Is it too late to suggest a moratorium on this expression, so beloved of journalists; at least until we and they can decide what we mean by it? The online Oxford dictionary suggests a definition for radicalize as “Cause (someone) to become an advocate of radical political or social reform” from which it follows that the noun equates to the process by which that someone’s views are shifted. Unfortunately, usage of this term comes laden with a heavy baggage of value judgement that is not helpful to understanding.

We used to hear that political parties were being radicalized; by which we were supposed to understand that the original and pure principles of an organization were being subverted by infiltrators; never that the organization was responding to wishes of supporters that it should change. And then Radicalization was a pop psychology phrase for what happened to soldiers caught up in the suffering of unjustified wars (e.g. Vietnam). In each case the object of the process is seen as essentially passive, maybe even innocent, while the process is malevolent or at least harmful.

This is not the place for me to defend the long and honourable tradition of radicalism through the ages. It should be self-evident that when circumstances no longer correspond to an established or traditional view, progress depends upon someone, whether right or left, proposing a solution that will inevitably seem radical until it is swallowed into the orthodoxy. Of course it’s my opponent’s views that are radical; mine are bold and visionary.

In respect of Vietnam veterans, it was at least not silly to infer that they were the passive receptors of experience over which they had no control once they had been drafted. By contrast, in the present context we are concerned with a willed decision to become an adherent of an aggressively fundamentalist and a-logical branch of militant religion, whether as supporter or combatant.  “Radicalization” is now just a label we affix to provide some explanation for what is otherwise disturbing and mysterious – that individuals who enjoy the benefits of modern civilisation might choose to reject them and opt for the stone age. In fact our journalists believe their own froth so much that every time we are presented with the hungry savage face of the enemy within, they go combing through the perpetrator’s past life to find that key moment when (s)he became “radicalized”.

Personally, I object to the word “radical” being used as a synonym for “murderous” but the implications of the language run deeper. You see the importance of the “-ized” here. If you are a Radical, it means that you have arrived at a set of conclusions by considering evidence and experience of life. If someone you know has been Radicalized, they suffered  change as a result of something that was done to them, like being bitten by a walking corpse and waking up a zombie.

The language is dishonestly applied to individuals making their own choices, but it suits all sides that it should be so. For apologists, and those liberals still clinging to the notion that enlightened self-interest governs our lives, it’s helpful to consider that a deluded few have suffered contagion that has taken them away from their cozy previous selves and perhaps with a shared cup of tea and a sympathetic ear they can be turned back to the light. For the hawkish, radicalization is akin to demonic possession; something evil that walks among us and must be rooted out. In both cases, fundamentalist convictions are separated from the person holding them: one group is concerned to redeem the person and the other to resist the abstract evil.

We should respect the individual to the extent of considering what they do for good or ill as proceeding from them; otherwise a human life is a waste of time. We have experiences; we seek out others; we exercise judgement and we reach conclusions: ultimately we act. Sometimes the things that people do justify it being said of them that they have irredeemably used up their potential as humans (the only true argument against the death penalty is that we, as society, should not be complicit in even judicially sanctioned murder – nothing to do with the murderer’s “rights”). Tolstoy claimed that “tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner” which is memorable, but wrong – at least; whether or not we pardon the perpetrator of an act, we need to hold them accountable for its consequences – this is called living in society. A society which uses language that is too cowardly to say what it means is weakened in consequence more than it knows.

Goodreads.com book giveaway starts Friday 16 Jan 2015.

“Je Suis Charlie” –Qu’est ce qu’on veut dire?

A legitimate question to my mind at least. Accepting as I must that the national conversations of western democracies have regressed to the point that what passes for discourse is no more than the exchange of small brightly polished tokens that we present to one another much as monkeys comb each other for lice, I understand the potency of symbols that pretend a universal value for so long as we don’t enquire too closely as to what they may mean (else we’d need to accept that they mean something different for each of us). I know I’m bound to be accused of missing the point, which is solidarity (with what, exactly?) but still it seems to me that if our languages have not entirely devolved to the pointing and grunting stage, it may be permitted to wonder what certain words, grouped together, are intended to mean. If not that, then perhaps I am allowed to ask what this particular cultural signifier may signify.

My heading is deliberately irreverent, since I’m mindful that the victims of this latest tragedy in France (at least, the victims who we’re being urged to remember) were professional malcontents whose work was enjoyed by at most a few thousand-like minded individuals. We can only imagine how farcical they would have found the present situation: a media army witness to assorted heads of state clambering over each other to ascend the pulpit while literally millions await the sermons that will tell them how they feel. The ridiculous spectacle would have given them a good laugh at least.

Our politicians don’t care about free speech: they advertise that fact every day in the laws they pass and their executive actions that seek to restrict it. If there is a legislative fallout from Charlie Hebdo it won’t be seen in laws that promote a more open society.

The simple truth is that France has suffered an atrocity; and if I point out that worse atrocities have been committed around the world in the last few months and weeks, that does not diminish the horror of these events. There is no scale of magnitude of evil that we can apply to derive comparative evaluations of such impacts. We can however judge relative effects on public consciousness, using rough metrics such as the amount of media attention generated, the commentaries of the “statesmen” of the day and the extent to which private citizens manifest their reactions. On that scale, it feels as if the effect here has been disproportionate to the cause (or if you were a terrorist, you might say you earned a high return of terror from a relatively minor investment of resource).

