Powerless against the screen pushers

I am having one of those moments of disaffection which is the real experience of English middle class life these days.

What do I spend more time doing than anything else, as a parent of pre-teenage children? I'll tell you. I am policing their screen time.  It takes huge energy and angst and negotiating skills. It prevents me from being much more productive. I resent it.

If it weren't for me on some days, when I'm looking after them by myself, they would spend the whole time being educated by Google and whoever happens to use their facilities.

They would be off laughing all night at the pre-teen humour of some of the Youtube stars - Yogscast spring to mind: people from Bristol who swear rather more than they would if they realised most of their viewers were eleven, and who think blowing things up is the apogee of humour.

They would be being abused online by their classmates, and - if we make the mistake of reporting the abuse to Youtube, one of those vacant corporations where nobody is at home - we will receive back the empty, helpless silence we have come to expect.

I suppose you could imagine a couple of answers to this.  First, perhaps I am wrong and they should plug into the virtual world as much as they like, on the grounds that it improves hand eye co-ordination or something or other.

Second, a little more seriously, I should set more elastic limits because they need computer skills if they are going to achieve the school system's highest ambitions for them - and become either a scholar or a machine minder (no other alternative seems to be encouraged).

Third, why should my children be different? How dare I cut them off from what is laughingly called kid's culture, as mediated by Murdoch and his equivalents.

You only have to write those out to see they have flaws. Don't they - or am I wrong? It is true that I was probably glued to screens more intently than they were at the same age, but with more control over what I am seeing.

But what really annoys me about this is that we kind of assume - as middle class types - that the government is at least vaguely on our side, shares our values, wants to support us to bring up our children in the best way that we can.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The government is firmly on the side of the screen pushers. The school system is dedicated to buying and pushing more Apple iPads - Apple itself acknowledges that their profits for iPads in 2013 were boosted by the UK school system.

Whitehall isn't interesting in my family life, They want my children to be entirely open to whatever rubbish sells more schlock.

I wrote in my book Broke last year that UK governments had long since turned their back on genuine middle class values.  I don't think I understood the half of it.

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Thank you, crowdfunders - I will do you proud!

I haven’t crowdfunded a book before. It has its embarrassing elements, asking friends and family for money for example – something I try hard not to do in normal circumstances.

But I am now down to the last 48 hours of the project to crowdfund a short ebook about the Room 40 naval codebreakers in the First World War, and the fascinating lessons they provided for Turing in the Second. It is called Before Enigma. And I've found it quite exhilarating.

There is, in fact, still time to contribute, should you be so moved. And although we may not finally reach the publisher’s target, we are now approaching enough to kickstart the project.

So here are three final reasons why this particular book needs to be written:

• It will provide a way of understanding Turing and the Enigma codebreakers a generation later, because those who managed him cut their teeth in Room 40.

• It will tell the fascinating story of the war at sea – rather ignored by the BBC these days – through the eyes of the peculiar bunch of brilliant amateurs collected together by the Admiralty to crack codes from 1914 onwards.

• It will allow me to tell the tale which fascinates me most – the emergence of the twentieth century phenomenon: the huge hierarchical corporation (in this case, the fleet) and how the mavericks learned the hard way how it might be provided with the information it needed to be effective. It is a lesson we keep forgetting, even in the twenty-first century.

So if you are among those who have helped fund this project, I am really ever so grateful. There is still time to contribute if you still want to, but not much time. Either way, I will do you proud...

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A Liberal economic breakthrough. It’s about time.

There may not be any obvious traction that the Lib Dems are bringing to themselves at the moment, no obvious attention from the media or speaking for the nation. But there are shoots emerging.

One of these was the speech on economics that Tim Farron made today at IPPR in London. The most important element of this story is the mere fact that Farron chose economics for his first keynote speech.

But it was also important the way he framed it – the idea of Liberals as the party of challenge, of enterprise and entrepreneurs, as the "party of Small Business, the party of wealth creators, the insurgents, the entrepreneurs".

“The Liberal spirit is the entrepreneurial spirit and entrepreneurs are natural Liberals,” he said. Quite so.

It is important because it is both positive and forward-looking, and rooted in traditional Liberalism – and, because the party has been timid about economics in recent decades, this is for me something of a breakthrough.

He also understood the implications of this stance for the banks. It is indeed extraordinary that the government is not breaking up the failed brontosaur RBS to turn it into an effective regional lending infrastructure – that the enterprise economy so badly needs.

By coincidence, the Welsh Lib Dems have launched an excellent paper on how to rebuild diverse high streets – and Wales has been more wedded to the failed out of town retailing regeneration ‘solution’ than almost anywhere else in the UK.

