Polly Toynbee on Christians

 I admire Polly Toynbee greatly, so it was disappointing to find her falling for the same inaccuracy as lesser commentators with regard to the reporting of Christian identity in the census.  “This is the first Christmas since time immemorial that most people in this country are not Christians.”  This is not true. Ticking a box about Christian identity in a census is very different from “being a Christian”. The vast majority of people in this country have not been Christian for a very long time, and it shows.

While I  accept completely Toynbee’s strictures about the damage done to the world and to the country by people who use Christianity to cover for their violence, I would observe that the country has not actually been Christian for a very long time, and does not appear to be much the better for it – the need for food banks (many of them run by Christians); the adulation and protection of wealth; the complete acceptance of lying and venality among the country’s leadership; the vicious racism and sexism promoted by the tabloid press (Clarkson); the vilification of strangers in the Rwanda policy. These are thoroughly non Christian developments.

Christianity – real Christianity – still has a role to play in this country, notably in speaking truth to power, as Jonathan Gullis seems to realise (“Too many people are using the pulpit to preach from.”!!).

As a Christian, I welcome the fact that fewer people are inaccurately self identifying as such. Honesty is a Christian value. More people being honest about having no religion is a step in the right direction. 

Roe v Wade and Brexit

 A is for anti abortion. B is for Brexit. C is for chaos.

The anti abortion movement in the States and Brexit here in Britain are the same thing, wedge issues chosen by people with right wing authoritarian tendencies with a long term plan for asserting control over an entire body politic. They are on the surface utterly different issues, but they each performed the same function. In each case it took their proponents forty years starting in the 1970s to get their way. Each was chosen because of the characteristics of the country concerned. In the States anti abortion could be made to appeal to powerful and rich right wing fundamentalist churches. The churches’ views had to be nudged into shape, but that too was part of the long term project. In the UK Brexit / sovereignty was particularly powerful because of the gentle but tenacious grip imperial nostalgia had on large numbers of British people. The fact that Brexit became Russian policy is tangential to the main thrust of native and global right wing forces. Arguably Brexit only became Russian policy after twenty years of tabloid headlines convinced them that it was possible.

A key feature of a wedge issue is that it divides people. Abortion in the States and Brexit in the UK have divided the population so fundamentally that the kind of broad alliances that sweep megalomaniacs from power have become much more difficult.

In each case the headline issue itself was not the main point. Each in a way was a staging post, a symbol of what was wanted. The main issues were what was needed to achieve each and what was the overall purpose. The aim was for right wing policies to be embedded in the governance of the country concerned, and for the temper of that governance to be gradually altered so that policies which tend towards the fascist became acceptable. Some things were done differently and some similarly. In both countries right wing media were very important, and very compliant. Regulators, if not already powerless, needed to be rendered so in order to enable media to peddle lies. Gerrymandering and the capture of elected office were used in the States, in the UK the revolving door between government and business, and the favouring of donors.

Both strategies in the end hinged on the fortuitous* appearance of a maverick – Trump in the States, Johnson in the UK, both people for whom principle and the rule of law were meaningless. But the mavericks are just the icing on the subversive cake, they are by no means the whole story – they could only get to where they got with the support and nurturing of many other people, and they could only achieve their ends with the active involvement of others, eg Trump’s packing of the Supreme Court aided and abetted by the house republicans’ abuse of procedure. And in the UK, the number of people still willing to pay Johnson's bills is astonishing. Principle and the rule of law had already become meaningless for many; they were just not quite so egregious in their rule breaking.

*I'll stick to "fortuitous". Some would argue that the development of political and media culture in our two countries made the elevation of mavericks inevitable. I would say more likely, but not inevitable.

And in both cases, that is not the end. The right wing justices on the Supreme Court have made it clear that they will be moving on further rights, and in Britain the government have moved on to dismantling our very effective human rights apparatus. This was always intended; the aim is to concentrate power in the hands of a few, and to demoralise and disaggregate the rest.

As I see it, the way back may be easier in the UK than in the States. Movement away from fascism requires an alliance of the centre and the left groupings which are usually fragmented. Fortunately, British voters are on the whole more sensible than the parties that represent them. Anti Tory tactical voting is now well established when circumstances require it, and Johnson has become a liability. One election may change the temper of British politics, though there would still be a very long way to go to root out the corruption that has been seeping into the UK’s system for several decades. But I fear the road back for the USA is much longer and much thornier.

