The Times today muses today on the PR challenge presented by Prince Andrew. Having worked for a while in PR for a major brand I would say that the only option is to tell the truth. If you don’t someone will find out and what is bad becomes disastrous. The art of apology is a tricky one to learn when pride is a dominant element. How often do we hear phrases like “I’m sorry if anyone is offended by my actions” when the proper wording should be “I’m sorry that my actions caused offence” – subtly but crucially different.

I’ve met Andrew a couple of times and found him thick and pompous. Power is different in all cases but in his case it seems to come solely from position rather than achievement. His Falklands war service may be praiseworthy – I’ve no idea. But there’s not much else on the credit side. A PR nightmare is to have to promote a brand with few or any positive values.

John Profumo, a good man brought down by a sordid liaison and mendacity, devoted the rest of his life to good works. He sought no publicity and made no attempt at public rehabilitation. I doubt that this is a model for Andrew – one cannot imagine him quietly doing good. 

The “MeToo” movement has been a good thing in that it has shown how even the rich and famous can be held accountable for their actions. PR has to be based on truth but even then some brands and some people are too soiled ever to recover.

Voting and choosing those who govern us is quite a good thing. Fallible of course if the electoral system is undemocratic (Britain’s is) or if the candidates are poor (likewise). But better than dictatorship and/or government by appointment or hereditary right.

That Elizabeth Windsor has been a good monarch does not make the undemocratic system that makes her our head of State have merit. There is something about a Republic that is morally comforting especially if the President’s role is ceremonial and apolitical – as in Germany or Ireland for (good) example.

We have been a couple of accidents away from having Andrew Windsor as our Head of State a thought that should concentrate the mind. As should memories of the ghastly Edward VIII. Yes Republics can elect dangerous fools but in the main in modern times the system doesn’t throw up Trumps. Andrew, aside from any moral inadequacies, was a joke as a representative for Trade. I saw him close up in this position and he was an arrogant, pompous, ignorant cypher. The idea that Britain would benefit from his “Hosting drinks receptions on a new national flagship” (as Forsyth suggests) is satire worthy of Monty Python.

There is so much needing change in our governance system and I would accept that moving to become a Republic is not an urgent priority. Abolishing the House of Lords as presently constituted and introducing a fair electoral system are higher priority. But one day we may have the courage to abolish the monarchy. I hope we do.

David Aaranovitch in the Times today records how it was a Times journalist, Philip Graves, who, one hundred years ago, bust open “The Jewish Peril” conspiracy and proved it to be fiction,

A hundred years ago, as now, life was confusing – maybe it always is? There are two responses to confusion – to hide or to enquire. What those who seek to benefit from ignorance do is pitch a solution that removes the need for the hard work of enquiry. And they do it with such vigour and noise that even those hiding cannot ignore it.

The “Europe is to blame” deception is a modern day “Elders of Zion” . A small group of politically motivated men and women decided that a route to power was to offer a solution to people’s concerns – especially about the influence of not Jews, but foreigners generally and Europeans in particular.

And so the “Leave the EU”movement was born. The goal was “to subvert the world order and replace it with their own.” Well maybe not the world order, but certainly the British bit of it.

The driver of the revolution is always lies. Tyrants cannot gain power by telling the truth only by distorting it, and by invention. The “Elders” of the European Union were power mad bureaucrats bent on creating a superstate with ultimate power over brave little England. It too was “twaddle” and “balderdash” but it presented a credible explanation to help us resolve our confusion.

We too have had our Philip Graves, many of them, proving that a conspiracy to gain power was underway. But they were ignored by too many as the participators in the fraud gained support. The waving of the flag and the raw appeal to patriotism was decisive. Brussels was the enemy. 🇬🇧

The above table is accurate, but a tad misleading. This is because many British pensioners of my immediate post war generation enjoy workplace pensions from an established Defined Benefit (DB) scheme. These schemes, which first appeared in the late 1940s, give employees on retirement a guaranteed pension related to their final salary and are index-linked.

Millions of us have DB pensions to which can of course be added our State Pension. Elsewhere in the world there are also workplace pensions and for a fair comparison to be made we should show a table which adds average workplace pension to state pension to get total pension.

Ex Pensions Minister Ros Altmann told me “It is true that the UK pays the lowest state pension in the developed world. It has always has. Low state pension was supposed to be supplemented by a private [workplace] Pension top up.”