So this is rather a good day, as far as I’m concerned. It is a long-awaited glimpse of a different approach to economics, understanding for the first time in half a century that the main economic purpose of Liberals is to promote diversity and fight monopoly.

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Time for a bit of economic archaeology

I have always been fascinated by those social movements that rise and fall, leave their mark permanently, and are then forgotten. I have had a soft spot for the 1920s movement Kibbo Kift as a result.

So imagine my surprise when I opened my Guardian last week and found a big feature about them, and their charismatic leader John Hargrave. I dropped everything and read through it immediately.

There are three reasons why I’m especially interested in this peculiar mixture of Scouting, Egyptology, outdoor ritual and back to the land.

First, because it was an early breakaway from the Boy Scouts (Hargrave had been a frustrated head of camping).

Second, because of their amazing sense of design. The logos look modern ever now, with just a hint of Art Deco about them.

Third, because Hargrave changed his mind – transforming Kibbo Kift overnight in 1929 into the militaristic Greenshirts, much more numerous than the Blackshirts, dedicated to changing the money system to prevent banks from creating money, in the way that they do now.

The article did not communicate all of this (this isn’t a criticism). But it is hard to quite recreate what Hargrave meant because, as D. H. Lawrence used to say, he spoke in a kind of sloganising gobbledegook.

It is also, in my book, not exactly ‘back to the land’, which is about growing things. Hargrave was more part of the conservation movement. He wasn’t interested in crops, just – in that rather Germanic, Romantic way – that it was important to be outside.

Being outside is important, but not as a relief from modern, urban life, it seems to me – but as a way of reforming it.

Why am I writing this? Because it seems to me extraordinary that we allow ourselves to forget these movements, because they carry within them important truths which have to be reinvented all over again by the next generation. Especially, it seems to me, in economics.

I hereby dedicate myself to the task of economic archaeology – the exhuming of forgotten innovations which our economics establishment was just too boneheaded to notice or discuss at the time.

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Buggins turn to bomb?

David Cameron has promised to come up with a strategy for bombing in Syria. This is a peculiar idea in itself: a strategy for defeating IS makes sense - so does a strategy to bring peace to the Middle East - but a strategy to explain the importance of bombing sounds like putting the cart before the horse.

There may, after all, be an overwhelming argument for bombing in Syria, but there are three reasons (at least) why it makes sense to stay sceptical.  My test of the present effectiveness of the House of Commons as an institution is about how long it manages to stay sceptical, and to think clearly. We have never depended on the independence of our MPs as much as we do now.

Here are my three reasons to keep an open mind about Cameron's bombing plans:

1. He is actually planning to intervene on a different side.  Despite the rhetoric of going back to the Commons for a second time to ask for permission to bomb, the commentators seem willing to forget that - last time - the idea was actually to bomb on behalf of the other side. The plan then was to bomb Assad's government forces. Now the plan is to bomb their enemies. Who will it be next time? Has anyone ever actually thought through this conflict clearly?

2.  He says our allies are asking us to intervene. This might be an argument, but it isn't a sufficient one - it is the argument which convinced Tony Blair to intervene in Iraq on a disastrous project. In fact, I suspect this would remain Cameron's argument even if the bombing was counter-productive, was known to be counter-productive, and would never be anything else,

3. We need to act; this is action - it isn't a convincing argument. Yet that is the one that Cameron wielded today. It makes no sense by itself, and when a prime minister falls back on that kind of logic, you begin to wonder if any thinking is going on at all.

It may be that the conclusion is that we should intervene in Syria, but the fact that our allies are asking us to do so is not an argument. It is just evidence that Cameron has caught Tony Blair-Disease: an inability to distinguish between British interests and what our most powerful ally happens to want at any one time.

What would be a strategy to defeat IS and to build peace in the middle east? Is the UK government up to the task of thinking for itself? Is there a strategy that, rather than buggins turn to bomb, might stand some chance of making a difference? I think we should be told.

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Liberalism and war

People don’t seem to listen much to Noel Coward these days, but he remains a great favourite of mine and I happened to be listening over the weekend to his wartime song ‘Could you please oblige us with a bren gun’.

I’m not sure when the song was written, but it refers to the Home Guard and their woeful, not to say farcical, lack of equipment.

I suddenly heard the song from the modern point of view, and the obsession with the corporate need to be ‘on-message’, and how often it has the opposite effect.

It struck me that there might be a clue here about how a Liberal society fights a war – with humour, openness, truth. But even so, I don’t suppose there is another nation on earth which would dare allow a song, at that moment, about how badly prepared we were for invasion.

I’ve been asking myself these questions after hearing President Hollande describing the Paris attacks as an “act of war”.

