Author: zenpolitics

Landscape and history, places and people, home and friends and family – the world out there rather than on screen is my focus. I’m interested in where we’ve been, and how it might help us make some sense of where we are now and where we're headed.

Flooding

I went out running a few mornings ago for the first time since I walked the Camino. My left foot remains a little sore, and I’ve been taking precautions, but I have to get out there! Running over Cranham Common, the wind blowing strong but no longer a gale, a rare touch of blue in the grey above, and big views over winter woods and hills on all sides.

My mind all the while has been on my favourite Lake District haunts, many overwhelmed by floods. The A591 torn away at one point, the bridge at Pooley Bridge undermined, and floods in Keswick, and up the Eden valley in Appleby. And now Glenridding.

Helicopter camera shots, TV cameramen, are after the event. Rivers race, streets are flooded. But the deluge itself doesn’t get recorded. Living through the rain, and the apprehension as it doesn’t stop.

And then there are the torrents debouching from the mountains, from the Helvellyn range, from the Scafells, the sheer force of water which tore through Glenridding. TV is after the event.

The fields were flooded as far south as Cheshire when I was there two weeks ago. The rain has nowhere to go. Further north still more so. Down south it’s grey and the wind howls, as it’s doing now, as a new depression wings its way in. But by comparison we’re no more than damp.

The rain follows a more northerly track, and still the depressions pile in.

Three characters in search of a blog

Frank Auerbach – there’s a major retrospective at Tate Britain, Wilfred Thesiger – living among the Marsh Arabs in Iraq in the 1950s, and Rudolf Abel, from Stephen Spielberg’s latest movie, Bridge of Spies.

A painter, an explorer, and a Russian spy.

Starting with Auerbach, and two quotations:

After each session he scrapes off the paint and begins again. A single painting might take months, even years, before something appears that he hadn’t predicted and, he hopes, means the work is finished. (Catherine Lambert, Tate Etc magazine) and The paint contorts to capture it [nature] …not the ‘character’ of a scene or even its atmosphere, but rather it simply ‘being there’… (TJ Clark, from Frank Auerbach , edited by Catherine Lampert)

Just two studios over sixty years, both Camden Town, subject matter all local to his corner of north London, and very few models for his portraits. Auerbach endlessly reworked his patch of land. Inspiration could come in a moment, realisation take many months, or longer.

I came across a book entitled ‘Zen Drawing’ recently but could find little of Zen in it. There’s much more in Auerbach. (Don’t know though if he’d want to own the idea!) Paintings conventionally freeze a moment in time, make the impermanent permanent. It’s as if Auerbach doesn’t want that permanence, and only when he feels he’s achieved that sense of a painting ‘being there’ is he content.

There’s also that sense of ‘being there’ in Wilfred Thesiger’s The Marsh Arabs, which I’ve re-read this week. Remote areas, as far from ‘civilisation ‘ as he could manage, were always his preferred location, and he didn’t travel in a conventional sense – as far as he could he inhabited  a region, shared it with the locals, lived and adopted their lifestyle, and even style of dress. (A cross between the Great White Hunter and Widow Twanky, according to Gavin Young.)

Memories of that first visit to the Marshes have never left me: firelight on a half-turned face, the crying of geese, duck flighting in to feed, a boy’s voice singing somewhere in the dark, canoes moving in procession down a waterway, the setting sun seen crimson through the smoke of burning reed beds, narrow waterways that wound deeper into the Marshes…. Stars reflected in dark water, the croaking of frogs, canoes coming home at evening, peace and continuity, the stillness of a world that never knew an engine. Once again I experienced the longing to share this with life, and to be more than a mere spectator. 

Visiting at least seven months each year over seven years, he saw a millennia-old way of life slipping away at first hand, as oil money literally seeped into southern Iraq. There’s close observation but also the fragility of that evening moment. How much did he sense its imminent collapse? That the young people would leave marshes, maybe yes, but that Saddam Hussein would drain the marshes – surely not.

