European democracy: between a rock and a hard place

As François Hollande is sworn in as the new French president, his suit will hardly have had time to dry after the Parisian rain before he is off to meet Angela Merkel in Berlin. The latter has promised to welcome the former “with open arms”, but whether those arms are open in order to embrace or to crush remains to be seen. In true European style, there will be warm words, a carefully crafted communiqué, and a circle that looks for all the world like a square. The Euro will derive some short-term comfort no doubt – at least until the machinations in Greece send it plunging again – but the the ability of the two leaders and their eurocrat assistants to maintain the illusion that believing the impossible before breakfast is a mere bagatelle becomes ever more strained. The end game is approaching. No communiqué, however sophisticated its theological squirming, can maintain the fiction that Greece is both in and out of the Euro. So something, or perhaps someone, will have to give. Assuming the latest attempts to cobble together a Greek government out of the remnants of their recent elections fail, it seems virtually inevitable that Athens will be wanting both to tear up the bail-out deal, and yet still be part of the Euro. If Greece leaves the Euro, Angela Merkel will have established German supremacy in Europe: if it stays in, François Hollande will have maintained, for now at least, the concept of Europe as a balance of powers.

The irony of all this is that Merkel and Hollande are ploughing their contradictory furrows because of an identical fear: that European democracy is in peril, and that at best there will be dictatorships in some European countries, and at worst there will be war. Germans look back to the inter-war hyper inflation that they believe ushered in Nazism. A collapsing currency is their greatest fear. They insist that fiscal discipline is the only bulwark against that risk crystallising. The French believe that the greater risk is impoverishment, and that only economic growth can prevent it.

Whilst Merkel and Hollande thus bandy their fears about what poses the greater risk to democracy in the future, they appear to neglect the clear and present danger that threatens democracy at this very moment. Is the Greek ballot box to be supreme, or is the troika? Is it the will of European peoples that rules, or is it the market?

This is the fundamental question that we must confront. If we allow the globalised market to continue to make democracy irrelevant, the future will be bleak indeed. The question is not about finding some sort of compromise between fiscal discipline and growth. It is about finding a way to make the market subject to democratic control. The impossible thing we’re being asked to believe isn’t that Greece can be simultaneously in the Euro and out of it: it’s that we can simultaneously have democracy and an unbridled, globalised market. We can’t. At the moment, we seem to be prepared to sell democracy down the river in the interests of economic liberalism. That’s a truly Faustian bargain.

Deficit: the defining political concept of the times

It’s hard to avoid the word deficit these days. Whilst pre-eminent among its current uses is of course its application to fiscal deficits, that kind of deficit is by no means the only one we face. Indeed, although it’s dominated us both literally and metaphorically these last 4 years, we may well discover that fiscal deficit is neither the most damaging nor the most dangerous of the plethora of deficits that surround us.

In particular, I think we need to understand the fiscal deficit not primarily as a cause, but as an effect. Because the direction of causation is generally thought to be in the opposite direction, all the policy levers are directed at reducing and eliminating the fiscal deficit. Success in this endeavour will, we are assured, lead to everything else in the garden being rosy. It’s worth all the current pain. As in any other illness, the treatment must be aimed not at symptoms, but at causes; the deficit is the cause, and so it is that which we must attack. Hence the Coalition’s obsession with the deficit, the whole deficit, and nothing but the deficit. But, to pursue the medical metaphor for a moment, if the wrong cause is being attacked, the patient is likely to get sicker rather than better. Just as leech doctors saw all disease as being to do with the blood, and draining as much of it as possible, so the fiscal hawks see the deficit as being the only issue to be addressed. The economic consequences are as doleful – literally – as were those suffered by the 18th century patient.