Ros makes the point that from a Government perspective the tax benefits of workplace pensions are a cost to the exchequer that needs to be factored in “The tax reliefs given to private pensions cost huge sums but are meant to help ensure people have enough to live on in later life.” In effect there is a choice between giving tax relief to workplace pensions and a lower State pension or, in theory, reducing the tax benefit but increasing the State pension to compensate.

The Pension situation of my generation is far superior to that of many younger people who when they retire in many cases will have far lower and far less inflation-proofed workplace pensions. As Ros puts it “Sadly private pensions are not evenly spread and many pensioners have no private pension.” This is a snapshot of the current position and one that will get worse in the decades ahead. The reason for this changed situation is that most employers no longer offer new recruits DB scheme pensions even where they maintain “heritage” Pension Funds to honour their obligations to the retired. These schemes have for some time mostly been closed to new entrants.

I am writing here about mostly private sector workplace pensions. In the public sector DB schemes (or equivalent pension arrangements) do provide employees with significantly better prospects of final salary linked (average salary in some cases) and an inflation proofed retirement income. I have covered this subject in a video which you can watch here.

There is something quintessentially typical about this piece by Sarah Vine. Does she really think that there is even the slightest rationale for claiming that Mrs Thatcher’s “Climate Change awareness” was in any way behind her taking on the National Union of Mineworkers? I call the piece “typical” because it is a classic example of a supporter of the political Right inventing “facts” and peddling them in high circulation online outlets.

Vine conflates two things that at the time were unconnected. Margaret Thatcher’s genuine (if short-lived) concern about the dangers of climate change, on the one hand, and her determination to defeat the NUM on the other. To anyone with the smallest knowledge about, or recollection of, the 1980s this conflation is Fake News.

As I made clear in my piece on Boris Johnson’s claim that Thatcher was motivated by environmental considerations in respect of the mining sector is bunkum. Later in the decade she did have a short-lived Green period and it is fair to praise her insight on this. But it certainly was not in any way a factor in her handling of the Miners’ strike and her determination to go ahead with a swingeing pit closure programme.

But Sarah Vine isn’t interested in the truth which she could easily have checked – the story is hardly a secret. I was close to the issue when I worked in Scotland during the Miners’ strike. This is a personal story and for me a memorable one. Vine berates the “Left” in her piece but she is wrong to do so. Many on the Left, whilst horrified by Thatcher, were less than enthusiastic supporters of Arthur Scargill.

I don’t think anyone on the Left “needs a lesson on 1970s history”, but Sarah Vine certainly does. When Edward Heath’s Conservatives came to power in 1970 Britain’s Energy industry was relatively stable. Coal to Fuel Oil conversion was well underway in the industrial sector but for power generation this was more problematic. Coal was institutionalised as the primary energy source and most power stations were strongly linked to coal mines. When the price of oil tripled the development of the then alternatives to coal (oil and gas) pretty much ceased for a time. This strengthened the hand of the already strong Miners’ Union.

Edward Heath unwisely and incompetently took on the NUM. He fought a battle at the wrong time and in the wrong way. In 1974 he fought and lost two elections on the issue of “Who governs Britain”. The Callaghan government of 1976-79 received a hospital pass from Heath (after a brief spell of comparative peace under the wiley Harold Wilson). Callaghan tried but failed to do a deal with an intransigent Trades Union movement. The Unions, not Margaret Thatcher, brought him down.

So the Conservatives were as responsible as Labour for the troubled 1970s decade. From Harold Wilson’s first administration in 1964 onwards successive British governments of both Parties failed to curb Union power. Energy lay at the heart of this. Power generation was insufficiently diversified and the only alternative to British coal was imported coal.

Thatcher won the post Falklands 1983 General Election and in her manifesto she had said this:

“In the next Parliament, the interests of the whole country require Britain’s massive coal industry, on which we depend for the overwhelming bulk of our electricity generation, to return to economic viability.”

To some extent this was code and there was no overt promise of confrontation with the miners. But “economic viability” could only come from reducing costs. In effect by closing loss-making mines and switching gradually to other energy sources (Natural Gas and Nuclear)

So Margaret Thatcher took on Arthur Scargill and won. But the damage to the social order was enormous. Politics descended into street fighting and the scars of that terrible time still remain.

Thatcher was re-elected in 1987 and the working class vote facilitated this. Notwithstanding the bitter class divisions of the Miners’ strike Thatcher received support across the board.

