Category: All in the Mind

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Two billion quid Stasi

We seem to have only superficial cuts in the huge state and corporate bureaucracy monitoring every aspect of our lives. If we needed any proof the current ConDem alliance is mere continuation of the same big business party previously marketed as New Labour, we now have it. No sooner were plans for a hi-tech identity card ditched and believers in mandatory RFID chips dismissed as conspiracy theorists, as the government plans to let GCHQ intercept our e-mails, browsing history and log into our social networking accounts server-side, for our own benefit of course. Surprisingly rather than rise to the technical challenge, some the biggest players in information technology have decried the proposals as not only intrusive and open to abuse, but expensive and unworkable.

Whenever your browser, mail client or any other TCP/IP application requests a resource from your Internet service provider or mobile phone company, the fact is logged. There is no need for surveillance software to run on your device. The problem is the sheer volume of traffic makes it very hard to make any sense of activity and what constitutes a request? Most high traffic news sites are saturated with advertising and tracking services. To post comments you are invited to log on via your Facebook, Yahoo, Google or Hotmail accounts, so in practice way over 90% of traffic can monitored via a handful of social networks, search engines and email services. I'm beginning to think maybe Richard Stallman was right after all:

As our society grows more dependent on computers, the software we run is of critical importance to securing the future of a free society. Free software is about having control over the technology we use in our homes, schools and businesses, where computers work for our individual and communal benefit, not for proprietary software companies or governments who might seek to restrict and monitor us.

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All in the Mind

How to argue with awkward purveyors of home truths

Here are just a few strategies you can adopt when confronted with troublesome individuals who insist on expressing politically incorrect opinions that cannot be refuted by facts alone.

  1. Suggest any inconvenient belief is just "their opinion" and by implication at odds with "received opinion" as endorsed by mainstream experts or opinion leaders. Decent people merely choose among a narrow array of officially certified opinions, e.g. phoney debates between mainstream political parties.
  2. Suggest you have your own preferred sources of information or have just read a report indicating otherwise. Of course, your awkward adversary also has access to these sources because they are broadcast and published so widely or even given away for free on the way to work.
  3. If your opponent suggests that the globalisation of labour markets may not be such a good idea for medium to long term socio-environmental stability, do not hesitate to call her, or him a racist. No doubt only racist‚ Australian Aborigines opposed European colonisation and only racist Black Africans opposed French and British imperialism. And what about all those xenophobic Chinese who fought the British imposition of free trade in the opium market and isolationist Bengalis who opposed cheap British textile imports in the 18th and 19th centuries?
  4. Suggest your adversary's views are mere conspiracy theories, e.g. Aren't you verging on conspiracy theory territory there? Of course, conspiracies never happen because all public and private institutions are totally upfront about their true motives. MPs never lie, at least in the United Kingdom and big businesses are philanthropic organisations. Pigs also fly.
  5. Contact a psychiatrist to help your friend overcome her or his belief issues.
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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Hedonism Ablaze

What a coincidence! Just days after the US administration agreed to raise their country's debt ceiling and let the global consumption party go on for a few more months or maybe years, In London marauding mobs run riot, loot retail outlets and set commercial and residential buildings on fire. Reportedly it all started in Tottenham Hale, North East, on Saturday evening when demonstration against the police shooting of a minicab driver and alleged drug dealer, Mark Duggan, descended into violence, just four miles from my bedsit. Eye witness accounts and video footage clearly show that police lost control and were unable to contain the ensuing disorders. Some observers have dwelled on the conflicting evidence behind the initial incident, whose background builds on longstanding mistrust between the police and local communities. In 1985 a notorious riot on the Broadwater Farm Estate after Cynthia Jarrett, an African Caribbean woman, died during a police search of her home, later saw a Policeman, PC Keith Blakelock killed. Early reports indicated just another example of police brutality against an innocent man. It now looks much more like another case of police incompetence, as both bullets fired were police-issue, but the 29 year-old victim and father of four was undoubtedly involved with narco-trafficking Star Gang. That may not have justified his death, but like many other lads from sink estates in a city with over 50 billionaires he opted to service the service sector by not only facilitating the distribution of drugs, but living by the law of the gun.

The saddest part of all the destruction that has followed is that many young people in towns and cities across the UK see little future other than to party and re-enact some gangland fantasy. The more talented youths may aspire to becoming pop musicians, actors, dee-jays or film producers. A few entrepreneurs may open hairdressers, pubs, nightclubs, restaurants and gyms,. And a few conscientious individuals may be drawn to the caring surveillance professions such as social workers, police and learning support assistants, but many just choose to live on benefits. The purpose of life in London has now become simply having fun or rather exploiting other people's desire to indulge in frivolous entertainment. The city has long been a parasite on the world stage, importing huge quantities of additional goods through the proceeds of a global casino.

As riots spread to other London boroughs on Sunday and Monday, a pattern began to emerge. Thousands of hyperactive youths, a small but sizable minority in a city with over 8 million inhabitants, enjoyed re-ennacting the kind of wanton mayhem they had previously seen on TV and simulated on game consoles. Rather than protesting against the evil capitalist system that enslaves them they could not wait to get their hands on the latest electronic gadgets. Admittedly some food outlets were trashed too, many fast food eateries, but these were no food riots. Britain's generous social security system ensures nobody goes hungry unless they choose to squander their benefits on booze, drugs and gambling. Indeed the scenes of ransacked shopping districts reveal another grim reality. Most shops sell non-essential merchandise. One happy looter posted a picture of his bounty on Twitter, a vast collection of video games and other gadgetry. Was this some kind of statement against the UK/US invasion of Iraq, a sign of solidarity with starving Somalis or attempt to redistribute wealth from the rich to poor? The looter may have feigned his opposition to the excesses of British imperialism or pretended to care about malnourished Africans or the urban poor in a grotesquely overpriced city. But no, he just wanted some instant gratification.

As more reports come in, the choice of looting targets seems to reflect the spirit of our times, to name but a few "The Sony Distribution Centre" in a large warehouse filled mainly with DVDs and game consoles in Enfield and the Party Superstore in Clapham. The big babies are throwing their toys out of their hyper-consumptive prams.

In reply to a New Labourite:

I wonder if New Labour's supporters will ever question the wisdom of economists whose advice has bankrupted the US and European economies in the name of growth? While New Labourites may distance themselves from the current ConDem coalition, they actively supported the previous administration with almost identical policies and equally subservient to the unaccountable multinational organisations who really run the country.

