The Britain we knew is gone forever

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To lose one country is a misfortune.  To lose both simultaneously looks like carelessness.  I apologise for paying so much attention to the UK, when the system has become so dysfunctional in the US.  But the US is not in danger of actually breaking up, and the UK is.

The following from the highly respected Martin Wolf in the Financial Times:

“No one knows what kind of Britain will emerge from the “Brexit earthquake” – but my increasingly clear conviction is that the outcome will be ugly and the damage long-term.  The UK that “the world thought it knew – stable, pragmatic and respected – is gone, probably forever”.

Failing to agree a smooth Brexit due to fears over the Irish backstop is a national folly – since that backstop only prevents Britain from making trade deals that are either “less important than maintaining good relations with the EU”, “probably unavailable” (China and India) or “abusive” (the US). The now-likely prospect of a no-deal Brexit risks multiple constitutional crises, the suspension of Parliament (“an executive coup”) and the probable break-up of the UK. And when it comes to political leadership, we face a sickening choice between a “serial fantasist” (Boris Johnson) and a man who supports “any notionally left-wing tyrant he can find” (Jeremy Corbyn). Can Britain really be this lost, “dithering between Ayn Rand and Leon Trotsky”? What’s happening is “not worthy of a serious country”. The conclusion? We no longer are one.”  (Martin Wolfe, Financial Times, 20 July 2019)

My contribution:  Without the UK the EU becomes a de facto German economic empire, something the British have traditionally resisted.  The right policy would have been to get back into the Brussels bureaucracy, down and dirty, and change the things you don’t like, not huffing and puffing on the sidelines, with  dramatic visits by Prime Ministers that were never going to work.  We started the process decades ago with a large number of experienced and pragmatic British civil servants running the show in Brussels, but these people have long gone and were never replaced by the Little Englanders in successive governments.  Instead?  Endless hot air, grumbling, and straightforward lies, some of them appearing to emanate from Moscow (well, of course Putin wants to dismantle the EU).

Alas, poor Britain! badly served!

The endless US gun murders – an Epicurean view

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There are so many simple, clear steps that lawmakers can take to reduce the epidemic of gun violence in America.  The following policies are actually supported by an overwhelming majority of Americans and even many gun owners:

Universal background checks.

Closing the gun show loophole.

Banning assault weapons such as AR-15s.

Banning bump stocks.

Addressing America’s mental health crisis.

Redoubling our efforts to combat white supremacy and domestic terrorism.

The Democratic U.S. House passed two bills that would accomplish many of these goals earlier this year, but Mitch McConnell and the GOP—at the bidding of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and gun manufacturers—won’t allow the bills to come up for a vote in the Senate. They won’t even allow federal funding for research into gun violence.

The endless gun atrocities are killing as many people as an international war.  The word “obscene” is inadequate to describe this situation, made worse by the President’s pathetic response, made, apparently, reluctantly.  It seems the United States cannot win a conventional war overseas and won’t lift a finger to halt an extremist pro-gun war at home, indiscriminate but mainly on immigrants and people of colour. There is a moral vacuum among right-wing voters and politicians, many proclaiming their religiosity.

My British father had a sporting gun.  It was locked up when not in use, and the lock-up was inspected every three months by the local police.  Moreover, if you wanted a gun you had to be 21 (from memory) and had to show that you had been on a gun safety course.  When I asked my father whether he thought this  onerous he replied, “ No, its common sense”.  But then he valued human life, all of it.

The Disunited Kingdom?

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Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Tories: no fan of the new PM

From The Independent, The New Statesman, The Times, Daily Telegraph, and The Guardian and The Week:

Boris Johnson professes to love the United Kingdom, said The Independent. He extols “the awesome foursome” and speaks of the UK as “the most successful economic and political union in history”. But how can that be squared with his readiness to countenance a no-deal Brexit? The very idea is anathema to the Scots who opposed quitting the EU in the first place: 62% voted Remain in the 2016 referendum. And if Scots are given a second chance to vote on independence, they might well now choose to sever their 300-year-old ties with their neighbour to the south. When Johnson visited Edinburgh this week, he was loudly booed as he arrived at the official residence of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, and chose to leave by the back door. Johnson’s stance on Brexit represents the “most lethal threat” to the union since the partition of Ireland in 1922. Without an abrupt change of course, the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom could also be its last.

It doesn’t help that Johnson is at loggerheads with his party’s best-loved figure in Scotland, said Chris Deerin in the New Statesman. “Charismatic, funny, outspoken, smart and brave”, Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Tories, has turned around her local party’s fortunes. Indeed, the 13 Scottish Tory MPs returned to Westminster at the last election are now vital to the Government’s survival, said Euan McColm in The Times. But Davidson, a convinced Remainer, is no fan of the new PM: in the leadership election she voted for three other candidates – anyone but Boris. And the mutual antagonism grew yet more intense, said Alan Cochrane in The Daily Telegraph, when Johnson last week sacked Davidson’s close ally, David Mundell, as Scottish Secretary. Growing demands for the Scottish Tories to break away from the UK party may prove irresistible. But Johnson is fully aware of the need to soothe Scottish sensitivities.  His concern to appease local opinion is the reason he deliberately chose Scotland as the place to announce a £300m investment in “Growth Deals” for the devolved nations.

