NE PLEURIEZ PAS MILORD - ENGLAND'S WORLD CUP

Every four years the FIFA World Cup delivers sporting theatre which is as rich in human psychology as it is in football. Of course it's only a game. But there were two comments from the papers following England's quarter final exit from a so-far enthralling competition in Qatar which stood out :

"The World Cup counts so much because it is a window on to who's who and what's what unlike anything else that football offers. We see what players are made of, divested of whatever advantages they have when playing for the biggest and best clubs, shouldering hopes of nations and conscious such opportunities come round only a few times in a career."

 and

"Football is the one place where reality and their highfalutin sense of themselves meet."

Interestingly, the journos were showing their disappointment with the teams of Brazil and Argentina respectively, the former knocked out by an un-fancied Croatian side containing a number of middle- aged men and the latter squeaking a bad-tempered victory on penalties against an equally unfancied Dutch side which refused to be rolled over, despite being 2-0 down for most of the match.

As a muddled Sassenach (albeit with Irish Catholic and French Huguenot ancestry) it grieves me to ask, but could not those observations be fairly applied to the football set up of England? Certainly the fans who watched open mouthed as Harry Kane hoofed the match saving penalty over the cross bar would seem to deserve an explanation.

Whatever his deficiencies in either selection or tactics, there is no doubting that England manager Gareth Southgate has a genius for PR. He managed the quite extraordinary feat of making the England football team vaguely likeable. This is a group with both talent and a social conscience. We have had knee-taking, armband wearing, group hugging and a general vibe of wholesomeness. When was the last time an England sports team changed the course of government social policy? One of its soccer stars, Marcus Rashford, managed to do just that when agitating for free school meals in both term time and holiday for the children of "vulnerable" families. Such is the shallowness of our politics, the administration of Boris Johnson caved in promptly. Yet no-one (least of all Rashford) seemed to consider that the proposal effectively relieved parents of the basic duty of feeding their children.

But no matter. Emboldened by all the hypocritical hoo-ha about Qatar's human rights record, Team England arrived in the desert in full warrior-for-social-justice mode. There was some confected nonsense about the wearing of Gay Pride armbands which was swiftly snuffed out once FIFA showed a metaphorical yellow card. The arc of England's football  followed a similar trajectory soon afterwards. 

For the side's performance at these events seems to be as predictable as the seasons. First, there are the qualifying matches against the likes of Tibet, Andorra and Vatican City where Team England still contrive to get a scare from part-time crews mostly comprised of students, car mechanics, elderly fishermen and hairdressers. There then follows a group stage at the main event in which it flattens a country of which few of its supporters have ever heard, and then ekes out a series of draw-bores to get into the knock-outs. The rest writes itself. 

From the Amazonian basin to the Himalayan plateau, there cannot be a person on the planet who is unaware of Team England's frailty in front of a barn door, minimally defended by a man in fluorescent jim-jams waving his arms about. More serious is their consistent inability to seal the deal against sides as talented, rich, well-trained and pampered as themselves. Were France the better team on the night? England's "rising star" Jude Bellingham thought not, which only goes to show the depths of a nation's delusions. England spent much of the match falling over, shouting at the referee and passing back to the goal-keeper - all sure signs of nerves beginning to fray. Their opponents played as if they meant to win it, whereas England played as if they thought they would win it next time.

It's no good blaming the manager, or the match officials or VAR or whatever. The media are as masterful in the stoking of fantasy as are the players. Over on ITV, some blow-hard preposterously declared that had England won, they would never have had an easier route to the final, as only Morocco would have stood in the way. What, the Morocco which played as a team, defended like tigers and put out the much vaunted sides of Spain, Portugal and Belgium? That Morocco?

In the end, is not courage defined by the exercise of key skills under pressure? Managers like Southgate are up against it because ultimately they are dealing with a bunch of immature multi-millionaires who don't really need to wear the national shirt, no matter how "gutted" they feel after blowing yet another chance for the long-suffering fans. Far more seriously, they are the product of an education system which routinely promotes self-esteem rather than self-respect, a construct to which impressionable young males seem particularly susceptible. In that sense, Team England really do represent a culture which in so many ways finds it easy to fold in the hope things will be less difficult next time.

So if you don't want to put yourself endlessly through the mangle as an England fan, but really want to see football played with guts as well as skill, then watch the women's game. Or better still, Morocco.

 

GOD BLESS CHARLATANS

In Dominic Sandbrook's brilliantly discursive and sometimes hilarious book "Seasons in the Sun - the Battle for Britain 1974 to 1979" there is a particularly depressing photograph. It shows a teacher supervising a lesson, which is taking place on waste-ground next to a row of dilapidated terraced houses somewhere in the UK in the mid 'seventies. Children sit aimlessly around a fire. Some mooch in the background and the teacher, all long hair and hands in pocket, looks strangely aloof and disengaged. There is a palpable lack of energy in the scene. In 1979 Pink Floyd produced "Another Brick in the Wall", its song about perceived classroom authoritarianism.  "We doan need no educayshun", they groaned. "We doan need no fought contro". They needn't have bothered: that class of '75 got "no educayshun" and came of age between the severe recession of the early 'eighties and the height of the miners' strike in 1984. It is largely that cohort which has been running the country for the past twenty years, and which has filled the upper echelons of its cultural and academic institutions. 

When your leaders are poorly educated and reach maturity in circumstances which enhance their sense of alienation, can anyone wonder about the total mess that is presently Governance UK? 

There have been a number of episodes in post War British history in which an atmosphere of existential crisis has been marked: Suez; the so-called Three- Day Week; the "Winter of Discontent"; the 1984 miners' strike; the financial crash of 2008 and the EU Referendum in 2016. Apart from the last two, all these instances also took place against the threatening back drop of a nuclear-armed Cold War. In three of them, there was an additional paranoia induced by Ulster connected terrorism, which frequently erupted onto the mainland UK. 

In the crises before the Millennium the essential organs of the modern British state held firm, despite a background of profound political turmoil and the possibility of civil strife. A dutiful and dis-interested monarch smiled and waved. Religious leaders were on hand to sooth the wounds of antagonism. The courts continued to dispense justice as found in UK based law. The police were largely trusted to uphold law and order. The professionalism and capability of the Armed Forces was mostly unquestioned. The Civil Service ensured the continuity of national and regional administration. The BBC's approach to public affairs was impartial and evidence based. There was no question of the break-up of the UK (despite the best efforts of the IRA). There was a firm belief in democracy and a healthy scepticism of blue-prints and ideology.

As the sharper elbowed of the class of '75 entered the cadre of national leaders at the turn of the century, the wheels began to fall off. The age of the charlatan had arrived, aided and abetted by the corrosive dominance of the social sciences in public life. It did not matter that the various schemes for the perfection of the citizen founded in the social sciences had manifestly failed, not least in the communist bloc. Unembarrassed, so-called "progressives" now asserted personal "truth" trumped objective truth. Indeed, the whole concept of objective truth was challenged by the increasingly shrill post-Modernist agenda, the sole purpose of which seemed to be the provision of axes to grind and the degradation of rational enquiry and well-tested custom. Social equality would be achieved by the promotion of nonsense - at least then we would all be united in ignorance.

Political chicanery flourished. Blair took the UK to war on the thinnest of pretexts and also because he personally "believed" it was the right thing to do. Brown supervised the largest accretion of the state in peacetime based on his hunch that only he and his coterie could deliver "fairness", whatever that meant. His successors were cast from the same mould in that they too were mostly untroubled by doubt. The vanity, shallowness and fragility of Cameron, May, Johnson and Truss tested to destruction the idea that Oxbridge (or at least Oxford) is the mother lode of educated talent. From these conceits much dross flowed.

When the upper reaches of civil society are as gripped by unreason as is more typically found at its base, there is a problem. Democracy cannot properly function where knowledge and practical experience (as opposed to "lived experience") are relegated or ignored. If accountability is either weak or non-existent, it becomes a lot easier to disregard decisions that have been democratically decided. Nor can democracy work where the fundamental assumptions behind it are endlessly challenged and weakly defended by those who ought to know better.

Charlatans once lived in constant risk of exposure by advances in science and philosophical enquiry. Alas, not even the scientific method has been immune to the contamination of objective truth by post Modernism, while the advances in technology have arguably facilitated the rate at which imbecility flourishes. Ask anyone to name a recently famous UK scientist, and chances are they'll mention Professor Stephen Hawking, the recognition of whom was much enhanced by his wheelchair bound existence and computerised utterances. Hawking made his name in the arcane and highly speculative area of theoretical physics. Although he conceded that so-called M Theory ("The Theory of Everything") was no more than a collection of unproven and unprovable hypotheses, it did not stop him and his collaborators from claiming that this branch of science had supplanted both philosophy and theology. As God had nothing to do with the rightness or otherwise of their speculations, ergo God did not exist either. The British love an underdog and enjoyed the spectacle of the boffin in the wheelchair taking on the Almighty in a contest that no sensible theologian would have asked for.

