Two months on, no blog, laptop crashed, new PC, new laptop, none of those saved addresses and re-assuring cookies making your computer seem like a friend, an extension of self. All an illusion: who needs a friend who hides so much away, and always wants more, and then relays it far and wide to people who want some kind of a hold of my ‘self’ –  want to know who I am so they can check on me, and sell me stuff, and catch me if I do something dastardly.

It’s all been said before. The world is intrusive, into every corner of our lives. Even on top of Snowdon last weekend I could have been picked up on Google Earth, and who knows who might have been there among the hundered or so on the summit with me.  Cameras everywhere taking pics: I’ll be on a  few, inadvertently, blocking the view. On Carnedd Llewellyn the previous day the cloud came down, and there indeed we have been unseen, unheard, unknown, but with the slight concern we might have been undone had we walked over a precipice.

Half an hour before we were watching a  mountain rescue as a yellow RAF helicopter hovered and winched up below us. That’s reassuring, they come quickly. But there’s another side to that too. We’re never out of range, even of a rescue helicopter. There were also brave souls hang-gliding.

Did they have cameras?

‘Paranoia strikes deep, into your lives it will creep,’   sang Stephen Stills forty years ago.

That’s the real worry. It’s all in the mind.

How to escape: clear the mind, unthink each thought, remove the cookies which track your memories back in such seemingly random fashion. When your mind is clear you’re no longer there,  though the cameras may think you are.

Referring back to my last blog, there is the question of course, who knows anything? Are we really any of us competent to comment on any issue, let alone exercise a vote which determines policies which often change lives dramatically?

It’s easy to be elitist. ‘I understand these things.’ There will be others who set themselves up in the opposite stall. They too will be sure of their own rectitude. 

Maybe we ‘understand’ the news. We understand that in Afghanistan there’s a civil war, on the one hand, which we’d be best well out of, and a vicious Islamic dictatorship on the other, which for good geopolitical reasons, we have to oppose with all the might we can muster.  Both are, on their own, convincing arguments. Are any of us competent to choose between them? 

Often we have a half-formed idea, and an event out there seems to confirm it, and we think eureka! I’m right, I know the answer. We’d be better off being objective. But we don’t learn that way. From an early age we all have our mindsets, with whole intellectual constructs based on them, and we’re looking for ideas that confirm not challenge. 

In the end we’re all kidding ourselves. Some of us are entrenched. We’ll never change. Others allow themselves a little more freedom, and I’d guess it’s there where our hope lies. In the floating voter. They’re often voting on a basis of hunch and assumption as much as anyone else, but at least they’re there to be challenged and influenced and persuaded. 

A few may have humility in the face of all they don’t know. But they will be few. I’ve never been one to date. Maybe I should try and be one now. But family and friends have to listen to me sounding off about policies and politicians. Reining myself in doesn’t come naturally. 

It’s also boring. 

‘If there were any justice in politics it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.’  Simon Heffer’s comment explains much of the Telegraph’s recent behaviour. We know they didn’t act out of a sense of probity or concern for the national interest (other than the interests of the island of Brecqhou) but, yes, it has been fun. If we had been disengaged from politics then we’re all engaged again now.

We’ve the sad sight all around us of horse chestnut leaves turning brown and dying. The first blotches in June, hardly noticeable, but by the end of July they scar the landscape. (And affected trees don’t it seems produce conkers.) The caterpillar of the leaf miner moth is the culprit. But there’s also the bleeding canker, which is about as expressive a name for an affliction of man, beast or vegetation that I’ve ever heard.

We all remember Dutch elm disease and the devastation it brought. It’s still hard to believe how quickly we lost one of the stalwart trees of Britain. I personally don’t blame the Dutch, and more than I hope the Italians blame us for zuppe inglese, or we the Spanish for their flu. 

Ironically it’s the Dutch (subconsciously influenced by wanting to restore their good name?) who seem to have come up with the answer. And what an answer. They’ve created an infusion of garlic which they inject into trees, and, well, it seems the caterpillars don’t like it, and curl up and die. I don’t know how it affects the bleeding canker. But there’s a chance that horse chestnuts will in future smell of garlic.

