The New Yorker and a new government

The journalist John Cassidy, writing in The New Yorker the day after the EURef result, cut through the confusion with a clarity some of us may have struggled to muster. Even so it would be interesting to delve deeper and discover quite what Cassidy meant.

He began his explanation of the results as follows

     ‘The EU has never been particularly popular with ordinary people in the UK, particularly England.’

I wonder who he means by the term ‘ordinary people’. Does he mean people aged 18-65 who go to work every day? Does he mean folks in social housing or in privately-rented accommodation? Perhaps he means couples with two children with a financed-car and a mortgage. Or does he mean 50% of the population in twenty-thirty-years-olds who don’t possess a university degree? Presumably ‘ordinary’ doesn’t mean yacht-owning, privately-educated well-to-do men and women.  Other points he makes refer to deindustrialisation.

·          ‘Most commentators … were assuming …prudence and risk aversion would generate a swing in favour of Remain

·         The Remain vote was particularly weak in the West Midlands and the Northeast of England, two areas that have been hit hard by deindustrialisation.’

I was brought up in the West Midlands at a time when there was full employment. Since the days of Margaret Thatcher unemployment has risen and the area has never fully recovered from the demise of the great steel works. When I was growing up our high street had restaurants, Marks and Spencer and high-class boutiques. My family was protected from deindustrialisation as dad was a grammar school headteacher and my brother has worked as partner in a well-established Midlands’ law firm for decades. Friends of mine who still live in my home town talk about the numbers living there who are now on benefits. I never knew anyone on benefits when I was at grammar school in the Midlands. I only met benefits-users in my fifties - and that’s since I started living in prosperous Bath. But, yes, people living in post-industrialised regions have been finding life hard, probably since the 1980s.

Cassidy echoes points made by Prof Curtice of Strathclyde University as referendum votes were counted:

·         ‘The Guardian has published some telling charts … they show gaping class divisions. Those with college degrees tended to opt for Remain…The older and poorer you are, the more likely you were to vote Leave.

·         The British working classes and lower middle classes, particularly those living in the provinces, have delivered a stinging rebuke to the London-based political establishment’

Back to the West Midlands, again.

On another tack I believe Cassidy sums up the Farage-effect well:

·         ‘Although much of the immigration into the UK comes from outside of the EU the Leave forces were able to focus attention on the freedom of movement for workers, which is one of the founding principles of the EU

·         …economic anxieties … underpinned the political anger that fuelled the Leave vote. Nigel Farage … (was) able to exploit these economic worries, directing them against settlers and other easy targets.’

If life is hard you have to have someone to blame. Farage harnessed this need to accuse. 

Let’s hope Theresa May, our PM for less than twenty four hours, genuinely believes her own words. As she addressed the nation she spoke up for those householders who are ‘just managing’ in financial terms. Her speech outside no.10 yesterday, a few minutes after being asked by the Queen to form a government, sounded as though she would seriously consider those who were in insecure jobs. It appeared those who were struggling financially would be at the heart of her government’s policies. Cassidy, back in June, commented on inequality in Britain:

·         ‘…decades of globalization, deregulation and policy changes that favoured the wealthy have left Britain a more unequal place … the legacy of increased national inequality in the 1980s’

Back to Margaret Thatcher who, some would say, defined 80’s Britain. Cassidy also believes Cameron made mistakes:

·         ‘…the Remain campaign was uninspiring in the extreme

·         …it can be argued that Cameron’s mistake occurred as far back as 2013, when, in an effort to satisfy the Eurosceptics inside his own Conservative Party, he pledged to hold a referendum …before 2017

·         Steve Hilton, a former political adviser to Cameron, said “People have expressed real anger at being ignored by the system, and I think this is at the heart” of what happened

·         To get people to turn out and vote in your favour, you  also have to give them something positive to rally behind’

Instead of saying how awful it would be outside Europe the Remain campaign didn’t help themselves by making clear the positive advantages of Remaining.