But the fiscal deficit is not a cause, it’s an effect of other, more fundamental deficits. I would point to the following as being the most significant:

• Democratic. I’m using the term in a broad sense, to go beyond the formalities of votes and ballot boxes, to encompass the general concept of control over the few by the many. Whether it’s the control of the mass of shareholders over the management of companies (witness the rebellion at Barclays over senior remuneration) or the control over media moguls by the electorate (witness the Leveson Inquiry for a spectacular example of that deficit in action) the failure of democracy, and the democratic deficit that failure has spawned, is much more fundamental than the fiscal deficit itself. Indeed, the fiscal deficit is like the meat in a sandwich of democratic failure. Lack of democratic control over capital has led to the fiscal deficit in the first place: the fiscal deficit now in turn deepens the democratic deficit by replacing elected governments with technocrats, as Greece and Italy attest.
• Environmental. The fiscal deficit, everyone agrees, can only really be dealt with by economic growth. The political dispute is simply about to what extent policy should be directed at the fiscal deficit directly (totally if your name is George) and to what extent indirectly by stimulating growth (quite a bit if your name is Ed). But growth, as we currently understand it at least, is simply and inexorably ratcheting up the environmental deficit. The downward economic spiral is largely a result of the lack of consumption, which creates over-capacity in the economy, which responds by laying people off, who respond by not spending, which results in greater over-capacity, and so on. So we must consume more, buy more, make more. And then what? Unless we face the environmental deficit, and find new ways of creating prosperity, all other deficits will shortly be irrelevant, as Sir John Sulston’s Royal Society report makes clear.
• Moral. Perhaps this is the most fundamental of all. Cardinal Keith O’Brien is every liberal’s favourite hate figure for his recent comments on gay marriage, but he is an instructive example of the truth that the same person can be both very wrong, and very right. In his attack on David Cameron for pursuing an immoral approach to tax and for failing to help poorer people but instead favouring “his very rich colleagues”, the Cardinal has surely put his finger on something significant. If any further evidence were needed, the latest Times Rich List shows that as the vast majority of our people see their living standards fall sharply, the rich sail on regardless, becoming ever richer in the process.

If we seriously addressed these three deficits, the fiscal one would sort out itself. As it is, the single-minded obsession with the fiscal deficit is leading us to ever greater deficits in the other three. We need to change direction, and fast. But that is not a castigation of George Osborne in favour of the lauding of Ed Balls. They are, in truth, as wrong as each other.

Panorama: appalling journalism uncovers appalling elderly care

Time was when the BBC’s Panorama programme was the journalistic jewel in British TV’s crown. Hard-hitting, but dispassionate; evidence-based and offering information from which the viewer might draw their own conclusions. That way of reporting is not the same thing as being in some artificial way neutral: investigative journalism isn’t about neutrality in the face of manifest wrong-doing, but it is about creating some distance between the reporter and the issues reported. A good piece of journalism in this genre is about the issues investigated: it is not some sort of opportunity for the reporter to display their own commitment to being on the side of the angels. It is not about them, after all.

Last night’s programme was investigative journalism re-packaged as consumer outrage, with the reporter breathlessly centre-stage throughout. “Look how appalled I am”, the programme screamed. It was all focused on the emotions of the daughter whose mother was being badly treated, and equally on the reporter’s emotional solidarity with her. It was reminiscent of Watchdog, or worse still, That’s Life. No attempt whatever was made to contextualise the undercover footage collected by the daughter. Nothing was said about the politics of elderly care in modern Britain. No politician was questioned. No economic analysis was offered. Nothing was said about the employment and recruitment practices of private care providers. When the regulatory environment was mentioned, we were pointlessly taken to outside the regulator’s offices to see again the reporter’s outraged and emotional credentials, but once more it was consumerist outrage that was uppermost in the programme’s mind. It could as easily have been a programme about a supermarket’s mouse-enclosing loaf of bread. “Ain’t it awful!” we were invited to agree. Well, yes, it many ways it was, but the programme merely scratched the surface, and left much more concealed than revealed.

