On the prospects of being blown to atomic dust

This post first appeared on the Radix UK blog...

“The British people are prepared if necessary to be blown to atomic dust.”

So said Sir Alec Douglas-Home when he was prime minister. There are so many things wrong with that statement – yet it is also a quintessentially patrician and British way of putting it.

Who are ‘the British People’ described here? Did he mean you and me? Because I don’t remember ever consenting to being blown to atomic dust.

Even worse, it was said by a man whose class probably meant that, personally, he would be inside a government bunker – probably in a regional seat of government under the Chilterns.

Now, I have no idea as an ordinary citizen how much this ancient emergency system is still working. I remember, when I was training as a journalist at Harlow Technical College in 1981, we were all shown around the nuclear bunker underneath Essex County Council. And many of us – especially for some reason the women trainees – were so cross about it, that I felt it would never be repeated.

What annoyed them was not so much the silly messages, left behind after their most recent exercise – one said: “AUTHORISE RELEASE OF 200 CREAM BUNS: POLICE ESCORT” – it was the sense that we were being tricked into the idea that we could survive and fight a nuclear war.

When I was a reporter in Oxford in the early 1980s, there was a room in the basement of the town hall which was supposed to be where they would manage the city from after a nuclear attack. Inside were two telephones, a map and a set of instructions which said: “What to do in the event of a nuclear attack on Oxford – No. 1: Make tea”.

This was good advice. But really the room was mainly used to keep bicycles in.

Since the end of the cold war in 1989, our own government has – rightly or wrongly – neglected these kind of precautions. So now, with a kind of proxy war happening against Russia, with Boris Johnson popping over to Kiev whenever he can and the Russian foreign minister threatening this country most weeks, I don’t believe this is good enough.

The government can’t have it both ways after all. Either Putin is sane and sensible, in which case, why has he invaded Ukraine, so disastrously? Or he isn’t, in which case I’m not reassured by defence secretary Ben Wallace and his blithe dismissal of the risk: "We are part of a Nato partnership of 30 nations who outgun him, outnumber him and have potentially all the capabilities at our disposal. I don't fear him, and I think we should be very grateful in this country that we have a nuclear deterrent."

What happens if Putin is as crazed and illogical as we fear?

Of course there need to be consequences for Putin for all he is doing – and there will be – but, if we are going to take the risk of standing up to him, then our government must put some resources behind protecting us all.

My prediction is that, if the conflict in Ukraine carries on for years – as Liz Truss suggests it will – then these issues will increasingly rise up the agenda here.

But what can we do about it – if nothing else because it beats sleepless nights worrying about whether the UK will be there in the morning?

First, I think we need to put money into civil defence again, so that we know we are not just protected by the fantasies of the current cabinet. In the second world war, there was a powerful political campaign for deep shelters for the urban population. We need something similar now.

Second, it is time to devolve resources for keeping people safe as far as they will go – to voluntary groups that may already exist, like Neighbourhood Watch or the new local welfare groups that emerged during the lockdown.

Finally, we need to make common cause with the Russian dissidents – and make links between them and our own. That was the historian E. P. Thompson’s strategy in the early 1980s – that the opposition to the cold war on both sides needed to make common cause with each other. That is certainly a healthier approach than the idea of 'cancelling' all Russians.

As the Common Sense newsletter, run by former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, put it last week: "FIFA and UEFA suspended Russian soccer teams from competing. A university in Milan cancelled (and then reinstated) a course on Dostoevsky. The International Cat Federation banned Russian-bred cats from competition. This, of course, in addition to blocking Apple Pay and Google Pay from ordinary Russians connected to sanctioned banks...."

Where, you might ask, are the British dissidents? Like Noam Chomsky or Chris Hedges in the USA  - people who discern the opportunity now being seized by a few washed-up cold war warriors and arms dealers who are keen to prolong the crisis? I don't know, but we need a few of them now...

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Looking back at 1997 - maybe what followed was inevitable

This post first appeared on the Radix UK blog

It is a little terrifying to think that thee general election of 1997, which brought with it such a sea change in our politics, was now 25 years ago this week.

I remember it as much for the extraordinary turn in fortunes for the Lib Dems, more than doubling the size of their parliamentary party to 46 seats in one leap, as I do for bringing the Blair-Brown show to power.