Personally I am very pleased to see a woman in no.10. I don’t vote Tory but the current state of the Labour party means Theresa May might have little opposition, even with a tiny majority of 12, in the House of Commons. Come on Labour! I am so glad to see the destroyer of schools - Michael Gove - out of her cabinet. One can only hope that May will appoint Secretaries of State for Education and Health who do more than criticise hard-pushed professionals. John Cassidy has summed up the reasons the Brexit vote won. I hope Theresa May helps hard-working teachers, doctors, nurses, teaching assistants, carers, office workers, shopkeepers, bus drivers. These are the people I define as ‘ordinary’. Some of them will be doing more than ‘just managing’. Others will be suffering after years of “Austerity Britain.”

Everyone who works hard can do without the toxic criticisms of Gove, Hunt et al. My only worry is that, as Home Secretary, Theresa May rubbed up the police force the wrong way. If she considers them to be part of the non-elite and she wants to help them, plus others who work hard, she’ll have to put some of the compassion at the heart of Christianity into her politics. Her father was a vicar. Was he a compassionate Christian? If so has any of it rubbed off on her?

The UK needs to make an informed choice

Timothy Garton Ash wrote in The Guardian, Saturday 25^th June, under A Farewell to Europe. He stated the beginnings of the EU and some of its current issues go back a long way. In 1989 the Berlin wall came down. ‘As their price for supporting German unification France and Italy pinned Germany down to a timetable for an overhasty, ill-designed and overextended European monetary union. As a result of their liberation from Soviet communist control, many poorer countries in eastern Europe were set on a path to EU membership, including its core freedom of movement. And 1989 opened the door to globalisation, with spectacular winners and numerous losers.’ Back to the workers living in social housing in my earlier post.

Ash commented further: ‘The eastward enlargement of the EU in 2004 was followed by a large westward movement of people and … 2 million of them came to Britain. …pressures on public services – and on housing stock in a country that for decades has built far too few homes – have been felt acutely by the less well-off… Their concerns are widespread…Unfortunately populist xenophobes such as Nigel Farage exploit these emotions, linking them to subterranean English nationalism.’

Where is Farage now? Living off the earnings of his German-born wife now he’s stood down as leader of Ukip? He’s helped bring the country out of the EU and he’s gone very, very quiet. He isn’t the only one demonstrating far-right views. Marine Le Pen speaks a similar language in France, Geert Wilders, Dutch politician and leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom, wants Turkey to remain outside the EU. He tried to work with Le Pen, right-winger Strache, for the Austrian Freedom Party, Salvini, heading up Italy’s Lega Nord – The Northern League, and Gerolf Annemans of  Belgium’s Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest). The notion was to form their own parliamentary group in the European Parliament. The Greek Golden Dawn and Poland’s Congress Party were not included so no new party was formed. Now, in the USA, we have Trump showing his true hand. I will not repeat his vicious attack on a variety of peoples but in the view of Ash: Wilders, Le Pen et al are ‘…trumpery European-style’.

Back to the effects on Britain. Farage is a millionaire. Having brought us out of the EU I am sure he won’t suffer personally. As Ash writes ‘We will pay the economic price for years to come. The costs will probably fall especially hard on the less well-off who voted for Brexit.’ And why did we have to have a referendum? Jeanette Winterson writing in The Guardian, also June 25^th, ‘What did surprise me was that Cameron and Osborne would risk the first full-power Tory government in decades on a gamble with an unelected cartoon character from a time-warp. Nigel Farage is ridiculous. But he has won. There was no need for a referendum. What was needed was a firm cross-party consensus explaining why the EU is not the problem facing Britain.’ 

As people having been moving since the fall of the Berlin Wall we have had migrant workers in Britain for many years. We rely on them. What we haven’t had is reasonably-priced housing, council housing to replace those sold off under Thatcher and proper funding for the NHS and state education. It seems to me the choice made by 52% of the voting population to leave the EU was a bad one. But where were the facts? Who knew what they were voting against? Voting against a lack of good, affordable housing and employment opportunities should be aimed at a British elite. Not the EU. 

