Other people’s money - the attraction never fades

The interface between government, politics and numerous institutions is lubricated by other people's money and maintained by those who chase after it. 

We know this, we've always known it, our ancestors probably knew it too.

  

Mr Carter was still secretary to the hospital where Reardon had once earned his twenty shillings a week, but by voyaging in the seas of charitable enterprise he had come upon supplementary sources of income; for instance, he held the post of secretary to the Barclay Trust, a charity whose moderate funds were largely devoted to the support of gentlemen engaged in administering it.

George Gissing - New Grub Street (1891)

The UN’s Green Climate Fund Ran Short Of Other People’s Money

The UN’s climate funds spent a July dialogue asking for more money. The best thing America did was stop sending it.

On July 14, the UN’s Adaptation Committee put fund managers, negotiators, and development bankers on a video call to work through a problem that clearly has them rattled. The money is drying up.

The Green Climate Fund, the Global Environment Facility, and the Adaptation Fund all sent people to explain how developing countries can tap them for cash. What they mostly did was ask for more. The reason they are running short, though, is news that ought to please anyone who pays U.S. taxes. In February 2025, the United States rescinded roughly $4 billion in outstanding pledges to the Green Climate Fund. We were the first country to do it. This spring, the United Kingdom followed, halving its pledge from £1.6 billion to about £815 million...

Where does the money go? The funds prefer to answer that in their own vocabulary. Ask what they finance, and you get “readiness,” “institutional capacity,” “capacity building,” “accreditation support,” “project preparation,” and “locally led adaptation.” Some of it does buy physical things, water systems and farms and flood defenses. A good deal of it, though, pays to build and staff the offices that write the grant applications in the first place.

Legal plunder

But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

Frédéric Bastiat - The Law (1850)

 
Among the husbands was Shalikov, the tax-collector—a narrow, spiteful soul, given to drink, with a big, closely cropped head, and thick, protruding lips. He had had a university education; there had been a time when he used to read progressive literature and sing students' songs, but now, as he said of himself, he was a tax-collector and nothing more.

Anton Chekhov - The Husband (1886)

In the prosperous year of 1856, incomes of between a hundred and a hundred and fifty pounds were chargeable with a tax of elevenpence halfpenny in the pound: persons who enjoyed a revenue of a hundred and fifty or more had the honour of paying one and fourpence. Abatements there were none, and families supporting life on two pounds a week might in some cases, perchance, be reconciled to the mulct by considering how equitably its incidence was graduated.

George Gissing - Born in Exile (1892)

Inconceivable

Then a strange fit of brooding came over him. Escaping from the influences of personality, his imagination wrought back through eras of geologic time, held him in a vision of the infinitely remote, shrivelled into insignificance all but the one fact of inconceivable duration.

George Gissing - Born in Exile (1892)


It’s part of the fascination of trying to cope with even a casual grasp of geological periods where a million years is the smallest unit of time and even this is both inconceivably long and too short to be useful. The perspective problem is not dissimilar to the inconceivable distances we have to cope with in the universe, or within our own galaxy or even our own solar system.

We could take it further. The propagation of light is inconceivably fast, atoms are inconceivably small, gravity is inconceivably weird and human activity and even our technology are becoming inconceivably complex.

Sometimes it is worth dwelling on these things, the pitfalls of trying to approximate the inconceivable within language, within generalisations, hypotheses and theories.

Yet as we know, with care and much trial and error, we often manage to approximate the inconceivable within language. It could be said that this is one of our greatest achievement. Degrading the achievement is the great moral crime of charlatans - and one of their tools.

Elaborate and costly playthings

The other day found Mrs H and I discussing how so many things become more and more elaborate over time. As if there is nothing at all which cannot be made a little more elaborate than the previous version.


On a chair lay a broken toy, one of those elaborate and costly playthings which serve no purpose but to stunt a child’s imagination.

George Gissing – In the Year of Jubilee (1894)


It applies not only to things, but activities, systems, processes, laws, rules and so on and so on. The curious thing is that we know it, perhaps everyone knows it, but still we elaborate.


Basset was inclined to be rather contemptuous of his half-brother, Lucas, whom he found feverishly engrossed in the same medley of elaborate futilities that had claimed his whole time and energies, such as they were, four years ago, and almost as far back before that as he could remember. It was the contempt of the man of action for the man of activities, and it was probably reciprocated.

