Early on last Wednesday, February 26th, the BBC Radio 4 programme World at One, had a major item on scamming. Here are the details of that programme:
Released On: 26 Feb 2025
Back in September we revealed the knitted cardigan scam. Millions have been taken in by social media ads of expensive looking knitwear for a reasonable price. Victims hear nothing until something cheap and nasty arrives in the post months later. But it’s more than a simple con. Shari Vahl reveals what its really about. Sales of stout show no sign of stopping as more young women are turning to it. Guinness blames increased demand with supply chain issues for a recent shortage. Its rivals in the dark beer world are jumping on the opportunity with some success. Will it work? Finally, a listener tells us how his energy company gave his mobile number to a criminal who went on to steal £40,000. We find out how you can prevent this happening to you. Presenter: Shari Vahl Producer: Kevin Mousle.
Then later on that morning, I watched the video below, produced by the American Social Administration
Then there was this list of scams and frauds produced by the USA Government
On yesterday’s World This Weekend the programme was entirely devoted to a speech that John Major gave on February 16th. His theme was: “We are moving into a more dangerous world“
Some of the best evidence for this comes from the behavior of two of the most powerful beings of the Maya world: The first is a creator god whose name is still spoken by millions of people every fall – Huracán, or “Hurricane.” The second is a god of lightning, K’awiil, from the early first millennium C.E.
As a scholar of the Indigenous religions of the Americas, I recognize that these beings, though separated by over 1,000 years, are related and can teach us something about our relationship to the natural world.
Huracán, the ‘Heart of Sky’
Huracán was once a god of the K’iche’, one of the Maya peoples who today live in the southern highlands of Guatemala. He was one of the main characters of the Popol Vuh, a religious text from the 16th century. His name probably originated in the Caribbean, where other cultures used it to describe the destructive power of storms.
The K’iche’ associated Huracán, which means “one leg” in the K’iche’ language, with weather. He was also their primary god of creation and was responsible for all life on earth, including humans.
Because of this, he was sometimes known as U K’ux K’aj, or “Heart of Sky.” In the K’iche’ language, k’ux was not only the heart but also the spark of life, the source of all thought and imagination.
Yet, Huracán was not perfect. He made mistakes and occasionally destroyed his creations. He was also a jealous god who damaged humans so they would not be his equal. In one such episode, he is believed to have clouded their vision, thus preventing them from being able to see the universe as he saw it.
Huracán was one being who existed as three distinct persons: Thunderbolt Huracán, Youngest Thunderbolt and Sudden Thunderbolt. Each of them embodied different types of lightning, ranging from enormous bolts to small or sudden flashes of light.
Despite the fact that he was a god of lightning, there were no strict boundaries between his powers and the powers of other gods. Any of them might wield lightning, or create humanity, or destroy the Earth.
Another storm god
The Popol Vuh implies that gods could mix and match their powers at will, but other religious texts are more explicit. One thousand years before the Popol Vuh was written, there was a different version of Huracán called K’awiil. During the first millennium, people from southern Mexico to western Honduras venerated him as a god of agriculture, lightning and royalty.
Illustrations of K’awiil can be found everywhere on Maya pottery and sculpture. He is almost human in many depictions: He has two arms, two legs and a head. But his forehead is the spark of life – and so it usually has something that produces sparks sticking out of it, such as a flint ax or a flaming torch. And one of his legs does not end in a foot. In its place is a snake with an open mouth, from which another being often emerges.
Indeed, rulers, and even gods, once performed ceremonies to K’awiil in order to try and summon other supernatural beings. As personified lightning, he was believed to create portals to other worlds, through which ancestors and gods might travel.
Representation of power
For the ancient Maya, lightning was raw power. It was basic to all creation and destruction. Because of this, the ancient Maya carved and painted many images of K’awiil. Scribes wrote about him as a kind of energy – as a god with “many faces,” or even as part of a triad similar to Huracán.
He was everywhere in ancient Maya art. But he was also never the focus. As raw power, he was used by others to achieve their ends.
Moreover, Maya artists always had K’awiil doing something or being used to make something happen. They believed that power was something you did, not something you had. Like a bolt of lightning, power was always shifting, always in motion.
An interdependent world
Because of this, the ancient Maya thought that reality was not static but ever-changing. There were no strict boundaries between space and time, the forces of nature or the animate and inanimate worlds.