Millions of working class people, previously solid Labour, voted for Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives in the 1980s. Sound familiar ? Then as now extremism of the Left was a turn off for the majority of voters. Voter motivations can be complex but it is fair to hazard a guess that nobody who voted for Thatcher did so because she was “ahead of her time on climate change awareness”.

The Conservative manifesto in 1987 said “The world’s resources of fossil fuels will come under increasing strain during the 21st century; so may the global environment if the build-up of carbon dioxide the so-called “greenhouse effect” significantly raises temperatures and changes climates.” This was, of course, well after the end of the Miners’ strike. The Tory solution was a commitment to Nuclear Power, though, to be fair, Renewables do get a passing reference.

Boris Johnson was being disingenuous in his assertion, joke or not, that Thatcher “gave the UK a head start in its efforts to reduce its carbon emissions by closing so many coal mines across the country”. In defending the Prime Minister Sarah Vine misses a trick. The key contributor to the decline of Coal was the rise of the use of Gas in power stations (see above) and this started towards the end of the Thatcher years. Gas firing is still threatening to the environment but far less polluting than Coal. North Sea gas as part of the energy mix was driven mainly by its increasing availability and the Thatcher governments helped facilitate this. But again the driver was not the Environment but economics.

The reduction in U.K. coal production started long before Thatcher took on the miners and continued in the decades that followed irrespective of whether it was a Conservative or a Labour government. Thatcher’s failure was not to manage the ongoing and inevitable decline in U.K. Coal production sensitively. I have argued that switching away from coal in the long term was desirable but that the confrontational way that it was done was deplorable.

Venturing into the unknown is a driver of uncertainty. When we stick with the familiar by definition we know what to expect. I’ve been surprised that the uniqueness of COVID hasn’t had more prominence in the media. More civilians have died of the virus in Britain than from any other cause in living memory. And we are a very long way indeed from being free of the plague.

Denial is a common response to threat and to fear. A minority response maybe, but far from uncommon. Commentators with national platforms became instant COVID experts overnight spouting denial and/or conspiracy theories, or some did. The human instinct to believe what we want to believe was all around. Ignorance of the subject was not a restraint – we have been very selective in what we choose to believe and to say.

The thing about experts is that they don’t always agree with one another. If you look around you can find an “expert” who will give you comforting reassurance (or fear-inducing concern !) on almost anything. Add in the fact that in Britain and the United States at the beginning of the pandemic there were heads of Government who were culpably wrong in everything they initially said and criminally neglectful in delaying action.

Truth has many faces and most of us are not scientists so we cannot validate what we are told by those who are. My personal response has been caution, it still is. To effectively quarantine myself has not been that difficult – there has been no pressure of any sort on me to return to “normality” ! I’m conscious both that I’m privileged and that I’m in danger of being complacent. Look at the above graph which is self-explanatory. Will vaccination really mean we avoid an autumn/winter upturn in COVID fatalities ?

We are, I think, venturing into the unknown again. There is clearly a correlation between ambient temperature and COVID deaths – has that cause and effect been broken? I can be accused of pessimism and of course I hope that my fears are unfounded. The truth is that eighteen months into the pandemic we just don’t know.

“The international community has a vital role to play in demonstrating our confidence in the Afghan people”. General Sir Nick Carter in “The Times” today.

This sort of empty, platitudinous rhetoric bedevils western perceptions of countries like Afghanistan. The underlying premise is that western States and, by unavoidable implication, their military forces have a role to play to prop up governments we approve of or to bring down those we don’t. The premise is false for both moral and practical reasons.

The idea that the United States, with or without Britain, has the right or even the capability to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries is, or should be, have become outdated by experience. Civil wars are endemic to the human condition and from Korea, via Vietnam to Afghanistan western interference on one side or the other only makes things worse.

What about diplomacy or international institutions like the United Nations? They don’t work in such circumstances either. Neither War War nor Jaw Jaw achieves anything. Ever. The sad reality is that the League of Nations failed to stop the Second World War and that post war the UN has often accelerated conflict rather than put a break on it. Indeed the UN was the prime mover in supporting South Korea against the North in 1950.

We can boast about our concern for the “Afghan people” but in reality these words are empty. It may sound harsh and uncaring but the Afghans have to be left to resolve things for themselves. President Biden was right to withdraw American troops and if he’s sensible he’ll think twice about deploying them as policemen anywhere again.

