England and Wales become more secular

Religious adherence in England and Wales continues to decline

A British Social Attitudes Survey published in May 2016 shows that the proportion of the population declaring themselves as adherents to a religion in England and Wales is continuing to decline. Nearly half of the population say they have no religion. The percentages are:

Anglican	19,8
Other Protestant	15,7
Catholic	8,3
Non-Christian religion	7,7
No Religion	48,5

Taking our cash away: the removal of high denomination notes

In May 2016 the European Central Bank announced that it would stop issuing EUR 500 notes in 2018.

The reason given for the abolition is that the high value note is used mainly for criminal and “grey” payments, so doing away with it will lessen tax evasion and more serious crime. Evidence for all this is a little thin, and my guess is that abolition will at best slightly hinder such payments.

Criminals use cars, but that it not a sufficient argument for their abolition. Ordinary people need cars, too. Likewise high denomination notes are mainly used by ordinary people for several purposes: to store their savings, to easily transport their money, to make instant payments, to avoid bank fees, and, of course, to make anonymous payments. The right to privacy in, say, buying a medical product does not signal any kind of criminality.

What the ECB is doing is quite simply diminishing, albeit slightly, people’s freedom, and handing power to fee-sucking banks and to the surveillance state.

Of course the situation is much better in the Eurozone than it is in Britain, where the highest denomination note is GBP 50, around 63 Euros at the time of writing. British shopkeepers often gasp in horror whenever a “fifty” is tendered. And today in Britain even the GBP 50 note is under threat of abolition to make cash retention, transfer and payment more difficult.

The right to hold one’s money in cash is a fundamental. Phasing out the EUR 500, but retaining the EUR 200 and EUR 100, both greater in value than the British GBP 50, is no huge deal. But going any further down this road is.

Antisemitism: the denunciation campaign

False claims of antisemitism are deployed to discredit the political left

The spring of 2016 has seen a bombardment of charges of antisemitism aimed at left-wing members of the Labour Party. The denunciation campaign, fuelled by the Tory Party, the Labour Right and reinforced by the press, with the liberal Guardian bating the pack, has led to the suspension of numerous members, including Labour’s former London Mayor, Ken Livingstone.

No-one but a fool would believe that that the denunciation campaign results from the sudden discovery that the Labour Party is constituted by ranks of Jew-hating Holocaust deniers, particularly as several of the people suspended are Jewish themselves. Indeed, the Labour Party is one of the places in British society where one is least likely to encounter antisemitism, or racism of any kind. The reasons for the denunciations are much more cynical. They serves two separate but related purposes: first, a drive to undermine the Corbyn leadership by smearing his supporters; and second an attempt to de-legitimise criticism of Israel by claiming such criticism is antisemitism.

It is worthwhile stating clearly what antisemitism is, and what it is not. Verbal and written antisemitism includes calling for discriminatory action to be taken against Jewish people, insulting them, or identifying people only because of of their ethnic origin. Antisemitism is about the attachment of negative characteristics, physical or cultural, to Jewish people solely on account of their ethnicity. It is about the peddling of myths, the purpose of which is to cast Jews in a bad light. Statements which are true are not antisemitic unless the purpose in uttering them is to fuel antisemitism.

Sentence Elements

Dividing simple sentences into their elements is the first step in grammatical analysis.

Every sentence can be divided into its elements. An element is made up of one or more words which together comprise the element. Sentence elements constitute the ‘building units’ of a well-formed sentence

There are five types of sentence element:
1 subject
2 verb
3 object
4 predicative (aka complement)
5 adverbial (aka adjunct)

A sentence element approach to grammar assumes a top-down methodology: it starts with the sentence as a whole and then divides it into its functional components.

In the sentence below every type of sentence element is present and is represented in this example by a single word.

They elected him president yesterday.

They (=subject), elected (=verb), him (=object), president (=predicative), yesterday (=adverbial)


Subject and predicate

In English every sentence has a subject. The subject is the grammatical topic of the sentence and the predicate (consisting of the remaining elements of the sentence) is the comment on the subject. Look at the example below.

Mr Jones planted cabbages in the garden.

In this example Mr Jones is the subject, and planted cabbages in the garden is the predicate. Mr Jones is the grammatical topic; and the comment is that he planted cabbages in the garden.

