Thatcher

A couple of weeks ago I complained about the lack of balance in the obituaries for Hugo Chavez. Mainly I was frustrated, since I wanted to learn more and am curious and unsure about how his legacy will develop in time.

 

Now an even bigger figure has died. Given that her age in power was a generation ago and the perspective that enables, I was again disappointed at the lack of balance. But this time I knew a lot more already, as I was in my 20’s in Thatcher’s Britain. I think the only time I have voted in UK elections has been against Maggie, so she was a dominant force in my formative era. So this time I have my own opinion.

 

We are all to a great extent shaped by context, and my main complaint with all the obituaries is that this seems to be too often overlooked. I can highlight four major examples. The first two mitigate some of the negatives written about her, the last two challenge the positives.

 

First, it is true that Maggie presided over a horrific recession with three million unemployed, but we need to accept she came to power at the height of the Iran crisis and the consequent oil shock. Oil prices shot up several hundred percent for the second time in a decade and all global economies suffered. This was not primarily Maggie’s recession, it was Khomeini’s.

 

Second, her approach to organised labour was brutal, but a middle path was not available to her. In the 1970’s, the TUC was more powerful than any party, and many union leaders had aims and approaches wholly incompatible with any concept of a competitive economy. This had destroyed her three immediate predecessors. When people say she should have negotiated with the miners and navigated a more gentle path, they forget how Britain was then. Scargill simply had to be defeated, and brutally, whatever the damage to ordinary families.

 

Third, the stunning UK recovery in Nigel Lawson’s time as chancellor had less to do with Thatcher’s economic policies and most to do with North Sea Oil. For the only time in the entire century (and perhaps ever into the future) the UK moved into a natural surplus position as an economy during the 1980’s. This created unprecedented opportunity to reshape the economy – which in my opinion Maggie tragically squandered.

 

Finally is the pervasive myth that somehow Maggie and Ronnie defeated communism. Communism defeated communism, it collapsed from its own unsustainability. One man, Michael Gorbachev, enabled this to happen in a way that avoided carnage, and hopefully will eventually be lauded for this. Maggie and Ronnie (then George senior) just happened to be around at the time. And they squandered the unique opportunity created.

 

Maggie was a fantastic politician. She had a wonderful combination of appearing certain and principled while in fact always calculating her next move smartly. The outward certainty meant she could take a brave stance, communicate it, and bring enough people with her. She was fearless and peerless. The command she had over her party was breath taking – remember those standing ovations? She somehow got bounced into the Falklands crisis, but while all her peers would have dithered she acted, indifferent to her legacy (the claim that somehow the war was contrived to turn around her poll ratings is pretty ludicrous, though the turnaround was indeed a direct consequence). This apparent certainty also enabled her to defeat Scargill.

 

Yet she was no hothead, there was political calculation in abundance. She was opportunistic in becoming leader. She used her party platform smartly. She fed the voters she needed enough of the policies they wanted to get her elected. She chose which unions to take on, and when. I believe she would have seen the poll tax through and been elected again in 1992 – it was Europe that she could not finesse within her party and which defeated her.

 

Apart from her overall positive service to labour relations, she also initiated two wonderful policies, combining vote-winning with genuine social and economic benefits. The first was the sale of council (socially owned) houses to their tenants, an idea so brilliant that we wondered why no one had thought of it before. The second was privatisation of state assets. This policy was brave, sound, vote-winning, and has stood the test of time and been exported around the world, usually with positive effect.

 

She had some disastrous policies too. I would highlight the planning changes that led to out of town superstores. These have turned out to change British towns in bad ways, making them resemble US ones rather than, for example, Dutch ones. Even in the prosperous South, high streets now are sad relics dominated by bookies and thrift shops, communities are dispersed to soulless suburbs, and everyone drives, to the detriment of public transport. The rest of Europe did not make these mistakes, and the result feels permanent and tragic. And it started with Maggie.

