creation follows destruction: a new Culloden

Joseph Schumpeter began his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy thus: "Can capitalism survive? No. I do not believe it can." He went on by explaining that "capitalism...would spawn a large intellectual class that made its living by attacking the very bourgeois system of private property and freedom so necessary for the intellectual class’s existence. "

I felt an echo of this in the preamble of Gordon Rayner's article on the British £37 billion bail-out of banks - leaving it in charge of £500 billion of British mortgages - in the Daily Telegraph yesterday: "October 13, 2008, will go down in history as the day the capitalist system in Britain admitted defeat". However, in the same paper, Martin Vander Weyer's "Countdown to Recovery" refers to a novel theory of capitalism Schuster expounded in the same book, creative destruction - the concept whereby economies develop through new technologies and thinking, evolving to replace the old order in what sounds like a shivaistic dance of breaking-down and renewal.

This process seems to refer to whole countries as well as sectors. On the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2, Alan Cochrane, the Telegraph's Scottish Editor, referred to Westminister's buy-outs of the majority shares in HBOS and RBS as a a "massive blow" to Alex Salmond, Scotland's First Minister, noting that the Scottish Executive was unable to broker a deal to take over the banks domestically.

The Scotsman's leader article, however, shows that the implications of what happened yesterday haven't yet sank in. It notes the "as yet incalculable consequences for the political economy of Scotland" of the "humiliation of this admission of catastrophic failure [and] the injury inflicted on national morale", but goes on to conclude that "Scotland's banks have not been levelled flat". The point is, those banks that are being nationalised that were - nominally - Scottish are Scottish no more. They belong to Westminster now - ie to the taxpayers of Great Britain. Guess where most of them live? To add insult to injury, the title of Bill McLaren's article today shows that some of my countrymen are coping with the crisis by pointing at "the auld enemy": "Government's rescue plan cloaks what will be a financial Culloden".

What a historical bloomer: Charlie wanted to be the king of Britain, not Scotland. The Young Pretender had no more care for the ordinary Scots than the banks did. On vine's show, a fromer RBS manager called "Clare" spoke of having to meet quotas of people called in for reviews as a pretext for selling them loans.

In April, The Spectator's Fraser Nelson wrote about Alex Salmond's policy of nudging the English towards independence. Case in point: the Campaign for an English Parliament, of which I am a member, has issued a press release detailing benefits that the aforementioned taxpayers will be paying for but which will not be available in England. Except, will these benefits still be distributed in the Shumpeteresque wave of financial refashioning that is coming?

My guess is that they will. Not only that, but it's not unlikely that Labour Government pressure on the banks it will have representatives on may seek greater parity of loans for members of their pet disadvantaged groups - the selfsame policy which has been laid at the door of Bill Clinton for setting parameters for the financial sector that were always going to bring us here.

As I've said before, regardless of what Scotland does, England will never be independent of it while both remain in the European Union; the monies which presently disappear north with the Barnett formula will simply be rerouted through Brussels. So the situation seems more grim on reading Cranmer's reference to Former EU Commissioner for Belgium (itself riven by secessionists) Viscount Etienne Davignon's speech in Ireland, stating that governments should stand down if they do not ratify the Lisbon treaty; not ratifying it was not an option, according to him.

Cranmer compared his language to that of quondam monarchs who insisted on their divine right to rule. This belief was a signal failing in the Stuart line, which ensured that James II/VII was the last of them to rule in Britain, and engendered the hubris in his son which ended in Culloden.

So maybe the hubris which has brought us here should be rewarded with the same short shrift. As "Clare" said to Vine, this was not just down to CEO's: "it's time bigwigs in the boardroom who forced staff to do pressure selling whould be named and shamed".

And hopefully, in time, Schumpeter's destruction will fuel a creation that might be something quite changed, different from what we know now, but free from an excess of hubris and still capitalism.


