The Anglo-Saxon silver penny and the blank spots in Anglo-Saxon history

Posted on by
9

Read the British press long enough and you’ll start to think every third Briton is out wandering the fields in the hope of digging up ancient metallic goodies. The country’s awash with people waving metal detectors over the earth, and when one or another of them finds a horde, often of coins, it’s news. And why not? We all love a story about some average Joe (and it does tend to be a Joe, not a Josie) finding buried treasure. 

But what happens to the coins after they find their way to a museum? I’ve pretty much assumed they sit in a case so we can look at them and think how thrilled we should be but aren’t. 

Although maybe that’s just me. I can appreciate a helmet or a brooch. Coins, though? I tend to nod off. But for all I know, seeing a pile of coins in a display case sets other people alight. Either way, a team of researchers has been studying Anglo-Saxon coins and they’re doing something more than just looking at them in a display case.

 

Irrelevant photo: A camellia–which wouldn’t have been in Britain when the Anglo-Saxons were traipsing around.

What coins are we talking about?

Silver pennies. Something like 7,000 of them have been found, dating to a 90-year period, 660 to 750 CE. That’s as many as have been found from the rest of the Anglo-Saxon era (the 5th century to 1066 CE)–and I’ll go out on a limb and assume that means as many coins, not specifically pennies. The wording in the sources I’m working from is ambiguous.

The silver penny came into existence to replace a small, gold coin called scillinga, or as the word’s come down to us, schilling. At the time, that would’ve seemed like a big change–if, of course, you were part of the money economy. But this period marks a shift: more and more people were being drawn into the money economy. 

The silver penny remained England’s primary coin until the 14th century. 

 

The research

To study the coins, the researchers looked at trace elements and took microscopic samples so they could analyze their lead isotopes. 

Why bother? Because “lead isotopic ratios may be used in age dating and petrogenetic tracing of igneous, metamorphic, and hydrothermal rocks.”

Did that help?

I didn’t think it would. Basically, analyzing lead isotopes can tell you stuff , but only if you know how to listen. I don’t, so I trotted along behind the experts and listened to them instead.

Here’s what I learned:

First, that they used a new technique involving lasers and very tiny samples of the coins. In other words, they took so little that they got to have their cake and eat only the tiniest sliver of it. 

Second, that although these are silver pennies, they have traces of gold, bismuth, and other elements I know next to nothing about except that they can tell  the researchers where the silver came from, which in turn tells historians who was trading with who and how much.

Third, that the coins weren’t made from recycled Roman silver–either old Roman coins or fancy tableware. The silver was from Byzantium. The study’s lead author, Dr Jane Kershaw, said, “These coins are among the first signs of a resurgence in the northern European economy since the end of the Roman Empire. They show deep international trade connections between what is now France, the Netherlands, and England.” 

But the silver itself would’ve gotten to western Europe decades before the coins were made, because trade and diplomatic contact were at a low point in the late 7th century. They probably spent the intervening years as fancy stuff that impressed the neighbors. 

One of the study’s co-authors speculates that Byzantine silver found its way to England by way of trade, diplomatic payments, and Anglo-Saxon mercenaries serving in the Byzantine army.

According to a co-author, Rory Naismith, “Elites in England and Francia were almost certainly sitting on this silver already. We have very famous examples of this: the silver bowls discovered at Sutton Hoo and the ornate silver objects in the Staffordshire Hoard.”

Sutton Hoo? That’s where an Anglo-Saxon king was buried in an entire ship with a hoard of treasure. If someone had melted down the Sutton Hoo silver, they would’ve had enough silver for 10,000 pennies. 

The Staffordshire Hoard? More of the same but minus the ship. And the burial. It’s “the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork ever found,” Take a look at the museum’s photos in the link two lines up. It’s beautiful stuff–and no one has a clue why it was buried.

As Kershaw explained, such “beautiful prestige objects would only have been melted down when a king or lord urgently needed lots of cash. Something big would have been happening, a big social change.

“This was quantitative easing, elites were liquidating resources and pouring more and more money into circulation. It would have had a big impact on people’s lives. There would have been more thinking about money and more activity with money involving a far larger portion of society than before.”

In other words, more people were being pulled into an expanding money economy: more money in circulation and more people circulating it.

I’d love to line that up with a quick sketch of some relevant events in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms at the time, but although I can find some irrelevant ones, relevant poses a problem. So little is known about the era. And that’s what makes this way of thinking about the coins important: it hints at ways the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were changing, and if it doesn’t quite fill in the blanks it does at least let us pencil some possibilities into the picture. But we’ll have to learn to live with a lot of blank spaces.

Politics, fleas, and lettuce: it’s the news from Britain

Posted on by
38

It’s an odd time in British politics. The Conservative Party has a massive majority in the House of Commons, which gives it the ability to push through just about any bill that doesn’t offend too many of its own MPs, and guess what: it’s falling apart. It’s a riveting spectator sport, but sooner or later some new government will come in and it’ll have to clean up after them. I don’t envy them that.

Where shall we start?

 

Let’s start with Liz Truss

Truss is Britain’s all-time champion, record-holding, shortest-term-serving prime minister, and if that isn’t enough glory for one person, in that very short time she also managed to crash the economy. That last bit happened in a fit of hubris. 

Hubris? It’s a disease politicians get that makes them think willpower is enough to transform the unworkable into the workable. It comes from the Greek and originally meant “Liz! No! Don’t cut the red wire.”

She went ahead and cut the red wire. You knew she would.

 

Entirely relevant photo: Wild garlic. It’s keeps midges away. It’s not proven to work on fleas or prevent hubris, but no one’s proved that it won’t.

While she was in office,, 13% of Tory voters switched to the Labour Party and she went from a net favorability rating of +41 among Conservative voters to a -30.

Stop nickering. Not everyone can do that.

Toward the end of her brief tenure, a newspaper ran a live feed of a head of iceberg lettuce to see which one would last longer, Liz or Lettuce. Lettuce, rather famously, outlasted her. I’d love to organize a demonstration against her. I don’t much care about the reason, I just want to be part of a group of people standing around quietly, respectfully, and visibly with lettuce leaves on our heads. Everyone will know what we mean.

Anyway, Liz is back in the headlines with what’s being widely called a memoir of her time in office (she says it’s not but who listens to her?), called Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room. 

How’s it selling? It’s been outsold by an air fryer cookbook. In its crucial first week, it sold 2,228 copies even though it got a huge amount of free publicity. You can find political memoirs that’ve done worse, so she’s not setting any head-of-lettuce-style records here, but those aren’t impressive sales. She was paid an advance of £1,512, indicating that her publisher didn’t think it had a hot property on its hands.

But forget sales. Let’s talk about content. Truss was in office for 49 days and the book runs to 320 pages (with or without an index and footnotes; I’m not sure), so she’s given us a bit more than 6 pages per day. Including weekends. Among other things, she tells us that 1) when she inherited the PM’s Downing Street apartment from Boris Johnson, she also inherited fleas from (presumably) Johnson’s dog, and 2) the queen died a few days after Truss took office. Despair wasn’t listed as the official cause of death but it would be reckless to rule it out as a contributing factor. 

That filled less than a single page, so I’m sure she has other things to say too. In fact, I know she does, because the book includes a quote widely circulated in antisemitic conspiracy circles, which incorrectly has the long-dead and Jewish banker Mayer Amschel Rothschild wanting to control a nation’s money. An unnamed source “close to Ms Truss” explained that it was all okay, though, because she didn’t mean anything by it. 

It’s particularly British to say something isn’t racist or whatever-ist because the person who said it didn’t mean it to be. I have yet to convince a single soul that their (or someone else’s) intentions are beside the point.

The close-to-Truss source explained that “numerous online sources have stated that [the quote] was attributed to Rothschild, so she simply attributed it thus. Clearly nothing more was meant of it.”

Will that little fuckup lead Truss to wonder if she’s hanging out in the wrong circles and reading some unreliable, not to mention unsavory, sources? I doubt it. If she doesn’t mean or recognize it to be antisemitic, it must not be.

The phrase If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas does come to mind.  

Her publisher has promised to cut the quote from future editions. 

Will there be any future editions? Your guess is as good as mine.

*

To be clear: the logic that something is only antisemitic if you mean it to be antisemitic does not apply if you attend a march against genocide in Gaza. 

 

Is Truss typical of the party?

Not at all. The rest of the party outlasted the lettuce. Once you get past that, though, she might have gotten her antisemitic fleas from sources closer to home than Johnson’s dog. It turns out that several Conservative Party politicians, staff members, and activists have been running Facebook groups–a whole network of them–that are filled with misinformation, Islamophobia, antisemitism, white supremacism, conspiracy theories, and threats. The people running the groups weren’t public about their role. It took a Greenpeace investigative unit to dig out the connection.