Recent debt-fuelled economic "growth" in the UK has mainly relied on banking and frivolous media services, aided only in part by North Sea Oil (the UK as a whole is now a net importer of oil and gas). Once demand for these non-essential services crumbles, as it surely will, Britain will have to start living within its own means. However, after 30 years of unashamedly pro-globalist policies (by which I mean reliance on global trade), a huge public and private debt and a large section of the working age population on benefits, the country will be ill-equipped to weather any storms. In a historical context globalism is but the last stage of imperialism, so let's call it global imperialism.

Circular Arguments over Immigration:

While mass immigration may create new jobs by boosting demand, that's an entirely circular argument, e.g. before the 2004 influx of Eastern Europeans there were 600,000 unfilled vacancies, 4 years later the UK still had the same number of unfilled vacancies, but a million more residents boosting the country's reliance on imports. The UK's population has not grown at such a fast rate since the end of WW2. During the 1970s and 80s more people left the UK than entered. Indeed we've witnessed a steady brain drain of talented Brits to the US and Australia and from countries like Nigeria, India and now Poland to the UK. We have a shortage of surgeons because many of the best UK born surgeons work in private hospitals abroad. The oft-repeated claim that "the economy benefits from immigration", means big business gets a short-term boost in profitability due to the influx of enthusiastic workers and total demand rises, but what is good for the economy in the short term is not necessarily good for society in the long term. These arguments made sense in countries like Australia, the US, Canada or Argentina. Indeed for some time now, UK economic growth has been consumption-driven. This logic fails to take account of rather obvious socio-envionmental factors. Southern England is now the most densely populated region of Europe and Londoners would starve within a week in the absence of food imports. Who said we need to boost aggregate consumption? We should be doing exactly the opposite. If you believe infinite economic growth is possible, then surely you'd have to believe in infinite energy and dismiss man-made climate change as a green plot to depopulate the earth (as some pro-growthists do), but you don't because it would be politically incorrect.

As we hit limits to growth, the consequences of a recent consumption frenzy growth will significantly reduce the earth's carrying capacity (i.e. more consumption per capita => fewer people). Yet new Labour's policies actively encourage procreation through Europe's most generous child benefits leading to a benefits-driven baby boom and these babies become young adults wanting to emulate Jeremy Clarkson because that's the consumer culture your friends in big business keep marketing. This observation may horrify you, I hear you murmuring "racist" or maybe sexist, but the facts on the ground are pretty undeniable, so don't shoot the messenger. We should not subsidise irresponsible procreation, because it will inevitably lead to more social problems further down the line. You know that. I know that, so stop pretending otherwise.

Waves of Migration and Social Breakdown

Advocates of mass immigration had claimed before 2003 we needed an influx of highly skilled Eastern Europeans because native Brits lacked these skills, although as you no doubt remember the Home Office estimated only 5000 to 13000 Eastern Europeans would move to the UK in the first year after their countries joined the EU,. The classic example was the Polish plumber. First why did British-born young adults not aspire to these jobs? Second how does simply importing skilled and semi-skiled workers form abroad address a skills shortage among the home-bred population? It doesn't. More important a large proportion of this new unemployable underclass in the London area are themselves descendants of immigrants from the 1950s and 60s, whose parents and grandparents had filled a skills gap. So many conflicts we see now are between different waves of immigrants, something that can only get worse in the event of economic meltdown. However, in the 1960s unemployment in the UK was negligible, two-parent families still very much the norm and housewives valued members of society. Fast forward 40 years and most of the manufacturing and skilled manual jobs that made the British working class proud have been outsourced or assigned to new communities. Whether you like it or not, only a small minority of people will ever excel in the kind of cerebral jobs created by a knowledge economy. I know from personal experience that while millions of people are proficient in the use of software applications, only a few have the mental discipline required to write programs. Hence there are more IT recruiters (talking the talk) than programmers (walking the walk). Back in 1997 your friend, Tony Blair, boasted about how Britain led the world in IT. I presume that's why so few young adults from the XBox generation can write more than a few lines of client-side Javascript code. Much of the rest of the knowledge economy revolves around marketing goods we don't really need and promoting various social agendas (hence growth in the charity sector), which in turn serve to create new markets.

Do you seriously think British born young adults cannot learn plumbing, bricklaying or farming? Their forebears did. Why did they become de-skilled? And if there was such an urgent need for friendly smiling retail and catering staff, why could big business not tap into the large pool of British unemployed, many of whose parents were immigrants themselves? Why had they become so demotivated and unwilling to get out of the bed in the morning? You may blame Thatcher, who oversaw a tremendous rise in benefits dependency, but Tony Blair followed in her footsteps albeit with different rhetoric.

"Tariq Jahan had lost his 21-year-old son Haroon, murdered in the Winson Green area of Birmingham by thugs who drove at him in their car in what appears to have been a racist attack. No one could be more aware of the simmering racial tensions between Asians in his neighbourhood and those of Caribbean ancestry".

So why should we tolerate further erosions of civil liberties turning us all into suspects to deal with the side effects of over-development and its recent manifestations as unbridled consumerism, narcissism and media trivialisation of violence. Yet as a result of these policies we will soon be cajoled into accepting even more authoritarianism

Attacking our Communities?

Globalist policies destroyed these communities. A community requires shared values, customs and social cohesion that cannot be built if its composition keeps changing. Ordinary people cannot afford to live in London except if the government, read taxpayers, subsidises rents. Indeed among the main beneficiaries of New Labour's welfare and immigration policies have been landlords, who in many cases can charge what they like because the Department of Word and Pensions will pick up the bill. As a result we have mind-boggling cases (that I have witnessed personally) of families subsidised to the tune of £3000-4000 a month? Let's do some maths. A typical semi in London is around £320,000 ... that means a couple needs to earn £80,000 per annum to get a mortgage, while real average salaries are closer to £30,000. Indeed in Scotland, I knew many on 15/16 K per annum as late as 2009. In case you haven't noticed there has been a whole scale exodus from vast swathes of London. Deny it if you will, but normal working people cannot afford to live here, unless like me they can tolerate a single room. So we have the chattering classes on 100K+ a year, wealthy advertising and media executives, and then street after street of houses converted into flats and rented to a motley crew of migrant workers, home-grown benefits scroungers and miscellaneous gangsters. What a wonderful community!

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All in the Mind

Why Procreate?