Residents wade through a street flooded by Hurricane Helene, in Batabano, Mayabeque province, Cuba, on Sept. 26, 2024. AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa
Everything was malleable and interdependent. Theoretically, anything could become anything else – and everything was potentially a living being. Rulers could ritually turn themselves into gods. Sculptures could be hacked to death. Even natural features such as mountains were believed to be alive.
The illusion is not that different things exist. Rather it is that they exist independent from one another. Huracán, in this sense, damaged himself by damaging his creations.
Hurricane season every year should remind us that human beings are not independent from nature but part of it. And like Hurácan, when we damage nature, we damage ourselves.
I am writing this having listened to a programme on BBC Radio 4. (Was broadcast on Radio 4 on Tuesday, August 13th.) It shows how many, many people can have a really positive response to a dastardly negative occurrence such as the Covid outbreak or a pandemic.
Every Friday, volunteers gather on the Albert Embankment at the River Thames in London to lovingly retouch thousands of red hearts inscribed on a Portland stone wall directly opposite the Houses of Parliament. Each heart is dedicated to a British victim of COVID. It is a deeply social space – a place where the COVID bereaved come together to honour their dead and share memories.
The so-called National Covid Memorial Wall is not, however, officially sanctioned. In fact, ever since activists from COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice (CBFFJ) daubed the first hearts on the wall in March 2021 it has been a thorn in the side of the authorities.
Featured in the media whenever there is a new revelation about partygate, the wall is a symbol of the government’s blundering response to the pandemic and an implicit rebuke to former prime minister Boris Johnson and other government staff who breached coronavirus restrictions.
As one writer put it, viewed from parliament the hearts resemble “a reproachful smear of blood”. Little wonder that the only time Johnson visited the wall was under the cover of darkness to avoid the TV cameras. His successor Rishi Sunak has been similarly reluctant to acknowledge the wall or say what might take its place as a more formal memorial to those lost in the pandemic.
Though in April the UK Commission on COVID Commemoration presented Sunak with a report on how the pandemic should be remembered, Sunak has yet to reveal the commission’s recommendations.
Lady Heather Hallett, the former high court judge who chairs the public inquiry into COVID, has attempted to acknowledge the trauma of the bereaved by commissioning a tapestry to capture the experiences of people who “suffered hardship and loss” during the pandemic. Yet such initiatives are no substitute for state-sponsored memorials.
What is remembered and what is forgotten?
This political vacuum is odd when you consider that the United Kingdom, like other countries, engages in many other commemorative activities central to national identity. The fallen of the first world war and other military conflicts are commemorated in a Remembrance Sunday ceremony held every November at the Cenotaph in London, for example.
But while wars lend themselves to compelling moral narratives, it is difficult to locate meaning in the random mutations of a virus. And while wars draw on a familiar repertoire of symbols and rituals, pandemics have few templates.
For instance, despite killing more than 50 million globally, there are virtually no memorials to the 1918-1919 “Spanish” influenza pandemic. Nor does the UK have a memorial to victims of HIV/AIDS. As the memory studies scholar Astrid Erll puts it, pandemics have not been sufficiently “mediated” in collective memory.
As a rule, they do not feature in famous paintings, novels or films or in the oral histories passed down as part of family lore. Nor are they able to draw on familiar cultural materials such as poppies, gun carriages, catafalques and royal salutes. Without such symbols and schemata, Erll argues, we struggle to incorporate pandemics into our collective remembering systems.
This lacuna was brought home to me last September when tens of thousands of Britons flocked to the south bank of the Thames to pay their respects to Britain’s longest serving monarch. By coincidence, the police directed the queue for the late Queen’s lying-in-state in Westminster Hall over Lambeth Bridge and along Albert Embankment.
But few of the people I spoke to in the queue seemed to realise what the hearts signified. It was as if the spectacle of a royal death had eclipsed the suffering of the COVID bereaved, rendering the wall all but invisible.
Waiting for answers
Another place where the pandemic could be embedded in collective memory is at the public inquiry. Opening the preliminary hearing last October into the UK’s resilience and preparedness for a pandemic, Lady Hallett promised to put the estimated 6.8 million Britons mourning the death of a family member or friend to COVID at the heart of the legal process. “I am listening to them; their loss will be recognised,” she said.
But though Lady Hallett has strategically placed photographs of the hearts throughout the inquiry’s offices in Bayswater and has invited the bereaved to relate their experiences to “Every Story Matters”, the hearing room is dominated by ranks of lawyers. And except when a prominent minister or official is called to testify, the proceedings rarely make the news.