Senior Tories have posted on the sites and seven Tory MPs are members.

The groups’ rules ban hate speech etc. etc., but posts that violate the rules weren’t taken down and the people who posted them weren’t banned.

The party has said it will review its “processes and policies.” It may or may not invest in flea powder. I’m not putting any bets on that.

 

What else is happening?

Chris Philip, Britain’s policing minister (no, I didn’t know we had one either) appeared on  the BBC’s show Question Time and discovered that Rwanda isn’t the same country as the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

The question leading to this revelation wasn’t a gotcha question. Rwanda’s central to the only thing our prime minister du jour, Rishi Sunak, believes is important: deporting refugees to Rwanda if they arrive in Britain the wrong way. 

What’s the right way? Sorry, we don’t have many left, but that seldom makes its way into the discussion. 

The policing minister is part of the Home Office, and deporting people is not only the responsibility of the Home Office, it’s been the Home Office’s favorite occupation for years now. So knowing what country they hope to deport people to would seem to be at least vaguely relevant to his job description. 

What happened was that someone in the audience asked if a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo would be deported to Rwanda even though tension between the countries is high and they have a history of violence. The minister explained that he didn’t think anyone from Rwanda would be deported to Rwanda.

Um, no, the audience member said. He wasn’t talking about people from Rwanda.

“Congo is a different country to Rwanda, isn’t it?” asked the sage from the Home Office.

Philip has since explained that the question was rhetorical. And that he had trouble hearing. And that the dog ate his homework.

A Liberal Democrat on the panel summed up the interchange by saying that we don’t have “a serious government.”

 

How are we to understand all this?

At least one major paper has been driven to–well, if not predict the future at least try to understand the present by reading not the prime minister’s tea leaves but his tea mugs. Or as they put it, his teaware.

I’d never heard of teaware before I read the headline, proving that even after 18 years in Britain I’m still American. My spell check program has heard of it and so has Lord Google, who’d be happy to help me part with money in exchange for some, so apparently teaware is a real thing.

The Guardian’s gone back through photos from several of Suank’s public appearances to read the messages on his mugs and noted a union flag cup, a cup with dog pictures, a cup showing a 10, presumably to remind us of his current address, and several company-logo cups when he visited places where people do actual work. 

According to journalist and, um, political mug expert Stephen Bush, getting the mugs into his photos is a way “to signal he is somewhat normal. . . . They’re a good way of being like: ‘Oh yeah, look, I’m a normal guy. I love this country. Look at me drinking from my normal guy cup.’ “

If this sounds somewhat desperate, I have a lettuce in the refrigerator that I’d be happy to lend you.

 

So is the party united?

One reason Sunak’s so fixated on the Rwanda plan is that he suffers from the delusion that putting it into action will placate the right wing of his party, return his party to power at the next election, and keep the antimatter from mixing with the matter-matter, although my reading of the teacups is that nothing short of seppuku would placate them right now. They got a taste of power with the Brexit election think they’re entitled to more.    

I am, sadly, not the right person to comment on the matter-matter and antimatter, although I’m sure it does matter.

A group of MPs on the right of the party apparently want to dump Sunak before the next election and replace him with Penny Mordaunt. They’re probably not the only group hatching a plot, just the one I happened to have a detail or three about. The theory behind the plot is that if she took power, her right-wing initiatives on tax and immigration would win the country’s heart and proving all the polls wrong the Tories would wipe out Labour. 

The plan is apparently called 100 Days to Save Britain, which is faster if less ambitious than taking 10 years to save the West. 

Mordaunt apparently wants no part of it and said speculation about the plot is “codswallop.”

Why isn’t she interested? Because the last person whose hands were on the wheel gets the blame when the ship goes down, and every election-watcher in the country says the ship’s headed straight for the iceberg. Mordaunt would much rather wait for Sunak to sink it, then see if she can’t raise whatever’s left from the seabed.

We’ll leave that metaphor before it takes us down with it. 

Local elections are scheduled for May 2–that’s the future as I write this and the past as you read it–and the Tories are expected to have a disastrous night. And day. And day after that, all of which could shift MPs already plotting against Sunak into high gear. That in turn could trigger Sunak to call a snap election in order to head them off. If he does, he and his party won’t be expected to do well, but it’s one of a series of bad choices he has. If he has any good choices, I can’t see where they’re hidden.

The party’s jitters have only been increased by one of its MPs–a former health minister–defecting to Labour. He’s a doctor and said, “I have to be able to look my NHS colleagues in the eye and my constituents in the eye. And I know that the Conservative government has been failing on the thing I care about most, which is the NHS and its patients.”

He doesn’t plan to run in the next election but hopes to advise Labour on the NHS.

 

One more bit of mayhem and I’ll stop

According to leaked documents, senior Conservative Party officials looked seriously at–in fact, worked on–a plan to hand the party’s membership database to a commercial outfit that would have used it to track members’ locations and send them ads, with the party taking a cut of the sales. It would make the party tens of millions of pounds, they promised.

The idea came from Christen Ager-Hanssen, a Norwegian businessman who went bust in the dotcom bubble and was involved in the collapse of a Swedish newspaper. He went on to work for a cryptocurrency company that was going to be part of the deal. 

What could possibly go wrong?

The party hasn’t said why it abandoned the idea, but it could have had something to do with the cryptocurrency company firing Ager-Hanssen.

 

And from the Department for Studying Life’s Little Ironies . . .

. . . comes this: homelessness activist Stuart Potts was scheduled to talk to  last year’s Conservative Party conference about the problems ex-prisoners face. He wasn’t allowed into the hall because of his criminal record.

As if running a marathon wasn’t hard enough: it’s the news from Britain

Posted on by
50

More than one person ran last weekend’s London marathon carrying a refrigerator. To be clear, that’s one refrigerator per runner, not a shared one. Admittedly, these weren’t the six-foot-tall kind that loom over a kitchen. They were the kind that fit under the counter and mind their own business, that are shorter than your average human, and that can, if you’re crazy enough, be strapped to your back and carried for long distances, although most people don’t care to do that. 

Laura Bird is one of the people who cared to, and she’s probably the one I heard on the radio. “You have to follow your dreams,” she said. Or if it wasn’t her, it was some other woman who ran the marathon carrying a refrigerator. I was driving and didn’t take notes. 

Whoever she was, she left me wondering whether as a culture we haven’t taken this follow-your-dreams stuff too far. I dreamed about scraping the side of my car on a rock the other night. Some dreams can just stay dreams. It’s okay.

Irrelevant photo: Honesty–which is, honestly, the name of the flower.

 

Daniel Fairbrother, another fridge carrying runner, stole the limelight, though, by stopping partway through the race to get down on one knee and propose to his girlfriend. With the fridge still on his back. He also made headlines during a training run, when he was stopped by the police, who thought he might have been an ambitious shoplifter.

“You do know . . . they’ll deliver it for you.” the cop said once he was convinced that he was just dealing with some innocent maniac.

I don’t know if this is strictly a British thing. Lord Google informs me that someone’s keeping track of the fastest time for completing a marathon while carrying a household appliance, which does argue for it being more than a personal quirk but tells us nothing about what country or countries can claim the quirk. So if you know whether people are carrying refrigerators in in other countries’ marathons, leave me a comment, will you? I need to know this.

And while we’re at it, I’d love to hear about whether it’s strictly a British thing to run races dressed as–oh, I don’t know, bananas or phone booths or ballerinas. Because people do that here too. 

*

If carrying a refrigerator isn’t one of the dreams you want to follow, you could consider marathon wine tasting. Tom Gilbey tasted a glass of wine at every mile along the route, trying to name the vintage, the grape, and the producer. He got 4 wrong and 21 “mostly” right. He kept from getting pie-eyed, he said, by taking only small sips or spitting the wine out if it wasn’t good, but in the photo the BBC ran he looks a little the worse for wear and the BBC says his verdicts became hazier as he got closer to the finish line.

At one point in the race, he said, “There was a real trio of bad ‘uns, and then around a similar point I was overtaken by a fridge. So that was sad.”

He did raise money for charity, but it was also, ever so incidentally, great publicity for his, ahem, “wine event experience” business.  

 

As long as we’re talking about household appliances

I’m endlessly fascinated by the obscenities of an unequal society. This one comes from Harrods–a store that’s not known for its bargains–which is offering an “ironing system” for under £4,000. Exactly $1 under, because any marketer knows £3,999 looks like a lot less than £4,000.

I need to add a link here to prove I’m not hallucinating.

