"Another England" by Caroline Lucas

From 2010 until 2024, Caroline Lucas was Britain's first and only Green MP (others were elected in 2024, when she stood down). This book is an attempt to create a blueprint for a better society in England.

But while I agreed with her whenever she analysed the problems we face, I felt her suggested solutions would be unlikely to convince one of her opponents. 

For example, at one stage she discusses alternatives to the nation state: the religious community and the dynastic realm. Neither appeals! The problem, it seems to me, is that we equate a community with its territory. This is why I have started to redefine my ethnic identity. If I am asked my ethnicity from a medical point of view, I understand that they need data about my physical body and so I am prepared to respond 'White British' if that is the appropriate option. But otherwise, for example on the most recent census, I choose the 'other' box and self-define as 'English speaker'. Because for me, the most important thing about being English is the language and the culture.

Furthermore, she states her intention is to consider English literature to show that England is, fundamentally, deep down, the society to which she aspires. But this is window-dressing rather than the focus of her arguments. Furthermore, her choice of authors sometimes seemed to undermine her points.

For example, when she is discussing rural England she makes the point that the countryside is always held up as the ideal environment even though most people live in cities. “The England of roads and railways, urban housing and shipyards ... are relegated to second place, as are the people who live and work there, in all their rich and diverse reality.” (Ch 6) She goes on to criticise the nostalgia implicit in Jane Austen, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, as well as (more explicitly) George Orwell. Great, I thought. Now she will praise authors who write about the urban environment, and she does indeed mention Zadie Smith's novel NW, as well as Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (really? it may be set in London but isn't exactly urban). But then she goes on to talk about the profoundly rural William Cowper, Chaucer, Wordsworth and John Clare, as well as the anonymous author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Hasn't she just relegated urban England to second place?

[I acknowledge that it is difficult to find urban authors. James Joyce's Ulysses is Dublin through and through, and the Vernon Subutex trilogy by Virginie Despentes does something similar for Paris but what about England? Suggestions please!]

[When I was writing my third novel Bally and Bro I wanted to depict my protagonist Bally as so much a product of his city environment that he couldn't even think in proverbs such as 'Make hay while the sun shines'. But it is very difficult to find town-based alternatives!]

Equally, when she is discussing the plight of the poor in our society, by her own admission Charles Dickens is a strange choice. The whole point of Oliver Twist, despite its clothing of workhouses and thieves kitchens, is to demonstrate that a well-bred lad would triumph over the naturally lower-class oiks. 

She also references Ruined City by Nevil Shute , a book whose solution to unemployment seems to be to find a bent banker with a conscience and which promulgates the concept that capitalist entrepreneurs are job creators as opposed to parasites living off the sweat of labourers.

There are hard-hitting moments, such as when she shows that the difference in life-expectancy between Kensington and Middlesborough “is comparable to the difference between the UK on the one hand and Guatemala, Iraq and Syria on the other.” (Ch 4). But I was unconvinced that she had the answers.

Selected quotes:

• “The moment Englishness took a political form it became anathema. The English flag was acceptable fluttering from a church tower in a picturesque village, but was instantly interpreted as a form of racism if hanging from someone's window on an estate.” (Preface)
• “The top 1 per cent ... have an average monthly income ... a full twenty times that of the lowest 10 per cent. It is impossible to justify this: though this doesn't stop a surprising number of the better-off from complaining that the poor have made ‘bad decisions’ or ‘lifestyle choices’, or from handing out patronising advice about how to cook on a budget, just as their Victorian predecessors did.” (Ch 4)
• “Work is not in itself a good thing. If it gives people a sense of purpose ... then this is generally very positive. ... But not all jobs provide these things.” (Ch 4)
• “Ours is an age in which the financial rewards of work and the autonomy of the employee have little connection to the demands of the role or the value they provide to society.” (Ch 4)
• “The Thatcherite ideal of a property owning democracy [is based] ... on the nasty implication that if you do not own your own home, you have a lesser stake in society, are more likely to be a burden, and are less committed to your community.” (Ch 5)
• “By any measure - life expectancy, human capital, infrastructure, economic development, democracy ... - the vast majority of England's former colonies are far better off now than they were under the Empire.” (Ch 7)
• “For all the talk of shared values and a common loyalty to the crown ... the empire remained a profoundly racist endeavour. If you were English, you could serve in the administration in Burma or Uganda, but if you were Burmese or Ugandan, you could not do the same in England. The British Empire was unlike the Roman, where if you adopted the language and culture, you could go to Rome and become an official, even a senator, even Emperor.” (Ch 7)
• “When you believe your military commanders should be appointed because they come from the right social class, not on ability, then it is no surprise if you are outfought, as in the Crimea.” (Ch 8)

September 2025; 240 pages

Published by Hutchinson Heinemann in 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power" by Stephen Greenblatt

In this wonderful book, Greenblatt dissects some of Shakespeare's great tragic heroes (including Richard III, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus) and uses the depiction of the tyrants to draw lessons about the nature of tyranny, power politics and fraudulent populism. This book works both as literary criticism and a forensic examination of how people grab power and what this does to them and those around them.

Brilliant and acute.

Selected quotes:

• “Even those at the centre of the innermost circles of power very often have no idea what is about to happen.” (Ch 1)
• “Populism may look like an embrace of the have-nots, but in reality it is a form of cynical exploitation. The unscrupulous leader has no actual interest in bettering the lot of the poor. Surrounded from birth by great wealth, his tastes run to extravagant luxuries, and he finds nothing remotely appealing in the lives of the underclasses. In fact, he despises them, hates the smell of their breath, fears that they carry diseases, and regards them as fickle, stupid, worthless, and expendable.” (Ch 3)
• “He is not merely indifferent to the law; he hates it and takes pleasure in breaking it. He hates it because it gets in his way and because it stands for a notion of the public good that he holds in contempt.” (Ch 4)
• "Richard’s deformity - or, rather, his society's reaction to his deformity - is the root condition of his psychopathology ... a child unloved by his mother, ridiculed by his peers, and forced to regard himself as a monster will develop a certain compensatory psychological strategies, some of them both destructive and self-destructive.” (Ch 4)
• “The tyrant, Macbeth and other plays suggest, is driven by a range of sexual anxieties: a compulsive need to prove his manhood, dread of impotence, a nagging apprehension that he will not be found sufficiently attractive or powerful, a fear of failure. Hence the penchant for bullying, the vicious misogyny, and the explosive violence. Hence, too, the vulnerability to taunts, especially those bearing a latent or explicit sexual charge.” (Ch 7)
• “Societies, like individuals, generally protect themselves from sociopaths. We would not have been able to survive as a species had we not developed the skill to identify and deal with noxious threats from within as well as without. Communities are usually alert to the danger posed by certain people in their midst and contrive to isolate or expel them. That is why tyranny is not the norm of social organization.” (Ch 10)
• “The elite perceive the poor, and the urban poor in particular, as a mere drain upon the economy, a swarm of idle mouths demanding to be fed. After all, most of the land and what it produces, along with the houses, the factories, and almost everything else, belongs to the patricians. To them, looking down from the top of this mountain of possessions, the poor, who own virtually nothing, seem like parasites.” (Ch 10)
• “It is a perverse but familiar pattern: the party of privilege argues that it needs authoritarian power so that it can preserve order in the state. ... Then when the wealthy are proved wrong - when the state, rich and poor alike, turns out to thrive under a more democratic system - they long for the disorder they promised to quell.” (Ch 10)