We know that Liberalism is a political creed that thrives in peacetime, but can struggle in war. The First World War disposed of Parliamentary Liberalism almost permanently, dividing it ideologically. It was hard for Edwardian Liberals to contemplate conscription. Nor could Liberals embrace the implications of the Western Front.

But is it really true that Liberalism can only tell us about peaceful societies? Has it got nothing to say now, for example, beyond a hopeful plea to ‘hold together’?

If it means the sort of vacuous relativism of postmodernism, that sometimes passes for Liberalism, then it probably doesn’t. It certainly can’t summon up the ruthlessness that societies need to demonstrate if they are going to defend – I hate to use the meaningless word ‘values’ – what they believe,

But Noel Coward’s song was a clue for me about what makes this Liberal defence possible. Tolerance of human frailty has to be protected, so does humour - not humour for the sake of humour – but the kind of humour that allows us to survive as a nation.

But the other, fiercer Liberalism is represented by the great Liberal philosopher Karl Popper. Liberal societies, as he defines them, are those which make it possible to challenge from below, to question elites, to ask difficult questions. They can learn from mistakes faster, and in the end that makes them effective.

You only have to only to read Anthony Beever’s book Stalingrad to see what happens when two dictators slug it out with millions of men at their personal whim, fighting inefficiently and brutally and inhumanely in the snow.

Put like that, the Second World War was won because one side was Liberal enough to learn from their mistakes. The same I believe will in the end determine victory over IS.

But there is one other lesson from Liberalism implied by Popper. I that if (heaven forfend) one of the Paris terrorists happens to be sheltering in the cellar of my office, then I know – or I think I know – that the government will not sacrifice my life to kill him.

I also know that, if I lived in some parts of Pakistan, those rules are somehow considered not to apply to me. They won’t be happy to sacrifice my life, but they may still do it.

Because it is a long way away? Because human life counts less there? Because they prefer not to think about how counterproductive this sacrifice might be?

But then, we live in a Liberal society where we learn faster because people are allowed to ask difficult questions. That is, paradoxically why we will win, so I'm asking this one. Because, the other Liberal lesson for effective war is that it matters very much - and for practical reasons - how you fight it.

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You can't understand Enigma without understanding what went before

Imagine the scene. It is wartime, and the stakes are high in the Atlantic and the North Sea. At the British fleet anchorage in the Orkneys, known to history as Scapa Flow, the signal lamps flash messages across the dank mist, unaware that they possess the most extraordinary weapon, utterly secret and also unprecedented in modern naval warfare.

Unlike the wartime sailors of other previous generations, they can listen in to the hour-by-hour thoughts and orders of the other side and act accordingly. Not in the ships, perhaps, battling against the salt spray in the moment of battle, but via their own signals to the Admiralty.

They can do so because of the invention of wireless telegraphy, but also because of the efforts of a handful of disparate amateurs who have forged themselves into the most successful team of cryptographers the world had ever known.

It sounds like Bletchley Park in its heyday, during the war of national survival, as Alan Turing, Peter Twinn and their colleagues, wrestled with the complexities of the Nazi’s naval Enigma code – but it isn’t. It is what came before Bletchley, Turing or Enigma, and what made them all possible.

It was the peculiar assortment of people operating together to crack the German naval codes during the First World War, and known collectively as Room 40.

The scale was smaller, of course. Bletchley Park eventually employed tens of thousands. The techniques were less sophisticated – they used logic and literary comparisons rather than mathematics and early computing. But even so, the people who launched Bletchley Park and shaped it, and who managed Turing and Twinn in the first two years of the Second World War, had learned their trade in Room 40 of the Old Admiralty Building in Whitehall, and absorbed their lessons about how codes could be cracked and then used from a man who was, in his own way, a genius of Turing proportions: Captain Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall.

In that respect Room 40 was the forerunner of Bletchley Park. It involved a series of near-fatal mistakes about how you should use decrypted information – about the best use of information in complex organisations – which were not made again as a result when the same team formed again on a wartime footing in 1939.

They were not made partly because Blinker Hall gave detailed advice to Captain John Godfrey, who occupied his chair as Director of Naval Intelligence in 1939. They were also not made because so many people who were key to Room 40 were there to kickstart a similar operation, in much more difficult circumstances, at Bletchley Park.

I want to set the record straight by writing a short ebook called Before Enigma. So I am crowdfunding the book through the website Byline, and would be enormously grateful for any help – either by donating directly or maybe by copying this article to anyone you know who might be interested.

Thank you so much. We now have two weeks to go, so any help you can give would be very gratefully received!

AND! My ebook Jerusalem: England's National Anthem  is on special offer for 99p this week. There is also a conventional print version here. 

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