We may actually have more immigration, not less, now that France is suggesting we roll back the borders from Calais. We may become a much smaller economy, especially if Scotland votes to leave the UK.  As Polly Toynbee wrote in the same edition of The Guardian ‘Soon those leave voters will find they were swindled. The foreigners will still be there. No new homes, hospital appointments or nursery places freed up by a migrant exodus.’

‘…Future US presidents will fly over us to the EU.’ Toynbee puts the blame squarely at Cameron’s feet and echoes Winterson’s surprise at Cameron and Osborne’s stance. ‘But in the end it was (Cameron’s) government’s relentless small-state austerity that tilled the ground for popular rebellion… He closed the Sure Starts, libraries, leisure centres and day centres that once held communities together. He accelerated right-to-buy so close-knit estates lost a third of flats, sold off to private landlords to fill with exploited migrant men. He is slicing away the lifeline of tax credits.’

And we have come out of the EU because of this? I doubt the EU made the decision for all the above closures, the rise of private landlords and abandoning the tax credit system.

As I write Farage is no longer on our screens, Cameron has resigned and Osborne isn’t on the ballot papers for the Conservative party leadership. Boris Johnson was speaking in the House of Commons only hours ago stating that migrant workers were welcome. Yet two weeks ago he was fighting to leave the EU, won, and at the same time lost. To Michael Gove.  

One chink of light in this shocking, confusing fall-out is that should Theresa May become our next PM she has said she wants a Britain for all strata of society not just for the elite. Let’s hope she is our next leader. I don’t vote conservative but she is the most sensible choice and as a country we need to start making sensible choices again. First inform the people so they can make an informed choice!

A let down

                                                  After the Brexit Vote

We were on holiday in Guernsey, a non-EU bailiwick of the UK, for EU referendum day.  Our postal vote, sent in on June 3^rd, stated we wished to remain. I hardly slept the night of June 23^rd, too eagerly engaged with the BBC news as the votes came in. Yes, even Guernsey is not beyond the reach of the internet. Indeed signals were excellent. But the news, at 4.40 a.m., UK time, showed Brexit was winning by a million votes. Birmingham, predicted to vote Remain, did not follow anticipated voting patterns. We were OUT of the EU.

Ian Jack, Guardian Opinion, June 25^th, wrote ‘Just as the pound was reaching its peak, Iain Duncan-Smith said: “Turnout in the council estates is very high.” It was about a quarter past ten.’ (Fifteen minutes after the polls had closed and the BBC’s live EURef programme had started its overnight broadcast.)

To my mind that comment about council estates seemed very class-ridden. Ian Jack said canvassers for Remain had told him “The Greens got the Tube stations, Lib Dems did the shoppers, Labour went “round the estates”.’ 

So Britain still has council estates? I thought social housing had been all but demolished, during Thatcher’s reign, to around 10% of former council-owned housing stock. Yet now the council estates' vote seemed so pertinent in the EURef. I D-S had hit on something. Ian Jack quoted Michael Sandel, an American political philosopher, on the British working class. “The sources of their dignity, the dignity of labour, have been eroded and mocked by … globalisation, the attention that is lavished … on … financial elites.” The working classes had plenty to protest about.

Jack continued: ‘On Sky TV Michael Gove spoke of how his father’s fish business in Aberdeen had been “destroyed by the European Union.” In fact, a report in The Guardian showed that the senior Gove had sold his business rather than closed it.

Believe Michael Gove if you will but since this article was written he has already managed to get Boris Johnson out of the running for Conservative Party leadership and gone against his own words – he had said he wouldn’t run for party leadership.  Yet he is, today, a fortnight after votes were cast, hours away from being second in the running for PM. Theresa May is way ahead in the votes for party leadership - and she voted to remain. Thank heavens for small mercies. May might be one of the few adults around capable of running the country since EURef.