Why? If we were concerned about the scale of the tragedy (17 dead) we should contrast it with the thousands of Nigerians killed by Boko Harun in the last few weeks alone. If it is defending free speech that excites us, why have there been no rallies for the 42 young students murdered in Mexico on the orders of the local mayor for daring to criticize their elected representative? The Paris killing was savage, but for barbarity the act itself – opening up with automatic weapons in a public space (which seems to happen every week in some part of the USA) can’t compare with a “government” making hostages of innocent people and then sawing off their heads on camera as a sick and terrifyingly effective recruitment campaign.

So it isn’t the horror, the principle of free speech or the scale of the event that arouses our passions: it’s that it happened close to us, in our world. We can’t feel our usual sense of superiority over victims who were so foolish as not to be born in a democratic liberal economy. When I spoke with my son about this, in addition to noting that human sympathy diminishes with physical and cultural distance, he made the point that a report that a part of the world that is always catching fire is burning again is not very newsworthy – in other words, there’s also novelty to consider.

Novelty; it sounds like a terribly inappropriate word in this context, but when you are witnessing a media feeding frenzy, modern style, it becomes difficult to relate the hysteric chain of reaction to the serious event that initiates it. Naturally the media is obsessed with itself, so the death of any kind of journalist in this way is news. The political establishment has long existed in a state of symbiosis with press and TV, characteristic of entertainment industries and the commentators who are paid to stoke the fires of those industries. These days, the synthetic emotions that brought the crowds out to mourn Rudolph Valentino, and later Diana Spencer, are fairly easy to mobilize. Certain people are only waiting to be told that they care strongly about something – anything – provided they can march behind a simple, easy to understand banner. A few ghoulish souls fasten onto occasions such as this like feasting vampires and persuade the rest of us that if we are normal we should feel similarly moved. Our leaders surf the wave of manufactured emotion that seems to justify their existence temporarily. Everyone is happy for a while.

Of course, grief turns easily to rage, which is both a danger and what the terrorists are counting on. If you want to start a war you need to build hate and distrust on both sides. I guess that there’s nowhere you can go in the world where the percentage of population that want to do more than get on with their lives exceeds 10%, but it is that small proportion that make or destroy everything. I’m not really interested in the terrorists themselves, insofar as we know well enough now that there is a small minority in every population that is willing and eager to do this kind of thing (for belief or only because they don’t like Mondays). It’s more important to know what the people they claim to represent think about it and why.

To answer my opening question, what it means to be Charlie clearly depends on whether you are a politician (with a sincere wish to maximise the personal attention you attract), a private citizen desperately seeking a strong, pure emotion in an increasing complex and ambiguous world; or a journalist (god knows what drives these boys and I don’t want to spend time inside their heads). The rest of us are just swept along for a while and then we rediscover our sense of proportion.

Objectively, it’s one of the tragedies of our age (every age has its own cross to bear, so to speak) that the oil dependence of developed nations has concentrated vast wealth, and therefore power, in territories that have not yet emerged into the post-religious world that most of us inhabit. Theocracy was a powerful and damaging force in the years when Europe was emerging from the middle ages, but if the popes of those days had enjoyed the oil revenues of, say the bin Laden family, then things would have been much worse. A half-diligent theologian can find justification for all manner of bad behaviour in the holy books of any stripe; and the spark that lights the bonfire in this case is the sexual insecurity that young males in any culture experience when they first see women challenging traditional patterns of subservience.

History rather than policy will resolve all this. At this point, a mature response in the west would be to drop the pretence that we believe faith of all denomination to be a marvellous thing: it has never shown itself to be such, at least so far as the bloody chronicles of organized religions are concerned. I’m not making a Dawkinesque argument that we have some sort of duty to persuade people to give up believing. It seems that the taste for belief is at least as strong and habit forming as the taste for alcohol and I know many excellent people who derive comfort from both. Established state churches are a logical nonsense though. If we believe what we say about all faiths being valid, why have a single Church of England enshrined in the constitution and funded and guaranteed by the state? Either you make everyone in a given country sing from the same hymn sheet (literally) or you accept that religion is a private matter, quite apart from whatever ties us together as a state (which needs to be expressed in a secular, inclusive way). As it is we are hypocritical in the extreme when we talk about other countries; our only excuse being that we don’t actually believe our own rubbish.

If the state sponsored churches had the courage of their collective convictions, they’d be the first to argue for disestablishment; and the free market mob should relish a level playing field for competition in the belief/non-belief sector, always with the caveat that everyone follows the rules of the secular state even if they think that aliens guide our actions through secret crystals hidden at the nexus of ley lines on the Somerset levels.

In the fields where I walk my dog, there is a sign that a local farmer keeps posting on the gates which reads, “The sheep in this field are under veterinary care as a result of being attacked by a dog”. So many different times, so many different fields. I do appreciate that livestock have to be moved around (especially in the months when officials from the farming ministry are assessing subsidies per head). Even so, if every one of these signs is based on fact, somewhere there is a nefarious, serially criminal canine who has so far kept his identity secret; and a very rich vet who is possibly his accomplice.

Sometimes the sign is fixed to the gate of an empty field, like “Bull in Field” (despite all visual evidence to the contrary) which is often posted across  hiking trails to deter walkers. One assumes that the evil dog has returned when the sheep are between counselling sessions with the vet and he’s eaten every one of them.