H.H. Munro (Saki) - Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914)

The living puppets

I buy a newspaper now and then. You cannot imagine how strangely those world-echoes impress me. The sage gravity of leading articles, the momentousness of this or that piece of news, the precision of reports, the advertisements, - is it I who am moonstruck, or the living puppets that play in this astonishing comedy? Once or twice I have been so overcome with a perception of ludicrousness as to fall back in my chair and make the roof ring with laughter.

George Gissing - Isabel Clarendon (1885)


The odd thing about the current US presidential situation is how foreseeable the risks were. It must have been obvious to those close to him that Biden was on the way down before he became president. There were enough indications for outsiders, so we may as well conclude that insiders knew he wasn’t a good bet for a four year stint - and Kamala Harris was the spare.

In other words, the current political mess in the US isn’t some plan mapped out by master schemers who foresaw all eventualities and engineered every outcome. No capable political planner engineered this. The current mess looks like the result of a bungled failure to read the situation and the personalities because that’s what it is.

The choice of Kamala Harris as VP and the prospect of now having to invent a raft of obviously fake media enthusiasm for her fictitious abilities adds a good deal of support to the bungled mess standpoint. The people behind all this are not smart people. Evil but not smart.

Fantasy land

Both parties are in fantasy land - but Sunak's tax attack on Labour is rich given what his government has cost voters

The parties fighting this election have yet to publish their manifestos. Until they do, their number-crunching is just speculation. What we do know is what Sunak's policies have cost households so far. And that both main parties are making outlandish claims which don't add up.

Before we get on to any of the numbers - from Rishi Sunak's claim about Labour raising taxes by £2,000 to the more outlandish numbers going around today - here's the most important thing you have to know right now.

The parties fighting this election have yet to publish their manifestos.

Each manifesto will be fantasy too. It isn't obvious why either party would allow itself to be deported from fantasy land via a manifesto they themselves have concocted. Fantasy land is their home where anything may be whatever they wish it to be. It's a form of lying.


There’ll never be a Utopia, and it’s only a form of lying to set such ideals before the multitude.

George Gissing - Denzil Quarrier (1892)

He was not a rascal by predilection

Keene eyed her with observation. He himself had slight depth for a man doomed to live by his wits, and he was under the disadvantage of really feeling something of what he said. He was not a rascal by predilection; merely driven that way by the forces which in our social state abundantly make for rascality.

George Gissing – Demos (1886)


It is probably necessary to take a fragmented view of our dire cultural situation and describe it in a number of ways, from the malign schemes of political fanatics the failings of abject stupidity. The overall problem seems to stretch from one end of this spectrum to the other and all points in between, including important offshoots such as racketeering.

Clearly Net Zero is at least stupid and malign, but there is also a curiously petty aspect attached to it, more parasitic than responsible. Virtue-signalling is abundantly evident as we know, but much of it is petty eco-etiquette where saying the right thing is far more important than doing anything significant.

There is also degree of rascality about eco-etiquette which complicates any effort to untangle motives behind projects such as Net Zero. Malign motives are clear enough, but some dilettante political actors are only prancing around on a bandwagon without any great interest in using it as anything but a bandwagon.


No, the men whom we honour are merely rascals who have had the good fortune not to be caught red-handed.

Stendhal - The Red and the Black (1830)

It is impossible that you should be sincere

‘I am sincere!’ she broke in, with more passion than he had ever imagined her capable of uttering.

‘I cannot call it sincerity. It is impossible that you should be sincere; you live in the latter end of the nineteenth century; the conditions of your birth and education forbid sincerity of this kind.’

George Gissing - A Life's Morning (1888)


An interesting passage where Gissing’s character says that it is not possible for people of a certain social class and education to be sincere in certain circumstances. Today we tend to call this hypocrisy, but it is useful to see it as a selective failure to acknowledge the real world, a failure to be sincere. 

Insincerity is one of the roots of woke culture, accounting for that strange ability to blend ersatz sincerity with blatant virtue-signalling. To outsiders, woke rhetoric seems insincere because it is. It is not rooted in the real world, but in a politically ersatz world where ersatz sincerity is correspondingly necessary. 

Today it is one of the problems faced by sceptics in a world where professional insincerity is no obstacle to advancement. It never was an obstacle of course. Yet although such cultural shifts are nebulous and diffuse, perhaps the value of sincerity has been eroded. It certainly seems like it.

A major problem faced by sceptics is that virtue-signalling is a widespread substitute for public sincerity, as are emotional outbursts, high-profile stunts, appeals to authority, arm waving and so on. But for sceptics there is a reliable guide through the swamp –

As for me, I will believe in no belief that does not make itself manifest by outward signs. I will think no preaching sincere that is not recommended by the practice of the preacher.

