Builders not invited

 
The world is filled, not with good and bad people, but with the builders and the destroyers, and the battle between them is eternal.

Hugh Walpole - The Bright Pavilions (1940)

Burnham pushes for closer EU ties and questions Russian interference

Andy Burnham has reignited the argument over Brexit, insisting the UK’s relationship with Europe must be revisited while adding it is "inconceivable" that Russia did not attempt to interfere in the 2016 referendum campaign.


Europe moves to further destroy itself! EU eyes COP31 climate deal to accelerate CO2 cuts, document shows – Seeks to turn ‘countries’ existing climate pledges into real-world actions’

BRUSSELS, Oct 12 (Reuters) – The European Union will use next month’s COP31 climate summit to push for agreement on a “package” of efforts to reduce the greenhouse gas ​emissions heating the planet, an internal EU document seen by Reuters showed.

The greatest quality in life

His desire, beyond everything else in life, was to be honest: to pretend to no emotion that he did not truly feel, to see exactly how he felt about life, and to stand up before it unafraid and uncowed. Honesty seemed to him the greatest quality in life;

Hugh Walpole - The Cathedral (1922)


Suppose we do a thought experiment and attempt to imagine ourselves as Ed Milband. Not that the idea makes sense and presumably most people would reject it anyway, but the point of the thought experiment is to raise the question of why we wouldn’t want to be Ed.

No doubt there are quite a few reasons, but to my mind the important one is honesty, our honesty is something we can’t imagine giving away, yet modern UK politicians do not put much value on honesty. 

In other words, the thought experiment is not unlike an invitation to imagine downsizing, perhaps from a pleasant house in a reasonable area to a caravan in somewhere like Jaywick.

Yet millions of UK voters vote for political parties which do not put much value on the honesty of their candidates. Then after each election, attitudes towards the political arena end up as akin to attitudes towards cheating in football - okay when our side does it but appalling behaviour by the other lot.

Voting for political parties doesn’t work, it doesn’t deliver reasonably honest politicians and we’ve known it for decades, yet we put a high value our own honesty. It's odd.

That's two fictions

Lower taxes and well-performing public services is “fiction” - Starmer

Sir Keir Starmer said today that Labour would not continue the “fiction” that you can have lower taxes and public services that run properly, in a speech ahead of the Budget.

Asked if his priorities were out of step with the public mood after a poll suggested most voters would prefer lower taxes rather than investment in public services, the Prime Minister said: “No. I think for too long, we pretended that you could lower tax and spend more on your public services, but you can’t. And it’s about time we faced up to that.”


Fiction 1 - we can have lower taxes under Labour.

Fiction 2 - we can have public services that run properly under Labour.


Some things, doubted by most of the world, are for these people true and beyond argument; this certainty of theirs gives them a kind of stamp, as though they lived so much in their imagination as to have very little assurance as to what is fact and what fiction.

Hugh Walpole – All Soul’s Night (1933)

Some things, doubted by most of the world

Approval of new UK coal mine was an 'error of law', new government says

The coking coal mine in West Cumbria was approved under the last government in 2022 by Michael Gove - but the Labour government said it won't defend the plans when a legal challenge is heard in the High Court next week.

The decision to approve a new coal mine in West Cumbria was made unlawfully, the UK's new government has admitted, as the carbon emissions from eventually burning the coal should have been taken into account.


Some things, doubted by most of the world, are for these people true and beyond argument; this certainty of theirs gives them a kind of stamp, as though they lived so much in their imagination as to have very little assurance as to what is fact and what fiction.

Hugh Walpole - All Souls' Night (1933)

Lib Dems embolden themselves

Lib Dems ‘broke equality laws’ over deselection of Christian candidate

The Liberal Democrats have been accused of deselecting a candidate based on his Christian faith in a breach of equality law.

Members have reported the party to the equalities watchdog over accusations that the party has tolerated a “hostile environment” for people of faith, failed to investigate serious allegations of discrimination and harassment and “emboldened those who believe Christians should be driven out of public life”.


You must have either intelligence or spiritual faith to stand up against life.

Hugh Walpole – The Fortress (1932)


It seems unwise of the Lib Dems to reject both intelligence and spiritual faith. We already know they aren't too keen on intelligence, not if "Sir" Ed Davey is any guide to the selection process.

A series of pictures

She did not think connectedly of her past at all. Old people do not. To the old the past comes in a series of pictures, not of necessity connected, here intensely vivid, there dim and blurred — a green field, a quiet evening, an angry quarrel, some loving face, some sharp disappointment — and all, vivid or blurred, dispassionately removed. No call for action any more. Quiescence. And then a strange wonder that to those about them these scenes so real, so actual, mean nothing, stir no reaction.