It is too easy to make fun of farmers; to suggest that a lot of them are mean-spirited, distrusting, grasping and selfish sociopaths who spend so many years hoarding what they can without enjoying any of it that it’s no surprise when in the end they are overwhelmed by the emptiness of their lives and willingly put the shotgun barrel in their mouth. No, I’d never resort to that crude stereotype. Read More→

Asked to contribute to a debate on whether women or men make better authors, of course I´m flattered, but then I ask myself if I really have anything to say on the subject. The start point is a survey published in the Daily Beast, carried by Grammarly, in which a majority of the 3,000 respondents clearly felt that women would have the edge, essentially (to paraphrase somewhat brutally) because they have more interest in people whereas men are more concerned about things. Essentially it is the old issue of whether plot or character should take precedence (with the twist that women are seen as stronger on character) and what can you say about that? – except to note that most fiction that doesn´t have some kind of story that makes sense having regard to the individuals who are supposed to be in it tends to be rather unsatisfying.

My first, instinctive, objection to the findings is that I´d agree we can usefully talk about qualities that we naturally consider to be male or female (in the way that nouns in most European languages are assigned gender – but note for example that the word for sea in Spanish can be male or female depending on whether you live close to the inconstant water) we shouldn´t expect to find those qualities reflected in the writing (or other activity) of only one sex. In other words, we may think of a tendency to value character over plot as being a “female” characteristic without falling into the trap of thinking that women can´t write thrillers (which tend to be plot driven) or that only effeminate men understand character.

If I think of an example of two writers I could consider to be modern greats in their respective fields, James Elroy writes in that most masculine genre of crime noir, but his entire published output could be seen as an extended character study of a certain type of American male. Some of his plots achieve almost Chandler-esque irrelevance. By contrast, Hilary Mantel´s historical novels are carefully structured, grounded in narrative, with character development emerging through events. It would be pointlessly reductive and somewhat beside the point to fix either of these writers as driven by male or female principles of authorship. The important thing is that both have written books that we want to go on reading; and that show us something about human that resonates with what we may have overlooked or taken for granted in our own life experience.

A second observation is that such polls need to be viewed with caution, because the views that readers and other consumers have of what they value and enjoy are not accurate – they are a better indication of self-image than tastes. People know what they have liked but not what they will like. No business has yet been able to make a success of asking customers to state their preferences and interests and using that to predict what those individuals will choose to buy. Amazon can´t even make useful recommendations when it knows just about all we have already bought. Maybe the next internet billionaire will have cracked the problem. Read More→

the best fruit falls beyond the shadow of the tree

read just a little then forget

enough to know the stuff of what you read

without being stuffed with undigested reading

More about economics, but it won’t take long. Not long after I finished scribbling some ideas that appear on this blog at tedious length, under the heading “Why Economics is Bad for You” (I actually only published part one) there occurred one of those publishing phenomena that journalists love; where a book becomes widely talked about (if not read) for no obvious reason. Journalists take turns to guess the reason, which fuels interest in the title and helps to sell papers; given that most of the people persuaded that they should have an opinion on the book will read an article about it rather than the book itself.

Especially this one; “Capital in the 21^st Century” by Thomas Piketty: an economics tome weighing in at around 685 pages in which Prof. Piketty concludes that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This is not a startling conclusion. The book started to become important in the USA, where equality and fraternity have historically carried less weight than liberty, but could it have caused surprise even there?

In the UK we have routinely measured equality of income for many decades, so we thought we knew that the gap between rich and poor narrowed in the post war years but has become wider under every government since 1978 (the year before Mrs Thatcher took office – the last three supposedly socialist prime ministers have presided over growing inequality). No one argued this was not happening; the argument was that it didn’t matter because the rich created more wealth that trickled down to the masses, which seems to rely on the questionable assumption that total wealth is not a finite resource.

It is perfectly ok for academics to critically examine what we think we know; and no one should be surprised that a French intellectual can take over 600 pages to tell us that what we thought we knew was true in fact is. What is strange is the impact this book has had, especially when there has been a glut of books and commentaries by respected economists in the years since the 2007-8 crash with the theme of rising inequality and the pernicious effects it has had on the system of capitalism that we know and love. Read More→

I finally got around to reading Walden, and it wasn’t quite what I expected. This book is the great American classic of self-sufficiency and choosing to retreat from the world. When you read the book, it seems strange to discover that its author, Thoreau, has been living on a plot of land, given to him by the poet Emerson; that is by a pleasant lake, one mile out of town; also that the author has been doing this not as a life choice, but a social experiment, always intending to return to society. If it was a modern work you might say that Thoreau spent a year researching his book.

When you read around the subject, it is clear that Thoreau’s commitment to seclusion with nature was less than perfect; for instance he regularly took Sunday tea at his mother’s house during his retreat.

This is not to say that the book is fake, only that it is more a literary construct than a diary of events. I’m sure that a nineteenth century American gentleman would have sincerely believed that the live Thoreau describes was one of noble savagery. However, the excuse of literature is at odds with the tone of the narrative, which pretends to be rooted in the soil, listing expenditure on nails and timber versus income from odd jobs and cost of seeds versus results of amateur cultivation.

