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.

Incarceration of migrants 1

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One gets the impression that the US is the only country holding migrants in what amounts to jail.  But a snapshot by The Guardian of 200 migrants held in seven British detention centres found more than half were suicidal, seriously ill, or. victims of torture, with 84% not told when they would be deported. Almost half the detainees had not committed a crime but had been detained for an average of four months. The situation appears to contravene UN human rights guidance that immigration detention should be a last resort.

The UK government detains just over 25,000 people every year pending deportation, at an annual cost of £108m. But fewer than 50% of those held in removal centres actually end up being deported, and most have lived in the UK for five years or more. A handful of private firms are paid hundreds of millions of pounds to run the detention centres, making up to 40% profit.  The UK is the only European country without a limit on how long these people can be detained.  The Labour shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, said: “This is a scandalously inhumane and unjustifiable system.” James Price from the TaxPayers’ Alliance said: “A bureaucratic and lengthy wait [for deportation] is bad for the welfare of those detained, as well as costing taxpayers and meaning less money for essential services.” A Home Office spokesman said the home secretary, Sajid Javid, wanted to “go further and faster” in finding alternatives to detention. (Guardian 11 Oct 2018),

Writing as someone who has migrated to another country (and am now a dual citizen), and made sure I did everything legally and above-board, I must say that entering illegally and hoping to get away with it, against the law, is something hard to support.  It’s illegal, dammit, even if you are escaping a dangerous and corrupt country.

Having said that, the way illegal migrants are treated in camps and for-profit detention centres is another matter.  I will comment on that tomorrow.

A humiliating way to treat an old warmonger

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From the New York Times:

Many of the people who have worked for President Trump have ended up “diminished” or humiliated in some way. To that long list we can now add a new name: John Bolton. Trump’s national security adviser won the role by impressing the president with his regular bellicose contributions to Fox News, but he appears to wield little influence with the White House these days. One can only imagine how cross the old “warmonger” must have felt recently when Trump recently shook the hand of Kim Jong Un. This, after all, is a man who cited the lifting of sanctions against Pyongyang in 2008 as evidence of the “total intellectual collapse” of the George W. Bush administration.

To make matters worse, Trump was accompanied on the trip to Korea’s demilitarised zone not by Bolton, but by the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who last month called Bolton a “bureaucratic tapeworm” for whom war is “always good business”. (To add insult to injury, Trump referred to Bolton during the trip, not for the first time, as “Mike”.) “It’s nightmarish to live in a country where our foreign policy has been reduced to an intramural battle between Fox News reactionaries.” But if anyone deserves to be cut down to size, it’s Bolton.  (Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times, 12 July 2019)

Unfortunately, while the far-too-numerous Democratic Presidential candidates bicker, seek attention, splinter the opposition and suggest policies that will bomb on election day, a wolf prowls the playground.  The wolf is already surprisingly well-organised on the ground and is prepared to do anything (literally) to win a second term.  If reports are not exaggerated he fancies (on and off, like everything else) overthrowing the Constitution and remaining in power sine die, with help from his packed Supreme Court. Nothing he says or does is off-limits to a base without principles or empathy and that votes for the very class of rich, unprincipled, money-obsessed  people who have caused their misery in the first place  The parallels are inexact, but one is reminded of Mussolini, who took a bit of an effort (understatement of 2019) to dislodge. But he was an amateur compared with this modern version. I mention this in passing owing to the grim effect all this has on Epicurean peace of mind.

P.S: Donald Trump’s approval rating among Republican voters rose by 5 points to 72% in the week after his racially charged Twitter attack on several Democratic congresswomen.  (Ipsos/Reuters) 

A statistic that needs no comment

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Out of England’s 334 high-rise blocks of flats with the same cladding as Grenfell Tower, 69 have so far had it removed.  ( U.K Ministry of Housing)

(The cladding on Grenfell Tower turned out to be flammable.  Scores of people were trapped in the burning high-rise apartment block on 14 June 2017 and were killed)

Trump Justice Department to resume federal executions

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From The Hill

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced  that it will resume capital punishment for the first time in nearly two decades.