How is an ironing system different from an iron and an ironing board? Well, it has a cover–that’s important–and a water tank and wheels and a cable rewinder and a bunch of verbiage that may or may not mean anything. I’m not the best person to judge. Ironing’s against my religion.

What do you do with an almost-£4,000 ironing system? Why, you iron your clothes, that’s what. And your sheets and underwear and socks. And your dishrags. I suspect the system has too many pieces to carry in a race, although the wheels might tempt a creative sort to roll it.

 

Outdated literary gossip

Let’s change gears. There’s nothing like a literary trash fight to get the blood circulating, even when it’s old news.  

Very old news. Back in the 1920s, when John Betjeman (later a poet laureate) was a student of C.S. Lewis’s (best known for writing The Chronicles of Narnia), Betjeman annoyed Lewis enough that he he wrote in his diary, “I wish I could get rid of this idle prig.” But he didn’t keep his dislike to  himself: he refused to support Betjeman’s bid for an honors degree.

Years later, the preface to one of Betjeman poetry collections thanks “Mr CS Lewis for the fact on page 256.”

The book has 45 pages.

 

And the news from abroad is . . .

In the US, ice cream sales increased by 3.1 percent in areas that had recently made recreational marijuana legal. Cookie sales increased by 4.1 percent, and chip [that would be potato chip] sales increased by 5.3 percent. 

I can’t give you a link for that. It comes from Britannica’s “One Good Fact”–a daily email featuring random bits of useless information. My life is immeasurably richer for having received this one.

*

Someone in Iceland is working to run a glacier for president. It seems to meet the requirements: it’s more than 35 years old and–well, you could at least argue that it’s a citizen. It needs a civil registration number, though, so the originator of the idea, Angela Rawlings, took its name–Snaefellsjokulll–as her middle name so she can be a proxy for the glacier on the ballot.

If you have a spare umlaut, drop it in there somewhere, would you? I’ve run out, it’s late, and the shop’s closed. 

A team of people is now working on the campaign, and like the fridge runners, who run to raise money for charities, they’re up to something serious.

“I come from the indigenous lands of Siberia,” Rawlings said, “and there the personhood of nature is something that is so common to the culture and the psyche in general.” The glacier is melting and she hopes its candidacy will put climate change at the center of the election.

*

In Barcelona, residents are fed up with tourists.

Okay, lots of places are fed up with tourists. They price locals out of housing, they travel in hordes, and most of them are convinced that them having a good time is more important than someone else having an everyday life. Not long after they hit critical mass, all the old shops are replaced by bars and nightclubs and vomitoria and by places selling key chains and ice cream cones and overpriced food. In Barcelona, so many tourists were taking the number 116 bus that residents complained they couldn’t get home. 

Why that bus? It goes by Antoni Gaudi’s Park Guell (that needs an umlaut too; thanks), which is on the tourist must-see list.  

Now the city council has had the bus taken off of  Apple and Google maps, and that’s made it invisible–except to residents.

Local activist Cesar Sanchez (add an accent please; the accent shop has been replaced by one renting wetsuits to tourists) said, “We laughed at the idea at first, but we’re amazed that the measure has been so effective.”

***

After last week’s post about the National Health Service, a friend sent me a link to FullFact‘s look at Rishi Sunak’s pledge to reduce NHS waiting times.

How’d he do? “Despite the ambiguity in the pledge, NHS waiting lists in England, for planned treatment, increased throughout the year following Sunak’s pledge.” Ditto waiting lists for Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.

The NHS has other kinds of waiting lists, including ones called hidden waiting lists–sorry, no data get published for those–but the list for planned treatment is the one politicians usually mean.

Did they grow because those dastardly NHS employees were on strike so much? Well, yes, but that added to the numbers, but they’d have grown anyway, even if the government had settled with them up front.

The early days of Britain’s National Health Service

Posted on by
26

The National Health Service–known to friends and wolves-in-friends’-clothing alike as the NHS–began in 1948, when World War II was over but food was still both scarce and rationed, the economy was just staggering out of a severe recession (no, I hadn’t heard of it either), and the empire was in the process of collapse. 

Introduce anything so ambitious these days and every sober advisor in (and out of) sight would tell you, Get serious. Maybe you could just replace the program with a nice slogan. So how did the prime minister, Clement Atlee, and his minister of health, Aneurin Bevan, manage this little trick?

For starters, the system they introduced didn’t drop from the sky. It had been taking shape since at least 1909. 

 

Irrelevant photo: A camellia–although if you read to the end it becomes semi-relevant since you could argue that it’s deepest pink. Or at least tinged with red.

 

Background

Here at Notes, we–by which, of course, I mean I–can never tell a story without going backward first, so let’s go backward. What happened in 1909 was the publication of the Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, under the leadership of Beatrice Webb. The commission was looking for something that would replace the Poor Law and the punitive Victorian workhouses. The minority report argued for “a national minimum of civilised life . . . open to all alike, of both sexes and all classes, by which we meant sufficient nourishment and training when young, a living wage when able-bodied, treatment when sick, and modest but secure livelihood when disabled or aged.”

Its focus was on preventing poverty rather than providing relief once it was entrenched. But this was a minority report. The majority report argued for individual responsibility and charity. 

What happened? The party in power, the Liberals, tossed both reports into the revolving file, also known as the trash, but Webb and her fellow Fabian socialists printed copies of the minority report and sold 25,000 of them. I’d be happy to see one of my books sell half as well. 

The minority report had far more impact than the majority’s and became  central to the thinking that eventually formed Britain’s welfare state. In some estimates, it led to the Beveridge Report, which leads us to our next subhead.

 

The Beveridge Report 

Despite its name, this was not a misspelled report on what people drank. It was a 1942 report that created the blueprint for a cradle-to-grave social services system. Most importantly for our purposes, it included the idea of a free health service, funded by the state and spreading the cost of healthcare out over the country’s population instead of having it fall on the individual or family unlucky enough to get sick. 

Some 250,000 copies of the full report were sold, along with 370,000 of an abridged version and 40,000 of an American edition. In twelve months. 

Britain’s 2,700 hospitals, at this point, were run by a mix of charities and local governments. National insurance existed, but it only covered people who were working. The number of wounded coming back from the war pushed the system toward bankruptcy, adding to the pressure for a unified, state-run health service.

 

Churchill, Atlee, the war, and the welfare state 

During the war–that’s World War II in case you got lost somewhere along the way–the Conservative and Labour parties governed in coalition. Churchill–a Conservative–was the prime minister, and Labour, the junior partner. pushed for the Beveridge report to be put into practice. Churchill was reluctant to commit the country to hefty new expenses until the postwar economic picture was clear, but he also advocated a “national compulsory insurance for all classes for all purposes from the cradle to the grave.” He didn’t oppose the Beveridge Report but wouldn’t commit himself to implementing it, and privately called Beveridge “a windbag and a dreamer.” 

That left Labour in a position to campaign as the party that would put the report–”the full Beveridge”–into practice, and in the first election after the war Labour won a big honkin’ majority: 393 seats to the Conservatives 197. Labour was a socialist party at this point (it no longer is) and on the first day the new parliament met, its MPs sang (or in some tellings, bellowed) the socialist anthem, “The Red Flag.” 

The link will take you to the song if you can’t go on without hearing it. This version is sung, not bellowed, which is a bit more important than being shaken not stirred.

Once he was prime minister, Atlee threw his weight behind the creation of a welfare state–a huge undertaking, including not just medical care but housing, education, and financial assistance to the unemployed, retired, and disabled.

“We had not been elected to try to patch up an old system but to make something new,” he said. “I therefore determined that we would go ahead as fast as possible with our programme.”

The program also included the construction of housing and the nationalization of key industries. Railroads and coal mines were “so run down,” as the Britannica puts it, “that any government would have had to bring them under state control. In addition, road transport, docks and harbours, and the production of electrical power were nationalized. There was little debate. The Conservatives could hardly argue that any of these industries, barring electric power, was flourishing or that they could have done much differently.”

I should probably stop here and say what will be obvious to some people and not at all to others: there’s no single definition of socialism that all socialists agree on. I think a fair summary of this version is that key industries were nationalized and the state was responsible for supporting people’s overall welfare. It was a form of socialism that coexisted with capitalism.

But let’s go back to the end of the war. The country was well past its eyeballs in debt and Keynes had warned earlier that the country faced a “financial Dunkirk.” It had borrowed massively to fund its role in the war (a lot of it from the US), and wartime industries like aviation were bigger than it now needed while basic industries like coal and railroads needed serious repair–which is to say, investment. As the Britannica (again) puts it, “With nothing to export, Britain had no way to pay for imports or even for food.”

Loans from the US and Canada helped the country get through a short stretch. The Marshall Plan got them through another stretch of time. But food continued to be rationed, and the fifties were a pretty gray time for the country.

