They say some species of shark can never stop swimming. They require forward movement to force water through their gills and hence breathe. Even if apocryphal, the story has some useful applications.

Around five years ago, our local independent garden centre closed, leaving a large, increasingly derelict space on the edge of our small town, about half a mile from the centre. It was not long before pinstripe-clad fins were spotted in the area.

At about the same time, a group of local residents was coming together to create a Neighbourhood Plan under the then-government’s localism agenda. The aim of these things is to build local control (shark nets?) into the statutory planning procedure.

It was a long and complex job, that took several years to complete, and this week it appears that it has cleared its final hurdle before going out to local referendum. This is quite a coincidence, because it is the very same week when a building company has launched its marketing campaign for the fifty or so Noddy houses that it is currently building on the site of the former garden centre.

Throughout the intervening period, the Neighbourhood Plan team put considerable effort into engaging with first the land agents promoting the site, and then the building company that bought it. Their aspiration was to produce an architecturally innovative, environmentally-sustainable development which would steer the emphasis away from car-reliance and create a model for the area.

I had several meetings with one of the pinstripe sharks as part of this process, and to begin with, the noises were smoothly consensual. But then the site was sold on, and the building company that bought it refused to engage with the local group. The excuses why certain things “couldn’t be done” mounted.  As a result, we have been left with just another cloned housing estate, planned entirely around the car with, apparently, the blessing of the local authority’s planners who still require major consideration for multiple car-use in all new designs.

So much for localism; the Big Fish have been fed again – and will now go off to prey on some other unsuspecting community. It makes the glossy sales blurb for the development all the more infuriating since it trades heavily (and sometimes inaccurately) on the beauty, strong community and local amenities of our town, while at the same time having made no effort whatsoever to preserve or enhance or them, to say the very least.

Businesses are like sharks; it seems they must move ever onwards, otherwise they perish. They have no sense of fair play; once they have eaten the minnows, they move onto other fish. They have no sense of restraint; cash is their oxygen, and they care not how they acquire it, or how much damage they do in the process. Cynicism is just part of the plan; I doubt they appreciate irony, either.

Decades ago, this nation was seduced by the shark-like charms of private business. We had a succession of Prime Ministers who championed it over the allegedly hopeless public sector. We were encouraged to become shareholders as the nation’s assets were sold off.  I remember, even as a teenager, having reservations about this – but I could see that a nation in which the proceeds of such enterprises were returned to the populace through widespread, small dividends might just work, and accountability to such large numbers of shareholders could even be argued to be democracy of a sort.

It didn’t last. The sharks quickly ate all the smaller fish; today the small private shareholder is a rarity. Privatisation has turned out not to be a form of democratisation, but the opposite. Most of the fodder is funnelled towards, and then circulated amongst, the large financial predators that constitute the majority shareholders. It’s that – and the fact the successive governments have done little to restrain their appetites – that causes market cynicism such as that shown by the building company mentioned above.

We have another one circling; at least in this case, it did engage, and has made some nods towards local wishes. But it was still immediately apparent that it would ultimately do largely what it wanted, while perhaps throwing a minnows a sweetener or two. It only shifts it swim-forward focus, we were told, to the extent that the Law requires it to do so. Which is Not Much. Again, the democratic wishes of the local population will be over-ridden by the profit-lust of the corporate sharks.

This pattern repeats itself throughout businesses and across the nation; it is how they survive. But it is an inherently selfish motive, always seeking to tip the scales decisively in its own favour, while never letting the fixed grin shown to customers slip for a moment. Even small businesses do it – they will (nearly) always sell you more than you really want if they think they can get away with it. Caveat Emptor! Beware the teeth!

Covid 19 has stirred the water. The placid shoals of consumers on whom companies feed have largely fled to safer places. Yet “The Economy” has been enough of a consideration to compromise – for some, fatally – the health measures that needed to have been taken much sooner. Those sharks need to keep swimming, come what may.

But where there is no food, the sharks will eventually starve and fade. That is what is happening to many businesses right now. I find it hard to sympathise; during the plentiful years of consumerism, those sharks grew fat predating on the rest of us. They relentlessly championed their right to do so, both politically and through that bewitching consumer grin. They were the real consumers, not us.  Now that times are hard, I see no reason why we should listen to their new tune. If the sharks really want markets to be so Free, then they can’t complain when they make businesses fail, as they are doing in large numbers at present. That’s the Quid pro Quo.

The more adaptable will find new ways of surviving anyway, and those that can’t probably are no longer needed. Not that many don’t have a good amount of body fat to survive on for a while yet.

Others are doing much better from the new habits of the shoals: those who provide entertainment or hobby supplies; many in the shoals have themselves discovered resourcefulness that they never knew they had. All sorts of amazing, innovative and sometimes downright crazy things are becoming popular in the virtual universe. The small fish are coming back into their own.

So let’s play the Free Marketeers at their own game: those who can adapt should survive in this new world where the gratuitous consumption needed to feed their endless appetites is no longer society’s main preoccupation. Those who can’t, we just don’t need any more. No need to shed any more tears than they did as they relieved us of our hard-earned cash often in return for little of much value, while despoiling our communities and environments in the process. Things referred to euphemistically as “externalities”.

There is, however, one problem: those businesses also employ the majority of the shoals of worker-consumers. The lost companies do also represent lost livelihoods and careers, often shed in the most cursory of ways – and potentially much hardship. Unemployment is rising – but many are also finding new directions that they would never have expected only a year ago. We need to nourish these new enterprises – the online artists and musicians, the writers, comics and posters of amusing memes, the small online craft community, the 3D printers and the hobby-orientated suppliers. We need to find a way of remunerating them for their new and creative communal activities – and encourage many more to join them.

The point of an economy is to serve people’s needs, not the other way round. Those needs are now different.

So forget the whinges of the airlines – what use are bulk-fliers when few people need or want to fly? What use the huge stores that have struggled to maintain their supply chains when we most needed them? Let them wither; if demand returns in the future, rest assured, someone will spot a business opportunity and things will re-start. We just need to find a cost-effective way of cold-storing the assets in the meantime, if we can. Those bits of the old economy that are still needed will be re-born in a way dead people can’t be.