Barr’s announcement comes as the number of executions in the United States has declined over the last decade amid concerns about whether capital punishment disproportionately impacts African Americans. Only three federal executions have taken place since 1988, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. All five of the death-row inmates named in Thursday’s release were convicted for the murders of children.

Some states have put a moratorium on the practice or suspended it, as wrongful convictions have also been spotlighted by groups such as the Innocence Project, which have secured the release of a number of death-row inmates in recent years.

The death penalty has been abolished in about 70 percent of countries, particularly democratic nations similar to the U.S.  In America, policies on executions vary greatly; states including Colorado, Oregon, Pennsylvania and California have issued moratoriums on capital punishment, while it has fallen out of general use in other states. But for some red states, such as Texas and Alabama, the death penalty is still a common practice.   (The Hill 25 July 2019)

My comment: Taking another person’s life is immoral. Period. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth might have prevailed as a revenge policy in primitive society, but has no place in more enlightened (?) times – nor should it have a place.

But there is an equally important and pragmatic consideration –  the death penalty is totally ineffective in preventing premeditated murder.  If your mind it twisted enough to seriously contemplate and plan the murder of another human being,  then either you are gambling on not being caught and executed, you don’t care or you would yourself welcome death.  On all counts you are mentally deranged and should be locked up.  State executions are executions in which all citizens are, by extension, implicated.  No thank you!

Home schooling in Britain

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From The Week:

One effect of schools “off-rolling” low-achieving pupils has been an increase in the number of children who are home-schooled. Almost 60,000 children in England are estimated to have been educated at home last year – double the number in 2014 – though since there is no national register of home-schooled children, the exact figure is uncertain. In some areas, the rise has been staggering: in Northamptonshire, the number of children registered as home-schooled has increased 350% in the past five years. Anne Longfield, the children’s commissioner for England, explicitly blames off-rolling for this: while some parents may choose to home-school their child, she says, others have been pushed to do so by schools, preoccupied by results, expelling difficult and unmotivated pupils.

As home-schooling is largely unregulated, there are concerns that the pupils affected – particularly those who may have been off-rolled as a result of having special educational needs – have been cast into a sort of educational limbo and aren’t receiving any sort of proper education. However, the Government is now looking at a plan to set up an obligatory register for parents who home-school so that local authorities know whether and how children are being educated, and can intervene if standards are low.  (The Week 15 June 2019)

My comment:  Some people think that obligatory registration of home-schoolers might impinge on the liberty of parents and deny them the opportunity of teaching their children at home.  Of the 60,000 children being home-schooled there must be a healthy number who are being well taught by educated and dedicated parents.  But there must also be those who do not have the time or skills, will not follow a rigorous curriculum, and will produce adults with few attractions to an employer, let alone a college or university.  What will become of these home-schooled children?  Some will be smart self-starters who will do well; others? ….well… ….  The parents want “liberty”, but  many children must need extra attention, have ADD etc, are quite possibly being denied a good start to life and a career.

Three of my grandchildren are being homeschooled, entirely voluntarily and from the beginning.  Their parents are lovely, loving and educated people, doing their best for their children, fiercely independent, rejecting the big classes, the bullying and other bad influences associated with public education.  The  ultimate fate of the children will be determined by the reaction of future potential employers to their CVs when presented, and this we have no way of foreseeing.  All grandparents can do is help by helping to fund wide experiences and educational encounters outside the home (especially time with children their own ages) and encouraging independent thought and life-long learning.  But not all grandparents have the resources, ability or energy to fill this role..

Meanwhile, the  government want a register and inspections, but to what end?  What will they do with the children?   The perennial hallmark of Conservative government is cutting funding. Period. What is needed is help, and well paid teachers, for weak students to avoid producing a generation of disaffected, deprived and resentful people, with the social turmoil and crime that goes with it.