Let’s hope it’s not garlic after a good meal the night before, which will empty the pavements and parklands, but that wonderful smell of wild garlic which with its hanging white flowers is the only rival to the bluebell in the woodland spring, to my mind anyway.

The first British trees are being trialled with the injection next week. Hailes Abbey is I believe one location. I await further news with interest!

The Reuters Institute report last month, Public Trust in the News, based on focus group findings, revealed that the majority of people didn’t understand the news and therefore didn’t trust it. For anyone interested in the workings of democracy this comes as no surprise, but to have it spelt out in a report is something new. At the same time, we have news organisations encouraging instant comment, welcoming contributions from the floor in Question Time style debates. The one follows on from the other.  We’re encouraged to have an opinion whether or not we have the full picture, and then we have the press out there desperately keen to create a partial picture.

I enjoy Question Time. But what I hear from the floor often scares me. It’s not the opinions, which we need to hear, but the certainty with which they’re expressed, the bitterness, the alienation …

We have a major issue here. A perplexed public is an easily prejudiced public, and easily manipulated. We can’t expect the press to take a lead, given its current ownership structures and attitudes, and so it falls to the politicians. There is simply no alternative to constructive debate, ensuring the key issues in any debate are properly understood, identifying common ground, elucidating points of difference. Both sides, all sides, need to buy into this. The only points scored should come about as a result of clarity and conviction of argument.

It all seems so simple, and yet … so impossible? Who will dare? Demagogues have always preyed on democrats, and it will take courage and determination (our old friends) to raise the standard of debate. But it is critical that we do so.

Andy Coulson, ex News of the World editor, friend of Simon Cowell, press secretary to David Cameron… giving a populist angle to Cameron’s presentation. That’s where we are at the moment.

As a postscript, written two days later on 24th July, David Cameron enthused about the new politics that had helped win Chloe Smith the Norwich North by-election. For once I caught the mood, not least because Harriet Harman then came on and chattered on about Labour investment against Tory cuts which is just the argument they tried to hammer home in Norwich, and which failed them abysmally. Bury Andy, and let Harriet bury herself, and Labour with her, and the Tories just might begin to catch the public imagination the way New Labour did back in 1997. But they’ve a long way to go.

‘What happens when we die?’

Not a  subject to ask a politician though quite a few will have died a thousand deaths recently. What happens when we ask a Zen master instead? In Zen as in politics the answer isn’t always want we want, or expect.

So what do we learn from the precocious and over-knowledgeable young Zen monk who couldn’t answer that simple question when his master asked him. ‘What happens when we die?’

He thought the answer would lie in the Buddhist scriptures and when he couldn’t find it there he insisted his master tell him, seizing and shaking him when he refused to do so. Appalled by what he’d done he left the monastery, spent years as a wandering monk, then tended the tomb of the sixth Zen patriarch, Huineng. One day as his bamboo struck stone the answer came to him. In a moment. It wasn’t the answer he’d have expected as a novice, something measurable and clear-cut. He’d taken many years unlearning (not learning) what he knew to find the answer.

If we seek too hard we’ll never find. All we can do is put ourselves on the right path, seek no certainties, have no expectations. It’s the path that leaves ‘I’ behind, that accepts suffering (being the distance by which reality falls short of our expectations), lets every day, every moment in that day, take its course. We have the illusion that we shape the world, when the world shapes us. We create ripples on the surface, and they are gone in a moment.

A story of my own. I stood by the river flowing through the garden one recent Monday morning. That river also works for me as an image of the Tao, the steady inevitable flow of life that we think we can influence but flows ever onwards at its own pace. It’s that flow we all need to be a part of, aware of the changing rhythms of the day, the elements, the earth, life itself.

The ducks who paddle that stretch of river saw me, one mother and four young turks, almost grown, full of energy, waiting for the bread we regularly feed them. That moment it seemed wrong, with the water coursing through the flowering ranunculus, and the trout steady against the stream, and the ducks pecking at bits of greenery here and there. But if we don’t feed them, then they won’t come back. That’s what we tell ourselves. There are other cottages upstream who also feed them, and they go just like us humans for the easy life, do ducks. So I fed them, and throwing the bread here and there, this moment one way the next the opposite, I create a scurrying and a spurting and a flurry and fuss that I never seen before.