NB: The item on the financial situation can be listened to again on Jeremy Vine's page on the BBC website, and will remain there until Sunday 19 October.

beautiful vermin - getting to the meat of the thing

Earlier this week, Professor Calculus informed me that he'd been given a rabbit and a hare. Since he didn't have the facilities to store them, he asked me to do so, and told me to keep the hare. So I put them in the freezer, then informed Minima and Minora.

Minima wasn't bothered; but from Minora's reaction, you'd think that I'd killed Maxima and offered them her in sandwiches. Like many adolescents, she knows that she opposes something with all her heart, but she's not quite worked out what it is yet, so the issue of killing animals was as good a cause as anything to get overheated about.

I tried to tell her that wild Leporidae were vermin, but she wasn't having any of it. She replied that they were beautiful, and I agreed: they're beautiful vermin. So I asked her what she had against the farmers whose crops rabbits etc ate, at which she had a fit of procrastination and went to her room to put some thump-thump-thump music on.

Anyway, I took the rabbit up to Calculus' place after a night's thawing: he showed me how to skin and "paunch" the beast, ie take its guts out. His dog Granum had a feast, and I wondered, am I going to be able to do that with the hare?

At home, I took the hare out of its plastic bag. Its pelt was smooth, and reminded me of the fur of our cat, Magus. It had been shot in the head, which had a couple of drops of blood on it. Even so, it was a handsome beast, and I raised the knife with trepidation.

I hacked its legs off first, above the elbows. Then I cut down the belly with Maxima's sharpest knife, pausing to wipe fur off the cutting edge. Paunching it wasn't as hard as I thought: I'd been worried about piercing the gut, but thankfully this never happened. I was surprised by the amount of force that was required to remove the pelt and flesh from the corpse. So had Professor Calculus with the rabbit - maybe they're not supposed to be frozen.

Even despite the ongoing supermarket price war, I've heard talk of hares and rabbits becoming more popular as a form of nourishment because they exist, free range, up and down the countryside. Their killing is a service not only to landowners, but often also to the cereal-eating public (ie just about everybody). And it's perfectly possible to kill them cleanly; the British Association for Shooting and Conservation has an information page on shooting rabbits which includes information on choosing an airgun and ammunition for "A well-placed shot [to] result in a clean, humane kill", and advises "You should never attempt to shoot a rabbit that’s more than 35 metres away, and only then with a headshot that will kill him cleanly."



I looked up cooking times in my Gran's old cookbook then added some just to be safe - penicillin wasn't discovered until eight years after the book was published, but now antibiotics are all over the damn place, including in the water supply that's used for irrigation. The hare meat was tender and not particularly strong-tasting, and after Maxima gotten over me disembowelling the thing in her kitchen she chopped and threw in a couple of onions and tatties. She joined me in eating some of the meat, as did Minima, but Minora remained green around the gills and sat huffily watching an anime video.

At a time when the prevailing financial conditions are pushing people away from money and back to bartering (including beer for game), it looks like eating game is going to become more mainstream than I've ever seen it (although the animals I saw most often in Glasgow were pigeons, rats and foxes). Which brings up the issue of how taxation for goods and services exchanged in a non-monetary system is going to be calculated and what the penalties will be for non-payment. And, although Labour's on-off manifesto commitment to shooting is currently "on", will any of the monies raised by bartering involving game be used to appease those anti-shoot campaigners who still form a significant minority within that party?

But all that's for another day. I'm famished now - I think I'll go and finish off the hare.

show and tell and war

The concept of show-and-tell sessions at school, although relatively new in the UK, is familiar to me; my Mum worked as, among other things, a secretary in a school attached to a Catholic church in New York in the early '60's. So, when Minima came home and told us her history class was putting on a form of show and tell for older kids, I knew the sort of thing she meant.

Her class was tasked with tracing their family trees, finding out where times of their predecessor's lives intersected with history, and bringing in some sort of artefact connected with one such crux.

I had no hesition and gave her a battered tin of my mother's, which contained most of what we have left of my Grandad, and told her about the contents.

There are two cap badges in it, one of which is from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. This was, however, his second regiment. The batallion of his first (the other cap badge, I think, is from the Highland Light Infantry), I've learnt at my mother's knee, was wiped out in France, and he stayed in the ASH when the survivors were brought within their fold.