In that situation, how were they going to pay for this massive investment in a welfare state? At least part of the answer was the National Insurance Bill–an extension of a system put in place before World War I–which had working-age people paying in every week specifically to support the benefits everyone in the country could draw on. (Married women who worked didn’t pay in, but don’t worry, they suffered enough inequalities to more than make up for it.)  

 

The NHS

In 1948, the National Health Service was launched, under the leadership of Aneurin–called Nye–Bevan, the minister of health. 

Bevan had started work as a miner at 13 and chaired his miners’ lodge at 19. He also chaired the local Medical Aid Society, a system that had members paying in and getting healthcare in return. Initially, this didn’t include miners’ families. During his tenure, membership expanded to include non-miners,until 95% of the town was eligible. This became his blueprint. 

“All I am doing is extending to the entire population of Britain the benefits we had in Tredegar for a generation or more,” he said. “We are going to ‘Tredegarise’ you.” 

The NHS was set up to help everyone, and care would be free and based on need, not ability to pay. “A free health service is pure socialism,” he said, “and as such is opposed to the hedonism of capitalist society.” 

Opposition came from the Conservative Party, the British Medical Association, and the right-wing newspapers.

Okay, historians argue about whether the Conservatives belong on the list. Their 1945 manifesto backed health services available to all citizens but didn’t commit to it being free. At any rate, they voted against Bevan’s version of the NHS and compared it to Nazism. That probably makes it fair to say they opposed it.

No one argues over whether doctors opposed the plan, at least as a group. Bevan claimed he won them around by “stuffing their mouths with gold”– allowing consultants to treat paying patients privately and still work inside the NHS. He later claimed he’d been “blessed by the stupidity of my enemies.”

 

And now?

I’d hoped to take you through a bit of more recent NHS history, but I dipped a toe into that water and just about drowned. Now that I’m back on the couch, safe and dry, I’ll risk nothing more than the most superficial of summaries. The NHS is immensely popular–basically, it’s the national religion–and most people find the idea of medicine for profit both shocking and counter-intuitive. But profit has crept into the system, and for the moment at least, socialism has been pushed to the political fringes. 

I’ve lived in Britain for 18 years and seen the NHS reorganized in assorted ways, all of them disastrous. Huge chunks have been privatized so one corporation or another could make a profit by running it as cheaply as possible, all in the name of efficiency, but somehow, magically, it all gets less and less efficient. At the moment, the NHS is suffering from years of underfunding. Waiting lists are long, jobs can’t be filled, and nurses and doctors are leaving the system to work somewhere–anywhere–else. 

With the next election predicted to return a huge Labour majority, I’d like to think the problems will be fixed–or at least addressed in some way that serves the public interest–but I’m doubtful. The current party leadership has been telling us we can’t expect much from them and I’m inclined to think they’re telling the truth. 

Still, for all its problems–and they’re many–the NHS is a magnificent thing: a system that makes healthcare free at the point of delivery, as the saying here goes. I’m originally from the US, so I’ve seen what the alternative looks like. A for-profit system is primarily interested in, um, making money, so what matters is whether a person can pay. US healthcare can and does bankrupt even the comfortable and well insured. It neglects the poor and milks the rich and–oh, hell, I could go on but you get the point. Both systems have their problems, but I much prefer the problems of a socialized system.

*

Now that Labour’s taken distance from any suggestion of socialism, I wondered if it had also taken distance from its old song, “The Red Flag.” Apparently not. Its 2022 party conference made headlines when the delegates sang it. The song opens with the words, “The people’s [or “workers’,” depending on the version you choose–and probably your politics] flag is deepest red / It’s shrouded oft our martyred dead.” A parody runs, “The people’s flag is deepest pink / It’s not as red as you might think.”

And with that I’ll leave you for the week. Stay well out there, people. It’s not safe to get sick.

Britain enters the contest to be second best

Posted on by
37

Britain’s Conservative Party, masters of social media that they are, have done it again. They posted one of history’s stranger political ads on Twitter–or at least on the site that used to be Twitter. It opened by saying, “Don’t let the doomsters and naysayers trick you into talking down our country. The UK is as strong as ever.” 

And how did it follow that up? By bragging that Britain’s the second most powerful country in the world and illustrating it with

  • A US fighter jet
  • A Canadian-owned car
  • A football team whose photo was taken just before it lost a game to Brazil
  • King Charles, looking overwhelmed by an outsized crown, although the royals aren’t supposed to be dragged into politics
  • A second fighter plane, this one developed by a European consortium back when the UK was in the European Union
  • And Rishi Sunak, who is, in fact, Britain’s prime minister

I’d link to the ad but it’s been taken down.

If anyone tells you politics are no fun, they’re following the wrong stories.

Irrelevant photo: I have no idea what this is but I am certain it grew in the right country. Whether that’s where it originated is a whole ‘nother can of worms.

 

So is Britain really the second most powerful country?

It depends who you ask and on how you define power. Also on how you go about measuring something that’s not as easy to measure as you might think, but I’ll give the Conservatives this: they didn’t make up the claim. It comes from a report by BrandFinance that ranked the UK second in something it called the Global Soft Power Index.

The what? 

It measures–or at least tries to measure–countries’ “ability to influence the preferences and behaviours of various actors in the international arena (states, corporations, communities, publics, etc.) through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion. Each nation is scored across 55 different metrics to arrive at an overall score out of 100 and ranked in order from 1st to 193rd.”

Did everyone survive that barrage of corporate-speak? Good. We’ll stagger onward.

“The report has found that at a time of global uncertainty and instability, economic credentials are increasingly important contributors to a nation’s soft power. Nation brand attributes such as ‘strong and stable economy’ and ‘products and brands the world loves’ emerge as key drivers of influence and reputation on the global stage.”

In my official capacity as a non-expert on just about all topics, I wouldn’t have said Britain’s economy was in great shape. We’ve been living with inflation and a cost-of-living crisis for long enough that the government’s started to brag when inflation slows down a bit. The cost-of-living crisis is present enough that it’s part of real people’s conversations–not to mention real people’s lives. We’re post-Brexit, post-Covid, post-14 years on Conservative government and the view from my couch doesn’t show me a country in great shape. But hey, what do I know?

Besides, in some tellings soft power is partially about a thriving cultural scene, and the ad did include a picture of the director Christopher Nolan, which gives me an excuse to mention that the Conservatives just cut arts funding. 

I’m telling you, the Tories–in case you live in a country that isn’t Britain and need a translation, that’s another word for the Conservatives–are an underappreciated party.  I admit that they’re despicable, they’ve wrecked the country’s infrastructure, and they do horrible things, but they’re so transparently bad at just about everything that they’ve become an art form. 

 

How are they doing in the polls, then?

According to a recent poll, only four out of ten people who voted Conservative in the last election plan to vote for them this time around, and Rishi Sunak–the Tory leader, remember–has a personal approval rating of -33%.

Labour’s leader, Kier Starmer, on the other hand, has a personal approval rating of -3%, which is roughly what mine was in high school, or to put that another way, nothing to brag about. 

How can someone have a minus approval rating? I tried to find out how they’re calculated but got nowhere, so I’ve randomly decided that–well, an explanation threatens to fall off the edge of the English language, so I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you’re a politician in a country with 100 voters and have an approval rating of -10%. Surely that means 110 of those 100 voters hate you. Or else  100 of the current voters plus 10 of the ones who’ve died hate you. The dead traditionally vote in Chicago, and the US has been in the business of exporting democracy for as long as I can remember, so I don’t see a problem with that.

 

Let’s switch to some non-political news 

This is brought to you by the Emperor’s New Clothes Department:

The company formerly known as Standard Life Aberdeen decided it was a good idea to rebrand itself after it sold off some pieces of the business, and that probably made sense, since one of the pieces was Standard Life. So they gave an unknown amount of money–I wish I knew how much but nobody’s saying–to a branding agency, which came up with a reinvention.

Hands up anyone who knew branding agencies existed. 

No, me neither.

Anyway, in return for that unspecified but presumably large amount of money, the agency came up with a new name: Abrdn. And the company said, Yeah, that’s great. We love it. Because if they called themselves Aberdeen, they couldn’t claim intellectual property rights on the name–the entire, rude city of Aberdeen got there first. 

The nerve of these people.

Cue all the predictable jokes in the media (“rlly stpd,” etc.) and at least one unpredictable one about “irritable vowel syndrome.”  Recently, the company’s chief investment officer’s accused the press of “corporate bullying.” 

“Would you do that with an individual?” he said in an interview. “How would you look at a person who makes fun of your name day in, day out? It’s probably not ethical to do it. But apparently with companies it is different.”

