Dreamers

You have to feel sorry for Jeremy Corbyn, really. This man of principles appears to have abandoned every one of them since he took the reins of what is left of the Labour Party. A career-long opponent of the EU, he now painfully claims to want to retain membership of the single market. A once proud defender of ‘British jobs for British people’ he now has to declare that freedom of movement for low-skilled workers, lowering wages and displacing Labour’s traditional voter base is a price he is willing to accept for said membership. A former red ‘firebrand’ he now meekly acquiesces to the EU’s impositions on its workers.

After a week which he began with his ‘yeah, but no, but, yeah, but...’ clarification of his multiple and varying stances on these policies he has taken the stage at the Fabians conference and left with yet more egg on his face. His latest policy response to the laughter and despair he aroused last week is to re-establish his commitment to the very worst, simplistic principles of Marxism and populist socialism. The answer, he really wants to say, is nationalise everything. Starting with the trains and moving on to care homes, if his heart isn’t in the right place then there goes the last possible excuse for indulging his fantasies.

The formula ‘make everybody better off’ as a starting point is nothing but a soundbite for the masses. The idea that you can achieve this by making some people worse off is pure cant. And the proposal that you can keep happy those on the lower rungs of the earnings ladder by propping them up with state charity is demeaning and preposterous. Anybody can stand on a stage and say they will ‘save’ the NHS, or improve the railways, or tackle Britain’s productivity shortfall, or make our schools the envy of the world. But without a credible means by which any of these things might be achieved you may as well say you will levitate or reveal god, or resurrect the dead.

Actually, Corbyn has already brought many policies back from the electoral graveyard and is somehow keeping them on artificial life support to no discernible purpose. Even failed communist plans deserve a decent burial and to be left to rest in peace. But listening to Comrade Jeremy, I can’t help but feel like Winston Smith; I’ve heard all this before, I remember it didn’t work the first time, or the next, or the next, but I am being asked to believe that, as under Common Core, three times four can equal eleven.

Children grow up dreaming and hoping and imagining bright futures where anything is possible. For a very fortunate few, success comes about by accidents; of birth, of opportunity, of flashes of inspiration, of being in the right place at exactly the right time, of sheer luck. But the majority will only succeed by applying themselves to acquire the skills and responsibilities that participation in our system of mostly benign capitalism requires. The high dreams fade and are tempered into realistic objectives as the reality hits home. Somebody should shake Jeremy gently by the shoulder and wake the poor old fucker up.

Humanomics

While politicians imagine they are playing chess and planning many moves ahead, only to be thwarted in turns by equally clever players doing likewise the rest of us get on with life as it is usually lived. We react serially and occasionally in parallel with events as they arrive at our door. Problems, hardships, opportunities, threats... win or lose, we meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same. Here at ground zero, planet reality, we know that life ain’t fair and not everything goes always to plan. Chess it is not; chaos, more like.

The Domino Theory, the Butterfly Effect, the Law of Unintended Consequences. If Newton were today formulating his laws in relation to human interaction he might observe that every action has an unequal and not entirely proportionate, not necessarily opposite reaction. Press this button and what happens? Nothing to see here, but a butterfly in the Amazon has just been squashed by a falling tree... that nobody heard. The tumbling dice of everyday life on earth knows no easy solutions except the aggregated effects of the millions of one-to-one interactions that make up real human economics... ‘humanomics’.

When you analyse all those possibilities though, it turns out there aren’t a gazillion different responses to stimuli but in fact just a few: fear, revulsion, love, curiosity and some in-between shades we give clever names to but which are just shadows of the eat/fight/fuck programming of our primitive brains. Tip the first domino and watch them all fall in a horrible, slow-motion inevitability, one after the other. Cause and effect, time after time. Instead of planning theoretical chess moves those oh-so-important leaders might want to stand and observe how the chips actually fall.

A million people are in motion. Like water they flow where you let them. If you open your borders wide it should come as no surprise that they flood in. If you suddenly slammed the door shut, Mrs Merkel, did you think the flow would be turned off like a tap? Put a rock in the stream and the bifurcated migrant-Mississippi will find other routes; if the gaps through which those torrents flow are too narrow the pressure will build and down will come somebody else’s flood defences. Hungary, Croatia, Serbia... one after one they falter and tumble.

All very pretty till it flaps its wings

Was this the best that the EU could come up with? Over the forty-odd years we’ve been paying in (and increasingly so in the last decade) the EU has shown itself incapable of dealing with even the simplest attempts at harmonisation. Imagining it can exist as a central planning regime after the Soviet model, a bunch of detached, unelected, comfortably made men and women make their unhinged decisions, imagining the stupid humans beneath them will quietly acquiesce. But although true academic chaos theory involves quantum mechanics, predicting that if you push people they will push back is hardly rocket science.