In fact it is the Robinson Crusoe contrast between the practical details of “survival” and the more high flown stuff that makes the book readable in current times. Thoreau was clearly an educated man (I suppose giving up books for a while would equate to living in the wild for him) and he has passages of classical allusion that is fairly typical for his day, but mixed in with some quite individual and radical polemical thinking about how to live that still reads quite modern (for example, he asserts that the farm owns the farmer and not the other way around). I suppose the book would have died by now if it wasn’t interesting, although it is probably more read about than read.

For me, there is a fascinating contrast between the way a European will read this book as opposed to an American. In the US, there are still highly intelligent people basing their lives around some of its precepts, whereas a European reader is likely to find the book quaint and entertaining. Neither is wrong, it’s just that we approach the text from different positions. Self-reliance, individualism and the notion that organized society is decadent and the authentic man is outside it: these are notions that pervade every element of American culture. It’s in any film Sam Peckinpah directed, the inane scribblings of Jack Kerouac, the life lived by Hunter S. Thompson. It’s why, in The Searchers, John Wayne is framed at the beginning and end in a doorway, with the landscape behind him and civilisation before. He goes back into the landscape of course.

A European sees little difference between John Wayne and Don Quixote in this respect; both are afflicted by the delusion that it is possible or desirable to live outside society. Which is not to say that the myth of life in the wilds has no resonance for us. Read More→

I had these two clients. George was a larger than life character who’d treated everyone around him to a bottle of wine or a meal at some stage and was known in most of the places where a good time was to be had. To call him a serial entrepreneur is not quite right. He’d had one big success, buying the rights to an anti-smoking medicine that had been developed by and early and vocal opponent of the tobacco industry (a pub landlord actually). George sold the rights on to big business for a tidy sum, before it became clear that the medicine would give you cancer more surely than smoking – not his fault, he did what he was supposed to do. With the proceeds he bought a Rolls Royce and a nice house and then spent the next decade and all the rest of the money (and more) chasing a dream of buying a casino in Malta. He had the deal set up, but could never raise the cash. At the end of that time he died, of lung cancer ironically, but I don’t think he felt any sense of regret about the path of his life, except maybe in the last few months when he was working hard rather than having treatment, hoping to do some kind of deal that wouldn’t leave his family completely broke.

Peter was his brother in law and completely different – a tough, determined little ex-boxer who’d built up a small chain of betting shops in poor areas. It took a lot of hard work to build up the business and more to maintain it. He was a methodical man who didn’t spend more than he had; and things went well. Unfortunately the world moved on and the shops stopped making money and then the business died anyway.

Both of these were admirable men in different ways and I was lucky to know them. The story has stayed with me over the years: the ending in failure only frames the tale and gives it an ending (all lives end in a failure of life after all). The contrast between the two coming to a similar ending is what makes it interesting.

And then, like all stories that stay with you for any length of time, the meaning that it has for you changes. I used to think it was simple: Peter worked hard and didn’t have time for the benefits while George enjoyed his life and the final result was the same for their business. Then I couldn’t see why anyone would work a day longer than they absolutely needed to (now I understand that the really successful renegotiate their engagement with work so that they can keep the bits the enjoy and have time for other things too). Later on, I wasn’t so sure which was happiest – Peter with his quiet satisfaction of patiently building up something that was his, or George with his one big hit.

What the story means for me now, is that you have to find a way to live that suits your character. If Peter had struck rich early, he’d have been like the Gene Hackman character in the film Eureka who finds the gold and spends the rest of his life discontented and wondering what to do next. If George had tried to run a betting shop he’d have been robbed blind in a week. So now I can think that both succeeded, because they spent their time doing what they were supposed to do. It seems that to discover your vocation is true good fortune; and until it appears, you must keep digging for it.

I wasn’t going to write about this because I thought everyone else would, but no, it doesn’t seem to excite people apart from me. Last week the European Union struck another blow for the helpless citizen oppressed by mighty corporations by ruling that everyone has the right to be forgotten. Or if you want to look at it another way, a bunch of faceless bureaucrats with apparently no understanding of the technical, legal and constitutional implications of what they were doing continued the old continent’s stubborn defence of its secretive society, trampling on sundry other “rights” such as free speech and fair comment. No surprise that the political establishment of Europe is in favour of greater secrecy.

First let’s be clear about this, the rule has nothing to do with the ordinary citizen, who is not going to pay the legal fees that will be needed to take on Google’s own lawyers and persuade them to take down internet items that could be mildly embarrassing, such as drunken graduation photos. Google and the other ISP’s will fight because this will cost them a fortune, and anyway no-one is yet sure in what circumstances this new law will apply. There is already a small army of lawyers besieging the internet with take down notices and they should be dancing in the streets this week.

Secondly, calling this a right to be forgotten is highly misleading: it should be called A Right to Tell As Many Barefaced Lies About My Past As I Choose Without Likely Risk of Being Found Out. The first successful applicant is a man who didn’t pay his debts, but now that he’s successful in business, he’d rather people didn’t know that. BBC reports that 60% of applications issued since this test case opened up a little floodgate relate to people with criminal convictions.

On second thoughts, why should you be able to find out if I’ve welched on my debts, lied about my qualifications and made inappropriate sexual advances to co-workers in the past? I might be asking you for a top job, for God’s sake, or standing for election. Imagine as I describe how I turned around my struggling business and built a multi million pound empire as a serial entrepreneur; and you tap something into Google and discover that I had to close that corner shop and we had to let both Margaret and Julie go. That kind of situation just detracts from the essential sincerity of my story (I mean, I really believed that electronic cigarette substitutes were the future).