Hugh Walpole - The Old Ladies (1924)


The other day found me passing the time in Littleover, a suburb of Derby which was once a village. It is still possible to see hints of its individuality, traces of the village it once was. I know it well, having lived there as a teenager with my parents and brother, then again some years later with Mrs H because it happened to be convenient for my new place of work.

Mrs H and I left the area for good nearly forty years ago when my job changed again and a series of pictures crossed my mind as I sat there in the café. Family, friends, bike rides, tennis, visits to the library on the corner, the old pub, the birth of our children, shopping, an alarmingly expensive barber I only visited once, people I once knew who lived there.

I still know the area well, but forty years is too long for the thread to remain unbroken and still feel a sense of belonging. Now it is merely a series of pictures. Maybe that was the sense of belonging, the immediate familiarity of the pictures. Maybe that’s all it was and still is - a series of pictures.

Starmer Grey

Although it was half-past three in the afternoon there was still a faint sun-stained fog about. He liked that sun-stained fog almost beyond any other weather that London provided, and it seemed especially kindly and reassuring now, for London had been so very dark of late.

Hugh Walpole - The Joyful Delaneys (1938)


It’s been a cold, grey day here in our corner of Derbyshire with barely a faint breeze to remind us that the weather hasn’t stopped altogether like a tired old clock which finally gives up on time. 

It has been quiet too. While disposing of the wood-burner ash in the garden, a woodpecker was so loud I thought it must be in the nearby cherry tree, but as usual I couldn’t see it.

A sun-stained fog would at least confirm that we still have a sun and the world hasn’t turned permanently grey. Starmer Grey perhaps.

A failure selling bootlaces

All that the street had to give for the moment was a bishop and an actor mounting the steps of the Garrick Club, an old lady with a black bonnet and a milk-jug, a young man in a hurry and a failure selling bootlaces.

Hugh Walpole – The Captives (1920)


Doesn’t happen now, no failure has to sell bootlaces or even admit to being a failure. Politics, a life on benefits, a sinecure here, a charity there. We rid ourselves of failures selling bootlaces decades ago.

A good thing too, but not an unalloyed good. It’s a reminder that there are quite a few people in public life who should be selling bootlaces.

If outcome points to intention

I only know that as one grows older one calls things coincidence more and more seldom.

Hugh Walpole - All Souls' Night (1933)


As we know, the Blair government made postal voting available on demand in 2000. As we knew at the time, it has certain obvious security weaknesses as a democratic voting mechanism. Reported to be a very minor issue here in the UK and successive governments choose to keep it.

The tinfoil hat question is obvious enough - outcome may point to intention. If the weakness is there then it is supposed to be there. A relaxed political attitude to petty fraud is not necessarily the whole of it. The elephant in the democratic room is that it could also function as a backdoor security measure for the permanent administration.

This doesn’t imply it ever has been used or is even likely to be used, but in a political situation viewed as sufficiently threating, it could provide protection against a radical populist viewed as dangerous. The precise mechanism may not exist in any formal sense, but the exploitable weakness does.

Yet intense propaganda is very effective and clearly the preferred option, we know that now, if we didn’t know the power of it in 2000. Legal and bureaucratic harassment is effective too, we caught glimpses of that with Boris Johnson and the Partygate silliness. The pandemic debacle and Net Zero offer much more than a glimpse.

On demand postal voting is inherently dubious, but rather like an old nuclear bunker it may already be a relic of the past. With Brexit still recent and from the perspective of the permanent administration, it could still be seen as naïve not to leave an exploitable possibility in place - just in case. That’s what postal voting looks like - a relic of the times when voting mattered. Off comes the tinfoil hat.

Think of the children

Something else which is very familiar, the virtue-signalling put-down. Often seen in mainstream media comments.


‘Made a good sale this afternoon,’ the little man went on. ‘Head of Balzac by Rodin. Sold it to that fellow Litehouse, the big tobacco man. He’s collecting pictures and things. Doesn’t know anything about art, but we look after him — see he doesn’t get anything rotten, you know.’

‘Much better,’ said Bendish gloomily, ‘if he gave his money to children’s hospitals or something like that.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Frederick, suddenly irritated, because nothing exasperated him so much as this very popular sentiment; ‘it would be an awful world if there weren’t any beautiful things in it, and who’d go on making beautiful things if nobody ever bought them?’

‘I don’t see that,’ said Bendish. ‘Pictures are only a luxury.’

Hugh Walpole - All Souls' Night (1933)

Gone utterly and for ever

A theme which runs through all of our lives – those endlessly grinding wheels of irreversible change.