October 2022; 189 pages

Other books about Shakespeare reviewed in this blog can be found by clicking here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"What's My Bias?" by Lee De-Wit

A book about the psychological reasons that underlie politics. This eminently readable book covers, among other things: 

• our innate morality of fairness (and the different interpretations we have of what fairness means); 
• fundamental aspects of personality such as openness to change, conscientiousness, extraversion, empathy and anxiety which govern our political choices;
• cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias;
• our tendency to vote for someone whose face suggests competence;
• the way the media frame stories;
• fake news (and fake science) and how to combat it;
• and why people don't vote.

I really enjoyed it. It was well written and easy to read with plenty of anecdote to balance the academic stuff. I knew quite a lot of it already (I wrote about cognitive dissonance as part of my own PhD thesis) but that was combined with the new stuff in a way that frequently made me think.

And as a collector of expressions I loved 'astroturfing' and 'sockpuppetry'.

Many years ago, I taught Lee A-level Physics. He has since become an academic Psychologist (working at the same department of Psychology in Cambridge where I spent the third year of my undergraduate degree). He makes certain criticisms of his schooling (not enough education about politics). Sorry Lee!

Selected quotes:

• "Political certainties are like the Berlin Wall. They appear to be concrete and immoveable, but they can crumble and fall almost overnight." (Introduction: The Political Animal)
• "ultimately many political arguments come down to the morality of fairness." (1 It’s Not Fair!)
• "if social animals are going to cooperate, they need to develop a keen sense of fairness – to prevent individuals taking advantage of others in the group." (1 It’s Not Fair!)
• "do you attribute someone’s wealth to the actions of that individual or their circumstances in life?" (1 It’s Not Fair!)
• "Absolutist thinkers are more likely to see something as inherently right or wrong, whereas contextualist thinkers are more likely to allow for circumstances that could have influenced someone’s behaviour." (1 It’s Not Fair!)
• "if you have a business that transports goods, you didn’t build the roads; if you rely on educated workers, you didn’t educate them yourself." (1 It’s Not Fair!)
• "You may well have worked hard, but that can’t explain success on its own, because there are plenty of people out there who work hard." (1 It’s Not Fair!)
• "people who identify as left and right wing differ substantially in the way they see two key moral principles: group loyalty and respect for authority" (1 It’s Not Fair!)
• "conservatives... display moral sensitivities about a wider range of topics." (1 It’s Not Fair!)
• "the greater activity in the amygdala shows that conservatives have a different cognitive process for thinking about risk, making them more sensitive to potential threats." (2 Personal Politics)
• "the political left rolls with the good and the political right confronts the bad" (2 Personal Politics)
• "there is a close correlation between the extent to which people view the world as a dangerous place, and the extent to which they think things like group loyalty and respect for authority are important moral principles." (2 Personal Politics)
• "liberals ... tend to respond more positively to change and uncertainty, which, in practice, might mean they are more likely to want to change what they perceive as social inequality, support minority rights and welfare, and be more tolerant of complexity." (2 Personal Politics)
• "Conservatives ... might be more diligent and careful (e.g. in appearance, or in their work), with greater respect for convention and tradition, perhaps being more likely to defend the status quo and support religious and traditional values." (2 Personal Politics)
• "when our feelings and the facts don’t match up, we’ll find some way to make them match." (3 Why You Always Think You’re Right)
• "Experts – pundits, commentators, talking heads who get quoted in newspaper articles as experts, and so on – ...  are wrong more often than they’re right (and that applied to TV experts in particular). And ... they weren’t right any more often than an informed layperson would have been." (3 Why You Always Think You’re Right)
• "viewing someone’s face for less than a second is enough for people to make a rating of their ‘competence’ ... the favoured candidate tends to win elections." (4 What’s In A Face?)
• "we have a tendency to assume that people who are more attractive are also more intelligent." (4 What’s In A Face?)
• "When we’re repeatedly exposed to something, its familiarity means we are more likely to be welcoming of it." (5 Making The Headlines)
• "‘Astroturfing’, the practice of hiding the sponsors of a political, advertising, religious or any other kind of message to make it appear as though it originates from ordinary folk (creating ‘fake grassroots’), and ‘sockpuppetry’, the deliberate creation of false online identities to promote opinions – including fake news – have been rampant for years." (6 Faking It)
• "if you want something to be effective in changing people’s behaviour, make it social." (7 Are You Being Nudged?)
• "just realising you have control over something can be inherently rewarding in its own right." (8 A Silent Majority)
• "voters in marginal constituencies are far more likely to be targeted by political parties, increasing the feeling that their vote counts, as opposed to voters in safe seats who frequently complain of being ignored and overlooked." (8 A Silent Majority)

This is an important book in the light of the new use of social media by political parties and the increasing polarisation of the electorate. It is also a good read, short and not at all heavy-going. It should be on your bookshelf!

August 2021

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Robert Peel: A biography" by Douglas Hurd

 Hurd traces the life and career of the first 'Conservative' Prime Minister, a man whose career started in the days of Rotten Boroughs and a monarch (George IV) who played an active part in government to the beginnings of the party system with mostly-contested elections and manifestos and a monarch (Victoria) who was soon sidelined after her initial meddling. And on the way he helped ensure that Roman Catholics could become MPs, he created the first organised police force, he reformed a chaotic penal code, he sorted out the US-Canada border, he helped the Whigs bring in the Great Reform Act, he reformed working conditions for women and children in mines and factories, and, during the Irish famine, he repealed the Corm Laws which imposed tariffs on imported corn, keeping the price of bread artificially high. In order to get this last piece of legislation through he had to battle against his own right wing; he split his own party and carried the vote with the help of the Whigs and Radicals in opposition. He was therefore remembered in two ways: as a turncoat who twice (Catholic emancipation and the Corn Laws) abandoned earlier principles and the self-interested principles of his own party and as a man who put the well-being of the ordinary people, particularly those who had no vote, before the interests of faction.

Unfortunately, Hurd is writing in 2007. He assumes that the Tory hard right (the 'Ultras' as Peel called them, the 'sour right' as Hurd labels them) are a self-destructive lot who will never win power as mainstream Conservatives; in the aftermath of Brexit we now know that to be wrong. He also assumes that Peel's repeal of the Corn Laws, a unilateral abandonment of a key tariff, was the first step in an unstoppable journey towards globalisation and free trade. In the aftermath of Brexit this is another conclusion that now looks unsupportable.