‘Sorry, chaps, I’m out of bread.’ They didn’t answer, and they didn’t go way. They were still there an hour later, hoping no doubt that I’d re-appear. I’d had fun and the ducks had too (I think, although maybe they were angry with me) but I wasn’t quite happy about it. All that kerfuffle had broken the mood, reduced the river to the same crazy place as the world beyond the garden hedge, and down the M4 only a few miles away.

Our world only exists because we imagine it. It’s our minds that give reality to the world and we give names and attributes to everything so that the world makes some kind of sense. The names (within a language group) we all have in common, but we all of us imagine the world in very individual, very different ways.

Try also a pool as an image… imagine it somewhere out in India, or in the African savannah. A watering hole where all the animals come to drink. They don’t come at the same time. They come in their own time. And that’s how we take wisdom from life. Not by all our crazy communal efforts but by sampling, listening, drinking, doing it as individuals, finding our own truth.

The river, the Tao, and the pool, that still source of understanding, are both metaphors for the inexplicable. We cannot explain the way, or understand wisdom in any intellectual way. Both take us beyond all our attempts to describe or understand the world. As happened to that Chinese monk all those centuries ago, we find wisdom when we don’t expect it, and then we live that wisdom. It’s not a subject for study, it cannot be enhanced by learning. We may try and explain how we get there to others, and the scriptures of Buddhism and other faiths have done that for two millennia and more. But wisdom itself is beyond explanation.

There are no answers. There may be some courses of action that are better than others. But there are no answers.

Talk of a bonfire of the quangos set me thinking.  Cameron wants to return all the policy functions of quangos to government, to ensure accountability to parliament. The exceptions are quangos whose role involves technical advice (eg the Monetary Policy Committee and the National Institute for Clinical Excellence), impartial advice (eg research councils), and transparency and independence  (eg the Office of National Statistics).

But why the change? I can see no reason why there can’t be tighter regulation of existing quangos outside government, with ministers held accountable for the quangos for which their departments have responsibility. It looks to me as if Cameron is playing games again, playing to a public mood without regard for the best interests of government. Just how much disruption will switching the functions of quangos back to Whitehall create? And are government departments always the best place for developing policy?

Recent consultation on the Climate Change Bill asked for a comment on the proposal for an independent analytical organisation, arguing that ‘an independent body will improve the institutional framework for managing carbon in the economy’. One  response was simply a plea for ‘not another quango’…..

And yet …climate change policy is one of many which needs to be informed by recommendations that are independent of government, not tied to previous policies or funding decisions.  It needs a long-term view.  Policy determined within government departments could be at the mercy of ministerial whim, itself swayed by electoral considerations and whatever pressure groups can get the strongest media campaign behind them.   

Quangos as I’d define them need to focus on the long term, and advise on policy areas which it’s hard for the public to have an informed opinion about. There needs to be accountability in terms of cost and competence of course, but to disparage quangos per se is simply foolish, and opens up the possibility of evidence-based decisions being open up to media influence and short-termism.

Cameron in power will find the same situation as Thatcher, Blair and Brown did: he’ll realise early on the benefits of involving third parties in policy development and recommendation.  And he’s find himself tied by the foolish pronouncements he thought he had to make to get him into power.

Reference Matthew Taylor of the Royal Society of Arts’ blog (italics) of 29 June, the day of Gordon Brown’s National Plan announcement. 

The idea of moving from top-down accountability delivered through guidance, bureaucracy and inspection to a bottom up accountability delivered by citizens enforcing their rights is attractive. Although we await to hear how exactly the entitlements are to be enforced. No one wants a field day for lawyers.

We’ve heard much about accountability. But we have a contradiction here. To be accountable there has to be agreement as to the procedures and standards schools and hospitals and indeed governments follow. That needs to come about ideally through consensus but as likely as not by government diktat expressed in legislation. The popular will doesn’t set standards. Governments acting in what they see as the best interests of the population do that, balanced against what’s realistic.

We’d all like to be seen by a consultant immediately we’re referred, but no government would accept that as a target.

