David Bennett

Visions Of The Future

9.17pm here in the UK on US election day. The results should be coming in within a few hours and I am nervous. It feels like a lot of people are holding their breath.

I am taking a step back, reminding myself that being of religious disposition, I believe that the world ultimately is in good hands.

Which is not to say that some things cannot be very painful, for indeed they can as history has shown us. In short, I hope that Hilary Clinton is the next president of the United States. I cannot imagine the insanity of Donald Trump as president.

People can be so nice. When they are in pain over someone else’s troubles, or when they display kindness to someone, people can be so lovely.

At the same time, they can be like a wounded animal with its leg caught in a trap, dragging themselves around unaware of the damage. It is so poignant.

And one of the killers of kindness and appreciation is cynicism and ridicule. And so many people have been aggressive and intolerant over the past few weeks and months. The hungry mob mentality in people has been awakened. There is a tipping point and history has shown that it can tip very quickly.

So against that background, here are few words about something I have thought for many years

It will be a Tuesday, around 11am. He (or she) will get up from his desk in the office and walk out because he isn’t going to do this any more.

He is going to stop the merry-go-round of the office and this way of doing things. He sees the whole structure and he isn’t going to be part of it any longer. There has to be a better way.

He will walk out onto the street and his heart will pound when he sees that many, many people are there on the street, standing like he is standing. They will look at one another, wondering – Where do we go now?

Is This It

People are scrabbling to make sure Hilary gets in. Or they are trying to get Trump in. A few will vote for third parties because they don’t like either of the main choices. Many will regret that Bernie Sanders didn’t make it, because they like the promise that he described. But for most of us, we don’t have time to discuss niceties or alternative visions of society. The prospect of our imperfect candidate losing is too horrifying. The times don’t allow us that luxury.

But if we take the time to think it through once the crisis is averted (as hopefully it will be) then plainly there is something wrong. And equally plainly, Trump is not going to put it right.

I made up a saying that I use for my own reference. It is a shorthand way of describing a reality that strikes me repeatedly:

It is that it is difficult to see that the world is not made of marmalade when you’ve got your head stuck inside the marmalade jar.

What I am referring to here is that neither candidate seems to be offering a vision of an alternative society that gets to the root of the problem. But in the face of the need to make a choice, we must make the best of it and try to move things as far as possible in the right direction.

So what is the problem?

The problem that is not being discussed is that we are living in mass societies geared to consume, divorced from community, living anonymously in urban landscapes knowing that for the most part we are inconsequential to the way the world moves along.

And there is something more.

In the sixties the counter-culture movement sensed there could be a better way. Of course it could simply be that what modern society is doing is exactly that – working towards a better way.

Perhaps we are working towards a society where people feel they are leading meaningful lives. It could be that it doesn’t look like that to some of us because it’s hard work and a messy business.

We know that progress is two steps forward and one step back. But huge corporations, with what seems like an unholy amount of cash and power, makes it feel like its two steps forwards and three steps back. And then we will never move forward.

People will put up with a lot and withstand a lot of privation if they know that we are all in the same boat. But when some are rich beyond the dreams of Croesus and we see them laughing at our institutions and the value of our very selves – then there is no society. There is just a fractured mass of people crying at the injustice.

But there’s something deeper than this that needs to be addressed.

Everyone who claims to be a moral person and who has more than his or her neighbour has to make a daily ritual of justifying to themselves why they are right to deny the claim of their neighbour. It can be as simple as the homeless person begging on the street. It can be as simple as the car I drive and the car you drive.

But we are nothing if not adaptable. We rationalise and create an equilibrium in our minds. And then something comes along to really upset our communal equilibrium. And it is the hundreds of millions people beyond the perimeter of fortress Europe and fortress North America. Those refugees and economic migrants have upset our balance. We feel guilty and oppressed at one and the same time.

How are we going to make a fair society when we know that by accident of birthplace, people beyond the fence are starving?