The subject is necessarily a nominal (e.g. noun, pronoun, noun phrase or clause).

The verb governs the predicate and determines whether objects, predicatives and adverbials are required, permitted or proscribed. Look at the example below:

My older brother gave Lorna a book yesterday in the garden.

In this example the verb to give requires two objects (direct: a book, indirect Lorna) and permits temporal and locative adverbials (yesterday and in the garden)

Adam Johnson: Punophilia and Sex Crime in Britain

In March 2016, professional footballer, Adam Johnson, was sentenced to six years incarceration for sex-texting, snogging and touching up a fifteen year old girl.

I care nothing for football, nor for men like Adam Johnson. The core facts of his case are clear: a fifteen year old girl showed herself sexually interested in the professional footballer, and, rather than turning away, Johnson sex-texted her, snogged her and touched her up in his car. The age of sexual consent in Britain, not unreasonably, is sixteen, so what Johnson did was rightly a crime.

The issue in this article is not his guilt but his punishment. Sentencing Johnson to six years inside - a sentence normally awarded to robbers and rapists - reflects moral outrage, not justice or sense.

I have no desire to see the girl punished in any way, but the issue remains: if what happened is so serious, why is Johnson the only one responsible? Had the girl, instead, gone shoplifting - or committed any other crime - she was well within the age of criminal responsibility. Yet, in her illegal relations with Johnson, she is automatically constructed as a victim, a mere passive agent without responsibility.

Much of the establishment hullabaloo around the case is formulaic. For instance, reports were submitted to the court about the psychological harm that Johnson had done to the girl. Johnson may indeed have caused the described harm, but we cannot know for sure because it is unimaginable that a social service report would ever have concluded that no damage resulted from the affair. I suspect the psychological impact on her was little different from what she would have felt had she been some months older and over the age of consent. But the greatest psychological harm - we can be sure - resulted from the case being heard in open court: her anonymity was breached and she became (quite wrongly) an object of abuse from some quarters.

Why is the case interpreted and framed in these terms? Where does the moral panic demanding draconian punishment come from?

The leading reason is obviously the horrors of the sexual crimes committed by Jimmy Savile. Savile is dead and cannot be held to account, but prosecutors and courts can find male celebrities today who have had sexual relations with fifteen year old girls and punish them severely. That urge to punish is further driven by some feminists, aware of the cruel “career-or-start-a-family” dilemma, whose anger focuses, not on the structures of capitalism that throw up that problem, but on the ability of adult men to cheat on their partners in favour of younger women.

Nothing written here is intended to exonerate Johnson. But as this case came to trial, it is a pity that it couldn’t be dealt with privately, something both Johnson and the girl would have benefited from. A fine, community work and attendance on a sexual offences awareness course would have been suitable for Johnson. Six years of incarceration, the probable ban from professional football and the near total destruction of his life would not have been called for.

Sexual offences should not be brushed under the carpet. But the Johnson case did not involve a major crime, if only because, had the girl been some months older, no crime would have been committed - whatever one thinks of the morality of the man's behaviour. His excessive punishment - the mob's punophilia, the love of punishment - merely shows that Britain is in the grip of a moral panic regarding under-age sex crime.

Facebook: posting links is no substitute for analysis

Facebook does provide a channel for political communication, but those who merely post links to online material are not providing the necessary analysis.

From the 1980s I recall an elderly left-wing gentleman, who raged against all forms of social injustice, with a particular emphasis on the betrayal of socialism by the right-wing leaders of the Labour Party. To make his case, he pushed his bicycle around the town, cloth carrier-bags dangling from the handlebars, shoving annotated newspaper cuttings though the letterboxes of those left-wing activists who might read them.

If you met him you would certainly get an earful, but if you didn’t you had to piece together his views from reading other people’s. Were he alive today, I am sure he would be on Facebook, writing little, but posting links to articles. And sadly, that is the communicative capacity limit for many of my Facebook “friends,'”  just a stream of posts consisting of links to other material. They don’t write much themselves, so all I know about their political views is garnered from the links to articles which they suggest that I should read.

