How to be King of the World

Right, as it’s the eve of Doomsday, I’ll just get this out of my system: my analysis of what has happened in Britain – not just on December 12th, or in 2016, but since 1979. Or even since 1918 when Britain officially became a democracy.

Democracy is usually defined as One Man (person) One Vote, but Abraham Lincoln offered an alternative definition: government of the people, by the people, for the people. Government by the people means the people being involved in government, playing an active part in decisions, confronting problems, dealing with them and seeing through the consequences. That requires a lot more involvement than putting a cross on a piece of paper once every four or five years. If the people start demanding to be involved in government on a day to day basis, what do you do about it if you are someone who thinks they should stay in their place and leave the decisions to properly qualified people like you?

Once upon a time, back at the start of the 19th century, our parliamentary-based government was in the hands of two parties, the Whigs and the Tories. To be grossly simplistic, the Whigs represented the free-thinking, disgracefully dissolute aristocracy and the Tories represented the respectable conservative squirearchy. Either way, they represented the property-owning classes because it was taken for granted that only those with property could have a proper and responsible interest in the government of the Kingdom. The landless labouring classes were regarded as a dangerous mob who would unleash anarchy unless controlled with an iron hand. If they were good and loyal, they would be visited with bowls of gruel when they were old and sick.

Then through the 19th century, things changed. The driving force of the economy moved from land-ownership to industry and trade and the franchise began to expand bit by bit until, in 1918, democracy in the form of One Man (and some women) One Vote was established. The Tories couldn’t really come to terms with this for decades. Not only were the lower orders now excepting to be allowed into polling booths, they were even expecting to be actively involved in government. They had the temerity to form their own political party and to join unions demanding a say in the economy. The country finished up with swathes of rural counties painted pure blue Tory and swathes of industrial areas painted socialist red and just a handful of swing seats in between.

Nothing was going to change until Thatcher came on the scene. She beheld the swathes of red, which were an irritant to her, and set about destroying them.

First step, obliterate the mining, steel, ship-building, motor industries, which had given those red communities their identity, with seemingly secure, highly skilled, comparatively well-paid, highly unionised jobs. Replace with financial services in The City that make vast fortunes for a few yobs in red braces. In the process, unions are demolished, helped along by legislation, so that instead of an organised labour force, ready to fight for its own, people are left on the dole or in a dog-eat-dog fight for low-paid, non-unionised jobs stacking shelves in supermarkets.

To add to the collapse of communal unity, whip up a general contempt for anyone claiming social security, even though 99% have no choice. Label them social scroungers. Broadcast stories of their dissolute laziness. Get neighbours and one-time comrades informing on each other as social security cheats.

Sell the idea that you are the hero of the common man by telling them they can buy their council houses. A property-owning democracy. Even today you can hear Tory politicians regurgitating the eighteenth century idea that property ownership gives people a stake in society. (No, actually we all have a stake in society, even if we don’t even own the cardboard box we shelter in.) The home ceases to be a place of shelter, warmth and security where families can be raised, and becomes a financial asset on a property ladder that must be climbed if anyone is to have any self-respect. Of course everyone wants to buy their own home. Everyone also nurses a hope of making a fortune by a nifty property deal. Help it all along with an end to rent control, allowing private landlords to charge fortunes for ramshackle shoeboxes, and forbid councils to build new social housing. Get everyone scrabbling for property that is skyrocketing in value. Skyrocketing, that is, in prosperous areas where there are jobs, but stuck at rock-bottom in the areas that have been eviscerated by the destruction of industry. There, property doesn’t sell, and even if a buyer is found, the price won't even to cover a deposit in the South East, so how do they move? They don’t. They are abandoned in their hopelessness. Add the final touch by portraying tenants of social housing as the criminal riff-raff at the bottom of the heap. Come up with terms like ‘sink estate.’ Ensure that ‘council house tenant’ can only be pronounced with a sneering curl of the lip.

As you have kept property prices low in those old Red areas, where better to dump desperate immigrants? Push them into areas where everyone else is already unemployed and hopeless. The benefit of this is that the people whose communities you have destroyed will now see the immigrants, fighting for the same jobs, housing and run-down services, as the enemy and the source of all their woes. Encourage mindless racism. Continue to mouth the stock line that Britain is renowned for its tolerance and open-minded generosity, while stoking up the underlying flames of intolerance and xenophobic meanness.

Your banker friends create a world-wide financial crisis. Deal with it by heaping all the pain onto the unemployed, the poor, the disabled – everyone living in the old Red areas. Reduce them to desperation. Don’t forget to say “We’re all in it together” as they go to the food banks and you order a delivery from Waitrose.