But equally while we have to start pulling in the net – bringing more people out of poverty and into comfort – we have to do so without insisting that the price they pay is to die slowly in an office.

Making Eurozone Hay Whatever The Weather

In a 2010 article in the Guardian on the financial troubles in Greece, the Economics editor Larry Elliott referred to the 1997 IMF bailout of Thailand, South Korea, and Indonesia. He says:

Asian nations found another way of protecting themselves against speculative attacks on their currencies: they used the devaluations that were part of the IMF bailout packages to export their way back to growth.

The result was that they amassed huge foreign exchange reserves, which they recycled into western financial markets, leading eventually to asset price bubbles. The countdown to the crash of 2007 started right there.

In other words, countries devalued to make their exports more attractive.

That is not possible for countries within the eurozone.

Imagine a country contemplating setting up a common currency with a number of other countries, and the deal was that they would all stump up so much per month to enable them to buy supplies at cheaper prices.

And imagine that one of them spent its income on fancy tables and chairs, parties and high incomes for its workers.

You can imagine how the others would be pretty upset.

If they had been smart, they would have agreed at the outset not to spend more individually than they took in as income.

If they had been really smart, they would have given each other access to their books so that they could all see whether there was a risk that one or more of them was going off the rails.

If they had been super-smart, they would have given a veto on each other’s chequebooks so that none of them could write cheques for more than they could afford.

So why were the Europeans so outraged at the idea that they should introduce this power and tread on each other’s sovereignty a bit?

It took a default by Greece to make the Eurozone countries wake up and even contemplate agreeing to contemplate this.

Hidden Benefits In Default

While Germany was powering away and building up its economy, its banks (and French and Belgian banks) were lending to Greece and Italy even though they knew that Greece and Italy were sub-prime economies.

And they made good interest out of the loans. And then when things got tough, they raised the interest rate to compensate for the risk.

But they created the risk themselves by lending in the first place to an economy that they knew was not paying its way.

When the game was up and the fun was over, Germany and France imposed budget restraint on Greece; the budget restraint that should have been agreed and mutually imposed from the start.

Why wasn’t it? Why is there not a code of practise among nations?

The answer is surely that too much money was being made and no-one in the governments of the rich Northern European nations were able to or wanted to stop their banks making hay while the sun shone.

And when the Greek default loomed? Germany and France and Belgium didn’t say – Ah well, it was good while it lasted.

Instead they got public money from across the richer countries of the eurozone to bail out Greece via the ECB.

Who thinks that is a correct view? Professor Otmar Issing, the ECB’s first chief economist.

In an article in the Telegraph of 16 October he is reported as saying he saw:

the first Greek rescue in 2010 as little more than a bailout for German and French banks, insisting that it would have been far better to eject Greece from the euro as a salutary lesson for all.

The Greeks should have been offered generous support, but only after it had restored exchange rate viability by returning to the drachma.

Where Does This Leave Britain

A couple of weeks ago, Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England prior to Mark Carney was reported as saying in an interview with Sky News:

During the referendum campaign, someone said the real danger of Brexit is you’ll end up with higher interest rates, lower house prices and a lower exchange rate, and I thought: dream on.

Because that’s what we’ve been trying to achieve for the past three years and now we have a chance of getting it.

So, four months into the Brexit referendum vote, where are we?

The FTSE is holding up because the UK economy is fundamentally strong.

The pound has fallen because hedge funds have taken their property investment portfolios out of the UK.

And the future? The future is uncertain because it’s the future.

If Trump gets in / If Russia and China take a more aggressive stance together over missiles in South Korea and Eastern Europe / if China confronts other countries more aggressively over sovereignty of the South China Sea / if Ukraine is annexed by Russia / if Brexit ever happens…

Rogue Politicians and Parent Figures

I saw a photo today of a city by the sea. Lovely photo – and almost the first thought I had was how the city might be threatened by global warming and the rise in sea level.

In other words, I thought about danger and change and uncertainty.