I was editor of Lib Dem News in those days, the party’s weekly paper, and I had spent much of the campaign travelling around the west country and other places, like Evan Harris in Oxford West & Abingdon, Brian Cotter in Weston-super Mare, Stephen Williams in Bristol West and Mark Oaten in Winchester (I particularly remember meeting his beautiful wife Belinda in the high street).

It was the perfect example of the so-called 'dual approach' at work: the Lib Dems were winning places where they had previously won local government influence. “Heading east from Penzance towards the capital - a journey of more than 300 miles,," wrote a Times columnist in 1993, "drivers spend all but the half-hour traverse of Avon motoring through counties that are dominated or controlled by the Liberak Democrats,"

It certainly felt like that as I drove through huge fields with huge blue posters, but Lib Dem gold or yellow posters in profusion on so many houses.

At the party at the Pizza on the Park on election night, that the campaign chair Richard Holme said, as Tom Brake won his seat in Caterham – which had long been a part of Lib Dem Sutton – that he had never heard of it before.We had become so used to never quite managing to win at a general elections – it was amazing to find ourselves suddenly popular.

I had been expecting a breakthrough like this since I had joined the Liberal Party in 1979 – I had even made a bet with my grandparents that we would win 50 seats “next time”. But 1983 came and went, and my grandparents died. In 1997, I finally felt some measure of justification.

The campaign had been characterised partly by a tacit alliance between Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown. That night, Ashdown was given a police escort to London after his own count in Yeovil. He believed he was driving up to London to take power.

I believed in those days that this was a disastrous idea. Now, I’m not so sure because – with the benefit of hindsight – it seems to me that so much of New Labour’s rule for the next 13 years was technocratic and flawed. What a difference the Lib Dems might have made if John Prescott had been faced down by Blair when he complained and persuaded him to dump his promise to Ashdown…

We could perhaps have prevented the Iraq war, and maybe insisted on a fair voting system for Westminster, but I’m far from sure that my own party would have had the self-confidence to reject Labour-style technocratic centralisation using numbers – a horrible boulderisation of the enlightened approach by alternative economics thinktanks like – like the New Economics Foundation – to spread skills downwards and to measure everything.

“But what else can we do?” Lord Falconer said to me in 2001 when I told him I was writing about too many numbers at the heart of government. Could we have predicted the growth and damage of tickbox – or that it would undermine the trust of anyone using services, or in politicians that saw the world in terms of a common good that over-rode individual rights?

Could we have, back then, seen the future enough to know what disaffection it would bring along with it, so that Blair's so-called 'modernisation' agenda now looks like a terrifyingly inhuman cul-de-sac?

I doubt it.

So it maybe that we were stuck with the history we have in fact been living through. It is just that it could and should have been different.

It is hard to recreate the sense of victory of the young over the old and worn out that the 1997 election seemed to mean, back then. "Did you stay up for Portillo?" was the main question we asked each other - which was a question about whether we had seen the shock defeat of the next Conservative leader, Michael Portillo by a young Labour type called Stephen Twigg.

Well, I did, but I was back home by then, trying to work out what it would all mean now that so many of my thinktank friends were all involved in inquiries which were to take us in and out of No 10 for the next few years.

So we didn’t achieve the enormous changes we had set ourselves to do, but we came pretty close…

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Why Boris and Biden need to be a little more measured about Ukraine

This post first appeared on the Radix UK blog...

When I was writing my Tickbox book, I found myself researching the great American technocrat Robert McNamara,

Like many other people in deep thrall to Tickbox, McNamara was also pretty emotional. His career was characterised by extreme loyalty, not just to Kennedy, but for a time also to Lyndon Johnson, his successor. It was a passion that nearly sent him insane, but it also led to his egregious habit of quoting selective numbers in public to defend his president – even, as it turned out, as he turned against the Vietnam War.

Still, it was the calculating element of McNamara’s personality, not the romantic side, that first brought him into conflict with the US defence establishment as Kennedy’s Defense Secretary – and particularly with his old boss, the USAAF general Curtis LeMay.

As such, McNamara was next to Kennedy throughout the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, urging a blockade rather than the massive strike favoured by some of the top brass. The most implacable of his opponents was his old chief Curtis LeMay, now also reputed to be the original for the Peter Sellers film Dr Strangelove.

“Kennedy was trying to keep us out of war,” McNamara said much later. “I was trying to help him keep us out of war but General Curtis LeMay, with whom I served as a matter of fact in World War II, was saying; ‘Let’s go in. Let’s totally destroy Cuba’.”