Pornography and global climate change

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The streaming of online pornography produces the same amount of carbon dioxide as the whole of Belgium, according to a new report by the French think tank The Shift Project. Its researchers found that the energy required to stream online videos is responsible for the emission of 300 million tonnes of CO2 a year – almost 1% of total global emissions – and that a third of that comes from videos with pornographic content.

From being an immense boon to mankind, a lot of what happens on the internet has become either bogus misinformation, silly self-promotion, or just plain boring.  Pornography is in the latter category, in my opinion, but someone, somewhere is making money out of it.  I don’t think in principle that it should be banned, just ignored.  On the other hand, unless we stop some of the activities that are increasing temperatures and threatening the future of the planet and the human race, the effects on future generations are going to be catastrophic.  So maybe pornography should, after all, be banned – it’s hard enough to get politicians to do anything at all about the climate crisis, so this just might find public favour.  Watchers of the stuff on the web will just have to get a life.

The death penalty

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The American Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Thursday that it will resume capital punishment for the first time in nearly two decades.

Only three federal executions have taken place since 1988, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. All five of the death-row inmates named in Thursday’s release were convicted for the murders of children.  The number of executions in the United States has declined over the last decade amid concerns about whether capital punishment disproportionately impacts African Americans.

Some states have put a moratorium on the practice or have suspended it.  Wrongful convictions have been spotlighted by groups such as the Innocence Project, which have secured the release of a number of death-row inmates in recent years.  Colorado, Oregon, Pennsylvania and California are among  those states with moratoriums, while it has fallen out of general use in other states.  Only in Texas and Alabama is the death penalty common practice.

Worldwide, the death penalty has been abolished in about 70 percent of countries, particularly democratic nations similar to the U.S.  ( Edited version of an article from The Hill, 25 July 2019)

My comment:  for any elected, democratic government to deliberately take the lives of anyone, convicted criminals or not, is immoral as a matter of principle. Secondly, the verdicts in all too many of these death penalty cases have eventually been proved unsafe.  But, more pragmatically, the death penalty is absolutely no deterrent to a killer, who, almost by definition, is mentally deranged.

Red meat for the Trump base, whose defining characteristics are resentment, hatred of the “elite”, fear and disdain for non-whites of all kinds, and curious religious beliefs, unique to red American states.  The fear is that these people, delighted with Trump’s style of “governing”, will ensure him a second four years.

Exasperating!

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To The Times

Nick King is right to point out that “small and family businesses make up 99% of the UK’s business population and create over three-quarters of new jobs”. Moreover, most of these businesses are also domestic-only and therefore do not trade with the EU, yet are still bound by its restrictive regulatory regime.

To listen to the apocalyptic siren calls of the Confederation of British Industry, the Bank of England, the Treasury and other usual Remain suspects about Brexit, one could be misled into assuming that our trade with the EU accounts for the majority of our GDP. In fact, the true figure is about 8%, and it continues to decline fast. It would be nice to have more honesty from the Remain lobby about the modest contribution of our EU-focused trade to our economic well-being. But this is probably too much to ask.

Nigel Henson, Farningham, Kent. (The Week, 27 Apr 2019)

In answer, this is part of a Research Briefing  from the UK Parliament library

  • The EU, taken as a whole is the UK’s largest trading partner. In 2017, UK exports to the EU were £274 billion (44% of all UK exports). UK imports from the EU were £341 billion (53% of all UK imports).
  • The share of UK exports accounted for by the EU has fallen over time from 55% in 2006 to 43% in 2016, increasing slightly to 44% in 2017.
  • The share of UK imports accounted for by the EU fell from 58% in 2002 to 51% in 2011 before increasing to 53% in 2017.
  • The UK had an overall trade deficit of -£67 billion with the EU in 2017. A surplus of £28 billion on trade in services was outweighed by a deficit of £95 billion on trade in goods.
  • The UK had a trade surplus of £41 billion with non-EU countries. A surplus of £83 billion on trade in services outweighed a deficit of -£42 billion on trade in goods.
  • Services accounted for 40% of the UK’s exports to the EU in 2017. Financial services and other business services (a category which includes legal, accounting, advertising, research and development, architectural, engineering and other professional and technical services) are important categories of services exports to the EU – in 2017 these two service categories made up 52% of UK service exports to the EU.