Thesiger was always on the move, but always within his chosen patch – this time the lower Euphrates and Tigris. Likewise  Auerbach, at a very different, almost infinitely more local level. Thesiger was always open to experience, and so too in his studio was Auerbach, waiting on inspiration and working it up into that marvellous thick impasto which makes some of his paintings as much sculpture as painting.

Also finally, Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, a Cold War thriller built around the 1957 exchange of Soviet spy Rudolf Abel and American U2 pilot, Gary Powers. Tom Hanks is puzzled and patient and wise as the lawyer, Donovan, and Mark Rylance is mesmerising, as low-key and dry as can be, as the Russian spy, Rudolf Abel. Talking to my daughter afterwards, we both wouldn’t have minded if more of the movie had been a Donovan/Abel two-hander. They develop an understanding born of few words, mutual respect, and Abel’s wonderful dry humour.

‘Aren’t you worried,’ Donovan asks his client. ‘Would it help?’ is Abel’s laconic and deadpan reply.

Connections between the three?  There’s something in their attitude, but also they share a decade…

Thesiger, travelling in 1950s; Auerbach, a young painter finding his way in the 1950s; Donovan defending Abel before the Supreme Court in 1957.

A decade where with each year the threat and fear of a nuclear holocaust grew, and scared me as a schoolboy, the open mind of childhood more than a little tinged by fear.

Auerbach just out of art college responded by producing a series of paintings of building sites, his dark palette obscuring detail. Thesiger escaped as only he knew how. The threat might be a local blood feud, the challenge a dangerous wild boar to shoot or circumcisions to perform. (There was nothing ordinary about Thesiger’s life!)

And the movie? Like me Spielberg is a child of the 1950s, born just thirteen days after me in 1946. What he conveys is a surprising optimism. The inviolability of the American political system, as he and Donovan would wish it, wins out over cynicism and fear. Abel, as Donovan discovers, is a man of integrity, and the American legal system has to respond in kind, whatever the CIA might think.

There a sense of triumph at the end of the movie, something I’m not certain many of us shared in the 1950s, faced with the Cold War confrontations that kept hitting the news. Spy swaps were tawdry affairs. And a Russian spy as a ‘hero’? But in his way, with his quiet courage, that’s how we see Mark Rylance’s Abel.

One final point. The Guardian review of Bridge of Spies suggests that those of us brought up on John Le Carre might expect is ‘shabby compromise and exhausted futility’. What we get instead is ‘decency and moral courage’.

Due process triumphs, as it has so conspicuously failed to do at Guantanamo Bay.

A paler shade of green

Are we entering the anthropocene, a new, man-created geological epoch? I don’t like the term: there’s an implicit assumption that we’re in charge. Climate change has a very different message for us.

One Labour MP commented on Hilary Benn’s recent speech in the Syria debate, ‘If only a shadow Foreign Secretary would talk about climate change with such passion.’ Unfair, not least because it’s not his brief. But it is an issue that’s inspired some fine rhetoric in Paris this week. Compared to Copenhagen in 2009, the hard truths of climate change are accepted by almost everyone, right-wing US diehards excepted.

The issue is how we deal with them (the hard truths, that is) – by investing more heavily in green forms of energy and/or looking for technological solutions. The earth as a self-regulating system (in James Lovelock’s terms), effectively an organism in its own right, which we disrespect at our peril, or the earth as servant of mankind, mankind ultimately omnicompetent, pushing back frontiers of knowledge and technology, destined to find answers to everything, well, almost everything.

I go with the former, because it keeps us grounded, keeps us in touch with our lives and our world as it is, and doesn’t posit some technology-driven future which could undermine that sense of connection with the Earth (inadvertently but appropriately capitalised!), and ultimately our very humanity.

But I am, that said, all in favour of investing in technological solutions. If India continues to build up its coal-mining capacity, and burn more and more, how might clean coal technologies make a difference? And carbon capture not just from coal. There’s also ongoing research into making clouds more reflective. And much else.

Awareness is everything. Having won the argument over climate change – it is for real, we have to face those who argue that current wind and solar technologies are too inefficient or too expensive, and use that to make a case for reducing or withdrawing funding now.  (The UK government being a case in point.) Their argument in one sentence: put funding, and it could be vast funding, into new technologies, and some will work, and some will not, but trust in technology and we will find an answer.