Free Markets are an ideological luxury: created not, as claimed, to benefit the many, but to allow a few to grow very rich minimally servicing them. If that were not so, they would engage in fewer anti-competitive practices where they feel they can get away with it. That is the nature of business: it is self-interested – and we are now living in a less self-interested age.

The problem is the incomes of those who lose their jobs. Yet we already have something of an answer: despite years of denial, it turns out that the government can, when the need arises, conjure almost limitless amounts of money out of thin air. It is only a construct after all – and one whose day is past. The need for income to support people in living reasonable lives is vastly out of kilter with the ability of any economy to generate and distribute the cash to provide it. That is why so many are in permanent deficit. And unrestrained markets actively funnel it in the wrong direction.

It has always struck me that expecting so many people to depend on the relentless swimming of what is in effect a glorified, unequal bartering system for their survival in the modern age is both primitive and insecure, not to mention environmentally unsustainable. Similar could be said for universal public services, whose quasi-commercial models are now also facing economic and behavioural contradictions that might not have existed under alternative models. Once again, the State has stepped in, because you simply cannot allow hospitals, schools and public transport not to operate just because they have become commercially unviable. There is a lesson there.

I don’t claim to have “The Answer” – but somehow, we need to decouple the supply of income to those who need it, from the shark-like behaviour of their (former) employers, swimming ever forward, irrespective of the damage they do with their huge income disparities, poor products, and social and environmental damage. There is supposedly a matter of balancing the books – but maybe that is a concept whose time has finally passed too? When companies are able, through technology, to make the mega-profits that many do, perhaps national debt is less of a problem than it might seem. We simply need to divert those flows to where they should arguably have been going all along. Perhaps the time of the Universal Basic Income has also come.

This not a call for a command-style economy, whose shortcomings are all too real (though the Chinese have perhaps shown to be less so than western mythology would believe). But traumatic events such as pandemics have prompted fundamental change in the past, and there is no reason why they should not do so again. Perhaps we simply need to accept that the sharks’ natural environment is gone forever – and put something more equitable in its place.

English gold has been our bane:
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

I wonder how history will judge the current time.

Maybe the song whose title has been circulating in my head will have something to do with it.

I know it a little from The Dubliners, and had always assumed that it was Irish, but a closer look shows that it is Scottish, attributed to Burns. The song excoriates those who signed the Act of Union in 1707, and the loss of Scottish independence that followed it. Plus ça change.

The Brexit experience seems to have sparked a bout of national soul-searching that shows little sign of abating; in effect, the arrival of Covid has done little more than divert the main channel of its expression, and perhaps blur the boundaries somewhat.

Quite where this will lead is anyone’s guess. No matter what the outcome of the UK-EU negotiations, a cultural chasm has been opened and it shows no sign of closing again. While those who have always had an outward-looking view seem to have doubled down on their Europeanism, the debate is not restricted to them. I think this is a good thing: as the Dunning-Kruger Effect shows, the worst thing about ignorance is your ignorance of your own. There’s only one way to change that.

The D-K Effect has a geographical expression too: people who are raised in insular places risk not only remaining insular, but also unaware of how insular they are. They tend to do it by over-estimating their own centrality and importance. That, to my mind, sums up the story of this nation, probably ever since sea levels rose 10,000 years ago.

The causes of Brexit go far deeper than the matters of the past decade and lie in the simple geographical fact the Britain is not part of a continent. How little this past-clinging nation has really changed was shown in the belief of a fair proportion of its population in its right and ability to ignore the rest of the world – except to the extent that it can contribute to further reinforcement of its own self-delusions. Such conservatism is another expression of insularity – in our case, turbo-charged by certain events in our past two centuries.

A feature of isolated groups around the world is that they tend to be inward-looking and self-referential. When the outside world does intrude, the reaction is typically one of suspicion, hostility, or disdain. It’s no different from an English speaker walking into a Welsh-language pub. A bombastic, passive-aggressive culture is often the result: a superiority-inferiority complex that wallows in its own failings, while simultaneously twisting them into virtues and thereby itself back into the Promised Land that it believed all along. We in all these islands excel at that. That, I think, is where Britain’s dark humour comes from: the hard-bitten cynicism of a place that deep down knows its reality is not a patch on its self-image.

Much of this nation’s historic relationship with the wider world can be easily read through this prism. The love-hate relationship with its neighbours that stretches back centuries may be more complex than popular opinion believes – but it is still an expression of a relationship that was founded on limited knowledge, just as it is now. People with literally and figuratively limited horizons simply find it more difficult to know how life might be different elsewhere. They have more difficulty just going to see what happens elsewhere – and Elsewhere finds it more difficult to bring itself to them. It was not unsurprising, when that outside world did intrude – during the Nineteenth Century when internationalism took root, the World Wars, and again with EU membership and its consequent migrations – that the national reaction would be inconsistent, unstable and extreme. Insularity and reactionary conservatism go together. When you are unused to dealing with people from Elsewhere you are not equipped to do so, and the line of least resistance is to dismiss them in one way or another.

And then we come to the Insularity Squared of Dunning-Kruger: worst of all, the insular nation was not able to see that the insularity was by definition its own, not the rest of the world’s. The 1950s headline Fog in Channel; Continent Cut Off may be apocryphal, but it still betrays the traditional view of an insular nation. I suspect many in the UK remain in ignorance of the extent to which life elsewhere has become internationalised and globalised. International families and nation-hopping careers are no longer unusual. We, meanwhile, still largely see Abroad just as a place to holiday with better weather.

The more I think about it, the more I believe that this problematic worldview has been embedded in our national mindset to a depth that even those who consider themselves liberal might be duped by. I remember my own parents – who were hardly apologists for the British Establishment – expressing attitudes towards “continentals” and their countries that appear mildly shocking now. It was not meant to be incendiary; that was simply how the British views of the continent were, even in the 1970s, when memories of the War were fresher. But despite the emergence of an internationalised so-called “elite” in the country, I think far less has changed than such people are inclined to believe.