Some great moments:

• "The Conservative Party will always include within its ranks those who in Peel's time were called the Ultras - men, and now women too, who instinctively resist change and pine for a golden age that never was." (Introduction)
• "If a man was clever and not ashamed of it, then it was thought almost certain that he was using his cleverness for manoeuvres and deceits from which decent men should recoil." (Ch 7)
• "Croker though Canning should be Prime Minister, but believed 'he could hardly take tea without a stratagem'." (Ch 7)
• "The second and smaller group of Ultras are the sour Right. There is nothing warm or nostalgic about their politics. Many of them are intelligent and sincere; but there appeal is to the prejudices and cruelty which are part of human nature." (Ch 7)
• "Politicians are often in a state of outrage. They find it a convenient condition for a day or two. They usually recover quickly and get on with the other pleasures of life." (Ch 9)

A well-written and eminently readable biography of a politician whose multiple achievements deserve to be better known.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

July 2021; 397 pages

"Liquid Modernity" by Zygmunt Bauman

This book, written in the year 2000, explores our modern ideas from a sociological / philosophical viewpoint. It has some interesting alternative perspectives and it is written with passion, sometimes anger; it is extraordinarily readable.

His thesis is that the advent of 'liquid' modernity (the internet, the flexibility of new capital, the changing relationships within society) have created substantial and important changes in the way we live our lives.

Freedom
Thus, he discusses freedom. After all, we live in the 'free world'. But this tends to concentrate on political freedom: freedom of speech, of religion, and so forth. Most of us in the western world enjoy this and it is a very precious freedom. But many people are not economically free. Poor people rarely have control of their own destiny. They may not be technically slaves but they often have little opportunity to determine their lives.

Bauman points out, first, that being free doesn't necessarily mean being happy. This works the other way as well. “what feels like freedom is not in fact freedom at all; that people may be satisfied with their lot even though that lot were far from being ‘objectively’ satisfactory; that, living in slavery, they feel free and so experience no urge to liberate themselves" (p 17) But this is not allowed by the libertarians who suppose "that people may be incompetent judges of their own plight and must be forced or cajoled, but in any case guided” to seek freedom (p 17).

In fact most so called libertarians are very distrustful of the mob. In the past, political freedom and human rights were balanced by the suffocating moral code of society. Even today, one's freedom to speak one's mind may be severely curtailed by the social opprobrium one suffers should one's opinions be deemed politically incorrect. So freedom is a balancing act. Hobbesian libertarians “draw their credibility from the assumption that a human being released from coercive social constraints ... is a beast rather than a free individual ... social coercion is in this philosophy the emancipatory force and the sole hope of freedom that a human may reasonably entertain. ... There is no other way to pursue the liberation but to ‘submit to society’ and to follow its norms.” (p 20)

Identity and Individualism

In the old days, people were born into their identities but now you have to become your identity. (p 32) In early modernity the challenge facing people was to conform to “the emerging class-bound social types and models of conduct.” (p 28) “class and gender were ‘facts of nature’ and the task left to the self-assertion of most individuals was to ‘fit in’ in the allocated niche through behaving as the other occupants did.” (p 33)

Nowadays “we are presently moving away from the era of pre-allocated ‘reference groups’ ... the destination of individual self-constructing labours is endemically and incurably undetermined, is not given in advance, and tends to undergo numerous and profound changes before ... the end of the individual’s life.” (p 7) This means that “the burden of pattern-weaving and the responsibility for failure falling primarily on the individual’s shoulders.” (p 8)

Nowadays Big Brother, the punisher of individuality, no longer exists. Nor does Elder Brother, who guides the individual into their proper channel. (p 61) “Everything ... is now down to the individual. It is up to the individual to find out what she or he is capable of doing, to stretch that capacity to the utmost, and to pick the ends to which that capacity could be applied best.” (p 62)

And we need guidance. Bauman points out that TV chat shows are “daily compulsive viewing for millions of guidance-hungry men and women.” (p 68) However the only support offered is the self-help support group. “One may perhaps also learn from other people's experience how to survive the next round of ‘downsizing’, how to handle children who think they are adolescents and adolescents who refuse to become adults, how to get the fat and other unwelcome ‘foreign bodies’ ‘out of one’s system’, how to get rid of addiction that is no longer pleasurable or partners who are no longer satisfying. But what one learns in the first place from the company of others is ... advice about how to survive in one's own irredeemable loneliness” (p 35)

Shifting the blame
“At the threshold of the modern era we have been emancipated from belief in the act of creation, revelation and eternal condemnation. With such beliefs out of the way, we humans found ourselves ‘on our own’ - which means that from then on we knew of no limits to improvement and self-improvement other than the shortcomings of our own inherited or acquired gifts, resourcefulness, nerve, will and determination.” (p 28)

“That men and women have no one to blame for their frustrations and troubles does not need now to mean ... that they can protect themselves ... if they fall ill, it is assumed that this is happened because they were not resolute and industrious enough in following their health regime; if they stay unemployed, it is because they failed to learn the skills of gaining an interview, because they did not try hard enough to find a job what because they are, purely and simply, work-shy.” (p 34)


The relationship between the governed and the governors:
Modern life is like a caravan site: “Drivers bring to the site their own homes ... each driver has his or her own itinerary and time schedule. What the drivers wants from the site managers is not much more (but no less either) then to be left alone and not interfered with. In exchange, they promise not to challenge the managers’ authority and to pay the rent when due. Since they pay, they also demand. They tend to be quite adamant when arguing for their rights to the promised services but otherwise want to go their own ways and would be angry if not allowed to do so. On occasion, they may clamour for better service ... but it won't occur to them to ... take over the responsibility for running the place.” (p 24)

Certainly the bosses no longer want to look after people. “The contemporary global elite can run without burdening itself with the chores of administration, management, welfare concerns, or, for that matter, with the mission of ‘bringing light’, ‘reforming the ways’, morally uplifting, ‘civilizing’ and cultural crusades. Active engagement in the life of subordinate populations is no longer needed (on the contrary, it avoided as unnecessarily costly and ineffective)” (p 13)

Instead the prime technique is to relocate the blame for misery. “Being an individual de jure means having no one to blame for one's own misery, seeking the causes of one's own defeats nowhere except in one's own indolence and sloth, and looking for no remedies other than try harder and harder still.” (p 38) As in the Bible, the Israelites are being ordered to make bricks without straw “and the producers of bricks are told that solely their own laziness prevents them from doing the job properly.” (p 49)

But the destruction of collective action and the iconisation of individualism has left the poor, those "limited to their own, individually owned, blatantly inadequate resources.” (p 33)  without a weapon:

Too many opportunities

Bauman suggests that modern capitalism has, in order to keep selling, moved beyond need. In the olden days goods were produced to satisfy need. But "there is a bottom line to what one needs in order to stay alive and be capable of doing whatever the producer’s role may require, but also an upper limit to what one may dream of, desire and pursue while counting on the social approval for one’s ambitions ... whatever rises above that limit is a luxury, and desiring luxury is a sin. The main concern is therefore that of conformity.” (p 76)

We've gone beyond the 'luxury is a sin' point. And now we are moving beyond desire. This is because “it takes time, effort and considerable financial outlay to arouse desire ... Consumers guided by desire must be ‘produced’, ever anew, and at high cost".