Well, what’s wrong with just posting links? True, good material on the net needs to be passed around. But anybody who thinks that he or she is enhancing his or her political analysis by this method is as deluded as a carpenter who thinks he is developing his chair-making skills by sitting on them and recommending them to others. It’s only when you pick up your pen – or today, open a Word document – that you develop the range and consistency of your own thinking.

The best way to learn is to get things wrong unintentionally. Make a slip and a friend will correct you in polemic; post a link to an article written by a professional journalist for another audience and most likely there will be no response. Just by re-posting other people's writing and by "liking," the gaps in your own thinking remain and the ability to articulate an idea or point never develops.

Even on the net people need to make themselves known as political personalities worthy of being listened to. A political activist needs a field of activity and interest; the information in the articles of professional journalists and academics needs to be digested, re-interpreted and re-focused according to local political need, not just re-posted.

The End of Politics in Britain

It is always interesting to look back into the past and see how one predicted the future wrongly. This short comment was published in March 2008. In it I rightly sketched the meaninglessness for working people of the then New Labour administration, though I underestimated the extent to which Cameron in government from 2010, with the Liberal Democrats in tow (2010-2015), would further slash the remains of the welfare state in the midst of the 2008-1013 recession, the longest in the post-war period. And I utterly failed to foresee the rise of Jeremy Corbyn in 2015.

Social inequality is sharpening, while political parties are converging.

This week has seen the opinion polls giving the Conservatives a sufficient lead over Labour for an overall majority in the 2010 general election. Across ‘Middle England’ - for whose supposed benefit New Labour was designed - Cameron’s freshness, rather than any great policy issue, seems to be the driving force behind the Tory surge. Little now divides Britain’s two leading parties: both want to commercialise everything, both are middle-class oriented and led, both are devoutly Atlantist. Over the next couple of years the cautious Brown, who for ever will be Blair’s grey deputy, will try to emulate Cameron, flog the New Labour agenda to death, and will probably fail in everything.

The last termination of a Labour administration was in 1979. That defeat gave rise to two voices. One was fundamentalist: "let’s make a socialist Labour Party worth fighting for;" the other was to urge ‘moderation and unity’ in the hope that the Tories would trip up and the pendulum would swing. But nobody would have said then that a change of government hardly mattered. What might follow Brown’s 2010 poll defeat?

The Labour left, of course, no longer exists. Labour’s formulaic denunciation of the new Tory government’s further assault on the less well-off will ring hollow after a decade and half of New Labourism. Unless new political lifeblood flows from somewhere, (e.g. Scottish independence and a new politics there?) then in Britain we are looking to a new political age characterised by a collapse of party politics in full-blown American style.

Ageing

The price of life is the inevitability of getting old

In an intellectual sense one accepts that one is growing older, but days and months pass without any real appreciation of the fact, and then all of a sudden one is visited by a gamut of reminders. The last couple of weeks have added up to such a reminder.

I noticed in the last few months that I was moving towards the light to decipher small print and increasingly removing my glasses to read at my desk at home. Though I remain short sighted, my optimal focal point is just too far now to read comfortably with my distance glasses, so off I went to the optician in search of reading glasses.

Then last Monday my tooth started to ache. Toothache was nothing new, but it was a tooth on which I’d had a root canal operation several years ago, so it had to come out. The next step, my dentist tells me, is that I need to start with implant treatment in January to replace the teeth on my right side.

Fiddling with my glasses and nursing my aching tooth, I sat down the other evening to take my pills – against the pain, against high blood pressure and another to ease urination. To that I must add my vitamin supplements, of course.

When I get up from my desk in a minute I know I will have to stretch my legs, if I want to walk rather than hobble. So this weekend I am determined to do some exercise to slow down this inevitable process.

The inevitability of inference

Thinking necessarily involves inference, but only part of an inferential statement is empirical.

Most of the information we have in our heads is based, not directly on observable fact, but on inference from fact. Thus, for example, when I see the cheese on the table and say, “Someone has put the cheese on the table.” I may not have seen the cheese being put on the table, but I infer that someone has put it there. The same is true when we see the wind blowing the trees through the window: we can see the trees moving and we infer that it is the wind that is moving them.

