Tag: Keir Starmer

‘Come you masters of war’

Remembering Bob Dylan’s song from 1962, Masters of War

So much has been spoken and written in recent days about the American and Israeli actions against Iran, and so much has been foolish. Too often we forget that violence as instrument of state always has vast unintended consequences, and even more so when there is little evidence of any planned outcome or endgame.

Palestine and Gaza are issues of long standing. Wisdom could have brought resolutions, recognising rights and interests on all sides. But any hope of that ended with the rise of Netanyahu. Iran is a vile, repressive, ideology-driven state. Israel not least as an American proxy gave it an external focus. Obama and the EU had an agreement (the JCPOA) to limit Iran’s nuclear ambitions: Trump scrapped it. We moved quickly from a world of attempted conciliation, which is always a long, hard road, to a world where threat is the modus operandi.

Trump in 2016 was a novice, and after 2020 he could have been written off as an aberration. There have been other populists aspiring to power in US history, but they’ve always been seen off. Not this time.

The notion of American exceptionalism is deep-rooted. Obama bought into it. But he saw it as bringing responsibility, not fist-waving, gun-toting belligerence. Seeing yourself as in some way ‘great’ is always a bad idea. Translated to a nation it’s dangerous. Allied to ‘again’ and we’re into wild misreadings of history. Was America greatest in the era of the robber barons, in the late nineteenth century? Or was it the 1920s, before the Wall Street Crash. Or the late 1940s and 1950s, when American beneficence brought restoration after the devastation of world war? Or the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall?

‘Greatness’ as currently manifested (in its MAGA and Heritage Foundation guise) lies in the freedoms of markets and expression. But both are heavily compromised. The US market is anything but free. And power is ever more concentrated. We have the big seven (Apple, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla) and a stock market racing ahead fuelled by their AI investments, not least in vast power-hungry datacentres. Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, enjoy their closeness to power. And their extreme wealth. Power has devolved upwards, and ends with Trump, in whose hands it has an increasingly deranged quality.

Where lies the future? The rules-based order the USA once espoused and help police has had remarkable success. But at the same time it has built up a vast deficit. Chinese investment in Treasury Bonds and elsewhere has funded vast levels of debt. But you could blame the vast appetites of the American consumer for Chinese imports for that. Not an attribution of blame Donald Trump would accept. (So also the extraordinary levels of drug consumption. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel is only a symptom, not the cause. But that’s a subject for another time.)

The USA as it is now is epitomised by the rantings of Trump, but also by Peter Hegseth, who has come from nowhere and now heads the newly-anointed ‘Department of War’. There is for him, for Trump, for the Israeli government, no sense of the value of human life for any nation other than their own. Thousands of deaths are necessary collateral damage. The destruction of a city, of Gaza, and now vast swathes of Iran, is of secondary concern.

Along with nuclear disarmament, now it seems dismissed as a fool’s game, we should be arguing for the banning of all aerial bombardment, other than that of specific military targets. And the routine taking out of heads of state is an appalling idea: once established as a practice government becomes impossible.

That brings is back to the UK and Starmer, limiting the American use of the Diego Garcia bases to defensive operations. That had to be right. But, as the Iranian regime in its death-throe madness aims its missiles and drones at Gulf State targets, the definition of ‘defensive’ has had to expand, maybe to the point of being meaningless – where international law as we’ve understood it becomes irrelevant.

Trump is a pip-squeak in the long sweep of history, just another emperor who would cast off his imperial clothes but found they fit too snugly. The only history Trump connects to is of the shortest – one deal at a time – variety. Short history is also the Heritage Foundation, which is itself a rejection of the notion of progress in human affairs, also in the MAGA movement, but for them at least American responsibility ends at its borders. Trump disavowed external involvement, he was in his eyes a peace-maker, but as we see now it was and is peace guaranteed by war. Aggressors may want peace – but on their own terms.

Short history also exists in a fabled space: it has embedded in it the notion of recurrence. We can, we must, go back to a fabled era. ‘Judaeo-Christian civilisation’ is under threat: we hear this argued on both sides of the Atlantic. And we do indeed need to define that culture, and its freedoms and wide responsibilities, and in its finest forms its embedded compassion and rejection of violence, against other cultures, and not least Islam. But by defacing our own culture, by being violent or abusive in its supposed protection, we only do damage.