To say that Hawking deserved his prestige would be overclaiming. But his public popularity and association with speculative science rather than the more precise realm of observed instances also gave a big boost to the quackery of so-called Model Dependent Realism. The very fashionable idea that we can have no concept of a reality outside the models or pictures we construct in order to explain the world has given a big boost to charlatans everywhere. Rational scepticism can be discounted just so long as what you are trying to prove (or disprove) can be fitted into a model. No other considerations apply. Sound familiar? Among the major economies, the UK's strategy to deal with the Covid pandemic was especially dominated by Model Dependent Realism. It did not matter that the assumptions were flawed, and the assigned probabilities seemingly taken out of a hat. The establishment was quick to claim it was "Following the Science" although the experience was a costly and predictable disaster. All the while, the well-founded suspicion that the pandemic had itself been engineered by scientists in a laboratory was ruthlessly supressed.

The "science" of Man- Made Climate Change is similarly compromised by the chicanery enabled by Model Dependent Realism. This has now passed from the realm of scientific enquiry to that of dogma. Notwithstanding the proper application of the scientific method has shown human activity to have a vestigial impact on global warming, sceptics are denounced as dangerous heretics. The Old Testament of anthropogenic climate change is routinely preached by the BBC, with the nonagenarian Sir David Attenborough cast in the role of a modern Elijah. It does not matter, for example, that drought in the Horn of Africa has been endemic since long before global industrialisation. More recently, it has been exacerbated by ethnic conflict, government oppression and widespread corruption. Amid the recent heart- rending scenes of starving infants, the BBC would have been nearer the truth had they said the drought was no fault of these beautiful children. Instead, we were told the catastrophe was entirely the result of Man- Made Climate Change. Never mind the suffering, just admire how on-message is our intrepid and air-conditioned reporter.

Have there been any philosophical defences erected against the rising tide of "personal truths" validated by "lived experiences"? The British pride themselves on their stout- hearted aversion to intellectualism, particularly in the public sphere. From that has arisen the conceit that Britain is somehow immune from any idiocies blowing in from abroad. Post Modernism - isn't that a bit French? Critical Race Theory? That's some nonsense from the US campuses. They'll never catch on here.

Yet arguably the post Modernists bombed the ground that had already been ploughed up by that school of philosophy called "pluralism". This held that romanticism, for example, was as valid a way of looking at the world as rationalism. Or that the wisdom of the ancients was as relevant to our system of morality as the Judaeo Christian tradition. You get the picture. If you asked anyone over 40 if they could name a famous British philosopher, chances are they'd name Sir Isaiah Berlin OM. Lionised by the establishment and adopted as the celebrity house philosopher of UK social democracy, Sir Isaiah owed his renown to apercus like this:

"I regard equality as one of the ultimate goals of men, and its rejection as such is deeply unsympathetic to me...I am not at all against believing that life can be ordered for the better, following a rule of conduct or a critique of culture or a method, even a scientific law - often one can, and if one can, one should". 

and this

"Equality and freedom may sometimes be reconciled and sometimes not...there are forms of inequality which diminish freedom, forms of oppression which destroy equality etc". 

and this

" I do not think that I intend to throw doubts on religious morality as such, only on one that excludes all non-religious values"

Read those highly conditional sentences again and you realise Berlin is not saying very much at all. His fellow pluralist Michael Oakeshott was more obviously suspicious of "systems". This and his reverence for practical knowledge, well tested custom and the human capacity for adaptation have led many to conclude he was an exemplar for the right. Perhaps for this reason, Berlin detested Oakeshott and called him a charlatan. So much for pluralism.

Where the pluralists were in the business of examining the multiple roots of our moral understanding, the post Modernists have tried to dig them up and burn them. They have had quite a bit of success. Politicians are unable to say what defines a woman and eminent doctors of the church can be found to affirm that Christ was, in fact, "trans". Members of the royal family would have us believe they are oppressed. We have been told to assume that we have a right not to be offended, particularly if we are "vulnerable" on account of our "protected characteristics". If objective truth makes anyone uncomfortable or is otherwise "problematic" or "inappropriate", it must be suppressed. Nonsense now has a code of approved attitudes to which citizens must adhere on pain of excommunication ("cancelling" in the vernacular) and even deprivation of their livelihoods. We turn to superannuated footballers masquerading as philosophers for our moral lessons and to professional agitators as our guides to modern manners. We throw billions at business charlatans and allow them to remain at liberty when they should be in jail. As one would expect in the "progressive" world of PO-MO, the zealotry of unreason is most pronounced in our institutions of higher learning. There has been nothing this culturally crazy since the witch burning of the 17th century.

As we enter the Advent season, it is good to be reminded that we were given a perfectly good rubric to help us lead better lives with purer hearts over 2,000 years ago. The Jesus of the Gospels didn't invite us to solve moral problems or to agonise where good ends might conflict - he enjoined us to lead a life of justice AND mercy. He did not assert, and he certainly wasn't in the excommunication game. He did however show that there is a wrong way, and that evil is ever-present. But he would also have been more forgiving of the charlatans than they have ever been of him.

Happy Christmas.

BACK TO THE FUTURE - 1806

According to the media, it is 1972 all over again and the parallels are uncanny. Apparently, the new chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng has just delivered a mini budget which is likely to outdo that of his Conservative predecessor Anthony Barber in its recklessness. The BBC can barely contain its excitement: listening to Evan Davis on Radio 4, Sir Keir Starmer is now the hero of the hour. A hyper-ventilating Ed Milliband told us the UK is going to be "saved" by going carbon neutral by 2030. Evan asked how, and Ed said the "numbers had been verified". Amazingly, this assertion seemed to satisfy the reporter. Political quackery and chicanery are now so widespread that they have lost their capacity to shock.

All around is change but things still seem to be the same. Even the old names of the seventies like Rolls Royce are on the skids once more. For the striking coal miners, read the current public sector. Large sections of it are dis-functional or "working to rule": the NHS, the police, the courts and officials who are "remote-working". Others are already taking industrial action (the trains and the Post Office), in an attempt to defy even the most modest reforms. Mark Serwotka of the civil service union is the new Jack Jones. Inflation is trending up sharply after a period of unprecedented monetary and fiscal stimulation. On this there has been a negligible return unless you have been lucky enough to own a residential property, mortgaged or otherwise. But now, interest rates are rising fast, and it is clear that all those buzzy little "Fintechs" could soon be the equivalent of the secondary banks that required the "Threadneedle Street Lifeboat" in 1973. 

Once again, the UK seems to be caught up in the backwash of a sharp change of course in US monetary policy. Having been held up by the natural resource sectors, the UK stock market is beginning to join the global rout and even the trajectory of the correction is looking like that followed by the course of the 'seventies bear market. Ominously, the £ is back to its 1985 post war low against the $ and some think that it will have to reach parity if the UK is to recover competitiveness.

There is not (yet) an acceleration in official unemployment. Indeed, there are 1.7m job vacancies. Yet what do you call those 5.5m households in receipt of some form of unemployment and/or means tested benefit (exclusive of the state pension and child allowance)? There is not (yet), a prices and incomes policy unless you are in Scotland (where rents have been "temporarily" fixed, but the costs associated with property ownership continue to float). However, there is now heavy state intervention to support consumers against the oil and gas price "shock". For the Yom Kippur War, read the Ukraine. For the Class War read the Culture War. 

Most of the more parochial of these comparisons with the early seventies miss the bigger picture. The UK has been caught up, like everywhere else, in a long overdue and global re-pricing of risk. You do not need to be a "neo-con" to see that the social democratic model that has been in place for most of the post War period in Europe is under severe pressure. In the UK, which is particularly poorly placed, it is close to disintegration.

Take a look at this chart. It is from the Bank of England, no less. It shows two centuries of steady secular productivity improvement in the economy with periods of cyclical variance. Two years before Denis Healey went cap in hand to the IMF, that long term upward trend (did we but know it) came to an end and has been in decline, with the odd interruption, ever since. For the last decade, it has been negative. Which might help to explain why the rate of economic growth recorded as 2.6% per annum between 1981 and 2007 has now nearly halved, even when the impact of the 2008-2009 Great Financial Crisis is excluded. As one eminent US economist has put it "We can see the effect of technology pretty much everywhere, except in the (UK) productivity numbers".