The two narcissists: peas in a pod?

 Trump and Johnson are both narcissists, but in very different forms. It is true to say that neither cares for anything other than themselves. But their relationships to other people are very different. Trump cares deeply about other people – not “for” them, “about” them. In his world there have to be winners and losers. He has to be a winner and you can only be a winner if somebody else loses. (There is no such thing as win-win in Trump’s world.) So his activities are based very largely around making other people lose; he gets into intense relationships with people, many of whom he has never met, in order to make them lose so that he can be a winner.

Johnson does not see the world in this way. He doesn’t care about other people at all; he does not deliberately set out to destroy people, but he has no thought for any misery that his decisions might inflict. His calculations are only about what is good for him. If he had calculated that backing Remain would win him the premiership, then we might now be a corrupt and failing state within the EU instead of a corrupt and failing state outside the EU. It would make no difference to Johnson. That was very unlikely though – in order for Johnson to be as free as possible to behave the way he wants, he cannot be fettered by greater powers. He knows he can bend British institutions to his will – the bending has mostly been done for him already by his real boss (PM refers to Telegraph as his 'real boss', Dominic Cummings claims) and others; he knows he could not have bent European institutions the same way.

Money is like water on a carpet

 Money is like water on a carpet. It gets everywhere, as long as people let it. For a long time money, in the form of profit seeking, was kept out of systems that were hard or impossible to run competitively. But since the 1980s, when monetary policy began to win the battle for top people’s hearts and minds, money has sneaked – or been openly invited in – to almost every sphere of public life. They would privatise the air you breathe, if they could (it has been suggested).

For a while I’ve been watching one of the more recent manifestations of this phenomenon, the fact that big money, I mean really huge, vast, global money has embedded itself into the UK children’s care sector (where forced competitive tendering was introduced in the 1980s). Many, many homes for deprived children or difficult children are now run by investment funds and the like. The dogma of privatisation has soaked right through into the responsibilities of local authorities, and money is being allowed to run riot. It shows in the number of children’s home rated poorly by Ofsted, and also in other figures:

June 28th 2022 Serious incidents more common in for-profit children’s homes in England: Privately run homes have more police callouts and staff complaints than council ones, data shows (Private providers say that is because they deal with more difficult children. I have no evidence as to whether that is true, but if they do then they should have better systems to cope with the difficulties.)

April 18th 2022 English councils pay £1m per child for places in private children’s homes: Private providers accused of making ‘obscene’ profits out of some of society’s most vulnerable children

March 10th 2022 UK has ‘sleepwalked’ into dysfunctional children’s social care market, says regulator: CMA finds local authorities are being forced to pay excessive fees for substandard privately run services

October 22nd 2021 Private children’s home providers charging councils too much, report says: Market in England is broken and failing too many children, says chair of independent review

Huge fees are now being paid by local authorities for poor standards of care in essential services. Why and how did we get to this point? Money does not care. That is one of the key issues with using the market to solve any social issue. Funds have invested in children’s homes because they see an opportunity for profit. They get a decent profit because they do nto care about the morality of charging hard pressed public authorities through the nose, and neither do they care about the outcome for the children they make themselves responsible for. This should not be surprising. The only responsibility of fund managers is to make a profit for their funds.

The only way to make funds do a good job of running a children’s home is to have contracts with penalise them heavily for getting things wrong, and a regulator that has and is prepared to use robust tools for enforcement. (There is one, and only one, effective way to regulate funds that run children’s home – by fining them heavily so that they lose the one thing they care about – profit.)

We are in this situation because, for forty years, those in charge of this country have worked on the unsupported assumptions that the market works better than other forms of provision, and that the market only needs to be lightly regulated in order to keep it efficient. Those assumptions have been made in other countries too, but in the UK we have raised it to an art form. There are examples in almost every sphere – sewage in our bathing water, with a regulator that is just beginning to wake up, having previously done hardly anything to ensure the investment that the firms promised they would make, or to prevent profit extraction from customers who have quite literally nowhere else to turn. (see Filth for a local example); crushing costs of energy, with an energy regulator that has done hardly anything to ensure the companies pass profits back to consumers rather than to shareholders and overpaid executives. Childcare is just a more extreme form of this behaviour.