First things first: he lied about his age to join the army and escape his job at the Parkhead Forge in Glasgow. Exploitative child labour in Great Britain had been attacked from all points on the political spectrum since the mid-1800's, but a coalition of distant managers, unprincipled gaffers and negligent parents conspired in to keep it going in some outfits for longer than is generally recognised in the history books.

Another precious reminder of him is a decaying photograph of a proud young sergeant taken not too long before the start of the Great War, which was far too fragile to entrust to Minima's enthusiastic mercies. It was as a sergeant that Grandad, Jim, first became empowered. A junior officer not long out of training school had come to his barracks, and soon picked up that if a soldier came to the Sergeant for a chit requiring a form to be filled in, Jim would make the soldier write what had to be entered on the form on the blackboard in the office. When asked why, he'd reply "I've got to check you's can all read an' write!"

It didn't take the officer long to click that Jim was functionally illiterate, and was simply copying the squiggles on the blackboard onto the forms, so he had Jim sent onto a literacy course. It was the making of him.

During the crucible of the Great War which made some men, broke others and rendered yet more silent on the subject until their deaths, Jim was able to use his own knowledge to "look after" the officer. In the Gallipoli campaign, for example, he advised the officer to order soldiers to pick up their comrades' corpses and put them on their backs. Turkish machine-guns were ahead of them, but some of the Allied ships behind were aiming their gunfire too low.

After the war, the two men never met again. But the officer - I wish I knew his name - never forgot his first Sergeant, and went to his funeral in the mid-50's.

Meanwhile, during the Second World War, Jim was too old to go abroad. But he played an important role training troops in Maryhill Barracks, Glasgow, which also acted as a receiving point for deserters. He would retrieve deserters from all over Scotland, and take them to his home for a bowl of soup before he handed them over to Maryhill: during WWI, he'd been one of the NCO's to realise that a conscript who had, for whatever reason, passed a certain point of panic was a liability, and had colluded in shooting off toes or trigger fingers.

Grandad had to sell most of his medals to collectors to get by, but couldn't bear to part with his WWI and WWII campaign medals. He was, however, especially proud of his Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders cap-badge, which is why I think my Mum was so protective of it. She said he was disappointed in those Scots, predominantly Glaswegians, who mispronounced the name of the regiment as "Argyll and Southern Highlanders". It betrays geographical ignorance of colossal proportions - Sutherland is the northernmost part of Scotland, so-called because to the Vikings it was the land to the south.

Although war-wounded to a degree that at times disabled him, Jim was refused help because in his more robust days he'd been a political agitator for an ideology that seems now to be de rigeur in Europe. But he was no ideologue: the memories of staying up all nights to protect eight newborns - three of whom survived to their teens - from rats left him angry. He was a member of the Independent Labour Party, but wasn't able to contribute many ideas because he couldn't afford the fees to make it to their summer schools. I thank God that shortly before he died he saw his first grandchild - my cousin.

I also thank God that he died before people of his own political persuasion capitulated to the ambivalence that left-wingers now feel about patriotism. It's obviously good that the Government has moved to protect the savings and the aspirations of people who invested their money in banks that appeared to be safe. But where was that support when British solders were being killed and injured because their vehicles were not up to the standard required to protect those inside them from landmines?

US spending for the welfare of veterans was $33 billion in 2006. I am unable to find the equivalent UK figure.

Rest in peace, Jim. I pray that you and my Mum are waiting for me so that we can have a ding-dong of epic proportions.

society's evolution to the financial

The Language of the Genes
Steve Jones
Flamingo 1994
pp 347

I was tucking into my curried tatties - Maxima is half-Irish and can do anything with the damn things - minding my own business this evening, when the author of a book I'm reading came on Chris Evans' Radio 2 show.

Steve Jones is an evolutionary biologist who started his career as a malacologist (snail-ologist), and I was given his book, The Language of the Genes, by a friend who expected to enjoy watching me explode in righteous inarticulacy. Instead, I was riveted.