This is partly the fault of the inquiry process itself. The hearings are due to last until 2025, with the report on the first stage of the process not expected until the summer of 2024. As Lucy Easthope, an emergency planner and veteran of several disasters, puts it: “one of the most painful frustrations of the inquiry will be temporal. It will simply take too long.”
The inquiry has also been beset by bureaucratic obfuscation, not least by the Cabinet Office which attempted (unsuccessfully in the end) to block the release of WhatsApp messages relating to discussions between ministers and Downing Street officials in the run-up to lockdown.
To the inquiry’s critics, the obvious parallel is with the Grenfell inquiry, which promised to “learn lessons” from the devastating fire that engulfed the west London tower in 2017 but has so far ended up blurring the lines of corporate responsibility and forestalling a political reckoning.
The real work of holding the government to account and making memories takes place every Friday at the wall and the other places where people come together to spontaneously mourn and remember absent loved ones. These are the lives that demand to be “seen”. They are the ghosts that haunt our amnesic political culture.
Extreme weather is by definition rare on our planet. Ferocious storms, searing heatwaves and biting cold snaps illustrate what the climate is capable of at its worst. However, since Earth’s climate is rapidly warming, predominantly due to fossil fuel burning, the range of possible weather conditions, including extremes, is changing.
Scientists define “climate” as the distribution of possible weather events observed over a length of time, such as the range of temperatures, rainfall totals or hours of sunshine. From this they construct statistical measures, such as the average (or normal) temperature. Weather varies on several timescales – from seconds to decades – so the longer the period over which the climate is analysed, the more accurately these analyses capture the infinite range of possible configurations of the atmosphere.
Typically, meteorologists and climate scientists use a 30-year period to represent the climate, which is updated every ten years. The most recent climate period is 1991-2020. The difference between each successive 30-year climate period serves as a very literal record of climate change.
This way of thinking about the climate falls short when the climate itself is rapidly changing. Global average temperatures have increased at around 0.2°C per decade over the past 30 years, meaning that the global climate of 1991 was around 0.6°C cooler than that in 2020 (when accounting for other year-to-year fluctuations), and even more so than the present day.
A moving target for climate modellers
If the climate is a range of possible weather events, then this rapid change has two implications. First, it means that part of the distribution of weather events comprising a 30-year climate period occurred in a very different background global climate: for example, northerly winds in the 1990s were much colder than those in the 2020s in north-west Europe, thanks to the Arctic warming nearly four times faster than the global average. Statistics from three decades ago no longer represent what is possible in the present day.
Second, the rapidly changing climate means we have not necessarily experienced the extremes that modern-day atmospheric and oceanic warmth can produce. In a stable climate, scientists would have multiple decades for the atmosphere to get into its various configurations and drive extreme events, such as heatwaves, floods or droughts. We could then use these observations to build up an understanding of what the climate is capable of. But in our rapidly changing climate, we effectively have only a few years – not enough to experience everything the climate has to offer.
Extreme weather events require what meteorologists might call a “perfect storm”. For example, extreme heat in the UK typically requires the northward movement of an air mass from Africa combined with clear skies, dry soils and a stable atmosphere to prevent thunderstorms forming which tend to dissipate heat.
Such “perfect” conditions are intrinsically unlikely, and many years can pass without them occurring – all while the climate continues to change in the background. Based on an understanding of observations alone, this can leave us woefully underprepared for what the climate can now do, should the right weather conditions all come together at once.
Startling recent examples include the extreme heatwave in the Pacific north-west of North America in 2021, in which temperatures exceeded the previous Canadian record maximum by 4.6°C. Another is the occurrence of 40°C in the UK in summer 2022, which exceeded the previous UK record maximum set only three years earlier by 1.6°C. This is part of the reason why the true impact of a fixed amount of global warming is only evident after several decades, but of course – since the climate is changing rapidly – we cannot use this method anymore.
Playing with fire
To better understand these extremes, scientists can use ensembles: many runs of the same weather or climate model that each slightly differ to show a range of plausible outcomes. Ensembles are routinely used in weather prediction, but can also be used to assess extreme events which could happen even if they do not actually happen at the time.
When 40°C first appeared in ensemble forecasts for the UK before the July 2022 heatwave, it revealed the kind of extreme weather that is possible in the current climate. Even if it had not come to fruition, its mere appearance in the models showed that the previously unthinkable was now possible. In the event, several naturally occurring atmospheric factors combined with background climate warming to generate the record-shattering heat on July 19 that year.