While some of us may seem very self-absorbed thanks to generations of social atomisation and disconnection from our palaeolithic roots, most of us are wired to adore new life. All but the most callous of us have a soft spot for babies or at least are wise and socially responsible enough to give them special dispensation as future citizens for the survival of our community and ultimately of our species, but the world hardly lacks young people and hundreds of millions roam the streets destitute or laze at home with few employment prospects, largely because we have become entirely reliant on big business and big government. Now some want to depend on big biotech (an offshoot of big pharma) to let them procreate when they discover they can't have babies naturally. Based on a narrow interpretation of human rights, this sounds fine. Why should we all not be entitled to have children of our own and why should we restrict such rights to fertile young heterosexual couples?

Historically only the fittest survived. We gave each new member of our community a chance, but when disease or other calamities struck, we just accepted our fate and wished others would survive in their memory. As a result for millennia the global population grew only very gradually with plenty of regional fluctuations, periods of relative prosperity and growth followed by periods of disease, famine and warfare. Pre-agrarian communities needed large areas of bountiful terrain, usually in coastal areas or near rivers, and had to keep their numbers in check. While many hunter-gatherer communities survived into the modern area, with some remote tribes surviving into the 20th century, they were in a matter of generations either outnumbered or assimilated into agrarian societies, who developed the technology to cultivate crops, rear livestock, irrigate and, more important, store surpluses for later re-use. This enabled the specialisation of labour and the growth of non-productive administrative class, making us increasingly interdependent. While in feudal times many still had direct contact with the means of food production, most had to hand over a large proportion of their yield in return for a plot of land. With the advent of the industrial revolution, we could no longer simply draw on nature's bounty, but had to compete for control over storable and stealable resources produced by others by selling our labour. In the post-modern era we sell not so much our labour, as ourselves, for money that we can exchange for the material goods we either need or simply desire. Now, children have become not just another great marketing opportunity for our growth-obsessed business leaders, but also a commodity in and of themselves.

Recent reports in the mainstream media have lamented the refusal of some NHS trusts to provide IVF. Let us set the record straight. In-vitro fertilisation is a relatively new technology, unavailable to previous generations, and not only is it extremely expensive, it is statistically more likely to lead to premature births, birth defects and multiple births at a time when we are struggling to feed the world's 6.9 billion human beings. I know, for some socially responsible women, it must be distressing to see other socially irresponsible women produce offspring with great ease with little thought as to how they will provide for them. However, a little intellectual honesty would be welcome. Infertility has become an issue because many women postpone motherhood to pursue their career or because they wish to start a new family with their new partner. Some men also want to spread their genes with their new partner. With so many children born to parents unable to care for them, why can't infertile couples adopt?

Let's briefly consider the huge changes in family life and social welfare over the last century. Once considered a safety net enabling the downtrodden to find their feet again and ensuring all children had a fair start in life, the UK's benefits system has encouraged the breakup of families through generous handouts to single parents and teenage mothers, attracted widespread abuse of incapacity allowances and created a general culture of entitlement among the descendants of the country's once proud working class. Official unemployment figures mask the reality that over 5 million more people of working age are not in employment, education or training and neither are they full time housewives, so effectively true unemployment stands at 7.5 million. Technological advances have not only reduced infant mortality, but also automated many tedious domestic chores and manual jobs that occupy vast swatches of working classes. Housewives were not unemployed, but a crucial part of a family team, replaced now by myriad teachers, social workers, child psychologists and carers. Neither were chimney sweeps or cobblers useless, they performed essential duties, now often assigned to recent immigrants. The drive to get women into work has led millions to swap the tyranny of housework for the tyranny of low-paid office, retail and care work. Only a privileged minority of women pursue genuinely rewarding and intellectually stimulating careers, most make do with dead-end jobs in supermarkets or care homes, often juggling paid employment with their parental duties. As a result instead women have traded economic dependence on their husbands for subjugation to state handouts or large corporations. Back in the 70s and 80s many hoped to see a new era of leisure with the average working week reduced to 30 or maybe just 20 hours and extended maternal and paternal leave. However, 30 years of neoliberal policies, heightened competition in the labour market and rampant consumerism, mean without benefits and on typical salaries, both parents have to work 40 hours a week, often with long commutes of 2-3 hours a day, or rely on state handouts. The largest portion of a typical family's expenses go on mortgages or rent and since 1997 house prices in the South East of England have tripled, way in excess of the official retail inflation rate. To qualify for the latter a parent has to claim to have no other source of income (e.g. a spouse's salary). The biggest scam of all is housing benefit, effectively subsidising ripoff landlords and enabling the workshy to afford accommodation in areas of London. Hence the birth rate in the UK is highest in three groups:

  1. Ethnic minorities with a religious and/or cultural commitment to large families, willing to work harder, proactively seek all welfare benefits and sacrifice luxuries for the proliferation of their community.
  2. Workless underclasses who see children as a means of obtaining benefits.
  3. Upper middle classes who can easily survive on one salary and/or employ a childminder.

In the middle are the masses of honest hardworking adults on modest salaries, who simply cannot afford to have more than 1 or 2 children, unless they split up and have children with their new partners, hence the growing demand for IVF. Many educated adults delay having children until they have established a stable relationship and pursued a career, by which time one may have become infertile, but rather than adopt one of the millions of unwanted children born to mothers unable to provide the love and attention all children need, they succumb to biological emotions to further their own kind. Thus IVF is often marketed as means of boosting a woman's self-esteem. The availability of IVF creates an emotional need that could otherwise be met by adopting, fostering or simply looking after nieces, nephews or neighbours' children, but in an increasingly atomised and fearful society we dare not trust anyone else with our children. Indeed the authorities don't trust us to raise children unless we collaborate with a whole bunch of busy-body supervisors (community nurses, social workers, teachers) etc.. Being able to bring up your children as you see fit has now become a luxury reserved for the wealthy and residents of isolated rural communities, for only these groups can afford options such as private education, homeschooling or have access to small rural schools. Everyone else's children are sent to mainstream schools, exposed to thousands of hours of media promoting high-consumption fun culture and, should their behaviour or attitude raise suspicion, referred to child psychiatrists (often mistakenly renamed psychologists) and labelled with ADHD, OCD, depression or autism spectrum disorders or simply given anti-social behaviour orders. In short even if you do have biological children, they are not really yours as the corporate establishment through its media and education systems guides their development. Recently primary school teachers have become concerned that children start school without being toilet-trained first ( see Head Threatens to Ban Pupils Who Are Not Potty-Trained). Some parents responded by claiming toilet training was the responsibility of social care workers. Why have children at all if all you can do is let the state and big business bring them up? If you want loving offspring who respect you and may care for you when you grow old, you need to spread your love and values, not your genes.