Since people are general pissed-off and angry, build on the racist resentment by pointing out that everything that’s gone wrong in their communities has happened since we joined the EEC/EU. Persuade them that it’s not the Tories who have destroyed their world but the wicked faceless bureaucrats of Brussels. And then, ta-ra! Use their anger to persuade them to vote Leave in a referendum that they are sure to see, primarily, as an opportunity to scream their rage.

The nation has spent centuries and countless gallons of blood fighting against despotic tyranny and for the rule of law and Parliamentary sovereignty. Tell the people that leaving the EU will restore powers to our own Parliament and to our courts. Take Back Control!!! (they like nice simple three-word chants). But then convince them that our Parliament and our courts are actually the enemy of the people and should be discarded or at least muzzled, leaving power solely in the hands of the government. Whatever you do, don’t remind them that they don't actually elect their Prime Minister.

Throughout all this, bear in mind that old trade unions used to set great store on education. Working men’s institutes and libraries encouraged questions, thought and discussion, but you will have changed the notion of education from being about expansion of the mind to a course of training designed solely to meet the requirements of employers. Education is not to be about thinking, analysing and understanding but about getting the necessary qualifications that will, just possibly, fend off the chaos and humiliation of Universal Credit.

Now you are in a position to wind the clock right back to the Eighteenth century. Persuade the angry plebs that they can say yes or no in a referendum but they really don’t want to have bother themselves with the consequences or search for genuine solutions. Leave that to the entitled classes, educated at Eton and equipped to understand these matters. If they vote for jolly old Boris, they’ll never have to worry about the fate of the country again. All this talking is just doing their heads in, isn’t it? They don’t want to hear any more discussion about the pros and cons of Brexit. If they simply give up all their last hundred years of struggle and vote Tory, they can get back to watching football and worrying over which Celeb is doing what with whom, or whatever it is that Common People do. They can leave the boring details of our fate to that rather amusing Bullingdon wag, whose only ambition is to be king of the world, and his clever minder, who doesn’t give a damn about anything but who knows how to play politics like a computer game bent on conquering citadels and and killing enemies by fair means or foul.

And there you have it. You have persuaded the people you’ve been kicking in the teeth for the last forty years to put you back where you belong, running the country. In fact, at this rate, you can probably dispense with holding another general election. Like Brenda of Bristol, they don’t really want to be bothered with all that stuff.

Lastly, don’t forget to say that you now intend to unite the country. This will be easy. You will already have established that everything you do is The Will of the People. No need to mention that it’s at best the will of only half the people. You will already have defined the other half as Intellectual Liberal Metropolitan Elitists. Just round up all Remainers in a cultural revolution and ship them off to political re-education camps where they can be quietly disappeared.

Oh, and if you want to boast about having a Tory MP presiding over the next Durham Miners’ Gala, learn how to pronounce Durham Miners’ Gala.

The Unwritten Writing on the wall.

Back in the 60s and early 70s, when we still wrote with quill pens and wove our own clothes, in that era before the national curriculum left no room for anything except qualifications for the labour market, I studied the British Constitution at O and A level.  Does anyone study it any more at school? Do any pupils other than Oxbridge students of PPE have any idea what our constitution is?

     It’s there. It isn’t written, but it definitely exists, embedded in statutes, traditions and legal pronouncements. Because it isn’t written, it tends to evolve – so at least we aren’t stuck with a fossilised 18^th century amendment entitling us to carry murder weapons. Is it evolving at the moment, in front of our very eyes? There’s nothing wrong with it doing so, if that is what we want, but shouldn’t we understand what it is before we started shredding little bits whenever we feel in the mood?

1215. Magna Carta: an awful lot of it is about who gets the income from weirs on the Thames and such matters, but the underlying idea that came out of it was the Rule of Law, meaning that everyone, from the lowliest dung-splattered peasant to the King in Westminster, was subject to the law of the land. There is no separate law entitling servants of the state to get away with what would be crimes for others. No specially oppressive laws applying only to those at the bottom of the pile. Everyone is under the law and everyone is entitled to its protection. No one can be held or punished without due process. No one can simply be “disappeared.” In theory. Theoretical or not, do we want the rule of law or do we want to replace it with something else? A system perhaps where someone in a position of power can act outside the law or change it to suit himself? We need to debate the matter before we chuck it away.

Parliament. Since 1265 we have had, on and off, an elected House of Commons as part of a Parliament to keep the King in check. Not that it meant much back then, but in Tudor times it began to be the really significant mover and shaker in the land, and a century later the country was plunged into civil war, deciding whether King or Parliament was dominant. By the end of the 17^th century, after one king was radically reduced in height and another was deposed, the principle of the sovereignty of Parliament was established. The power of parliament could not be curtailed by anyone or any body except itself. It did voluntarily curtail that power when Britain joined the EEC, with the understanding that it could, equally, revoke that membership.