More helpfully, the US ambassador to Moscow Tommy Thompson was also there and urged Kennedy to reply directly to Khrushchev’s earlier, less aggressive message, where he promised to remove the missiles in return for a face-saving undertaking that the US would not invade Cuba. He worked out that Khrushchev needed a device to allow him to step back, and – as it turned out – he was right.

As McNamara tightened his grip over US defence policy, LeMay became increasingly implacable. He ended his career as running mate to the racist governor George Wallace in the 1968 presidential election. But that is beside the point.

The real point I am making here is about the importance of finding a face-saving formula. McNamara and Thompson realised this, and so did Kennedy. 

The problem we have is that the situation in Ukraine is increasingly dangerous because both the British prime minister and the US president seem determined to ‘win’ the conflict there.

They are neither of them stupid, but the truth is that the Ukrainian war came as a godsend to both men. Johnson could grandstand and avoid the fallout from ‘partygate’…

What result are they really intending? That somehow the cavalry will sweep through and arrest Putin, bearing him off to the Hague and his personal war crimes prosecution?

That isn’t going to happen. Khrushchev did not long survive the Cuban crisis. He was removed from power by Kremlin insiders like Leonid Brezhnev, partly because of what had happened there. He was retired from 1964-71.

Putin may well need to be ousted, as Biden says, but – since we are not into regime change any more these days – then that can’t be our decision.

The Russians will have to do it. And only then – maybe – we might find a way to putting him and other war criminals behind bars.

I am not drawing parallels with Khrushchev. The Cuban Missile Crisis was nothing like the war in Ukraine. But we may still be heading for some kind of Cuban style stand-off.

That is the point when I am praying, for the sake of the world, that there is someone like McNamara or Thompson to put the case for a chink of hope, rather than just unthinking gung-ho voices like Biden and Johnson.

There can be no winners in these conflicts and, although the Ukrainians are at the moment pushing back the Russians – with huge skill and courage – I am not sure how long this will last.

And even if it does, we don’t want to push Putin into such a tight corner that he does something even stupider.

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Why we need to start embracing complementary health

This first first appeared on the Radix UK blog...

I am treading on eggshells here and I am far from sure I will reach safely to the other side. We shall see.

As many of you will know, I have been diagnosed with parkinsonism – a variant (though nobody is quite sure which) of Parkinson’s Disease. That has made me peculiarly interested in complementary health of all kinds – even if I hadn’t had chronic eczema for years too.

The difficulty is just how little there is of it over here. Rather as alternative education has been squeezed out by the ‘consensus’ in the UK, so has complementary health. It is as if we in the UK have started believing our systems so much that we can imagine no alternative.

I have found acupuncture, osteopathy and homeopathy really helpful – especially, perhaps, the latter. Nutrition is not really complementary in the same way, but I kind of think I would have been better if I had changed my diet earlier.

I mention this because homeopathy has been the focus of huge negativity from both sides of the political spectrum.

There is something naive about the mainstream opinion that there is no ‘evidence’ for any of these – as if any pharmaceutical company was dashing to carry out the research, or any medical researcher was keen to destroy their career by asking them to fund it.

I am not being 'anti-science' here - as I am occasionally being accused of. Quite the reverse: I am a follower of Karl Popper. I really believe political rhetoric as shifted us too far from scientific method.

Nor am I an anti-vaxxer – I’ve had three jabs and covid too – but equally it has been clear to me for some time that there was an emerging issue about our immune systems. I have no idea whether this has anything to do with overloading our immune systems with childhood immunisations – or maybe it’s our appalling food, air quality or the strange electro-magnetic pulses we need to keep the economy ticking over, or something else.I’m not a medic or a scientist, so I don’t know – I am asserting this as a patient. But I think we will need to look beyond our current systems and knowledge at some point.

Yet although I’m finding it hard to hear anyone discussing these issues in the UK, there is a huge underground cascade of videos from the USA on these subjects – mainly related to the peculiar experience of the pandemic we have all just lived through.

The trouble is that, largely because of the two political camps in the USA, this debate can’t really take place openly – because of the assumption from both sides that anyone at all sceptical of prevailing medical opinion in the USA must be a Trump supporter.

That makes many of my own more sceptical opinions (which I am too nervous to spell out here) shunnable by the mainstream.  It isn't hard to understand why so many American sceptics are veering off towards Trump-style populism.