In my own case, it was only the opportunity to experience other European countries ‘differently’ that came from having useful language skills and friends who had moved abroad, that changed this beginning in the late 1980s – but even then I found it a long and difficult struggle to stop being intimidated by those places and their ways, even as I enjoyed discovering them. Had this chance not arisen, I suspect I would have continued with my childhood perspectives, as others in my family have done.

Whatever one’s conclusions, I think it is good that questions are at last being asked. If nothing else, Covid has made it harder to avoid comparisons between the nations of Europe and indeed elsewhere – just at the time when many Britons might have wanted to be doing just that. The raw statistics have made it harder than ever to argue that national differences are not significant, or to persist in the belief of the UK’s innate superiority: the same superiority that informed Boris Johnson’s early claim that the nation had a “world-class” response at the ready, and would survive virtually unscathed, as it always supposedly did.

World Class – the perpetual refrain of a nation that is now very often anything but; those that are, don’t need to keep reminding themselves. A natural disaster such as a virus can demolish the vanities of national exceptionalism like little else can.

My own objections to Brexit were born from a genuine belief in the commonality of people, most immediately within a shared Europe, where history and geography have always made it inevitable that we need to rub along somehow. But it was also born from my growing realisation of just how backward and inward looking this country still was, and a patriotic desire that Europeanism might change that. But for years, my views met most commonly with blankness, as though people simply didn’t know what I was going on about. The idea that Britain might no longer actually be Top Dog simply did not compute for those whose entire lives were still based around the contrary assumption.

Or maybe they just didn’t want to think about it. It is a view that many Brexiters still seem to struggle with, despite the tribulations of the last nine months.

If anything, my view has shifted more towards resignation. The one thing that might have made me accept Brexit would have been concrete evidence that this country is indeed building such a strong and enlightened future for itself that membership of the EU would clearly have been a handicap. That would not be impossible: see Switzerland. But I just can’t see it here. The hype is nothing more than that; the repressive undercurrents run just too deep to see, let alone change.

First amongst them is the received wisdom that society is inevitably hierarchical. I have gradually come to see that this assumption is, if not absent, then significantly weaker on the continent wherever stronger social democracy prevails. In fact, I suspect that the UK is one of the last developed nations to have such an entrenched, subconscious and hypercompetitive preoccupation with Status and Pecking-Order as it still does; many others now define themselves absolutely to the contrary.

It is so entrenched that even now most don’t see it; but it is socially destructive all the same. It is there in the promotion of high-end goods on their “exclusivity” and the emphasis on the status that wealth supposedly brings. And in the notion that getting ‘one up’ is both acceptable and desirable. You don’t need to worry so much about social mobility if society is reasonably equal in the first place.

I see it on my regular cycle rides into the Essex countryside, which have revealed any number of luxury modernised farmhouses and former barns tucked away in the glacial folds, where the Very Wealthy are buying themselves seclusion, away from the towns and villages that are fighting a losing battle against swamping by the future-slums of the volume Noddy-house builders. I wonder at the lives lived in such places: a mere 50 miles from London, perhaps simply second homes, the children neatly tucked away in private schools. No need to interact with the plebs of Regular Britain at all.

But it’s only what the higher orders have done in this country for centuries. In a way, I almost don’t blame them – for Regular British life is a pretty crass affair, not something to aspire to. “Civilising” forces – such as a respect for learning, and access to higher culture, are largely absent from mainstream British life, drowned out by the lowbrow, the cheap and the blatantly commercial to an extent that I don’t think I’ve seen elsewhere.

Historically, this country produced few cultural giants of the stature of the French painters, Italian sculptors, or German composers; only in literature do we come close. We have never valued abstraction or philosophical thought – the basis of idealism for a higher life. (Such as we produced was, ironically, mostly Scottish). We hark back to the Victorians – yet much of their legacy, while grand, is largely derivative and backward looking, a manifestation in stone of that same social authoritarianism that has kept so much of the nation down. It took French abstraction and German/Scandinavian modernism to produce genuinely new templates for the present age – and once again, Britain struggled to cope with change. Its elites made sure of that.

It can be argued that there has been a renaissance in Art, Food, Architecture and Fashion in the past few decades, but it has largely (once again) been cornered by the new-generation elite – educated and affluent; just a new way of demarcating social status rather than anything genuinely democratising. There are precious few signs of its widely enriching the towns and lives of provincial Britain, let alone the poorer parts. Except where the new rich in-comers are pricing many locals out of their own homes. It became symbolic of a way of life that is alien to the majority of British people.

Why wouldn’t those of more discriminating tastes want to distance themselves from such a morass? There seems little alternative – but this is part of the problem, not the solution. By monopolising the best, all you do is coarsen the rest. I see less to flee from in more equal countries.

You only need look at the political climate, or the responses to Covid to see that different values and perspectives are at work in different places. In this country’s case, it is the desire of those at the top of that still-enduring hierarchy to wash their hands of the rest (or at least, patronise them) – as their breeding suggests they are entitled to do – that actually perpetuates the wider crassness. It is by democratising the nation’s assets that people can be levelled up – to use the Prime Minister’s favourite phrase. And yet that is the last thing instinct makes him and his kind able to understand, let along implement. They just can’t get over their traditional sense of entitlement – and over generations, institutionalised deference has polluted the entire nation’s view of itself.

Brexit and Covid are pushing this nation further into a mire of its own making. We still seem unable to see that the only workable ways forward are communal and egalitarian: new models, not clinging to the old. Shameless individualism can be exploited by the virus as well as the political system. We still don’t ‘get’ that the underlying problem is the way this country is fundamentally configured.

Its solutions to both are largely predicated on the values and worldviews of its past; just as was the way it has functioned for decades. It is there in the way its adversarial political system dismisses any other than a single dominant world-view; in the condescension of its leaders, and their failure to cope with the consensual pluralism of the EU27, which even now is more concerned with finding an accommodation than rattling sabres. Its only answers are “more of the same” – the criticism I first made of this country’s inability to become truly forward- and outward-looking several decades ago.

