Society

In the 1980s, the then Prime Minister famously declared that there is no such thing as society. She encouraged a free-for-all so that people would claw themselves higher. Of course, it came at the expense of ordinary working people who were not very good at clawing.

They didn’t have the advantage of money or power or friends in the right places.

They were simply consigned to the rubbish heap.

How can anyone expect people to care when the society is run by self-seekers? People aren’t stupid – they know when they are being robbed blind.

And the dominance of big business doesn’t help to make anyone feel they are a meaningful member of society.

Yes, it is for each person to bear responsibility for their personal actions and to behave ethically no matter what they see around them – or at least to do so as much as possible.

But responsibility and allegiance are not the same – and people are trying to survive in the cracks left in the framework of a system that doesn’t care about them.

People will put up with a lot when they know that they share the burden with everyone. But when social and economic justice are absent – anyone will question why he or she should owe allegiance to anything.

TSB Bank came into being on September 9, 2013 as a result of Lloyds Banking Group splitting off 631 of its branches.

Lloyds was required to split off the branches to fulfil the promise it made during the financial crisis that under EU law qualified it for UK Government aid.

In June, 2015, the Spanish bank, Banco Sabadell was been given approval by the City regulator to take over TSB.

What a strange turn of events.

In the first episode of Series Five of Homeland, the high-ups in the US Government ask CIA operative Peter Quinn to tell them how their strategy in Syria is going.

He asks them to tell him what their strategy is and he will tell them whether it is working. It is his introduction to tell them they have no strategy, but their enemy has.

They ask for his recommendation and he says to bomb the city of Raqqa to a parking lot. The answer is unacceptable because it is not humane to bomb a city where the enemy is mixed in among the civilian population. That’s TV.

Real Life

In 2011, Obama said that Assad must go. When ISIS came on the scene, Assad suddenly didn’t seem such a bad option, and Kerry has made some ambiguous remarks since. Now Russia is bombing in Syria and Putin claims they are doing a much better job than the US Air Force has done, and it seems to be true.

The US has protested, but I wonder whether they might not just be glad that someone else is bombing Raqqa into a parking lot for them.

Of course, there is another war going on. It is the war of how to describe Islamic fundamentalism and ISIS. Tony Blair says it is a clash of civilisations. I think GW Bush saw it the same way.

The current thinking in the US is probably to treat ISIS as criminals and deny them ideological credibility. Which is the more dangerous strategy? Time will tell.

Personally, I don’t think very much can stand in the way of personal freedom. Once people see it and get a taste for it, they want it. There is no turning the clock back. It is how the USA won the Vietnam War.

At an exhibition of Hemingway’s life that I saw in New York last year, I copied down this list.

Hemingway had written this required list for young writers at the request of a young writer.

Here’s the list:

The Blue Hotel by Stephen Crane
The Open Boat by Stephen Crane
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Dubliners by James Joyce
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
Hail and Farewell by George Moore
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Oxford Book of English Verse
The Enormous Room by E.E. Cummings
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Far Away and Long Ago by W.H. Hudson
The American by Henry James