On the same Saturday Philip Aldrick, writing in The Times stated ‘British industry has been left reeling by the European Union referendum result as fears increased that carmakers based in the UK and big aerospace companies such as Rolls-Royce and Airbus would transfer work abroad.’ Those companies used to be based near the school where I taught; it had a non-privileged intake. Some reports say such areas are worse off now than in the Depression of the 1930s. How will Brexit help those people who have already suffered from unemployment and worsening prospects? If big companies move off our shores working class labourers will have fewer choices after Brexit than before. Did Michael Gove point this out  to voters in his rush to greatness? Derby-based Toyota has likely had the go-ahead to build new hybrid cars scuppered since EURef. Again it will be workers in these industries who suffer the most. It’s the poor what gets the blame.

Back to The Guardian. John Harris said the ‘...signs of discontent have been obvious for years... In Peterborough in 2013 we found a town riven by cold resentments, where people claimed agencies would only hire the non-UK nationals who would work insane shifts for risible rates.’ He continued ‘Last year 3.8 million people voted for Ukip. The Labour party’s vote is in seemingly unstoppable decline… Jeremy Corbyn might be seen as that problem incarnate. The trades unions are nowhere to be seen, and the Thatcher-era ability of Conservatism to speak to working-class aspiration has been mislaid.’

The working classes feel let down and the referendum gave them voice. Sadly as the country makes plans to leave the EU it seems their lives will likely be further blighted. Their issues are closer to home. Leaving the EU will make things harder for them, not easier. Did Brexiteers know what they were voting for? What now for the impoverished living in council housing? They have suffered from austerity, reduction in local services, underfunded schools and a stretched NHS. Will leaving the EU help their plight?

Pause - Brexit - Pause

It has been more than a month since my last piece. There are good reasons for that: we did get away to lovely Guernsey - a jewel in the English Channel. That explains the first pause. In addition we have been glued to news channels, newspapers, online news, the radio 4 Today programme - yes, even in tranquil Guernsey. Unsuprisingly Brexit has caught our attention.

While others were queuing to vote on June 23rd we were sunbathing on white sands in the bailliwick of Guernsey, a non-EU member, having used our postal vote on June 3rd. No resident of Guernsey had a vote, of course. The BBC online news stated '... The Channel Islands are not part of the UK.' We learned a lot - more than we wanted - on that fateful day.

I watched the results of the referendum until 4.40 a.m. I hardly slept thereafter as the news was not what I wanted to hear. I hadn't voted for Brexit. I felt PM David Cameron should not have called for a referendum and should not have allowed Nigel Farage - an MEP who wants the UK to be independent - the oxygen of publicity.

Friday's newspapers, on the 24th of June, revealed little as they had gone to press well before that fateful hour. At approximately 4.45 am the Brexiteers had gained too many votes for the Remain camp to be able to overtake them. The papers could only report on this in the Saturday editions - the day we travelled back to Bath. One of the very few pleasing elements in the post-EURef gloom is that Bath voted to remain. I was going home to a city where there weren't huge swathes of unemployed, poorly-paid, poorly-educated people who wanted to leave the EU. ( According to Professor Curtice of Strathclyde University such groups of people were more likely to vote to leave the EU.) I have taught  for many years in depressed areas - people's lives are stresed - their finances pinched - their opportunities reduced.  I would be less likely to meet people who shouted racist abuse at migrant workers. Bath has two universities.
( Professor Curtice suggests graduates generally want to remain in the EU). Many under-graduates and comfortably well-off post graduates reside here. Our local shop is run by an Asian couple who come to our parties; he is a graduate. Frequently we are driven in a taxi by a chap from Turkey and other times by a young man from Iran. A good friend of mine is Mexican, another is a Bulgarian post-graduate and the host for our Brasserie Writers. A third is from Sierra Leone and yet another is Latvian, also a post-graduate. I would be horrified if any of them were told 'to go home' now that the Brexiteers have 'won' the vote and we are to leave the EU. But Facebook is full of stories of racist verbal attacks. The EURef has unleashed a level of nastiness I can't remember since seeing graffitti shouting 'Blacks Go Home' in the 1960s.