Arguably, the underpinning of economic growth of the last 15 years is even flimsier, once the effect of immigration is excluded. The importation of large cohorts of unskilled or under-skilled labour has provided a useful fig-leaf behind which the UK economy has ticked over. The official class likes it because it has allowed the urgent need for difficult reforms to be deferred. But GDP per capita has risen by a mere £1,000 since 2007 to £32,555. Large scale immigration has also come at a heavy cost to the UK's social services, a factor which clearly informed the decision of many to vote to leave the EU as a way of "controlling our borders". Bafflingly for the Left, there has even been a perceptible increase in the number of first- generation immigrants deserting it. As in the USA, these folk do not want their hard- won security undermined by newer arrivals.

The biggest threat to the UK's prosperity and harmony is the sheer size, cost, intrusiveness and uselessness of the state. Indeed, parts of it give every impression of trying to thwart decisions which have already been democratically decided. Central government taxes now account for 37% of GDP and in the year 2020 to 2021 it further borrowed the equivalent of 15% of GDP. Total central government debt exceeds £2.3tn, close to 100% of GDP. Yes, Covid cost a lot of money, but the trend of fiscal incontinence was in place long before the Wuhan laboratory blew up. Even under the so-called "austerity" of George Osborne, the debt burden never dropped below 75%. 

By far the biggest drain on resources is "our" NHS (GC), a system of healthcare provision that no other country emulates. Its status is totemic, yet the faith placed upon it has long defied rationality. During Covid, the government's entire strategy was predicated on a determination that its bed spaces were not filled too quickly. No expense was spared: £15bn on PPE (£3bn of it unusable) and £37bn squandered on Test & Trace. Billions more was spent requisitioning private sector bed space that was then not used. The Army was conscripted to build Nightingale hospitals that stood idle as soon as they were up. We were told that the NHS remained "open for business". Yet now its waiting lists exceed 6.8m people in England alone. Think about that. Very nearly 10% of the UK population is effectively hors de combat. The BBC and the Times tells us that the markets have a downer on Kwasi Kwarteng's "giveaway" budget. No, they don't. What the markets have a downer on is uncapped government spending dominated by a healthcare system that has been unable to prevent vast swathes of the population from being economically inactive and which is incompetently managed, impervious to reform, and which is well on the way to bankrupting the UK.

The markets have also noticed that of the developed economies, the structure of the UK's is perhaps the least able to cope with the global re-pricing of risk. Naturally, the lazy will identify BREXIT as the main culprit, but the UK has been living beyond its means for years and the last time the country recorded a current account surplus was when John Major was in Downing Street. The deficit has now ballooned out to over 8% of GDP - that isn't BREXIT, so much as what happens when you needlessly keep the productive parts of an economy in suspended animation for the best part of two years and are then forced to satisfy the pent- up demand from overseas. You can't really export NHS administrators, of which there are nearly half a million.

Despite all the guff about "the enterprise economy"; "investing in innovation"; "education, education, education" and "hard working families", the dynamics of UK economic growth have been increasingly corroded by financial speculation in the supply side and welfarism on the demand side. The ratio of university graduates to those with a practical technical qualification is approaching 100:1. Growth has been characterised by offshoring, de-skilling, green washing, large scale immigration and the further shrinkage of the manufacturing base. This accounts for little more than 11% of the economy, or 4% if construction is excluded. The UK buys in over half its food from abroad, yet domestic agriculture and fishery are mere rounding errors in the national accounts. Instead, the economy has been financialised to a massive degree. The UK is essentially an agency economy that has lucked out on its time zone and is heavily dependent on activity elsewhere. The wealth that has accrued has been juiced by ultra- low interest rates and fiscal incontinence. It has then been thrown at a property market as sclerotic as any on the planet.

The year 1806 marked the comprehensive defeat of geo-politically isolated and economically backward Prussia by Napoleonic France at the Battles of Jena and Auerstedt. It was a watershed moment in German history as the country was overrun, dismembered and forced to pay a gargantuan indemnity. Faced with ruin, the residual Prussian state underwent a radical transformation. The Stein/Hardenberg/Humboldt reforms took on vested interests, galvanised the education system, introduced a genuine meritocracy in the selection of officers and public officials and re-oriented the political direction of the country. Public administration was professionalised. It was also hugely de-centralised with appointment determined by competence rather than political connection or cronyism. Everywhere "the indifferent state, so hostile to change of any sort" was challenged. Stein's great insight was that a servile population, so dependent on the whim of remote officials and producer interests, did not make for a dynamic or patriotic one. 

Today the state of the UK is not Ted Heath's Britain of 1972. It is that of 1806 Prussia under Frederick William III and we are also staring down a barrel.

RE-IMAGINING BLOOMSBURY AT THE EDINBURGH BOOK FESTIVAL

Dare one ask, but has not the appalling physical attack on Sir Salman Rushdie in up state New York also been a shot-in-the-arm to the Edinburgh International Book Festival? In the week before the opening, its director Nick Barley weedily proclaimed that there would be no "trigger warnings" in the programme - people should expect to be "challenged" by its content. This little chirrup of editorial boldness would have had greater authenticity were not the same programme mostly a dawn-to-dusk parade of all that is modish and au courant in the literary anglosphere. A quick glance at the "themes" of the Festival reveals that the only people likely to be challenged by its content is that tiny fragment of the literary establishment not presently part of the seemingly settled progressive consensus around such issues as the "Legacies of Colonialism"; "Our Planet and Us"; "The Heart of Europe" and "Celebrating LGBTQIA+ Voices". As for the punters, they are not really there to be challenged or entertained so much as to be educated in the ever expanding vernacular of secular liberal piety. Perhaps that's also why the scuffed gardens of the Edinburgh School of Art seemed so empty and listless on Sunday afternoon: after all, how much appetite does the ordinary citizen have to hear these sermons again and again? Do we each want to part with £14 to be reminded that the bounds of progressive tolerance are pretty narrow and that we are somehow "fallen" if we don't get with the programme?

So the assault on Rushdie at least allowed Barley to claim that the Festival was now an "act of defiance" on behalf of writers. But the idea that freedom of expression is a tiny and flickering flame bending in the winds of a barbarian hurricane (in the shape of one crazed knife wielding lunatic in New York), is just ridiculous. Never have there been so many books, literary festivals and prizes for writing. Never have editorial jowls wobbled so mightily in defence of the "freedom of expression" in the printed and broadcast media. Never has it been easier to get a platform for deeply consensual views that are eagerly marketed as "transgressive". On the contrary, the attack on Rushdie has provided a diversion from the fact that the assault on the freedom of expression is generated almost entirely from within the literary and academic establishments that purport to defend it.

To sit in on the panel discussion about Bloomsbury was to see this paradox in all its po-faced glory. Marketed as a "re-imagination" the session was anything but, as the hour was used to re-heat all the old tropes about Woolf, Grant, Bell, Strachey, Garsington, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and All. The main point of the show seemed to be to allow the panel to give its lengthy benediction to Bloomsbury's "queer aesthetic", "flamboyance" and something called "campiness". Category errors abounded as the myriad of Modernists that reached far wider than the bitchy little caste at Garsington were presented in the round as the literary vanguard of Gay Pride and gender fluidity. That some members of Bloomsbury were gay is beyond both dispute and, surely, interest. It was however a stretch to imply the full literary, critical and artistic output of the Modernists (of which Bloomsbury was a small if influential outpost) was driven by this dynamic. Apart from a very tangential reference to the photography of Cecil Beaton, it was not even made clear how same sex attraction was handled in the writing and art of some of Bloomsbury's gay exemplars.

A lady called Nino Strachey, a descendant of the waspish (but hardly "flamboyant") Lytton Strachey, reminded us of the "repression" that Bloomsbury had to endure under the Tory government of the nineteen twenties. But this was also a decade punctuated by two Labour governments, whose social conservatism and adoption of prevailing Liberal orthodoxies are matters of fact. It was also, shock horror, a Conservative government of the period which lowered the voting age for women. Yet apparently, men could only dance together in the upper stories of buildings where the street level plods couldn't see them. Whatever happened to curtains? 

By contrast, the Bloomsbury guests of Garsington certainly seemed to have a high old time of it, with male acolytes "dressed as nuns yesterday morning and as shepherdesses in the afternoon today". One member of the audience wondered why, if the 'Twenties were so repressive, Duncan Grant, Stephen Tennant and Co. were able to exercise their transgressive behaviour "in plain sight" much as the paedophile Jeffery Epstein had done more recently. For this "sordid comparison", the poor lady was roundly ticked off by the moderator and she fulsomely apologised. Her question was primly ignored.