Anthony Trollope - Barchester Towers (1857)

This of course is the guide to sincerity which is not ersatz - outward signs. It is the guide in our day just as it was in Trollope’s. 

Today we know all about outward signs which point unerringly towards insincerity. The rich climate activist who travels by private jet, the celebrity with multiple houses, the journalist with a villa in a warmer climate, the callow young activist with wealthy parents.

It is impossible that you should be sincere...

The irresponsible charges of resentment

Doubtless she was posing as a martyr before all who knew anything of her story; why had she refused his money, if not that her case might seem all the harder? It were difficult to say whether he really believed this; in a nature essentially egoistic, there is often no line to be drawn between genuine convictions and the irresponsible charges of resentment.

George Gissing – Demos (1886)


A quote recalled when Barak Obama popped up at No.10.

A useful observation by Gissing which is easy to forget. We see them all the time - public figures with a strong streak of egoism. So often we see the egoism as a fault, note the dishonesty which comes with it but forget the other baggage egoism carries.

Gissing was right, egoists are damagingly irresponsible as well as dishonest. The egoism itself isn’t the only damaging aspect, it’s the irresponsible accusations prompted by setbacks or criticism. We cannot draw a line between an egoist’s convictions and their irresponsible charges of resentment. That is to say, their tendency to fire off irresponsible accusations when things aren’t going their way.

To take another prominent example, we have the spectacle of Justin Trudeau leading Canada down the totalitarian rabbit hole in response to personal political setbacks and criticism. With Trudeau there is no professionalism, no pragmatism, merely an egoist showing us yet again that there is no line to be drawn between genuine convictions and the irresponsible charges of resentment.

There are many other examples, so many that it is remarkable that we ever vote for them. Yet we have been warned about egoists over and over again. We shouldn’t vote for them but we do – which is also irresponsible.

The importance of not being earnest

Once more understand — in England politics must be pursued with gravity. We don’t fly about and chatter and scream like Frenchmen. No man will succeed with us in politics who has not a reputation for solid earnestness. Therefore, the more stupid a man, the better chance he has.

George Gissing - Thyrza (1887)

It's a rum quote this, one of those observations which is not without a kind of horribly familiar, sarcastic validity. 

I certainly came across second-rate people who used an earnest manner to promote poor ideas and somewhat silly viewpoints which didn't reflect well on anyone. Yet the earnest manner does work, it is used to promote everything from a tedious fog of irrelevance to the most blatant stupidity to outright lies.  

The Davos jamboree finishes today, a thoroughly earnest cabal if ever there was one.

Sir Keir invites mocking laughter

'Huge difference' between Labour and Tories, Starmer declares as he rejects 'cautious' criticism

Sir Keir Starmer has rejected claims he is being too cautious and timid in his offer to the public - and insisted there is a "huge difference" between Labour and the Conservatives

In his speech at a research centre near Bristol, Sir Keir urged voters to reject "pointless populist gestures" and pledged to crackdown on cronyism as he sought to outline the dividing lines between Labour and the Conservatives.

Life is a huge farce, and the advantage of possessing a sense of humour is that it enables one to defy fate with mocking laughter.

George Gissing - New Grub Street (1891)

Irony and softer modes of meditation

As we know, not everyone does irony and it doesn’t work with all audiences, even though it can be a powerful rhetorical device if handled well in the right context.


"A thousand pounds a week!" Lilian murmured, aghast. Her imagination resembled that of a person who, on reaching a summit which he has taken for the top of the range, sees far higher peaks beyond. And the conviction that those distant peaks were unattainable saddened her for a moment. "It's absolutely awful."

"Why awful? If you have the finest you must pay for it. A thousand a week's nothing to that fellow. Moreover, he's a British citizen, and he did splendid service for his country in the war. Among other things, he owns two of the best brands of champagne. The War Office gave him a commission and a car; and he travelled all over Europe selling his own champagne at his own price to officers' messes. After all, officers couldn't be expected to fight without the drinks they're accustomed to, could they?"

Lilian obscurely divined irony. She often wished that she could be ironical and amusing, as Felix was; but she never could. She couldn't conceive how it was done.

Arnold Bennett – Lilian (1922)


Mrs H and I both do irony and that seems to be significant as we chat about life and current affairs over coffee. Maybe there is a certain social divide between those who do irony and those who don’t. Perhaps irony can highlight a social divide which was there to begin with, because there are those who do seem to prefer a softer form of social discourse.


Irony and sarcasm — very agreeable to a certain class of newspaper readers — were just now his stock-in-trade, and he could not afford to indulge any softer mode of meditation.