I am fortunate to be living in Bath. It is indeed largely populated by an educated population who, if not wealthy, are comfortable. Of course Bath has its non-graduates and its poorer areas. I haven't been back from Guernsey long enough to chat to people I know who live in social housing. How did they vote? That conversation is yet to be had. Would their attitudes be in line with Professor Curtice's findings?

To move on from the immediate post EUref commentary I need to return to my title: Pause - Brexit - Pause

We are now in the second pause phase.
This pause is universal. The world holds its breath. As if some rocket launch had knocked planet earth out of its orbit, causing it to hurtle off its axis, crashing into the sun, the notion that the UK will leave the EU has had cataclysmic effects. And our parlimentarians don't seem to know what to do next. I would think the rest of the world must be looking at the UK in astonishment: a) how did we come to decide to leave the EU and rock financial certainties and securities?  b) what on earth are we doing about it? Surely losing our PM and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, losing two-thirds of the opposition party and rumours of losing Scotland from a non-EU UK must look to other nations as if little England is suddenly nothing bigger than Guernsey - and, in parts, far less beautiful.

One French journalist had commented that if the UK were to leave the EU it would be no more important on the world stage than Guernsey - which is doing very well - but he had a point. How long this  pause  will last is anyone's guess. No-one has a plan for  who, what, when article 50 is triggered.
I have been scouring the press for some inkling but until today journalists have analysed voting patterns and causes. I will write about that in my next entry. Meanwhile back to the pause.

Roller Coaster

Thankfully Richard had some excellent news about his early-stage prostate cancer cells. All readings were normal - so the radiotherapy has blasted them away. A bonus has been he hasn't had any ill effects either. Well done the Royal United Hospital Bath. We were so pleased with the help he's received we raised money for the RUH from his Open Studio over May Day weekend. A win-win situation. If the weather holds we can raise a bit more at our garden party on July 2nd. A percentage of the proceeds from sales of Richard's prints and cards will go to the RUH funds for the new cancer unit. It cost £8 million+ and so much has been raised they 'only' need £1 million+ now.

So that's the good news.


That's the down ride on the roller coaster - the fun bit. But the hard slog up to the top of the ride has yet to be achieved. We are very slowly trudging up to the pinacle. Mum's house is - as I write - having a trench drilled through the drive, garage and conservatory. Why?

After months of negotiation with mum's insurance firm my brother has managed to get them to see that the cracks in mum's bathroom, kitchen and above the landing are caused by root damage from the massive trees on the field next door. The foundations are being weakened - slightly - just enough to create structural problems. Last month a result; the trees have been lopped in half. Equally important soil samples showed roots from said trees had broken water pipes and upset the water table under mum's house - hence the cracks. So now the pipes are being replaced. Hoorah! But it'll take another year of monitoring the fissures to see if the damage has been stopped - or if the cracks in the brickwork are continuing to widen. A new kitchen and bathroom are waiting to be installed in mum's house. It may take yet another twelve months before work on those installations can even start.

But it's been a very sad few days as mum's health has deteriorated such that she barely has the energy to speak. This is largely, though, in her own hands. If she drank more water, tea or juice she would revive. One nurse even mentioned bringing in the hospice and instituting end-of-life-care. So we were upset to hear this. My brother is having to travel north - and is exhausted - visiting a member of his wife's family in intensive care. What a terrible few days. We thought we would have to cancel our Guernsey holiday and my brother still doesn't know if he should go away this weekend and have his early summer break.

So we sit in the buggy on the roller coaster waiting for good news: we want to plunge on the down-rides and have some excitement - away from the doom, gloom and difficult situations. Our short holiday in Devon, in full sunshine, was upset by health news. Let's hope the next time we see mum she's got some strength back, is drinking and can hold a conversation without being so depleted of energy.  "Where there's life there's hope" has never been more pertinent.

The Digital Age - passwords - grrrr

So - using email, texting, using your own printer, making your own photographs - it's all so convenient, and quick. Yes, for the most part, that may still be true. But what about this scenario?