Yet she was surely on to something. The received wisdom of the show, that the sexual mores of Bloomsbury were thrillingly avant garde, is just nonsense. As Noel Annan and Martin Green have revealed in their brilliantly discursive books about the period, Bloomsbury was very much of its time rather than ahead of it. Early Modernists like Wilde and Forster really suffered for their gay sensibilities. Wilde went to gaol, yet neither man received more than a passing reference from the panel. By contrast, Bloomsbury was able to surf the wave of revulsion at the culture of toxic masculinity that had caused so much death and disfigurement in the Great War. In the back wash, homosexuality became something of a cult that was ultimately to chisel out deeper public acceptance. The earlier images of a doomed and beautiful youth captured in photographs of the likes of Rupert Brooke and Wilfrid Owen resonated in the extraordinarily popular output of Beaton. Whatever the then Tory Home Secretary might have thought, the pacific Eros of same-sex love seemed far less threatening than the testosterone fuelled carnage of recent memory. Bloomsbury happily mined this sensibility, but it was Forster and Wilde who had more boldly sunk the original shaft.

Of much greater interest would have been more discussion of Bloomsbury's attitude to other differences such as race. The habitual references at Garsington to "frogs" and "niggers" are matters of record as is the anti-Semitism of TS Eliot, and should surely have prompted more of a "re-imagining" than was on display at this Festival session. Shola von Reinhold, erstwhile Monegasque princess and scion of the Grimaldi family who is now non binary and here sported a five o'clock shadow, razor pointed nails and a long bottle blonde wig, was invited to read from "their" novel Lote. This Shola did at great length and speed, yet with greater emotional engagement than did the others from their own works. Lote sounded like a brilliantly imagined tale, constructed around the slenderest of evidence of a young black poetess on the margins of Bloomsbury. Von Reinhold's point was that this did not signify Bloomsbury's inclusivity so much as the reverse, and that white admiration of Black culture was very much confined to its contribution to the jazz age, surely the ne plus ultra of democratic Modernism.

Most tellingly of all and despite the focus on Mrs Dalloway, there was no mention of Virginia Woolf's essential feminism or even her literary legacy. What she would have made of Shola's transformation as well as the modern literary fetish for a conforming "queerness" really would have been worth hearing. As likely as not, she would have said something politely "inappropriate".

Which is what made her worth reading in the first place.

 

WAR GAMES

Who wants to watch safely sanitised scenes about the Siege of Mariupol, the murder of unarmed civilians and the destruction of the Ukraine on the Beeb when you can see the real thing on the big screen? There's no way that the BBC's value free impartiality, phoney dis-interestedness and obsession with audience "vulnerabilities" is going to permit its reporters to show the visceral truth about the bloody nature of warfare even if those staffers wanted to. Which they don't. So welcome to "Top Gun: Maverick", in which a barely aged Tom Cruise takes on the bad guys, albeit in an inclusive, diverse and emotionally aware way. But while the original 1986 "Top Gun" caused the biggest surge in recruitment in  US Navy Aviation history, this is warfare for the Tik Tok generation. It will also appeal to social influencers who like sunglasses, Dior deck pumps and grooming products; mental health gurus; diversity "champions", and those who genuinely think the opposition can be biffed without any of the nasty stuff. 

The plot, such as it is, can be grasped by the meanest intelligence and is essentially a promo for the enduring versatility of Cruise, now on the cusp of his seventh decade. Here's Tom flying at Mach 10,  Tom sailing a boat, Tom clambering out of top storey windows, Tom hitting the winner in beach volleyball and Tom allowing himself some manly tears for the new generation. There is also a weird bit of romance, in which the hero re-convenes with a girlfriend who looks as if she was probably about 9 years old in the original, given the time lag to the sequel. But Tom is a Scientologist too, so all bets on reality must be considered nul and void. 

The visuals do not disappoint. There is a thrilling 007esque prequel sequence in which Cruise ("Maverick") drives a motorbike well beyond the speed limit without a helmet and then naughtily pinches a stealth plane without the proper authority. This he flies from Los Angeles to Ibiza and back in just under three minutes. BA, easyJet and Ryanair should take note, although to be fair, Tom didn't need the services of baggage handlers. Nor did he try to take off from Manchester or Gatwick: in which case he would still be on the tarmac. After that, Maverick's spoil - sport superiors endlessly try to discipline, ground and even cashier him. But they can't of course, because he's Tom Cruise. And anyway, he's a fantastic pilot and the US Navy needs him for a Mission Impossible. So he is sent to the flying academy at Top Gun, to lick into shape a team of aviators who are not quite as good as he is.

The rookie heroes are a cross section of the US demographic after applying the most zealous of affirmative action programs. There is even an Eskimo or some other Native American. All have perfect teeth (indeed the film is an advert for the prowess of the US military's Dental Corps) and a lot of attitude. They all sport silly names like Iceman, Pac-Man, Wigwam and Cornish Mivvy, although there is also one called Bob. Naturally, the gals are as cocky as the lads and everyone is utterly charmless.

After these necessary preliminaries, things rather sag. Cruise meets his old flame who is now running a pub, and there is some endless faff with him trying to settle his bar bill. The pilots strike poses, do a lot of pouting, gurning and eye rolling, and everyone tries to squint or stare in a way that is meant to be significant. There is also an extremely boring digression into the relationship between Maverick/ Cruise and one of his charges who is plainly "vulnerable" (so there's another box ticked). Apparently, Maverick has hurt the feelings of this lad (whose codename is Goose or Flounder or something) and he has to sort it all out with some eminence who looks remarkably like a wizened Val Kilmer from the 1986 original, but with a bouffant hairdo. In fact, he is yet another admiral with immaculate dentures, albeit also with an illness that has made him somewhat mute. Happily, Kilmer looks relieved to have only a limited repertoire of words in the film, as a lot of the dialogue elsewhere is absolutely risible. I mean, does anyone really say "Stop looking at me in that way" to someone with their back to them? Meanwhile, the kill-joy admiral in charge of the caper keeps trying to carpet Maverick. At this point, your bum may very definitely be starting to shift in its cinema seat.

The Mission Impossible turns out to be an attack on an underground nuclear plant at the bottom of a volcano crater. Who runs this facility or why they would place it in such a ridiculous spot is not, alas, explained. In the 1986 film, the bad guys were disobliging Libyans who could be shot to pieces without embarrassment. Today of course, you can't be too careful about naming the enemy lest you hurt their feelings or offend some other liberal canon. The identity of the foe is however, inadvertently revealed in one fraction of a tiny scene where you can briefly spot a rising sun motif on one of the "enemy" jets. Crikey - it's the Japanese ! It's so sporting  to allow themselves to be blown to smithereens by Tom & Co. And on the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Midway too, an action they would probably rather forget.

But that's enough flippancy. Because the "enemy" (or Japanese), we are sternly warned, are also in possession of "Fifth Gen Fighters" which can apparently outgun the relative antiques operated by the Americans. This extraordinary admission of US inferiority is perhaps the most arresting bit of the film, even more so than the reticence about naming the opposition. It's patently clear the mission could be a major bummer for the good guys.

Amazingly, after a rigorous training program consisting of bar pool, 200 press ups, a homo-erotic game of beach volleyball, astonishing aerobatics and a lot of emotional incontinence, the kids are ready. Tom selects his final crew and manages to achieve a near perfect balance of gender, ethnicity, body image and mental health. Even Bob gets to go. Mount Fuji is attacked at 30,000 mph, Flounder recovers his mojo, the bombs hit a fitted wardrobe in the snow, the "Fifth Gen Fighters" are destroyed and the papier mache enemy missiles are (mostly) vaporised. Alas in the noisy melee, Maverick and Flounder are shot down in balls of fire. But with minimal disarrangement of their ensemble, they manage to trek through the tundra to find the only enemy plane left standing after a massive Cruise Missile attack on the airfield (Yes, even the ordnance is named after Tom). Following a quick bit of scoffing at the antique controls, they fly it away and manage to execute a perfect belly flop landing into a child's bouncy castle erected on the deck of a US carrier. Cue 10 minutes of man hugging, tears and high fives. Even the spoil - sport admiral gives a rueful chuckle and permits us to see a final glint of his perfect gnashers.

Harmless, exciting, silly fun? Certainly. But the film-makers also ask us to buy into the serious po-faced emotional stuff, and you can't have it both ways. This is Saving Private Ryan with all the killing taken out, and that gives a pretty big clue about the culture of our times. Because the truth is that the occupants of 10 Downing Street, the Bundeskanzleramt, the Elysee Palace and the White House really do seem to believe that if only they could find a Tom Cruise, we wouldn't have to worry about nasty people like Vladimir Putin, or mobilise people in their own self-defence. And while they might have some members of their respective Special Forces who really are dumb enough to think they could pull off a bloodless stunt like Maverick's, they have very little else. That is the extent of the West's military preparedness in all its infantilism and decadence. All Tom Cruise has done is to package this reality to comfort us in our imbecility.

Cue credits.

OXBRIDGE : THE BEST WE CAN DO?