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All in the Mind

On The Laws of Probability

Every day we experience hundreds of near misses, accidents waiting to happen unless we take the right precautions and pay constant attention to all potential dangers. Yet the human brain can only actively focus on one event at a time, switching our attention to monitor the progress of other concomitant events. Some of us can switch between events better than others, but then some key tasks require much more intense concentration. The slightest momentary distraction can have unplanned consequences, like forgetting to close upstairs windows before leaving the house, leaving a frying pan on a stove unattended or as happened to me the other failing to check my rucksack still lay neatly between my feet in a crowded pub in central London during a recent Drupal meetup. Not only was my rucksack discretely lifted, but it contained my trusty laptop and my passport, renewed only last October. CCTV footage was unavailable as cameras had been turned off the previous day, Easter Monday. As I don't own a car or a house, this was pretty much my most valuable possession, without which I can't work as a Web software developer. Little did the thief know how important this object was to me personally and while others can tactfully express their commiseration, the pain remains. I had to bite the bullet, metaphorically speaking, and enact plan B. Get a new laptop and restore it from scratch. Luckily Apple's OS X's Time Machine came to the rescue. I was minded to buy a cheaper alternative, but to get up and running and avoid missing another day's work, I had to choose the more expensive route using funds I had set aside for something else. I hope someday soon, we can do all our work from a tablet with mission-critical data backed up remotely as envisaged by Google's up and coming Chrome OS, but alas network coverage cannot be guaranteed. On many other occasions, I had left my laptop temporarily vulnerable to smart thieves, in offices and even in bars while someone else kept a watchful eye, yet it had never happened. I had assumed among colleagues and friends, I would be safe. The conclusion is simple. If something can go wrong in theory, sooner or later it will go wrong. That's the lesson Japanese nuclear engineers had to learn in Fukushima. The chances of getting my MacBook back are exceedingly remote. Lies, damned lies and crime statistics. While the occurrence of burglaries has decreased mainly due to better surveillance technology, thieves have simply adopted new techniques. Smartphones and laptops are easy to carry away and sell. Many thefts simply go unreported, because victims know there is little the police can do. How can anyone seriously believe the oft-repeated claims about declining crime rates? In just 5 years in London, I've witnessed one murder and two burglaries first-hand.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Ubiquitous Assault on the Senses

How will future generations view early 21st century Britain? An age of enlightenment that allowed more women than ever to work, redefined loud arguments as domestic violence, exposed childhood sexual abuse and extended the benefits of prosperity to more people than ever. This is the spin of the neo-liberal media, i.e. you've never had it so good or experienced such a wonderfully fair and harmonious society. Surely you don't want to return to the dark ages when parents routinely spanked their children at the slightest hint of disobedience and women were chained to the proverbial kitchen sink? In affluent communities violence has been confined mainly to virtual reality, blasted through speakers in the form of death metal and rap, projected onto mega-screens and translated into a captivating and highly addictive games. We are not just separated from the harsh realities of nature as our forebears knew it, but shielded from the consequences of violent ideation, now a dominant form of entertainment. This genre of entertainment may be likened to less technologically advanced spectacles such as gladiatorial fights in ancient Rome, or more recently boxing, wrestling or fencing, but over the last 20 years we have witnessed the gradual encroachment of war themes into our leisure life It's no longer just war movies, thrillers and video nasties occupying little more than one or two hours a week, but over 80% of the most addictive video games, paintball, Laser Quest and steady repetitive raucous beats and metallic dins accompanying electronic sound marketed as music and played in locales as diverse as sports centres, shopping malls and even offices. Indeed some young people find it hard to concentrate without a continuous blur of discordant noise at work. So paradoxically one may not shout at one's spouse for fear of being charged with domestic abuse, but one may play gangster rap at full volume while washing the car. If one dares suggest first-person shooters trivialise violence, one is soon ridiculed as reactionary and wait for it, against progress. Dare one suggest rap triggers feelings of hatred and intolerance, one is routinely slammed as intolerant of our wonderful cultural diversity.
So while many of us feel increasingly powerless to change any aspect of our lives, we can only sit back and watch the spectacle of millions immersed in virtual violence in the safety of their bedrooms or offices. Paradoxically many first person shooter fans would be utterly horrified by the slightest hint of real-life gore. Recently an Italian teacher in a farming community arranged for her class to view the slaughtering of a pig. Parents were horrified, how could children learn the truth about meat processing. Sadly many pupils had previously believed meat comes from supermarkets in the same way as petrol just magically gushes from a filling station pump. Did our ancestors dream of heroic battles six to eight hours a day? Did they revel in death and destruction? At stake is the viability of human solidarity for if we dream of exacting revenge against perceived foes in times of economic disparity and limited per capita resources, we are doomed to repeat the worst democidal excesses of our recent history. To what extent is violence an inextricable part of the human condition and to what extent can culture either channel violent urges into socially useful activities or trigger violence in otherwise peaceful individuals?

I would measure progress, not in terms of material possessions or abstract statistics championed by bureaucrats, but as a broad measure of social harmony, contentment and self-fulfilment, a delicate balancing act focussed on the reduction of conflict and personal suffering, e.g. ambition can drive innovation leading to significant improvements in life, but also cause conflict and selfishness.

Human beings have a vast array of instinctual behaviours that may be unleashed under certain conditions. Some of our behvaiours require little active thought, either because they are essential to our existence and have been inherited from millions of years of evolution or because inculcated behaviours have become second nature. A healthy baby need not learn to suckle, breathe or even cry in response to basic nutritional needs. By contrast, humans did not evolve to drive cars or type, but many of us perform these tasks with amazing agility. In comparison with most other animals human babies are pretty helpless. Other newborn mammals can walk within minutes of birth. However, many other ingrained behaviours are learned skills building on our intellectual hardware and primitive reflexes, e.g. linguists such as Noam Chomsky believe complex language relies on a specialised brain functions absent in other species, but clearly the exact manifestation of our linguistic abilities depends largely on our environment. Our humanity determines our intellectual potential, while our environment determines how we develop and utilise our intellect. Without applying reason and compassion in the forebrain, a male responding to his innate libido might be inclined to sexually assault any unaccompanied attractive female within easy reach. Were we to let our basest instincts guide our actions, modern civilisation as we know it would never have arisen. The technological progress that helped us expand our food supply, tame nature to meet our needs and lower infant mortality relies on advanced forms of social organisation and co-operation, in which our intellect and sociability prevail over primitive forms of social control.

