Schrödinger’s Cake

I genuinely don’t get all the column inches devoted to the slip-up/deliberate revelation that the government’s position on Brexit can be summed up as, ‘have cake and eat it’. After all, notwithstanding the metaphysical fallacy of possessing something which no longer exists, isn’t having all the cake the default starting position for all negotiations? Going in to Brussels armed with the feeble demand that we only want a few crumbs is a stance more suited to the Jeremy Corbyns of the world than to any rational Anglophile.

But the media, perhaps sensing their days of credibility are numbered, are grasping at straws to attract business to their increasingly ad-encumbered web pages, where clients linger for a few seconds before being driven away by the incessant barrage of pop-ups, auto-start video and animations, none of which bring anything resembling ‘enhancement’ to the experience. Even Radio 4’s PM programme had a discussion about ‘Schrödinger’s Brexit’; something which could both exist and not exist until somebody looked at it, when it would then be in only one state of being.

While most of those who voted to leave are quietly getting on with business, or better yet, planning for the opportunities which Brexit will bring and thus preparing themselves to both possess and devour all the cake coming their way, the clamour of naysayers shows no sign of abating. The Schrödinger comparison was actually quite apt in that the world is divided into three camps; those who are intrigued by the whole cat-in-a-box conundrum and will lie awake at night worrying about it, those who know that, alive or dead, the cat isn’t the issue and those who are blissfully unaware that anybody is worrying about a fictional bloody cat.

Asking for predictions about Brexit, complaining that the starting point is wanting everything and all the time talking down our prospects sounds just like petulant teens claiming their parents are ‘ruining their lives’, then locking themselves in their bedrooms and proceeding to stew themselves into a frenzy of loathing, thus bringing albeit temporary ruin to their lives. Brexit will be what we make it and repeatedly shouting that the UK cannot survive ‘on its own’ is hardly helping towards the positive outcomes that, surely, help everybody.

Try telling a child you can't have your cake and eat it.

You hear talk of children ‘divorcing’ their parents; I wish this lot would get on with it. But hey, in the meantime you can amuse yourself by getting in a lather about potentially racist money. The new UK £5-note contains traces of animal and is thus untouchable by vegans and some minority religious sects who haven’t yet worked out that, A) God doesn’t exist and B) If he did, he wouldn’t be worth worshipping if he cared about you coming into contact with what he’d created. All of which goes to prove that even if you did manage to both have your cake and eat it, some people would still never be happy.

Cheeky Fakers!

You are entering a world of pain. A dark forest in which Little Red Riding Hood is swallowed whole by the wolf and instantly dies, to be slowly digested along with grandma as the wolf sleeps off his repast. There is no woodcutter, there is no happy ending. Nature gets its way and they stay dead forever. Is that what you want? Is it? Is it? Well then if you want the happy ending you have to listen up and do what you are told, else it’s the dark, dark woods of truth for you!

It’s only a story, but the swirling mists of disinformation thrive on the primal desire for happy endings and the fear of being thought a bad person. Any deviation from the narrowly defined path is met with stern stares and dirty labels; descriptions such as psychopath and misfit are anathema to a race comprised of individuals who, above anything, want to fit in. So a long litany of epithets exists whose sole purpose is to mark out an individual as a dangerously different from the supposedly settled will of the masses.

Being berated as a racist is losing ground though, as ever more tiny transgressions against approved thought are called out as racist. Wanting to live among people like yourself has been denounced once too often as evidence of ‘far-right’ allegiances when in fact it is nothing more than wanting to feel comfortable and safe. The increasingly desperate lies that organisations like Tell Mama promulgate are beginning to look unhinged; those who cry wolf without a thought are themselves becoming marginalised and irrelevant.

The campaign to leave the EU was never waged by a government in waiting. The referendum wasn’t an election and the suggestion that what we paid to the EU for no net return could be spent here at home on one of the institutions held most dear by the lefties and remainers was only ever that, a suggestion an idea, a possibility. And a clever one at that, in the scheme of things, as it focused attention on how our hard-won public finances were spent. It was a story to appeal to a target audience and it may have done the trick.

Attempts to now call ‘broken promise’ when the promise was in nobody’s gift is disingenuous at best, downright dishonest in reality. But if you honestly thought you were saving the NHS by voting out and now completely regret that decision then frankly you ought not to be voting at all. This is just another fairy tale the remainers cling to, that out-voters didn’t know what they were voting for, while, presumably, in-voters were marvellously well-informed and competent to exercise their ballot.