Relentlessly the programme’s moral outrage was focused on the individual care staff, who were eventually hounded into unemployment and in one case, the courts. How disgraceful that these hapless workers should have the temerity to discuss their appalling terms and conditions of employment. One thing that united these care staff, apart from their manifest professional inadequacies and slave-labour wages, was that they were all non-white, and immigrants. Before everyone gets the impression that I am suggesting that there is something wrong with having either of those attributes, let me be clear. It is not their race or their immigration status per se that’s important: it’s what those things say about the market in care work staff. Poor conditions and poor pay cannot attract sufficient workers from the British labour market, and so employers must look further afield to where wages are lower, conditions are worse, and thus make their offer attractive to workers in low-wage and labour rich markets. Couple this with lack of training, and criminal negligence from their managers, and the ghastly events recorded by the programme are indeed repugnant, but they are not a surprise. Left without any contextual analysis, the programme was effectively reinforcing the notion that if you employ Filipinos or Africans, this is what you get.

The problem of care for the elderly is indeed a scandalous and a pressing one. What we need are programmes that help us to understand what has led us to this malaise, that challenge the cuts in spending, and the cultural changes that leave our elderly citizens with no-where to go other than to institutions run by private sector commerce needing to make profits out of paper-thin margins. The problem is one of social, economic and political priority – or the lack of it – given to the needs of our ageing population. Difficult matters. Challenging matters.

How much easier to show emotive footage and an earnest reporter, and leave the difficulty and the challenge aside. How much easier, too, to hang out a few individuals to dry – and to show with triumphal, callous indifference, a wife and child who will now be husbandless fatherless for 18 months, and to revel in the perpetrator’s likely deportation. Job done.

Horizon on fat: a mechanism is not a cause

Last night, BBC2′s Horizon programme discussed “new” discoveries about what lies behind the “obesity epidemic” that’s assailing us. It was a fascinating programme, and did indeed reveal some very interesting things: but fascinating as it was, it was also deeply misleading.

It was presented by a surgeon who began, so the programme told us, with the belief that obesity was a consequence of people eating too much, and exercising too little. People who exhibited such behaviour did so because they were too weak-willed to do any better. Ergo, what was required was some stern talking, possibly the compulsory viewing of “Supersize vs Super-skinny” (well, had it not been on a rival channel), and for those whose wills were not thus strengthened, the reluctant intervention of an already over-stretched NHS to deal with their inevitable type 2 diabetes, and perhaps an opportunity to recoup some of the money by selling voyeuristic clips of yet another stomach by-pass operation in action. The latter probably wouldn’t be very effective, as the market for gruesome shots of implements that “cut and staple simultaneously” would seem already to be saturated. Every time yet another programme turns the spotlight on our modern gross fatness, and what we might do about it, it seems it is de rigueur to include surgeons at this most unattractive pastime.

But the surgeon starring in yesterday’s programme was obliged to confess to an unsavoury attempt to “take the moral high ground” with her simplistic view that perhaps obese people might have some slight degree of responsibility for their predicament. Because she was wrong. It was all down to genetics. Fat people have a “hunger hormone” that is frankly too lazy to make them feel really hungry when its owner is really hungry, and instead merely makes the hapless person feel a bit peckish all the time. On the other hand, obese people have a “fullness hormone” that never gets its act together at all, and never informs the brain that enough is enough. Later in the programme it was revealed just how the brain was responding to all this hormonal misinformation: thin people’s brains were hardly exercised at all by pictures of cream doughnuts, whilst fat people’s brains produced a veritable frenzy of irresistible urges that their rubbish fullness hormone utterly failed to control.

So obese people are between a rock and a hard place. It is truly wrong to hold them responsible. On the one hand their hormonal chemistry is all up the creek, and on the other their brains conspire against their every attempt at self control. The answer? Well, it seemed to be either hormonal pills, or else an odd side effect from the ubiquitous stomach by-pass surgery referred to earlier, which seemed to have the unlikely additional benefit of re-educating the brain.