Alternative models that have successfully addressed at least some of these issues have been available just a few tens of miles offshore for the past fifty years. But we have only ever been intent on seeing the wideness of the Channel, not the opposite. And so intent were – and are – we in our belief that there is no other way, even an ocean-crossing virus has yet to make us think again.

It’s easy to blame the nation’s current predicament on this or that sub-group. But in truth it is the whole culture – all of us – that is the problem. From the coarsened urban masses, through the newly-affluent in their barns, to the old elites (whose influence is still stronger than many realise – only less visible) – to our new generation of bombastic, wealth-obsessed ‘leaders’ with their empty nationalism. The Scots (who once made common cause with the French) might sense a particular irony – and the continentals themselves I suspect now see it in a clearer way that we still can’t, now that we have shattered the stereotypes.

In reality, we’re all part of it: such a parcel of rogues in a nation.

It took a little while for us here to start wearing masks. While we were locked away at home, it wasn’t really an issue – but we now have them and hopefully wear them intelligently – i.e. when in enclosed public spaces or where proximity with others is likely. It has become apparent that wearing one also works quite effectively to remind others to keep a distance. It is not a major imposition, apart from the problem of foggy glasses.

So quite what is one supposed to make of reports that fewer than 25% of the British population is wearing masks? Experience here suggests that it may well be much less than that, and comments from friends suggest that even the legal requirement to wear one on public transport is being widely flouted.

By comparison, it is reported that around 84% of Italians and 65% of Spanish and (even) Americans are routinely wearing them.

Assuming the figures are correct, in my eyes this comes close to the indefensible. Even if there is disagreement over the impact of masks (which seems in any case to be diminishing) the precautionary principle surely applies. And the degree of difference in these figures is surely big enough to be significant about something. The question is what.

It is easy to put the hat of indignation back on; I do it easily – but then, I am a teacher. Teachers are paid by society to stick their noses into other people’s lives and behaviours and try to improve them – and I have been a teacher for a long time. Besides, when that behaviour potentially affects my well being, I believe it becomes my legitimate concern. That notwithstanding, it is still an objective fact that different societies in different places and times exhibit differing behaviours, and it is hard not to conclude that there must – somewhere – be reasons for this, given that human beings are in biological terms fundamentally the same everywhere.

Indignant or otherwise, it is easy to read this as an explicit statement of how a lot of individuals in Britain regard the wider society of which they (fail to see they) are a part. The purpose of wearing a mask is primarily to protect other people, and when widely observed, the situation becomes mutual. The impact on infection rates is becoming much clearer. There may well be widespread misunderstanding about this fact – but that raises questions of its own, both about how much attention people are paying, and the effectiveness of official communications.

Equally, it may be an expression of very low levels of concern that people have in what is left of civil society in Britain, for each other: so low that even a trivial but important obligation is too much of a personal infringement to be seen as worth making. This in turn might cause one to wonder at how it came to be like this here, when it is clearly not a universal habit.

The difficulty is, it is almost impossible to pin such things down objectively – and therefore one is left scrabbling for explanations that are all too easily distorted by confirmation bias.

As I said, the most charitable explanation is a low level of understanding – though this still does not reflect well on the country. Worse is low levels of concern, which fly in the face of much of this country’s self-image as a place of civilised values and courteous behaviours.

Somewhere in the mix this may reflect on the nation’s seeming inability to organise itself properly. Even arch-patriots seem to accept that good organisation is at best touch-and-go in this country, even if they turn the regular muddles and short-sightedness into a strange kind of virtue even as others (including me) are tearing their hair.

I suspect another facet is an in-bred tendency to look backwards: in general the British are not good as early adopters, since that involves looking positively at the future, and as a nation we are still far more in love with our past.

It seems to be true at both an individual and collective level: I saw a first-hand report yesterday from a British woman flying in from Germany, of sanitising facilities at Heathrow that had not been replenished, and of people milling around in the airport without any observance whatsoever of suitable distancing. Surely it is not beyond us to get these very practical things right? At very least, this is not the image we as a nation – and certainly not the present government – like to have of ourselves – and yet ironically such débacles are depressingly common. They are not everywhere – as many Brits seem to assume. As one commentator put it some weeks ago: “Even when all we need to do is copy the Germans, how come we still get it wrong?”

Still trying to be charitable, the only other conclusion that I can see for the traditional British cock-up (which seems to be more common than the alternative) is that there is something in the British culture or mindset that is so ingrained that we cannot collectively overcome it – even when we know we need to. It seems to be something that afflicts our ability to construct effective institutions and guide individual behaviour almost equally. I hesitate to call it a blind spot because some of us at least are aware it is there, though trying to overcome it is by no means as easy as might be thought.

What is the common trait that leads British planning law to be impenetrable, that causes so many mega cost-overruns on projects that end up being abandoned, that leaves us dithering over high-speed rail half a century after our neighbours started build theirs; that leads us to persist with outdated forms of government even though there are many examples of how they are dysfunctional – and which leads so many to neglect or even fight against basic individual responsibilities in the face of a resolutely apolitical virus? That makes it so difficult for people in this country to “do the right thing” even when they know they should, to take the easy way out even when we know it is doing us all harm?

Education might be a likely culprit. And in some ways plausibly so – but I think that any failings in that respect are more a symptom than a cause. Why is it that this country has taken such a myopic, market-driven view of education when many other countries seem to see perfectly clearly that developing minds and societies does not and cannot work in that way? That education needs to be about far more than just preparation for the workplace; that “qualifications” are meaningless if not backed by real knowledge and understanding? Arguably it is a shortsightedness that fails to cause it to be otherwise.

“The Market” might be another culprit – again reasonably so, because in reality, free markets like nothing more than large numbers of docile, compliant, identikit producer-consumers. And it is certainly not averse to trying to shape people’s behaviour (not least through flattery and the deception that people are freer than they actually are) to make them so. It seems to me that those countries that exhibit the kind of aggressive/defensive behavioural complexes that perhaps explain people’s unwillingness to take part in collective actions are more likely to have aggressively neoliberal governments and deregulated commercial sectors. But it is still not easy to say which is the cause and which the effect: in a sense people choose their economic models through the ballot box.