The highest observed temperature each year in the UK, from 1900 to 2023
Later in summer 2022, after the first occurrence of 40°C, some ensemble weather forecasts for the UK showed a situation in which 40°C could be reached on multiple consecutive days. This would have posed an unprecedented threat to public health and infrastructure in the UK. Unlike the previous month, this event did not come to pass, and was quickly forgotten – but it shouldn’t have been.
It is not certain whether these model simulations correctly represent the processes involved in producing extreme heat. Even so, we must heed the warning signs.
Despite a record-warm planet, summer 2024 in the UK has been relatively cool so far. The past two years have seen global temperatures far above anything previously observed, and so potential extremes have probably shifted even further from what we have so far experienced.
Just as was the case in August 2022, we’ve got away with it for now – but we might not be so lucky next time.
That last sentence says it all: “Just as was the case in August 2022, we’ve got away with it for now – but we might not be so lucky next time.”
I am giving a talk, The Next Ten Years, next Saturday to our local Freethinkers group in Grants Pass. Close to the start of the presentation I say: “The Global Temperature anomaly, as of last year, 2023, is 1.17 C, 2.11 F, above the long-term average from 1951 to 1980. The 10 most recent years are the warmest years on record.“
Finally, I am getting on in age and part of me wants to die, hopefully naturally, before more climate extremes are reached, but then another part of me would like to experience it!
I shall be 80 in November; I was born in London some six months before the end of World War II in Europe. I was the result of an affair between my father, Frederick, and my mother, Elizabeth. My father died in December, 1956 when I had recently become twelve years old.
I think that age spans have their own characteristics. So, for example, a person in their 20’s or their 40’s cannot sense what it is like to be in their 70’s or 80’s. Just a theory of mine and I have no evidence that this is a fact.
But as an introduction to today’s post it serves the task perfectly. And today’s post comes from The Conversation.
(And when I was writing this on the 11th July Biden was still the US President. My hunch is that he will not be by the 16th!)
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‘The immortal Gods alone have neither age nor death’
President Joe Biden, left, and first lady Jill Biden depart following a presidential debate with Donald Trump on June 27, 2024, in Atlanta. AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
President Joe Biden’s current fraught situation, showcasing both his weakness and his determination, is dramatic because it touches upon more than the political moment and more than one man’s character.
And that’s not all. Biden has come to symbolize both the biological challenges and the existential poignancy of aging – of aging in power, certainly, but also just the unrelenting wear and tear of growing old.
The pressure of all these factors makes Biden a tragic figure.
Others reluctant to step down
To see this clamorous moment in the light of the past doesn’t make living in the present easier, but it does widen the perspective. Biden is far from the first person in a position of power who has been reluctant to step down – even when common sense or sheer weariness might dictate otherwise. In recent history, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is often cited as an unfortunate example, and there are many other figures historians can cite.
Literature has always been concerned not only with people in power but also with the life cycle and the complexities of family relationships. Myths stay fresh and timeless; as we age, our understanding of a myth may change.
Tonya Morris reacts at Tillie’s Lounge in Cincinnati during the presidential debate between President Joe Biden and the Republican candidate, former President Donald Trump, on June 27, 2024. AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
In Homer’s “Iliad,” the elderly Nestor endlessly reminisces. Although listened to respectfully, he is a figure from an earlier generation whose role in war has dwindled to that of counselor.
Priam, the old king of Troy, heartbroken after the death of his son Hector, still finds the energy to berate his surviving sons as they clumsily hitch the mules that will draw the cart loaded with ransom so Priam can redeem his dead son’s body from the warrior who killed him, Achilles.
The subsequent moment of recognition between Priam and Achilles is one of the most poignant in literature, not least because the sight of old Priam reminds Achilles of his own aged father. Achilles might be expected to be enraged, but seeing Priam turns his anger to grief. Achilles knows he won’t see his father, Peleus, again. Being old is no protection against suffering; the aged Priam, mourning his son Hector, is assailed by the same desolate grief as Achilles.
But Lear refuses to cede control. Finally, as he sinks into confusion, he discovers humility and compassion – too late. Lear is reunited in prison with his loyal daughter Cordelia, who hasn’t been afraid to speak truth to power but who also has never ceased to love him – but she is summarily executed, and Lear, heartbroken, dies.
Decision requires ‘rare detachment’
Political commentator Bill Maher has called ageism the last respectable prejudice. It’s as if age and its accompanying disabilities create a force field keeping others at a distance. Or perhaps age bestows a universally recognized vulnerability on people who seemed powerful.
