As I meander along in my eighth decade my thoughts occasionally drift away from important things like how the Special One will heal the rift with Dele Alli to things like political philosophy. The latter is full of “isms” like Socialism and Capitalism. And, in general, these isms are unhelpful.

The problem is that usage has been so unavoidably imprecise over the years as to render the words meaningless. Maybe I’ll cover Socialism another time but for now let me have a go at Capitalism. We’ve never actually not had in modern times in Britain the system under which the use of Land, Labour, Capital and Enterprise in combination produces goods and services. Even before the Industrial Revolution, and certainly during and after it, this free enterprise system has been how we do things – call it “Capitalism” if you like.

But in the late nineteenth century it became clear that unfettered free enterprise was not only damaging to those at the bottom of the pile but sub optimal as well. Unit production in the dark satanic mills was lower than in manufactories with better conditions. So a combination of social awareness and pragmatism forced change and a plethora of regulations came in. Children stopped going up chimneys.

In the twentieth century change accelerated and in the immediate post war period we actually expanded government control of vital services – nationalisation. The mixed economy was born. In truth it had been around for a while but 1945-51 was its flowering. It’s still with us – even Capitalism’s heroine Margaret Thatcher only shifted it a bit.

So any debate about the principle of Capitalism is doomed to be impotently irrelevant. There is no alternative that makes an iota of sense. Where there is room for debate is about who does what and where in the mixed economy. Such debate must not be ideological. The public/private mix in our healthcare system does not need ideologues from either side of the debate. The only criteria are patient care and efficiency. If that means more (or less) contracting out so be it.

Capitalism with a mixed economy is what we do. Fine tune it of course but it’s not not going away.

There are few institutions in Britain that have to be all things to all men (and women) as the BBC. Its charter pretty well requires that. This means that much of its output should be, and is, popular entertainment. “Eastenders” and “Strictly” . Pop music on Radio 1. Light music on Radio 2. That the corporation also caters for those with more cerebral tastes – BBC Four and Radio 3 (etc.) is also part of their long-standing role to educate and inform as well as entertain. Reithian values just about hang in.

Charles Moore is not , I imagine, a fan of “Strictly” . Indeed he doesn’t seem a man fond of any entertainment you can’t do on a horse. Etonians don’t do the “Common touch”. Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher is thorough and well written, but a bit condescending to the grocer’s daughter. And if Moore couldn’t quite get her what chance he’ll understand your average fan of Dot Cotton and Dirty Den?

Elitism and snobbery are part of society – we are stratified in a hierarchy with the privileged, like Moore, at the top. Old Etonian Prime Ministers in the past had a touch of Noblesse Oblige about them but not their modern successors. Dave and Boris always look uncomfortable when they have to meet the hoi polloi. Moore will patronise the stable lad no doubt but have little interest in his television and radio choices.

Moore writes entertainingly and is well-mannered in a Wodehousian sort of a way. You can imagine him rising early, dressing in tweeds and popping out to check on his pig. What you can’t imagine him doing is running the BBC.

There is a preposterous article in The Times today which tries to do a sort of Cost Benefit Analysis on the Royal Family. Only in a society that knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing could measuring the value of the Royal Family be a matter of simplistic accountancy. The issue is simpler and more principled than is revealed by building a spreadsheet and entering data. Does Britain in the future want to give power and privilege to people based on the accident of their birth, or not?

The Royal throne of Kings does not make us a Sceptrered Isle as is only too apparent if we look around us today. Our problems are not helped by the fact that sitting on pedestals above us is a bunch of individuals whose only qualification is who their parents were, or who they married. That these individuals vary from the good (The Queen ) to the bad (Prince Andrew) and the ugly (your call) is not irrelevant.

No society that even plays lip service to the principle of equality of opportunity can justify hereditary privilege. It starts at the top. An unelected Head of State brings risks with it. We could have entered the Second World War with a Nazi loving King and only chance prevented this calamity. If HMQ had died at the same age as her father and Charles followed her before he married we’d have had King Andrew. Think about it.

The main symbol of the pernicious British Empire was Queen Victoria. The Empire is gone but the symbol remains in her regal successor. Elizabeth has been a fine public servant and might have made a good President had we had the sense to become a republic and vote her into office. But the serendipity of hereditary succession is inappropriate in a modern state. Is Charles Windsor really the early best we can do ? It’s not the cost of the Royal gang that matters but the principle.

“No 10 takes a very long-term view of Brexit and the opportunities it brings.”

Arch Brexiteer James Forsyth in today’s The Times.