The ground is moving under my feet. And under the feet of millions of people, to judge by the comments that are swirling around in the news and social media at the moment.

The news is that we are all much more wound up and tense thinking about problems than we were. I certainly feel the pressure.

I think it comes down to parent figures. We want them to take the responsibility off our backs. We want them to keep things on an even keel, running smooth, predictable.

From the perspective of the West, we don’t want relations between the US and Russia to deteriorate. We don’t want to look into what behaviour and what ambitions have brought about the tension across the globe.

We don’t want Russia and China forming new alliances to to oppose US intentions as they see it. We don’t want Turkey and Russia doing deals on gas that strengthens Russian access to the Mediterranean.

And on the other side, we don’t want the US and/or NATO putting missiles ever closer to the dividing line down the middle of Eastern Europe – at least, we want the defence shield and the extra capability but we don’t want to stir up problems with Russia.

We want a better technology that strengthens the defence shield, but we want it invented in the Pentagon with little or no visible sign to ratchet up the tensions.

Geography and territory still rule in all our thinking. We have not moved on in thousands of years.

And when rogue politicians appear, we get all the more nervous.

I think that is perhaps Clinton’s greatest psychological strength – that she appears as a steady hand on the tiller in this dangerous times on the international stage.

But it’s a dangerous game for her to refer to the dangerous times we face. After all, she was Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013. There is always the thought that perhaps things could have been ratcheted down had someone else had the job.

Still, it’s a better hand than Trump can play. He is on the knife-edge of becoming a laughing stock and a hate figure for his attacks on women. And that undermines the image he tries to portray of himself as someone who can talk tough and talk frankly and do a deal with Russia and others.

I think people are getting the idea that he would be ridiculed. Then he would get angry and start posturing in a way that would further threaten the stability of the world.

But he is not an idiot. I think he made credible points at the second debate on October 9th. Here is a link to the transcript of the debate. Search for ‘Assad’ and you will find the section where he says that the US has strengthened Iran, that the US Administration doesn’t know who the rebels are, and that Russia and Iran are killing ISIS.

I think he is missing the greater geopolitical picture in the relationship between Syria and Russia, and that the US Administration are well aware of it. You’ll find that in an earlier article Why Russia has been bombing ISIS

The Public Face Of The Overworked

There was a time when if you ordered something by post in the UK it was delivered by Royal Mail. And postmen didn’t look overworked. Perhaps the people in the sorting office had it tougher, but we didn’t see them.

Royal Mail was a nationalised industry until it was sold off some years ago. Still, it has tens of thousands of employees, a strong union (the CWU) and from the way postmen talk about it – reasonable working conditions.

The Communication Workers Union is the biggest union for the communications industry in the UK with 199,443 members. Formed in January 1995 when the Union of Communication Workers joined forces with the National Communications Union, we represent members in postal, telecom, mobile, administrative and financial companies including Royal Mail Group, UK Mail and BT, Telefonica O2, Virgin Media, EE and Santander, as well as outsourcing company Capita. Our members’ expertise includes engineering, computing, clerical, mechanical, driving, retail, financial, call centre and manual skills.

Now online shopping has rocketed, and I see people delivering packages for private delivery companies like Hermes and Amazon. I see them running up stairs, hurriedly gathering signatures or pushing packets through doors.

They usually have no time for more than a glance at the people they deliver to.

Tamara and I know the Hermes delivery man and when he has time, we chat. He’s been helpful in the past, when Tamara would phone him and he’d coordinate deliveries for when we are in.

Yesterday he told us it was his last day because he was moving to work for Amazon. He was sweating from rushing about so much.

It occurs to me that when workers were effectively hidden from view in factories, we as members of the public would not see the way they were overworked.

Now we see them on the street, rushing about delivering parcels. I wonder what effect this has on the collective psyche? Does it speed us up to keep time with their speed? Do we become more anxious as we see their anxiety?

It certainly feels like it sometimes.