Most geneticists have to deal with the fact that their science had inauspicious origins, and Jones deals with this frankly in the introduction. Social Darwinism was founded largely by liberal Victorian thinker Herbert Spencer and Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's half-cousin. Through Galton's influence, the movement - which mortified Darwin - morphed from letting evolution carry on without interferences such as healthcare and philanthropy into eugenics, which was very much involved with interfering with evolution. The pseudo-science served as a cover for figures from all parts of the political spectrum who were concerned for the future of the white race - whatever race is apart from societally-determined constructs based on arbitrary classification of features, mainly (but not exclusively) skin colour. Jones relates an anecdote towards the end of the book:

In 1987, a secretary from Virginia sued her employer for discriminating against her because she was black. She lost the case on the grounds that, as she had red hair, she must be white. She then worked for a black employer and, undaunted by her earlier experience, sued her for discriminating against her as she was white. She lost again: the court found that she could not be white as she went to a black school.

That all this was not consumed in the obscene flames of the Holocaust is borne out by both last century's history and recent events.

In Fatal Misconception: the Struggle to control World Population, Matthew Connelly relates how de Gaulle thought that post-war France had become too "Latinized", and approved a scheme for "an infusion of Nordic blood" which included persuading German prisoners of war to marry French women.

A row has recently erupted about a pioneer of eugenics being featured on stamps. As the Daily Telegraph's Gerald Warner points out, Marie Stopes was an ardent admirer of Hitler, supported compulsory sterilisation of the "diseased", and formulated the slogan "Joyful and Deliberate Motherhood, A Safe Light in our Racial Darkness". (Her organisation was called the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress; it bears no links to Marie Stopes International - this was born when the Population Services Family Planning Programme bought the rights to her name from the British Eugenics Society post-WWII.)

Combining a lightness of touch with the depth of his knowledge of his subject, Jones then proceeds to take us on a journey of discovery that passes through biochemistry, virology, palaeopathology, discrimination, the evolution of evolutionary science and gender politics. Indeed, three-quarters of my family would be pleased to read in the chapter on The Battle of the Sexes that "We are still not certain why males exist; and why, if we must have them at all, nature needs so many...the frank answer is that...although the reason for the existence of women is obvious enough, nobody has any real idea what point there is in being a man."

I would answer that one in the words of Genesis 1:27: "So God created man in his own image...male and female he created them". And for good reason: as Jones points out, the product of sexual reproduction is a genetically unique individual every time, whereas in asexual reproduction, an unfavourable mutation is there to stay. Jones, however is not a man of faith; but, while he holds some strong views on creationism, he is not an ideologue like, say, Richard Dawkins - he refers to Biblical quotes several times in his arguments; although he might not believe in the historical books, he unashamedly points to their feasibility.

Another point at which he diverges from Dawkins is in his refusal to reduce human beings to disposable vehicles for genetic material; he states: "To make too much of the shared DNA of chimps and humans is to be in danger of falling into...foolishness. Humans, uniquely, are what they think." Later, in case the point hasn't got through, he refers to Dawkins' book The Blind Watchmaker (which is a parody of William Paley's parable of finding a watch in a field and realising that it must have been, as we might say, "intelligently designed"):

There is a danger of seeing the whole of biology as evidence of natural selection. Just as Paley saw the complexity of life as an argument for God, there is a neo-Paleyism which plagues evolutionary theory. It argues that all animal structure is well adapted so that it must always reflect the action of selection...Some feel that the Darwinian theory drives the whole of evolution from the order of the bases in DNA to the shape of the nose...Another beauty - and an important weakness - of the theory of evolution by natural selection is that with a little imagination it is possible to come up with an explanation of anything...Many are fantasy, but because they invoke events which took place in the distant past they are almost impossible to refute.