But I suspect that the real shapers of national mindsets are actually deeper and less obvious. For a start, I doubt that very many non-mask-wearers are actively going out to cause harm to others. The failure to make the right decision is probably less conscious than that: something that simply causes insufficient awareness of such issues in the first place, though a retail-indulged “all about me” is no doubt part of it.

Another common factor in self-harming libertarian cultures seems to be strong hierarchies. In the case of the UK this was, and in part still is, down to ancestry and social status. In the USA it is linked more directly with wealth – though the UK is treading that path too. I suspect that the resultant inequalities do not only do physical harm but also considerably wider psychological damage. The whole notion of a pecking order informs one’s sense of self; the restrictions imposed by one’s (many) superiors can be limiting and denigrating – and may well lead to a sense of powerlessness and an aggressive defence of what little remains of one’s autonomy and self-respect. Could this explain the shows of aggression seen when non-conformers were asked to comply with lock-down, sanitising or now mask-wearing?

I sense that something is different in those countries where mask-wearing rates seem to be higher (the US seems to be an anomaly here, though it reported varies massively between states – and correlates with their political allegiances). Lengthy acquaintance with some people in continental Europe suggests to me that on the one hand they are more assertively individualistic as citizens – and their socio-politico-economic systems reflect that – but perhaps as a result, they are also less aggressive when challenged or required to pool their sovereignty with others. Compared with places where there is a more overt or overbearing elite, there is perhaps a greater sense of real individual sovereignty – but also more respect for the same of others: in other words a greater sense of commonality.

It’s not an easy thing to describe – but a useful analogy might be driving styles. The UK has one of the lowest road fatality rates in Europe; this might correlate with its self-image as a polite and rather cautious nation. But it also has plenty of overt, daily aggression, often originating from those who drive the most expensive and powerful vehicles. In Germany, Switzerland and Italy, by contrast, experience suggests that driving is often more assertive – you will certainly know if a faster driver wants to pass – but there is somehow less overt aggression behind it; that assertive driver will still normally wait without hassling until you choose to pull over. Behind that, there is an implied acceptance that both have equal right to be on the road – something that road-rage denies.

I increasingly suspect that the supposed modesty that underpins the British self-image is actually nothing of the sort; it is actually harmful passivity: a kind of indifference or complacency born of the fact that in this country all the important decisions are made, and responsibility born, by Someone Else; that for many, their little lives are not felt to be as consequential as those of Important People. Such places often seem to have a strong culture of celebrity veneration, a kind of vicarious living, as though ordinary lives are not good enough.

I think it is symptomatic that here, the perceived solution to the mask problem is for the government to tell people to do it; it should not need to: they have minds of their own. And the failure of our government to do so is in any case part of the problem since governments elsewhere have done precisely that, supported by public expectations.

Somewhere in the mix persists the belief that we live in a promised land in which nothing really bad ever happens – even as it is killing more of our compatriots than almost any comparable nation. And therefore we never need to give any serious attention to our actions, because they are mostly inconsequential. Even when they are not. It is a kind of communal paralysis that is in so many ways perpetuated by the small-mindedness and belief that muddling through is still sufficient, even when we can see that it is not. It is the absence of a profound democratic belief that every life really does matter – not only those of the ruling and economic elites.

But it also allows those in the nation who are alert and ambitious (but not necessarily benign) – and not only viruses – to run rings round the lazy brown dogs of everyone else, thus perpetuating the situation and indeed making it worse.

Another objective truth about societies (as individuals) is that they are quite capable of self-harm, even knowing self-harm. Brexit is one example; the failure of civic duty in the face of the virus is another.

Britain is certainly not the only country where such phenomena exist, or where antisocial behaviours are manifest – but the disparities in mask wearing are surely significant enough to show that it is one of them. In that respect we come close to being objectively inferior to those who are getting it more right. Will we learn from them?

The belief that we are immune to national blind-spots is our national blind-spot. The problem is that the pathology seems so deep that we still simply can’t see it – let alone escape it.

 

Being a teacher is a strange job. You rarely see the results of your work – and even if you encounter former pupils in later life, it is almost impossible to identify with much confidence any specific effect that you had in them. The whole job of a teacher is predicated on the hope that you will have some helpful effect on the individuals you teach, even if you will never know what.

This is probably why ideology plays such a strong part in the educational profession: in the absence of anything more concrete, there is little else to fall back on to provide shape to our actions.

It is this problem that also leaves the profession exposed to so much idiocy. When it is almost impossible to prove anything much at all, anyone who claims otherwise can get in on the act without difficulty. So we are continually beset by the claims of ‘gurus’ bringing magical solutions, even though it means that education tosses and turns on a perpetual tide of contrary solutions, such is its yearning for answers to the unanswerable.

It is the same lack of agreed, provable outcomes that has made it all too easy for politicians to appropriate education for their agendas. It has been too easy for them to point the finger at teachers for being wrong-headed, unproductive, pointless. It has made it easy for them to impose conditions on education that attempted to twist it into paradigms derived from sectors where it is much easier to measure output. In doing so, they have turned education into a conveyor-belt industry, whose output is not educated individuals, but statistics published and boxes ticked; numbers of certificates handed out, no matter how little the real intellectual effect on the minds of those who received them.

You can’t be a teacher without having some faith in humanity – that it is possible to turn thoughts and behaviours to the good. You cannot function in a classroom without that unprovable belief that what you are doing is in some way important and beneficial. That is true everywhere: the very fact that to educate someone is to anticipate their future means that it cannot be otherwise. But the fact that education’s benefit is unprovable does not make it undemonstrable. Some countries seem to find systems that equip their citizens better for their future lives than others.