Well, um, yes. For one thing, they’re not individuals. And the company not only chose their name, they spent a lot of money to choose it. 

The media is filled with remorse. The Financial Times posted, “Lv Abrdn aln,” and City AM put “Abrdn: an apology” on the front page. It read, “sry we kp tkng th pss ot of yr mssng vwls.”

*

If that last item was about things that have gone missing, this next piece is about extras:

A guy who worked at a German art museum, Pinakothek der Moderne, smuggled a painting of his own into an exhibition and hung it in a hallway. It lasted eight hours before the gallery spotted it and took it down, gave it back, fired him, and in case it hadn’t made itself clear, banned him from the gallery. 

It doesn’t always work out that way, though. A woman smuggled a piece of her work into a different German art gallery and no one spotted it until they took the the exhibit down and found an extra painting. They put up a post on the site that used to be Twitter and now has a silly name: “We think it’s funny and we want to get to know the artist. So get in touch! There’s no trouble. Word of honour.”

The artist, Danai Emmanouilidis, said she’d always wanted to get one of her paintings into an exhibition and “smuggled it in with a giant hoodie over my leggings.”

The gallery auctioned it off and the money went to an art charity called ArtAsyl in Cologne. I don’t know how much it sold for, but I’ll bet a cinnamon bun that it was less than Abrdn paid for its new name.

Will the real London please stand up?

Posted on by
22

In preparation for London’s mayoral election, the Conservative Party ran an ad on what used to be Twitter saying London has been on the brink of chaos since its current mayor, Sadiq Khan, “seized power.” It had become “the crime capital of the world.” To prove its point, it showed a video of a panicked crowd running through what was supposed to be the London underground but turned out to be New York after a rumor about gunfire. 

The rumor turned out to be false, as did, according to a fact-check, all the claims in the ad. Khan didn’t seize power; he was elected. The murder rate has dropped under his tenure and under the two mayors before him. New York–to everyone’s surprise–is not London. And so on. 

Two things about Khan drive the Conservatives nuts: 1, he’s from the Labour Party and 2, he’s Muslim. I guess I could add 3, in spite (or because) of 1 and 2, he’s still London’s mayor.

Irrelevant photo: Pussywillows–a sign of spring.

Mind you, some Conservative MPs are Muslim, but–

You know what? I was going to explain why it’s okay to be a Musim if you’re a Tory but not if you’re Labour, but I’d be making it up. I’m not inside these people’s heads and I have no idea what goes on there. What I can tell you is that a month ago Conservative MP Lee Anderson claimed Khan was controlled by Islamists. All hell broke loose, although nowhere near as much as if you’d said a Jewish politician was controlled by Zionists. Accusations of antisemitism kick up a far more powerful dust storm than accusations of Islamophobia. (Yes, I’m Jewish. Sorry to spoil the fun but you can’t accuse me of antisemitism for saying that.)

A Conservative Party source sort of defended Anderson by explaining, that “Lee was simply making the point that the mayor . . . has abjectly failed to get a grip on the appalling Islamist marches we have seen in London recently.”

Appalling Islamist marches? Those would be the ones against Israel’s invasion of Gaza. 

Anderson has since defected to a party further to the right, Reform UK and the ad’s been taken down, although the memory lingers on.

 

Easter eggs on the island of Sanday

Britain does Easter in a big way. Good Friday’s a bank holiday, which is Brit-speak for a national holiday. Easter Monday? That’s a bank holiday unless you’re in Scotland, in which case you’d better set the alarm and waddle in to work. But if you’re not in Scotland and you’re working a Monday-to-Friday job, you get a four-day weekend. 

Easter’s also the marker for schools to take a couple of weeks off. 

Your friendly local Jewish atheist–in case we’re not being clear about this, that’s me–had heard about Good Friday before moving here, although she did kind of vaguely think all Fridays were good, but Easter Monday was news to her. Having them as holidays reminds–okay, this her stuff is getting awkward. Having them as holidays reminds me that although Britain’s not a particularly religious country, it does have a state religion. That creates an interesting, contradictory picture.

What’s Easter like in the US? It doesn’t bring us any extra days off work, which immediately downgrades it to a minor holiday. For those of us who don’t see it as a religious holiday, it boils down to seeing rabbitty things everywhere. Maybe we go wild and buy a chocolate egg or something. For some families, it’ll involve a special meal of some sort. Parents who aren’t philosophically opposed to it put Easter baskets together for their kids. Or at least they used to. I hope they still do. Easter baskets are one of life’s small joys. They involve jelly beans, chocolate, and things that look eggish, rabbitish, or chickish. And fake grass. The fake grass is important, although to the best of my knowledge it doesn’t have any religious significance.

The British, on the other hand, go in for huge single chocolate eggs filled with various sorts of candy, and that brings us to the reason I’m telling you this: a small shop on the island of Sanday–one of the Orkney islands, way the hell up north, off the coast of Scotland–ordered some of those big Easter eggs, as any small food shop will as the holiday approaches. Unfortunately, the owner got careless and ordered 80 cases instead of 80 eggs, ending up with 720 eggs. For a population of 494.

Once he pulled himself together, he set up a competition, with the winner getting 100 eggs and the proceeds going to the RNLI–the Royal National LIfeboat Institution. He figured most people would give them away, but a few told him they were hell bent to eat all hundred if they won.

Last I read, he’d raised £3,000, but Nestle–a big-league maker of Easter eggs–offered to match donations up to a £10,000 limit and he might just make it. The story spread–how else would I have picked it up?–and donations and letters were coming in from around the world.  

As were orders for Easter eggs. Wjhy walk to the corner shop and buy one when you can order it from Sanday, so he’d busy mailing them. In fact, he had to order more to keep up with the demand.

Now that Easter’s over, he may be able to squeeze in a night’s sleep.

 

Think you know everything the Romans brought to Britain?

One of the less well known things the Romans brought was the bedbug. Or to be more accurate, since they never travel singly, bedbugs, plural. 

A team of archeologists at Vindolanda, a Roman garrison near Hadrian’s Wall, found evidence of Roman bedbugs. They’ve been found at one other Roman site, Alcester, but the Vindolanda batch dates to about 100 CE, making it Britain’s earliest bedbug find. The going theory is that they’d have arrived in whatever the Romans brought with them–clothes, straw, grain.

On the other hand, the Roman philosopher Pliny wrote that bedbugs helped cure ear infections and other illnesses, so I can’t help wondering if someone brought a few over as–well, not quite pets but supplies. 

How do we know Britain didn’t have bedbugs before the Romans came? I doubt we can absolutely, but no one’s found evidence of them, so until further evidence shows up we get to blame the Romans. 

The Vindolanda batch is long dead. It’s safe to visit.

 

Your reward for getting this far

A local paper, the Bude and Stratton Post, had a glorious headline this week: “Cost of parking rockets in Bude.” I read it three time before I stopped wondering, Who parks rockets in Bude? and realized, Oh. It’s a verb.

A quick history of Britain’s gun laws 

Posted on by
52

Britain has some of the world’s toughest gun regulations, and not only do the vast majority of people approve of that, 76% think they should be stricter. That’s from a sober poll taken in 2021, but Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Survey reports pretty much the same thing. 

How did I conduct my survey? Effortlessly. I’m an American transplant, which leads British friends and acquaintances to ask periodically, “What is it with Americans and guns anyway? Are you people crazy?”

I’m paraphrasing heavily. Most people are too polite to ask if we’re crazy, but if you listen you can hear the question pulsing away, just below the surface. Basically, they’re both baffled and horrified by the US approach.

I should probably tell them that a majority of Americans (56%) also want stricter gun laws but haven’t managed to dominate the national conversation yet. That’s probably because they haven’t poured as much tightly focused money into political campaigns as the pro-gun lobby. 

Am I being too cynical? In the age-old tradition of answering a question with a question, Is it possible to be too cynical these days?

Irrelevant photo: The Bude Canal

 

What are Britain’s gun laws?

For a long time, they were somewhere between minimal and nonexistent. 

Way back when William and Mary crossed the channel in small boats, the price they paid to become Britain’s joint monarchs was accepting the 1689 Bill of Rights, which acknowledged that Parliament was the source of their power. It also guaranteed the right to bear arms–unless of course you were Catholic, who were the boogeymen of the moment. You were also excluded if you were some other (and barely imaginable) form of non-Protestant.

The relevant section says, “The subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions, and as allowed by law.” 

That leaves some wiggle room: “suitable to their conditions”; “as allowed by law.” (The US second amendment is ambiguous as well. Maybe it’s something about weaponry.) So when in 1870 a new law required a license to carry a gun outside your home, it wasn’t a violation of W and M’s agreement, because this was a law. As far as I can tell from the wording, if all you wanted to do with your gun was set it on the kitchen table and gloat over it, you could skip the license.