A fortnight ago I was inundated with emails from someone who said I was using her email address. I had inadvertently used it once - because icloud wanted me to use another email address other than my own as icloud, or was it Apple? id. So many fruitless hours fiddling and talks with Apple later I signed in, changed my password and signed out. No problem. No problem? It took over 2 days to get all that sorted.

Another scenario. I tried to use my ipad to air print with a printer my aunt uses. I had her password but forgot to change my wi fi password once I got home. So which password is this then? Yes I had travelled home, I had sorted things at my mother's house, I had visited her in her nursing home three times in two days. I was tired and had a cold. Thankfully I have the sky hub password on my iphone and it's clearly labelled on the new hub. But how do I change it to a memorable password? How many more wasted hours were spent trying to sort that? I did get my ipad connected to the internet again but no luck with sky hub password change. That only took 24 hours fiddling. Then I went down big time with some flu-like symptoms. No surprise there then.

Tonight my iphone won't receive emails and I buggered my ( very old) printer which kept referring me to 'documentation'. If they mean the handbook that would take another day of searching ... Thankfully, despite the fact I had only 4-5 hours sleep last night, by pulling out a few cables, switching the printer on and off, then switching my lap top from which I was trying to print, on and off,  the thing finally starting printing again. I'm sorry but each of my devices, in some way or other, needs a great deal of time spent on them.

Yes I have got them all running again but why do we need so much knowledge and time for these semi-expensive gadgets? Meanwhile I still haven't seen TV I recorded from Sunday night. Perhaps if I use my ipad for itv player it might let me watch The Durrells? Or do I need a password for that too?
Meanwhile I'll spend ages trying to get the thing to work and,guess what, I still won't have seen the programme. Time consuming or what? I thought computers worked for us - not the other way round.


Grrrrrr

How do I get the balance?

A few weeks back I wrote the final chapter of my novel. I hasten to add I'm not especially ecstatic, more mildly pleased, as it's only draft one and I know how much editing will be required, even though, in essence, the work is complete.

It begins in December 1918, just after the end of WW1 and the novel ends in France just before the outbreak of WW2, in September 1939.  England has declared war on Germany, but France hasn't entered the war.

In some ways it would be easy to think my novel is about the inter-war years. In fact it's a tribute to the relatively few women who got the vote in 1918, and who forged ahead, in difficult times. They lived and worked through The  General Strike, The Depression, during a time when there was a lack of free health care, non universal secondary education and poor contraceptive choices. The women who voted for the first time in Britain in 1918 had to be thirty and either married or householders in their own right. In my novel the central character is Eliza. She got the vote in 1918 and succeeds with none of the advantages of modern times.

I have spent something like six weeks working on these last 20,000 words. The whole is now 92,000 + words. I am pleased to have achieved writing the novel but my social life has gone through a down turn, I haven't been swimming for three weeks and I seem to have spent a lot of time behind a screen!

However I have managed a Creative Evening, my Writers' Group, pub quiz and Book Group. We are planning a garden party in July so we are prepping the garden in readiness. I feel I have had a busy few weeks but tomorrow - ah tomorrow - I have promised myself a day of rest. This will include a walk, sensible eating and other physical exercise, but no sitting behind a screen, growing roots through the cushions on my sofa, nor typing at my desk. Perhaps I should be like Barbara Cartland and have a secretary. That way I could dictate my novel, get up, walk around, do step ups and get fit while getting my novel written. Or maybe I could speak into a voice recorder while I'm going out for a jog. Either way there is a tension between the creative urge and the need for physical activity. One feeds the other but both areas of my life seem time consuming.

Our next plans are for the Open Studio at the end of this month. That also takes a lot of planning. Cards to label and package, bio in the brochure, paintings to be framed, prints to be made. I also plan to bake cakes and biscuits to raise a little for the Cancer Unit at the RUH. It's all laudable, creative planning. But again it doesn't help me keep fit!

Perhaps I need to invent some form of exercise I can do while planning other things. But in order to invent a new form of exercise I will have to sit down and come up with some scheme. Back where I was. The tension between brain activity - or creativity - and physical activity. I am physically lazy but mentally active. How do I get the balance?