Bitching about the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and the dominant positions held by their alumni in the nation's cultural, commercial and governmental institutions has a long historical pedigree. In the 17th century Oliver Cromwell tried in vain to found a rival institution at Durham to bring a bit more pluralism to the existing arrangements. He was largely defeated by a fierce backlash from the incumbents themselves and paradoxically by opposition from some of the very people who might have benefited from greater educational diversity to the long established English and Scottish universities. The Quaker George Fox had earlier revealed ""the Lord opened unto me "that being bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not enough to fit and qualify men to be ministers of Christ" ". Yet the Quaker still denounced the Protector's modest plan on the grounds that it would cement the established religious orthodoxies to which he objected by increasing the numbers receiving a Puritan form of higher education. Poor old Cromwell; he was a simple soldier and his proposals lay fallow. Durham didn't get its royal charter until 1837, somewhat proving the enduring power of entrenched elites.  

Scroll forward to 2022, and there is an updated version of this dissenting tradition in Simon Kuper's Chums - How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK. The journalist is better known for his gently philosophical and occasionally whimsical contributions to the FT Weekend Magazine, but here he is in polemical mode, albeit politely expressed. Kuper makes two cases: one banal (and inaccurate) and the other preposterous. The first is the overweening influence Oxford and its graduates have among Britain's elites. He's not sure if this is a good thing. But this is not news at all, and his relative neglect of Cambridge seems odd, although some jubilant Oxford types will enjoy scoffing that the last Prime Minister educated at Cambridge was Stanley Baldwin. His second theory is that a small clique of  undergraduates, which included the likes of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Daniel Hannan (two of whom were Kuper's Oxford contemporaries in the late 'eighties), came together to plot and execute Britain's departure from the EU while grabbing Number 10 in the process. It is hard to know what Kuper resents the most - the way their glib rhetorical proficiency, so usefully sharpened at the Oxford Union, disguised their intellectual shallowness and amateurism or that they managed to pull it off.

Either way, the idea that Brexit was a sort of conspiracy seems to deny the voting public any agency while conveniently ignoring the fact that the  resultant putsch (if that is what it was) received endorsement in the referendum in 2016 and with votes from across the political spectrum. Nor does it give any credit to the discontents to which the EU and its antecedents gave rise long before Boris's little gang turned up to exploit them. So while Kuper has the good grace to admit that he himself is very much a beneficiary of the narrowly based elitism he affects to criticise, it seems pretty clear that his beef against Johnson & Co. was not that they were successful Oxford graduates, but rather the wrong type of successful Oxford graduates.

Chums looks set to join the lengthening canon of regret and bitter frustration penned by the losing side of the EU referendum debate. The book is an entertaining snapshot of Oxford University in the late nineteen eighties and is well supported by Kuper's insider knowledge. There are also some good vignettes, not least of Simon Stevens, who is also exposed as another congenital bluffer and who went on to do arguably far more damage than Boris and Co. ever did with his disastrous leadership of England's NHS before and during the Covid pandemic. Yet Kuper's case is further let down by the occasional flash of chippiness (he is swiftly damning of David Cameron's alleged lack of affinity with anyone not from Eton or his "class") and he falls way short of offering any solutions to the problems he detects. At least Johnson can be dealt with at the ballot box. As for the egregious impact of Oxford in the national life, Kuper merely suggests that the university should  concentrate solely on research and post graduate teaching. It's either that or we'd better get used to its continuing disproportionate influence. Neither seems to be the sort of suggestion that you would expect from a brain trained at the very same university. 

And that surely is the real problem, which is we seem to be in thrall to the idea that Oxbridge produces the cleverest people in the UK. Certainly the more prestigious newspapers and journals seem to think so because their feature writers never tire of reminding us if they were at one or other of the universities. It's almost as if they are trying to reassure us about their superiority when all they are really telling us is that their employer chose them because they went to Oxbridge. 

If Oxbridge does produce the cleverest people, and their alumni do occupy the highest perches of our national institutions, it should be asked why our cultural establishment is paralysed by group think (which paradoxically is claimed to be "progressive"). Or why the Oxford smarts of the now ennobled Lord Stevens saw the trajectory of "Our NHS" go from top left to bottom right on the performance chart during his seven year watch. Or why our governance is in such a mess. Indeed, at the Home Office a sort of fronde seems to be in progress, with a succession of Oxbridge educated senior mandarins (Trinity Hall, Cantab and Merton, Oxon since you ask) trying to thwart a small woman of Asian descent (Keele) who has been elected.

In the academic year 2020/21 just short of 660,000 undergraduates enrolled at UK universities to take their first degree. Of that cohort, nearly 7,000 got places at Oxbridge - a mere 1% of the total. Most of these latter places were secured by offers conditional on achieving at least 3 A level passes at an A grade, or their equivalent. But for the year in question, well over two fifths of the cohort achieved a mixture of straight A's and A*'s. So how do you sort the wheat from the (high grade) chaff as Oxbridge claims to do in its search for students with "potential"? The truth is that entry is determined by a lottery in which the rigour of the written component has been diluted; by the (modestly) increased use of social profiling, and lastly by the "crucial" interview. Insiders say that the successful candidate is ultimately identified by whether or not the interviewer likes them rather than by their brilliance in being able to handle the mythically difficult Oxbridge interview questions. Of course Oxbridge likes to claim that the whole process is entirely objective and dis-interested, but the colleges didn't get to be as rich as so many of them are by recruiting only those with "potential". Well no system is perfect, and life isn't fair. But arguably too many people defend the status quo by pretending that they are.

One person trying to challenge all this is Professor Stephen Toope (Harvard), a mild mannered Canadian who is just about to step down as Vice Chancellor of Cambridge. In 2020 he got into a frightful mess by trying to introduce a code of conduct enjoining visitors to the university and its members to be "respectful" of any opinion they encounter. The proposal was self-evidently a defence of free speech; but the uproar was tremendous with critics saying that it was precisely the opposite and a surrender to "wokery". As a compromise, the word "tolerance" was substituted for "respect", feathers were smoothed and academic presumptions were preserved. But Toope would surely be right to claim the last laugh because what constitutes a view or opinion "worthy of respect" has been established in law. Opinions need not be either right or wrong, only that they contain a minimal level of cogency, seriousness and coherence. What a pity the indignant and laser sharp intellects in the common rooms hadn't thought of that one.

Toope seemed to be on firmer ground with his recent warning that those who receive a private education or go to a grammar school will get fewer places in the future. For example, Cambridge will show greater partiality for state educated students who qualified for free school meals. As Oxbridge currently recruits 27% of its student body from a privately educated cohort that represents just under 12% of school leavers going on to university, Toope's statement seems a nudge in the direction of  fairness. But he has again attracted a lot of ire much of it completely illogical, and containing a high degree of subjective bias. The gist of the whinging by folk like Emma Duncan in the Times is that state school children with worse grades (because they spend too much time on their play-stations) will be favoured over hard working private school pupils (whose parents have scrimped and saved to get them there) with better ones. Some  have claimed that the human rights of these advantaged children are thereby being breached, but there is no law which says that the budding intellect has a right to be recognised. Maybe these people should relax: no one is pushing for quotas, else less than 1% of the places would be reserved for Jewish people, because that's their proportion of the UK population. And how stupid would that be? But such is the Oxbridge hex, aspiring parents will go through all sorts of expensive contortions and specious reasoning to give their offspring a shot which already has only the tiniest chance of success. 

Happily, market forces are gradually achieving some of Toope's objectives for him. Those well heeled parents with ambitions for their children are increasingly looking at the US Ivy league for their tertiary education. To them the drive for greater diversity at Oxbridge looks too much like social engineering designed to further reduce the chances of their offspring joining the elites. The huge expansion of the university system in Britain has also increased competition for brighter students, and demand for high quality teaching staff to attract them. Many Oxbridge academics are finding better career opportunities away from their alma maters in other UK institutions and overseas. They have greater academic freedom and there is less pressure to conform to an Oxbridge model with its increasingly faint and anachronistic Brideshead aesthetic.

Back in the 1650's the master of Gonville & Caius was the religious dissenter William Dell, who was surely on the nail for his times when he opined "a poor plain countryman by the spirit which he hath received is better able to judge of truth and error touching the things of God than the greatest philosopher". Toope has just dusted Dell off and given his utterance a spring-clean. And if he helps to break the absurd modern fetish about Oxbridge, he will be doing us all a favour. 

NATIONAL TREASURE - SIR JIMMY SAVILE & THE NHS

How does a shy 11 year old girl even begin to recover from having the fingers of a national celebrity shoved firmly into her vagina while the other members of her church's congregation continue to worship, oblivious to the assault upon her, only a few metres away?  And how are you supposed to remove the hands of the same celebrity from your private parts as you are lying injured and immobilised on a hospital trolley? These were not the least of the many questions raised by the utterly disturbing but compelling documentary "Jimmy Savile - A British Horror Story" aired over three hours last week by Netflix. 