In order to keep selling the capitalists must create a mind-set in which we are desperate for endless self-improvement. “The ‘my body a besieged fortress’ attitude does not lead to asceticism, abstinence or renunciation; if anything, it means consuming more - but consuming special ‘healthy’ foods, commercially supplied.” (p 80)

But this pursuit of wishes brings anxieties: “One thing the fitness-seekers know for sure is that they are not fit enough, yet, and that they must keep trying. The pursuit of fitness is the state of perpetual self-scrutiny, self-reproach and self-deprecation, and so also of continuous anxiety.” (p 78)

We used to admire those who could wait for things. But now we are too busy running to catch up with eternally receding goals. “No longer is the delay of gratification a sign of moral virtue. It is a hardship pure and simple, a problematic burden signalling imperfections in social arrangements, personal inadequacy, or both. ...In the casino culture the waiting is taken out of wanting, but the satisfaction of the wanting must also be brief, must last only until the next run of the ball, to be as short-lived as the waiting, lest it should smother, rather than replenish and reinvigorate, the desire.” (p 159) “To stay alive and fresh, desire must be time and again, and quite often, gratified - yet gratification spells the end of the desire.” (p 160) “One can think of no reason to stick to an inferior or aged product rather than look for a ‘new and improved’ one in the shops.” (p 164)

But there is too much to want.
"The world full of possibilities is like a buffet table set with mouth-watering dishes, too numerous for the keenest of eaters to hope to taste them all.” (p 62)
I just need to look at my bookshelves, stuffed with books I have bought but not yet got around to reading, and the Amazon 'later' list which has over one hundred titles on it, and the poster of a hundred books I 'must' read on which I have nearly half still to be read, to know that there is too much wanting in my world.

Of course this endless choice is only available to the monied. “The more choices the rich seem to have, the less bearable to all is a life without choosing.” (p 88)

Cities and strangers

The modern dream is to live in a community. But other people are dangerous. Defining a city as "a human settlement in which strangers are likely to meet" (p 94) Bauman suggests that such encounters require us to develop "civility" (p 95) a code of behaviour appropriate for an encounter unlikely to have either a past or a future. He suggests that the spaces we develop where encounters with strangers regularly take place (airport lounges, hotel rooms, motorway service stations etc) "do not require a mastery of the sophisticated and hard-to-study art of civility, since they reduce behaviour in public to a few simple and easy-to-grasp precepts.” (p 102)

But we are becoming so frightened of strangers that we are redeveloping gated communities (going back, perhaps, to the walled towns of the middle-ages) in which civility and community is ensured by the tight surveillance of security guards and CCTV (p 92)

Then we dump everything that is bad outside the walls. The “communal world is complete in so far as all the rest is ... hostile - a wilderness full of ambushes and conspiracies and bristling with enemies wielding chaos as their main weapons. The inner harmony of the communal world shines and glitters against the background of the obscure and tangled jungle which starts on the other side of the turnpike. It is there, to that wilderness, that people huddling in the warmth of shared identity dump (or hope to banish) the fears which prompted them to seek communal shelter.” (p 172)

Work

Once upon a time, we worked for our tribe. Work was “the collective effort of which every single member of humankind had to partake." This meant that work became elevated into a moral imperative. "All the rest was but a consequence: casting work as the ‘natural condition’ of human beings, and being out of work as an abnormality; blaming departure from that natural condition for extant poverty and misery, deprivation and depravity; ranking men and women according to the assumed value of the contribution their work made to the species-wide endeavour; and assigning to work the prime place among human activities, leading to moral self-improvement and to the rise of the overall ethical standards of society.” (p 137)

This was a time when labourers were needed. Bauman suggests that the welfare state owes its origin to the need for the bosses to make sure that there was a supply of (healthy) labour ready to be call upon. “The unemployed were fully and truly the ‘reserve army of labour’, and so had to be kept through thick and thin in a state of readiness, in case they were called back into active service. ... More sceptical observers saw the welfare state as a collectively financed and managed sanitation device - a cleaning-and-healing operation to be run as long as the capitalist enterprise kept generating social waste it had neither intention nor resources to recycle.” (p 145)

But now there isn't enough work to go round. “Work can no longer offer the secure axis around which to wrap and fix self-definitions, identities and life-projects. Neither can it be easily conceived of as the ethical foundation of society, or as the ethical axis of individual life. Instead work has acquired ... a mainly aesthetic significance. It is expected to be gratifying by and in itself, rather than be measured by the genuine or putative effects it brings to one’s brothers and sisters in humanity ... let alone the bliss of future generations ... It is instead measured and evaluated by its capacity to be entertaining and amusing” (p 139)

Furthermore, the global economy means that mobile capital can roam the world while the less-mobile workers are stuck in one place. This in turn means that localised governments have to pander to capital. “To an unprecedented degree politics has become a tug-of-war between the speed with which capital can move and the ‘slowing down’ capacities of local powers ... A government ... has little choice but to implore and cajole, rather than force, capital to fly in ... In practice, all this means low taxes, fewer or no rules and above all a ‘flexible labour market’. More generally, it means a docile population.” (p 150) The only weapon governments have is their markets. “Capital is dependent, for its competitiveness, effectiveness and profitability, on consumers ... a labour force is but a secondary consideration.” (p 151)

Bauman suggests there are now four sorts of work: “People who invent the ideas and the ways to make them desirable and marketable ... those engaged in the reproduction of labour (educators or various functionaries of welfare state) ... ‘skin trades’ requiring face-to-face encounter with the recipients of service ... routine labourers ... the most expendable, disposable and exchangeable parts of the economic system.” (p 153)

Other ideas

• Reality “is created by ...the stubborn indifference of the world to my intention, the world's reluctance to submit to my will, that rebounds in the perception of the world as ‘real’ - constraining, limiting and disobedient.” (p 17)
• “When authorities are many, they tend to cancel each other out. ... It is by courtesy of the chooser that a would-be authority becomes an authority. Authorities no longer command; they ingratiate themselves with the chooser; they tempt and seduce.” (p 64)
• “Heavy modernity was the era of territorial conquest. Wealth and power was firmly rooted or deposited deep inside the land - bulky, ponderous and immovable like the beds of iron ore and deposits of coal. ... Anything lying between the outposts of competing imperial realms was seen as masterless, a no man’s land, and so an empty space - and empty space was a challenge to action and a reproach to idlers.” (p 114)
• “The labyrinth becomes the master image of the human condition” (p 138)
• “If staying together was a matter of reciprocal agreement and mutual dependency, disengagement is unilateral.” (p 149)
• “Leadership has been replaced by the spectacle, and surveillance by seduction.” (p 155)

This is an amazing book. I might not agree with many of the things that has been said, and time may prove wrong, but there is no gainsaying that this is a brilliantly argued position and it certainly made me think.

