Hooray For The Nanny State

Falkirk MP, Eric Joyce, recently hit out at something he called, “The New Paternalism.” He was writing about Scotland’s proposed new licensing laws, minimum pricing, tackling binge drinking and the like. The point (I think) he was trying to make is that by restricting choice in order to help cure our love affair with drink, there were some silly, catch-all prohibitions on the sale of alcohol, in petrol stations, for example.
The core of his argument seems to be that the less-well-off (who tend to be the ones who drink too much White Lightning) are being forced to reduce the amount they drink by Government edict rather than persuaded to give it up by power of argument, explanation of the risks involved and the offer of help to see the error of their ways.
In other words, too much control is being exercised over people lives in order to help the poor help themselves. So, in order for Buckfast to become prohibitively expensive for a sixteen year old, some nice wee middle class auntie from Kippen or Inverkip has to be penalised by not being able to buy a bottle of wine from her local fishmonger.
And, says Mr Joyce, that’s just not right. Now maybe the Government’s new laws won’t have the desired effect. Perhaps there will be just as much drunkenness in Falkirk of a weekend and all the anti-social behaviour, vandalism and violence, both public and domestic, that goes with it. Mr. Joyce seems to be of the view that a lighter regulatory touch with more emphasis on education and persuasion will work better.
It’s vaguely reminiscent of the new American book that’s been all the rage among the chattering London classes this summer. It’s called Nudge, and was written by two academics.
They say you don’t need loads of laws to stop people making all the wrong choices that do them harm. All you need to do is start schemes that will point them in the right direction. Ultimately, you leave it up to them. You say, “Here’s something that will allow you to make a better decision about this type of behaviour”, and leave them to make their own mind up.
I don’t think Mr Joyce is a roll-back-the-state libertarian (at least that’s not my impression from reading his musings) but he does seem to think that we can interfere in people’s lives too much. Hence, he writes :
“The central definition of the new paternalism is that it’s patronising. It says some folk aren’t open to change so we’ll target them and make life difficult for them. This seems to me the apotheosis of bad legislation.”
But the argument comes down to decision-making. Even the authors of Nudge realise that people are hopeless at arriving at the best choice. But, they would claim, it’s better to guide than force.
The trouble is, it’s the poorest who have the biggest problem in breaking their cycle of behaviour in anything that’s remotely bad for them. It’s the poorest who have the least chance of giving up smoking. It’s those at the bottom end of the socio-economic scale who have the worst dietary habits, although, experts say there is less of a gap between how much money you have and how pished you get.
And anyway how much guiding do people need ? It’s been going on for years and hasn’t worked. Surely, and I think Kenny McAskill would agree (although maybe not publicly), that the time has come to stop pussyfooting around and start proscribing things.
Look at the new fag packets (if you dare) and look at the groups of kids hanging round the off-licence on a Friday night and wonder to yourself if the encouraging, friendliness of “please don’t to that” has had the desired effect ?
What our American friends in their nice book say (without actually saying it) is that people are too stupid to make the right decision about what’s right for them. So who’s going to do it ? Who will grab the bull by the horns to make real inroads into improving not just people’s health but society ?
The only answer is the state. Take one look down Falkirk High Street and you will see people who are crying out to be told what to do. A succession of political leaders are to blame for this as much as anyone.
The post-war generation has been sold a dream of endless consumption and they have bought it. The pursuit of money in the hope that buying things will make them happy has been state policy in what’s laughingly called “the developed world” for too long. Its beauty is it doesn’t require the long arm of the state to make it work. People have, therefore, become used to governmental non-interference in their lives, although they have quite happily allowed multi-national corporations to shape their desires and spending habits with the minimum of fuss.
And it’s all turned out to be a house of cards. It’s created unsustainable development which threatens the future of the planet and every living thing on it. At a more micro-level, people are unhealthy, their lives are full of stress and unrewarding. They have no beliefs to help them cope. Their familial relationships are floundering in a sea of amorality. They have no friends. They are sad.
Who is going to fix this ? New age economic gurus with buzzwords ? Or do we need a benign, strong force for good to regulate what we do, so it’s better for the majority ? The next one knocking the Nanny State gets it, alright ?