Either way, old people can seem somehow separated from the rest of us.
It’s hard even to imagine President Biden alone; on the contrary, he is apparently surrounded by loyal familyand advisers. But the vulnerability of old age was on full display in the first presidential debate. News reports convey how hard it has become for anyone outside Biden’s tight circle to really see or know him.
One of the countless contrasts between Biden and Donald Trump is Biden’s almost sphinxlike unknowability, especially now. With Trump, as has frequently been noted, what you see is what you get. For better or for worse, his qualities are consistently on full display.
Age has been traditionally associated with wisdom, yet the wisdom old age can bestow seems out of reach for a figure still in the thick of politics. Lear’s “all-licensed” Fool rebukes the king: “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou had been wise.”
Only withdrawing from the fray might bestow some tranquility. But the vision to make the difficult decision to withdraw requires a kind of detachment that seems to be very rare in history, and not common in literature either.
The aged and blind Oedipus at Colonus, in an 1800 drawing by Bertel Thorvaldsen, says, ‘The immortal Gods alone have neither age nor death! All other things almighty Time disquiets.’ Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
‘Almighty time disquiets’
Greek tragedy does offer an eloquent example of just such wisdom.
Sophocles’s “Oedipus at Colonus” is a play about an old man written by an old man – Sophocles was in his 90s when the drama was presented.
The aged, self-blinded and self-exiled former king Oedipus, guided by his loyal daughter, finds himself in Colonus, a holy district outside Athens. When Theseus, the ruler of Athens, arrives on the scene, Oedipus’s words to him transcend both the immediate situation and Oedipus’s dire backstory.
“The immortal Gods alone have neither age nor death! All other things almighty Time disquiets. Earth wastes away; the body wastes away; Faith dies, distrust is born. And imperceptibly the spirit changes Between a man and his friend, or between two cities …. … but time goes on, Unmeasured Time, fathering numberless Nights, unnumbered days ….”
By touching upon the shared human condition of mortality, as well as another universal, the inevitability of change, this speech bestows a stark tranquility on the situation.
Oedipus knows that he has come to Colonus to die, and his words convey a vision that seems to issue from beyond the grave. His detachment has an authority that now seems almost out of the reach of any of us, let alone a politician. But it’s good to remember that such qualities exist.
Of course this is a different moment. The looming juggernaut that Trump represents makes it hard for Biden’s supporters, or any Democrats, to be calm. Nevertheless, it’s useful to think about the potential strengths, as well as the vulnerabilities, of age.
The widespread anxiety now rampant among Biden’s supporters is sometimes mocked as unjustified panic. Time, as Oedipus might remind us, will tell. I personally find this anxiety touching and heartening for its humanity; there’s widespread compassion for Biden’s vulnerability.
In the ugly spectacle of American politics, it’s hard to keep humanity in sight. Literature can remind us of what we already know about growing old, about change, and about mortality.
This was seen online in the afternoon of July 4th.
Dogs have appeared at U.K. polling stations wearing bows, rosettes and colourful leads as the public go to vote in the British General Election. The hashtag #dogsatpollingstations has become a highlight of election days for animal lovers on social media as people share photos of themselves exercising their pets and democratic rights at the same time. This year did not disappoint, with dogs on X, formerly known as Twitter, photographed in badges, bows and colourful leashes.
It is an alternative to the normal Picture Parade.
A recent article by George Monbiot gets me thinking.
George Monbiot is 61; his birthday is on January 27th. Thus he is 14 years younger than me. He is an experienced writer for The Guardian newspaper. Plus he has authored quite a few books and founded a charity, and given TED Talks, and I am sure more than this.
I read all of the articles that are published by him. His website is widely read. Please read his biography. Some of his many articles really get me thinking.
Some time ago I asked Mr. Monbiot for permission to republish his articles and that was granted. A small number of them have been republished on Learning from Dogs.
Today I want to republish an article that was presented on July 3rd.
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The Fight Against Oligarchy
Oligarchy is the default state of politics, and it is surging back. How do we stop it?
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 27th June 2024
We are about to return to normal politics. After 14 years of Tory corruption and misrule, a Labour government will put this country back on track. Justice and decency will resume, public services will be rebuilt, our global standing will be restored, we will revert to a familiar state. Or so the story goes.