Violence has long been a feature of human existence, but its role and pervasiveness have varied enormously over the millennia. Many anthropologists have observed we are the only animal that wages war against other members of our own species, but disagree on whether tribal warfare first emerged in the Neolithic era as stone-age humans began farming and establishing more permanent settlements around fifteen to ten thousand years ago, or whether internecine conflict has always accompanied homo sapiens sapiens throughout the Paleolithic era. We might consider some exceptions, e.g. a lion may fight a rival over control of a pride and then slaughter cubs that are not their own. However, not only are lions some of the most ferocious mammals, but their survival depends largely on brute force and obedience within a tightly knit community and, more important, on hunting other animals. They evolved to be top of the food chain, not to go forth and multiply and thus dominate through numbers. On the African plains, aggressive predators are in a minority, while the vast majority are mere grazers, browsers or warblers. Violence as a survival strategy only works if your species has a low population and can feed on a much larger number of easy prey. It is plainly foolish to apply human ethics to other species. Lions are born to kill and care only for their immediate family. Notions such as compassion and solidarity simply do not enter a Lion's mindset.

We descend from a line of vegetarian and omnivorous primates, who succeeded in mastering their habitat through dexterity, cunning and social organisation rather than the exertion of physical force, which was largely reserved for travel, work, foraging, hunting of small animals and occasional defence against predators. Around six to seven million years separate us from our closest primate cousins, chimpanzees, but why would violence evolve as an innate human instinct? First we need to define violence a little more accurately. Many primates do not hunt at all preferring to forage as vegetarians should their habitat provide plentiful food, but we are most closely related to chimpanzees who do not only hunt, but have been observed resorting to violence as a means of conflict resolution and imposing their power on more submissive females. By contrast Bonobos, close cousins of chimpanzees, use playful erotica to diffuse social tensions. Obviously any carnivorous animal exerts physical force to catch and kill other animals. Few animals practice cannibalism except as a last resort in after a natural calamity. However, we do not relate to other animals in the same way as we relate to members of the same species. To a carnivore, other animals are food, not sentient beings. At this point it might be useful to distinguish intra-species violence from inter-species violence. Some would take an absolutist stance against murder of all sentient beings and thus promote vegan pacifism, arguing that human technology allows us to be at one with nature. However, most Vegans in wealthy countries relies on a huge human infrastructure that has completely reshaped our planet and effectively ethnically cleansed whole species from their natural habitats or confining them to wildlife reserves. To enable the apparently peaceful existence of a middle class Western European family with their 4 bedroom house, two cars, household appliances, endless gadgets, holidays abroad and weekly supermarket shopping sprees, we need to inflict violence on a huge scale against the planet's delicate eco-system, something many of us would rather deny. So we might not witness real warfare firsthand, but it is committed in our name so we can drive our cars and fill our refrigerators without much thought as to how that delicious frozen salmon ends up in our freezer. This warfare may not always be waged against non-collaborative communities, but simply displaces traditional human communities and other species in the name of progress.

In many ways we are slowly emerging from an age of apparent harmony, in which people from different socio-ethnic backgrounds learned to live and work together. Certainly throughout history different ethnic groups have intermingled, but also fought bloody battles. Most of us have enough trouble trying to care for our immediate kith and kin. We can easily relate to our immediate geographic community and if this is cohesive enough, we might help disadvantaged neighbours. Charity really does begin at home. All of a sudden we have been asked to care not just for other members of our ethnic community, i.e. a group of people with a common language, mores and cultural identity, but all 6.7 billion estimated to grace our planet in 2010. As this is clearly impossible, we just pretend to care and look after ourselves, but often seek revenge against rivals by playing victims to justify our selfish actions. In reality while many of us pretend to care about the wider human race and some of us have been known to help strangers in distress, unless we are very rich and/or resourceful, we can only practically look after number one and our immediate family and friends. More important a socially competitive and high-consumption society pressures people to acquire more material posessions for themselves, either through hard work or financial manipulation. As a result millions are so busy struggling to make ends meet in a never-ending rat race, they have little time for others. Philanthropy has become a luxury afforded to the fortunate professional classes with time on their hands, while often members of idle classes prefer to indulge in media therapy (watching TV, chatting on Facebook etc.) rather than help others in their community. And even when people do help others, deep-seated cultural prejudices condition how this is targeted. The idea that billions of atomised human beings immersed in variations of the same global culture will learn to love each other is clearly a myth.

Postscript

While the Web is deluged with gamers' rants against any attempt to limit their freedom to indulge and many journalists in mainstream newspapers make a living out of promoting virtual violence as a legitimate genre of entertainment, my thoughts are not entirely unique. An Yugoslav Australian, Dejan, reached similar conclusions:

Are we becoming a violence obsessed society? I think we are.

Is it the excitement or the adrenaline rush? Maybe its a product of the life pressures we face today or even a mixture of the aforementioned? Something surely is driving us towards this culture where violence is being glorified and aggressiveness respected. It seems that way. The political sphere, the media and entertainment industries promote this aggressive culture that cant be leading the world towards a prosperous future, quite the contrary. Read full article at http://socyberty.com/society/the-obsession-with-violence

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All in the Mind

Oil Discovered Off the Falkland Islands?

Are all wars ultimately motivated by Greed?

How very convenient, by mere coincidence around 60 billion barrels of oil has been discovered within 150 miles of the Falkland Islands. Before you conclude this will save our economy from the effects of peak oil, that's approximately 2.75 years of global consumption and as in the North Sea would have a low EROEI (energy return on energy invested), i.e. it would require expensive oil rigs drilling hundreds of metres below the bottom of the Southern Atlantic Ocean. For more read Falklands oil prospects stir Anglo-Argentinian tensions

So far the UK government has spent tens of billions reoccupying and defending the largely desolate windswept Falkland Islands and its 1500 inhabitants. Why bother? Why did the Thatcher government not rehouse the inhabitants in the Hebrides back in 1982? It would have been much a cheaper option and saved several thousand lives.

I grew up in the 1960s and 70s, when the UK was at its least interventionist, at least outwardly. British soldiers struggled to keep peace in Northern Ireland and elsewhere seemed to be only deployed in multinational policing operations such as Cyprus. After public opposition to the Anglo-Israeli-French attempt to recapture the Suez Canal in 1956, The UK had amazingly refrained from deploying its troops in territories over which it had no jurisdiction. Notably Harold Wilson's 1964-70 government kept the UK out of the Vietnam War. Of course, that was just a façade, as the UK arms industry and military were fully integrated with NATO and the US military industrial complex and Britain continued to service colonial outposts such as Gibraltar and Hong Kong as well as deploying tens of thousands in its sector of West Germany. Yet despite relatively recent memories of the Second World War and the perceived threat of the Soviet Union, back in the 70s the British public were generally against the new mantra of preemptive interventionism. 30 years later British troops are stationed in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Balkans, Cyprus, Sierra Leone and numerous other outposts in official or unofficial capacities. And all along we are led to believe official pretexts for their presence.