The world by arrogance and by sheer foolishness has found itself in the last few days in a terrible place, with outcomes uncertain, and hatred deeper embedded, thousands of lives lost, swathes of territory obliterated, with no possibility of any simple transfer of power to the good guys – not least because, these days, just who are the good guys?

The day after election day

Elections are emotional occasions. And referenda: I remember lunchtime drinks after a night watching (literally, as a teller) as voting slips were unfolded in 2016. The empty glass. This time, a chunky bacon bap and a full cup of coffee at the local village hall.

As for the big-timers. Exultation: arm-waving and Sweet Caroline if you’re Ed Davey, big big smile if you’re Keir Starmer. Glad-I’m-out-of-it chuckle from Jacob Rees-Mogg. (He may be fooling us.) Hiding on the age of the stage, in a state of shock, thoroughly deserved, if you’re Liz Truss.

But then there’s Nigel Farage. He’s going for Labour, he says. He thinks their support is wafer-thin. That he can win folk round with his rabid ‘Britain is broken’, left-behind, anti-immigrant narrative. He’s now in parliament. He has a mouthpiece.

I’d like to disregard him, but he is a superb maker of noise. A favourite word of Labour in its early days was fellowship: Starmer is part of a long tradition. Compare Farage. A man without a sense of history. He pitches one group against another. He feeds off hostility behind that over-wide smile. He’s at home with Trump. Half-truth comes easily.

Contrast key words in Starmer’s Downing Street speech yesterday: ‘stability and moderation’ (two words working as one), and ‘service and respect’ (again, two as one). Compare the provocateur that Sunak had become, pushed by party and media.

One interesting stat: more than half the new intake of MPs are new to parliament. In 2019 only 21.5% were new. In every way, we’ve a clean sheet. Farage and his small team won’t be the only newbies, though they may shout more. 

Also catching my eye. Larry the cat has now over thirteen years outdated five Tory prime ministers. The green of Angela Rayner’s trouser suit walking to 10 Downing Street. (She is Stockport. Her, and my, home town. I’m proud of her.) And Wes Streeting lost in a sea of nautical metaphors. Don’t sail when you’re tired!

Back to the essentials. How will Tories respond now? Penny Mordaunt, speaking when she lost her seat: make it a broad church. Robert Buckland and Grant Shapps are of similar mind.

Invite Farage in, match him with Braverman, and the Mail and Telegraph, and we will have division, and some pretty wild misreporting. If Starmer can push through his agenda, then Farage and the Tory far-right will have less and less to rant about. The far-right want there to be battle-lines. Play their game, put our liberal democracy into play, and the battle would become existential.

A Labour landslide – what next?

10.30, Friday 5th July. The day after an election in which Labour won a landslide victory. Mainly because the Tory vote imploded …

It’s raining as we wait for Rishi to say goodbye on Downing Street. As it was when he announced this election. It won’t dry up any time soon: this is a bad July. But, yes, good for Labour, though its share of the vote hasn’t changed from 2019. That’s remarkable. What matters, though, looking at it backwards, is that they haven’t lost voter share. They’ve held theirs, while everyone else, save for the Tories, has gained.

Yesterday’s vote was the ultimate anti-incumbent protest. No British government has, arguably, ever made such a mess, and they’ve kept it up over fourteen years. The electorate though hadn’t abandoned the Tories until Johnson partied and Truss went over the top.  Vast swathes then went in different directions, moderates to the LibDems and populists to Reform.

Underlying it all, and I’ve been doing a quick calculation with every result, and I was watching until 4am (lazy you might say – why not all night?), is the left-of-centre against right-of-centre vote, broadly defined. How do the combined votes of left and right stack up? On the left we have new Labour (mark 2) and old socialist, including one Jeremy Corbin. And we’ve the LibDems – wow! I didn’t expect that. And the Greens. And Plaid Cymru. They are all democrats, all part of a great tradition of evolving liberal democracy.

As for the right-of-centre, many will be died-in-the-wool Tories who simply couldn’t change their spots, or soften their deep-blue shading. But there are the Bravermans. And there is Reform.