 

While she was a consummate politician, I am in the camp that would condemn her as a stateswoman. Her politics and her context gave her an opportunity in the late 1980’s to reshape Britain, building on the privatisation success and defeat of the destructive side of trade unionism. She had the space (from politics) and the money (from oil) to do what she wanted. How did she use this opportunity? Disastrously.

 

She destroyed local government, a paradox really from someone who professed devolving power from the state. Only now I am spending time in the USA do I realise how important state and local government is to foster innovation and enterprise. Instead, enterprise came to be associated almost completely with finance, in Maggie’s share owning democracy. Talented kids in the UK had always gravitated to professions and finance rather than business, to parasitic rather than creative activities, and Maggie accelerated this. Where are Britain’s great companies nowadays, outside the fields of consumption (Tesco) or finance? This lost opportunity from the golden age of oil may have condemned Britain for generations. Look at the underlying economic statistics nowadays on Britain – productivity, innovation, balance of trade are all disastrous. This started with Maggie.

 

She had the chance to invest in infrastructure, in education, in decent housing, in equality of opportunity, European trade relations and in the benefits of immigration. Her scorecard in all these areas is bleak. I don’t advocate old style industrial policy, but instead promoting these drivers of growth. She successfully cleared the decks of the old way, but put nothing useful in its place, only greedy parasitic bankers.

 

Socially there were also missed chances. Another paradox, as a woman she pushed forward but also pulled back female emancipation. She appointed few women, and did little to promote good child care or pre-schooling. Tolerance of homosexuality was held back, and bigotry against immigrants allowed to build. Criminal justice policy reduced to throwing more and more people into jail. The Daily Mail still talks for much of Britain, and it is generally an unedifying voice. This started with Thatcher. It did not have to be this way.

 

But if the domestic legacy is a sad lost opportunity, the international one is even more tragic. Thatcher came to power in a bipolar world, and it was understandable, even if ultimately indefensible, to act as a cold warrior then. She felt let down by Mugabe, so tacitly backed apartheid in South Africa for too long. Big men on “our side” were tolerated elsewhere, and the Iran Iraq war almost promoted as a dream scenario, despite the human cost, and indeed the ultimate reckoning to the Western reputation we are now facing. She never embraced Europe, but at least stayed in, no doubt as a quid pro quo with Ronnie (something she could not reconcile at the end).

 

Then came Gorbachev and the collapse of communism, and a glorious opportunity. But Maggie was stuck in a win-lose mentality and could not help to forge a better world, unlike for example Helmut Kohl. The chance to truly promote democracy, to reduce weapons and military influence (especially covert operations) was cast aside. Russia was subjected to inappropriate economic orthodoxy with lingering catastrophic effects. Admittedly, the US had a greater role in this calumny, but Thatcher had earned some influence yet failed to exercise this in any positive direction. We are all still paying the price.

 

Her final failure was in her strong suit, politics. She did little to promote talent in her own party, and left behind a rudderless ship that became unelectable for a generation, with her stirring things in the background. She did nothing to improve parliament or the constitution, and arguably made Britain less governable after her demise, especially with the shocking regional profiles of political parties now existing. Sensible discussion of coalition, criminal justice, immigration and, especially, of Europe, remains almost impossible even now.

 

The way she dominated her cabinet led to my favourite Thatcher joke, from Spitting Image. The scene is a restaurant she enters with her cabinet for a meal, and the conversation between Maggie and the head waiter goes as follows:

What would you like to order, madam?

Steak.

How would you like it, madam?

Raw.

And, madam, what about the vegetables?

What? Oh, they’ll just take the same as me.

 

So, in my opinion, Thatcher was a great politician who achieved more change than most, some of it necessary and some brilliant. But ultimately she failed as a stateswoman as comprehensively as she succeeded as a politician. And it is in stateswomanship where the legacy really lasts. And, for me at least, it stinks.