We the people have a voice, if we are prepared to use it. Strip away the faux-patriotic flag-waving bombast and there is nothing much left. 179 British servicemen died in Iraq and more than 450 in Afghanistan. And sad though it is they all died in vain. Surely we have had enough of body bags being flown home from faraway countries of which we know nothing?

The Taliban has won in Afghanistan and though we may deplore it we cannot deny it or ameliorate it. The “international community” is impotent in the face of this truth.

In a civilised society men working in deep mines in dangerous and unhealthy conditions hacking at a seam of coal is unacceptable. Taking the coal produced and burning it in a boiler to generate electricity whilst polluting the atmosphere and damaging the climate is unacceptable as well. But let’s be clear. Prime Minister Thatcher’s attack on the traditional mining industry had nothing to do with Health and Safety and even less with concerns about the Environment. It was all about political power.

In 1974 Edward Heath took on the miners and failed. Later in the decade James Callaghan failed as well. They both asked the nation “Who governs Britain?” They were told “Not you”. Thatcher was not going to make the same mistake.

The decline and fall of deep mining and then of coal-fired power stations was indisputably a good thing. The way it was done was scandalous. There was no coherent strategy to the pit closure programme. Mining towns lost their raison d’être, their employment and their self-respect. As the pits closed nothing opened to replace them. It was largely left to the market, and the market failed.

It may be that working with the National Union of Mineworkers to implement a strategy to run down coal mining was never going to be possible. That there was no room for compromise and that Binary Britain had its origins among the coalfields. But working at a higher level with the TUC to co-jointly put in place a strategy could have been possible. Who knows?

It was in 1963 that CLR James, adapting Kipling, asked the question “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” That quote illustrated perfectly the dilemma faced by cricket lovers about South Africa. Not for the first time the Marylebone Cricket Club is putting cricket sentiment before principle in its decision to erect a gate in Rachel Heyhoe-Flint’s memory. The decision is an affront and in this age of cancel culture it may become a target for Black Lives Matter activists.

In 1960, with Apartheid firmly in place, Rachel Heyhoe had been a member of an English women’s team touring the country. In her autobiography she revealed that the tourists had been warned “…to make absolutely no comment on the ‘racial issues’ (sic) in the country)”. Black spectators were banned at the matches and the coaching the English women did was only for the whites. The British Women’s Cricket Association (WCA), in which Rachel played a significant role for many years said that the 1960 tour “engendered goodwill”.

Rachel obeyed the rules in 1960 but by 1978 when her memoir was published, she revealed her true feelings “[I] retained the view that it was their country, and hardly the place of any English people to criticise”. This was a naïve even offensive remark, not least because it was made ten years after the D’Oliveira Affair and seven after South Africa had been banned from all international sport.

Rachel’s position on Sport and Apartheid was made crystal clear in her 1978 autobiography “[if] the British Government consider it their duty to register their disapproval of South African policies I suggest they cut off every contact with them, including banking and trading links. For, as things stand, sport is merely being used as a political lever. Who are we, in any case, to tell the South Africans how to run their country”?

Rafaelle Nicholson, a historian of Women’s cricket, has written that “in the build up to the D’Oliveira Affair, it was the women’s cricket community who continued to wholeheartedly to embrace South Africa.” The WCA was in the forefront of this, and Rachel Heyhoe played a significant part as player and later administrator. In 1968 once MCC reluctantly cancelled the men’s tour to South Africa over D’Oliveira the WCA followed suit cancelling their own planned cricketing stopover.

Nicholson writes further “Several members of the [WCA] Executive Committee had wanted to go ahead with the stopover… but had been outvoted. Presumably, this included England Captain Heyhoe-Flint, who told The Times that she was “very disappointed”. Nicholson calls her chapter on Women’s cricket and Apartheid “Who are we… to tell the South Africans How to Run Their Country”. She quotes Rachel Heyhoe-Flint verbatim.

Rachel’s position on South Africa, including her participation with many luminaries of the world of cricket to try and ensure that the 1970 men’s tour took place, was unequivocal. Her position in 1969 was an establishment one and many joined her in the “1970 Cricket Fund” which was set up to pay for security to allow the games to go ahead. Those in cricket opposed to the tour, most notably Mike Brearley and the Rev. David Sheppard, were in a minority. So Rachel was far from alone in supporting the 1970 tour.