It’s not just the pursuit of a no-deal Brexit that makes Johnson unpopular with Scots, said Tom Devine in The Guardian. “Foppish, rich, incompetent, xenophobic,” he is for many the embodiment of the archetypal right-wing English Tory, a figure utterly out of sympathy with their “social democratic” attitudes. Even before Johnson moved into No.10, the polls were suggesting that almost 50% of Scottish voters backed the independence cause. With him in power, there may now be an absolute majority. Of course, it’s the PM who has the power to decide whether Scotland should hold a second referendum, and Johnson won’t be in a hurry to give his approval. But if it ever does come to a vote, the nationalists may find that Johnson is their best “recruiting sergeant since the days of Margaret Thatcher”.   (The Week 3 August 2019)

It would be ironic if the Tories, led by Johnson, caused the breakup of the United Kingdom.  I would remind readers that the official name of the Tory Party is the “Conservative and Unionist Party”, that is union with Scotland and Northern Ireland. Latterly, their more accurate name might be the “Reactionary and Disunity Party”.  When I was a young adult I seriously pondered (for a week , or something) the idea of going into politics on behalf of what was then a reasonable, principled Conservative Party.  The follies of youth……

Collectively we are all guilty of perpetuating misleading “facts”.

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From the Harvard Gazette:

We are all too ready to judge the world though anecdotes, images and distorted reporting designed to sell news, rather than quietly studying the actual facts.  Some examples: 

  –   Trump refers to American “carnage” in an era in which violent crime rates are close to historical lows. Bush created a massive new federal department and launched two destructive wars to protect Americans against terrorism, which annually kills fewer people than bee stings and lightning strikes. In the year after the 9/11 attacks, 1,500 Americans who were scared away from flying died in car crashes, unaware that a Boston-LA air trip has the same risk as driving 12 miles.

 –       One death from a self-driving Tesla makes worldwide headlines, but the 1.25 million deaths each year from human-driven vehicles don’t. Small children are traumatized by school drills that teach them how to hide from rampage shooters, who have an infinitesimal chance of killing them compared with car crashes, drownings, or, for that matter, non-rampage killers, who slay the equivalent of a Sandy Hook and a half every day. Several heavily publicized police shootings have persuaded activists that minorities are in mortal danger from racist cops, whereas three analyses (two by Harvard faculty, Sendhil Mullainathan and Roland Fryer) have shown no racial bias in police shootings (poor training or just plain fear?).

– Many people are convinced that the country is irredeemably racist, sexist, homophobic, and sexually assaultive, whereas all of these scourges are in steady decline (albeit not quickly enough). People on both the right and left have become cynical about global institutions because they think that the world is becoming poorer and more war-torn, whereas in recent decades global measures of extreme poverty and battle deaths have plummeted.

– People are terrified of nuclear power because of images of Three Mile Island (which killed no one), Fukushima (which killed no one; the deaths were caused by the tsunami and a panicked, unnecessary evacuation), and Chernobyl (which killed fewer people than are killed by coal every day). They imagine that fossil fuels can be replaced by solar energy, without doing the math on how many square miles would have to be tiled with solar panels to satisfy the world’s vastly growing thirst for electricity. And they think that tiny and voluntary sacrifices, like unplugging laptop chargers, are a sensible way to deal with climate change.

How do we change this destructive statistical illiteracy and disdain for data? We need to make “factfulness” an inherent part of the culture of education, journalism, commentary, and politics. An awareness of the infirmity of unaided human intuition should be part of the conventional wisdom of every educated person. Guiding policy or activism by conspicuous events, without reference to data, should come to be seen as risible as guiding them by omens, dreams, or whether Jupiter is rising in Sagittarius.   ( Lightly edited piece by Steven  Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, in the Harvard Gazette)

Mea culpa.  I too am guilty of drawing dire lessons from relatively isolated instances.  Maybe we all are.  It simplifies life – but life is simply not that simple.  We should look at actual statistics before we make assumptions and unsubstantiated claims.

Incarceration of migrants, 2

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The migrants on the Southern border are treated as an army of feckless invaders.  Families are being broken up , children are kept in hot, fetid disease-ridden camps, and no one in the government seems to know how many are in detention, where they are or which children belong to which parents.

Common decency, and Epicurean teaching, requires us to treat migrants kindly and respectfully, feed and accommodate them decently, and treat them as fellow human beings.  Sub-contracting this job to private profit-making companies employing uncaring, even racist staff is unacceptable, as is the  incarceration of domestic criminals in private, for-profit (!) jails.  The idea that one’s friends and political funders should be able to make a profit out of everything under the sun, including tasks only appropriate for government,  is distasteful and was probably at outset never intended to be humane.