As a strategy it’s high risk. It’s dangerous to trust in hypothetical futures. There are current strategies which may be inefficient, and still small scale, but they have impact, and will in time – as, for example, solar cells become much more efficient and energy storage is improved – put subsidy behind them, and be fully commercial. We can’t risk losing the momentum we have.

I can’t get into carbon taxes and cap-and-trade here (expertise I haven’t got!), but they are of course another strand of the argument.

In the meantime we rely on imported gas, nuclear (handing over to the French for expertise and the Chinese for finance, high risk, given the importance of energy security), and fracking (also, high risk, this time in terms of local environments). How we strike a balance is not something this blog can address.

There’s a letter in a recent edition of The Times arguing for the potential, in the longer term, for turning CO2 into fuel – ‘artificial hydrocarbon fuels’. (CCU – carbon capture and utilisation.) It’s a process that requires vast amounts of energy, but as the writers say, ‘it is no use burning hydrocarbons to make hydrocarbons’. We’d need to use renewable energy sources, and that, they argue, should include nuclear power, with the ‘ultimate solution’ being to use solar power.

That struck a chord with me, not least because it sums up the dilemmas we face.

A little family history

Travelling north recently I drove along the M5 through the western outskirts of Birmingham, and then toward Manchester along the M6.

Not you might think the most romantic of journeys. But it had its own magic, and set imagination and memory running.

Reading Alison Light’s marvellous Common People I’ve learnt a lot about how one branch of her family made its way in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were needle-makers, one part of that remarkable network of industries small (there were also nail, pin, screw, chain and washer-makers) and large that made Birmingham famous around the world.

Another branch of her family were bricklayers and Baptists, and made their way from Wiltshire to Portsmouth, where one of their number became a building contractor, at a time when the city was growing fast, and contractors established themselves as middlemen, and bricklayers were unionised, and organised labour set itself up against the employers.

Alison Light’s ancestor also built churches.

Why did this strikes a chord with me? Because my ancestors, the Colliers in Leigh in Lancashire, were also builders, as early as the 1850s. And if they didn’t build churches then building contractors on another side of my family, the Adkinsons, did do so – only one to my knowledge, the Methodist church that dominates the centre of my home village in Cheshire.

Nonconformism and bricklaying and building went hand in hand. The Church of England lived and died by the old social hierarchies. As a Methodist or a Baptist you were part of a vibrant and supportive communities, and need feel inferior to no-one.

You get little sense of the old Black Country from the M5, and the M6 takes through open Staffordshire country. But look to the right as Cheshire approaches and on the far horizon there’s the hilltop village of Mow Cop, where in 1800 the prayer meetings which led in time to the founding of the Primitive Methodists were first held. There’s a magic about Mow Cap, and Alan Garner in his novel Red Shift captures that sense of a place apart.

It’s right on the edge of where I explored as a child, and each time I catch sight of Mow Cop on my journeys north I feel like I’m coming home. Liminal in place and in imagination. And I will head north again soon, to explore further just who the Colliers and Adkinsons really were, who and where they were before they took to bricks, and when they found religion.

The irony is that I’ve never laid brick on brick, never built anything in all my life. My ability even to put a shelf up straight was – quite unjustifiably! – queried recently. Maybe the two genetic lines simply cancelled each other out.

UK air strikes in Syria – the vote

Relief at the vote in parliament. 297 to 223 in favour. Mightily impressed by Hilary Benn, making a powerful moral case for intervention. A reminder of Labour’s tradition of internationalism, opposition to fascism, support for human rights.

But…. I’m aware of how hugely divisive this is, and how family, friends and commentators who normally agree are polarised on this issue.

Cameron’s disgraceful comment that his opponents are ‘terrorist sympathisers’ requires an apology that hasn’t been forthcoming.

Likewise the following statement in the literature of the Stop the War Coalition, also totally untrue: ‘In reality, it is not conscience at all that animates pro-war Labour MPs. It is either inveterate support for all British war-mongering, or a desire to destroy the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, or both…’

Leaving aside comments on Corbyn’s leadership, as someone who has thought long and hard on the issues involved, and come down on the side of engagement, it’s in effect an attack on me as well.