The Language of the Genes concludes with a reflection on the dangers of making too much of the genome, in which he refers (in 1994) to a movement "to add to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights a statement that everyone has the right to a genetic constitution which has not been changed without their consent". In 2004, the Vatican's International Theological Commission released Communion and Stewardship: Human Persons Created in the Image of God, which was published under the auspices of Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Paragraph 91 states:

"The uniqueness of each human person, in part constituted by his biogenetic characteristics and developed through nurture and growth, belongs intrinsically to him [sic] and cannot be instrumentalized in order to improve some of these characteristics...Such modifications would in any case violate the freedom of future persons who had no part in decisions that determine his bodily structure and characteristics in a significant and possibly irreversible way [but] gene therapy...would help the individual to give full expression to his real identity which is blocked by a defective gene.

By 2006, the best that UNESCO's Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights had come up with was that "The impact of life sciences on future generations, including on their genetic constitution, should be given due regard".

Much of this section might have been written last week, instead of over a decade ago. Jones tells us of an insurance company that offered to test a couple's unborn child for the gene for cystic fibrosis "only if the parents agreed to have an abortion if the test was positive". Mass testing might (then) cost £50,000 per person for every case of cystic fibrosis "prevented" - "much less than the cost of lifelong treatment" (although he notes that a hundred times more people may carry the gene than have the disease). This is the logic, I think, that will increasingly inform the policy-making of government, health and insurance agencies should the present financial crisis turn out to be a long-term phenomenon. Which poses the question: are people with disabilities, health-needs or a probability of developing these in the light of their genome seen to have any intrinsic value? (Jones: "Is a damaged gene a pre-existing condition?")

The reason that Jones was appearing on Evans' show was down to his statement - fleshed out in an article he has written for the Telegraph - amplifying TLG's conclusion that "it looks as if the human mutation rate is on its way down...we are almost at the end of [our] evolutionary road". So the eugenicists have failed in their bids to control human evolution - but the ethical dilemmas we inherited from them have not left us, they have merely mutated from the racial sphere to the financial.

Tesco: a different view always helps

Yesterday's Cambridge News reported that a Cambridge City Council has finished hearing four days' of evidence regarding an appeal by Tesco's against decisions to refuse permission to the chain to install an extension and plant into a shop void which the Council has already given it permission to move into.

This story has been running all year in the face of a concerted anti-Tesco campaign which has included submissions to the Council from Germany and Australia. It has included a 600-strong protest march, a petition containing over 4,000 signatures, and a dedicated facebook group.

However, a related Facebook group called Let's turn Mill Road into chains free zone unintentionally puts my own argument into a nutshell:

Mill Road is an extraordinary street on which it is possible to drink Arabic coffee or fine wines; where you can worship in a Mosque, a Hindu shrine or a Baptist church; where you can eat foie gras or fish and chips, tom yum or chicken tikka lababda; where you can stock up on herbs and spices from aam to zedoary.

My argument, and that of many others who are too busy to march down Mill Road, is: which of the above is a Tesco Metro going to threaten? (Although I'm a bit doubtful about the claim for foie gras; the last mention of it in Cambridge I recall was when a restaurant selling the delicacy was vandalised by animal-rights protestors. The story made me feel tempted to develop a foie gras habit.)

As well as being able to access all of the above, there are more goods you can buy on Mill Road - cannabis seeds and the means to grow them, second-hand firearms and hard-core pornography. In this context, I was surprised to learn that Cambridge's MP David Howarth is supporting the campaign against Tesco's opening in Mill Road: there are more important issues affecting the thoroughfare.

Like, for example, Lib Dem Councillor Kilian Bourke's plan to make Mill Road a shared space. I'm not saying that removing signage and road markings would not make motorists think more carefully about what they were doing, but the No Mill Road Tesco campaign's own video shows how busy the road can get; I don't see the wisdom of removing demarcation between those parts of the road used by drivers and those by pedestrians. The Wikipedia article linked to above states: "Shared space zones are very frightening for the blind and partially sighted who cannot visually negotiate their way with other road users, as the lack of separation implicit in these schemes has also has removed their safe space".