George Gissing - In the Year of Jubilee (1894)

Bill Multi-Jet

Bill Gates Owns Multiple Jets He Calls His ‘Guilty Pleasure’

n 1997, Gates joined the elite ranks of billionaires and purchased a business jet, a Bombardier Challenger 604, with a price tag of approximately $21 million. Gates chose to use his personal funds to acquire the aircraft, rather than relying on Microsoft to foot the bill, even though the jet would primarily serve business purposes. This business jet provided Gates the flexibility and convenience he required for his extensive global travels, aligning him with other business magnates who had recognized the value of private jets.

Gates now owns an impressive fleet of at least four business jets. Valued at close to $200 million, his collection includes the elite Gulfstream G650. Beyond ownership, he also runs a private aviation management company and has channeled substantial investments into the largest business jet service provider globally. …


There are forces of madness; I have shown you that I make allowance for them. But they are only dangerous so long as privilege allies itself with hypocrisy. The task of the modern civiliser is to sweep away sham idealisms.

George Gissing - Born in Exile (1892)

When neither is a positive good

 

The lad he employed in his office was run over by a cab one slippery day, and all but killed. Piers visited him in the hospital, thus seeing for the first time the interior of one of those houses of pain, which he always disliked even to pass. The experience did not help to brighten his mood; he lacked that fortunate temper of the average man, which embraces as a positive good the less of two evils. 

George Gissing - The Crown Of Life (1899)

As we know, Tweedledee and Tweedledum are probably the only candidates with a realistic expectation of becoming Prime Minister after the next general election. Even when neither party leader is a positive good, that seems to be the only choice. Although neither Tory party nor Labour party is a positive good either, one of them is likely to be embraced by the electoral system.

Yet anyone may easily imagine a situation where the media often point out party similarities as well as differences, where media analysis commonly includes the constraints of external pressures, the number of inexperienced MPs, the paucity of their technical knowledge, their general lack of business experience and examples incompetence and weakness displayed by the permanent administration. 

But look, a soundbite squirrel!

The volume of shouting

If a writer has friends connected with the press, it is the plain duty of those friends to do their utmost to help him. What matter if they exaggerate, or even lie? The simple, sober truth has no chance whatever of being listened to, and it’s only by volume of shouting that the ear of the public is held.

George Gissing - New Grub Street (1891)

It’s a sobering thought this one. We've mostly renamed 'the press' as 'the media' now, but we have been subjected to daily non-stop shouting by the press for our entire lives. As our parents were and no doubt our grandparents. On current form, our children and grandchildren are also destined to go through a lifetime of non-stop media shouting.

Yes – it’s a sobering thought.

I’m re-reading some of Aristotle’s work at the moment. Like a breath of cool, mountain air. Not so much a contact with ancient times as a contact with a simple and methodical analysis of the human condition. A striving for clarity without our baggage.

‘Without our baggage’ – now that's a good, modern way of putting these things. We have many more vivid terms and phrases, but unfortunately they tend to be drowned out by the incessant shouting and misused by legions of shouty folk.

It’s one reason why I pass idle moments by reading old detective stories. Many of them manage to capture a flavour of their times without being loaded with all of our baggage. More baggage than Aristotle perhaps, but no shouting. That's a blessing.

Below the Salt

A fictional conversation between Dyce Lashmar, a would-be Liberal MP, and his father, an Anglican vicar and political sceptic.

“Yet, Dyce, when I think of the Sermon on the Mount—" He paused again, holding his pipe in his hand, unlit, and looking before him with wide eyes.

"I respect that as much as anyone can," said Dyce, gravely.

"As much as anyone can—who doesn't believe it." His father took him up with gentle irony. "I don't expect the impossible. You cannot believe in it; for you were born a post-Darwinian. Well, your religion is temporal; let us take that for granted. You do not deny yourself; you believe that self-assertion to the uttermost is the prime duty."

“Provided that self-assertion be understood aright. I understand it as meaning the exercise of all my civic faculties.”

“Which, in your case, are faculties of command, faculties which point you to the upper seat, Dyce. Tom Bullock, my gardener, is equally to assert himself, but with the understanding that his faculties point to the bottom of the table, where the bread is a trifle stale, and butter sometimes lacking. Yes, yes: I understand. Of course you will do your very best for Tom; you would like him to have what the sweet language of our day calls a square meal. But still he must eat below the salt; there you can’t help him.”

George Gissing - Our Friend the Charlatan (1901)


The elitist nature of Liberal political games haven’t change much since Gissing’s day. Dyce Lashmar is the ambitious charlatan of the book’s title. 

