Month: October 2024

Friday 25 October 2024: Today is the 30^th anniversary of my father’s death. This post is dedicated to his memory, which will be formally acknowledged over this coming weekend in the liturgy of a Solemn Requiem Mass at St Wilfrid’s Church, Harrogate.

Friedrich Nietzsche once said that if you haven’t had a good father you’d better invent one by becoming a father to yourself. Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce’s anti-hero in Ulysses, knows this sentiment only too well as bitterly minded he seeks to find a surrogate father to replace his natural one – a man who has declined into bankruptcy and drunkenness. Stephen’s search is highly symbolic, for a family without a father is Joyce’s analogy for an occupied Ireland without its own natural leaders.

I have enjoyed far more luck. For my father, who was born in Ireland in 1912 and died aged 81 in England, is someone with whom I was never at odds, despite feeling I never ever got to know him personally that well. That’s not unusual, of course. But, in Dad’s case, there was more to the matter than immediately met the eye, as I have written about HERE

It’s not that Dad was secretive; more that he was a discrete and very private man. Also, England, to where he emigrated, aged 19, in 1931, was not then a very Ireland friendly country. I suspect English anti-Irish prejudice caused Dad to keep his ethnicity, and himself more generally, under wraps, certainly initially. 

In these more tolerant times, I don’t feel any need to, which is why I will shortly follow closely the ins and outs of the Irish general election, which is likely to take place sometime next month. Already I have a keen appreciation of the issues that will feature prominently in the campaign – housing, health care, and immigration. Familiar, eh? And I have a good idea what the result will be – a version of what Ireland already has, which is coalition government in which FF and FG share most of the power. 

The ‘Irish situation’ (Conor Cruise O’Brien) matters a lot to me, in other words. It’s why I read The Irish Times most days. It also concerned Dad, but not in such a self-evident fashion. It was spoken about by him, but always somewhat behind his hand and only occasionally. Although a cultural Catholic, he also never initiated me into any of it. I did that .

As a boy and young man, I nonetheless looked up to and admired my father enormously. Gentle, softly spoken, and virtuously uncomplicated, Dad was an excellent role model: he earnestly worked hard, always finished things, and he was kind, generous, and prudent. He’d never let anyone down. Read this EULOGY to find out more.

Two of the photographs which illustrate this post picture Dad as I knew him. The portrait at the top – an excellent likeness – shows him not long after his retirement, aged 68; the one of him reading a newspaper (like me, he rarely missed an opportunity to keep up with current affairs), taken in his mid 70s, also captures Dad perfectly – in retirement, he wore a tie only occasionally, liked red socks, and enjoyed sitting outside.

The image below shows me behind Dad’s gravestone at the  Sacred Heart Church in Rathgormack, which is the small village in Co.Waterford nearest to where he was born..

The next photograph shows me with Dad after my PhD graduation ceremony at Lancaster University on 4 December 1984. Although bemused by the proceedings, he took huge pleasure in my success that day, which is evident in his smile. Notice – Dad is sporting  a tie, which, as I’ve said, is not something he did that often after retiring. Like father, like son!

The photo immediately below shows me and Dad (wearing another tie!), above Bath, on Beechen Cliff, in 1951. I am 4 years old; he is 40. It must have been taken on a Sunday morning, which is when he sometimes required me to accompany him on a local walk. I wonder who took the photograph. It can’t have been my mother, who hadn’t a clue about how to operate a camera. Dad did.  

The next photo was taken in the early 1980s, during the time I was a graduate student at Lancaster University:The last photo below, taken sometime in 1936, somewhere in India, shows Dad, aged 24, in the uniform of the Royal Horse Artillery. His career in the British Army, which took him to Middle Asia, the ME and Europe, lasted for over 20 years, details of which, including his time as a POW, can be read about in this EULOGY

Tuesday 15 October 2024: Well, I wonder what you made of it, by which I mean the Labour government’s first international investment conference held yesterday in London.

Listening to some of the interviews and keynote speeches coming out of it I was reminded of Mark Fisher’s short (2009) polemic Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? which includes these two memorable sentences: “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. There exists a widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it”.

(Oh, Mark, why did you have to leave us so soon? Click here:https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2022/11/mark-fisher-capitalist-realism-k-punk-alex-niven)

Capitalism was not just the only show in town yesterday at Labour’s conference; its version of political economy was embraced enthusiastically by Team Starmer, whose approach to managing the UK economy over the next five years and more will be, it’s clear, if it was ever thought to be otherwise, unashamedly pro-business and more and more growth focussed.