The mantra that regulation is bad still holds sway. That is despite the disaster of 2008 which demonstrated with the utmost clarity what happens when you under regulate. Over regulation is indeed a bad idea; under regulation is just as bad. But that is still what we are told – markets work, entrepreneurs need to be free to make bold decisions, (global Britain ha ha) blah, blah, blah.

It might make sense to have commercial companies running some of our systems, like parts of the NHS under contract, but only under strict regulatory control. (And regulation actually costs money – a lot of it. One of the most fundamental misconceptions about the market mantra is that regulation can be done on the cheap.) But in some fields it makes no sense. Childcare is one of them, but we are still stuck with a system in which all the key decision makers maintain their cruelly compromised faith in the effectiveness of the market, and their fealty to money.

In my view there is a deep connection between the obeisance that has been paid to money since the 1980s and the current political crises working their way out in the UK and the USA. The overwhelming temper of market decisions is that money and the market must rule. No space is left for humanity, for caring about anything. Forty years of reducing caring about anything to second class status in any high level decision making has seen both the USA in 2016 and the UK in 2019 elect leaders who quite literally cared for nothing beside themselves. It didn’t have to be like this but the tendency was always there and the tendency in the end won.

The Angela Rayner story: I don't agree with the speaker

 I am glad that the Speaker of the House of Commons  is a staunch believer in press freedom. So am I. But it is not his job to protect press freedom; they are quite good at doing that for themselves. It is his job to enable MPs to go about their business as freely as possible - and that includes freedom from misogyny and scurrilous insults.

Our press should be free to say anything they want, and indeed they are, as the story about Angela Rayner shows. But they should not be free to say anything they want without consequences.

The Mail on Sunday chose to write up the report about Angela Rayner in a scurrilous and misogynistic way. Assuming they're telling the truth about their source - which is by no means certain, but let's do them the courtesy of assuming it is - they could have reported it in any number of ways. The responsible thing would have been to write it up as "Tory MP tries to distract from partygate etc by using misogynistic innuendo against Labour front bencher".

But they didn't. They chose to write it as fact. They chose to aim it at Rayner rather than at the sad excuse for an MP who briefed them. They chose to be misogynist and they chose - quite deliberately - to be scurrilous.

The jouirnalist responsible for the story should have had his pass revoked - for a short but exemplary period of time.

Rob's International Film Festival, aka Riff70

 March 26th is my 70th birthday. I have decided to celebrate it by holding an international film festival. International not in the sense that the films are international (they are decidedly not, as you will see below), but that I have friends in many places, and I hope some of my friends will join me film watching once or twice in the week leading up to March 26th.

I will be watching a film a day from March 20th to March 26th, and complementing the films with  menus of my choice. I won’t share the menus. Suffice to say that hotdogs and popcorn both feature but so do other dishes.

The films I’ve chosen are films I know and like, and haven’t seen enough of. None of them is particularly demanding. It’s supposed to be good fun. So, for instance, I chose not to include the Russian film Leviathan , which is excellent but gut wrenching. I also chose not to include Casablanca which is The. Best. Film. Ever. Made. But I’ve seen it several times recently.

My choices won’t be everybody’s, but there are themes or associations for all of them, so I invite you to pick your own.

And while you watch I hope you will choose to donate to one of my fundraisers. I have two, one for Blood Cancer UK and one for Action For M.E. 

(Circumstances are different now to when I planned this event. Many people will find their attention, and their donations, taken up with Ukraine. So be it: you can still enjoy the films.*)

Blood cancers are killers. A lot of research is going on and breakthroughs occur regularly. But it is a very expensive business. Blood Cancer UK puts a lot of its budget into funding research. Go here to donate to Blood Cancer UK.

ME is a horrible soul sapping illness which often affects its victims for life. Action for M.E. supports people with ME and funds research into the causes and possible cures – there are none at the moment, but biomedical research, which has been increasing worldwide in the last few years, is beginning to allow for a greater understanding of what is going on and what we might do about it. Go here to donate to Action for M.E..

And so to the films.

Sunday 20th 

I will start RIFF70 with

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Perhaps it is coincidental that the first film of each of the Star Wars trilogies is the best (I’m not counting the middle three). I saw Star Wars when it came out in the cinema, yes, I am that old. I still try to teach toddlers in buggies the ways of the Force, sometimes to the bemusement of their parents. The Force Awakens shades it for me, just jolly good fun all the way through.