Why is everyone so sick these days, I asked in a recent blog? Why are our immune systems so often malfunctioning? These are important issues which can’t be dodged forever. They will emerge again, and you can see some of those US doctors – who have been cancelled in various ways – beginning to articulate a series of new approaches, while the mainstream is still trying to push opposing views under the carpet. And especially on the left: hence the danger here.

In fact, I believe that those who have suffered chronic health problems – who have in some ways found themselves maintained in that by the health and pharma systems – may over the next few years forge themselves into an important and influential movement. They will be looking afresh at issues like 5G and other mass experiments, or low-level radiation.

They may well be sceptical abut 'experts', as Michael Gove was - drawing a distinction, as I do, between genuine expertise and those who are just steeped in the current system or ways of working, as i set out in my book Tickbox.

It may be 20 years before this alliance feels themselves as strong politically as they need to be – but if they find themselves aligned with Trump and other climate sceptics then these will also be carried along to power alongside them.

That is why it is so vital to organise some kind of post-pandemic rapprochement between complementary health and the radical centre. Don’t forget that was how the Five Star movement took its first steps to power in Italy by linking with everyone they could find online with an interest in complementary health.

The alternative is that we will be forced to face down another version of Trump when it really matters for people and planet. There is no necessary link between climate scepticism and medical scepticisms. And we need the latter to defeat the former – before it's too late!

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Forty years on: don't let's go back there!

This post first appeared on the Radix UK blog...

It feels a little exhausting to say so, but the invasion of the Falkland Isles took place exactly four decades ago on Saturday. Ah yes, I remember it well.

I was a junior reporter, a trainee, on the Oxford Star in those days. On that particular day (2 April 1982), I was heading for a weekend training course in Oxfordshire with other trainees and I remember picking up a hitchhiker on the Oxford bypass, who turned out to be a naval rating who had been unexpectedly ordered back to his ship.

It was my first indication that something was really happening.

I have two points I want to make about that time.

First, just how unusual war felt in those days. I did not remember any conflict – apart from Northern Ireland, of course – for my whole childhood (I was born two years after the Suez debacle). Harold Wilson had managed to keep us out of the Vietnam war. There had been British peacekeepers sent on to the island of Anguilla in 1966, but in the end the government sent London bobbies (the New York Times headlined the affair ‘The Lion that Miaowed’)!

These days, when we have endless military challenges, it is hard to remember what it felt like then to end a period of almost complete peace.

That was one reason why I was, at the age of 23 and newly obsessed with politics, so keen to dash back to my bedroom between lectures to listen in to the debate in the Commons – and it was strange to find only one of my colleagues seemed keen to discuss it (how are you, Candida?).

Looking back to that debate, it was amazing to remember how bellicose Michael Foot and the Labour opposition were in the immediate aftermath of invasion – perhaps because they smelled blood: the Thatcher government was desperately unpopular at that stage, and Foot may have believed that nothing could be done and that this would prove their final straw.

The second point I want to make was that the recovery of Margaret Thatcher’s reputation and the apparent success of her government can be dated pretty accurately to the moment that the destroyer HMS Sheffield was sunk by an Exocet missile (4 May).

I had been out canvassing for the Liberals that evening in south Oxford (for Victoria Mort) and I took a break – and, like everyone else – I saw the lugubrious Ministry of Defence spokesperson Ian Mcdonald announcing about the sinking.

Going out again afterwards. I found the mood had completely changed. Someone had even nailed a copy of the Labour election address to a telegraph poll and scrawled the word ‘TRAITOR’ across it.

Looking back, I have a feeling that was when the tide turned against the Liberal-SDP Alliance.

You can see the same difference with the fly-on-the-wall documentary Warship¸ two series of which I have been watching on My5 – which is upbeat, thrilling and a relaxed view of the navy, as the Duncan is involved in a missile strike on Syria after it used chemical weapons. Compare that to the 1976 series Sailor, an uptight, class-obsessed view of the oldest ship in the fleet, the Ark Royal – where Captain Gerard-Pearse is seen complaining that none of his instruments are working correctly.

It was the same distinction between the film Chariots of Fire (1981) and Lindsay Anderson’s last film Britannia Hospital (1982), with Leonard Rossiter playing a slightly cynical hospital manager trying to smuggle the Queen in through the picket lines outside.

Say what you like about the old ways of seeing the world, I definitely prefer Chariots of Fire, the unexpected success to the unexpected, and undeserved flop. It looked back beyond that feeling of exhausted cynicism that prevailed in Britannia Hospital – or in Ark Royal in Sailor or any other metaphors for the nation in the late 1970s.