March 2018; 200 pages

"What Happened" by Hillary Rodham Clinton

Clinton is the wife of Bill Clinton, former president of the United States, who went on to become a Senator for New York, US Secretary of State under Barack Obama, and Democrat candidate for US President in 2016 in a race in which she gained more votes than her rival Donald Trump but lost to him because of the archaic US Electoral College rules. This book tries to explain how her campaign, which everyone (including herself and, it appears, Mr Trump) thoughtshe would win, failed so spectacularly.

It is written in a very straightforward style. As is typical of US books it is obsessed with facts, in particular poll ratings, the names of people, and what she eats. She would appear to read a lot of inspirational books especially those written by religious people.  I found that these details tended to get in the way of the narrative.

It's not a rant. There is a lot of careful policy. Clinton comes over as extremely thoughtful, searingly honest, and very caring, although it is interesting that the norms she accepts (such as self-help, reducing taxes, being the world's policeman) are really rather right wing in the context of European politics.

Some interesting comments:

• "To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis on which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle." (p 9; quoting Timothy Snyder)
• “Attempting to define reality is a core feature of authoritarianism.” (p 9)
• “It wasn't all yoga and breathing: I also drink my share of chardonnay.” (p 27)
• There is an opioid epidemic in the US. In 2015 over 33,000 people overdosed and died. “A woman in treatment [for opioid addiction] told me, ‘We're not bad people trying to get good. we're sick people trying to get well’.” (p 62)
• “Gun violence ... is the leading cause of death for young black men [in the US], outstripping the next nine causes of death combined.” (p 178)
• “Change might be the most powerful word in American politics. It's also one of the hardest to define.” (p 197)
• “Service is the rent we pay for living.” (p 215; quoting Marian Wright Edelman)
• “President Obama once compared Vladimir Putin to a ‘bored kid at the back of the classroom. ... he's got that kind of slouch’.” (p 327)
• “De Tocqueville ... wrote that revolts tend to start not in places where conditions are worst, but in places where expectations are most unmet.” (p 442)

February 2018; 464 pages

"The Road to Wigan Pier" by George Orwell

A classic of proletarian literature.

Orwell liked political discourse. His most famous novel, 1984, contains a long extract from a political tract written by the arch enemy of Ing Soc. This book starts with wonderful journalism, describing working class life in the north of England between the two world wars, and ends with several chapters of tedious, probably outdated, politics.

But it starts brilliantly with a description of a filthy tripe shop cum lodging house in which OAPs subsist in shared bedrooms an bread and butter imprinted with the filthy thumbprint of the landlord. Despite receiving a pension, without extra savings an OAP cannot survive on their own. Nor can they live with a son or daughter if that person is unemployed and on the dole because if they do so they will be counted as a lodger and the dole will be reduced to the extent where the whole family will starve. So they have to eke out their sunset years in undignified misery.

The book continues with wonderful descriptions and haunting images of poverty. He describes a slum girl, glimpsed momentarily from a train, whose face wears "the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen ... she knew well enough what was happening to her." He uses this image to refute the concept that the lower orders are dumb brutes and don't mind poverty and squalor.

He also admires the "superhuman" coal miners ("The miners' job would be as much beyond my power as it would be to perform on the flying trapeze") with "their noble bodies". But in very hot mines, where it is necessary to go about half-naked, most of the miners have what they call 'buttons down the back' - that is, a permanent scar on each vertebra" from not bending low enough when they are crouching through the tunnels. They are also tattooed: "Every miner has blue scars on his nose and forehead, and will carry them to his death. The coal dust of which the air underground is full enters every cut, and then the skin grows over it and forms a blue stain like tattooing, which in fact it is."

He draws the following lessons:

• "It is so with all types of manual work; it keeps us alive, and we are oblivious of its existence."
• Educated bourgeois are no more gifted than anybody else but "have the cheek necessary to a commander."
• "The price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt."

This first part of the book was so well-observed that it was mesmerising, like rubber-necking at the site of a car crash. But he can also turn a phrase:

• Dismissing conspiracy theories: "What I have seen of our governing classes does not convince me that they have that much intelligence."
• "Sheffield ... could justly claim to be the ugliest town in the Old World."
• "the dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of 'progress' like bluebottles to a dead cat."
• "A Yorkshire man in the South will always take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior."
• Of self-made men: "Though he might be narrow-minded, sordid, ignorant, grasping and uncouth ... he knew how to make money."
• Of the way certain novelists depict women: "every married woman is an angel chained to a satyr.

Cut most of part two with its dreary politics and you will have a wonderfully written book, even more powerful (perhaps because it is journalism rather than fiction but probably because of the vivid description) that Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole. These books need to be remembered so that Britain never again exploits its people as it did then.

Well worth reading. May 2016; 204 pages

Here is a review of Orwell's biography by Michael Shelden

Orwell also wrote a memoir of the Spanish Civil War called Homage to Catalonia, the political satire Animal Farm, and a memoir of time spent tramping in England and dishwashing in France called Down and Out in Paris and London.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Out of time" by Lynne Segal

I was delighted to receive for Xmas a book about getting old. It captured me from the off when it pointed out that very few old people thought that they were old ... so if I protest that I am not yet old enough for this book I suppose that means that I probably am. I am 58. Judge for yourself.

More challenging is that the book is written from a feminist perspective. I am a man. So I have to be careful not to feel alienated and to try to listen to what this book is saying with an open a mind as too much testosterone will allow. Well, I tried. But what annoyed me more than anything else was how slender her evidence base was when it came to making generalisations about all men: most of what she says about men is based on the work of a handful of novelists. A different selection may have given a different result although I feel sure that it would have changed her opinion: she believes men are obsessed with their penises and that this leaves them little room to think of anything else. Her discussion of ageing women, on the other hand, scarcely mentions vaginas.

Chapter One: How Old Am I?

Segal's refusal to cast her net wide is emphasised on page 13 when she points out that there are many terrifying old women in myth: "the hag, harridan, gorgon, witch or Medusa". Firstly, Medusa was a gorgon and therefore included in the list twice. Secondly, Ovid describes Medusa as a beautiful young woman and a brief glimpse of Google Images for Medusa confirms that she is generally thought of as young. Thirdly, why has Segal restricted herself to the myths of the classical ancient world? There are certainly old men (and old women) to be found in Voodoo; Odin is usually an old man.

I love the idea Segal floats on page 19 that old people have access to "all the selves we have been". She develops this idea on page 24 in terms of people being haunted by their memories (and by the memories that others leave with us).