In 1903, a new law required a license for any gun with a barrel shorter than 9 inches and banned ownership by anyone who was “drunken or insane.” 

You could have a lot of fun poking holes in that. Could I get a license if I was sober all week but on the weekend I routinely got so drunk I fell in the horse trough? If I had a title and expensive clothes, would I still be considered a drunk (or a nut)?

Never mind. That was the law they passed. Nobody asks me to consult. It’s a mystery.

But let’s go back a couple of years, to 1901, as Historic UK does in its post on gun laws. Handguns were being widely advertised to cyclists, with no mention of licenses, although the ;need for them may have been so obvious to everyone involved that they didn’t need mentioning. Or enforcement may have been patchy.

Bikes were the hot new thing–the AI of the day–and everyone who had any claim to with-it-ness was rushing around on one. And maybe the cyclists felt vulnerable, out there in the countryside on their own, or maybe gun manufacturers saw an opportunity and manufactured a bit of fear to boost sales. To read the ads, every cyclist needed a handgun. They were advertised, variously, as the cyclist’s friend and the traveler’s friend. One ad said, “Fear no tramp.”

Before World War I (it started in 1914; you’re welcome), Britain had a quarter of a million licensed firearms and no way to count the unlicensed ones. Then the war turned Britain, along with a good part of the rest of the world, on its ear. One of its smaller side effects was that when it ended soldiers came home with pistols. 

How’d they manage that? The army didn’t want them back? I consulted Lord Google on the subject, but I seem to have asked the wrong questions, because he went into a sulk and refused to tell me anything even vaguely relevant. But bring guns home they did, in large enough numbers that the government started losing sleep over it, because this was a turbulent time and  the government had a lot of things to lose sleep over. For one thing, the Russian Revolution not only meant it had to share a planet with a revolutionary socialist government, it also kicked off a wave of revolutions in Europe that must’ve made it look, for a while, as if Britain would end up sharing the planet with multiple socialist governments. 

Life was turbulent on British soil as well. Not all that long before the war, in 1911, a shootout in London involved two Latvian anarchists, a combination of the Metropolitan and City police departments, the Scots Guards, and Winston Churchill. The anarchists might not have been anarchists, though, but expropriators, carrying out robberies to support the Bolshevik movement. Either way, they were well armed and the police were armed only with some antique weapons they pulled together. Until the Scots Guards showed up, they were outgunned. 

In “Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence, and Fear of Brutalization in Post–First World War Britain,” Jon Lawrence argues that postwar Britain lived with a fear of violence from returned soldiers, the general public, and/or a government “brutalized” by the war. (The quotation marks are his. I’ll hand them back now that we’re ready to move on.) 

The press was full of violent crime reports. When isn’t it, and when don’t we at least partially believe it’s a balanced picture of the world we live in? Still, the stories are part of the picture: fear was the air people breathed.

The soldiers returning from the war are also part of the picture: they came home to unemployment and its cousin, low pay. A wave of strikes swept the country, including a police strike and in 1919 a strike by soldiers–or if you want to put that another way, a mutiny. Some of that was violent and some wasn’t. All of it kept the government up at night.

In many cases, unemployment led to whites turning their anger on Blacks and immigrants, blaming them for taking their jobs. Familiar story, isn’t it? (Black, in this context, includes people from India. I only mention that to remind us all how fluid the categories that seem so fixed in our minds really are.) 

Longstanding Black British communities were joined by a good number of sailors from both the military and the merchant fleets who were stranded in Britain when they were fired and their jobs filled by white sailors. Their hostels were a particular target for violence. Black and immigrant communities often defended themselves, leading to some full-on battles–and more lost governmental sleep.

For a fuller story on that, go to Staying Power: the History of Black People in Britain, by Peter Fryer. We’ll have to move on, because most of that is, again, a side issue to this topic. The point is that that was a turbulent period with a nervous government. In 1920, a new law allowed the police to deny a firearms permit to anyone “unfitted to be trusted with a firearm”–a loose category if there ever was one. 

 

And after that?

In 1937–a different era but the midst of the Great Depression, so still a turbulent time–most fully automatic weapons were banned, then in 1967 shotguns had to be licensed. Applicants had to be “of good character, . . . show good reason for possessing a firearm, and the weapons had to be stored securely.” 

In 1987, a man killed 16 people and himself, using two semi-automatic rifles and a handgun, and the government came under pressure to tighten the laws. In response, semi-automatic and pump-action rifles were banned, along with anything that fired explosive ammunition and a few other categories of weapons. Shotguns remained legal but had to be registered and stored securely. 

After a 1996 shooting of 16 schoolkids and their teacher, in which the shooter used four legally owned pistols, a new law banned handguns above .22 caliber, and in 1997 .22s were outlawed.

In 2006, in response to a series of shootings, the  manufacture, import, or sale of realistic imitation guns was banned, although it was still legal to own one. The logic there is that they look realistic enough to commit crimes with, so this isn’t exactly gun control; it’s more like toy control. The maximum sentence for carrying an imitation gun was doubled, and it became a crime to fire an air weapon outside. The minimum age for buying or owning an air weapon went from 17 to 18, and air weapons could now be sold only face to face. 

In 2014, police were required to refuse or revoke a firearms license if the applicant or license holder had a record of domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, or mental illness, which implies that they’re expected to actually check.

 

And the result?

I know a few people in Britain who own rifles and shotguns that they hunt with. When they applied for licenses, they had to show that they had a secure place to store them, that they had a legitimate reason for owning a firearm, and that they were “of sound mind.” They had to pass police checks and inspections of their health, property, and criminal records. If any of them have moaned about it, I haven’t heard it. 

As a way of looking at the impact, I thought I could find a nice, simple set of statistics comparing homicide rates in the US and UK, but nothing’s ever simple. If you use two different sites, one for each country, you end up comparing apples and motor scooters, but I did eventually find one that compares many countries’ murder rate per million people. In 2009 in the UK, it was 11.68; in the US, it was 44.45–four times higher. We’ll skip the intentional homicides, which aren’t  the same as murders, along with the accidental deaths and the suicides. They might all be worth thinking about if we’re talking about the impact of gun ownership on death rates, but they’ll make my life more difficult and I don’t know how you feel about that but it won’t make me happy, so basically, screw it.

Another site I found compares mass shootings between 1998 and 2019. The UK’s had one. Twelve people died in it and one was injured.  The US has had 101, making it the world’s leader in mass shootings. In the deadliest, sixty people died and more than eight hundred were injured. In the second deadliest, forty-nine died and fifty-eight were injured. 

So is the US, with its permissive gun laws, a freer country than the UK? That’ll depend on how you define freedom, and that’s above my pay grade since I do this for free. Some people measure freedom by a country’s voting system, some by people’s sense of security and safety, and some by the right to carry a gun. I have yet to meet anyone in Britain who feels oppressed by the gun laws or measures their freedom by their access to weaponry. I’m sure someone out there does, but they’re a minority, and a small one. 

What about the argument that access to weapons makes the little guy a more powerful political force? My observation is that the little guy struggles to be heard in both countries, but that guns and threats of violence in the US are allowing a minority–a sizable one but still a minority–to increase its power at the expense of their fellow citizens. That’s not a good fit for my definition of freedom.

How many prime ministers does it take to destroy a party?

Posted on by
44

Is anything more fun than watching a political party you despise come apart in slow motion? This isn’t innocent fun, I admit, because the Conservative Party’s woes risk tearing the country apart as well, but as long as it’s happening I see no reason not to enjoy the spectacle. 

What’s going on? The most recent news is that a section of the Conservative Party seems to be plotting the overthrow of yet another prime minister. That’s a prime minister who belongs to their own party, remember. Who leads their own party and who they put in office to replace a prime minister from their own party who they put in office to replace a prime minister from their own party who–

Et cetera. 

Irrelevant photo: primroses and lesser celandine.

What’s the latest plot?

A group of MPs (Members of Parliament; you’re welcome) met to discuss replacing Rishi Sunak with Penny Mordaunt. The group comes from the right wing of a party that has no left wing and whose anatomically awkward center wing is increasingly hard to spot (at least from the vantage point of my couch). Still, they seem to have located a few moderates to meet with and discuss their plotlet.

When I talk about the party’s right wing, mind you, I’m not talking about some unified group. They split apart as easily as mercury. This particular group could, if they’d wanted to, have backed Mordaunt in the last battle over who would be prime minister (she did run) but they wouldn’t because they didn’t like her views on trans rights. 