I'm rather unhappy with the video as it gives no indication of the time of day it was taken - during term time, much of Cambridge is practically gridlocked, not just Mill Road, for the school runs. When I was in town the other day, I saw how vulnerable the road was to stoppages when a huge Co-op van blocked the whole road while maneuvring into the street running down the side of the supermarket.

Which brings me to the reason why the Mill Road situation has been in my mind recently. Last week I went to an event at Cambridge University facilitated by the Co-op; it had been planned for a previous date, but a delay held it back until the week before the Tesco hearing. One of the speakers, I see from my notes, brought up the subject of the chain's own farms, which might "mitigate the impact of [pause] larger retailers". She later said that schoolchildren she spoke to thought that milk originates from Tesco's, and to much hilarity an audience member shouted, "you're really in trouble if your milk comes from Tesco's!"

I'm not saying that this event had a hidden agenda to herd Cambridge's shopping intelligentsia against Tesco's, but it reminded me that if you didn't know the smaller ethnic stores in Mill Road very well, then if you wanted anti-Mill-Road Tesco's material you went to Mill Road Co-op; and that a Tesco's in Mill Road would threaten the Co-op much more than it would, say, the tearooms, the pagan bookshop, the nail-bar, etc...

In February, the anti-campaign published a shopping-basket comparison, according to which another Tesco Express's goods were slightly dearer than goods bought in various local shops. Ok, but shortly after this the Cambridge News printed a letter from an older person who said she'd be happy to pay the difference if it would save her from walking up and down going to various shops. There's always swings and roundabouts. (I'm a little puzzled as to why the campaign differentiates between the Co-op as a "local" shop and Tesco's as a chain, though.)

The anti's have got an advantage here, in that it's much easier to proclaim oneself anti-Tesco than pro-Tesco. Myself, I'm "pro" a relatively pleasant shopping experience with a short waiting time and reasonable prices. I might get that in Asda's, Sainsbury's etc, but I happen to go to Tesco's when it's handy.

Indeed, I've always said that I prefer Tesco's; and added that if I stopped preferring it, or it was busy, I'd go somewhere else, because I do not ascribe to an ideology which classifies human beings as economic automata. I believe Tesco's would sit well in Mill Road because, with shops as with people, it takes all sorts.

Related posts:

Do the shopping, stuff the skunk
Normal service will not shortly be resumed

cooperating with carbon: salvation or hot air?

Last week, I was pleasantly surprised to be given an invitation to a debate on food ethics, courtesy of the Cooperative retail chain, at Cambridge University's Møller Centre, a conference centre with striking architecture which is attached to Churchill College.

It was all very nice, with a buffet beforehand, comfortable swivel chairs with plenty of room between rows so that people could pass by those already seated without creating a harrassed Mexican wave, and facilities for powerpoint accompaniments to talks. It was all so luxurious I nearly didn't notice that, when the event was drawn to a close at the end of the question-and-answer session, I was still waiting for the debate to start.

The event was opened and facilitated by Ranjit Singh of Co-op East Anglia, who stated that 99% of Co-op stores now run on clean energy (where carbon generated is offset) and that the Co-op's travel agency offered the customers the chance to offset the carbon emissions of their flights. He was, however, brave enough to inform us that in a recent survey only 4% of Co-op customers thought that climate change should be a priority.

This became a theme for the panel of four speakers through the evening. At one point there was a discussion on whether producing vegetables in a greenhouse in England heated by conventional energy created more carbon-containing emissions than flying the same vegetables in from Kenya, or less. Suddenly, I felt as if I was in the company of mediaeval schoolmen discussing to what degree a particular action was a sin and under what circumstances.

One interesting talk was by an associate trainer from the Co-operative College, who spoke about wasting food.

My first thought was of the quondam childhood cry, reprised by comedians, in response to parental pleas to think of starving children before wasting food (usually something like brussel spouts or tripe): "send the food over to the starving children, then!" But that's not funny any more, I thought with a twang of guilt. I was surprised to learn that, in Great Britain, 340,000 tons of uneaten food which is still in date is thrown away, including 272 tons of bottled water, which was once de rigeur for serious poseurs.