We were all young and hopeful then, we could all live on a shilling a year and think ourselves well off, we could all sit in front of the lumbering horse ‘buses and chat confidentially with the omniscient driver, we could all see Dan Leno in Pantomime and watch Farren dance at the Empire, we could all rummage among those cobwebby streets at the back of the Strand where Aldwych now flaunts her shining bosom and imagine Pendennis and Warrington, Copperfield and Traddles cheek by jowl with ourselves, we could all wait in the shilling queue for hours to see Ellen Terry in Captain Brassbound and Forbes-Robertson in Hamlet, we could all cross the street without fear of imminent death, and above all we could all sink ourselves into that untidy, higgledy-piggledy, smoky and beery and gas-lampy London gone utterly and for ever.

Hugh Walpole - All Souls' Night (1933)


Walpole writes of the world he knew as a young man before the Great War, but it’s an experience we all know very well indeed. Often too well as the familiar slips into the past, never to be recovered - people, places, times.

Much of the world I grew up in, the myriad impressions, the fascinating, foolish texture of the times which made it the fifties and sixties, that has gone forever. 

Even mundane physical details such as the farm along the lane where I cycled to buy eggs. The farm house and farmyard are long gone - vanished forever under a compact gaggle of houses.

Builders and Destroyers

The world is filled, not with good and bad people, but with the builders and the destroyers, and the battle between them is eternal.

Hugh Walpole - The Bright Pavilions (1940)


There is much to recommend this idea as the basic political divide – builders and destroyers. Somewhat tongue in cheek perhaps, but it isn’t a new idea. Political radicals have always wanted to tear down old systems in order to replace them with something new and noble which unfortunately doesn’t work.

Taking it a little further, we could modify Walpole's idea and suggest a division between builders and bunglers instead. Yet destroyers are almost always destroyer/bungler hybrids so this isn't quite right either. Suppose we refer to the hybrids as destroyers for simplicity.

In which case, the basic political division is not left and right, socialists and capitalists and all the other ists, but this more fundamental, more visceral division. A division between men and women who aim to build for future generations and those who do not because the incentive to build has been dissipated within the comforts and complexities of modern life.

It is something many people appear to have noted for years, especially via the internet. Those who build, make, repair or grow tend to see the world in a far more pragmatic and constructive light than those who live by words rather than deeds. It’s a crude division but maybe there is something in it, something at the core of our wider political interactions.

The orthodox climate change narrative is a destroyer’s narrative. Net Zero is a destroyer’s policy. The focus is on cannot do rather than can do. The promise of a better world tomorrow is subservient to the destruction waged on this one today.

As for gender politics, we certainly see destroyer politics there. The aim is to destroy biological science and commonplace certainties. They are gone, destroyed, expunged in pursuit of a victory of words over the very basis of life itself. The ultimate in wordsmith arrogance if ever there was one.

Destroyers tend to be political, builders apolitical as far as they are allowed to be by the need to oppose destroyer narratives. All of our major political parties are filled with people not necessarily good or bad, but the ambitious find it easier to be a destroyer rather than a builder. The destroyer vote is much easier to address.

It’s why we have cancel culture because it is a necessary destroyer strategy - destroy the possibility of debate. There is no point being a destroyer who values pragmatic analysis – that would turn a destroyer into a builder. Doesn’t make sense, but cancel culture as a necessary destroyer strategy does make sense.

Inevitably, mass media pander to destroyer sentiments. It’s easier and cheaper and the market is a large one. The number of people living on words rather than deeds has grown enormously over recent decades and it has not been a healthy growth.

Let us hope Walpole was right and the battle is eternal. It doesn’t seem so at the moment.

The value of things we shall never find

We must make it our business to search for the things that we shall never find. After the full summing-up something always remains. It is only that that is of value.

Hugh Walpole - Wintersmoon (1928)


The search is where the value is to be found, the search for what remains to be found. The search never ends of course, but politically there is no longer any desire to search. To search in this probing, analytical, investigational sense is no longer fashionable. It is not even allowed into the political arena.

Disraeli’s Great Game has become too old to search for anything better. It is reduced to recalling the simple, failed nostrums of the past. The Great Game has become senile, an endless dribble of elaborations tottering round the old familiar nostrum of equality. Levelling Up is a senile political nostrum. Net Zero is senile political nostrum. We see little else in a senile political age.

Diversity, gender politics, race politics, all reflect this weirdly senile game which once meant so much. Even recycling reflects it. Garbage must go round in circles, as if junk must have an egalitarian destiny equal to anything not yet junk.