As with everything else, the pandemic has highlighted this. The responses by individuals from the most powerful to the most ordinary are the product of their thought processes – or lack of them. To some extent, that in turn is a product of the sum of the education they received, both formally and otherwise. How they reacted to CV-19 is an expression of that.

I have worked for many years in education in the same hope that I was helping to equip British people to be effective thinkers, to be able to take their opportunities and respond intelligently to their difficulties. I hoped I was helping to create a nation of thoughtful, responsible, cultivated citizens.

I always believed that education does have an effect, and that it was a positive and definite force, even if its specifics for any particular individual were unknowable. I never even considered that it was actually an exercise in damage limitation to contain the worst of human idiocy; this was just too cynical an interpretation for any teacher to entertain and still function. But the past few years have shifted my view on this out of all recognition.

In a national political plebiscite that required knowledge and informed thought, despite their so-called education, a majority of the British Public opted to side with prejudice, rumour-mongering or just ignorance. Or they abdicated their responsibilities entirely.

In the face of a known epidemiological threat, this was the response of a significant part of the British public yesterday:

It is no good just blaming the politicians: all of those people have brains of their own. It is what they (fail to) do with them that is the tragedy.

It’s not only what happens in formal education that affects such behaviour: much of the national attitudinal landscape is the product of home life, the national media and peer pressure. But the same is true in all countries, and yet responses – and responsibility – in similar circumstances have not been the same everywhere. The role of formal education is to equip people to know better.

It seems that in Britain life is so cheap that it is worth risking the death of oneself and many others for the sake of a pint.

Educating the British public: how did we get it so wrong?

I once saw work defined as ‘doing something you would rather not’. That seems about right: I have been pretty constantly productive during the lock-down months, and yet almost nothing felt like ‘work’ ; in fact the same could be said for the last three-and-a-half years since I stopped  full-time employment and was largely confined to quarters. Now that the ill health that caused this situation has mostly receded, the revised life-balance has been very largely beneficial.

Yet the cultural wisdom of recent times has been that work should be central to our lives, that it is the most important aspect of our existence, our most significant activity. By extension, this suggests that disliking our work is the last thing we should do. In fact, we are expected to love it. (One might have another discussion entirely about what we would rather do or not, and why…)

People seemed to lap this up: in the teaching profession, I encountered many people who admitted that they lived for their work. While teaching is a rather unique vocation, I suspect that the sentiment is much more widespread, though how much of this is actually just virtue-signalling is open to question. I often wondered both what such required devotion did to the quality of the rest of their lives (I knew what it threatened to do to my own) – and what messages it sent to the up-coming generations.

The cynic in me suspects that things are not this simple though – and as with almost everything else, the Corona-virus emergency has cast a harsh light on our assumptions and choices. I wonder whether there will be substantial change in this respect – or whether we will in fact return to the good-old-bad-old days as soon as restrictions are fully lifted.

Work is not absolute: it is a cultural phenomenon – in Britain’s case a legacy of the “Protestant Work Ethic”;  it is also a complex matter that goes to the heart of existential issues that I rather doubt the average commuter gave much attention to in normal times. From birth, we are in effect programmed to expect that after schooling, we will spend most of our lives in employment, before being put out to grass at some point when the going starts to get tough. Modern reality may not be quite so predictable, but that is still the normal, if dated template.

The existential matter comes from considering what we would do if we were not at work: part of the fear of lock-down for many people seemed to come from not knowing how they would fill all those extra hours. Many seemed to go looking for alternative forms of work. And yet we have no more hours to fill in a day than people ever did. There is plenty of evidence that even at subsistence level, people in the past rarely filled all their days with work – they did what was necessary, but no more, even though that involved much more than in developed societies today. The same seems to be true in subsistence cultures today – and it can be informative to look at other species, who face the same existential issues when it comes to filling time: what is one to do between birth and death? While lower species do seem to fill almost all their time with basic survival, the same is not true for the higher ones such as big cats or other primates – nor many domesticated animals.

There is certainly a psychological aspect to work, or the lack of it. Unemployment is known for being a scourge, and yet I wonder whether it is the lack of work per se that is the real difficulty, or simply the lack of resources that it brings for doing other things instead. After all, the affluent classes whose income derives from rentier activities do not always seek work – being leisured was (is?) seen as their good fortune. I suspect that many of the problems of unemployment actually derive from the wider situations of those who are most likely to face it: lower income, less educated and with few other ways of finding meaning.

Therein lies another issue: it is undoubtedly true that work bestows purpose and identity. One of the most unexpected difficulties of losing my own job was the lost ability to say to people “I am a teacher”. Ergo, anything much at all. Again, this is probably particularly important for occupations that have a strong vocational element but it may be more widely significant too. But I also suspect it is a stronger male trait than female, which may suggest it has other underpinnings.

We might consider how attitudes to work differ between cultures. I’ve seen enough of southern Europe to know that the mañana culture is by no means dead and this is unsurprising, not least for climatic reasons – but it is also a lazy stereotype to believe that southern Europeans never work hard. There is, for example, a strong work culture in northern Italy, even if one might suspect that it may be a way in which it seeks to assert its parity with the ‘efficient’ countries further north. But that country is also famous for the imagination and richness it devotes to its wider way of life – and that to me seems to be to be a worthwhile trade-off.

One might look at the Germanic countries where there is supposedly a much stronger work-ethic. Except that it may not be all it seems. My experience of those countries suggests that while quality, efficiency and skill are very important, work is not the end in itself that one might expect. Law in those countries has established the social purpose of work – for example, providing employment is seen as equally important as generating shareholder wealth; the requirement to have employee representation at board level has embedded that. A more important question is perhaps why Germany created such laws in the first place when they would be highly contentious in the much less efficient U.K.

The division between work and not-work seems much more flexible – even blurred – than it does in the U.K. Taking sabbaticals is rather more possible – and provision for issues such as paternity/maternity leave and childcare more generally, famously more generous. Perhaps this is the future: where a highly-skilled and autonomous population checks in and out of work as required, as one activity amongst several in an average week? Once again, Britain seems to be behind the curve.