Among the other lies – and there are many - confected by the losers is the idea that the right is rising. But there is no real organised right as such; the only organised politics is leftist in origin and using terms like ‘far-right’ and ‘extreme-right’ is just driving the wedge deeper between politics and people. All that’s really happening is that the ‘man in the street’ tired of being ignored is saying okay, you’ve had your fun but the world cannot function on advisers and focus groups and studies and experts in things nobody needs to understand. We need machines and tools and food and stuff grounded in reality and all of that requires real work not fancy words.

But still the war of words continues as the increasingly fake news site, The Guardian, does its bit by helping to create the story rather than just telling it. In a preposterous piece of naked propaganda it spins the yarn that in the aftermath of Saint Jo Cox’s death 50,000 tweets ‘celebrated’ her death. Notwithstanding the fact that this number pales into insignificance against the numbers who burned effigies in the streets on Margaret Thatcher’s demise or wish death on Tories on a daily basis, the story is based not on rejoicing in her death but rather refuting the canonisation of a politician not in tune with her party’s core supporters. 

"What a big tongue you have, Grand-mama!"

"All the better to lie to you with..."

And never knowingly out band-wagonned, Sunny Hundal leaps aboard the Jo Cox Express to denounce the new Ukip leader as soon as his win is announced with his claim that Paul Nuttall is metaphorically marching death squads to the doors of other Labour incumbents. The hyperbole is almost deafening as the story-tellers of the mesmerised try to maintain their hold on their listeners, while increasingly losing their grip on reality. But it's time to let reality back in. The big, bad wolf won... get over it.

Is the new world brave enough?

It’s a strange old world, isn’t it? Man is undoubtedly a pack animal and as such we are always happy to have a set of rules to follow. Rules mean we don’t have to think for ourselves and generally speaking, the majority of humans who have ever lived have done so without needing to synthesize an original thought. The sun comes up; it goes down. It gets warm in summer and cold in winter and the crops respond; learn to make hay while the sun shines and you have the basis of survival despite the tyranny of nature.

Once you get rules you get religion, with a bunch of men dressing funny, saying that god told them to and by the way, here are some more rules. And he said he wanted Keith here to be in charge. Now, call me cynical, but how come nobody called Keith out on his literally ridiculous new dress, his insistence that god wanted us to multiply and go forth and - much as he’d love to help with the graft - toil harder in the fields so Keith didn’t have to? Religion has tyrannised mankind for millennia and devised ever more structures, strictures and controls in the process; the divine right of kings, good ones or bad, is sanctioned by such irrational beliefs.

And we’ve lapped it up. It seems we are never so happy as when we are under some kind of tyrannical regime, doing as we are told – and here’s the best bit – actually punishing each other for falling out of line. The age of religion may be waning, at least in the civilised world, but the need to be bullied into conformity – even the kind of youthful conformity that tries to look different by all dressing and thinking the same – endures, deep in our instincts. Here, in the age of global politics, with the promise of a level of scrutiny over the internet which challenges even the omnipotence of former gods, we still seek the tyranny of thought.

However, when we try to exercise our rights to abide by the common consensus it seems that might is no longer right. The high priests of the new religions, born of post-religious political thought, will not relinquish their hold on us without a fight. And in the new language, straight from the literal word of Marx (peas be upon him) what was once worshipped as democracy becomes, in the words of John Major, the tyranny of the masses. The epithet, 'post-truth', is apt. Up is down, left is right and right is wrong... if those in charge say so.

Castro. G... T... ex.

It is fitting then, that yesterday, post-truth met its apotheosis  - its elevation to divine status – as the world acknowledged the death of a man who has been a tyrant to his people for over fifty years, yet lived as a shining beacon of social justice for millions of devoted followers who would never have to bear his wrath. It is interesting to see which world leaders praised Castro, as one of the last bastions of communism began its inevitable descent into destruction. Tyranny of the masses, Mr Major? It looks more like the clear vision of the forgotten. Democracy may yet have its day.

Legal Eagles

The watchword of these days is ‘uncertainty’, as if the absolute certainty of all those dire economic forecasts that were to befall the post-referendum nation had been realised and now the only thing that can save us is to believe the same doom-mongers and overturn the will of the people. In the seventies they warned about global cooling. By the nineties it had become global warming and now it is referred to as climate change. Why not call it what it is – climate uncertainty, because it’s uncertainty that is the real evil here?

But that is a bogus claim, as uncertainty is the normal state of affairs in human society, so it is a clever trick that has been performed, to demonise that normal state, blame it for everything and then imply that somehow threatening to ignore the outcome of a vote will restore us to certainty. In fact, people already voted for more certainty; they want the certainty of their wages not being undercut by outsiders with no stake in Britain. They want the certainty that criminals will be deterred from their actions. Most of all, they want the certainty that when the government seeks a mandate and gets it, the government will act on it.