For all my frustrations with the current state of the nation, I don’t want to go back there.

Picture courtesy of Argentina.gob.ar (Gobierno de Argentina) - https://www.argentina.gob.ar/armada/gesta-de-malvinas/la-aviacion-naval

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We may be more generous than we fear we are

This first appeared on the RadixUK blog...

It is strange what a difference a few weeks make. As the refugees began to stream out of war-torn Ukraine, pouring into Poland and finding it hard to get to the UK, because of the usual, embarrassing bureaucratic barriers, many of us watched with comfort and shame – a mixture of the two – to watch BBC news film of the generous Germans crowding into Berlin railway station to offer their homes to desperate Ukrainian families.

It just went to show, something or other – we said to ourselves, fearing that it was just the Germans or just the continentals. If only we British could be a little more like that – or so we thought…

Fast forward a couple of weeks, to Michael Gove’s announcement about how we might do something similar, earning £350 a month by doing so – and we now all feel a little happier about it.

Then suddenly, 25,000 people had signed up for the refugee scheme within the first hour. OK, then there were more barriers to surmount…

But it demonstrated that the ordinary British were as hospitable as any other nation. It made us feel good about ourselves – which is tantamount to actually becoming better people (as Cressida Dick showed us back in 2017).

The implications are important. That when our political system is designed and interpreted by people who are more suspicious and nervous about people’s motives, then we will be too.

Nor is this just a problem about governments of the political right. Socialism seems in practice to encourage a kind of corrosive cynicism. In fact, both ends of the political spectrum are intolerable in different ways.

Instead, what we need to do is to share the business of government with people – a process known as co-production – because, as the late, great social innovator Edgar Cahn used to say, people have a fundamental need to feel useful.

Everyone does – not just those who are qualified to run public services. And I know from the experience of starting time banks, for example, that when you give people who have only been receiving care their whole lives the chance to give back, then you can transform their lives.

That seems to be to be an indication of what radical centrism might mean: it is the opposite of Home Office style tickbox suspicion and Leftist cynicism too.

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Why is everyone so sick these days?

This post first appeared on the Radix UK blog

Why are we so sick these days? I mean, really?

It wasn’t suppose to be like this – thanks to Beveridge, we had assumed that when you start treating people for free then it should cost less, year on year to keep people healthy. But it hasn’t worked out like that anywhere.

Of course, there are conventional reasons why health is so expensive - from changing diseases to the survival of more premature babies. But I don't think any of those are really adequate explanations.

There seems to be something about the way we live has made health as expensive as it has become. Because it is also the service of last resort, where all our problems come home to roost – including issues that the NHS was never designed to deal with. It hardly matters what it is – if it affects people adversely, then in the end it adds to the weight on the NHS.

So why? The first answer is that this to have something to do with the rise of mental ill-health. The WHO says that up to 300m around the world living with depression – which  is pretty amazing, given that depression has only really been known as a problem since 1980.

I have been reading and absolutely fabulous book (full disclosure: the author, Susan Holliday, is a friend of mine), called Hidden Wonders of the Human Heart).

Back in 1975, the great psychologist James Hillman warned that “in psychiatry, words have become schizophrenic, themselves a cause and source of mental disease”.

I understand her quotation from a patient along these lines, when she describes “the frustration of trying to put something into a box that is slightly too small.”

I understand this also as a parallel to the related problem of Tickbox, where we are equally trying to break out of the stultifying definitions. The “words we use today to articulate our emotions arrive preconfigured,” writes Susan Holliday. "[They] become desiccated and opaque, like cataracts.”

Sue is describing the antidote to this problem, how to really see to “the ecology of the human heart”. I thoroughly recommend her book.

But of course there may be other reasons for the rise of chronic ill-health.

There are waves of online lectures crossing the Atlantic these days about various generalised interpretations of the huge numbers of people who are suffering from ill-defined combinations of anything from digestion to neurological issues, whether they have something to do with the gut-mind link or auto-immunity (see for example, Dr Peter Kan).

The danger is that we may no longer be allowed to question some of the central tickboxes of NHS delivery, on the grounds that our tramlines are “based on the science” and only those who are steeped in the existing ways are qualified to question them. Or on the grounds that the research has been done – without understanding that some theories will never get funded for testing.

That is why we still have to be vigilant about some of those technologies that our masters most approve of – like 5G or the next generation of nuclear energy. In case their failure to see outside their own definitions and boxes blinds us all to why we are no longer healthy.