It was easy to be carried away with the programme’s scientifically certified approach. Except for one rather glaringly obvious point that was never mentioned at all. The human brain has been as it is for a rather long time. The body’s hormonal chemistry has been as it is for millennia. And yet the obesity crisis that we are constantly being told about has only really taken off in the last, say, 50 years. It’s only reached the consciousness of TV producers in the last 20. Thus I can with absolute confidence say that the cause of this crisis is not to be found in endocrinology or in brain functionality, neither of which has suddenly changed in the last half century. A cause and its effects cannot possibly be so delayed. To believe this proposition is to believe that fundamental aspects of our biology, that never bothered our species before, have suddenly begun to do so. Obviously not.

What the Horizon programme so carefully and thoroughly revealed was not a cause, but a mechanism. The cause is much more obvious, and simpler. It is that our Western diet has changed over the last 50 years in very deleterious, but very profitable, ways. At the same time, our level of physical activity has dropped precipitately. What we can learn from yesterday’s revelations is that this sorry state of affairs does not affect us all equally. Some of us are better equipped than others to resist the doleful consequences of rubbish food and physical slothfulness. True also is the programme’s point that resistance is easier for some of us than others.

What would a rational response be? Surely it would be to attack the causes, rather than to fiddle about with the mechanisms, a fiddling about that is bound to bring other unforeseen consequences in its wake. Why don’t we do this? For two very different, but actually strangely connected reasons. We don’t attack the food culture that is causing our fat malaise because too many people make too much money from its continuance. And we prefer drug or surgical interventions in mechanisms to attacking causes because drugs and scientific medicine are also major money-spinners. Not only that, scientists are as seduced by their flashy toys as any adolescent is by his or her iPad, or Android device, or X-Box console. How much more fun to play with an MRI scanner, or wield a tool that simultaneously cuts and staples, than to wonder about the dominance of hawkers of confectionery or fast food? I can still remember my excitement when I first got to use an electron microscope.

Yes, we should be careful to remember that obese people are indeed people about whom we should care, and not fools that we should castigate. But we should also be very wary of those who would locate every problem in genetics or chemistry, and who seek to minimise human volition or responsibility.

Once more unto the breach for gay marriage

Do please forgive me if I’m boring you, because I know I’ve written on this subject twice before. To be honest, even I don’t think that gay marriage is up there with environmental degradation and nuclear proliferation in the pantheon of things we should be most urgently fretting about, but the issue does seem to have an extraordinary ability to part people on all sides from any sense of proportion, or indeed, of any sense of sense.

For those who believe simply that gay marriage is an abomination in the eyes of Almighty God, and then leave it at that, I have some respect even if no scintilla of agreement. But the opponents of gay marriage seem far too embarrassed just to leave it at that, and instead feel constrained to make up all sorts of other spurious and, frankly, scaremongering additional objections. None of them, it seems to me, stand up to scrutiny.

So here’s a canter through some of the most often advanced additional reasons, beyond that of God’s personal displeasure, and why they make little or no sense.