Savile was knighted in 1990 for his prodigious and widely admired philanthropy, especially but not exclusively on behalf of Stoke Mandeville, the NHS hospital for severe spinal injuries. He was also, as the program showed, a monster hiding in plain sight, and it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that the length of time in which swathes of the establishment chose to remain blind to his criminal enormities amounted to complicity. With a rat-like face reminiscent of the child-catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and with that extraordinary wispy blond barnet that would not have looked out of place on a page boy at the court of  King John, Savile was no common-or-garden sociopath. The thesis of the programme was that Savile ( a member of Mensa ) was extraordinarily skilful in disguising his wickedness, not least because he preyed on those who lacked a powerful voice and whom he sensed would not be believed had they otherwise come forward. His intuition seemed to be correct and had he been a spy passing nuclear secrets to the Russians, it is doubtful that he would ever have been found out. But behind all the blokeish bonhomie, the crowd pleasing capers of Jim'll Fix It, the stunts for charity and the weird and eccentric appearances on TOTP, Savile was a cold blooded, voracious and predatory paedophile. One of the most appalling features of the various interview clips with the increasingly shrivelled pederast was how self-controlled, coldly impersonal and so utterly lacking in genuine empathy he appeared to be. Even more extraordinary were the number of times that Savile himself hinted at what he was up to ("My case comes up next Thursday"), yet this was all just treated as part of his schtick. As his fame and confidence grew, Savile treated ordinary folk and their daughters as mere instruments to feed his celebrity and depraved sexual appetites.

But it was also made abundantly clear that many of his contemporaries in the media, the police and the official class knew a thing or three before he died in 2011. Some of the testimony (Selina Scott & Ian Hislop) seemed both self serving and self-deceiving but others (Lynn Barber & Andrew Neil) were publicly prepared to be bolder in trying to get at the truth. The clip of Savile questioned by Neil was edge-of-the-seat stuff. But the spectre of Sir George Carman QC, barrister of choice to the rottenest apples in the UK establishment, was always hovering in the background, a writ for defamation or libel in his hand. Nonetheless, the extraordinary shot of Savile aggressively molesting a shocked looking teen on TOTP in front of a nationwide audience should have been enough of itself for sceptics to stand their ground. 

More extraordinary still was the benediction that Savile received from Number 10 Downing Street and the Royal family. The earnest letters of the Prince of Wales seeking his guidance were toe-curlingly embarrassing in their plucking intensity while Margaret Thatcher tried not once but four times to get the ghastly deviant a knighthood, finally succeeding with her resignation Honours List in 1990.  Yet here was Sir Robin Butler, Cabinet Secretary to three Prime Ministers silkily murmuring that not everyone had been fooled at the time. But when the innuendo about Savile became deafening "it was decided", Sir Robin regretfully sighed, not to proceed against him. By that time, Savile was just too firmly embedded in the establishment for it to be bothered with the revelations of silly little working class girls.

Aiming at a US audience, Netflix was perhaps a little too discriminating in its targets for censure. Naturally, the Royal connection provided the cat-nip and there was even footage of a none-too-pleased looking pontiff, grabbed by Savile in a bear hug while on a Papal visit to the UK in the early 'eighties. Savile's warped understanding of his nominal Roman Catholic faith was given plenty of theatrical attention, although it seemed a bit of a stretch to imply that his global co-religionists were somehow all accomplices. There was also lots of footage of other "celebs" (including Scott) fawning on Savile and a thoroughly creepy section of him sharing complicit smiles with that other living nightmare of the vulnerable child, Gary Glitter. However, different institutions like Savile's long - term employer the BBC seemed to get away scot-free. Perhaps the average US subscriber would have been just too bored by exposure of the Beeb's lengthy indulgence of the weaselly pervert or of its disgraceful decision to suppress the bombshell revelations unearthed by the journalist Meirion Jones and its own Newsnight team in 2011.

So what on earth has all this got to do with the NHS, other than the connection between Savile and Stoke Mandeville Hospital ? The way Netflix told it, Savile was undoubtedly a force for good when it came to passing around the bucket to raise cash for the decrepit facilities (he initially got involved when the roof on one of the units fell in on the patients below). But it was rather more coy about apportioning blame as to how Savile was able to use his charity work and compliant medical connections to gain access to patients at both Stoke Mandeville and other hospitals including Leeds Royal Infirmary, there to take advantage of their incapacity for his sexual gratification. Nonetheless, the limited testimony that was provided still beggared belief. As was the determination to turn an un-seeing eye.

Not even the NHS could remain indefinitely blind to the facts of a celebrity systematically molesting and raping  patients on its own premises, and more than a decade after the police had begun their own leisurely investigations, the government appointed Kate Lampard CBE to produce a report in 2015. As an exercise in the marking of one's own homework, "Lessons Learnt" took some beating. Lampard was an NHS insider to her fingertips and her report was full of those dead phrases about "assurance", "quality oversight", "board engagement" and "pathways for improvement" in which accountability is fully dissolved and responsibility widely dispersed. The only people who were fingered were, apparently, the patients. Nobody was disciplined, although three doctors were later convicted in separate incidents for similar acts of criminal depravity. 

Scroll forward to 2022 and the Ockenden Report into the Shrewsbury & Telford NHS Trust shows that Lampards's narrowly bureaucratic recommendations for improvement in both the culture and operation of the NHS in 2015 remained just that. A former midwife, Donna Ockenden was asked to look into the abnormally high incidence of infant death and life-changing injury to both mothers and children in the care of the Trust between 2000 and 2019. Seeking to understand why over 200 babies and 9 mothers had needlessly died, Ockenden unearthed a culture riddled with management incompetence, professional in-fighting (between midwives and obstetricians), buck passing, warped "targets" for caesarean sections and other clinical outcomes, and official lies. Ockenden made 15 recommendations which can be snappily condensed into one ("more resources"), although she later retracted her observation that the misconduct identified at the S&T Trust is almost certainly more widespread. Yet not the least amazing feature of her report was that similar failings were identified at the Morecombe Bay Trust in 2015, at about the same time as Kate Lampard was sucking her pencil in institutional judgement of Jimmy Savile. So many reports, so much money spent, so little progress.

Naturally, the government has said that people will be "held to account", a promise that may be treated with a raspberry. Several of the "leaders" of the S&T Trust over the relevant period have gone on to bigger or better things within the NHS or have leveraged their former public sector connections for a private-sector gain. One has been convicted for fraud. But no matter: the Care Quality Commission gave the Trust a "good" rating in 2018.

When do sins of omission become sins of commission? And at what point does a professional become useless to a degree that brushes criminality? Jimmy Savile's career shared many of the features now increasingly associated with the NHS: the credulous admiration of the public, the propensity to lie, the comfort of powerful friends-in-the-know, professional conceit, the lack of accountability and wilful criminal mis-conduct. But there has (yet) been no imputation that Savile actually killed people. 

It seems hard to believe now, but as Ockenden was furrowing her brows, the government saw fit to award the NHS the George Cross. How much must Her Majesty be looking forward to receiving the "leadership" representatives of the "heroic" NHS to stand beside holders such as Chris Finnegan GC and Johnson Beharry VC in her jubilee year. But as Andrew Neil observed, the public "made" Jimmy Savile just as much as the public has made "Our NHS".

So at least that's clear: it's all our fault.

CHICKEN KIEV

Putin may be a gangster, but he is not a discourteous one. He waited until after breakfast before ordering his troops into the Ukraine, thus giving the UK media time to catch up with the further confirmation HM is performing "light duties" because she has Covid; the news university undergraduates will definitely require a pass in GCSE Maths and English before taking up their studies; the revelation that Storm Algernon- Percy overturned two ice cream vans in Doncaster and that Emily Maitlis, John Sopel, Eddi Mair and Andrew Marr are leading a brain drain from the BBC.

Notwithstanding the news of these defections, three hours later it was reassuring to see business as usual at "our" national broadcaster. There was Clive Myrie and team stolidly attempting to keep us all abreast of the new war on the fringes of eastern Europe in the tedious longueurs of the twenty-four hour news cycle. Clive was perched atop some high rise in central "Keeeeve" while Steve Rosenberg fronted from Moscow (or should that be "Moskva"?). Given the hysteria in the financial markets and the footage of things going bang in ploughed fields and on airport runways, Clive seemed to be taking it all pretty calmly. Indeed, not even the insistence of his director that he put on body armour lest he be scraped by some dis-obliging fragment of Russian ordnance knocked his somnolent composure. Hand in pocket and stifling a yawn, he "interviewed" the Beeb's Lyse Doucet. Like her colleague Orla Guerin, the BBC's chief international correspondent has been schooled in the technique of using arresting clichés to disguise the fundamental lack of useful information about the "hot spots" from which she reports, usually long after the bombs have dropped. In the world according to the Beeb, everything always seems to happen "by dawn's early light". Victims are always "hoping against hope", or have "wearily walked too many miles to count" but no-one interviewed ever seems to use expletives, 'though they may have been shot, blown up, maimed or ethnically cleansed. 