As for climate change – even the climate has to become strictly egalitarian. Nobody must ever feel disadvantaged by unexpected changes in climate. Storms, floods, heatwaves and droughts, banish them all in the name of equal treatment.

Even opinions, lived experiences, emotional needs, the magical and the mystical have to be placed on an equal footing with established facts, scientific knowledge and the most obvious, most basic facts of life. More than equal in many cases.

Oddly enough, egalitarian nostrums are allowed to be superior to every other mode of thought. Which seems inconsistent - but senility is inconsistent.

Trifles

Of all the things of which we are uncertain in this world — and there are more every day — we can at least be sure that History has for one of its subjects the ultimate importance of trifles. A coin rolled on a table, a verse by Mr. Pope, a cabbage grown in a stubborn garden, a foggy night in Carlisle, a players’ booth in Penrith, scattered snow reflected like feathers in a lake —

Hugh Walpole - Judith Paris (1931)

Well you never know, instead of a foggy night in Carlisle, a cold day in Bakewell may turn out to be of ultimate importance. It’s a long shot but worth investigating. While we’re there I’ll look out for a trifle. It’s years since I sampled a good trifle.

And yet on a less trifling note, is interesting to dwell on apparently trifling events which had or could have had major impacts. If I hadn’t offered to buy Mrs H a Stella when we first met for example. If Boris Johnson had always kept his hair neat and tidy. If Tony Blair had become a rock star.

Or if the Colston verdict had been guilty - what then? Perhaps we would have retained a certain faith in trial by jury. Almost as if…

Coming Ready Or Not

No observer, however keen, could have guessed his thoughts; he had acquired sufficient knowledge of the art of life to hide his opinions even when he was alone; nay, more than that, he was afraid of coming to a clear understanding with himself.

August Strindberg - The Red Room (1879)


The underlying weirdness of COP26 and the whole climate game seems to be exactly as Strindberg described over 140 years ago - he was afraid of coming to a clear understanding with himself.

As if the whole aim of the climate narrative is not to bring about a desirable state of affairs at all, but to encourage voters to hide from an undesirable one where people are free to do things. To hide from a state of affairs where people are free to build futures where there is no paternal hand to keep everyone in line.

There is a powerful juvenile streak here, but many of those in the climate driving seat do not share it. The drivers drive and know where they personally are going. They go along with the rhetoric and the madness, they see how many middle class people are easily manipulated by juvenile fears so they take advantage of those fears. Malthusian fears, not new ones.

But this way lies madness. We cannot hide from what we have built here in the developed world, from our absolute need to understand where we are, how we arrived here. We cannot hide from a need to adapt, move on and be free to tackle whatever turns up.

We cannot push aside people with the ability to take us forward. There is no alternative direction other than serious decline. We cannot reject capable people, silence them and hope that totalitarian politics will somehow arrange our lives in our favour.

What’s this madness? Nothing but taking just one step further — the step that takes you into a country where every sound, every movement, every smell, every tiny action means only one thing. It’s the ordinary normal world suddenly turned completely to one purpose. Something or someone must be stopped, put out of the way, silenced. That done, all will be right again.

Hugh Walpole - The Sea Tower (1939)


That done, all will be right again. But of course it won’t. We see that already.

Who chooses the experts?

Do you suppose that anyone else sees you as I see you, any one else alive or dead? We all of us meet one another uniquely and that meeting is only a shadow of the only real meeting we have — our meeting with ourselves

Hugh Walpole - John Cornelius (1937)

You are unique, I am unique, today is unique, tomorrow will be unique. Whatever we try to do about it and however we try to mitigate or ignore its effects, uniqueness weaves complexity into our daily lives. We get over it in numerous ways from generalisations to stereotypes, from slogans to doctrines, principles, beliefs, ideologies and many more useful subterfuges.

Or we listen to experts who offer us their generalisations. Yet in a sense, experts become a generalisation when presented to us as its human face. Especially when selected by governments, media or a whole range of interested parties including interested individuals. Experts say, climate scientist overwhelmingly agree, experts predict, an expert study has shown, this guy has made a video.

In the public arena there is often no easy escape from situations where experts are selected by those who are not experts. Experts are unique individuals, their expertise was uniquely acquired, their expert views are unique, their careers individually unique and so are their ambitions, personalities and indeed their politics.

As we know, when we are offered experts as the human face of a political generalisation, we should check both. We should check the experts and the basis of their generalisations. As we also know, many people don’t bother checking. Yet experts are unique, fallible individuals and that’s a generalisation worth hanging on too.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? also applies to experts.