• That gay marriage will somehow make it impossible to bring children up properly in future. Aside from the rather obvious point that we don’t seem, as a society, to be doing a very good job of bringing up children properly now anyway, without gay marriage, this seems the strawriest of straw men. How exactly will the fact that some gay men and women are married impact on how I bring up my children in my heterosexual marriage? Will it be the embarrassment of having to explain these same-sex couples to my children during the supermarket run? If avoiding parental embarrassment were central to successful child-rearing, then sex education would disappear overnight. Insofar as this argument has any coherent basis, it generally seems to be something to do with making it more likely that the off-spring of unsuccessful heterosexual relationships will find themselves coerced into gay ones. Well, if that’s so bad, it happens now anyway. How will being coerced into a gay marriage be any more damaging than coercion into a gay civil partnership? The same argument applies to gay couples adopting. If it’s so wicked, why will it be more wicked if the couple is married?
• That society is founded on marriage between a man and a woman, and to extend the concept to gay couples will knock society’s struts from under it. I happen to be a supporter of marriage (now – I haven’t always been) but if too few marriages are threatening society’s cohesion, I should have thought that adding more marriages would be a good thing. I fail entirely to see how permitting gay marriage would undermine heterosexual marriage. As a heterosexual married man, why would the sight of gay married men, for example, make me more likely to be unfaithful, or to abuse my wife? Were I to be tempted to gay unfaithfulness, then perhaps the knowledge that I was also threatening someone’s marriage might give me greater pause. Hang on, I’m starting to give this notion more credibility than it deserves. I’m not tempted to gay unfaithfulness largely because I’m not gay.
• That it’s OK to have heterosexual marriage, and gay civil partnerships, but calling them all marriage will cause the heavens to fall. I rather doubt it. But the fear that it may do is based on an old misunderstanding – that equality between things is tantamount to saying that they are the same thing. That’s not true. To say that gay people and heterosexuals are equal in being married is not to suggest that gay relationships and heterosexual relationships have mysteriously become the same thing. A pound of carrots is equal to a pound of potatoes, but carrots are not potatoes. Gay and heterosexual marriages would be equal, but not the same.
• That allowing gay marriage is simply a giving-in to selfish demands for the indulging and normalising of sexual perversion. This is the crux, actually. This is why the opponents of gay marriage are so vulnerable to the charge that they are simply homophobic. Once the legitimacy of gay sexual attraction is conceded, then all the other objections melt away. No less an authority on the subject of sexual desire than St Paul himself accepted that it is better to marry than to burn.

Thus there are only two real objections to gay marriage, and they are often merged together. God is implacably opposed to it, and/or homosexuality is a filthy perversion anyway. Either or both of those is an honest position to take. If you believe those things, say so and be damned. But don’t witter on about society, bringing up children, or changing what has always hitherto been understood as the nature of marriage. Just stick to your guns, and I’ll stick to mine.

Chance is a cruel mistress indeed

The appalling coach crash in a Swiss road tunnel in which 28 people died, amongst them 22 children, is one of those news stories that simply transfixes you in dumb, mesmerised horror. You don’t have to have children yourself to appreciate the awfulness of course, but for any parent I suspect this strikes a deep and heartfelt chord of anguished empathy. I simply cannot begin to imagine the shock and despair that must engulf the parents of these children. They sent their kids off for a fun-filled skiing holiday, and never saw them again.

One might think that losing a child in this way represents some kind of ultimate limit of suffering, a sort of absolute zero on the scale of emotional experience. But in this incident there’s another layer, a twisting of a knife that one might have thought could not be twisted any further. The coach in which so many children died was but one of a convoy of three. The other two coaches arrived unscathed in Belgium, discharging their occupants to the loving arms of their families.

The agony of having one’s child killed in the third coach must surely be cruelly aggravated by the inevitable thought that they might just as easily have been travelling in one of the other two. For the parents of those killed, the temptation to fall into a bitter jealousy of those parents of children in the other coaches must be almost irresistible. And in a symmetric but equally unfounded manner, the guilt experienced by the parents of the safe children must be just as overwhelming.

The need which we all have to make sense of events, to construct some sort of narrative that explains what things mean, that looks beyond “how” into the realm of “why”, makes us vulnerable to all sorts of distortions and tortures every bit as destructive as the meaninglessness from which we are trying to escape in the first place. In trying to rationalise events that in fact are devoid of meaning, we ironically create irrationality.

We know with our heads that there is no answer to the question, “Why was it my child that was in the coach that crashed?” No answer to why my child was spared when others were not. Yes, chance is indeed a cruel and unforgiving mistress.

In the face of such a mistress we have nothing to offer except our prayers. Meaningless fantasy in the face of meaningless events, many might feel. Yet if I were one of those grieving parents, I might take the prayers anyway. Anything is better than empty nothingness.