As far as the Facebook generation goes, my first reaction was that if they didn’t want to be remembered lying in a pool of their own vomit with a toilet seat round their neck, they shouldn’t have posted that particular photograph; but then I recollected that like everyone else I have done and continue to do lots of stupid stuff I’m ashamed of; so what is the value of a free and open society when set against some mild embarrassment I might suffer if the world knows what a dick I can be?

So just to recap on the current situation – if someone writes something about you which is not true, you can have it corrected like you always could. From now, if someone writes something about you that is true, you can’t object, unless you can afford to pay lawyers  to give Google a hard time, in which case you can have it wiped from the record. that information could include, for example, newspaper reporting of allegations of serious offences that didn’t actually result in criminal convictions – like the investment banker who recently did a deal to pay back the money he’d cheated from London Transport on tube fares in order to avoid prosecution; except that unlike the people who cheat on a few pounds, he wasn’t even named publicly as he’d cheated on tens of thousands.

There is a serious and sad comparison to be made between a country like USA, where successful people seem (rather too) willing to admit past mistakes, and our own silly, outmoded pretense that the successful and prominent have always been perfect. It’s also good to see that the power elite are always looking for new things to buy – now they want to own the past as well as the present.

I’ve been taken to task, and quite rightly, over the comment that I made in a posting earlier this week to the effect that Mr. Putin was at least not corrupt. I realize now that the adjective is one that carries so many shades of meaning that it needs to be qualified. What I meant to say in that post was that the President follows policies that he believes are in the best interest of his country, rather than doing whatever is most calculated to enrich him personally. In politics, sincerity may be a dubious virtue – fanatics are usually sincere, however disastrous their actions may be – so in suggesting that Putin is a patriot (a word that has very different resonance in North America as compared to Europe) I am some distance from supporting his actions.

It’s clear that when corruption and politics are mentioned in the same breath, most people think of politicians using their office to get rich, but there are some relativity and double standards issues that come into play. Like every other recent President of the USA, Obama has made millions since gaining office and will probably gain far more in the years to come, without trading influence for cash. The $87m that Bill Clinton made, basically from public speaking, since leaving the Oval Office, doesn’t make him corrupt in my judgement.

In the case of Putin, you can find stories that say that in spite of having a relatively modest salary and humble beginnings, the man has a fortune of around $70bn, close to being the richest human on the planet. When you track the stories back, the numbers are quite similar, which suggests they come from a common source. An article I found in Bloomberg  confirmed that this is basically gossip. Putin has some expensive watches; that he probably couldn’t afford to buy on his official salary. As head of state of a commodity exporting country, he could probably let it be known that he likes watches and have a warehouse full as presents, without spending a cent. The story makes what I think is the very good point that it is rather irrelevant to ask what Putin owns as opposed to what he has the use of – he has an entire country at his disposal, so whether he can point at something and say “this is mine” (if we even understand what such a statement means in context) doesn’t tell us much. The Queen of England would be rich even without the £450m she “owns” because she never has to pay for anything.

If it comes to that, numbers tell us little. Officially ex-PM Berlusconi is worth £6.2m which is slightly less than PM David Cameron’s personal fortune. Cameron inherited the money; Berlusconi got his hands dirty getting rich – which has the moral high ground? Of course the truth is that the Italian has much more but most of it is hidden. The tax and criminal laws in different countries make comparisons meaningless. Supposedly, God’s ex-prime minister Blair has amassed $135m since being UK premier, mostly advising dodgy regimes and peddling influence – this is not considered corrupt, though he’s been earning £13-20m per year from it (still some way to go to catch up on the $70,000,000,000 that Putin is supposed to have trousered, Tony).

Even within Europe, there’s moral chaos. Spain has a Prime Minister who has seen the written records of the kickbacks he shared for more than a decade published in the country’s most respected newspapers, but he’s still in office and when he goes to Brussels shakes hands with the ministers of countries that would send such people to jail. And no-one in Europe seriously expects that ex-PM Berlusconi will serve prison time.

So, I’m about to propose a new test. Given that degrees of transparency, tax laws, local ethics and the ready availability of slippery legal advice move the position of the goalposts in every case, we should judge this issue from a “friends and relatives” index. If the net assets of your family and cronies has increased by more than X% since you gained a position of influence, it means you are corrupt; unless you can show that Bill Gates or similar is your cousin .

Even then, there’ll be arguments. The current English prime minister has surrounded himself with chums from his old school (Eton): they dominate the high paid and influential advisory jobs (the schoolfriend he could live without is rival Boris Johnson, Mayor of London). This state of affairs is defended first on the basis that several conservative/liberal ministers went to different famous schools – we call them public schools because they are private – so the government includes a fair cross section of the 7% of the population that is privately educated; which kind of misses the point that the ministers, unlike the advisers, needed to get elected. The second line of defence is that these advisers are simply the best people for the job – I’m afraid I too am prone to assume that people who look, think and act like me might be the best people to work with, except I know that it’s not true because, unlike most politicians and just about all current ministers, I’ve actually held real jobs in my life. I wonder, does cronyism count as corruption, and if so is it more or less blameworthy when carried on with the unconscious assumption of superiority that characterizes what we must still call the English Ruling Class?