In later years

He would always be one of those egotists who can see no one right but themselves; who, in later years, will slip behind the times and make themselves fools because they do not know that time, weather, habit, philosophy and religion have all changed while they were blustering.

Hugh Walpole - The Bright Pavilions (1940)

A disturbing quote if we think of our civilisation as one of those egotists. It is surely plausible that our western civilisation could turn out to have been a temporary anomaly. One which rose from nowhere and is destined to fade back into a feudal future where most of our technical, scientific, cultural and legal achievements are slowly forgotten.

Perhaps not so odd if sustainable turns out to mean primitive. That would be primitive for the peasants of course - not everyone.

Consider the dominance of woke politics, climate change, gender politics, race politics, the coronavirus debacle, immigration, mainstream media. Now add Joe Biden to the mix.

Which three?

The Elizabethan Age was ferocious, cruel, superstitious, greedy and courageous.

Hugh Walpole writing about the reign of Elizabeth I.

To my mind our Elizabethan age seems to have dispensed with three of those characteristics.

Loopy

The exercise of power grows with what it feeds on.

Hugh Walpole - The Fortress (1932)

 

People climb on bandwagons. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. We also know how bandwagons grow and grow as more people climb on and then even more people simply because it is growing. This is a feedback loop and it works until metaphorically speaking, the wheels fall off.

A characteristic of political discourse is that it tends to be seen as top-down in the sense that those at the top are generally supposed to initiate whatever needs initiating. If only those at the top were less greedy, dim, obstinate or whatever, the thing would be done. If only it was our party in power. Yet as we probably know but do not often acknowledge, feedback loops are what we really have to consider.

Feedback loops from the media for example. Our audience numbers are going down and down. Something must be done – we need more bandwagons. Plus of course, more tits and bums. Or more fascism disguised as correcting oppression. Or more trips to eco fantasy land disguised as battles against polluters. Or more Malthusian angst disguised as science. Or more government – that’s the easy one.

Political feedback loops weave their way into totalitarian regimes, even though the core aim of such regimes is to prevent feedback loops. They work more slowly perhaps and the loops may be attenuated, but they are always there. The harvest is below expectations yet again. Something must be done. What we have done so far hasn’t worked and if it fails again I may be ousted by those devious swine who pretend to support me.

There are feedback loops from the peasants. Taxes are too high, there is no point in producing more than the bare minimum. The black market is flourishing so maybe I’ll try that in future. Hide those pigs in the woods, the tax gatherer is coming.

Feedback loops are not usually rapid and may operate over generations rather than years or months, but it is worth reminding ourselves that they are loops. Dictators try to find a place outside the loop but there is no such place and in the end the loop wins and they fail.

A complex tangle of feedback loops eventually undermines even the most rigid regime. Loops are economic, demographic, political, practical, cultural or may be induced by climate, natural disasters, pandemics, economics, upper class incompetence and so on. Added to all that is the scheming of opponents prepared to create new loops and boost old ones.

All this is particularly clear at the moment here in the UK. Through establishment incompetence the UK government has wandered into two key feedback loops it could have avoided but did not. Coronavirus lockdowns on the one hand, and high profile carbon neutral policies on the other.

The important point is that the UK government did not initiate these feedback loops, it was willingly drawn into them. It climbed onto two bandwagons and cannot get off either unless it runs into the sand because of outside influences. But voters are part of both bandwagons and voter inertia and acceptance are key drivers which keep both feedback loops going. For now.

An older loop has been mass immigration. We were warned about it at the time. That warning could possibly have initiated a much more cautious immigration feedback loop if voters had played their part in strengthening it. They didn’t.

Faded purple and dusky gold

The long room was beautiful: faded, even shabby, but beautiful. The deep-rose curtains, the soft wine-coloured carpet, the wallpaper of dove colour — all were shabby. Between the gilt frames of the pictures there were, once and again, little tears in the paper. The two big armchairs, one on each side of the fireplace, covered with heavy rose damask, were worn on the arms. There were tall lacquer screens, a long bookcase filled with old tattered volumes; three tall white vases filled with chrysanthemums. Everything was old: even the flowers seemed ancient. But the effect of the room, softly lit, was beautiful, colours dim and deep, rose and faded purple and dusky gold.

Hugh Walpole - The Sea Tower (1939)

It’s an old and rather upper class idea of domestic beauty perhaps, but one I could identify with. Especially if we could afford a place with mullioned windows and lots of old oak, the kind of place Walpole probably had in mind.

Take a gander at Rightmove and you won’t find many domestic interiors of this description even though it could be copied. Apart from the tears in the wallpaper perhaps. Not easy to do that artistically. The sterile look seems to be far more fashionable if Rightmove is any guide.