We’d all like to see light-armoured replaced by more heavily armed vehicles, but armies need to adapt to new fields of warfare, to prioritise working within a limited budget. So no government would agree that. Scrap aircraft carriers and Trident, do I hear? Don’t kid yourself. That’s not an easy decision for anyone to take. (An issue to come back to.)

An interesting plan’s credibility will sadly be undermined by the failure of the plan to tackle the political machine of Whitehall. We have too many ministers looking for work to do. They constantly generate new priorities and guidance which are all too often interpreted at the front line as instructions. Gordon Brown will want to make the case that his new framework frees up the front line and makes government less bureaucratic and complex, but until he slims down and muzzles the ministerial monster this is not believable.

I like this. Hold ministers accountable. Too busy and they are reprimanded. We want less legislation, not more…  (And we want ministers in place for longer, so they don’t feel each time they have to make their mark.)

Matthew Taylor elsewhere strikingly contrasts Michael Gove (education, radical change) and Andrew Lansley (health, steady as she goes). At the end of a recent seminar both got applauded, but all the talk was about Michael Gove. It seems universally accepted that he’s very bright, but it sound like he’s going over the top before the war’s even started.

There’s this guy called Quentin Letts who writes for the Mail and won an award recently. He published a book last year, called ‘Fifty People Who Buggered Up Britain’.  (Sequel, next year, is ‘Bog-Standard Britain’.)

Great idea, great for argument – and great for reinforcing prejudices, and feeding the Mail readers’ paranoia that if we haven’t already gone to the dogs we’re heading pell-mell that way.

The list includes Jeffrey Archer, Kenneth Baker, Ed Balls, Richard (Dr) Beeching, John Birt, Tony Blair, David Blunkett, Rhodes Boyson,  Gordon Brown, Paul Burrell, James Callaghan, Alastair Campbell, Anthony Crosland, Richard Dawkins, Princess Diana,  Greg Dyke, Sir Alex Ferguson, Tony Greig, Edward Heath, Graham Kelly, Graham Kendrick, Sir Denys Lasdun Dame Suzi Leather, John McEnroe, Stephen Marks, Michael Martin, Alun Michael. Rupert Murdoch, John Prescott, Nicholas Ridley, Geoffrey Rippon, Charles Saatchi, Sir Jimmy Savile, John Scarlett, Janet Street-Porter, Margaret Thatcher, Alan Titchmarsh, Harold Walker and Helen Willetts.

Thatcher, in summary: did lots of good things, pro-business, won in the Falklands – but was vindictive toward a remarkable body of men, the miners, and re-inforced, set in stone almost, the North-South divide as we have it today.

I wondered how Mail readers down south responded to that. (Are there any up north?)

I haven’t read up on Helen Willetts, happy weather girl, and I won’t bother.

The biggest problem these days – column inches to fill, and a public who expect to be titillated. But talking people up rarely titillates anyone, unless it’s Andy wining at Wimbledon at 10.40 pm, so we get endless talking down, reinforcing negative modes of thinking on every subject.

Try setting out with a  smile and not a grumble and it’s amazing how much happier and sunnier the world looks. Helen Willetts always smiling does her best… although I must admit it can be wearing…

…but mustn’t grumble.

Sorry, that sounds corny. But, damn it, it’s 100% true, and I, we, most of us anyway, just don’t do it.

Nick Robinson is doing a radio programme on the subject of the wider impact of the expenses crisis. (Catch it if you can – re-run at 8pm R4 Monday 29th, also online of course. It’s not Bedknobs and Broomsticks by the way. Try Moats, Mortgages and Mayhem.)

I’ve yet to listen to the programme, only heard the trailer. So I’m guessing what you’ll say, Nick, and it’s too late. You played along with the crowd, and lost credibility. It was clear what was happening to many of us from day one, but we didn’t have a mouthpiece.  (That is a crime in itself.)

You and other insiders would have known better than most about the integrity of the great majority of MPs, and about the damage this would do to them individually, their work as constituency MPs, the institution of parliament and the political process itself.