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All in the Mind

The Daily Motorist Mindset

The recent cold snap over much Western Europe with temperature lows not seen since infamous winter of 1963 has prompted Daily Mail columnists and their avid readers to deny any human effects on our eco-system. Yep, just because we are gripped by Arctic weather, does not mean 800 million motor vehicles and 6800 human beings have zilch effect on the environment.

Climate is unpredictable as are weather forecasts or for that matter the side effects of the exponential rise in human activity over the last 60 years. Global warming was always a gross oversimplification, climate destabilisation is much more accurate. Switch off the Gulf Stream, and the British climate resembles that of Newfoundland. The Daily Motorist mindset is driven by the belief in a green conspiracy to stop them driving their cars 40 miles to work everyday and doing the weekly shop at Tesco with food trucked in from thousands of miles away. The whole economy, including service-sector-led boom of the late 90s and early to mid 00s, is fuelled by consumption, consumption, consumption. Can we continue to consume at this rate along with 2.5 billion Chinese and Indian consumers eager to emulate a Western European standard of living? We've been on a huge consumer binge. It has consequences. Only time and science will tell exactly what those consequences are.

Categories
All in the Mind

BBC Drama Promotes Schizophrenia Myths

TV programmes promote agendas behind of smokescreen of wishful thinking. Waterloo Road is no exception.

Over the last three years Waterloo Road has sought to raise awareness about certain social issues with varying degrees of success and misinterpretation. Considering the programme's main appeal is to teenagers, it comes as a shock, but sadly not a surprise, that the last episode focussed the attention of millions of youngsters on one of the most poorly misunderstood psychiatric labels, schizophrenia, a dated term that should really be replaced by something more specific like psychosis. However, it is commonly referred to, in polite circles, by the euphemism "mental health" (shouldn't we all aspire to good mental health?"). Thus if this programme has done nothing it has instilled in people's minds that when teachers and social workers talk about "mental health", they really mean "schizophrenia" or plain English "madness".

Not only was the portrayal unrealistic, it perpetrated the myth that psychosis just bedevils someone out of the blue. As misfits are increasingly labelled with Aspergers and ADHD (and often diagnosed by the same so-called professionals), this excuses the behaviour of bullies against weirdoes. In the not too distant past, weirdoes were just kind of different, but nonetheless valid human beings. Now thanks to psychiatrisation, their deviant behaviour is considered pathological. If many teenage kids did not know what schizophrenia means, they do now and it will, thanks to the BBC, become the latest playground term of abuse.

In the vast majority of cases of real psychosis, either drugs, whether recreational or indeed prescribed, have been involved or there have been significant environmental factors, such as physical and emotional abuse, traumatic events, bullying, poor diet, exposure to hallucinogenic chemicals or, minor brain damage after an accident. In many cases psychosis represents the final stage in a downward spiral of alienation and rejection.

It seldom appears in well-balanced teenagers with a good diet, not into drugs, with a stable family background and plenty of friends. Out in the real world, over 50% of cases of psychosis in London are related to skunk, yet in the mythical world presented by the psychiatric/pharmaceutical lobby it is a hereditary "endogenous" disorder that merely has environmental triggers. Sure, some people may be more susceptible to manifest psychotic behaviour, but the potential is there in all of us. Everyone is a potential psychopath and all men are potential rapists.

In all likelihood you sought advice from so-called charities that promote the biogenetic model of madness.

In all honesty programmes like Waterloo Rd should steer well clear of "personality disorders" and focus on real social problems, not least the alienation of uncool children who fail to fit in with an increasingly conformist dumbed-down hive mentality. We are not disordered as individuals, society is...

Response:

Dear Mr Gard[e]ner

Thanks for your e-mail regarding 'Waterloo Road'.

I understand you had concerns that the programme focused on mental health issues and schizophrenia. I note you feel that this is an area that the programme should avoid.

As you are aware the programme focuses on its teachers and students, and confronts social issues, including affairs, abortion, divorce and suicide.

The show has been designed to be entertaining but at the same time we do hope that it has some real things to say about the experience of teaching in an inner city school, the barriers to that being an easy place to work and how hard teachers work to change the lives of some children.

Nevertheless, feedback like your own helps to inform the discussion about a programme's tone and content and the reactions of our audiences are closely studied by our producers and senior management to ensure the right judgement is being made about what is acceptable to the audience in general.

With your complaint in mind I can assure you that I've registered your comments on our audience log. This is the internal report of audience feedback which we compile daily for all programme makers and commissioning executives within the BBC, and also their senior management. It ensures that your points, and all other comments we receive, are circulated and considered across the BBC.

Thanks again for taking the time to e-mail us.

Regards

name withheld for legal reason

BBC Complaints

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Reality Denial

When do we let our political judgements be swayed not by a rational analysis of the facts, but by self-interest, wishful thinking, superstition or just plain irrational prejudices? Whether rapid climate change is taking place and is caused by human activity is surely a matter of scientific analysis, on which I suppose you may hold different perspectives. You may return from an unusually mild southern Greenland only to witness subzero temperatures in Madrid. Your objective analysis during a Spanish chill may sway you against the global warming hypothesis, but if you used a weather event selectively to discredit much more voluminous evidence to the contrary that would be bias. Supposing, as a mainstream newspaper pundit, I wished to prove most Iraqis supported the US/UK liberation of their country despite all the trouble, with sufficient funds I could easily arrange for a group of pro-occupation Iraqis to acquiesce to a little public relations. I could simply choose my sample in an area renowned for its support of the US/UK invaders, such as the Kurdish north. What I'm alluding to is our ability to construct a reality that matches our aspirations and prejudices by picking the facts that suit our agenda,

Some of us might like to think only others are prone to biased constructions of reality. We may accuse others of prejudice often as a rhetorical weapon against an argument we cannot empirically refute. This often follows fuzzy logic, e.g. "You claim there are too many people in London. The BNP (xenophobic British National Party) makes the same claim. The BNP is irrationally racist. So are you. Only a warped racist could believe London is overcrowded" or consider this "You claim we should take action to cope with climate change. So does the mainstream media representing big business, so you must be wrong". Well let's consider these assertions. First the portrayal many tend to exaggerate the arguments of their adversaries. A statement like "Planet Earth cannot support six billion human beings at current rates of consumption in the long term" soon becomes simplified to "We'd better start culling excess human beings now, so the rest of us can continue enjoy the same standard of living". Next comes a bold assertion about a common bête noire, an extremist grouping or demonised tyrant with whom is simply not done to sympathise. Sometimes media may have been so successful at marginalising dissident idea that the bête noire in question may actually present rational ideas, but the existence of genuine extremists and assorted nutters serves the establishment`s mind control agenda very well. Suppose a small radical Islamic sect called for the liquidation of all US millionaires.