Relationships in the workplace seem more equitable and less hierarchical there, and it seems to me that less importance is attached to work as a wider social signifier than it is in the U.K. It also seems to me that there is a much more visible level of active non-work life in those countries, be that from the numbers one sees doing outdoor activities, eating out or attending cultural events. So much for the Germanic worship of work: I think their attitude is simply a manifestation of a widely more proactive culture.

The pandemic has thrown new light on our attitudes in the U.K. – and it seems that the government is increasingly prioritising the economy over public health. A recent encounter with a former Conservative councillor confirmed his view, at least, that the economy is “far more important than….” He didn’t finish his sentence. I wanted to suggest, “than the lives of little people?”.

For several decades, we have been told that work is indeed the most important thing we do. Most other aspects of life – including education – have been subordinated to getting people into the workplace. But that has not implied becoming an entrepreneur; the emphasis has been on being a ‘good employee’, working harder than you are asked, “going the extra mile” and not rocking the boat. Is it a coincidence that such a relatively poor workplace “settlement” seems to be a feature of those hawkish countries that retain neo-liberal ideologies and hierarchical societies? Is work really as essential as they would have us believe – or is it just very convenient propaganda to keep us toiling to keep them in the lives they seem to expect?

It seems to me that successive generations have accepted this largely unquestioningly; on more than one occasion in my own working life I was lectured by colleagues that I needed to “learn to play the game”. But it increasingly seemed to me that it was less of a “game” and more of a racket. Or at least an excessively hierarchical, quasi-feudal, exploitative set-up that was increasingly tilted in favour of those at the top – and those who gained their favour. My not “playing the game” was simply an attempt to be a reflective professional – one who was prepared to entertain difficult truths in the interests of doing an excellent job – and ironically, trying to help develop the institution for which I worked. But it proved unacceptable to those who ran the place.

It is quite difficult not to come back to the cynic’s interpretation. At present, it seems that health-protection measures are increasingly being compromised in order to get people working. While we hear that many have experienced hardship in lock-down, very many from whom I hear have actually found it a positive experience. They have discovered a new way of life that does not revolve entirely around the rat-race – and also that they can survive without the 24/7 conspicuous consumption melée that our country has become.

This may be the real agenda: making people work so hard they have no time to think is in reality a form of social control: over our place as consumers who keep the economy churning, who provide often-expendable work-units that are needed by the owners of businesses who in recent times have taken more and more of the proceeds of our work for themselves, and who have eroded employment rights in order to keep it thus.  And because the political class fears a population that actually has time to stop and think, and perhaps to find a way of life that does not involve compliance with a status quo than disproportionately benefits them rather than us?

Work is certainly important for many reasons, not only keeping food on the table. The sense of purpose and accomplishment it can provide can be good for mental well-being; it also provides social contacts and structure to our days; it of course creates wealth and innovation and gets things done that society needs done; it is perhaps even reasonable to accept that it does involve a degree of societal control, because there are still many who seem not to know how to use their non-work time constructively.

But the prioritising of work above all else has actually made those problems worse. It has eroded civil and communal life, it has made family life more difficult – and it has removed from people the autonomy to know how to rely on their own resources and to find other aspects of life by which to define themselves. Reducing the long hours of my own work and taking more control has been a significantly good thing. The small town where I live is noticeably different now too: quiet – but inhabited – not emptied-out, as it feels in a normal working week after the commuters have left. The endless (and often needless) consumption and the income to afford it, which is the quid pro quo for the long hours – (and which actually feeds our income back to those who own the organisations that employ us in the first place) – is having a disastrous environmental impact.

In other words, excessive work is actually the cause of many of our other dysfunctions, not the solution.

If the pandemic has made people question these things, it can only be good. The pendulum may have swung too far to sustain – there will always be a trade-off between time and money, though new technologies may be part of the solution here, as indeed electronic technologies have shown in recent months.

Giving people the freedom to choose how to balance their lives seems to me to be an inherent component of a good quality of life – and it already exists to some extent in similar countries; it should be up to people to choose how to spend their lives most fruitfully, not the nation’s patricians to dictate.

That is entirely consistent with the nature of Sprezzatura: the scope to run your life rather than it running you. And I suspect that is the real reason that the powerful in Britain are concerned that it does not go on much longer.

 

Twenty-five people strode out onto the grass. Several of them were carrying balls, which ever-shifting groups proceeded to kick about among themselves.

As time wore on, an air of uncertainty seemed to descend, as though they were waiting for something. Eventually, one of them decided to make off up the grass with one of the balls, towards a goal post. There was a cheer from the spectators. But some of the others on the grass seemed not to have noticed; they were still occupied with different balls.

Gradually, however, a few more started to join in a repeat of the above movement, even passing the ball from one to another as they went. Others tried to stop them. But it wasn’t easy to tell who was on which team, since there were ten different colour schemes visible on the field.

After about ten minutes, one of the people deliberately tripped up another who had a ball, and then dribbled it around behind the spectators before coming round the end of the field and through a goalpost that had, in the meantime, mysteriously been replaced with one four times as wide as that at the other end of the field.

Some on the field protested vigorously, at which point they were set upon by the others, and a full-scale brawl ensured. Some of the spectators gladly joined in, while others lost interest and sauntered off home. The ‘game’ was eventually won by those who were able to punch the hardest, at a score of 13-0 and five dead.

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Times of emergency often provoke people to face issues that they would rather not. Currently, that includes some pretty fundamental questions, such as whether it is possible to run a country under conditions where close interaction between its residents is potentially fatal.

One might also ponder the importance, or otherwise, of Trade in a situation where matters of mutual survival are suddenly of much more immediate significance. Public Opinion in the U.K. apparently still supports an extended lockdown until the risks of infection have fallen much further. When it’s a choice between cash and life, most people don’t hesitate to choose the latter.