What are her views on trans rights? Good question. Two years ago, she either did or didn’t want to make it easier for them to transition. And she either did or didn’t make a U-turn on whatever her earlier position was. Or wasn’t. But since she hasn’t denounced them as a threat to women, weather, and western civilization, the culture warriors consider her woke.

Am I work? I got up at 5:30 this morning, walked the dog, and had two cups of tea. I’m writing this at 7 a.m. and I’m about as woke as it’s possible to be in that situation.

But we weren’t talking about me; we were talking about important people. If the right wing of the party–or this winglet of the right wing of the party–is going to back Mordaunt, the papers say she’d have to agree to farm out culture war issues to them. That way she could protect the purity of whatever she turns out to believe while still letting people who believe the opposite do whatever they think will earn votes from the rabid wing of the country’s electorate. 

Am I biased? I do have a few biases. They’re like accents: everyone has at least one, whether they know it or not. I like to take mine out and waive them around once in a while–it keeps them as fresh as if I’d dried them on the line–but my posts are as accurate as I can make them and I do my best to link to reputable sources. 

Will Mordaunt bite at the bait the plotters are dangling in front of her? She hasn’t said so, at least as I write this, but she also hasn’t said she wouldn’t, although her supporters make it sound unlikely.

This is political maneuvering, though. We can’t expect what people say to always match what they mean. Polls predict Mordaunt will lose her seat at the next election. It’s not out of the question that she’d rather wander out into the allegedly real world as ex-prime minister than as a lowly ex-MP.

 

Why choose Mordaunt?

The plotters have several reasons to have taken Mordaunt off the hanger when they chose their outfit for the day. One is that, as I’ve said in multiple posts, the Conservatives have an extremely shallow talent puddle and they’ve pretty well splashed all the water out of it. That’s what happens when you give kiddies rubber boots and turn them loose in wet weather. But the most important factor may be that during the king’s coronation she carried an eight-pound sword, upright and well in front of her body, for fifty-one minutes. 

The newspapers all agree that this is no easy trick. Since I’ve never tried it–we don’t have a lot swords at my house–I’ll have to take their word for it. The articles were written by serious journalists who wouldn’t just close their eyes and trust Mordaunt’s publicity machine on something this important. They will have borrowed eight-pound swords and tried it themselves.

If any of you have relevant experience, I’d love to hear about it. A reader who drops in to Notes from time to time is a weightlifter and has pulled a truck in competitions. Is she a good candidate for prime minister? She’s looking better all the time.

Sam, if you’re out there, we need your help here, at least as a sword-carrying consultant and quite possibly as a candidate for prime minister. Our slogan will be, Our candidate can pull a truck. Can yours?

 

Does the sword really matter?

Maybe not. Some people in the know are speculating that it isn’t Mordaunt the plotters want. They’re using her to hide their real plan, which is to trigger yet another leadership contest in the Conservative Party before the next election. Then they could put her in as prime minister and when she leads them into what pretty much everyone expects to be a disastrous defeat at the next election, they can blame her. That will clear the path for candidates who are further to the right to really, really lead the party, because waiting in the wings and oozing ambition are Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman, and Grant Shapps.

Will anything come of this? Anyone who thinks they can predict where we’re headed is delusional. 

As for Rishi Sunak, our prime minister du jour, he says his party’s united and life is fine. I have no information on how long he can hold a sword upright.

When will the next election be? Best guesses at the moment are that the election will happen in November. Or October. Or some other month. The latest possible date is January 25, 2025–five long years from the last one–but prime ministers can set earlier dates if they get lonely. 

 

What’ll happen at the next election?

Polls suggest a disaster for the Conservatives, although they’re hoping that if they postpone it long enough the economy will improve, all the gods I don’t believe in will descend from Mount Olympus to intervene, and they’ll scrape through. One of many wild cards, though, is that the main challenger, Labour, has divested itself of almost everything it ever stood for. That’s supposed to make them bulletproof. You know: if you don’t hang up a target, it’s hard for anyone to hit a bullseye. 

Whether that will get people to vote Labour is anyone’s guess. It’s hard to work up much passion for a party whose slogan is We’re not the Tories. Vote for us and we’ll all find out what we stand for. If anything.

As for the Liberal Democrats–the other major nationwide party–no one ever did know what they stand for. Or at least no one I know.

In the meantime, multiple MPs–whole flocks of them–are announcing that they won’t run again. Many have taken phone calls from reality and realized they can’t win, but it’s not just Conservatives who are giving up. Across the political spectrum, many are saying, essentially, “I can’t stand this anymore..” 

As Carolyn Lucas, a Green Party MP, put it, “In any other walk of life, if people behaved as they do here, they’d be out on their ear. . . . It is utterly, utterly dysfunctional. I mean, really, it’s loopy.”

Britain’s unexploded bombs

Posted on by
37

In February, a builder in Plymouth was digging–something builders do a lot of–when his shovel hit a piece of rusty metal. That doesn’t sound like national news, but after a bit of exploration he recognized the size and shape of an unexploded bomb and hit the panic button. As did the experts once they were called in. 

What he’d found turned out to be a 500-kilo bomb left from World War II. (If you want that in pounds, multiply it by 2.2 and eat three squares of dark chocolate, preferably before breakfast.) Some 1,200 people were evacuated from the area and over 100 military personnel were brought in as a kind of unintentional trade. 

Or in a different article, over 10,000 people were evacuated, but let’s not worry about it. I suspect we’re looking at two different categories–the residents who had to move immediately; the ones who had to move later to clear the route the bomb took to its final exploding place; the ones who ran screaming from their houses even though they weren’t anywhere close. Or else we’re looking at a roving zero, which plonked itself down in somebody’s text. I love to see numbers mess with people other than me. I take up enough of their attention, so it’s only fair that I step back sometimes. Anyway, let’s just say a lot of people had to move out of their homes. Roads were closed. Trains and buses were stopped. Reporters and photographers gathered. Ink was spilled.  

Irrelevant and ever so slightly ironic photo: a sunrise, looking as hopeful as any sunrise will

It took days to dig the bomb out, and once that was done (without setting it off, mind you) they still had to move it through the city and out to sea, where they could detonate it safely. Or at least safely if you’re not a marine creature minding your own business in an area humans consider uninhabited. But let’s not think about that. Let’s just call this a happy ending. The alternative–or at least one alternative–was blowing the bomb up where it was, destroying homes for blocks around and threatening water and gas lines.

 

What’s an unexploded bomb doing in Plymouth?

Plymouth–like London; like a lot of British cities–was bombed heavily during World War II. It had a major naval dockyard and a large military presence, making it an important target. 

Not that a city needed strategic value to be bombed. Leftover bombs were dropped pretty much anywhere at the end of bombing raids so the if the planes carrying them were being chased they could gain height and speed and get the hell out of there. And non-strategic cities were bombed on the theory that destroying historic sites would damage morale, which is why Exeter was bombed. The target was the Cathedral, which they missed, but they wrecked a lot of the city center. When the city rebuilt, it left some of the wreckage in place as  monuments to–well, you can read the monuments any way you like: to those lost in the bombing, to everyone who died in the war, to everything that was lost. Maybe it’s the openness that makes the remains so moving. 

But back to Plymouth, with its value as a strategic target. Want to do numbers? Of course you do. Numbers make us all sound like we know something. 

During the seven worst days of the Blitz, the city was hit with 6,000 general purpose bombs (hands up anyone who knew there was such a thing as a general purpose bomb) and 105,000 incendiary bombs. In four years of bombing, over a thousand civilians died and over three thousand were injured, That’s out of a population a bit north of 200,000. More than four thousand properties were destroyed and eighteen thousand were damaged. The city center was pretty well flattened. It was rebuilt in the late forties and fifties and (unsolicited opinion follows) is pretty grim. 

Never mind. Those weren’t easy times and it’s easy to criticize when you don’t have to wrestle with the problems that must’ve been involved. 

To take in the scale of what Plymouth was  living with during the Blitz, though, you have to think about not just the 59 bombing raids but the 602 alerts, when people would  haul themselves out of bed and hide someplace they hoped was safe but knew to be, at best, only safer than staying put and pulling the covers over their heads.

In the midst of all that bomb-dropping, some 10% of the bombs dropped didn’t explode.

 

How many unexploded bombs is the UK sitting on?

It’s hard to get an exact count. You can call for them to put their hands up all you want, but they won’t do it. Something like 45,000 have been found, although that’s probably an underestimate. The Ministry of Defense deals with some of them, but others are dealt with by private companies, and there’s no central count for us to tap into.

If we can’t get a count of the bombs that have been found, we’re even further from getting a count of the ones sitting under someone’s garden, minding their own lethal business. The closest I could come to a number is that some 500,000 “items  . .  of unexploded ordnance” are in the waters around Britain, mostly from World Wars I and II, although some are from exercise drills and other fun stuff. 