Beginnings And Endings

Politicians from across the world are getting ready to gather in Poland to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. Presidents, Prime Ministers and even our own David Milliband will be at Westerplatte on September 1st to remember where the first shots were fired on 1st September 1939, 70 years on.
Wait a minute, you might ask, didn’t the war start two days later on 3rd September ? If you are British then you would be right, in a sense, because that was the day the UK declared war on Germany. But it doesn’t alter the fact that fighting began two days earlier.
And as Poland gears up to host the centrepiece of events looking at the beginning of the war, it becomes evident that not only do we have a different starting point, Poland and Britain feel the greatest event in the 20th century also ended at different times.
We were taught at school that hostilities ended on 8th May 1945. The conventional histories say so, although the Russians celebrate Victory Day on 9th August because the ceasefire came after midnight Moscow time.
But consider this from Poland’s Culture Minister, Bogdan Zdrojewski. “In this year there are three important commemorations, two taking place in Poland,” he said. “The 1st September 1939, the Polish elections of 4th June 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The ultimate end of World War Two was the June elections and the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.”
So, for Poles, he says, the War did not end with the shooting in 1945. It continued right the way through the period of the People’s Republic of Poland and came to a conclusion only with the election of a Solidarity government and the withdrawal of Soviet troops.
To many Poles this matters. It went to war in September 1939 to protect itself from foreign invasion. The Germans were eventually repulsed six years later but that only brought the arrival of Soviet forces, who stayed for more than forty years.
They argue, therefore, that Poland was only returned to its pre-1939 conditions of a free, independent, liberal parliamentary democracy at the point at which the Soviet influence over the country ended. Only then, they say, were their war aims of 1939 truly satisfied.
And this view seems to mean a lot to lots of Poles, even today. A nationwide survey was carried out to mark the 70th anniversary investigating the feelings of ordinary Poles about the war. The greatest pride was taken in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, organised by members of the London government and left to flounder by Stalin.
The greatest shame was bestowed on those who collaborated with the enemy. And that doesn’t mean just those few Poles who were forced to work for the Germans.
“Only 17 per cent of those questioned said there were events that brought shame on Poland,” historian Paul Machcewicz told the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper. “But so few Poles collaborated (with the Germans) that people can’t identify individuals by name who were involved. Interestingly, the first name that appears on the black list is Boleslaw Beirut (the first leader of Communist Poland). So, collaboration and treason in wartime is today primarily associated with those Poles involved in Polish subordination to the USSR.”
This public perception is very important because it shows just how effective politicians have been in using history for their own ends. If the history taught to young Poles since 1989 paints the Soviet Union as the bad guys of World War Two, it’s much easier to present Putin and Medvedev as people to be generally wary of. And, therefore, to see Poland’s current EU and NATO role as a natural continuation of a long historical process of positive engagement with the west and hostility to the east.
But is the picture it paints an abuse of history itself ? To ask that question leads us back to the debate that has, and still, causes rancour among historians; who was worse Hitler or Stalin ?
Revisionist academics claim that one was just as bad as the other and, therefore, the crimes of each can be roughly equated. Taken over the course of each of their reigns, and in all their actions at home and abroad, you could argue the toss. But what about Poland specifically ?
Hitler’s division of the country with Stalin unleashed different terrors on different places; the westernmost parts of the country were incorporated into Germany and the locals either Germanised or expelled. If they were thrown out they ended up in the General Government, a dumping ground for the racially inferior where you ran the risk of arbitrary execution or death through starvation. In the east you either were Sovietised or deported to the Gulag.
But that changed with Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. All of Poland became a German domain and almost all of Poland’s Jews were murdered. And had the Soviet Union been defeated and German hegemony established permanently across Europe ?
It’s a ‘what if ?’ scenario perhaps but there is enough written evidence, and you don’t have to go far to find it, to suggest we know what would have happened. Poland would have become virgin land for the Germans, the Poles simply uneducated slaves doing their masters’ bidding. They would have been expendable and, given the Nazi’s predilection for extermination, probably wiped out as a nation before long.
But that didn’t happen. The Soviet Union fought back and used its might to rid Poland of the German menace. Geopolitical demands, Stalin’s paranoia over an attack from the west, and the Allies’ grateful recognition of his contribution meant he had all the cards and could do as he liked with the parts of Europe where is troops remained when the Nazi’s surrendered. No other option was possible without another war, which the big powers did not want.
And he chose to make Poland communist. That’s not what the majority of Poles wanted, but what they got was a series of Governments subservient to Moscow, implementing ideas that felt alien to their way of life. Oppositionists were locked up, people’s lives were dictated to by authorities they hated. However,everyone had a job, some food to eat, somewhere small and inadequate to live. But unless you did something serious you did not live in fear of your life. Millions of others chose a long and painful exile abroad where they left a lasting, and positive, legacy.
This was a tragedy. But it was not catastrophic for the Polish nation. Had Germany been able to carry out its murderous plans then there may not have been a Poland left. Maybe those who say the Communists were the country’s greatest shame of the Second World War should use the 70th anniversary of its start mulling that thought over in their minds.