Then, carbon reared its allotropic head again, with the statistic that the AVOIDABLE WASTE (written on a slide in BIG LETTERS) equalled 18 million tons of CO₂. Personally, I thought the more pertinent statistic, given the present financial climate, was that households with children threw away food worth £610 per year, and single-occupancy households £250.

But this lady was on a mission. She takes this lecture round schools because, she says, "people are in denial about this".

The use of the word "denial" was interesting. People who do not swallow the theory of climate change being anthropogenic are labelled "deniers". Lawrence Solomon explains the reason why in the introduction to his 2008 book of the same name:

The very term "deniers" is a deliberate reference to the "Holocaust deniers" who defend the Nazi regime by claiming that Jews and their allies faked the Holocaust to slander Hitler. Scott Pelley, of CBS's 60 Minutes, was asked by CBS Web reporter Brian Montopoli why "he did not acknowledge global warming skeptics" in his influential broadcasts on the topic. Pelley replied, "If I do an interview with [Holocaust survivor] Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?"

As happened when supporters of the Roman Catholic Mass of Pope Paul VI labelled adherents of the Tridentine rite as "Traditionalists", climate-change sceptics have embraced the appellation of "Denier", and the smear campaign has backfired spectacularly.

I wanted to ask a question about this, but a chap at the back took the words out of my mouth: "Is the Co-op assuming, like other organisations have, that climate change is due to the activities of mankind?"

The atmosphere electrified. An angry buzz went round, and dagger looks were aimed at the questioner. Poor Ranjit didn't seem to have anticipated the question, and iterated that 99% of the Co-op's stores ran on clean energy and the academic speaker, of course, quoted New Scientist. The most interesting response came from the associate trainer, obviously a true believer, who stated that if you denied the anthropogenic cause of climate change you supported logging in the Amazon and drilling for oil in Alaska and ended, red-faced and almost shouting: "Let's do what we can with earth's resources before we go back to it for more!" A round of applause was starting up before Ranjit wisely stepped in to draw the session to a close.

Freud would have loved the answers, because what was not said was as important as what was. The theory of human actions causing climate change was not explicitly defended; instead, there was an emotional attempt to depict deniers as people who would despoil the beauty of Alaska and destroy resources and cultures by illegal logging. (In fact I'm perfectly happy for the former to happen with safeguards, but the latter leaves me cold and angry.)

What I think is happening is that people have invested so much cognitive, emotional and financial capital in the concept of combatting climate change as a means of salvation for the earth that they can't or won't believe that a great deal of the theory is a textbook exercise in circumvention. As well as Solomon, another of many commentators suspicious of the climate-change industry is Noel Sheppard, who has documented trickery in reportage - for example, presenting statistics from weather stations without mentioning that they were moved from the upwind to the downwind sides of cities (where the wind would have been warmed by blowing past dwellings, factories, etc), and figures being withheld from the public.

As Professor Bob Carter of James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, shows, the earth is cooling down; but (or perhaps therefore) we are increasingly treated to alarmist reports that we have, variously, six-to-seven, seven, eight, ten or even 75 years (the last from a poster who thinks an asteroid will hit us first and criticises "the Earthlings" for their inaction). New Scientist is playing the eager acolyte, of course, as it seeks to populate the demonology of the climatic pantheon with the figures of the old order (in their eyes). "Warmists" like climate-change's jet-setting prophet Al Gore are panicking: Gore is now proposing "civil disobedience", presumably to distract his votaries from their emperor's naked strutting.

There was great unmined potential for a debate on the Co-op's Fairtrade policy to support growers in developing countries versus struggling British producers, and personal versus national duties towards hunger at home and abroad in the context of the crying shame of good food going to waste. Instead, using the event as another opportunity to preach our carbon-sinfulness drowned out a lot of good subjects that were worthy of debate but had to take a back-seat to the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. If I were a lecturer marking the non-debate as a submission, my mark would be: could do much, much better.

shades of grey

Today, Minora came home from a routine appointment at the GP's, and related how kind and understanding she (the locum) had been. Then she added that the doctor was Chinese, and said: "So you see, Dad, not all foreigners are bad". I felt that she was holding up a picture of a not very nice person, and trying to present it to me as a mirror image.