     So if we now leave the EU, are we firmly re-establishing the sovereignty of Parliament or do we think something or someone else should be sovereign even over Parliament? Like the will of the people expressed in a single referendum? If we do think that’s an option, let’s debate it. Should sovereignty from now on be invested in the people by holding an endless stream of referendums (referenda?) to decide how we should be governed? It’s not impossible. Switzerland has them all the time. But if we think we might want that, let’s talk about it.

    It has been suggested that in the referendum, the people instructed Parliament to take Britain out of the EU. We have never previously been in a situation where Parliament has been subject to instructions. Do we want to change things? Traditionally, MPs have not been delegates, sent to Westminster as mere mouthpieces for their constituents. Instead, we have candidates in elections who put forward their manifestos, and we choose which one we prefer, on the assumption that the elected candidate will thereafter follow that manifesto, using his or her own judgement – and will have to answer for it at the next election. Do we want to keep that, or do we want our MPs to refer back to us for instructions on how to vote each week? It’s a valid option but one we need to decide.

Democracy. Is a referendum more democratic that electing MPs? What is democracy anyway? It has been defined as one man one vote, but let’s come into the 21^st century and say one adult one vote. We’ve had a Parliament for nearly 800 years but we’ve only had democracy since… well, all men over 21 got the vote in 1918. All women got it in 1928. Votes were only restricted to one per person in 1948 (before that, business owners and graduates had 2). Adults between 18 and 21 only got the vote in 1969 and the last lingering shadow of equating voting with property only really vanished when homeless people were given the statutory right to register to vote in 2000, so you could say that we have been a democracy for less than 20 years. Some have said that we have only been granted the right to vote because it’s meaningless and gives us a mere illusion of power. Other people have fought to the death to achieve it. Do we want it or not? If more and more people are deciding not to bother to vote, what are we going to do about it?

The separation of powers.  There are, theoretically three powers which govern our country: the legislature, which makes laws, the judiciary which enforces those laws and the executive which administers the country under those laws. i.e. Parliament (or to be formal, The Crown in Parliament), which makes laws, the courts which apply them and the government which makes things happen… or not. It is held as gospel that the three powers should be separate, balancing and restraining each other, which is obvious nonsense in Britain’s case as they are all intertwined. Until it was replaced by the Supreme Court, the top court in Britain was the House of Lords. Senior judges sat as law lords. At the top of the pile was the Lord Chancellor who was a member of the government. In our Common Law system, laws are made not only in statutes but in court judgements by the judiciary and in statutory instruments made by the executive. The executive, or government, is not independent of the legislature since it is formed by whichever party commands a majority in the Commons. And vice versa: except in remarkable situations where the Commons seize control, legislation is largely dictated by the executive.

    Everything in our system is intertwined, but our influence on any of it is very limited. In our “democracy,” we choose the members of one half of Parliament (the Commons), but we have no say in the House of Lords, no say in the choice of judges and no say in the choice of government. Johnson has not been elected as Prime Minister by the country, but then neither has any Prime Minister ever. All we get to vote for is our local constituency MP. In the USA, they vote for their legislature (Congress) and they vote separately for their executive (the President). Since our Prime Ministers are becoming more and more presidential, should we be voting for our MPs and have a separate election to choose our Prime Minister? It seems that many people are happy with a Prime Minister who has lacks any support in the House of Commons, so do we want to change our whole voting system?

The Union. Not the European Union, the other one. Ours. We quaintly talk about four nations, England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, but except in matters of sport this is fairly meaningless. In 1800, we became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and that was such a success that we are still mopping up the blood, leaving us with the rump of a divided Ireland.  These days we are the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We are not the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Ulster, nor are we simply England, though many non-Brits, presidents among them, think we are and many non-English Brits feel it's less of a union and more of a subduction zone.

     In the seventeenth century the Stuart monarchs had two separate kingdoms, Scotland and England. They were only united as one kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. Scotland cannot leave Great Britain. If Scotland splits from England, there will be no Great Britain, just Scotland and England with a side order of Celtic Fringe that doesn’t really count – as usual. Many Scots want the Union dissolved. Now many nationalist English do too. While we were all in the EU, it was fairly pointless.  Even divisions in Ireland ceased to matter so much, because the UK and Ireland were both in the EU so why kill each other over sovereignty? The Good Friday agreement became possible. But now that we are about to float off into the Atlantic and cut our mooring ropes to Europe, what do we want to be? If the Scots want another referendum on independence, do the English want one too? We are already divided down the centre by Brexit. Are we about to become the next Balkans? It might be nice to discuss it before it just happens.