Nobody, I hope, believes that Vladimir Putin is Satan, despite what we’re currently being told to think. We may believe that the using military force on another country can’t easily be justified, without needing to swallow the mild hysteria and gross hypocrisy that our “statesmen” and media are peddling. The crisis in the Ukraine has a fairly obvious pragmatic outcome, assuming no-one gets too overexcited. Russia keeps the Crimea and the EU fast-tracks membership for the rest of the Ukraine, if that is what the people of Ukraine want (though I am mindful of the comedic potential of using EU and fast in the same sentence).

I like the idea that big states should not use their power to impose new national boundaries, but from a historical perspective, it’s quite new. The whole purpose of the Berlin Conference of 1884 was for the great powers to carve up Africa between themselves, leading to geopolitical instability that continues to the present. Six years earlier, the same diplomats met (again in Berlin) to divide up the Balkans – which also didn’t end well. Now the west regards self-determination as a self-evident “right” unless it’s close to home (say in Catalonia or Scotland) though that might change as secessionary movements gain ground. But history moves at a different pace in different locations; and while we may sometimes enjoy the illusion of living in “post-history”, the past is more self-consciously a factor in some of those locations. It’s not just that those who don’t understand history are condemned to repeat it: they are also sentenced to be continually surprised by its unfolding narrative. Having said which I have to note that some of the astonishment expressed by western politicians about events in the Ukraine has a slightly synthetic ring to it.

All of which is by way of a preamble to some things to say in defence of Mr. Putin.

1. World War II is still the most significant modern historical event for most politicians, consciously or not. Western leaders remember the disastrous policy of appeasement of Hitler in the Thirties (both Churchill and Kennedy wrote books about it) and not standing up to a bully has had a bad press internationally ever since. Russians remember 20 million of them dying in the war that followed. Territorial integrity of the state has been the first concern of Russian leaders ever since and Putin (democratically elected by the citizens remember) is no exception. Put simply, a Russian president is not going to tolerate having to ask an EU member state for permission for the Black Sea Fleet to put to sea.

2.There is something strange about the indignation of UK ministers who believe that it should be OK for Russia to have access for its navy to the Mediterranean potentially blocked, while Britain continues to occupy a piece of Spain called Gibraltar held to secure passage for its own ships. Of course, these days we only keep Gibraltar British because it’s what the inhabitants want – a bit like the 90+% of Crimeans who wanted to join Russia.

3. When Putin claims angrily that he’s been tricked over Western intervention in other countries, he has a point. US interventions (backed by UK/EU) in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya were supposed to be humanitarian missions but they quickly morphed to regime change. We may feel positively about those outcomes (at least in Bosnia) but we can’t argue that the means were openly discussed. Putin has rather clumsily dressed his strategic intervention as supporting threatened “ethnic” Russians – well George Bush was happy for Bishop Blair present his oil policy as a holy crusade.

4. The West can assert that Obama is not Bush. By chance, USA currently has an intelligent and well-intentioned leader, who is roundly despised by more than half of the electorate. However, Libya was on his watch. We can justify getting rid of Quadaffi. For us, he and the other dictators of the region, in Egypt and in Syria, needed to make way for western style democracy. That reflects our narrative and the pious hope of the educated urban classes in those countries, but the mullahs have the numbers in the countryside. Russia has Chechnya within its borders and is more interested in stability in the Islamic world than the spread of a system of voting. What our commentators dubbed “the Arab Spring” – a reference that Russians would have found insensitive since it alludes to the Prague Spring that was effectively a failed revolt by the Czechs against the USSR – looks from a different perspective like a continuation of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. By the way the history of the Black Sea Fleet, begins with a victory against the fleet of the Ottoman Turks. the English know how a sea battle can resonate down the centuries.

5. The words that Louis XIV had stamped on the barrels of all his cannons ultima ratio regnii. Power is the final argument in every case. the US fought a civil war against secessionists and until recently its security forces routinely replaced regimes in its South American sphere of influence by proxy revolutions (eg in Chile or El Salvador) where that was more effective than simple assassination. Venezuela was a recent rare failure. True, two wrongs don’t make a right, but let’s recognize the horrified moral outrage of our leaders for what it is – a calculated response.

6. Russia has democracy, like us. We get a choice between different brands of the same product. They have a choice between Putin and gangsterism. Why is Putin so popular in Russia? With the Soviet collapse, the so-called oligarchs emerged – ie those who were quick and ruthless enough to grab the assets of the country. In the West, we honour this urge to steal as much as you can, in fact we make a system of it, but there are still some rules to be observed. At the time Putin came to power, the oligarchs were looking for political power to complement and secure their wealth, as ruling classes are wont to do. He contained (without solving) the problem, by making it clear that these individuals could hang on to their wealth on condition they stayed out of politics; otherwise they go to jail. And though we may not like the man, does anyone seriously suggest he is personally corrupt?

One analysis of the recent regime change in Ukraine is that the popular revolt against Yanukovych was organized and at least partly orchestrated by the Ukraine oligarchs – not that they are interested in creating a Western European political model, but the pro-Russian gangster president was cutting away at their interests, replacing them with members of his own family in the best Corleone tradition. There are different views on the influence of the oligarchs – as in the West, the barons don’t make their intentions public. What is clear is that from Putin’s perspective at least, he has to contend with these as well as the other issues.