The Problem Reaction Solution and Counterreaction

The basic difference between the infamous Italian Mafia, Camorra and Ndragata clans running protection rackets and modern states lies in their size, influence and control of the mainstream media, but the former often act as immature micro-states within states often offering many of the same services as the latter. Paying a pizzo or protection money to your local Mafia boss may seem extortion, but it's basically what we do when we pay taxes. Sure, to some extent, government money trickles back to the general populace providing many of us with jobs and redistributing wealth in an inherently unjust corporate economy. Here are just a few examples of classic problem reaction solutions:

  • We have rampant crime, therefore we need more police, more surveillance and tougher sentencing.
  • We have terrorists and political extremists in our midst, therefore we need more monitoring of people`s everyday lives and clamp down on hate speech.
  • We have unsustainable immigration, therefore we need tighter immigration controls, more police, more social workers, more new houses, more money spent on integration etc.
  • We are facing an environmental crisis, therefore we should trust our leaders to impose greater controls on our irresponsible behaviour as private citizens.

Thankfully many of us don't buy this logic. Why should we accept greater hardships because of macro-economic decisions taken by remote business leaders and politicians? All the above problems, if indeed they are problems, are created by an absurdly unsustainable and unbalanced economic system hooked on perpetual growth. Instead of asking "how should the state combat crime?", "how should the state deal with troublemakers?", "how should the state control the migration of human beings in a never-ending rat race?" or "how should the state and big business address climate change?", we should ask "Why do people turn to crime?", "Why do people resort to violence and hateful ideas?" or "Why are we facing an environmental catastrophe?". These more rational questions do not negate the existence or perception of real problems, but turn the questions raised by the mainstream media on their heads.

Nevertheless many of us react by negating the reality of the problems. A common notion on the liberal left is that "We don`t need Draconian legislation" (a conclusion I agree with) because crime has not risen recently and may have actually declined, a perception only possible if you live in a leafy suburb somewhere. Likewise we should value free speech, again a view I wholeheartedly agree with, because everyone is so tolerant and nice in these enlightened days, a perception only possible if you genuinely believe in the benefits of over twenty years of neo-liberal economics and social engineering. Next consider the conclusion that "we should not deport illegal immigrants, (and I would be loathe to trust the state to do so in anyone`s interests but their own), because we need more immigrants to boost our dynamic economy and do jobs we don`t want to do and besides this country can host tens of millions more (as long as we can continue importing cheap food)". Once again this conclusion tends to appeal to those who are doing fairly well and can afford to steer clear of the adverse side effects of unplanned economically driven migration. We see two sections of the mainstream media engaging in a phoney debate over immigration with both sides supporting the unsustainable model of perpetual growth that drives immigration in the first place. Some on the left are simply incapable of admitting that overcrowding will exacerbate the very socio-economic tensions we wish to eradicate, hiding behind a façade of cultural diversity, interethnic tolerance and international solidarity while relying on a globalised economy controlled by a small number of supranational corporations.

We see the same fuzzy thinking behind the looming environmental catastrophe, except here we see a distinct trend towards outright denial or downplaying of the evidence before us. To some extent it would be easier to argue with some left-leaning climate change deniers, if the mainstream media denied its reality. Why should we rely on former Vice President Al Gore to warn us of a pending disaster caused by human hyperactivity in large part due to his own country`s grotesque overconsumption?Yet we have let TV, Cinema and commercial Web services dominate our lives to such an extent, some of us only ever believe something when Hollywood-style edutainment movies endorse it.

The Rense Dot Com Mindset

Personally I`d treat many articles promoted by rense.com with the same degree of scepticism as I reserve for the Daily Mail, the favourite newspaper of Britain's disgruntled middle classes. They remind us of some home truths, correctly identify some social problems and then pursue their own agenda. Rense Dot Com has recently featured numerous articles challenging the notions of Peak Oil and manmade climate change, while simultaneously providing a platform for one of the US`s most vehement anti-immigration crusaders, Frosty Wooldridge. That unsustainable immigration is driven by unsustainable overconsumption does not really occur to a narrow conservative American mindset that just wishes to conserve their uniquely prosperous way of life threatened by low-paid immigrants and politicians attempting to increase fuel taxes.

The Greg Palast Mindset

I've covered the strange case of the Frank Füredi sect (RCP => LM Mag => Spiked Online) with their characteristic form of technocratic polemicism. However, much more commonly on the left we encounter an ideological refutation of environmental hard truths to support an unremitting optimism for the human progress. Such social optimists are willing to identify and expose the reactionary or unprogressive nature of today`s ruling elites. They rightly participate in the rhetorical crusade against Bush, Blair, the IMF/World Bank and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, but somehow deep down still believe in the enduring myth of Western enlightenment capturing the hearts and minds of an oppressed underdeveloped world. Many on the left view the world in terms of good causes and are thus very susceptible to the emotional arguments of mainstream pundits promoting hidden agendas. Few could pretend life was easy for Afghani women under the infamous Taliban. I certainly would not like to live in a society in which women become little more than the property of their husbands kept in ignorance and under veil, but what right do we have to impose our worldviews on an autonomous community. Human rights is very relative concept with many trade-offs. When the warlords of the Northern Alliance gained power before the Taliban imposed its variant of Sharia law, women were regularly raped and many actually welcomed the protection these drastic laws claimed to provide, possibly in the same way many people in this country welcome the installation of CCTV cameras at every street corner, e-mail snooping and lynching of suspected paedophiles. The spectre of extreme misogyny served to dampen opposition to the invasion of Afghanistan and steer attention way from the true geopolitical goals of the exercise. Likewise leftwing immigrants rights campaigns fail to address the true causes of socially and environmentally unsustainable migration, often acting against the immediate interests of their own native working classes,