Trading insults is massively counter-productive.  It’s a debate where there’s been too much heat. It’s wound me up, as it has many others. We have to be much cooler in our arguments, and listen better to the other side.

Democracy – a bloody miracle

Democracy is a fragile institution. Not, to paraphrase Churchill, the least-worst form of government, but a bloody miracle. Against the tendency humanity has shown throughout history to tear itself apart we have fashioned a form of government which works – where we listen, argue, campaign, vote, and accept that vote. After legislation in the last parliament, for a five year period.

And in practice?  Governments and oppositions have to abide as far as they can by the manifestos on which they’re elected. But MPs also have to make their own judgements. Trust in an individual has to be one of the criterion the electorate use in voting someone into parliament. Ultimately MPs are mandated by the electorate, and not by conferences which may support policies which weren’t in an election manifesto. 

Party loyalty, and especially the three-line whip, is necessary part of the parliamentary process, but there will be issues where MPs take principled positions against party policy (‘conscience’ is a poor term), as Jeremy Corbin often did in the past, and as others would have done had there been a three-line whip in the Syria debate. There’s been much talk recently of the duty of an opposition to oppose,  and the failure to impose a three-line whip in the Syria debate is seen as weakness by some. But when a party is divided, with both sides arguing from principle, a three-line whip serves no purpose. It only exacerbates division. 

Nor am I a fan of referenda which can be influenced by short-term considerations, or media hype. But with the Europe referendum coming up, that’s an issue for another time.

There’s a centre ground of British politics, where parties are broad churches, encompassing right and left wings, representing interest and arguments across the political spectrum. It’s as near as we have to a political duty to make certain the system continues to function and flourish.

History has yet to suggest that there is any better form of government than parliamentary and party democracy, with all the check and balances of tradition (the UK) or a constitution (the USA, above all others) built in. I think it’s one of mankind’s greatest achievements, flawed in its execution, but our first and last best hope.

I want to be arguing in this blog for compassion, aspiration and opportunity. Against the bigotry of some sections of the press, and for a compassionate state. Neither small state or command economy. For a wide and international perspective. Beyond ideology.

But this blog is called zenpolitics – politics, and politics is a rough old game. That said, we have in the UK the finest working democracy in the world. The challenge is to build on that, not to undermine it.

Syria – a just war?

Can I justify supporting military action while writing a ‘zenpolitics’ blog? Can there be such a things as a ‘just war’? When is intervention justified in the affairs of another state? Ultimately the justification has to be humanitarian, and that’s the way I see the situation in Syria. Iraq 2003 was political, with grand ideas of a new world order, and economic, riddled through with self-interest, and with remarkably little thought given to the likely consequences.

Intervention in Syria this time around has to be step by step, where we have a clear end in view but revise our position in the light of circumstances. IS poses an extraordinary threat to lives and values, and requires – demands – an immediate and practical response.

I’m also troubled by my argument that the Assad regime should be included in the alliance against IS. I’m well aware of its brutality. But if the shortest route to ending violence has to involve Assad, and I believe it does, he should be included. The US, Russia, France, the UK, Saudi Arabia, Iran, all working together, bringing together diverse interests but with a common goal, is our best chance.

I’ve argued often that compassion has to come first in all our considerations. How that’s expressed toward the people of Syria, toward people in any war situation, is a mighty challenge. But we cannot sit on the sidelines, we cannot wait for grand strategies to be put in place. And we must avoid cheap accusations of warmongering. We have a war on our hands, not in our backyard, but one with profound implications for all of us. We have to respond.

Syria – Monday 30th November

There’s a vote coming up in the House of Commons on the subject of bombing Syria –  bombing IS, something very different from the vote on bombing Assad’s forces which was lost two year’s ago. (Bombing Assad would have been a disaster, but that’s another subject, for another time.)

What are the arguments? Should we bomb, should we join France, Russia, the USA? Would we making the same mistake as we did in 2003? How valid are comparisons?