How do the percentages work out? 52.6% for Labour, the LibDems and Greens, taken together. And 38% for the Tories and Reform. Others including the SNP, Plaid Cymru and Northern Ireland parties 9.4%. (Figures corrected from the first version of this post.)

I was watching those early results, from Sunderland and Blyth. The North East was so strongly Brexit and that left-behind, anti-sentiment now finds a home in Reform. It is those two descriptors – left-behind and anti-immigrant – that go far to define Reform.

What Labour has to do is take the North/South divide head-on. If they do their almost 35% share of the vote should increase next time. Labour has to re-establish that link with those old, and socially conservative, and indeed older-by-age working-class constituencies. It can still be a big-city party. Its performance will be judged, it goes without saying, by the performance of the economy, but also crucially by its attitudes to health and social care. They, even more jobs and housing and education and climate and indeed gender, will be the defining issues. Get them right, and so much else will follow. Not least a healthy and motivated workforce.

Stroud is my local constituency. High turnout, 71%, a Labour gain. Twickenham, my old constituency, LibDem hold on a 72% turnout. Compare Sunderland and Blyth, both 53%. There, Reform got their vote out. Vast numbers of others, maybe of the ‘they-are-all-useless’ persuasion, will have stayed away. Trade unions used to give voters an identity. No more. Devolving power and local accountability will help. But they must show tangible results. Otherwise, the Britain-is-broken, keep-the-bastards-out Reform mentality, the Farage farrago of false and half-truths, will entrench.

Look over the Channel. The second round of the French election is this coming weekend. I was listening to a radio piece about Langres, a rural French town with a grand cathedral, where I stayed several times on childhood trips through France. It has these days 25% unemployment. It votes National Rally (RN). The perceived gap between Paris and the provinces is, and is perceived as, vast. This gives the RN its way in, with all the anti-immigrant, find-a-culprit mentality that goes with it.

I don’t doubt Starmer and his crew are more than aware of all this. That’s what will make the next few weeks so interesting. It’s so crucial to get the direction right. France will probably have chaos before any resolution.  Macron has big ideas and big solutions, he’s been looking to the future, but, it seems, he hasn’t paid sufficient heed to the present. Starmer must take that hard lesson on board. Think small as well as big. Country as well city. Somewhere (where you’re rooted, where you’ve always been) as well anywhere (where you’ve left home, you’re metropolitan, you’ve been to uni).

Charisma helps. But then Farage has a warped mind of charisma. Being ordinary also has its big advantages.

A year-long foreign-policy review has come to this …

The government’s year-long foreign policy has come to this. The UK’s focus will shift focus towards Indo-Pacific countries, described as ‘the world’s growth engine’. This, Boris Johnson asserted in parliament today, will guarantee our future economic prospects. And – at the same time – justify Brexit.

We will also, according to Johnson, have to ‘relearn the art’ of competing against countries with ‘opposing values’. Which speechwriter I wonder thought up that apparently clever phrase, ‘re-learning the art’? To be cynical, we’ve managed it pretty well to-date with Saudi Arabia. And China’s values haven’t been ours for a good few years.

(I will leave aside for now the government’s plans to increase the cap on the number of nuclear warheads to 260.  It had been due to drop to 180 under previous plans.)

This is all simply nonsense, grandiloquent nonsense. Keir Starmer, wary of Brexit-constituency MPs among his backbenchers, appears not so far to have called it out. I trust he will – we need a clear distinction to be made between the government’s damn-the-consequences hard Brexit and the close relationship with the EU which a soft Brexit would have allowed.

This EU hatred is absurd and deeply damaging.

‘Shifting focus’ is Brexit speak, an attempt to cover the disaster of turning our backs on Europe, our own backyard, which was and is and remains our best guarantee of future prosperity. Our focus has to be on Europe and the Far East. Quite apart from neglecting the vast opportunities which lie close at home this new ‘strategy’ overlooks the much higher risk in trade with the Far East. Brexit was in part predicated on a trade deal with China… that isn’t likely to happen. And stretched supply lines are fine – if you shored up your supply lines close to home.

A further consideration – will any Far Eastern country give us a better deal negotiating on our own than we’d get negotiating with Europe? There’s this false notion that the EU is somehow laggard in this area.  There will be much analysis of this switch in our national priorities over the coming days – at least, I trust there will be. But let’s call it out now for what it is – nonsense.