The Immigration Conundrum

The traditional difference between the left and right, at least in my simplified way of thinking, is that the former stands up for the rights of common people in general and the downtrodden in particular, while the latter defends the status quo often appealing to the forces of reaction against subversive and destabilising elements. In the fantasy world of the radical left working class British workers struggling to pay their mortgage or rent, forever in debt with their bank and doing overtime to settle bills and loan repayments, will, once politicised and enlightened, unite in struggle with the oppressed masses of the not-so-prosperous world. While we can cite many examples of Western European striking for better pay, improved working condition or against cutbacks or privatisation, we can cite few in which the same workers have taken industrial action in solidarity with much lower paid workers elsewhere. Indeed all evidence shows working class Europeans flocking to retail outlets to buy the very consumer goods whose deceptively low prices are only permitted only by favourable exchange rates or rather an injection of virtual money by banking cartels into high consumption economies. Whether you like it or not migration nearly always flows from economically and/or environmentally disadvantaged regions to more prosperous or more environmentally sustainable regions. The British didn't colonise Australia just to get a suntan or enjoy a more outdoor lifestyle, but because by the late 18th century the growing population of Britain's newly industrialised regions had become too much of a burden, so the excess population either died early through hunger or disease or emigrated. The same is happening today, except we see a movement away from countries currently undergoing structural readjustment to countries with plenty of virtual money, most of which have been or still are colonial powers. At the same time we see a smaller movement by the propertied classes away from the bustling metropolises of the wealthier countries to the greener and sunnier pastures of low-income countries. So while Poles, Romanians and Bulgarians flock to London, many Londoners are buying up properties at knock-down prices in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Qatar, France or Spain. However, in both cases we see the resurgence of 19th century divisions between a servant class and their professional masters. This is just fine, if you happen to own a house in London (currently a modest four-bedroom semi can fetch around £500,000 in many boroughs) and you don`t mind retiring or relocating. Many opt simply to move to the surrounding home counties and rent their London property. Indeed whole residential streets are now rented out to London's new migrant classes with several families often sharing a Lilliputian three-bedroom house. The new immigrant classes fill two key gaps in the labour market, traditional hands-on skilled jobs that fail to appeal to young Britons and low-paid service-sector-servicing roles. The latter category encompasses anything ranging from bartenders, childminders, care assistants, bus drivers to newspaper distributors, but the apparent gap in the labour market would cease to exist if the clientele had less expendable cash and more indigenous young people were prepared to do these jobs as they did until recently. Currently a high proportion of home-grown fruit and vegetables are harvested by migrant labour. If we paid home-grown farm workers a decent wage and sourced all crops suited to our climate locally, prices would inevitably rise even more than they are now as a result of fuel crops and soaring oil prices, but we`d adapt by consuming less junk. The immigration wave of the early 21st century has in effect enabled an unsustainable consumer-led service-oriented economy to stay afloat. In one extreme case a Polish family doctor flew every weekend all the way from Poznan, Western Poland, to Glasgow, hired a car to drive all the way to remote area of Aberdeenshire to earn £2000 as a weekend general practitioner owing to a temporary shortage of qualified GPs willing to work in the area. As budget airline Ryanair announce cutbacks following recent rises in oil prices, we may wonder how long this absurdity can continue, burning umpteenth barrels of fuel to cope with the consequences of unsustainable hedonism and a rat race that attracts the best minds away from their provincial to the citadels of power and corruption.

The Sick Man of Europe

Back in the 1970s Britain, as we then called England + Wales + Scotland, was known as the sick man of Europe, strike-prone, inefficient and basking in the glory of a bygone era of imperial and industrial might. Thatcherism proved a very bitter pill to swallow, with unemployment rising officially to over 3.5 million and unofficially to over 6 million with millions of manufacturing jobs gone forever. The economic resurgence of the mid and late 1980s saw mainly the growth of services. While the early years of the Major government saw a brief resurgence in the manufacturing sector through inward investment and a low pound, the current administration has overseen the almost complete outsourcing of what remained of Britain`s manufacturing base. Besides services, three industries dominate UK industry, military hardware, energy and pharmaceuticals, all relying on imported components and raw materials. In an idyllic past each community had the right mix of professional farmers, manufacturers, craftspeople and service providers. We all need and expect housing, furniture, plumbing, electrical power, domestic appliances, food, restaurants, roads, public transport, schools and healthcare, yet for some reason the professions essential to the provision of these goods and services do not appeal very much to young Brits, by which I mean anyone who grew up mainly in England, Scotland or Wales. As a result numerous essential professions were by the mid 1990s severely under-resourced. People management, sales, media and leisure-related professions tend to appeal much more to a generation raised on TV, pop music, movies and now video-games and the Internet. However, on a structural level we can observe that many traditional professions only exist as human resources within a larger organisation rather than self-employed workers and small tradespeople offering services to their local community. Rather than encourage entrepreneurism, the gradual takeover of a handful of supermarket chains and retail outlets of not only the food supply, but also furniture, clothing, DIY and commodity appliances restricts the scope of small businesses to essentially franchisees or minor service providers, or rather contractors, of larger corporations. If you grew up in a sprawling suburban housing estate, went shopping once a week at large supermarket, while your parents worked as loyal enforcers in a state-corporate system to earn credit to buy readily available goods, you may be tempted to opt for the easiest and least stressful means of making money. Thus the prospect of becoming a baker or plumber only becomes attractive, if the potential earnings offset the enormous effort required to learn the tricks of the trade and other members of one's extended family or local community serve as professional role models. Instead too many people in this country have grown to consider such tradespeople as simple low-end and easily replaceable human resources or possibly quaint characters portrayed on TV sitcoms or seen in exotic backwaters. TV chef, Jamie Oliver, recently took his healthy school meals campaign to the wilds of rural Lincolnshire, only to discover school catering staff unaware of local vegetable suppliers literally a stone`s throw from the school grounds preferring instead to visit their nearest supermarket. Yet down on the ground farmers are compelled to hire cheaper migrant labour in order to maintain the low prices that the big supermarket chain impose. As always there are two sides to a story. Polish smallholders have been driven off their land because foreign food chains like UK-based Tesco and the French Carrefour group have taken over large sections of the distribution chain preferring to buy from a smaller number of large agribusinesses rather than from thousands of smallholders that had until recently dominated Polish farming. The resulting conglomeration and restructuring inevitably caused rampant unemployment and a huge pool of cheap labour. Not surprisingly many Polish newcomers to the British Isles consider the natives here lazy, spoilt little brats.

Would it not have been better for the English, Scots and Welsh to relearn the skills we need to fend for ourselves, and leave Eastern Europeans to develop independently and sustainably rather than emulate the ultimately soul-destroying and unsustainable Anglo-American neo-liberal model.