I am less happy with the ideas that old people are less creative and "educable" than young people. Segal mentions these myths without aligning herself for or against. How true are they? I am presently studying for a PhD at the age of 58 and I think I am learning as fast as I was when I was 20. I have more stamina than when I was younger, I am better at organising my time and I am more patient (although I am, perhaps, quicker to discontinue a non-productive activity so in a sense I am less patient; I think I am more easily bored than I was; I certainly am less tolerant of trashy TV). I also have far more experience to compare new learning with; until a few years ago I could never have invoked the Voodoo counterexamples above and therefore I think that I can do the 'mix' bit of 'rip, mix and burn' learning better than I could. Since I believe that creativity is governed by similarly 'mixing' experiences, the more experiences that I have the more creative I can now be. At the same time, I am better able to endure the hard and boring work that is need to transform mixed ideas into burned new products.

On page 35, Segal says that on the whole "men see themselves faced with the challenge of how to keep desire visibly alive, many seeking assistance for maintaining the sexual potency of youth." It is certainly my experience that erections are slower to arrive and harder (not quite the right word!) to maintain as I get older. But desire, lust, is still strong. In fact, this year I have experienced upsurges in horniness such as I cannot recall since puberty (but perhaps that is just my autobioheimers kicking in).

Chapter Two: Generational Warfare

The inescapable truth is that the old are luckier than the young because the old have been young while the young might not grow old. This is not how Segal sees it.

She kicks off, in both senses of the phrase, by describing "the war between the generations, or the baiting of older people" (p 40), immediately signifying her bias. In Greek culture, she remarks (and it is surprising how monocultural her references seem to be), "all heroism, beauty and sweetness resided in youth" (p 41)although wisdom was seen as a preserve of the old. Perhaps different generations do indeed have different strengths.

But on the whole, in the past, old people were better respected than they are now. A reason for this might be that "where there is a mass of elderly people there is less respect than in societies where there are few, especially when in the past it was more likely to be only the relatively powerful and affluent who survived into old age." (p 40) That seems a valid point worth investigating.

A point she never makes is that all old people are enfranchised while many young people are not. Recent UK referenda point out the implications of this: the Scottish independence referendum controversially extended the franchise to 16 and 17 year olds on the basis that they would be affected by the decision; the UK/EU referendum will equally controversially deny the franchise to 16 and 17 year olds despite the fact that they will be affected by the decision. Perhaps we should remove the franchise from everyone over a certain age (85? 90?) on the basis that they will only be affected by any electoral decision for a very short time while young people might be affected for longer. If the argument is about competence to make decisions it might easily be argued that a bright 16 year old is more competent than a 90 year old suffering dementia.

But her arguments do not need evidence. To argue about the unfair representation of old women in Hollywood (p 43)she relies on three films made between 1950 and 1968: hardly a representative selection of the hundreds of films made during that period or the thousands made in the 47 years since.

She talks about the "chorus of men blaming women" for the deterioration in their privileged positions without realising that feminism itself represents a chorus of women blaming men: what is sauce for the goose is indeed sauce for the gander. Clearly it is more reasonable for those without power (eg women) to fight to gain power than for those with power to fight to hang on to it. And the voices of the weak are often louder and angrier than those of the strong. But is this not the very reason why young people at the moment are angry with the old: because the old tend to be wealthier and more powerful? There are clear biases in the UK political system towards the old. The 'triple lock' guarantees that pensions will rise faster than inflation but there is no such protection for young people on low wages who rely on benefits to help them (Segal remarks that "the issue of pensions is indeed one in need of serious attention" (p 48) but she wants even better pensions than now). And is not that the reason why young people have always been resentful of the old? Isn't this exactly what happened in the Sixties?

She believes that the activists of the Sixties were defeated. But were they? In some things they lost; Thatcherism saw to that. But in other areas they were triumphant. While racism still exists it is nothing like the blatant casual racism of fifty years ago. Whilst homosexuals still suffer homophobia, gay culture is celebrated and gay rights are enshrined in law. Sexually we are much more free than before the era of 'free love'. Women have much more power and wealth than they had. In my youth, every office had girly calendars. Nowadays they have been almost completely replaced by hunk calendars and male nudity on stage is now more common than female nudity. I am not saying that the journey is complete, only that we have come a long way.

Segal believes (p 57) that "Many boomers have no good fortune at all to feel guilty about". Well they should not feel guilty. But healthcare is far better than it ever was and this is reflected in the increased life expectancy. In my youth there were regular famines in India and Africa; now these famines are fewer. Far more households around the world have access to running water and in this country far more people have refrigerators. We are much better off than we were. To say we have "no good fortune at all" is ridiculous.

Chapter 3: The Perils of Desire
Segal turns her attention to sexual desire, focussing again on "those who have a far stronger sense of their extensive past than of how they should relate to their much shorter future" (p 77) which is a lovely way of saying 'the old'.

Although she does acknowledge that the 'mid-life crisis' is essentially male and involves "periods of dramatic self-doubt, anxiety and worthlessness" (p 79), some of which relates to retirement (or when still in employment being overtaken by younger men) she does spend a lot of time looking at men's "faltering erectile capacities" (p 78), the "useless 'spigot of wrinkled flesh' between their legs" (p 84), men as "lecherous mavericks" (p 85)  full of "phallic longings" (p 86), "mortified by the 'pathetic shrunken wreck' his beloved penis has become" (p 87), "chronically depressed, self-destructive and, of course, impotent" (p 87) "as their erectile capacities falter" (p 89). In other words, she essentially defines masculinity in terms of sex. Old women, on the other hand, find themselves "free of the shackles of sexuality" (p 91); she claims that "Viagra wives" are not thrilled to be asked to resume sex lives (pp 94 - 95). Indeed, she seems to feel that while male homosexuals usually discover their homosexuality in their teenage years, lesbianism begins over a much wider age range and some seems to be a result of being less desired by men (just as some male homosexual behaviour is due to the denial of female company eg in prisons). (pp 117 - 118)

But Segal does quote Doris Lessing as suggesting that "Older women ... lose men of their own age to younger women, because such men are the inevitable prey of these younger women." (p 107)

Men, of course, kill themselves more than women. "Women on average are most miserable at age forty, whereas men's blues kick in when they hit fifty" (p 82) which may be something to do with the differing ages of menopause.

In other words, Segal's arguments on the effect of ageing on sexuality do not offer a clear cut message. Although for men ageing is all about impotence it is much more complicated for women. Again, I feel that Seghal is not even-handed. For example, her evidence about ageing men derives almost entirely from the fictional works of Roth, Updike and Amis whilst she has a much broader evidence base, both fictional and non-fictional, for women. And if men are essentially playthings of biology with the urge to reproduce at every opportunity, can we use that same biology to analyse women after reproduction is no longer possible? Segal doesn't attempt this.

Chapter 4: The Ties that Bind
I was less interested in this chapter although it was again noteworthy that her understanding of the male perspective relies entirely on her analysis of fiction writers, here expanded to include Julian Barnes, whilst her feminine perspective is largely based on factual writings, especially memoir. Why is there this difference? And to what extend does such a limited and anecdotal evidence base devalue the validity of her conclusions?