To all the mums and dads of autistic children…

Recently I had a long and wonderful lunch with a dear and close friend. We go back many years, although we’ve only regained contact in the last 4 or 5. During our long years without seeing or hearing from each other – as I discovered when we met up for the first time after that period – my friend had been widowed in excruciating circumstances, and had also had 2 children. Her eldest child is towards the extreme end of the autistic spectrum: he has no language, and communication with him is a constant and formidable challenge.

This post is, in one sense, not about autism at all. In common with, I suspect, the vast majority of people, autism is something that I’ve heard of, have some rudimentary knowledge of, know is an increasingly common diagnosis, and which has been brought to my attention over the last few years mostly in the context of the long and fractious contention over autism’s alleged connection with the MMR vaccine. That particular dispute may, in the minds of just about everyone except some parents of autistic children, have now been finally resolved, but its genesis is too easily put down to parental gullibility; parents want to be able to blame something for their misfortune, and have therefore clutched with an almost pathetic desperation on an unscientific and unproven myth. Thus the narrative goes.

The reality, I think, is rather different. There is perhaps one small grain of truth in it though, and that’s contained in that word, desperation. And I have to say that if I’d had to go through what my friend has gone, and is going, through desperate is exactly what I’d bloody well be. What I probably wouldn’t be, and what she is in spades, is resilient, courageous, determined, tenacious, committed, resourceful, beautiful and inspiring. She’s also, on occasion, angry, despairing, lonely, isolated, fearful, and very, very, very tired.

Much of what she endures cannot be mitigated, cannot be diluted with support, or money, or anything else. She knows that. But she also knows that many of the challenges she faces have nothing intrinsically to do with autism at all, just like this post. They are the thoughtless, careless consequences of unimaginative, under-resourced, ill-trained staff who simply don’t understand how difficult it is to cope with an autistic boy in his mid-teens, and who, doubtless unwittingly, make an already almost unbearable situation maddeningly worse.

Autism is characterised by, amongst so many other things, the fierce need for predictability. So to be phoned up to be told that a new carer is going to accompany her son to his special school tomorrow – someone he doesn’t know, won’t recognise, won’t be able to communicate with – is an unbelievably disruptive and aggravating experience. It requires, yet again, an explanation of the blindingly obvious to an agency that should not require such an explanation. It takes yet more energy. Yet more frustration. Yet more anger.

When her son was approaching school age, my friend had to spend months and years fighting for adequate provision. And then she had to do it all over again when he came to secondary school age. And when he reaches 19 and he can no longer go to his secondary school? Who knows.

But this constant fighting, constant anxiety, constant avoiding or negotiating of often unnecessary obstacles, is only a tiny part of the challenge she faces. The big, almost inexpressible, majority of that challenge is existential. It’s magnified in her case by the loneliness and loss that comes from being widowed. One thing she really doesn’t have time, or energy, for is to start on the intricate dance of meeting someone, of romance, of all that jazz. For sure that magnifies, but it doesn’t create the angst of being the parent to an autistic child. That comes from the tragedy of the condition’s imprisonment of one’s child; from its intractable and never-ending nature; from the pain of never being able to enter into one’s child’s world, or ever really understand what his world is like; from the anxiety of suddenly being the subject of unprovoked, hormone-fuelled assault.

I simply can’t adequately express my admiration for her fortitude, her courage, her unquenchable sense of humour, her seemingly bottomless well of resourcefulness and energy. And I can never fully appreciate her loneliness and her profound and ever-present – if always hidden – sadness.

She’s not alone, of course. And so this post is one small attempt to express something on behalf of all the mums and dads who daily have to face the challenge of their autistic children. It’s not all gloom, and there’s joy too. But most of us simply don’t have a clue. It’s time we got one. It’s time we campaigned for better services. It’s time we stood up for autism.