war. The same may be said for whole civilisations.

So if all the fears are unfounded why do they persist? To put it another way, who benefits by keeping the people terrified?

The obvious answer is politicians like Donald Trump. He has garnered huge support by pandering to the fears of the American people. But in many ways Trump is just the visible manifestation of a much deeper issue. The USA, like many Western countries, is about thirty years in to a social revolution which has reversed a long-term trend. In these countries wealth is being concentrated into a smaller and smaller group within society. In his book “Capital in the 21^st Century” published last year, Thomas Piketty demonstrated that this is an inevitable consequence of the essential workings of capitalism unless it is checked by deliberate government action. Until the 1970s that government action was considered to be a basic responsibility. It was the mark of a civilised state that its government should support Jeremy Bentham’s fundamental axiom (See Enlightened Stories) of seeking the greatest good for the greatest number.

Not any more. Since the 1980s the tide of politics has turned. Concentration of wealth into a smaller number of hands is not only acceptable it is the inevitable consequence of policies that have become mainstream. Regressive taxation which bears down heavily on the poor and practically bypasses the rich has become the norm. The movement of capital around the world to exploit low-wage economies at the expense of middle class people in the US and Europe is an established – and highly lauded – business strategy. The fruits of the staggering technological developments of the last hundred years are being apportioned in a manifestly unjust manner.

So why do people put up with it? Why is it impossible for a politician who advocates a return to Benthamite values to get elected? That’s where the fear comes in.

George Orwell was one of the great thinkers and writers of the 20^th century. In 1984 his picture of a world divided into three competing super powers in which populations were controlled by maintaining a constant state of war rings eerily true today. Of course it didn’t predict every facet of modern life and of course it would be folly to take it as a manifesto for today’s world. That said I can’t help thinking of Orwell whenever I hear a politician talk about the “War on Terror”. There is nothing better than an open-ended and fundamentally unwinnable “war” to excite the public and distract it from other political issues that have far more impact on their lives.

As long as people are fearful they are less likely to be angry with their leaders. And as long as they aren’t angry about things that could be fixed then nothing much can change. It suits the immensely wealthy individuals and organisations that finance politicians to keep the fear flowing. The mass media are, in general, controlled by the same interests that finance the politicians. It should come as no surprise that the furtherance of fear and ignorance is such a big part of their business strategy.

So the United States lives in a constant state of fear. And yet it doesn’t. On an individual level and at the level of communities the people of the United States are capable of enormous levels of courage, not to mention care of the weak and kindness towards strangers. Whether it's the 9/11 firefighters who ran towards the collapsing towers or the bravery under fire of Chief Warrant Officer Edwin J. Hill, during the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941 (If you don’t know about Hill, it’s worth a few minutes of your time to read his story here) or the every day courage of the families caring for disabled children across the country, Americans are tough, strong and brave. So why as a nation do they allow themselves to be ruled by fear? And more importantly how can they change that?

Those questions are too big for me to answer, especially as a non-American. Whatever the answers are they have to come from within. One thing that might help would be more engagement between ordinary Americans and the rest of the world. It is an often-quoted factoid that only about 5% of Americans travel overseas each year. That’s not many  compared to other developed nations but given the size of the country and the low number of vacation days that Americans enjoy it’s not that outlandish. But you don’t have to travel physically to engage with others. In today’s world it’s easy to see foreign movies and TV, to play online games with people on the other side of the world and to eat exotic food from every continent. It’s easy so why don’t many more people do it? Crack that puzzle and there may be a way to reduce the fear of the unknown.

And then there is religion. For a country with a constitutional separation of church and state there’s a whole lot of bible-bashing in American politics. Things might just improve a bit if the folks who bring you ideas like Original Sin, The Last Judgement and The Rapture were to confine themselves to the realm of the personal and play less of a part in the body politic.

Whatever the solution I do have confidence in the American people that they will eventually find it. There will probably be more bumps in the road. The fear mongers will have some more successes along the way but if the USA is to avoid the fate of those earlier empires reason will have to prevail in the end. And I am a great fan of reason, as I may have mentioned before.