What Makes You Happy ?

It seems no-one can answer that question. The strange thing is we certainly know what makes us unhappy. For me it was work, that’s why I’ve decided to give it up.
Now, for most people quitting a job in the middle of a recession with no alternative source of employment to jump into seems a bit of a nightmare. And, I will admit, it needs a bit of finance to make the move. I don’t even know if not having a job will actually make me happier, but I might as well give it a try.
Happiness anyway is a strange thing. I find it weird that almost all the analyses of whether we are happy or unhappy are psychological; it seems to make much more sense to look at it from an economic, political and sociological perspective.
Money does seem to buy some people happiness but it is also “the root of all evil.” Is that a circle we can square? Any economic and political investigation into happiness probably depends on your own world perspective. Do you buy the whole idea of individualism, making something of your life and reflecting your status in consumption? Then it’s pretty much taken that the modern world as it stands is a perfect fit for the way you want to live.
But if you are primarily social, on the left and understand Marx’s theory of alienated labour? Then doubts will start to appear, and after that cracks and before you know it you are not only questioning the whole edifice but taking a sledgehammer to it.
That’s where I’m at. Feeling the pressure to perform in the rat race simply to make profits for capitalists no longer fits. And as more and more (although not nearly enough) of us start to question big profits and big bonuses it is certain there must be a better way. Especially as capitalism is directly responsible for climate change and the possible long-term end of the planet and humanity.
I have laughed at all the self-help guides for improving our own lives for too long to think I have the answers. But these are my solutions, just for me.
I will only to earn enough money to survive. I will exchange my labour for cash only to the extent that it allows me to pay my bills and feed myself and my dependents.
I will offer more of my talents on a barter basis, exchanging work for skills, or possessions, that other people have and which may be of use to me.
I aim to reduce cash spending to an absolute minimum. Consumption for me, from now on, will be based only on need and not on desire (apart from my daily newspaper, two pints of beer in my weekly visit to the pub and occasional book purchases).
I want to reduce the damage I do to the environment. I will look for way to lower the amount of electricity I use and cut the amount of waste I produce.
When I read them back these seem like wooly-liberal aims. People will laugh and mock, I know, but I do want to disengage with a world I feel alienated from, full of daft consumerism, pointless desires and, dare I say it, unhappiness.
Sadly, too many people seem to know no other way. The world, it seems, has to exist on the circulation of money. People have to invest to create jobs, those workers have to be paid so they can spend money on things they don’t need so that other people can have jobs making the things they don’t need, so that they can have money, and on and on it goes.
And who benefits? Rich people. And how do they benefit? They go and consume, buying more and more things they don’t need to show off to others how wealthy they are in the hope they will gain more respect and status.
And who suffers? Poor people who can’t get jobs because economic priorities dictate that rich people can’t afford more luxuries if they employ them. Everyone, because all this madness just ends up creating demands on us that we can’t fulfil and desires that we can’t afford. Society, which goes up the spout because the pressure to succeed means we have no interest in helping others or time to see how we might need other people to make life better. And the environment. The world’s taking a pounding. The raw materials which are essential to drive forward our lifestyles get scarcer and people go to even more insane levels to find them, bringing destruction in the short term and environmental chaos in the years ahead.
What makes me unhappy ? Modern life. I’m vowing to give up as much of it as I can. I’ll let you know how I get on.