I sat down with her and said that I had never made out "all foreigners" to be "bad". I pointed out the many nursing staff from Addenbrooke's who come from the Phillipines. Andrew Lansley, a Cambridgeshire MP and the Shadow Minister for Health, had pointed out to Parliament that they had been recruited because Philippino nurses are so good - to get a decent job in the Phillipines you have to speak good English (which is one of the two official languages of the country); and also the culture dictates that a sick person be treated as one of the carer's family. I know many Pinoy, and I've never met one, adult or child, who couldn't speak English well.

I was once invited to a Mass at St Quadraginta, celebrated by a Philippine priest, who stated that the country was starting to run out of nursing and care staff. Similarly, Mr Lansley stated that "our recruitment from such countries just cannot go on".

In the same vein, last year Poland's Deputy Culture Minister pleaded with Polish emigrant workers to come home. In as little as 4 years, the country will be hosting Expo 2012, and co-hosting the Euro 2012 football championships, and there aren't enough skilled workers to build the necessary structures. In May this year, The Guardian reported Eastern European workers leaving Ireland for fear of racism in the economic downturn.

Now that the downturn looks like a plunge, there is much unease in the UK about immigrants. Not just migrant labour, but populations so numerous that they can exercise no small influence in the country, for better - like the Philippinos - or for worse.

For example, Richard Edwards of The Telegraph reported in August that just as "cheating the system" became a way of life under the Communist régime in Poland, so the magazine Przeglad released an issue on how to get gas, electricity, mobile phones and accomodation without paying. Way of life or not, the news could hardly have come at a worse time for Poles, whose community leaders met with Cambrigdgeshire Constabulary Chief Constable Julie Spence, after voicing fears that Ms Spence might be the subject of hate-attacks after she was brave enough to link increased migration (there are now 95 languages spoken in Cambridgeshire schools) to rising crime levels and a need for greater funding.

In September, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Pakistan's High Commissioner to the UK, claimed that Western actions in Pakistan would radicalise young Muslims to the point that the streets of Britain would be less safe in the light of calls for Pakistanis' anger to be organised.

Earlier this week, The Guardian's Sarfraz Manzoor wrote a rather thoughtful meditation on whether multiculturalism served Britain's communities well, and if the rise of "political Islamism" might not render Enoch Powell's speech at the then Midland Hotel, notoriously misnamed the "rivers of blood" speech, "if not prophetic, then at least bracingly relevant."

Manzoor's article was entitled "Can Muslims trust the Tories?" This exercised Cranmer somewhat; in a tightly argued essay His Grace pointed out that "political Islamism" is a tautology, and towards the end posed the question: "what makes you think Muslims can trust Labour?"

I can only reply to Cranmer's question with another: "why should we think that any group without the necessary political clout to swing the next election in Labour's favour can trust it?"

Without wanting to get into the issue of "stealth amnesty", last year 19,000 asylum-seekers (not counting dependants) were given leave to stay in Great Britain, and will be eligible for passports - and presumably voting rights - in five years. How many of these deals have been done? This year, the "Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust published a report voicing concern about the "Purity of Elections" in the UK, regarding which I've posted an extract concerning a cause célèbre in Burnley, Lancashire.

How many amnesties have been given apart from the one reported by the Times? How many will be looking forward to passports due not long after 2010, the latest an election can be held?

How will Labour resist playing the race card, saying that we nasty Tories will break Labour's promises?

On a positive note, when Minora comes home from school I'll be able to show her a story on the front page of today's paper about a group of people born far away from Britain who have won a battle to remain in this country, despite the government fighting them tooth and nail. Sometimes a good story breaks through the gloom - the Gurkhas can stay.

Which leaves just one more question - where are our children getting the idea that to love one's country makes one a racist?