But another rather existential question concerns the nature of human interaction. Since the time that there was first more than one person alive on this planet, there has been a need for some kind of accommodation of the possibly-conflicting interests of multiple sentient beings. It is evident, too, that by virtue of existing, those individuals cannot help but have an effect on everything around them, including other beings. The question is, what type of effect. It also apparent that individuals’ good can be furthered by interaction, thereby achieving things that neither could alone. It is not as simple as just allowing the economy to perish, since people do need to interact for all sorts of things, while isolating people totally is potentially to leave them to perish from all sort of other causes. This is the argument being made by some for ending the lock-down.

How to reconcile these two grossly conflicting needs is the conundrum that Covid-19 presents. It is also the subject of social and economic theory down the ages.

There can be few who would advocate running Premier League football along the lines described at the top of this post – and yet there seem to have been plenty over the past decades who thought it was a good way to run society more generally.

They are the ones who describe taxation as theft, who claim that there is “no such thing as society”, and that “the invisible hand of the market” is the best mechanism for running things. They tend to claim that competition is the natural dynamic of society, as of Nature itself – competition which they evidently intend to win. They are the ones whose attitude towards the State is hostile, who portray the organs of the state as either megalomaniac or lumpenly jobsworth, intent on depriving them of their “rightful” freedom to act as they alone choose.

These attitudes may reflect more on those who express them than anyone else: on what grounds might one really object to the presence of any form rules – except because one wishes to flout them? Most of the “bureaucracy” that such people wish to hack away exists to protect the many from predation by a few. Why else would one wish to loosen safety standards or conditions of employment?

Yet a version of such market-dominated views is prevalent in the U.K., to the extent that even the more thoughtful among the younger generations who have never known it otherwise, seem to find it very difficult even to conceive of society being run any other way. This is probably no surprise, since in that time, even the State itself has been run by those who held such views, and whose overriding aim was seemingly to remove its influence from as many areas of national life as possible. They argued that the State was inefficient and inept. At what, one might ask. Selling burgers – or saving lives?

 

I’m old enough to have been brought up with a different view, no doubt reinforced by the fact that most of my family has worked in various state enterprises. I grew up with a view of a benign State as the guarantor of basic standards and needs. It was the State that provided electricity and water, and co-ordinated train and bus services. It oversaw the provision of universal standards of healthcare and education. It underwrote those things that are necessary, but where profit is not the most important or viable consideration.

It might have been a bit dull, but it nonetheless had a showroom on every High Street rather than a call-centre in cyber-space, and you knew that the prices it charged were not fuelling the mega-profits of a few private individuals living in tax havens or the zero-hours contracts of unfortunate operatives. You knew that the head teacher was answerable to the County Council rather than his own pension fund. You knew that train fares would be consistent, not run by “yield management” techniques designed to maximise income for the operator.

You had some faith that the State would take a long-term strategic view of the needs of society as a whole, and plan accordingly, that it could act where there was no profit to be made. In short, the State was arbiter, the provider of the social goods that underwrite the basic needs of society, which it provided without fear or favour irrespective of people’s private interests.

I’m not naïve enough to believe that the State got everything right, or that the divide was always in the right place. It was probably never a good idea for the NHS to be the sole provider of spectacles. The consequences were visible on the face of every citizen with less than perfect eyesight. I also know that innovation can be messy and unpredictable, while self-interest is a strong (but not the only) motivator. The important thing is to balance conflicting interests.

I suspect that the shortcomings of the State peddled by free-marketeers since the 1980s were less inherent, and more to do with poor practice. The State is not inevitably bad: just look at the German, Swiss, Scandinavian or New Zealand ones. It is just that the British State has been badly run – not least because it was perpetually starved of funds by those who were able to avoid contributing, and often run (with little accountability, but plenty of condescension and entitlement) by those who had few personal interests in its working well, since they had already bought themselves out of it.

It is not as though the free market does any better. The myth of market efficiency  has been exposed: what private companies crave is not competition, but monopoly: a private monolith instead of a public one. A situation where they have the rest of society over the barrel of their own corporate interests – and these they  will conspire to create when the State is too weak – or negligent – to prevent it.

The pandemic response is simply the latest, most extreme demonstration of what happens when you try to run civil society without the impartial, logical, consistent organisation that only a disinterested entity can provide.

It is the “lean and efficient” commercial sector that largely replaced such an entity in the U.K. which has been exposed as having neglected investment and strategic planning. It should come as no surprise that when one promotes profit-seeking, it is entirely predictable that that is how many people will behave, both individually and in groups. It is inevitable when such organisations tend to be run by self-selecting, profit-seeking individuals whose personal perspectives align with that worldview.

The Coronavirus pandemic has put the shortcomings of this approach up there in huge, illuminated letters for all to see. When it came to the crunch, it was the large corporations who struggled to keep supplies rolling, who were ill-equipped to cater for a suddenly-much-wider range of needs – not that it stopped them propagandising as vigorously as any State, telling us how they were “here for us” and were “looking after the nation”. No: they just knew the alternative was oblivion.

It was quasi-commercial policies that deprived the NHS of the strategic reserves it needed to respond fully to the emergency – and the altruism of its ordinary employees that largely saved the day while the executives were struggling to work out what to do.

The same could be said of the government: at a time when the guiding principle has needed to be social solidarity and welfare, grass-roots society has largely risen to the need. But the libertarian free-marketeers in charge have found themselves bereft of the insight for far-sighted decision-making. Even now, their approach is more public-opinion than public-service. And as if that wasn’t enough, the experience is being daily rubbed in by the very different situation in those nations that never lost sight of the need for an effective social contract in the first place.

Perhaps the most ironic sight is now the self-same private sector that has spent the last decades demeaning the State and profiteering from its neglect, now coming cap-in-hand to the State for support, supposedly in the interests of its vital social function. So much for the “invisible hand of the market”: when the chips are down, it is the very visible hand of the State that is needed to save the day, just as ever.

Those who advocate competition fail to notice that in even nature, co-operation is at least as effective a survival strategy. When individuals compete, the strongest normally wins; when disparate individuals compete with an effective team, the team does.

Because those existential questions dictate that, whether it is a game of football or the functioning of a complex society, few things can operate properly and equitably without logical, consistent and fair rules – and their enforcement by an impartial Referee.