The two situations are radically different. IS is a clear and present danger, terrorising, a very literal sense, destroying communities, espousing a brutal ideology, with no spiritual content in the way I’d understand the term. Inaction isn’t a strategy. Bombing cannot win a war, but it can contain, it can limit IS’s expansion beyond its current boundaries, and if sustained break its lines of communication and its oil-based ‘economy’. Removing IS from Raqqa and Mosul is another matter, and will indeed require ground forces, and there is real danger of loss of innocent life and widespread destruction. But concerns over Raqqa and Mosul shouldn’t mean that we don’t act now to restrict IS’s operations, and at the same time break its hold on the imaginations of potential recruits.

Our engagement with the Middle East arguably goes back to the Battle of Lepanto in the 16th century when we first began to turn the tide of Arab and Ottoman dominance. There followed centuries of Ottoman decline and growing British and French interest in the trade and politics of the Levant.  Our Western instinct, that we know better, our instinct to interfere, is deep-rooted. The second Iraq war in 2003, which I strongly opposed, was born of that instinct, and a radical misjudgement. But this isn’t to say that all engagement is wrong, and the situations in Iraq in 2003 and in Syria in 2015 are radically different.

I’m well-aware of the argument that the bombing to date has been ‘ineffective’. Though in what sense? True, IS haven’t been defeated. But how much further might have they have extended their reach had they been (with the exception of the Kurds) unimpeded, without any disruption to their supply lines?

The answer now cannot be to withdraw, or to fail to support allies (and that in itself is a powerful argument) who are very much engaged. I don’t doubt that bombing on a much extended scale, well directed, and with a much broader political support, can be effective.

I don’t buy into the argument, which has been picked up across political spectrum, that we should have a clear end-strategy, and not approve a strategy involving bombing IS without one. What we can guarantee is that whatever that end-strategy might be, it won’t be what happens in the end. We have to proceed  step by step, deal with immediate dangers, and move forward from each new position we achieve. There is common ground at this time between the French, Russians and to a degree the Americans, and we need to take full advantage of this – as of now.

We also need to recognise that Syria in the short and medium term will comprise several different authorities and spheres of influence. Assad will remain in control of Damascus and considerable territory along the Mediterranean, and to the north. The Free Syria Army will have, I would hope, its own sphere of influence, and Kurdish territory will be well-defined. I wouldn’t expect them to fight side-by-side but their action could nonetheless be coordinated if all the various parties involved, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, work toward that end.

We may have a dream of a Western-style democratic Syria, but it’s one we should put out of our minds for now. The aim has to be an end to violence and reestablishing political authority in whatever form proves most viable. Once that’s in place and security is guaranteed refugees can begin to return home. They have to be the first steps.

The aim for ten years time has be a Syria, or a Syrian territory, at peace, and that peace needs to be a guaranteed peace, ideally with UN involvement. The return of refugees will be well underway if not a complete, and the traditions of civilised life which were well-established, along with religious tolerance and educational opportunities, before 2011, will have a chance to reassert themselves again.

Cornwall in the rain

Back to walking after four weeks, this time with heavy winter boots, the better to trudge through Cornish coastpath mud. To Falmouth from Truro, by a two-coach train which is as inconspicuous as a railway can be, leastways the stations, all away from the main town. The giveaway is the viaduct.

Clouds look heavy, and threaten, but the wind’s blowing from the north. I follow the rain remnants out to sea, and I’m taken by surprise when cloud suddenly rides lower from the hills behind, and the rain is torrential, but brief, and there’s a tunnel under the viaduct to shelter me, then a little later, just as it deluges again, a beach cafe, no inside, but canvas outside, and just enough shelter for me, a cappuccino and a flapjack. Though the flapjack does get a little soggy. And then at Maenporth, another deluge, and another cafe, empty, but an awning outside is enough – and this time a hot dog and cup of tea. Two real dogs, black, bedraggled and thirsty, arrive while I’m there.