Forgotten senses

At school, we learned that we had five senses. Sight, hearing, smell, taste and feeling/touch. The last one was a bit odd because it came from our skin and hence from all over the body, but the first four related to parts of our face, which made them quite intuitive to learn about. If I recall correctly, these fours senses were taught over a similar timespan.

 

This little nugget came back to my mind when reading an article recently about what is the best smell. The content of the article was predictable enough, with advocates for smells from baking bread to particular flowers. But I was struck by something in the commentary, Two of the judges out of five (maybe the oldest two?) had lost their sense of smell.

 

Then I recalled that my Dad also lost his sense of smell. And I wonder if I have partially lost mine too. If I am out with my family, I always pick up a scent more mildly and later than others, especially the kids. I seem to be quite lucky in that I can encounter bad odours without as much discomfort. Presumably the other side of the coin is that I am picking up less sensory pleasure from good odours.

 

I also notice that my sense of taste is not as acute as the kids’. One of them especially has an amazing ability to place tastes, describe and link them, and recall his history with them. I often sit in wonder at this. But maybe I used to be like that as well.

 

Since being in New York, I have been tested for ailment after ailment. I confessed to some loss of hearing so was sent to an ear expert. Even the GP gave me a sight test, and indeed it is hard to avoid sight specialists and shops and tests, including one for my NY driving licence. But there it stopped. No-one ever asks about my sense of smell. Or, for that matter, taste. Feeling is only tested, as far as I can tell, by things like the knee-jerk test.

 

Now, I wonder why this should be. One sense gets all the treatment it could possibly wish for, and has sprouted a large industry. A second one (I blogged before about hearing seemed to be the poor relation of sight) is starting to generate interest too, albeit too slowly for my taste (or should that be my hearing). But the others are just ignored.

 

Now this strikes me as rather unbalanced, and rather sad, and maybe is an opportunity for someone. Evolution has presumably given us all the senses for a reason. Even nowadays, when our hunter gathering is rather sporadic and our methods for selecting mates are maybe a bit more sophisticated than they used to be, these things must have some uses. They can protect us from danger – eating bad food for example – and have the potential to give us a lot of pleasure. Indeed, if you think about it quite a large part of our pleasure is associated with the senses.

 

Sight somehow has gained prime position. Maybe there is a clue in the driving licence, because there are activities which we now consider quite basic, many work related, which simply require good sight. Given this, the medical industry has responded. It developed good tests with simple, standard, metrics, and then produced workable corrections. I had laser eye surgery and feel it was a good investment and it has improved my quality of life.

 

Hearing is way behind. The test is still pretty awful and unreliable, the metrics are very simple, and the corrections are crude and rather ineffective. Belatedly, the medical industry has woken up to this, and I see a lot more hearing clinics about nowadays. Maybe hearing aids (or laser hearing correction?) will improve markedly in the coming years. I certainly hope so, for my partial deafness (very minor, according to my most recent test) still inhibits my life, and it seems likely to get worse.

 

Why was medicine so far behind? I don’t accept that the science is tougher. Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t, but medicine generally finds solutions once it starts seriously looking for them, which is when it gets funding or companies see the chance to make money.

 

Hearing loss seems to be associated with age, whereas many people suffer short sight from youth, and that may explain the lack of attention. Old people did not used to be as plentiful as they are now, and their ailments were seen as something they just had to put up with.

 

But I have a theory that more people are slightly deaf than they realise, and that it does marginally disable them. We realise that listening is a key skill in life, but some of us find it physically harder to do that than others, especially in somewhere like a crowded restaurant with modern, metallic furniture.

 

What gets measured gets fixed, and until now the hearing test has held science back. It has not been routinely available at the GP, and seems to be quite susceptible to bad readings. I remember once being asked to press a button when I heard a sound, and it was only half way through that I realised I could see the nurse activating the equipment to make the sound!