In our day, modern charlatans push Net Zero as a means to ensure that the vast majority of the population remains below the salt forever.

Our Friend the Charlatan

Few Englishmen had a smaller endowment of practical ability; few, on the other hand, delighted as he did in speculative system, or could grasp and exhibit in such lucid entirety hypothetical laws. Much as he talked of science, he was lacking in several essentials of the scientific mind; he had neither patience to collect and observe facts, nor conscientiousness in reasoning upon them; prejudice directed his every thought, and egoism pervaded all his conclusions. Excelling in speciousness, it was natural that he should think success as a politician within his easy reach; possessed by a plausible theory of government, he readily conceived himself on the heights of statesmanship, ruling the nation for its behoof.

George Gissing - Our Friend the Charlatan (1901)


It's an interesting passage this one. I couldn't read it without thinking of various political figures who fit the description rather well. David Cameron for example, but there must be many others.

Fashionable Ignorance

Better Mad with the rest of the World than Wise alone. So say politicians. If all are so, one is no worse off than the rest, whereas solitary wisdom passes for folly. So important is it to sail with the stream. The greatest wisdom often consists in ignorance, or the pretence of it. One has to live with others, and others are mostly ignorant.

Baltasar Gracián - The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)


A striking aspect of modern life is the spectacle of ambitious people in pursuit of ignorance rather than truth. The greatest wisdom often consists in ignorance, or the pretence of it wrote Gracián over three and a half centuries ago and he was right. Ambitious politicians engage in fashionable ignorance because they must. Fashionable ignorance is important for oiling the wheels of social position and political power.

On the one hand, she had contact with the world of fashionable literature, on the other with that of fashionable ignorance. Mrs Lane’s house was a meeting-point of the two spheres.

George Gissing - New Grub Street (1891)


In a technical world such as ours, the pursuit of truth is a narrow and comparatively unrewarding path to tread for the politically ambitious. Facts can be checked, claims destroyed by uncertainties, dishonesty exposed. Yet fashionable ignorance may be expanded, elaborated and pursued with boundless enthusiasm. As we know.

Politically, technical matters are not important unless gross technical incompetence leads to a level of embarrassment where even the most adroit ignorance is no defence. 

Yet a crowning achievement of fashionable ignorance has been gender politics, the fabrication of a ludicrous fantasy version of human reproductive biology. Obviously it has mostly generated fake ignorance, but ignorance does not have to be genuine – merely fashionable and therefore exploitable.

It is impossible that you should be sincere

‘I am sincere!’ she broke in, with more passion than he had ever imagined her capable of uttering.

‘I cannot call it sincerity. It is impossible that you should be sincere; you live in the latter end of the nineteenth century; the conditions of your birth and education forbid sincerity of this kind.’

George Gissing – A Life’s Morning (1888)


As Gissing points out here, there is something not quite genuine about sincerity within certain social circles. Beatrice is the young woman being accused of insincerity, not because of what she could be but because of what her social class and education demand of her.

Within the social circles of people such as Beatrice, sincerity is a vulnerability. To be sincere is to be exposed in a way which could become a social disadvantage among those who accept fashionable discourse as a measure of what they are. The adopted solution is a careless insincerity, a cousin of nihilism without being thoroughly nihilist.

Within the lives of people such as Beatrice, fashionable discourse gives no hostages to aspects of life which others regard as important such as integrity, duty, honesty, facts and even reality itself. Talk is part of the social game, an expertly articulate shallowness which is never quite caught out by genuine sincerity.

Maybe this is what sceptics try to retain - the ability to be sincere even within a comfortable life. To be a sceptic is to accept the discomfort which may be inevitable on the social tightrope of unfashionable views. Maybe within that discomfort, it is possible to retain a degree of uncomfortable sincerity.

Health and good spirits

You wake at half-past two in the morning, and suffer infernally from the blackest pessimism. It’s morbid — yes; but for all that it may be a glimpse of the truth. Health and good spirits, just as likely as not, are the deceptive condition.

George Gissing – The Whirlpool (1897)

Nurses across UK back strikes in pay dispute

Nurses across the UK have voted to strike over pay with action expected to start by the end of the year.

The walkout will involve Royal College of Nursing members in more than half of hospitals and community teams, but emergency care will still be staffed.


Cancer care delays: How bad are they in your area?

There has been a sharp rise in long waits for cancer therapy in the past four years, BBC analysis shows.

The number waiting more than the 62-day target time for therapy in the past year has topped 69,000 across England, Northern Ireland and Scotland - twice as many as the same period in 2017-18.