If one wanted evidence there is no parliamentary road to socialism – and I don’t – then yesterday’s conference surely provides it. For sure, there will be wiggle room here and there for progressive, lefty-like, ideas to make an impact following it. But the overall direction of travel is clear: capitalist realism is here to stay. It is baked in.

What Lefties like me do about that is not straightforward. For to seek ways of ameliorating the worst effects of capitalism’s excesses – which is what we usually do – runs ultimately the risk of colluding with the raison d’etre of capital accumulation. The oppositional actions we perform, not to mention the ones any Labour government legislates for, are usually accommodated by capitalism on its terms not those of its critics.

A problem, eh? Well, it is for people like me. But not of course for capitalism’s champions, who are in the majority, and who have no desire at all to see inaugurated a form of political economy  antithetical to their operations, which they assume, as I’ve said, are the only ones worth pursuing economically. They are capitalism’s ‘realists’, remember. Like Mark Fisher, I think they are dangerously crazy; but then they think he and I are mad extremists.

Mind you, one immediate and easy route publicly to discredit capitalism’s logic is critically to engage with the words and expressions its champions use. Did you listen to some of them coming out of London yesterday?

Their meaninglessness made the parallel ones uttered during the ‘business section’ of BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today Programme’ appear plausible, even attractive. John Crace’s satire in today’s Guardian surely can’t be bettered on this:

Put a whole heap of CEOs together in the same room and you can guarantee that within seconds they will be speaking in a tongue almost no one can understand – about multiplier effects, intangible assets, align adjustments, index numbers, etc . It is a world of cliche and jargon where normal sentences are deprived of internal logic and meaning. Hard to believe, but you don’t become head of a multinational without first having learned to speak Pure Doggybollocks. It is the code that admits you to the club. And it’s a rarefied world where everyone knows their place. The politicians may be in government, but it is the business leaders who hold the real power. This is not a meeting of equals.

How is it possible that the CEO’s of some of the globe’s biggest corporations can speak in such illiterate doggerel but still go on to ‘rule the world’? Beats me.

Why aren’t they called on more to account for the nonsense they utter? And why do successive Chancellors mimic them? Answer: they’re capitalism’s ‘realists’ too.

And what of the verbal sleights of hand on show, the most notable of which surely is to do with ‘stability’ and ‘certainty’. According to the CEOs, they can only do ‘good business’ if governments encourage and consolidate each of them? Eh?  Isn’t capitalism inherently unstable because its markets are precarious and systemically uncertain? As Mark Fisher says, capitalism is by its very nature opposed to any notion of sustainability. 

What are these people on about? Do they want the world to be ordered by elected governments in ways that allow them to operate with impunity entirely on their terms? I think they do. It’s why they hate governments which restrain through regulation their financial activity. They want to be free to make money entirely on their terms – for themselves and for investors. 

The CEOs at yesterday’s conference aren’t then philanthropists. They are money-making entrepreneurs looking to make returns on investments better than they can get from buying government guilts. They are in it for their good not ours, not society’s. And they expect governments  – Starmer’s government included – to help them by not getting in the way of their kind of ‘progress’ which fosters class power and privilege, inequalities of wealth and income, and worsens the climate emergency.  Why are they allowed to get away with this? Again, it all beats me,

What doesn’t is the need always to be on one’s guard when politicians – of the Right and the Left – embrace fully a pro-business stance, as Starmer did in London yesterday.

Growth, growth, and even more growth are all very fine, providing each is linked to a story about long-term societal wellbeing, which Team Starmer is yet unambiguously to write.

Prosperity only becomes a societal good when it contributes to the common weal – when it floats all boats and not just a few of them.

Thus, you don’t have to be a socialist to expect a Labour government to promote greater equality, improved fairness, and more social justice. As a Labour supporter said in the Guardian the other day: What I expect from a Labour government is that it should always be asking the questions: growth from what? And for whom?

And it’s not unreasonable also to demand that Labour does not legislate in ways that better enable unscrupulous companies to maximise yield while fostering public harm.

The PM yesterday said at one point that “growth leads to a country that is better equipped to come together”. Mmmm? What’s the evidence for this claim? Indeed, is economic growth of the sort he envisages a precondition for repairing the public realm? Some of us aren’t sure it is, you see.