I note also that the government wants the UK to become a ‘science and tech superpower’ by the end of the decade. As I do. Other countries will be pursuing the same goal. We have remarkable levels of cooperation across Europe at the moment, which are currently under serious threat. Do we really think we can go it alone?

I heard this morning our Foreign Secretary asserting that we are still held in the highest regard around the world… and that may be, despite the current government’s best efforts to undermine that reputation. We will re-instate, Johnson tells us, the 0.7% of GDP assigned to foreign aid ‘when the fiscal situation allows’ – as if this was some kind of policy success. 

There’s much more to be said. But will it be? Media and parliament are sadly emasculated. Who will challenge?

Getting yourself noticed

My recent reading has as always taken in various reviews, articles, books. One day last week they seemed to come together, on the theme of ‘getting noticed’. But not in the sense of shouting from the rooftops. This blog is after all combining ‘zen’ and ‘politics’. In politics you do have to make yourself heard. Zen exists below the radar. And ‘getting noticed’ doesn’t mean you won’t be as quickly forgotten.

Mary Wollstonecraft did get noticed in her own time. And then she was all but forgotten. Proto-feminist, author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’, resident in Paris during the Terror, she was also mother of Mary Shelley, by William Godwin. (Grandmother of Frankenstein you might say.) She died in 1797. Godwin’s biography of his wife published the following year did her no favours. The opposite. ‘The more fully we are presented with the picture and story,’ Godwin wrote, ‘the more generally we shall find ourselves attached to their fate, and a sympathy in their excellencies.’ He was wrong, desperately so. Robert Southey accused Godwin of ‘a want all feeling in stripping his wife naked’. (See Richard Holmes’ This Long Pursuit.) That was mild compared to other execrations.

It’s taken two hundred years, but in our time she’s celebrated.

For someone totally different – I chanced on Hans Keller, refugee from Hitler, BBC musicologist, influential post-WW2 and through to the 1970s. Keller was in the Reithian BBC tradition, which had as its aims to ‘educate, inform, entertain’. Classical music was party of that educative purpose.

Wollstonecraft has found herself on the right side of history. Not so Keller. He wrote in 1973: ‘If we can bring ourselves to learn and practise the art of not listening to the radio, of turning it off… radio can become a cultural force of unprecedented potency.’ ‘As Nicholas Grace reviewing a new biography of Keller concludes: ‘Keller’s island of Reithian paternalism was soon to be swept away by a digital tsunami.’ (London Review of Book, February)

He may be all but forgotten, but how we listen to music, and how we concentrate when listening, they are still issues, and extend well beyond the confines of music.

Wollstonecraft and Keller brought to mind a few heroes of mine. The Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, who became a leading Civil Rights campaigner in the USA. George Orwell of course. He understood the absurdities of power better than anyone. It’s why he remains a point of reference for so many of us today. One example in my reading from last week. ‘Nationalism,’ Orwell wrote in 1945, is ‘the political doctrine of a delusional fantasist.’

People had hopes back then that we’d seen the back of the likes of Hitler and Mussolini. But nationalism still rides high. And Orwell remains as relevant as ever.

This is where where I could so easily veer away from Zen, from the pursuit of wisdom, if you will, to raw politics. I could list the hyper-nationalists of our time. From Putin across and down. Or the petty nationalists. I could include the UK reducing its foreign budget, and that would take me right back into the mire.

Also, in an earlier version of this blog I had Ed Miliband and Keir Starmer not getting heard. Rafael Behr in the Guardian suggesting that part of Starmer’s problem lay in ‘a lack of rudimentary storytelling’. In UK politics Covid and Brexit are the dominant stories. The story of the old Toryism of Major, Heseltine and Clark has all but disappeared: no-one is doing the telling.

They will find their way into future blogs. This blog has been about under the radar. We could all add the names of poets and novelists and adventurers and scientists. Just for now, Wollstonecraft and Keller, Orwell and Merton must suffice.

We live fragile times …

Evening skies are, it seems, always clear these days. Even when the day turns cloudy and cold, and winds hit 40mph, by 8pm the sky is clearing, and Venus shines brilliantly, as it has since February. It will later this year shine brightly as a morning star, and return as an evening star in the autumn of 2021. We have the certainty of billions of years.