Why Book Fairs?

Judith Barrow, me and a banner

Very soon, in little more than a month, I shall be attending Narberth Book Fair (28th and 29th September) which I have helped to organise, with fellow author Judith Barrow, for the last... lost count of how many years, but it has grown successfully from its early days in Tenby to become a two day book fest featuring over fifty indie authors and publishers from Wales and further afield, and one of them is me. Which is why I am updating a blog post from a previous era and explaining why I'll be there.

To stand at a stall, offering my wares, might seem a very medieval way of going about things in the days of internet ordering and e-books. Besides, what are bookshops for, if not to provide any book that anyone is looking for? Literary festivals like Hay, with big names addressing crowds of fans are all very well, but why bother with book fairs?

Narberth Book Fair 2018

The reason is that for most of us authors, such events are the only occasions when we get to meet our readers in the flesh, to discuss our work and hear their opinion. We write for ourselves, mostly, and perhaps to please a publisher or agent, but ultimately, since we choose to be published, rather than storing our work in notebooks under our bed, we write for “the reader” out there, who will devour our polished words. It becomes a somewhat surreal situation if our readers never materialise in the flesh. We need the contact to keep it real.

A fair also allows us to meet our fellow authors, in an atmosphere where everything is all about books, and sometimes it’s very healthy to escape the private isolation of writing and remind ourselves that we are not alone. There are other people as obsessed with writing as us.

Me. At the fair, last year.

For indie authors, who self-publish, and who want to rely on more than Kindle sales on Amazon, fairs can be almost the only way to put their printed books out there, for people to see. Many bookshops simply don’t stock independent authors. An ISBN number is not enough to get you on the “List.” And for us conventionally published authors, there is no guarantee that bookshops, even their local bookshops, will pay them any attention whatsoever. If you are lucky, you might find a copy of your book, buried in a dark corner, out of sequence, while the front displays concentrate on the highly promoted big names. If you are in the hands of one of the mega-publishing houses, which sees you as a potential block-buster in WH Smiths or on airport concourses, then they might send you off on tour round the country or the world, to meet your readers. They might flaunt your book cover on billboards for you. 99% of authors don’t get that treatment, so we have to put ourselves out there.

And that’s what book fairs are for. So do come. We're a rare breed and well worth gawping at.

Space, the final fictional frontier

We are celebrating a memorable event: the Moon Landing. I remember it well. It was thrilling, it held us spell-bound and it seemed to herald an exciting new age, even if it was just a yah boo interval in the Cold War.  I have heard it repeatedly described as Man’s greatest achievement. Is it? A man steps on a bit of dusty barren rock that isn’t the Earth and that outranks everything else we have done on this planet?

I think our exploits in space did achieve something truly awesome. It gave us an off-Earth view of our own planet and taught us that of all the lumps of rock and swirling gas that make up our solar system the only one of unbelievable beauty and worth is the one we are already on.

Our planet has water, an atmosphere, everything required to sustain life, and it has us. Not just our bodies but our minds, with our ability to imagine, to create fiction. Only from our own planet can we conjure up beauty out there. We glory in, even worship, the sun when it’s a life-giving source of light and warmth that slips with reassuring certainty across our blue sky. In reality, it’s a lump of hot plasma, engaged in nuclear fusion. We gaze adoringly at the eerie loveliness of the white moon in our dark night. In reality, it’s dead rock, nothing else. What is more beautiful than the evening star, a low bright pageboy to the sinking sun… It’s Venus, and in reality it’s a boiling image of Hell under clouds of sulphuric acid.

 Mars, the red planet in our imaginations is the home of aliens, Martians, who can both fascinate and terrify us – except that in reality if there ever was any chance of life on it, it has long gone, with its atmosphere.

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are balls of gas. Their moons are rocks. They might be volcanic. They might even harbour water.

Scientists get excited about this and so should we all. It is exciting. But not as exciting as the volcanoes on earth, reminding us, whenever they erupt, of our own limitations as masters of the universe. Not as exciting at the vast oceans of water that cover Earth, with depths that we have yet to explore and life forms that we have yet to discover.

That is not a bad thing, at least for novelists. The unknown opens up an endless source of speculation and possibilities, which definite answers will only spoil. From Earth, our imagination opens up Space in a way technology never will. We can do the impossible. NASA may be able to lift a bit of metal out of Earth’s gravity and dump it on the Moon, but in our imaginations we can travel faster than light and visit distant galaxies. And we do it on the most perfect planet there is – unless we manage to mess it up.

Find my earth-bound books at my website