Saturday 12 & Sunday 13 October 2024: This weekend marks Labour’s first 100 days in office since winning the UK GE on 7 July. Why the 100 days marker is highlighted so much in electoral politics has always bemused me – why 100, why not 200, etc?

Historical precedent is the answer. Its origins can be traced back to 1933 and the then US President Franklin D Roosevelt. The 100th day of his presidency that year was 12 June. On the 25th, he gave a radio address to the nation, near the start of which he said: “Looking back, we all wanted the opportunity of a little quiet thought to examine and assimilate in a mental picture the crowding events of the hundred days which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of our New Deal.”

Since Roosevelt’s time, the first 100 days of a US presidential term has taken on symbolic significance, constituting a benchmark to measure the early success or failure of not just US presidents, but the record of political office holders in other parts of the world.

So, looking back, how should we “examine and assimilate in a mental picture the crowding events of the hundred days which have been devoted to the starting of the wheels” of Labour’s change agenda since it was elected three months ago?

One of my mental pictures looks like this: imagine a headteacher newly appointed to lead a just-opened school. In his/her first term in the role, s/he botches the selection of the school’s senior management team, embarks on introducing two highly unpopular and socially damaging policies, and considers reneging on a pair of commitments made during interview. Don’t you think there’d be calls to ask him/her ‘to consider his/her position’? Or, if not that, there’d be rumblings among members of the interview panel that they’d made an error of judgement in appointing such a person to the role?

This mental picture is benign compared to the one conjured by a contributor to the left-wing Novara Media website, who says: “Over 400 seats at the election with the lowest turnout in British political history against the worse government in British political history. This wasn’t a mandate; it was simply chance; and those 400 seats are built on quicksand due to an electorate dissatisfied with our whole political class. A swing of just 6% from Labour to the Tories would totally wipe out Starmer’s majority. If he had been radical his popularity numbers would have held up. Instead, he appears economically Conservative light. Meanwhile, the working class and the middle class and small to medium sized business class still suffer and will continue to do so under a government that will tinker around the edges without doing anything of real consequence.”

The Guardian’s political editors are kinder, though deeply concerned:“after a bumpy start, there is anxiety that this might be more than the usual stumbles of a government getting used to the vagaries of office, and instead the symptoms of a dysfunctional No 10 operation, and even a lack of political acumen at the top.” They quote a ‘senior Labour source’ as saying, “we all hope it’s teething troubles, but we all worry in case it’s something worse.”

So does the right-wing Spectator magazine which says Labour’s first 100 days “could have not gone worse”.

Well, they could have by a country mile is my reaction to that daft evaluation. Isn’t it good that Labour has settled long-standing pay disputes with rail workers, doctors and teachers? That it scrapped the infamous Rwanda policy for asylum-seekers? And didn’t Team Starmer do well in its response to the anti-immigration riots? And hasn’t it made a good start on planning reform?

Yes, is the answer to all four. But there remains, methinks, a big problem going forward, which the editor of The Economist highlights: “without a compelling analysis of what ails Britain and a clear sense of direction, the wheels of government are more liable to spin. Without a vision of what he wants to do and why, Sir Keir will struggle to avoid being distracted by events or to explain the trade-offs that governing demands.”

Will Hutton concludes similarly: “Part of the problem is that the party’s leadership relegates the importance of ideas and political philosophy because, allegedly, they do not constitute good ‘retail politics’, don’t play well in focus groups, and open up the threat of attack for being of the Left. It is safer to duck argument over ideas and be a managerial party focusing on delivery.”

I am rarely on the side of either The Economist or Will Hutton but, on this occasion, I don’t think either is far wrong.

However, I am not optimistic Team Starmer can produce a set of ideas, least of all represent and propagate a vision, that adds up to the kind of socialist one I adhere to and want to see advanced. But then it would be silly of me – and all other Leftists – to expect it to.  

Ours is a capitalist state, and its governments, including Labour ones, get elected to meet and manage its needs and expectations. The Tories, happily the party of wealth and privilege, do this with a relish; Labour, allegedly the party of the underdog, feigns not to. 

Ralph Miliband then was right in 1961; and he’s still right over 60 years later – there is no parliamentary road to a socialist society. Labour governments are disabled ideologically and constrained economically from inaugurating one. It’s an establishment party, not a revolutionary one.