Inbetween times, Gyllyngvase. One place where the Cornish name (Gilenvas) is so much simpler. And beyond Swanpool  I climb away from the road and through woodland, now a threadbare canopy, all transferred beneath, but better the oak leaf carpet than the mud and the muddy pools that lie beyond. But I love the big skies and the sea stretching south and west reflecting a watery sun, which I’m amazed is there at all. No blue sky, so the further landscape is all shades of grey and silver and winter brown, but close to it’s a rich green, and there’s a variety of ferns, including bracken, and tucked below the bushes a few campion still flower, and there’s a late – or early – violet or two as well.  A bramble carries one or two flowers, and the gorse is abundant yellow in places. All beneath that grey sky.

And it’s the 28th day of November.

Beyond lie three headlands, each one stretching further south, the third the Lizard. Tempting, but too far.. much too far to walk this day. First there’s the Helston river to cross, a ferry in summer, an additional ten-mile trek via Gweek in winter.

Advent Sunday tomorrow and I’m singing out loud an Advent hymn – O come o come Emmanuel –  with its lovely cadences and a special history – the tune has been sung in one form of another for maybe 1200 years. I pass a memorial, to a girl who died aged 20 a few years ago. ‘Now in God’s safe hands,’ I think it read.

We imagine a better world when we look out west beyond the sea, beyond the horizon. There lies paradise, and the safe hands of God. West is finis terrae.

But there’s another memorial, above Swanpool, to the Home Guard, who watched through WW2 for ‘a thousand days’ in case of the Germans landed. A memorial to war. There’s been a fort at Pendennis Castle since the time of Henry VIII. Now no-one watches, and there are only concrete bases where the gun emplacements once were.

I look out to sea with a sense of eternity, beyond war, as others have done, almost forever. For ten thousand times ten thousand days. When you walk alone, and I hardly met a soul, that sense is almost palpable.

(Ten thousand x the thousand years I wrote first. 100 million years BC. That would mean dinosaurs and not homo sapiens or homo habilis, or whatever. Not certain they had an ‘sense of eternity’. But who knows?)

A few other policies we might say goodbye to

Time for a brief, and serious, political digression. We’ve just had the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement, focusing on the government’s spending plans. There will, to everyone’s surprise, for now be no cuts to tax credits. And this after all those arguments we’ve heard from sections of the press. Tax credits – a disincentive to full-time work if you’re part-time, or to bettering yourself if you’re in a poorly paid job. The implicit assumption that people on any kind of benefit lack aspiration. Pain is good for you.

Are these arguments suddenly no longer valid?

The New York Review of Books has the text of an intriguing conversation between the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, Marilynne Robinson, and President Obama. Robinson has the following in response to Obama asking her whether politically she’s just ‘in the mix like everyone else’.

Well, if I’m going to be honest, I think that there are some political candidacies that are much more humane in their implications and consequences than others. I mean, if suddenly poles were to be reversed and what I see as humanistic came up on the other side, there I’d be.

Basing myself on that ‘humanistic’ principle, I wondered – if the government can abandon one core policy, how about one or two others?

Free schools, for example, much-loved by middle-class parents who worry about poor performance in existing local schools. Much better to incentivise recruitment in existing local schools, so that the good and great teachers schools need can be more readily recruited.

Junior doctors: if the government has lost their support, they’ve also lost the BMA, and much of the rest of the health service. So let’s have a rethink there too.

Social care: councils will now have the ability to levy an extra 2% to support social care, but while useful this is hardly a joined-up policy to allow the much wider provision of care in the community we need to take pressure off hospitals.

Reductions in housing benefit: Osborne’s announced further cuts in the autumn statement. House prices rise, housing benefit is cut. New flats rise above the old streets of Vauxhall. Hard for old communities to survive. And new communities, new identities can take decades to establish.

And another policy which is closely associated with George Osborne:

Infrastructure: scrap HS2 and invest in a nationwide infrastructure, not just a link which will take a decade to reach Birmingham, longer Manchester, and longer still anywhere else. We need transport links which benefit the whole country, and brought in over a much shorter period. What about the North-East, East Anglia, Cornwall… and Scotland, if the Scots hang around for long enough?

And there are of course a few other policies….