 

So I predict a greater interest in hearing solutions in the years to come. And, by the same logic, I predict the same for smell and taste, albeit slowly.

 

While I can make a case that poor hearing can be disabling in a job context, that is harder to do with smell or taste, unless one happens to be a chef or involved in sanitation, I suppose. Often, avoiding pain and disability has led medical progress. But, now we are a bit richer, pleasure can play a role too. Just look at all those ads for facelifts and the like!

 

My theory is that many of us are losing out on a lot of pleasure due to our weak smell or taste. Perhaps all our sense get weaker once we past forty five? Perhaps there are techniques we can deploy that would not even need medical intervention? A Paulo Coelho novel talks about love between two people only being real once it has been experienced with all five senses. This rings pretty true to me, and probably all the senses matter in other contexts too.  

 

What I know is that smell (and taste) are powerful, and that the money men should be interested. When I worked for Shell I was for a time involved in marketing our shops. I became convinced that an odour was potentially a massive hidden inducement to buy, especially an odour of bread or, even better, coffee. At the time the science of this was nascent, and I was told that chemicals would soon be available to simulate things smells, but not yet. Finally, people are catching on to this, and soon these chemical odours will be routine in some shops.

 

And then, marketers will finally realise that us oldies have partially lost our sense of smell. And the medical industry will finally step up. They will develop reliable tests, metrics, advice and corrections. Maybe when I reach seventy and I visit the GP for routine tests, these will for the first time include smell and taste. And even something more subtle for feeling than the old knee jerk too.

 

Perhaps this will be a bit late for me, but not the next generation. Another theory I have is that glasses will soon be obsolete (except as a fashion item) as someone will develop a reliable life-long correction that can be cheaply applied in childhood. Then, maybe twenty years later, similar innovations might become available for the other senses.

 

So, there is an investment opportunity for someone, and something the medical industry can more usefully focus on than wholly cosmetic things. Let me know please when something useful becomes available. Just remember please to use large print or a loud voice.

What goes around

There is a welcome new discussion in the USA about drones and their legality. Until this year, most Americans did not really know what drones were doing in their name, and were certainly not encouraged to question it. Now, Obama has made some speeches and indicated his wish to form a stronger framework for drone attacks by appointing John Brennan to head the CIA. This has led to some relatively thoughtful articles on the subject, including one in Time a couple of weeks ago.

 

There is no doubt that this discussion is overdue. The USA has quietly been using them as the weapon of choice for some years now. They are quite cheap and don’t place servicemen at risk. They can target enemies with only limited damage to non-combatants. As a result Obama now has a regular Tuesday meeting at which he signs off who can be killed and where. Time also made clear that the CIA has its own drones, its own list, and does its killings without regular sign off by the president.

 

Now, isn’t that frightening? If the USA wants to invade a country, nowadays it faces massive public pressure, costs and international consequences (even though war has not been declared since 1945). Obama is wont to do so, as his stance in Syria shows only too clearly. Yet why bother, when you have drones? They seem to offer all the intended consequences with none of the problems.

 

A Republican congressman, Rand Paul, made himself famous by forcing Obama to answer a question saying he would not use drones to kill Americans abroad or at home. The response he received was slow and underwhelming. Like all quick fixes, drones have now become part of the establishment, and will be hard to regulate. At least with Obama and Brennan, we have a better opportunity to reach a reasonable solution than with Bush and Cheney at the helm.

 

Time focused on the risk to Americans, and on narrow US legal questions. Apparently, the drone programme is justified at home using sweeping legislation passed in 2001 after 9/11. People now find it increasingly tenuous to justify a killing in, say, Yemen, with the need to round up 9/11 perpetrators or to stop a re-occurrence. But it is messy, as congress is grid-locked and getting anything through is tough just now.