Chapter 5: Flags of Resistance
There were some very interesting points made, although the evidence base is still rather thin. Does she really think that a handful of novelists represent the spectrum of opinions across all men?

"Biologists have revealed that ... (Class) differences are clearly evident even at the cellular level." (p 175). I'd love to see the evidence for this. She cites Thomas von Zglinicki (ed) Aging at the Molecular Level, New York, Springer, 2003

"Striving for agelessness is thus in one sense a rejection of life ... it is also quintessentially shallow, self-centred and elitist in its refusal to engage with the suffering and helplessness of others ... It is a form of imaginative impoverishment to refuse to accept the tragic." (p 179) This is a nice counterblast to all those 'think positive' self-help people.

"pondering over all the ways the past has impacted upon the present." (p183)

"Contemplating ageing might include mourning the roads not taken." (p 183) It's not so much regret because it is not possible (nor desirable) to take every road but a gentle sense of the inevitability of one's limitations.

Take a stoic view: "the fleeting strength or beauty of youth ... Is best seen as something that never truly belongs to its bearer, who should remain indifferent to it." (p 190). Perhaps stoicism is a sensible, non-religious, westernised alternative to Buddhism. Perhaps I should read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

Chapter 6: Affirming Survival
Coupledom
One of the problems of old age is that one's kids may have moved away and one's partner may have died; this of course is a fundamental flaw of the nuclear family and Segal explores alternative living arrangements, concluding that communal living rarely works after one has reached middle age. This reflects her own experience: she lived in a shared household (although she owned the house) until her son was in his late teens and about to move away when she started living in a couple with a man who, fifteen years later, left her to have his own children so she was then alone. She realises that 'coupledom' is what most people want (she rather regrets that gays want to get married) and hypothesises that "The comfort of marriage, or long-term partnerships, in so far as they remain monogamous, is precisely that they usually remove us from the intense jealousies that always shadow desire, even if they inevitably moderate or dramatically decrease desire in the process." (p 246)

Failure
She quotes Samuel Beckett: "Fail again. Fail better" (p 247)
and Quentin Crisp: "If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style." (p 247)

Dependency
"When you are seen as 'dependent' you are always in danger of being ignored, patronized or pitied, seen as having no secrets."  (p 260) It is this last that Segal most deplores.
She does recognise the difficulties involved in a son or daughter switching roles to become the carer which can be "all the more challenging if the earlier relationship with the parent was tense or ambivalent". (p 261)
Dependents "may feel simply a burden on those very people whose wellbeing was always dearest to them." (p 261)
She quotes John Moore, Thatcher's Secretary of State for Social Security as stating: "A climate of dependence can in time corrupt the human spirit. Everyone knows the sullen apathy of dependence and can compare it with the sheer delight of personal achievement." (p 262)

This book had some great points in it but it is a very personal viewpoint.

Note that the following picture was taken a few years ago. But I still look like that. More or less. 

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Redirect" by Timothy D Wilson

This is a book about the social sciences. It starts off by giving a number of examples where treatments for social and educational ills have been implemented, sometimes at the cost of billions of dollars, without being subjected to careful scientific testing. It shows which of these treatments are ineffective or, worse, counter-productive; the author compares these to the blistering and blood-letting treatments of quack doctors which were either unpleasant and useless or dangerous.

Some of the treatments are:

• Critical Incidence Stress Debriefing which results in a higher incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder
• Self Help books which suggest that positive thinking will get you want you want (implying that "if you are poor, or if, God forbid, you contract a serious illness - well, it's your own damn fault")
• Bribing kids to read which might work for kids that don't read but actually turns kids who do read off reading
• Just say no to drugs or underage sex; a better way of preventing these is to encourage kids to volunteer
• Getting convicts to scare kids off crime which increases the chance that they will commit crime
• Diversity training

The author's panacea (OK so I was getting a little cynical by this time) for all these is to encourage people to rewrite their inner monologues so that they saw themselves as empowered.

He also emphasises the need for randomised control tests for all such programmes before the politicians spend vast amounts of money on them.

A very readable book which demolishes a lot of shibboleths. Not sure if his message on rescripting lives was quite as clear.

March 2015; 240 pages

"The uses of pessimism" by Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton is a philosopher and a proponent of conservatism. Perhaps he is principally revered for his aesthetics: I can't comment on this. The present book is essentially philosophical and summarises some of the reasons why he so dislikes the opponents of conservatism.

This is the only Scruton book I have read so I can't generalise my comments but from my limited evidence it seems to me that this work is essentially reactive. He describes and attacks what he hates. He hates utopians and revolutionaries. Thus he attacks the French Revolutionaries and Mao.. In so doing it appears that he is guilty of the fallacy of the straw man. By attacking the worst excesses of his opponents, such as Hitler, terrorists and post-modern gobbledygookers, he seeks to undermine the moderates. But he doesn't seem to defend his own proposals.

However, my main concern with this book is that Scruton never provides any evidence for his assertions. He justifies nothing. For example, he supports 'free exchange' (free enterprise?) and the 'invisible hand' (Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market, one presumes) but he never defines these terms, he never provides any evidence as to why they are good (except that they are somehow opposed to what is bad and that they are 'traditional') and he certainly never explores the limitations of his ideas. He seems blind to the fact that the invisible hand of the markets does not always work perfectly, that theft and predation are a type of free enterprise; he seems blind to the fact that if 'America' does not enjoy global support there may be some reason other than the stupidity and wickedness of his opponents.

I came to Scruton from reading Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature and Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. Both hammer home every point with evidence: Pinker usually uses 'real' statistical data and Kahneman usually employs evidence from psychological experiments. But Scruton's arguments against transhumanism, for example,  come from Huxley's Brave New World, Shelley's Frankenstein, and Capek's The Makropulos Case. These are all works of fiction. They may be dystopian visions but they are not hard evidence. Again, he suggests that we only need originality "when circumstances change" (p 21) but he gives no evidence for this assertion. I look at the evolving world and see that nature continually creates novelty even when circumstances stay the same. Evolution may be massively wasteful but at least it seems to work. I worry about a world where we can stagnate and yet believe we can turn on originality as needed. Please, Mr Scruton, give me some evidence for your point of view.

A lot of his arguments rest on rhetoric using boo-words to damn. He criticises "the worst kind of optimism" (p37); presumably the worst kind is necessarily bad just as the best kind of optimism is good. He criticises "unscrupulous optimists" (p38) (does he applaud scrupulous ones?) because they create "folly and wickedness" (p37) and fall into fallacies which leave them "forever in darkness". He certainly knows how to lay extreme language on thick. At the same time, apparently without the slightest concept that there might be a speck of wood in his own eye let alone a beam, he tells us that these unscrupulous optimists damn their critics as "not just mistaken ... but evil." (p38) Scruton, heal thyself!