How marked the contrast with the fragility of our Covid times. None of us knows how the exit will work out. There are two fundamental directions – two well-defined attitudes. One, a re-set to where we were. There will be some big shake-outs, but we will revert to the old norms as we did after 2008. Old inequalities may be embedded even deeper. We will be in denial.

The other, an awareness of the fragility that our climate and health crises have highlighted, translated into a determination, in Europe and the USA at least, to re-set our priorities – with regard to conditions of work and taxation, and to the way we care for our planet, and moving beyond our respective health services to the way we care for each other.  (The USA in this regard has further to go than others.)

Nadia Whittome, at 23 the youngest MP in the House of Commons, is working weekends during the crisis in a care home. She recalls how, a couple of months ago, she ‘asked Priti Patel which aspect of social care she considered to be low skilled and she couldn’t tell me’. She thinks Patel’s response might be different now. ‘We’ve found out,’ Whittome continues,’ during this pandemic whom we couldn’t do without. It’s not the offshore companies, the hedge fund managers and the bankers; it’s the porters, the cleaners, the delivery drivers, care workers.’

This is the change of emphasis, more than emphasis – a change to fundamentals, we might hope to see. Though I’m not sure I share her optimism about Patel.

But we can’t do without growth. Without it we’ve no hope of financing the vast deficit we’re racking up, rising (according to a leaked Treasury document quoted in the Telegraph) from £55 billion before the pandemic to £337 billion. Extending the furlough scheme alone could be £80 billion on its own.

At the same time, growth on its own, without a re-set, will only polarise societies even further. ‘Agitation for more progressive and distributive policies’ will not go away. (Historian Walter Scheidel, quoted in The Guardian.)

There’s little sign that the government has any understanding of this. They’ve intervened in an extraordinary way, out of sheer necessity, but their instinct is and will be to free up market forces as soon as possible. Some Tory MPs are demanding that the government shouldn’t, post-crisis, be supporting unprofitable companies. I won’t critique this daft idea further other than to say that profit is too often a short-term measure, and a poor guide to the public utility, or longer-term success, of an enterprise. And what agency would be deputed to make these decisions?

This would be a different kind of shake-out for the one we might hope for. But it would fit well with the government’s Brexit agenda. As I’ve argued before, a post-Covid financial crisis will hide the economic debacle that’s likely to follow from a country operating post-Brexit under WTO rules.

Keir Starmer has declined to join the other parties in demanding a delay to the 31st December cut-off date for negotiations with the EU. I’m not sure he’s right on this – but it does mean he keeps his powder dry. Brexit is a high-risk card to play in any form for Labour. If, or when, talks collapse, and the government shows no signs of wanting to make the compromises a free trade deal with the EU will require, he will be in a stronger position.

His focus, as it was in the second (and largely unreported) part of his reply to Boris Johnson’s speech last Monday, has to be on creating a better society post-pandemic. One, as he put it, where we no longer under-invest in our public services – and yet expect front-line workers to protect us.

I don’t want this blog to be party political. First principles for me are compassion and enterprise, or enterprise and compassion, operating in tandem. But in the current climate I have no trust in the Conservatives, and I do have some hopes that the sheer common sense and decency of Starmer might yet deliver – exactly what, time will tell.

A society, and a wider world, which is a little, maybe even a lot, less fragile, is something to aim for.

Zen and democracy

How might Zen, and Zen practice, connect with democracy? 

Let Zen be clarity, clear-thinking. That space, in Zen terms, that original space, before thoughts crowd in, and one thought leads to another, and back, and tangentially to others. We lose track, surrender judgement, make easy moral judgements, and take the short cuts that characterise a cynical mind. Hamlet had it right: ‘… for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’

Zen, and Buddhism more widely, puts other people on a par with self. Recognises compassion as our pre-eminent instinct. And once you escape self, and all the anxieties that attach, something akin to joy is revealed as innate. Not a manic or euphoric joy. Not a high, which presupposes a low to follow. You don’t have to badger yourself into being positive. It comes naturally

It’s Sunday morning. So let the sermon end here.