What is the “normal” envisaged by pundits and politicians of the left and centre? It is the most anomalous politics in the history of the world. Consciously or otherwise, they hark back to a remarkable period, roughly 1945 to 1975, in which, in certain rich nations, wealth and power were distributed, almost everyone could aspire to decent housing, wages and conditions, public services were ambitious and well-funded and a robust economic safety net prevented destitution. There had never been a period like it in the prior history of the world, and there has not been one since. Even during that period, general prosperity in the rich nations was supported by extreme exploitation, coups and violence imposed on the poor nations. We lived in a bubble, limited in time and space, in which extraordinary things happened. Yet somehow we think of it as normal.
Those “normal” politics were the result of something known to economic historians as the “great compression”: a drastic reduction in inequality caused by two world wars. In many powerful countries, a combination of the physical destruction of assets, the loss of colonial and overseas possessions, inflation, very high taxes, wage and price controls, requisitioning and nationalisation required by the wartime economy, as well as the effects of rising democracy and labour organisation, greatly reduced the income and assets of the rich. It also greatly improved, once the wars had ended, the position of the poor. For several decades, we benefited from the aftermath of these great shocks. Now the effect has faded. We are returning to true “normality”.
The history of many centuries, including our own, shows that the default state of politics is not redistribution and general welfare, but a spiral of accumulation by the very rich, the extreme exploitation of labour, the seizure of common resources and exaction of rent for their use, extortion, coercion and violence. Normal is a society in which might is right. Normal is oligarchy.
In his magisterial book The Great Leveler, published in 2017, the historian Walter Scheidel explains that only four forces have ever significantly reversed inequality: mass-mobilisation warfare (such as the two world wars), total and violent revolution, state collapse and devastating plagues. Decisions, decisions.
He shows how warfare economies were turned into welfare economies, sometimes by force. For example, following the defeat of Japan, the US occupation government, led by General Douglas MacArthur, sought what it called “the democratization of Japanese economic institutions” to ensure “a wide distribution of income and ownership of the means of production and trade”. To this end, it imposed high property taxes, with a top marginal rate of 90%; broke up business conglomerates; demanded a labour union law enabling the right to organise and strike, and higher wages for workers; organised comprehensive land reform, which dissolved large holdings and distributed them to peasants; and introduced fiscal reform that led eventually to taxes on the highest incomes of 75% and an inheritance tax on the largest estates of 70%. These programmes resulted in the near-total destruction of income from capital and the creation in Japan of a political and economic democracy, almost from scratch.
All the major combatants were similarly transformed. In the US, the top rate of estate (inheritance) tax rose to 71% in 1941, and income tax to 94% in 1944. The National War Labor Board raised workers’ pay while holding down executive pay. Union membership soared. In the UK, the top rate of income tax was held at 98% from 1941 to 1952. It took decades to decline to current levels. A purchase tax on luxury goods was introduced in 1940, with rates that later rose to 100%. The share of incomes captured by the richest 0.1% fell from 7% in 1937 to just over 1% in 1975.
In the absence of one of the four great catastrophes, income and capital inexorably accumulate in the hands of the few, and oligarchy returns. Oligarchs are people who translate their inordinate economic power into inordinate political power. They build a politics that suits them. Scheidel shows that as inequality rises, so does polarisation and political dysfunction, both of which favour the very rich, as a competent, proactive state is a threat to their interests. Dysfunction is what the Tories delivered and Donald Trump promises.
Oligarchs seek the destruction of oversight, which is why UK bodies such as the Environment Agency and the Health and Safety Executive have been comprehensively gutted. The same desire was the driving force behind Brexit. They want the cessation of protest. They want a failing NHS, to justify privatisation. They want malleable politiciansand a tame BBC. They get what they want, distorting every aspect of national life. They pour money into neoliberal and far-right politicalmovements, which help capital to solve its perennial problem: democracy. The arc of history bends towards injustice. But every so often it is broken over the knee of catastrophe.
If you want a return to the rich nations’ “normality” of 1945 to 1975 – in other words, to redistribution, a shared sense of national purpose, robust public services and a strong economic safety net, high employment and good wages – and I think most people would, you need a politics that is not just abnormal, but unprecedented. Snapping the arc of injustice would mean going way beyond Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 manifesto, let alone Keir Starmer’s limp offering, which treads so carefully around the interests of the rich. We would need to do what the world wars did, without the violence and physical destruction: a peacetime MacArthur programme for overthrowing the oligarchs.