If you don’t have it or don’t like it, then I suggest 

- any sci fi film (even Life of Brian – it has a sci fi sequence)

- any film with Carrie Fisher in it

Monday 21st

RIFF70 day 2 will be

Miss Sloane

It has Jessica Chastain in it. What’s not to like? One of a small bunch of films that is even better to watch the second time. When you know what going to happen and why, there’s an extra joy in seeing it unfold behind the scenes. And the penultimate scene - when she begins to repeat the opening monologue, and you get quick, almost millisecond, shots of Daniel reacting because he’s realised what she’s doing - is a tour de force of editing.

If you don’t have it, then get into the spirit with

- any conspiracy film (Manchurian Candidate – the original, not the remake)

- any film that you enjoyed as much second time round

Tuesday 22nd 

RIFF70 day 3 will be

The Ipcress File

I’m talking about the 1965 film here, not the TV series which is apparently being released around the time of RIFF. Not sure how I feel about that; I’ll probably try it, but I won’t finish it if it doesn’t measure up.

This is a film from my childhood. Or somewhere vaguely near my childhood; I don’t remember when I first saw the film, but I got the book in my early teens and there was a period when I re-read it two or three times a week for several months. I would say it’s iconic (over used word, but if everybody else is using it, so will I) in several ways. Those glasses; and the use of physical architecture to frame shots. So reminiscent.

If you don’t have it or don’t like it, then I suggest

- any 60s film with non-vertical shots (you could probably go the 50s for those as well)

- any spy film. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy would do. (There hasn’t been a film of The Honourable Schoolboy, though in some ways it’s the best book of the Smiley trilogy. And the BBC missed it out of its rendition of TTSS and Smiley’s People. Probably mainly for the same reason the film of The Ipcress File deviated from the book. They couldn’t afford a Hong Kong shoot, just as the producers of The Ipcress File probably drew the line at a Pacific atoll.)

Wednesday 23rd

RIFF70 day 4 will be

Baghdad Café

Slice of life, small town Americana. Miniplots, social issues, fish out of water. Lots of clichés there, but a happy vibrant film. And a scene stealing cameo from Jack Palance.

If you don’t have it or don’t like it, then I suggest

- any other small town America film. There are a lot to choose from: Paris, Texas; Three Billboards…

- if not America, then other countries. Bulgaria’s The Lesson

- or any film with a famous actor in a bit part stealing the scene

Thursday 24th

RIFF70 day 5 will be

Seven Samurai

Number 2 in my list of best films ever. Bravery, comradeship, the meaning of life. And death. 

I might follow up with The Magnificent Seven, which would feature highly in a list of Remakes Nearly As Good As The Original. The Yul Brynner version of course. Denzel Washington is always watchable, but his version should have been left in the cutting room.

If you don’t have it or don’t like it, then I suggest

- get hold of it. It’s too good to miss

- any “against the odds” film.

Friday 25th

RIFF70 day 6 will be

The Station Agent

I like this film a lot. Very watchable characters, a fair bit of quirkiness. And Peter Dinklage – pre Game Of Thrones. It has the feel of an adaptation of a book, but it’s an original screenplay. Economical direction and great feel for location.

If you don’t have it or don’t like it, then I suggest

- any random group of people film. For some reason my mind is drawn to Went the Day Well.

- films about trains

- films with librarians in: Party Girl; The Name Of The Rose; Fahrenheit 451; The Shawshank Redemption (yes - he becomes the prison librarian)

Saturday 26th - my birthday

RIFF70 day 7 will be

Tampopo

It’s a food film. No, it’s a love film. No, it’s a western. It has noodles in it; it has gangsters; it has a showdown. The finest mixing of genres you could imagine.

If you don’t have it or don’t like it, then I suggest

- any film that mixes genres: Blazing Saddles - western and food (remember the baked bean scene).

And that will be that.

Join me in ten years’ time for Riff80.

*And finally if you haven't donated to Ukraine and want to, here are two options:

The Red Cross DEC appeal https://donate.redcross.org.uk/appeal/ukraine-crisis-appeal

And to donate direct to the Ukrainian war effort or humanitarian aid, use the links on this page: https://online.yes-ukraine.org/2022-march