How might Zen connect with politics? Must it be political? First and foremost, Zen is democratic. It consults the interests of everyone. Democracy so defined is not the least-worst form of government, but as near to a miracle as you can get. And it is our ultimate challenge. How can we build out from family and locality, where we meet and consult and agree (that of course is a challenge in itself!), to national and international platforms? That will always be our challenge, renewed with every generation, with no neat Social Darwinian conclusion. No paradise, no for-all-time solution, awaits us. But it takes out our biggest enemies – the cynical mind and the lazy mind.

They are not always easy to spot. Julian Fellowes, who we all love as a conjuror of a romanticised past (and I’ll be watching Belgravia tonight), had a rant recently about how ‘the BBC, the National Theatre, the National Trust … have all been speaking with one voice. They are the left-of-centre metropolitan elite.’ ‘A kind of Hampstead voice.’

So easily does good sense get dismissed. But he claims not to take sides in these social battles. ‘I just watch people behave and how they respond… enjoy watching … human situations play out’. So, it seems, our lot takes sides, and they don’t. What depresses me is that Fellowes is a Tory peer. We need Tory politicians of the old school, who engage with ideas. Fellowes too casually allows the new-wave of doctrinaire small-state Tories take over the field. (One of the things that impressed me reading Peter Hennessy’s Never Again, about the early 1960s, is the way Harold Macmillan engaged with issues, and brought to bear the kind of intellect so obviously lacking now.)

Small state – that takes me back to my last post. We’ve a new Labour leader, with commitments to re-nationalising. He may or may not be right. Hard-core free-market economics, notionally ‘rational’ markets, matched against the beneficent hand of the state, which may, or may not, be the slippery slope which Friedrich Hayek warned against in The Road to Serfdom. It may just be that the way forward is that accursed ‘Hampstead’ weighing of arguments, seeking out a middle ground, which allows the wisest decisions – whereby, maybe, we re-nationalise railways, or in some way ‘re-involve’ the state, and subsidise the Royal Mail, but allow public utilities to stay private, under closer supervision. Or more or less, or all or none, of the above.

Big state, or small state. Both are predicated on dominant leadership. Which isn’t the same as strong leadership, which every democracy needs. British democracy is accountable democracy. That’s why it has inspired the world. I read an interesting article (Hal Foster, London Review of Books) recently about Albert Jarry’s wild and subversive play, Ubu Roi. Forgive the Freudian references. I liked it because it took me close to the dangers a cult of the leader can pose for democracy.

Ubu is ‘a travesty of sovereignty… both father and baby, both sovereign and beast; he represents the authoritarian leader as monster infant…akin to the “primal father”, the almighty patriarch who is shame-free to boot … we submit to the leader as authority and envy him as outlaw. Trump is one part Pere Ubu, one part primal father; so are Duterte, Bolsonaro, Putin…’  I’d add Xi Jinping. Boris needs to be wary he doesn’t head down the same path.

Mention of Boris reminds me of his alter ego, Dom Cummings. I’m a believer in disruption. Climate change, conservation of natural habitats and water supply, farming methods, demographics, all need radical and change-making thinking. Such matters are secondary for Cummings. He loves disruption for its own sake, and imagines he has answers where no-one else does. Pride and presupposition are dangerous attributes. Backed by big money and a loud-mouthed media they can turn a democracy. And vested interests then seek to ensure the turning is entrenched, and becomes a new normal.

And finally – the virus. How do you deal with pandemics? We were, arguably, too slow to respond in this country, and thousands of unnecessary deaths may be the consequence of that. The decisions government made were ‘science-based’. But other nations have interpreted the ‘science’ differently and acted more quickly. How much did politics influence the science? Did an instinct natural to this government cause it to delay intervention, ‘with the idea (quoting David Runciman) that hasty government intervention is often counter-productive’. This may, or may not, make for an interesting, and important, discussion in future.

Over the pond we have Trump, worried that damage to the economy could damage his re-election chances. Democratic governors are being pilloried as too cautious. In this country there is a high degree of unanimity about putting public health first. In the USA the virus has become just another part of the Great Divide.

If I wanted to cheer myself up writing this – cheer you up – I’ve failed. Democracy isn’t an easy path. And you can’t simply turn over a stone and find joy bubbling away underneath. But putting the other guy first,  looking for the common ground rather than pandering to someone’s personal ambition – they are useful starting-points.