On page 49 he contends, without any supporting evidence whatsoever, that "it is only in a society governed by the 'invisible hand' that true equality can be achieved: not an equality of property, influence or power, but an equality of recognition." Where is the evidence for the 'only'? Where is the evidence that 'equality of recognition' is the 'true equality'?

On page 50 he contends that we acquire freedom through "obedience" but he doesn't explain why or how and he doesn't explore whether it is possible to acquire freedom through any alternative method.

Again and again he builds a tower of conclusions, each one based on his own arguments and beliefs unsupported by external evidence. The result is a philosophical house of cards.

I was terribly disappointed by this book. Something is seriously wrong if this is the best philosophical justification that conservatism can muster. This book is little more than a list of unsupported assertions. The arguments lack evidence and lack depth. This book reads like the rant of a bar-room bigot seeking to convince by shouting reason down.

Embarrassingly weak. August 2013; 232 pages

"The state of Africa" by Martin Meredith

This is a comprehensive study of Africa since independence. It travels, more or less chronologically, from country to country, starting with Ghana as Kwame Nkrumah makes the jump from political prisoner to Prime Minister in a single day. We travel to Afrique Noire as France reluctantly releases its hold on Dahomey, Niger, Upper Volta, Cote d'Ivoire, Chad, the Central African Republic, the French Congo, Gabon and Senegal in a single month, August 1960. It was even more reluctant to release Algeria. We learn of the difficulties faced by the new countries as they tried to recover from colonialism with a minimum of infra-structure, almost no skilled workforce, and national boundaries that ignored traditional ethnic and tribal divisions. It talks of the Big Men such as Hastings Banda in Malawi who was a South London GP until he was 60 when he returned to Nyasaland and led it to independence, ruling it for another 30 years. We hear of Mobutu and Gadaffi and Nyerere and Idi Amin.

Africa's misfortune was to be colonised. Then it suffered from an era of dictators who plundered whatever resources they could. First they nationalised everything so they could get rich from controlling revenues and bribes. Most of the nationalised industries were incredibly inefficient; ghost jobs were created for friends and family and those who paid bribes. The industries were propped up with state loans or foreign aid. Then the Big Men  privatised everything so that their cronies and their families could get their hands on state assets cheaply.

 Then they fought wars. They fought for oil fields and diamond fields. They fought civil wars to control the government so they could divert government revenues into their own pockets. They fought to placate political interests at home. They fought to even old tribal scores. And they fought as proxies for the cold war superpowers.

The superpowers and the old colonial masters made things worse. Even after the genocide was a matter of public knowledge, France intervened in Rwanda on the side of the Hutu who were killing the Tutsis. The US regularly backed Mobutu even against African leaders who were relatively good guys. International aid kept Biafra fighting enabling Biafra's leaders to cynically sacrifice even more of their population.

Even now most of the Big Men have gone the democratic regimes replacing them have mostly been deeply corrupt. And now we have the scourge of AIDS. In Botswana, uniquely peaceful and democratic since independence, 37% of its 1.6 million people have HIV; life expectancy is 27. AIDS kills teachers faster than they can be trained.

This is a deeply gloomy book. Africa has so many natural resources and is mired in such endemic poverty. Aid and debt relief are wasted or stolen or used to maintain armies. There seems to be no solution.

Sad. But a beautifully written  book. Very readable.

June 2012; 688 pages

"50 Political Ideas you really need to know" by Ben Dupre

This book puts Politics into perspective. It shows that the latest ideas have been around for centuries. It points out that one's least loved ideas have something to be said for them and that their is a valid alternative viewpoint to one's core values. Politics is really the art of running society so that it functions. What works in one country or age or context won't work in another. No cows are sacred; we just have to find the next compromise.

May 2011; 203 pages

"Nudge" by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein

This 'hugely influential' book is really rather limited and boring.

These are the big ideas. None are original.

• Human beings are not as rational as the ideal consumer portrayed by Economists.
• Therefore, humans make choices based on rules of thumb such as 
• Anchoring (based on the latest information you have; they demonstrate this by asking you to add 200 to the last 3 digits of your telephone number and guess whether Attila the Hun sacked Europe before or after this date; strangely for me the right answer was exactly equal to the last three digits of my telephone number added to 200!); 
• Availability (we choose based on the evidence most readily available to us such as the horrendous aeroplane crash in the tabloids), 
• Conforming to others, 
• Overconfidence, 
• the fact that we would rather avoid Losses than make Gains, 
• seeking false patterns in random data, 
• and sticking to the Status Quo. 
• (All of these ideas are much better covered in Stuart Sutherland's Irrationality.)
• A choice architect designs the way we are presented with a choice. There is no such thing as a neutral choice.
• A choice architect can therefore influence our choice by manipulating the choice architecture in line with the rules of thumb. This is a nudge.
• This is morally acceptable within the framework of libertarian paternalism if the nudges influence us to make choices that are in our own best interests. Our best interests can be demonstrated: no one ever makes a New Year's resolution to start smoking or exercise less. 

They need to spend some time defending libertarian paternalism from the American right. They argue that it is better that government should nudge us to do what is in our own best interest rather than to force us to do this. They suggest that not all government officials are necessarily incompetent or corrupt. (I think they could go quite a way further here and suggest that it is more likely that a civil servant will try to influence your choice in a way that is good and positive than that a capitalist seeking to maximise the profit of himself or his shareholders will. They do say: "One the face of it, it is odd to say that the public [choice] architects are always more dangerous than the private ones. After all, managers in the public sector have to answer to voters, and managers in the private sector have as their mandate the job of maximizing profits and share prices, not consumer welfare. Indeed, some of those who are most suspicious of governments think that the only responsibility of private managers is to maximise share prices." (p238) )

So far the book has been interesting though not revolutionary. The test of the pudding as always is in the eating. Here they apply their theories to a variety of spheres (health care, pensions, sub-prime mortgages etc; mostly from a US perspective). What do they come up with in terms of practical advice?

• Default options are important but especially so when it becomes difficult to choose. Madly (because of fears of being sued) the default prescription option for seniors under the Bush health care legislation was to pick a plan at random even though in healthcare the past is a pretty good indicator of the future.
• Transparency is good. They recommend that for investment plans etc banks are required to send annual statements detailing all charges to prompt people to consider whether they really made a good choice before. Generally information is good although when the choice becomes complex it becomes critical as to what information you present and how your present it. This too is part of choice architecture.
• Escalators are good. People are more likely to save for their pensions if they are asked to set aside a small amount now with a commitment to an automatic increase every time they get a pay rise.

To keep choice architects on the side of the angels they suggest the slightly novel moral principle (they credit it to the moral philosopher John Rawls) that you should only do what you would not be embarrassed about. If you place mirrors into restaurants to nudge people into eating less you might be happy for this idea to be publicised; you might be less happy if you had used subliminal advertising to achieve the same end.

So overall this was an interesting book although I had encountered most of its ideas before and the practical applications do seem rather limited. I hope there is more potential for the essential idea.

March 2012; 260 pages