There are few real certainties, other than death and taxes... and Tony Blair seeking a return to public life. But there is one cast iron certainty - to paraphrase the pledge that put us in our current state of turmoil – and that is, whatever happens whatever it costs, somebody, somewhere will be making money from it. Financial gurus, stoking the fears and making the markets, rent-seeking, professional ‘advisors’ attaining positions of influence and altering the circumstances of many without ever having to atone for their mistakes. And of course, the legal profession.

In Dickens’ Bleak House, the law firm Jarndyce and Jarndyce which is, ‘of course’, acting only in the best interest of their clients, emerge the only winners, having spent the entirety of a considerable fortune to pay their fees and thus solved the knotty problem of how that fortune was to be distributed. Recourse to law has been the refuge of both victims and their villains throughout social history and its verdicts have been the source of much anger and frustration. So it is unusual to see the passing of lawyers as the reason for national morning.

But, on one recent occasion there was an enormous turnout to witness the laying to rest of not one, but two prominent local legal eagles. The funeral procession included two horse-drawn hearses behind which walked a man leading a large Rottweiler. A few paces behind, several hundred more people followed the man and his dog. Curious, I approached the man and asked what was going on. “The first hearse carries my ex-wife's lawyer," he said. "My dog bit him and he died two days later. The second hearse is for the lawyer who opposed me in some business litigation. My dog bit him and he also died.”

I pondered for a moment what he had told me and walked a few paces alongside the pair. Like many of us, I have harboured my share of animus with the legal profession. I asked him, with a wry smile as I did, “Could I borrow your dog?” He barely glanced up, but I could see a ghost of a smile on his lips. “Of course, you can. That’s fine by me” he said, and gestured at the procession behind, “but you're going to have to wait your turn, like all the others.”

Autumn Statement

Why do we put ourselves through the annual – recently bi-annual - ordeal of suspending our natural inclination to pragmatism for a day in which everybody has to pretend to believe in A) what the Chancellor of the Exchequer says, or B) the opposite of what the Chancellor of the Exchequer says? The big guns of the Office for Budget Responsibility is wheeled in to present grandiose projections of what might happen in the future, always supposing the world doesn’t end tomorrow, after which everybody gets up and A) agrees with the OBR’s projections, or B) flatly refutes the OBRs outrageous assumptions.

The economy, one might paraphrase, is an ass. It is an ass, donkey-wise, in that it is driven by simple desires and it is an ass, sphincter-wise, in that it has the propensity to shit on anybody at any time, unless you have taken the wise precaution to stock up on economic Imodium®. Of course the notion of saving for a rainy day has taken many knocks of late given the ultra-low interest rates and the dangerously uncertain nature of investment in shares, whose value is determined not by reality but by perception.

For a start, there is the sheer generalisation of all the forecasts, assuming that everybody will behave in the same way and not seek to act independently of groupthink. Actually, that’s not so bad an assumption - proportion of people who do actually manage to go off-grid is vanishingly small. But you don’t need to decouple from the economy altogether in order to exert some control over it. There is talk of falling consumer demand; surely a large part of that is down to simple caution. The numbers don’t need to be very large for the cumulative effect to be noticeable.

If every family – say 30 million households – spends £2 a week less, (less than a stupidly-named coffee in Starbucks) that’s £100 per year and thus, at a stroke, £3billion fewer pounds-Sterling per year circulating in the economy. And if an outcome is that Starbucks branches close down, consumers have lost nothing but the spurious notion of choice. Oh, but wait, they have exercised choice in quitting the daft habit of queuing with hipsters to collect an overpriced cup of brown liquid to then wander the streets with. (I never did understand the attraction of portable coffee as a status-signalling fashion accessory.)

But, you object, what of the employees of those now empty cafes? Well, tough, but it may just have the knock-on effect of making those now ex-employees seek more fruitful and useful employment. It might cause more parents to encourage more kids to work harder at more useful subjects than ‘Being Everybody’s Soulmate Studies’ and in a few years Chancellor Hammond’s longed-for increased productivity might actually come about. As gently as you might want to be with others it is my experience that a kick up the arse is often a far better way of focusing the productive mind than groups hugs and clearing-the-air meetings; everyone’s input is not of equal value.

How the budget works...

Of course, everything bad is blamed on Brexit and everything good is just – phew – lucky happenstance. In reality the budget is never either good or bad, it is a simple fucking about with numbers, a political prestidigitation to make believe that somebody, somewhere has their hairy mitts on the levers of economic power. If the media gloom over ‘the cost of Brexit’ manages to achieve one thing – the big kick up the arse that persuades more people to take responsibility for their own budgets, rather than imagining government can do it for them – it will have been worth every penny.