Politics

So I think I have had at leat two, if not more, blog posts with scarcely a mention of politics and surprising though it might seem to most, there are those who don’t mind the odd political rant once in a while from yours truly, so I had might as well be upfront about it. The clue is very much in the title, so you read on at your own peril.

First things first though, Ava-Jane continues to be on super form, which, I suppose is what allows my mind wander onto less momentous stuff than the well-being of my daughter, like, for instance, the future of the planet that we inhabit or the health of democracy throughout the world.

On a certain level, I don’t actually have very much to say about politics in general. I mean, I can of course bask in the rather empty exercise of saying “I told you so”. And I am obviously not alone in having been proved right about what a complete catastrophe Trump was going to be and thankfully we should have seen the last of him.

I did also say that Boris Johnson was going to be a disaster of a Prime Minister but I did not anticipate that he was going to be given quite such an opportunity to demonstrate how poorly qualified he is to lead the nation. Johnson is a big Winston Churchill fanboy, to such an extent that he has written what is apparently a rather shoddy biography of his hero. You can say a lot of things about Churchill and he was most certainly a flawed man (aren’t we all?) but I think we can agree he rose to the challenge that history presented him. Can anyone reasonably say the same of Johnson? I think the best we can say is that we all wish him the best, even someone like me who is a big detractor of his, doesn’t enjoy seeing him floundering in this way surrounded by a cabinet of incompetents and being consistently outplayed not just by his supposed opponent, Keir Starmer, but also by a football player with a sense of decency. As luck would have it, I am watching Manchester United vs Liverpool in the FA Cup and Marcus Rashford has just scored a wonderful goal – what a guy he is… and I hate Man U!

And I don’t think I can really say, “I told you so” about Brexit yet – we are only a month in and the full horror show will take a while to play out. I should probably keep my powder dry because it will get a lot worse. But note what we have already seen in these three short weeks. We have seen the fishing industry, that totemic but insignificant sector that took up so much of the negotiating bandwidth, brought to its knees, with fish rotting in British docks as bureaucracy makes “our” fish uncompetitive. We have seen British ships stranded in Norwegian ports because the narrow deal that Johnson managed to secure does not include EEA countries like Norway, and whadda you know, there’s a lot more fish off the coasts of Norway than the fjords of Austria. We have seen musicians, including the likes of Roger Daltrey, complaining of the damage that the Brexit deal, that Johson secured, will do to our incredible artistic sector. Roger Daltrey, lead singer of The Who, once the loudest band in rock, now has a salmon river, wears Barbours and was a big supporter of Brexit, can bugger off a little, maybe he should have died before he got old.

Random but scenic sheep pic.

Which brings me neatly onto the main political point I would like to make – I am talking about generations (ouch!). The White House is now inhabited by someone who is not mad… *little* yay! the Brexit ship has sailed *sad face* and we have got four years of Johnson before we can do anything about it within democratic means *thinks* hmmmm. So I think we should move onto something else, well, I mean I think I should move onto something else.

My worry now is the younger generation. At 51 years of age, I am now “into my 50s”, so I am expected to be liberally using old duffer expressions like “the younger generation”!

Arguably my generation is the first generation that will have lower expectations than the generation that preceded it. We will not get the iron-clad and generous pensions that our parents received and we have had to spend a considerably larger proportion of our pay packet on buying a house or sending our children to private school, should that be a priority. To use a parochial example that illustrates this point nicely, my parents and we probably have comparable relative incomes. However, we live in Spring Grove Barn while they lived in Spring Grove Farm and my son went to Swanbourne School (state), whereas my brother went to Swanbourne House School (private).

But while things like this do show that we have become somewhat downlardly mobile through the generations, as a family, I really do have a very fine life but I worry about the future that we are passing on to our children’s generation.

It was already looking fairly crap, chiefly due to climate change. This really is a terrible legacy that only gets worse as we shove it on from generation to generation. There is, I believe, a strong argument to say that countries, such as the United Kingdom, that industrialised early and whose populations have benefitted from this industrialisation bear much responsibility for the state of the planet today. What I mean is that we, in the industrialised West, have been burning fossil fuels for a long time and all of us have this industrialisation to thank for the life of luxury that we live. And conversely, those countries that might be labelled “under-developed”, really have not churned out too much of those greenhouse gasses that are causing us such a nuisance. Whether the industrialised nations of the west should therefore compensate the countries that have contributed less to the heating of the planet is a very thorny, sins of the father type of question. Should we be penalised for the behaviour of long dead people who had no idea of what they were piling up for their descendants as they burned King Coal ignorant of the implications?

But my generation was the first generation to be fully aware of the damage that our way of life had on this beautiful, blue planet that we call home. And what did we do? Did we stop flying? Did we stop zooming about the place in gas-guzzling mobiles? Did we stop importing nonsense from far off places? Oooh, check me, aren’t I getting rhetorical? (did you see what I did there? And again!!)