7. It was all such a surprise and a shock: if that is true then our foreign ministers and their professional advisers should be replaced for incompetence. The strategic and political importance of the Black Sea Fleet for Russia is not a secret. It’s based in Crimea; the shipyards are in Crimea, the fleet harbours in the Sea of Azov which is in Crimea. Russia and Ukraine have been arguing and negotiating for the last seven years about this and every time the pro-European side is in ascendancy in Ukraine, there’s talk of tearing up leases and accommodations that have been granted. To a Russian president, this must seem like Gaul declaring it wants no part in defending Rome.  Here, I’ve included reference to an objective military history in case anyone doubts this.

I read a short novel about Hungary recently. It was a good reminder of how much misery the Soviet machine imposed on Eastern Europe in the post-war years, regarding them first as the outpost of communist expansion and later as a buffer zone to safeguard the USSR. There was no excuse for that, even if 20 million Russian dead 1939-45 offers an explanation (we seem more understanding of how the deaths of 6 million Jews has shaped the consciousness of modern Israel). Still, I’ve found that you may disagree with what someone does, but you’re unlikely to change their mind unless you understand why what they’re doing might seem like a good idea. Labelling people we haven’t met as our enemies, or evil, won’t achieve much in that way. Perhaps there’s enough genuine evil in the world, to go with the blindness and selfishness, as it is.

People are so weird. If you want to get a political education, watch all the episodes of the Simpsons when Springfield has to vote on an issue. For today the news in the UK is all about energy companies. The bosses of the big private companies that provide our gas and electricity have been summoned to government to explain to our politicians why they have all made huge increases in their charges as the commodity price is reducing; and why all the increases are more or less the same. The funniest comment was when one supposed expert said that it appeared that the companies were charging as much for their products as they thought they could get away with.

Duh. The system is called capitalism. The businesses are supposed to be in it to make money and the bosses have a (legal and philosophical) duty to make as much as they can for the shareholders – assuming they can do it without diverting too much attention from amassing personal fortunes.  You can blame bosses for being greedy, although that doesn’t make a lot of sense when you have a system that is supposed to be driven by the profit motive (ie “greed is good”). It makes no sense at all to blame companies for trying to maximize their profits; and few people would invest in the shares of any company that failed to do so. To attack a company director for making too much profit is like blaming a leopard for not being a zebra.

UK members of parliament don’t understand this (or much else) or if they do they find it convenient not to let on. For the rest of us, it’s more useful to wonder how we got to the stage of needing half a dozen big companies to provide what a state industry used to deliver at a fraction of the cost in terms of executive pay, marketing spend and the rest. I do understand that the Free Market is a religious imperative as much as a rational organizational approach, but consider this:

These bosses who are forced to spend the best part of a day justifying their existence to a bunch of irritatingly non-deferential elected representatives (and will  take it out their frustration on junior staff for the rest of this week) have all denied that there is any cartel existing between them, in spite of price rises being suspiciously similar. I believe the bosses – I don’t think they would risk their positions by getting together to fix prices. There is a simple explanation, they say. They all have the same cost base, the same basic commodity cost, etc etc. And it’s the truth.

But then; the Free Market is supposed to arrive at the most efficient economic position by the magic of competition, that reduces marginal cost and stimulates competition. So if we credit these bosses, who should know what they are talking about, then the whole expensive and painful process of privatising the power industry and all these unsolicited calls and mailshots we all get every week, encouraging us to switch supplier, have all been for nothing (in fact Mr Cameron, our notionally Conservative prime minister, has been talking about standardizing the tariff offerings of the different companies).

What we’ve experienced in the UK over the period since 1979 hasn’t been all (or mostly) about liberalising markets to make them Free. In respect of Power, Railways Health and all sorts of other stuff, we’ve seen state intervention to create an artificial market, or the illusion of a market, where in fact none of the conditions for a market exist. The model is that you set up three or four providers within the effective monopoly that replaces the old state monopoly. As there is no natural competition between the suppliers, you establish a regulatory body to “represent” consumers. In the case of Power, it’s called Ofgen, but in all cases the regulator comprises “experts” (ie people who have worked in the industry) who use evidence provided by the industry to impose a notional check on the wilder excesses based on the conventional industry wisdom. This arrangement never works because it can’t work: for the Labour party to say that it will solve this problem by creating a better regulator is intellectually dishonest.

Effectively, what’s been going on here is the worst kind of centralised planned economy that the Free Market worshippers are supposed to recoil from – even down to franchises being awarded to cronies, though we can pass on that for now – a Free Market that is neither free nor a market. I don’t know enough about energy production to say whether private enterprise could offer benefits, or what the benefits might be; but the bosses of the businesses involved are telling me that there are none.

I worked in public service years ago and saw inefficient management, relatively poorly paid, delivering a not very good level of service. When I’ve been back in the post-privatisation era, I’ve seen inefficient management (often the same people but richer) well paid, delivering a not very good level of service. Something has changed, but it doesn’t seem to have much to do with the greatest good for the greatest number.

It seems there are some problems that the Market is just not able to address: I’m quoting here from that well known Marxist firebrand, Bill Gates. In any case, my response to the fabricated indignation of the MP’s and their journalist remorae is – don’t break up a supply chain for ideological reasons, replace it with a bunch of profit making entities; and then start bitching when they do what they’re supposed to do and chase profit.