(Time out)

Well, now I’ve listened. I’ve heard Michael Howard quote the example of Ruth Kelly’s insurance claim, illegitimate according to the Telegraph, utterly proper in fact, I’ve heard the smug and greasy complacency of the guy I assume is the Telegraph’s editor, and I’ve heard Nick Robinson’s concern that every night of the story he’d go to bed worrying that he’d made the situation worse for a group of people he believed were for the most part in politics to do good. But ‘the facts drove the story’, he claimed. His definition of ‘facts’ in this case isn’t mine.

And I’ve heard his belief that if the story fuels an easy cynicism that politicians are all in it because they’re on the make, then it will have done damage. Lightly encoded we have Nick Robinson’s message. Damage has been done, and we know from the context that he believes it’s been done unfairly. What he doesn’t say is how extensive the damage is, which maybe we can look forward to in a sequel.

Nick Robinson’s an old boy of my school, OK some fifteen years younger than me I guess. So he’s a North Cheshire lad, and I rate him, and while he’s a relative innocent in this case (compared to some of the charlatans at work) I think he’s let us down.

I’ve written elsewhere on the subject of W.B. Yeats’ comment:

I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.

( It seems that Pope Celestine V resolved the papal schism by resigning and leaving the way clear for Boniface VIII, who Dante loathed. For his cowardice, his refusal to honour his obligations, Dante consigned Celestine to hell.)

Nick, you sat on the fence. You were part of that great refusal. And the same goes for most of your colleagues. Maybe you’ll be spared hell. Hot air only in your case, no flames. But be careful.

Martin Bell is writing a book, the musings  of a journalist who decided writing up news stories was tedious, better to make the news himself, who took his Knutsford defeat of the Hamiltons on an anti-corruption platform as proof that he and his white suit were somehow the chosen ones. Twelve years waiting for another crisis and he’s in luck. He’s recognised ‘a once in a lifetime opportunity to revive our politics’. They were, Martin, as I see it, doing quite well, and don’t need reviving by moral crusaders.

The relationship between parliament and people is like any relationship, indeed like a marriage. There’s failure and there’s an ideal, and because what you have doesn’t quite approximate the ideal you shouldn’t assume failure.

I don’t believe for a moment that the marriage of people and parliament has broken down. Like any relationship though it can be influenced by outsiders. Whisper in any spouse’s ear that love can be more intense, sex better, loyalty stronger, and talk up a wayward look into infidelity and you’ll have a breakdown of something that might have been working well.

We all know where the talking-up has been coming from in the case of this marriage.

Not all’s been well in the relationship of course, creating a climate in which the public, suitably and self-servingly prompted, has been all too willing to believe the worst.  As so often happens mistrust feeds on itself, with a crisis the inevitable result.

Happily, now the pressure from the drip-drip of revelations is off them a little, MPs are coming out fighting. John Bercow is his address to the Commons asserted that ‘this House is neither corrupt or crooked, but what was meant to be a straightforward system of compensation has become immensely  complicated, mired in secrecy and short of accountability.’ We are all agreed that has to be put right. He wants to strengthen backbenchers and revive parliament, and that means controlling its own business, exercising effective scrutiny and ensuring that as representatives of the people the executive is accountable to parliament, and not to the media.

Funny this. The media argue for change, and a key part of that change would cut out the leaks on which they’ve thrived and reduce just a little the dominance they’ve enjoyed.

Bercow ends by arguing for a clean break, and I’d part company a little here. We want a clean break from the failings of recent years, and an escape from the taint of scandal, but we also want a reassertion of all that’s good in the best of parliaments, not best in the sense that the balance of powers we have is better or worse that the American, but best in the sense that the traditions of parliament are a better guarantee than any written constitution, or the pronouncements of any judiciary.

Having dismissed Bercow yesterday as a non-entity, having read that speech I’ll give him a chance. (Which is nice of me!)  In the context of his age, or rather lack of it, he quoted past Speakers, Speaker Addington among them, who took over as PM from Pitt the Younger. I believe him when he says he doesn’t want to be PM.  But that’s an aside. I like the sense of tradition he shows, and will bring to the post. He’s no old hack or grumbling grandee. Not only will I give him a chance, I will desist from writing any more on the subject of parliamentary reform until he’s set out his stall.