Anyway, the point being is that we have known perfectly well the damage we have been doing to the planet for some time now and frankly we have done very little about it and while we might be able to shuffle off this mortal coil before it all goes tits up properly, our children will not. So while we might have to fret about the flooding of places like Tewksbury or the Maldives, our children might witness London and New York being engulfed by the waves. And though I have nothing against Tewksbury or the Maldives, in fact I am sure there are both very special places in their own way, their loss would have less of a momentous impact on the continuation of civilisation as we know it than would the disappearance of cities like London and New York or all those other mega-cities that we have built in unspeakably foolish places, vis San Francisco, Tokyo, Manila, Dhaka.

Just a quick side note on the existential panic that we have passed on to our children: before we get overly sorry for the poor little darlings, we did after all live through the Cold War. So, yup, it is somewhat harsh to grow up fearing this gradual heating of the planet will result in it becoming an uninhabitable desert but let’s not forget, we were worrying that, at any moment, the planet was going to be fried in an instant, so there is that. Diddums.

Okay, sorry, but seriously, a severely compromised planet is but one of the terrible legacies we leave our children that we should really consider how to compensate them for. Let’s consider their education.

I left University with a 2:2 in Comparative American Studies, an M.A. in Latin American literature and a £500 overdraft. Now while the 2:2 in Comparative American Studies and the M.A. in Latin American literature had no practical benefits whatsoever in the jobs market, the fact that my total debt burden added up to no more that £500, meant that I was footloose and fancy free to carve my way in the world. And, as luck would have it, I have found a funny little professional niche in which my my 2:2 in Comparative American Studies and my M.A. in Latin American literature are actually quite handy.

But now that these days you have to pay for a degree, would it really have made any financial sense to have racked up debts of approximately £30,000 with nothing more to show for it than a Desmond (2:2… geddit?) in a mickey mouse subject. Lord knows what an M.A. would cost these days – I spent most of that year in my bed reading fabulous books by the likes of Garcia Marquez, Borges and Vargas Llosa, which was lovely but arguably not that productive. So maybe 18-year-old me might not have opted for Comparative American Studies, might not have randomly ended up in Spain and might not have found that funny, yet rewarding, little professional niche where my apparently worthless degrees actually have some value.

I think I might be digressing a little into personal anecdotes but the question that I think we should consider is what should our children expect from a university education that is going to leave them with high levels of debts. Is it enough to be able to spend a few years dicking around, spending time with interesting people, discussing apparently earth-shattering questions and reading the odd book to be sent out into the with no obvious practical skill? When you pay for your degree, the whole thing becomes a financial transaction and you expect value for money.

And then obviously this brings us to Covid which is where, I believe we owe our greatest debt to the younger generation. The educational situation for university students that I describe above is only far worse when, for the considerable cost of a university degree these days, they are actually not even getting any actual teaching, their £9,000 per annum tuition fees give them little more than videos on YouTube. And, worst of all, they are not having any fun whatsoever.

And I think we can fairly say that to a large extent all these privations that we have imposed on the nation has been to save the old and vulnerable at the expense of the liberties of the young and healthy. As we have seen in university settings, we really can let Covid rip through a young, healthy population with very few casualties, it’s when they make contact with wider society that the trouble begins. And I think that is entirely right, no one wants to “Kill Gran” as the warnings ran. Of course, the young, as part of a community, should play their part in keeping this dreadful virus under control but maybe we owe them one.

I think we also owe them one, whichever way we might have voted in the Brexit referendum, as their horizons have certainly been reduced as a result of it. And wasn’t it nasty and spiteful the way we Johnson ducked out of the Erasmus programme at the last minute. It was never an EU programme but because it was tainted by its association with Europe, this small-minded, petty government prevented young people from being able to have the enriching experience of a year of education in a foreign setting.

We should also acknowledge how uncertain their professional prospects must look when people are not only not getting pension plans to look after them in a distant future, they are barely getting contracts to give them some sort of stability today. The world of work is in complete flux right now and it is impossible to foresee what skills and talents will be needed for jobs that might not exist by the time our kids enter the workplace.

Politics, as it currently functions does not work for this upcoming generation. It has failed them time and again. Our constituencies are gerrymandered and our electoral system rigged to only allow a choice between two party political behemoths that mean little to a generation that does not self identify as either Conservative or Labour or red and blue or any of those silly colour permutations that we have used to divide us running all the way back to Byzantium. Any politically aware young person can clearly see that a vote for a party like the Green Party, that might well most closely align with their beliefs is an utterly wasted vote.

So that’s my manifesto, for what it’s worth – let’s help the kids!! I might have to work on some of the finer details of this manifesto but I think that’s what we have firmly in our sights in the years to come. What are we leaving to our children? How can we improve this legacy? What might we have to sacrifice to compensate for what they will have lost?

Ava-Jane and I are playing red – she is rightly looking worried about our situation. Essentially we are Japan just before the A-Bomb falls on Hiroshima.

It turns out that Otto has not just lucked out genetically but also in games of chance. Ava-Jane was in charge of rolling the dice for us and, frankly, she was rubbish. Even with my superior knowledge of global military history (you can see me explaining to her how Charles XII, Napoleon and Hitler and failed to take Russia), we took a battering. As I say, this was because she rolled badly, it was nothing to do with me.