Political parties would need to overcome their fear of economic power: of the newspaper barons, the property developers, the fossil fuel companies, hedge funds, private equity bosses and assorted oligarchs who now fund and influence our politics. The longer we leave this confrontation, the more extreme and entrenched oligarchic power becomes. If we want even a modicum of democracy, equality, fairness and a functioning state, we need not the accommodation with economic power that Starmer seeks, but the mother of all battles with it.
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Let me repeat a sentence from the article: “Oligarchs are people who translate their inordinate economic power into inordinate political power.”
I am towards the end of my life. Whether or not things will change politically, as Monbiot suggests above, I do not know. But if asked to guess I would say probably not.
I would love to see a different, as in a better way, of us humans running things. I can’t put it better than how George Monbiot expressed it in that last sentence: “If we want even a modicum of democracy, equality, fairness and a functioning state, we need not the accommodation with economic power that Starmer seeks, but the mother of all battles with it.”
Finally, George Monbiot has a saying on his website: “I love not man the less, but Nature more.” I wish that were not the case, I wish oligarchy was a dead word, but Nature is so beautiful.
The Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer, is heavily favored to return to power for the first time since 2010.
To a U.S. audience, many of the top issues in the election campaign will sound familiar: the economy, immigration, health care, Ukraine and Gaza. The choice of date, too, may ring a bell – and political soothsayers are already trying to read into what it means for the U.K. election to fall on Independence Day.
U.K. elections can be an odd affair in which mainstream politicians can rub shoulders with the likes of rival candidates Count Binface and Lord Buckethead. Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images
But as to the campaign itself – well, they do things a bit different on the other side of the pond. While Americans may be used to set terms and lengthy campaigns filled with endless advertising, in the U.K. such things are, to use a Britishism, “just not cricket.” Here are three main ways in which the British conduct their elections.
1. Election timeline
U.S. elections follow a predictable schedule. In 1845, Congress passed a law establishing a single day for federal elections to take place on “the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November.” Further, presidents are elected for a fixed four-year term, making the dates for upcoming votes knowable for the foreseeable future.
That isn’t the case in the United Kingdom. By convention, elections have been held on a Thursday since 1935. But the month of the vote has varied considerably. For the most part, they take place in late spring or early summer – but fall and winter elections are not unheard of.
The U.K. Parliament does have a fixed term of five years, with elections automatically scheduled once that time has lapsed. In practice, however, parliaments have rarely gone the full five years.
Indeed, prime ministers in the United Kingdom have the authority to request the dissolution of Parliament at any time. They can do so without the approval of the cabinet, and so prime ministers have taken liberal advantage of their ability to control the timing of the election to try and gain an advantage.
Many thought that Sunak may have been eyeing an election later in the year, but a number of factors, including economic forecasts and not wanting the distraction of a U.S. election, may have factored in to him calling an earlier-than-expected vote.
2. Campaign rules
Besides the shifting timing, the nature and rules of the campaign are also very different in the United Kingdom. This starts with the sheer brevity of the campaign. Once Parliament is dissolved, the election must take place 25 working days later. This means the parties have a mere six weeks to make their case to the public.
And unlike in a presidential system, voters in the United Kingdom do not cast a ballot for the person they want to see lead the country. Instead, the U.K. is divided into 650 distinct constituencies; voters pick their preferred candidate to represent their local constituency in Parliament. The party with the most seats typically wins the election, and the leader of that party has the opportunity to become prime minister and govern as a single-party government or as part of a coalition.
U.K. election campaigns are also subject to strict rules to maintain neutrality. Once the campaign starts, the period of “purdah” kicks in, which imposes certain restrictions on government activities. This involves, for instance, strict prohibitions on government ministers announcing new initiatives to affect the election or using public funds for political purposes.
In the same manner, civil servants – employees of the crown who work for the government but are not political appointees – are required to maintain strict impartiality and not become involved in partisan debates.
Moreover, the Office of Communications, the United Kingdom’s independent media regulatory authority, also enforces strict rules for broadcast media, including television and radio. The 2003 Communications Act requires that all broadcast media must cover the elections in an impartial manner, providing coverage of all parties, even if they do not assign equal time.
Opposition leader Keir Starmer, left, poses on the campaign trail with what the photographer says is a cup of coffee … but which I strongly suspect is actually tea. Leon Neal/Getty Images
Broadcast media is also not allowed, on polling day, to suggest the outcome of the vote before polls are closed.
In a huge departure from the U.S., U.K. political parties are banned from buying television ads, but this rule does not apply to streaming television.