Lyse's piteous analysis included a riff on "Keeeeve's" air-raid warning system, "a siren that has entered the lives of everyone in the Ukraine" and opined that things have not been this serious since WWII. Various hardy souls were interviewed going about their daily business, but it did not really look or feel like the morning of Barbarossa. Clive nodded sagely before languidly handing back to Thomas in London to tell us about today's weather. Standing in front of an enormous map of a frontal system in Ukraine's national colours of blue and yellow, the Beeb's weather pixie looked appropriately grave and warned us of a hot air pressure system blowing in from the west, as apt a metaphor as any for the official reaction to Putin's act of aggression.

For has not the Russian leader played a complete blinder, irrespective of the merits of his murderous case? The collapse of NATO's campaign in Afghanistan and steady and lengthy erosion of western Europe's military capability and preparedness told him all he needed to know about the likely force of the response to his invasion. Nor has the threat of economic sanctions been a deterrent: Putin has built up an impressive war chest of foreign exchange reserves; the Russian national accounts are in better shape than almost anyone else in the G7, and he has secured his eastern flank by putting his arm around the shoulder of China. Most important of all, Russia has found itself in the fortuitous position of being the marginal supplier of Europe's energy needs, in which scenario the UK (which is at the end of a very long distribution system), is looking particularly vulnerable to a market shock. The cost of Europe's ill-considered zero carbon strategy and of its complacency about energy security is now rising very rapidly.

In contrast to Putin's insolent display of confidence, the response from most of the capitals of western Europe has been both embarrassing and slow footed, none more so than in London. This is a crisis that has been building for years not weeks, and naturally it is all a bit too difficult for much of the British media to get its head around. Cartoon villains like Roman Abramovich have come in for censure - why can't Boris confiscate Chelsea FC and a few penthouses in Knightsbridge or "cancel" the playing of the Champion's League in St Petersburg? Let's "stop" the Russian money that has hoovered up so many of "our" high end assets. It is an almost risible strategy, yet the government has begun to execute. Even the "quality" press has got itself into a total muddle, with David Aaronovitch of the Times sententiously dismissing all those who have tried to warn about the impending debacle as if they were somehow Putin's collaborators.

Putin's "useful idiots" are, by contrast, those retired armchair warriors who are now demanding that NATO's "ramparts be defended". But the horse has long since bolted. The UK's defence secretary might chortle on camera about the Scots Guards giving "Tsar Nicholas I a bloody nose in the Crimea", but he has overseen plans to run down the army's strength to below 80,000 personnel, its lowest level of manning since the 17th century. Germany is in an even worse place. Conducting exercises in 2020 with wooden rifles, the chief of the German General Staff has taken to social media to expose the utter lack of preparedness of the Bundeswehr. Yet Ursula von der Leyen at the EU says that the organisation is standing "shoulder to shoulder" with the Ukraine. Who are these people trying to kid?

The level of stupidity, hypocrisy and ignorance amongst our political leaders and government officials is alarming. In modern history, Russia has been on the receiving end of four major invasions from the west: an amateurish assault in the Crimea in the 1850's; the attack of the Central Powers in 1914; the intervention by the allies on the side of the "White Russians" following the 1917 Revolution, and the absolutely murderous attack by the Germans in 1941. Armed with that history, one might have thought western statesmen would appreciate the extreme sensitivity of the Russians about their security. Indeed, did not George Bush (Snr) promise Gorbachev that there would be no expansion of NATO's frontier following the collapse of the Warsaw Pact? But who now cares (or even knows) about that? Au contraire, our leaders thought it would be a brilliant idea to co-opt the Ukraine as a NATO member, thus taking the western alliance up to almost the most eastward line of the German advance in 1942. Putin has only made good on a reaction that he has threatened for a very long time, and the declaration by the Ukrainian president (a former stand- up comedian) that his country would make alliances with whomsoever it damned-well pleased was the final straw. 

Watching an increasingly doddery President Biden stumble over his "outrage" at the invasion made one almost yearn for the diplomatic skills of Donald Trump. At least that oddly coiffured narcissist realised the limits of American power and tried to "cut a deal" where he knew the USA was at a disadvantage. Yet the official liberal establishments of the west remain wedded to "standards" that they cannot credibly uphold at home while trying to impose them on everyone else. So while the US was defunding the police and "taking the knee", Germany was mobilising papier mache helmets and broomsticks, and the UK was trying to decide if its male soldiers could have a cervix, Putin was getting busy. 

It's obvious Russia's leader can't take our own leaders seriously: maybe he has a point.

 

A DOCTOR'S NOTE

It has been a bad month for the British State. The Duke of York's colourful private life and prat like behaviour finally caught up with him with the decision of a US court to press ahead with a civil (but not yet a criminal) indictment for his alleged sexual assault of an under-age woman of whom he claims no recollection. With an eye to the preservation of the dynasty rather than any individual member of it, Her Majesty was finally persuaded to act with ruthlessness and to defenestrate her boorish "favourite son". An easy scalp, the press sententiously declared he had "been found guilty in the court of public opinion". Nonetheless, the royal family's connivance with the media's almost gleeful abandonment of the principle of presumed innocence is one that it might later come to regret. It is not a great start to the Diamond Jubilee year.

A concurrent kerfuffle came in the shape of "Party-Gate", which has generated a more justifiable amount of confected outrage. As with the Duke of York, the media has gone all- in on this story and the "impartial" BBC news team seems to have taken an even more overtly political stance in its own right. But the government's reaction to a mess of its own creation has been quite pathetically inept, and the Prime Minister's attempts at exculpation have demeaned his office as well as the intelligence of nearly everyone else. In a craven attempt to swerve accountability, a judgement on the whole fiasco has been outsourced to a civil servant. Yet by deferring to Sue Gray of the Cabinet Office, Johnson is making the same high risk wager as did Nichola Sturgeon when she passed the decision as to whether or not she broke the ministerial code to James Hamilton. In each case, the bet is that no civil servant or establishment law officer is going to bring down a sitting Prime or First Minister. But Sturgeon is a far more skilful and articulate dissembler than is Johnson, who has been publicly disowned by even his own party north of the border.

Nonetheless, the hypocrisy and sanctimony of those now crying "foul" leaves as nasty a taste. Her Majesty's Opposition has put on its crocodile suit and tearfully exploited all those separated from loved ones by the over-the-top regulations whilst BoJo and his office minions were getting wasted in the Downing Street garden. Yet if memory serves, was it not Starmer and all the other ayatollahs in his party who were demanding even stricter and more demented lock-down measures at the time? And was there no police officer (of which there are quite a few swaggering around Downing Street, ludicrously dressed as if for an imminent assault), with the gumption to warn Number 10 of the illegality of its jolly? After all, the rozzers were being pretty punctilious in fining lockdown "breakers" everywhere else. And what did those others in Downing Street with positions of power and responsibility think they were doing? It has been seemingly forgotten that the Cabinet Secretary recused himself from an earlier enquiry on the grounds that he too had attended a lockdown busting knees-up.

Another nadir of sorts was also reached in the unlikely setting of King's College Hospital in London, where the Health Secretary Sajid Javid was faced down by a critical care consultant. Dr Steve James  told the minister (in no uncertain terms) that he was not going to get vaccinated against Covid, and deplored the policy of compulsory vaccination for healthcare workers, on pain of dismissal. Absurdly off guard, Javid bobbed his head in a placatory sort of way. Evidently, the exaggerated politeness with which well-mannered politicians used to treat bishops and clergymen, even when they were talking utter cobblers, has now been quietly transferred to quite junior medical professionals. Yet the minister's deferral to the articulate specialist seemed more like an act of cowardice than a display of social grace. It was either that, or Javid was simply not on top of his brief. For any other minister with an ounce of salt would have given Dr James both barrels, and it was noticeable that not one of the nurses or other medicos at the scene sprang forward to endorse the good doctor's opinion. Indeed, KCH later put out a weaselly worded statement, distancing itself from their employee's assertions. Yet James has now been hailed for his "plain speaking", is an instant You-Tube "sensation" and has been given further airtime to promote his disobedience and to claim that his "bodily autonomy" has been threatened.