More generally (and I’m musing now) I was trying to explain to a friend recently that Spain is a more civilised country than England, because in Spain the entire political class is corrupt. All of the politicos have been dedicated for a long time to getting their snouts as firmly into the trough as possible; and that leaves no time for tinkering with what actually happens to the country (ok,Spain may split into different countries while they are messing about, but that would be a relatively limited tragedy). In the USA ( my son finds impossible to get his head round this) a citizen will vote for a democrat for one house and a republican for the other, on the basis that paralysis is the safest option. Here in the UK, most of our politicians find overt corruption non-productive (they have to find more imaginative ways to enrich themselves) plus they feel like they should be seen to be doing something. Our politicos are not hobbled by the electoral impotence that the US system creates; and many of them have swallowed the American Dream straight (without the mixture of cynicism and genuine idealism that makes it a cocktail for true Americans). All of the above makes mainstream UK politicians both wholly inadequate to the times and truly dangerous.

As a UK citizen, the only consolation you have as you sit in a traffic jam on roads that are disintegrating, or wait for an overcrowded train that doesn’t come, or waste a small fortune on palliative drugs as you are pending an operation that never is scheduled; is to know that things cannot go on in this way – so mismanaged, so harmful, so divided. History tells us that when things reach this stage, eventually they collapse and some kind of new order emerges – we just have to hope it won’t be a Golden Dawn that comes next.

Cycle racing was my second true love. The last few years have been good for our relationship. First, Armstrong retired, which meant I could start taking an interest again; then he was caught, which I never expected. After that you have the emergence of Team Sky, with verifiable sports science taking over from sports pharmacy, capped by back to back English victories in the big race. Plus a lot of heroes continued in the new world, somewhat diminished, but proving that they were great riders, even without the superhuman power and ability to never have an off day that they’d shown previously. Alberto Contador, just as brave in the attack and not interested in riding for second place; Valverde with his canny racing brain compensating for the legs that aren’t quite the same.

Then comes the Vuelta a Espana – the Tour of Spain – that has just finished. The Vuelta is the third and often the most exciting of the big Tours, after France and Italy. It often throws up surprising winners. It’s at the end of the year, when riders are tired or preparing for the world championships. The route is so hard that having a well drilled team (like Sky) doesn’t help as much as in TdF. And it’s in Spain.

Spain is the country where the police managed to track down blood bags of sporting dopers that were being stored for their future use, labelled so that you could see who was who even if that couldn’t be established by blood tests. Some cyclists confessed and took their bans. The investigation dragged on for years. Then Dr Fuentes, the head of the clinic involved, disclosed that many of the samples that had not yet been analysed related to prominent tennis players and footballers at the major Spanish clubs (he claimed Spain would not have won the World Cup without him). The result was that Fuentes quickly got a suspended sentence and the judge ordered that the remaining blood bags be destroyed “to respect the privacy” of the subjects. The Spanish police aren’t going to waste more time on this when they have an entire political class that is corrupt to attend to.

So for a professional cyclist, if you were going to have one last go at beating the system, Spain is the place to do it. Which means that when a 41 year old American former teammate of Lance Armstrong, who’s been solid all his career but never great, suddenly wins a Grand Tour by never having a bad day in three weeks; and discovering an ability to simply ride away from some of the world’s best climbers on the hardest mountains – well, eyebrows are going to be raised.

People can do high level sport to a good age now if they look after themselves. Ryan Giggs is in the Manchester United first team on merit at a similar age, but he doesn’t play the same way as in his twenties; and cycling, unlike football, is mostly about physical power and (in stage racing) recovery. Ask Giggs how he feels the day after a match now, compared to twenty years ago; and then consider that a Grand Tour lasts for three weeks with maybe two rest days.

The reports that other former Armstrong teammates have made about what you signed up for when you joined team Lance are a matter of record. That may be in the past. The effects of some of the illicit treatments don’t go away though. The Vuelta winner himself says that what he has done will never happen again, which is a strange thing for a sportsman to believe.

To CH’s credit, his team has published the readings from the power meter attached to his bike, but that just causes more uncertainty. Current scientific theory is that a power to weight ratio of 6.2 is the upper limit of what is humanly possible without chemical assistance – but precise calculation requires accurate measurement of weight. Depending on whether you go by the team’s website declared weight or a guess based on your own prejudices, this old guy is churning out wattage that is either at or very close to the margins of human possibility, or just over that.

Some people close to the sport will think it doesn’t matter either way. It’s an older generation that will be gone next year. The team needed to win something this year to keep its sponsors. But then, there always have been and will be those with not much to lose prepared to take more chances – so it does matter.

Unless something comes out in the next weeks or months (from testing) only the man himself and a few others will know the truth one way or the other. However, it is worrying that we now learn that Horner missed a random dope test on the race; and more concerning that his team is demanding an apology that this fact has been published, as it’s explained by the testers going to the wrong hotel.

Anyone who’s read the excellent book, The Death of Marco Pantani, by Matt Rendell http://www.amazon.co.uk/Death-Marco-Pantani-Biography-ebook/dp/B009S8AV2M/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1379403131&sr=1-1&keywords=the+death+of+marco+pantani

will recognize this scenario. The tests are random, but they have to be arranged in advance. Word gets out. The riders have their own testing capability: If the  results don’t look good, there may be a last minute change of hotels for the team, notified by a misdirected fax that doesn’t arrive in time. Very hard for the policing agency to complain afterwards as that would be to admit that their own people on the ground are not reliable.

None of which is to say that this happened in the present case; but rather than issuing an apology to the team, the testers should be explaining how they came to turn up at the wrong hotel for this test.