The politics of all the “1970 Cricket Fund” supporters was probably “Reactionary Right” and these supporters included the Monday Club. The official TCCB position on Apartheid was that they “disliked it” but that “they could not change the law in South Africa [and that] playing against South Africa would be the best means of changing Apartheid”. This was certainly Rachel Heyhoe’s view. She said in the Preface to her autobiography that she had a “deep-seated interest in politics – I could dream that I might one day become minister of sport” so we are not dealing with someone politically unaware.

The 1960s and 1970s saw a binary divide between those who wanted to build bridges with and those who wanted to boycott South Africa. That Rachel was in the bridge-building category is not in itself to be condemned. So were many others including future MCC Presidents M.J.C Allom, Colin Cowdrey, Tony Lewis, and many other members of the cricket establishment. The Women’s Cricket Association was particularly pro South Africa ties and Rachel was often their go-to spokesperson.

By the early 1980s the issue had not gone away – a planned England Women tour to the Caribbean was cancelled because three of the England party had played on private cricket tours in South Africa. Rachel declared her position once again unequivocally and said “…perhaps the time has come for a stand to be taken against the removal of our freedom and rights”. The Times reported on 19th February 1983:

“Rachael Heyhoe-Flint, England’s best-known woman cricketer, said yesterday that she was “completely shattered” by the decision to cancel the tour “We heard through the Jamaican High Commission in London some 10 days ago that there could be a problem, but we never thought it could come to this,” she said. “The big irony is that the five people referred to went to South Africa four years ago on what was a completely unofficial visit and that subsequently the West Indies have played in England and have not raised any objection against the players who had been in South Africa.” John Carlisle, the Hard Right Conservative MP and a member of the MCC, said: “This cancellation illustrates the total chaos that now surrounds cricket and the extent to which political interference rears its head at every turn.”

The “freedom and rights” issue was, of course, to stay in play as the rebel tours began in 1982. This is a large and contentious subject and perhaps Mike Gatting’s statement that “I know very little about Apartheid [but] I do believe that there shouldn’t be any politics in sport” encapsulates the naivety or more likely hypocrisy often involved.

With hindsight Rachel can perhaps be seen as only being naïve but I think that would be a cop out. She was unquestionably in her statements and actions close to being an apologist for Apartheid. She could hardly claim like Gatting to “know very little of Apartheid” having toured South Africa as a player and visited as an administrator. She said, again in her 1978 autobiography, “And if we are honest, can’t we other examples of oppression, perhaps just as odious, in the recent histories of counties such as Chile and Russia?” This takes us into some very dark areas indeed. She implicitly acknowledges that Apartheid is “Oppression” but defends not doing anything about it by saying that there is oppression elsewhere. For someone with a declared “Deep-seated interest in politics” this is not surely ignorance or naivety but a declaration of her true feelings. There is a token criticism of Apartheid in her statement “…South Africa, apartheid apart, is such a wonderful country for a visitor”. But the idea that you could praise a country by avoiding any comment on its institutionalised racism, and with Nelson Mandela locked up on Robben Island, does rather stretch credulity!

“We must not turn our backs on the Afghans” says William Hague in The Times today. Can he really not see that in the post-war era Western interventions in the internal affairs of independent countries have been an unmitigated disaster? With one or two exceptions American and often British military action in pursuit of some specious high-sounding goal like “freedom” have resulted in outcomes which were worse than the start point.

In my lifetime Korea, Vietnam, Suez, Iraq, Afghanistan and countless other adventures have been long on pompous rhetoric but short on effectiveness – often tragically so. America has in theory the military strength to be the policeman of the Western conscience but, as we saw in Asia and the Middle East more than once, not the strategic nous to know how to win.

The Taliban is like the Vietcong a flexible pragmatic force which can disappear into the hills whenever it needs to, regroup and fight another day. In Iraq the sheer power of America backed by Britain’s largely token forces overthrew Saddam alright. Leaving still unresolved chaos behind, tens of thousands dead and continuing instability. Not to mention hundreds of bereaved American and British families.

President Biden is right to recognise that the American dream of honourable defence of liberty, articulated so eloquently in John Kennedy’s inaugural address in 1960, has proved to be bunkum. And the British Government should get real as well and realise that our obligations extend no further than the defence of our own borders. No more body bags returning from far away countries of which we know nothing please.