Inferential thinking consists of three elements. Let us look at these:

The first element is the sense data (e.g. The cheese is on the table) which we receive at least in part through our five senses (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste). But even what appears to be observable fact is a product of two parts only one of which is exclusively empirical: i.e. the external world that is impinging on our senses. But prior to our observation we also need concepts such as cheese, table and onness in our heads which we use to capture the sense data in the mind.

The second element in making an inference is a rule, either absolute or probabilistic, which we apply to the situation (e.g. Household objects are in the place they are because a human being has put them there). Rules may be necessarily true (e.g. All objects exist in space and time), or contingent and spring from repeated past experience (e.g. Fresh strawberries taste nice). In the case of contingent truths we assume that because something held true repeatedly in the past it will hold true in the future.

The third element is a conclusion drawn by means of logic from the observable fact and the rule; e.g (1) Household objects are in the place they are because a human being has put them there. (2) The cheese is on the table, so (3) a human being put the cheese on the table.

The key philosophical point to draw out of this analysis is that only part of an inference is empirical. The concepts, the rule, and the logic do not derive from our immediate observation, but are applied to it, and contain non-empirical elements. Thus, inferential statements are only in part empirical.

Prospects for the Left in Britain - as seen in 2010

The prospects for the British Left seem dire; and the situation is entirely different from in the past.  (Written in 2010)

Overall, I am extremely pessimistic about the prospect of building a progressive movement in Britain. I had hoped in the mid-2000s that the total abandonment by New Labour of progressive politics in general and the huge opposition to the Iraq War in particular would lead to a serious organisation to the left of Labour coming into existence. Instead, all we got was George Galloway blending his own egocentric personality with an illiberal cultural relativist agenda in the form of his politically marginal Respect Party.

Since 2010 Labour has been in opposition to the Conservative Liberal Democrat coalition government. About what to do there are two contrasting opinions among people on the left.

On the one hand, there is the view that however awful New Labour was between 1997 and 2010 in government, nonetheless it is the only political organisation that working people have to advance their interests. We should, therefore, work for a Labour government to be elected in 2015 because even the worst Labour government is better than this. Of course in the meantime we can campaign and try to move Labour leftwards.

On the other hand, there is the view that the Blair-Brown governments crossed the Rubicon. New Labour in office abandoned social democracy, built up capitalist power and inequality, sought to diminish personal and civic liberties and actively promoted a sycophantic pro-Americanism around the globe. The people actively engaged in that project still lead the Labour Party today. Asking working people to put their faith and aspirations in Labour is, therefore, dishonest and will yield nothing but disappointment.

Superficially in this debate one can find similarities in the ending of the Blair-Brown governments in 2010 with the close of the Wilson-Callaghan years in 1979. Perhaps the most significant similarity is that Labour in opposition tends, at least initially after losing office, to start moving leftwards. And that was apparent in the symbolic election of Ed as opposed to David Miliband as party leader. But on closer examination there are two crucial differences between then and now.

First, unlike New Labour, the Labour Governments 1964-79 never abandoned social democracy. Wilson’s self-declared remit was left-leaning: to advance the well-being of working people within the post-war consensus and to be progressive in social, civic and personal affairs. In the latter, if not so much in the former, Labour chalked up significant success: abolition of the death penalty, legalisation of male homosexuality and abortion, lowering the age of majority to eighteen, etc. So in 1979 one could argue: “Labour is basically sound, but what we want is a more left-wing and progressive version of it. Let’s join and see what we can do”

The second crucial difference between now and then is that when Labour lost office in 1979, the left had never been so strong in the constituency parties and in the trade unions. There was real hope that by “mucking in” the left could win through. In 2010 Diane Abbott, the left-over of the Bennite Left was on the leadership ballot paper thanks only to the self-interested charity of New Labour MPs, who wanted to prevent the election being characterised as one between four white middle-class men. The movement behind Abbott was tiny and marginal. Few socialists remain active in the Labour Party.

My conclusion is that the situation in 2010 is fundamentally different from the one in 1979. The stain of New Labour cannot be washed away even in half a decade. Socialists cannot be, and cannot be seen to be, the junior partners of the people who managed New Labour after 1994, both in government and opposition. The Labour Party will not change its spots soon. If the left has a future it is not with Miliband and Balls. Tactically we might vote for them in elections, but that is all.