Are they dangerous? Um, yes, at least potentially. Some are known and marked on maps. Others aren’t. 

Ooooh, don’t go wading. I think I see something just under the sand.

On land, though? The BBC says there are “potentially thousands.” We’ll go with that. It’s vague enough to be unchallengeable. And they’re at least as much of a threat as the ones underwater.

“What makes unexploded bombs dangerous is their unpredictability,” one expert said. Over time, they might have degraded. Or they might’ve become more dangerous. We’d be wise not to gamble that eight or so decades of sitting in the ground, contemplating the horrors of war, has made pacifists of them.

 

How did Britain deal with them during the war? 

At the beginning, badly. Bomb disposal officers could expect to live two months. They were issued a hammer, a chisel, a ball of string, and if they were lucky, a stethoscope. 

What was the string for? Your guess is as good as mine, but the stethoscope was for the bomb, not to see if their hearts were still beating.

“The running joke was ‘join the Army and see the world, join the bomb disposal squad and see the next world’,” historian Steve Day said.

(You’ll find that in the BBC link that’s just above if you want to make sure I didn’t invent it. I remember just enough about footnotes to get twitchy when I don’t put a link in for quotes.)

With time, they–those who lived and the folks in charge–got better at it. The key was understanding the fuses. One, Type 17, had a clock that could be set to go off anywhere from a minute to a few days after the bomb landed, but it could be gummed up with either a sugar-based fluid or a magnet. When the Luftwaffe upped its game and introduced an anti-tamper fuse, disposal experts learned to drill into the side of the casing, force steam in, and let the liquid TNT drain out. 

These days they use pretty much the same techniques, but robots get to do the most dangerous work.

Love, death, and adverbs: It’s the news from Britain

Posted on by
31

Residents of a care home in Surrey were sent Valentine’s cards–red heart, pink bow, all the traditional stuff—from that most caring of senders, a local funeral home. A spokesperson for the care home said residents were thrilled to get the cards, and doesn’t the involvement of a local business go to show how deeply embedded the care home is in the community? Read the quotes and you can hear “Look on the Sunny Side” playing between the lines.

Residents’ families, on the other hand–at least those who were quoted–said things like “appalling” and “insensitive.”

The funeral home itself said, “Oops” (that’s a rough summary), followed by some verbiage about “unintended distress,” and it’s that “unintended” that makes this a particularly British story. Because tossing in screamingly unnecessary adverbs is a very British thing. My favorite is when newsreaders tell  us that someone “sadly died.”

As far as I’ve been able to figure out—and I’ve lived here for almost 18 years now—you can’t die in this country without doing it sadly. You can’t die absurdly, or with a sense of relief, or even unnecessarily. Above all, you can’t die unadorned. The word died isn’t allowed out in public until it’s fully dressed and the correct adjective has been buttoned up to the neck.

Irrelevant photo: An azalea blossom. Indoors.

 

Immigration and the search for an enemy

Ten years ago, when Britain’s anti-immigrant fringe was still searching for a group of people frightening enough to rile up the populace, the Home Office discovered foreign students and offered them up as a target for some of the free-floating hate that drifts across the island with the rains that blow in from the Atlantic.

Why foreign students? The better question might be, Why not foreign students? They needed someone. The Home Office was led at the time by Theresa May, and she was working to establish her right-wing credentials by declaring a hostile environment for illegal immigrants, which ended up creating a hostile environment for legal ones. A hefty number of them were deported, but it’s never enough to satisfy the anti-immigrant lobby, so lucky Terri, Santa Claus brought her the off-season gift of a BBC documentary about cheating on the English-language competency tests that foreign students had to pass before they could renew their visas. The documentary focused on just a few test centers, but Terri turned off the TV and said, “Right. We’ll cancel the visas on 35,000 of them.” Or to put that another way, 97% of the people who took the test.

Is it even vaguely credible that 97% of the people who took the test cheated and, until Terri turned off that fateful TV program, got away with it?

Who cared? It played well with the anti-immigrant lobby, who by then had left the lobby and were occupying seats in the House of Commons.

Cue dawn raids, students held in detention centers for months, lost degrees, lost careers, lost reputations, and deportations before anyone had a chance to appeal or prove that their English was just fine, thanks. What the hell, they were a bunch of foreigners. Of course they cheated. Give them a chance to appeal and they’ll tie this mess up in red tape forever. Give them a chance to demonstrate their competence and they’ll only make us look silly.

Foreigners are sneaky like that.

So here we are, ten years late. Some 3,000 former students have won appeals and a new group is starting what sounds like a mass appeal. And since a TV series dramatizing a post office scandal drove politicians of all parties to make noise about compensating some deeply wronged sub-postmasters, a group of the former students are working on a TV script about what happened to them. To date, noise is all that’s come of the political agreement about the sub-postmasters, but still, if you can’t get justice, the illusion of it is comforting.

*

Lest you should be silly enough to expect consistency from the Home Office, lately it’s been closing its eyes and flinging work visas in what sound like some dodgy directions. Not because it now loves immigrants. It’s at least as anti-immigrant as it was under Theresa May, although it’s found a new boogey man: refugees who cross the Channel in small boats. They make for scarier headlines than foreign students.

The current crop of visas are meant for people to work in the care sector, which is understaffed and underpaid and relies heavily on immigrant workers. But the visas don’t go to individual care workers, they go through care providers, who get licenses to sponsor immigrant workers, and those providers are popping, mushroom-like, out of the soggy ground of our political bog. Or of our overdone metaphor.

One company that was granted 275 visas didn’t exist; 268 companies have never been inspected and some aren’t registered with the watchdog that’s supposed to do the inspecting. Some don’t have addresses, only post office boxes. Some have been formed so recently that they’ve never filed company accounts. One has a website with reviews from clients named John Doe and Jane Smith.

I could go on, but I’ll spare you. And myself.

The assumption is that the companies are selling the visas. I’ve seen reports of immigrant workers in the care sector paying as much as £15,000 for visas and once they get here being “housed in sub-standard accommodation and even forced to share beds.with colleagues.

“Some have been paid for just a fraction of the hours they have worked or [been] subjected to racist remarks, harassment, and intimidation if they complain about the treatment of the people they care for.

“Others have worked for several months without being paid by their employers, who claim this is to recoup fees towards the cost of the migrant workers’ training or accommodation.”

The number of companies with the power to sponsor visas more than doubled between 2022 (41,621) and 2023 (84,730).

 

How much for that Mao in the window?

A London auction house was selling artifacts–that’s a fancy word meaning stuff–from China’s Cultural Revolution, and a rare early edition of Mao Tes-Tung’s Little Red Book was expected to sell for more than £30,000.

What’s wrong with this picture? So much that I have no idea where to start, so I’ll leave you with the picture and save my adjectives for the time when, sadly, I have to report a death.

 

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a free stuffed toy . . .

. . . I can tell you how to get one.

This didn’t happen in Britain, but with a little work it could’ve, since it could happen any place where attractive nuisances entice people to trade coins for a chance to pick up stuffed toys with a mechanical claw and drop them down a chute so their kids can take them home and love them for ten minutes or so. Or not drop them down a chute, because no matter how simple it looks the machine never gives you quite enough time to get the toy where it needs to be.

In Australia, a three-year-old found a better way to get what he wanted. In the half-second when his father got distracted, he climbed up the chute and materialized inside the machine, standing upright among all the stuffed toys any kid could dream of.

Since using the claw to drop him back down the chute didn’t seem like a good idea, the father called the claw machine company, which asked helpful questions like, “How much money did you put in the machine?”

The only thing stuck in the machine was his son, he said, and he’d like to have him back.

The person on the other end of the line wasn’t programed to deal with that and the police ended up smashing the glass and extracting the kid. The media is (sadly) silent on the all-important question of whether the boy got to take a toy home.

 

From the Department of Historical Preservation

In an effort to polish Britain’s reputation for eccentricity and historical hoo-ha’s, the owner of a pub in Staffordshire, The Crooked House, has been ordered to rebuild it, brick by brick. It was built in 1765 and sank into the ground either because of mining in the area or a nearby water wheel (no, I don’t understand that last one either), until it sat at a 15-degree angle. It had been propped up in various ways over the years and was doing just fine until it was sold and–oops–mysteriously caught fire.

Then, just to make sure of things, the new owner had the shell bulldozed.

Local people got up in arms. Or up in containers, which they used to store 23,000 bricks that they salvaged from the rubble, and the new owner’s been ordered to put them back where they were, and at the pre-fire angle. Unless the owner appeals, they have three years, but they may be too distracted to bother, since the fire’s being treated as arson.