3. The role of money
The limited role of money is another distinct feature in U.K. elections. Even factoring in the different population sizes, U.K. elections are significantly cheaper than their counterparts in the United States.
Indeed, total campaign spending in the 2020 U.S. elections, covering presidential and congressional races, hit more than US$14 billion. That scale completely dwarfs how much parties and candidates will be able to spend in the 2024 United Kingdom election.
Through regulations established by the Electoral Commission, an independent government agency, a British party that competes in all constituencies in the United Kingdom will be allowed to spend just over £34 million (around $43 million) in total to support all candidates.
That figure in itself marks an 80% increase from the allowance at the last election in 2019, so to factor for inflation since limits were set in 2000.
As a result, both Sunak and Starmer will have only a short time – and limited funds – to make their case to voters. Whoever wins will face a very challenging situation at home and abroad, with little to no respite. According to the think tank Institute for Fiscal Studies, the state of public finances is “a dark cloud that hangs over the election.” And then there is the delicate matter of maintaining a special relationship with the U.S. – a country that may itself have a very different political landscape after it goes to the polls later in the year.
As I have frequently said, I feel English and love the fact that I speak with an English accent. Yet I adore, along with Jean, where we live just outside Merlin in Southern Oregon. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in the world.
Politically we are in very strange times, as was said right at the end of this article.
I was born in London in November, 1944. Exactly six months before the Second World War ended in April, 1945.
Thus it was of great interest to me that yesterday Jean and I listened to a BBC Radio 4 programme about the letters that were exchanged between two great Jewish men: Einstein and Freud, in 1932. The programme was called Why War? The Einstein-Freud Letters.
The programme ends with offering the listener a fundamental choice, which I won’t spoil for you now. But to me it is an extension of my post (or Patrice’s post) that I published recently on March 19th.
I believe, and hope, you can listen to it by clicking on this link. Here also is the text that is at that link:
In 1932 the world-famous physicist Albert Einstein wrote a public letter to the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Einstein, a keen advocate of the League of Nations and peace campaigner, asked Freud if he thought war and aggression was forever tied to human psychology and the course of international relations: could we ever secure a lasting world peace?
Einstein’s letter is deeply prescient, as is Freud’s extraordinary response. The exchange was titled ‘Why War?’. The two thinkers explore the nature of war and peace in politics and in all human life; they think about human nature, the history of warfare and human aggression and the hope represented by the foundation of the League of Nations (precursor to the UN) and its promise of global security and a new architecture of international law.
At the time of their exchange, Freud is in the last great phase of his career and has already introduced psychoanalysis into the field of politics and society. Einstein, the younger of the two, is using his huge international profile as a physicist for political and pacifist intervention.
For Einstein, future world security means a shared moral understanding across the global order – that humankind rise above the ‘state of nature’ never to devolve into total war again. He wrote to Freud, as ‘a citizen of the world…immune to nationalist bias…I greatly admire your passion to ascertain the truth. You have shown how the aggressive and destructive instincts are bound up in the human psyche with those of love and the lust for life. At the same time, you make manifest your devotion to the goal of liberation from the evils of war…’ Is it possible, Einstein asks Freud, to make us ‘proof against the psychoses of hate and destructiveness?’. Freud’s answer is fascinating and quite unexpected.
The exchange of letters was sponsored by the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, an organisation promoting global security by using prominent thinkers, drawing on multiple fields of knowledge (from science to psychology, politics and law) to achieve a new language for international peace, following the lessons learned from the Great War of 1914-18.
But even as Einstein wrote to Freud in the summer of 1932, the Nazi party became the largest political party in the German Reichstag. Both men felt a sense of apprehension about what was coming; both were pacifist, both Jewish, both would be driven into exile (both Einsteinian physics and Freudian psychoanalysis were denounced by the new regime). The letters were finally published in 1933 when Hitler came to power, suppressed in Germany, and as a result never achieved the circulation intended for them.
Featuring readings from the Einstein–Freud letters and contributions from historians of warfare and psychoanalysis, war journalism and global security, this feature showcases the little-known exchange between two of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers, ‘Why War?’ – a question just as relevant in today’s world.
Contributors include historian of war and peace Margaret MacMillan, BBC chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet, defence and security expert Mark Galeotti, historian of international relations Patrick O Cohrs, author Lisa Appignanesi, who has written on Freud and the history of psychoanalysis, and Faisal Devji, historian of conflict and political violence in India and the Middle East.
Readings are by Elliot Levey (Einstein) and Henry Goodman (Freud)
Learning from Dogs 