 

But what about the bigger picture? How can it possibly be justified that people, any people, are summarily executed without any trial or meaningful judicial process? Basically, Obama and his generals are asking everyone else to trust their own judgement about who should live or die, not just in exceptional circumstances but on an industrial scale. Surely this is an outrage, and it only goes to show how toothless global institutions are nowadays that there has been so little outcry outside the targeted Muslim states.

 

It is sad that Time felt it could not make this simple point. Americans are so brainwashed by the concepts of good and evil liberty and terrorism, still so traumatised by 9/11, that they are no ready to accept any argument about the human rights of any foreigner. Obama no doubt sees the problem himself, but is hemmed in by the political need to appear strong. The brave move to address the narrow legal question is the best he can do to insure against another cowboy in the White House four years from now.

 

But there is another argument which could be used and which might even work. What happens when everyone has drones?

 

Drones are not all that difficult to copy, and the USA has been deploying them for some years already. Surely the Chinese will have a drone programme? And the Russians. What about Pakistan? Iran? 9/11 required breath-taking audacity and execution, combined with a lot of complacency on the American side. It doesn’t sound so tough to send a few drones to take out some targets across the USA. But it would be as devastating politically, and of course tragic for the victims and their families.

 

So the argument could be based on imagining what would happen when the tables are turned. There has been plenty of practice to learn this lesson. Short-term considerations led the USA to dropping the nuclear bomb, to adopting client states, accepting torture, weakening the UN, and even some economic bullying.

 

The most recent example has been cyber-warfare. Stuxnet is software which went a long way to disabling the Iranian nuclear programme. Americans have not been asked to think about the ethics or the legality of such action, nor even of the killing of Iranian scientists. But China is already just as good at this sort of hacking. Only last month we read a report about how Chinese are infiltrating companies and agencies worldwide. But what right has the USA got to complain, when they do the same themselves?

 

This is all a sad consequence of the emergence of a single. Dominant, global power. When communism collapsed, many of us hoped for an era of peace and human development. The need for client states disappeared, and indeed, slowly, true development has come to Africa as a result. Of course the eventual impact for those in Russia and its orbit has been mainly beneficial. But sadly many other opportunities have been lost.

 

One possible root cause is the CIA itself. A massive organisation with few checks on its behaviour suddenly found itself with not much to do. We should not be surprised to learn that they invented new threats to keep themselves in business. Clinton has an excellent legacy overall, but it would have been so much stronger if he could have found the will to take a giant axe to the secret services. For me, it remains the scariest part of the Time story on drones that there seem to be two weekly kill lists, largely independent of each other, one signed off by an elected politician but the other one not. How we all so meekly accept our own nations’ covert activities is a mystery to me.

 

While we have nation states as the dominant political structures, the temptation will remain for those seeking power to play up to a storyline of superiority. What are our best hopes, to achieve some balance in the world without having to suffer another world war on the way? A bi-polar world did not work, and a unipolar one doesn’t seem to work well either. When China has overtaken the US, I don’t hold out many hopes that they will behave better, indeed it may be worse, given the politics there and the history of China.

 

But that is why this argument about what goes around comes around could be so powerful. The only deterrent to any bully is the fear of a bigger bully. Everyone can see that the US power is a transient thing. This creates an opportunity to use fear as a weapon to turn public opinion around against abuse of power. Rand Paul did a good job, but how wonderful if he could have incorporated this argument into his speech? For, as I see it, only this argument has a chance of making the world’s leading power behave more responsibly, from the bottom up.

 

Of course, bringing a fear factor in can backfire. 9/11 itself proves that, as the USA public immediately succumbed to the urge to fight back. The Norwegian response to Brevik is so laudable, and remarkable for how it went against modern norms. Somehow, we have to learn to be more like Norwegians, so we can enable our leaders to refrain from a power response to fear. Come on, Obama, time to sort out your legacy. Come on, US journalists, time to start helping rather than hindering. Come on, so called allies, time to be heard. Drones is a great place to start.