In the first place, was Dr James right to speak out so publicly in a professional rather than private capacity? He is after all employed (if indirectly) by the state and has a role for which public confidence is essential. Back in the late 'eighties and only three months away from leaving the British Army, I buttonholed the Armed Forces Minister who had come to lunch in the Officers' Mess. With others sycophantically murmuring around this senior member of the government, and deciding there was nothing to lose, I firmly criticised the Poll Tax (hardly a military matter), which was within a year of being introduced in England & Wales and which had already made a very inauspicious start in Scotland. The Tory politician listened politely and did not even try to refute my argument that the tax was both highly regressive and at variance with the established principles of national taxation. Happily for him, there were no cameras present, but he was clearly discomfited enough "to have a word" with his host later. My embarrassed boss was absolutely furious and made it clear that my outspokenness would have done great damage to my career prospects had I been staying on. The reprimand was upsetting, but of course he was absolutely right. It was not that my view was either rudely expressed or necessarily incorrect, but who in his position would want to risk such an instance of a loose cannon going off when the real bullets were flying about?

These are different times and far different organisations, but were even the assertions of the critical care consultant correct? Dr James immediately tried to claim the moral high ground by saying that there was no "scientific" basis for compulsory vaccination, ergo the minister was an idiot. He declared that there was limited difference in infectiousness between the vaccinated and un-vaccinated and that "scores of studies" had show that "broadly speaking" natural immunity was equivalent to the immunity provided by vaccines. He couldn't deny that being unvaccinated "is a huge risk for some" but seemed much more certain of his untested hypothesis that having had an asymptomatic infection himself, he was unlikely to be laid low in the future.

James is not the first person "following the science" in the Covid crisis who has confused risk with uncertainty. Indeed their conflation at the highest level of government  has done a huge amount of avoidable damage at enormous cost. But nor do his other assertions about public policy have a basis in either logic or fact. After all, no minister has yet denied the infectiousness of Covid and the primary purpose of the vaccination program has been to protect the vulnerable from life threatening illness. Further, lockdowns were initiated at the express demand of a healthcare establishment which doubted the natural immunity, by which James sets such store, could be achieved before the NHS was overwhelmed. None of this seems to have cut much ice with the consultant, however. Yet if Dr James is eventually laid low by the virus, who is going to fill in for him in a service that we are repeatedly told is at "breaking point" by the very practitioners whom James claims to represent? Certainly, many fair-minded people would think it highly irksome that folk should continue to suffer restrictions of life and liberty so that a minority may maintain their "bodily autonomy" by refusing the vaccine. That they should have to do so to protect the scruples of a minority of critical health care professionals like James would strike most as outrageous. The consultant himself admitted that the vast majority of those people with Covid clogging up scarce ICU resources had not been jabbed, yet seemed to think that the issue was not that they were unvaccinated but rather that they were fat. In Dr James's universe, physical shapeliness and the currently fashionable neologism of "bodily autonomy" would seem to trump all other medical indications. 

When are people, not least the grown-ups, going to wake up? The idea, assiduously promoted by the BBC, that it is the Prime Minister who is responsible for all our discontents is as fatuous as it is misleading. Johnson is certainly an amoral narcissist, and although highly intelligent, he seems far too idle to master his complex brief. Yet other Prime Ministers have also shown many of these defects. The difference is that those like Lloyd George and Wilson surrounded themselves with men and women of the highest intellectual calibre who, critically, realised that no government (not even a socialist one) could aspire to do everything. They were also served by senior officials of equally high ability and even greater probity. Can anyone with any knowledge of the heart of UK government truly say that now? 

The government and practice of governance in the UK is today faced by the equivalent of the seventeenth century Fronde in France. A rebellion by the noble and judicial elites against the authority of the young Louis XIV at a time when the nation was also locked in battle with Spain, the Fronde was an existential struggle which the royal government simply had to win if the early modern French state was to survive. Nicola Sturgeon may unfairly grab all the headlines in the debate about the durability of the UK, but the real threat comes from a public sector that is not only far too large to manage, but which is now totally out-of-control. Hearing it from the teaching unions, the BMA, the NHS Confederation, UNISON, the police, UK Border Force, the MOJ and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the provision of paid for public service in the UK is now entirely at the discretion of the state employee. If the likes of Doctor James become the approved yardstick for the behaviour of public servants, we are in deep trouble. 

HISTORY REPEATS

We live in a world where the market value of a US smartphone and software provider, Apple Inc., is greater than that of the GDP of the UK. Artificial Intelligence and quantum computing promises a new paradigm in the nature of human endeavour; medical science is delivering healthcare solutions in a fraction of the time it took to establish the efficacy of earlier versions of vaccines, anti-biotics and diagnostic tests; the technologies behind the "green revolution" have already massively reduced the costs associated with the sources of renewable energy such as wind and solar, and of power storage; more people than ever before are going into tertiary education; the world produces more food than it can possibly consume; poverty is increasingly discussed as a relative phenomenon rather than an absolute one; humans have sent probes to Mars and are steadily unravelling the mysteries of the Universe. So why does Britain today feel as if it is stuck in the 1640's, a time marked by constitutional dispute, religious upheaval, profound societal change, and later by civil strife?

Some of the similarities seem obvious. The "union" of Great Britain achieved by James VI of Scotland, the first of that name in England, is challenged today as it was in the 17th century. The Scottish Nationalist Party has appropriated the mantle of the early modern Kirk which defied the authority of a centralising Stuart monarchy and court, as it sought to defend John Knox's revolution against "idolatrous sovereignties". The sulphurous politics of early Stuart church government has however been replaced by the antagonistic promotion of the SNP's divisive "progressive" agenda, a mish mash of secular left wing pieties wrapped in the folds of the saltire. After a brief interlude of fragile peace, the sectarian politics of Ireland are again casting a baleful shadow. Cultural bafflement has crept back into the relations between the two Atlantic states, one a republic of citizens, the other a realm of subjects. In the other direction, Great Britain is cut off from the Continent, its rejection of the supranational authority of the EU an echo of its earlier repudiation of the Catholic model of governance that had dominated Western Christendom for centuries. It is a fragmenting nation, seemingly contra mundum.

The analogies between today's secular neuroses and the religious disputes of the first half of the 17th century are even more striking. Sir Isaac Newton was born on the first Christmas Day of the English civil wars and the scientific revolution was still very much in its early infancy. Political arguments were, more often than not, religious in nature and frequently settled by reference to Scripture. At their heart lay a fundamental question - how was the state to command the loyalty of its subjects if its purposes seemed contrary to the will of God and to the consciences of men who believed that, by God's grace, they were pre-destined to enter the Kingdom of Heaven? Those who took up arms against Charles I were as much motivated by their fear of the monarch taking Britain in a "Popish" direction as they were by their desire to gain greater weight in the governance of the nation as men of property. They wanted a state of the Godly, not a democracy.

It was a time when men's worth was measured by their Protestant piety. Puritans were particularly conscious of their status as the "Elect" and some such as Fifth Monarchists, Quakers and Unitarians thought of themselves as more Godly still. Micro minorities came to define the religious and political zeitgeist, all claiming  their own version of God's revelation trumped everyone else's. Sound familiar? Today's societal discourse, though framed in secular terms, is also conducted in an atmosphere of intolerance and virtue signalling. Educated elites and those "citizens of nowhere" who dominate high culture and the media seem similarly attached nowadays to certainties which are labelled as "progressive". These form the canon of a new secular "Elect" which  appears determined to impose it upon everyone else. Heterodoxy is not permitted by the new Puritans. 

As in the early 17th century, the shrillest noises are heard in the universities and, as then, the nature of the debate seems largely untouched by the reason of enlightenment. Modern "Cancel Culture" has a lengthy pedigree and the rage and intolerance of the so-called Twitter-sphere has an analogy in the pamphleteering of earlier times, a form of social networking from which our literate ancestors drew much of their understanding of what was going on in the world. But at least then there was search for truth - faith was placed in the revelation to be found in Scripture, but it was also the era of Descartes and Spinoza. Now the concept of truth itself is under attack, as Post Modernist imbecilities leak from the social sciences into the humanities and literature. Not even the scientific method is safe: on the contrary, it is traduced as a tool of the oppressive patriarchal hierarchy. Who can forget the straight-faced denunciation of Einstein's work as "sexed equations"?

It is a time of great societal change. The advances of technology, the evolution of financial techniques and the steady replacement of human labour by machines are creating huge uncertainty for many as well as opportunity for some. These trends have also enriched an economic elite, the wealth of which has been largely untouched by the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 or the more recent Covid pandemic. An enormous class of graduates and secondary school students whose education has been severely disrupted by government diktat face an uncertain future. The early Stuart state was also  confronted by profound changes and as with today's vast political class, was found severely wanting. It was a time of climatic change (it got a lot colder), the displacement of men by the changing patterns of land ownership and usage, and the growth of literacy. Vagrancy was widespread. Unregulated capitalism was on the march, and the weakest were left unprotected by the gradual disappearance of the old feudal ties of obligation. The Leveller movement was as much about the failure of the state to provide protection and justice for citizens as about fundamental democratic rights.

Today, we can gain some comfort from the resolution of disputes by the ballot box rather than by battle. But did not someone also say that those who did not study history were condemned to repeat it?