My comment:  the British people have had to put up with years of bogus “ facts” and straightforward misinformation. Everything that has gone wrong has been blamed on the EU, which doesn’t have the manpower to do half the things they have been blamed for by trouble-makers like our new Prime Minister.  Ignored, for instance, are regional EU funds that have helped poor areas which the Tory party has cared nothing about.  The effects and influences of the EU for good in terms of food safety, air pollution and scores of other things that make life safer are of equal importance to money and  trade.  And that is without reducing the dangers of European wars that have bedevilled Europe for so many centuries and have always dragged in the British.  To focus just on trade is petty and illustrates the amazing effect that persistent lies in the media have had.

 

A poem for old-timers

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I remember the cheese of my childhood and the bread that we cut with a knife, 

When the children helped with the housework, and the men went to work, not the wife.

 

The cheese never needed a fridge and the bread was all crusty and hot.

The children were seldom unhappy and the wife was content with her lot.

 

I remember the milk from the bottle, with the thick double  cream on the top.

Our dinner came hot from the oven, and not from the fridge in the shop. 

 

The kids were a lot more contented, they didn’t need money for kicks.

Just a game with their mates in the road and sometimes the Saturday flicks.

 

I remember the shop on the corner, where a pen’orth of sweets was sold.

Do you think I’m a bit too nostalgic?  Or is it….I’m just getting old?

 

I remember the ‘loo’ was the lavvy and the bogey man came in the night.

It wasn’t the least bit funny going “out back” with no light.

 

Hung on a peg in that loo, were interesting items to view,

from newspapers cut into squares. It took little to keep us amused.

 

Dirty clothes were boiled in the copper, with plenty of rich foamy suds.

But the ironing seemed never ending as Mum pressed everyone’s ‘duds’.

 

I remember the slap on my backside and the taste of soap if I swore.

Anorexia and diets weren’t heard of and we hadn’t much choice what we wore.

 

Do you think that bruised our ego? Or our initiative was destroyed?

We ate what was put on the table and I think life was better enjoyed.

 

But a huge fact not hereto mentioned in this tale of nostalgic rejoice,

Is the reason we all “enjoyed” our lot: we had no bloody choice!

(Anon.)

Almost too ridiculous

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From The Times. 12 July 2019:

“Please beware. There may be nudity. Or loud noises. Or cigarette smoking” 

“Theatre productions issue all sorts of health warnings to ticket buyers these days.  But London’s Donmar Warehouse has gone a step further: it is protecting audiences from any possible distress by giving detailed information in advance about scenes that may be emotionally challenging. Of its play “Europe”, written by David Greig, it had this to say on its website:

“In the first half of the play, a man repeatedly places his hand on a woman’s leg, to her discomfort. In the second half, a man beats up another man due to his status as a migrant. A man describes a violent attack on a woman.”

“This isn’t pandering to the over-sensitive, insists the theatre’s executive producer, Henny Finch: it’s “about being considerate to all audiences and ensuring everybody feels comfortable”. Really? Since when has drama been about making people feel comfortable? The aim of good theatre is often to shock, disturb or discomfit them. But remove any element of surprise or possibility of offence and you can say goodbye to that.  (Jawad Iqbal, The Times. 12 July 2019)

If you just want to feel good and have a harmless laugh go to a British pantomime (which doesn’t exist in America).  There you get camp acting and weak jokes.  I agree with the writer – theatre should deal with human motivations and illuminate raw emotion.  My wife and I have written two musicals, in the course of which we received advice from a drama-writing expert.  The basis of drama, he told us is a single principle: “who wants what from whom”.   Motivations are often hidden and not very nice.  In the theatre we learn about raw human needs and emotion.  Babying an audience is patronizing.  If you object to being shocked stay at home and watch TV.