The most that can ever be hoped for from a Labour government then is that it will manage successfully the capitalist state in a fashion that leads to less bad stuff: children in poverty, pensioners dying of cold, low pay, inequality, etc.

A lot in this connection will of course be evident or not in Labour’s first Budget, the content of which we will learn about on 30 October.

This is 117 days since it took office, which I have calculated is the longest interval for a new government to hold its inaugural Budget in over 50 years.

Let’s hope it’s worth the wait. I am not holding my breath.

Sunday 6 October 2024: I flew from JFK to London HR today. An uneventful journey made easiy for me by my new bag carrying assistant:

Since leaving the UK on 27 September, I have had a busy and very enjoyable 8 days staying with my daughter, Chloe, and her family in Brooklyn, NYC: watching baseball for the first time ever at the Yankee Stadium, going to the theatre in Manhattan, visiting the Bronx Zoo, bike riding twice round Central Park, doing the school run and attending Mass each weekday, studying for three whole days in two libraries, reading every day a hard copy of NYT, and hanging out a lot with each of Chloe and Renée.

Today’s NYT is much dedicated to the upcoming presidential election, which is just 30 days away.

It includes a 12-page supplement covering the key issues. Besides a very helpful survey of how 6 key ‘swing’ states might vote on 5^th November – which tells us that the outcome in most of them is far  too hard to call – the supplement outlines what is at stake in each of the elections for the Senate and the House.

This indicates the Republicans couldwell retain control of the latter, while conceding a narrow victory to the Democrats in the former. 

The supplement also sets out the stances of each of Trump and Harris on a range of key issues: the climate emergency, crime, abortion, the economy, immigration, and foreign policy, including in particular the war in Gaza and the OWB.

The differences between Trump and Harris on each of them is not as huge as you might suppose. True, they are poles apart on abortion rights; and they don’t agree on NATO and Ukraine.

Otherwise, like on the economy, including taxes, immigration, housing, social security and medicare and foreign relations, there isn’t a lot to divide them.

Although Harris is not remotely a MAGA enthusiast, she supports an active global role for the US, seeing it as the world’s leader in promoting liberal, free market capitalist democratic values.

Trump then is lying when he says Harris is a Marxist! She’s not even that much of a left of Centrist. More like Biden and the UK’s Keir Starmer than Chile’s Gabriel Boric is thus a better description of her ideologically.

Although there is not a huge of difference between the Democrat and Republican prospectuses, this does not hold back the NYT’s editors urging its readers and the wider public to support Harris.

They describe her as “the only patriotic choice for America”, concluding she “has shown care, competence and respect for the Constitution – the fundamental qualities necessary for high office”.

Their recommendation is thus based on an assessment that Harris has the better ‘character’ of the two. And, on that, they must be right. It supports its endorsement by quoting over 90 people prominent in American public life, each of whom consider Trump as unworthy of the Presidency.

Richard Logis, onetime, longtime Trump supporter speaks for most of them, saying, “lying is his toxic superpower”. Meanwhile, Paul Ryan, Republican Speaker of the House from 2013 to 2019, says, “Character is important. It’s a job that requires a kind of character that he simply just doesn’t have.”  

I guess this also explains the NYT’s continuing hostile view of NY Mayor Adams, who it says should resign before his trial.

The NYT carries a poll to support its case, which reports that over 75% of New Yorkers say they want Harris to step down now.

I saw this cartoon displayed in a café in Park Slope earlier today. Am I being an over-sensitive Irishman to think it is a very demeaning (even racist) characterisation of the island of Ireland?

The Irish are happy to laugh at themselves, and do so a lot; but they take offence when other nationalities jokingly construct them as second rate. Isn’t this cartoon doing just that?

Seeing it triggered in my imagination a set of ‘Irish’ questions: does President Biden really have Irish ancestry? does it matter if he does or does not? when will the Republic’s GE be held? and who will win it?

My answers: he does have it; if he doesn’t, then he’s a liar; well before Christmas, probably late November; on current polling, Fine Gael will narrowly win the most seats (an improvement from 2020, when it was the third largest party in Dáil Éireann). But it will have to go into coalition with Fianna Fáil to hold power, ignoring all overtures from Sinn Féin (which surely won’t be forthcoming in any serious fashion), who I predict will in any event lose a little ground.

In other words, Ireland’s next GE is likely to realise a government much like the one which currently rules it. Yawn, yawn. The right of centre will hold.