I have tried, I really have tried, to get Brexiteers to tell me what these “opportunities” are. From before the referendum, during the campaign and since I have never heard of one genuine tangible benefit that leaving the European Union brings us. Plenty of nationalistic flimflam about “Sovereignty”. Plenty of headline grabbing rhetoric about “taking back control”. But one properly costed real benefit ? Nah.

In the “long-term” we will all be dead of course and by then the grotesque damage of Brexit may have worked its way out the system. But for the foreseeable future whatever facile fudge the government manages to walk away with we face years of political, economic and social stress for no advantage. My European citizenship was confiscated without reason – a culpable breach of my human rights without precedent. Our nation will be the only one in Europe without established trading relations – except for Belarus who we come closely to resemble. Except that the natives are rather less supine in Minsk than they are in Manchester.

It all seemed very silly for quite a while and those of us who deep down believed that at heart we are not idiots thought common sense would prevail. Since 2019 it has become clear that the idiots are alive and well and that they have taken over the asylum. And that their position has shifted from one where Brexit would bring immediate benefit to one where we are asked to take a “very long-term view”.

Nations sometimes drift towards disaster in deadly cumulative steps. Alliances, treaties and deals can stop the drift as allies help us to think again. In Germany in 1930 the German people, with no checks and balances in place, chose a course of action that was ultimately deadly. Their “sovereignty” permitted them to do this – for the last time for 15 years as it turned out. Maybe they took a “very long-term view”.

George Bush turned out to be a one term President. He was a decent man, a good Veep to Reagan – able and experienced. But in 1992 America was looking for someone new. Someone younger, someone more charismatic, someone who would clearly draw the line under the generation of Reagan of which GHWB was part. Bill Clinton, 22 years his junior, was that man.

The letter was not released by Clinton until 2016, a couple of years before his predecessor died. That was the year that Donald Trump was elected to be the 45th President of the United States. The two men, Bush and Clinton, Republican and Democrat a generation apart were united by their service and their patriotism. And, without doubt, their aversion to the man who was shortly to move into the office they had honoured.

GHWB and his son George Bush Junior, both had different politics to the man who was in office between them. But that was on the margins. Both made mistakes personal and political. But at no point did they vulgarise their presidencies to the extent that Trump has. (And, no, I haven’t forgotten Monica and the consequences of Clinton’s foolish dalliance).

America desperately needs renewal. The Clinton/Bush letter shows how it should be. I have always honoured the Office of President of the United States. Years ago I toured the White House and went into the Oval Office and I realised then that there is a symbolism to the job of President that goes beyond America. We should all care about it. That’s why Trump is more than an aberration – he is an obscenity. He wouldn’t recognise “wonder and respect” in a million years. High time the world was rid of him.

“And my vision for Britain is simple: I want this to be the best country to grow up in and the best country to grow old in.” Sir Keir Starmer

Keir Starmer is making a dramatic difference to the Labour Party and clearing the Augean Stables of the toxic stink of Corbynism. He’s not there yet but the signs are promising. Until yesterday I thought that as well as returning common sense and coherence to the Party he was eschewing the vulgar populism that so infects our body politic. Now I’m not so sure.

Flying the flag is a pragmatic necessity for politicians of ambition and sometimes this can be a bit gruesomely faux-patriotic. But to have the ambition to make the United Kingdom the “best country” in the world – as the quote from Starmer’s speech at the top of this blog does – goes way too far for me and crosses the line into populist claptrap.

We are accustomed to political sloganry and often it doesn’t really matter. But we live in an interdependent world and one in which all nations have their individual national character. When we judge them, which inevitably we do when we visit, we do so from our own perspectives. We are entitled to have “favourite” countries but surely not to suggest a “good, better, best” ranking.

My personal perspective is likely to rate culture, scenery and cuisine highly. And my favourite countries tick all the boxes though I have to say Germany, which I love, doesn’t feature strongly gastronomically! The point of course is that every country is a complex mix. There can perhaps be “best” countries for aspects of a nation but even that is subjective. The frankfurter has its stout defenders.

The aspiration for Britain to be the “best country” to grow up in or grow old in actually suggests that there are measures available to allow targets to be set and progress to be measured. There are not – except at a very detailed level. We probably can measure our education or transport or healthcare systems against others. And my gut feel is that we don’t do very well. But to decide how our combined provision of public services across the board can make us the “best” would be a pointless and subjective task.

Of course Sir Keir may just have been indulging in populist jingoism with a touch of flag waving thrown in but I’d have preferred something a bit more forensic. To aim to be a “better” country (e.g. in respect of public services) is an admirable goal, providing it is detailed, specific and measurable. But to throw out the generic and bombastic “Best country” is too redolent of the mock exceptionalism of Flanders and Swann for me:

“The English, the English, the English are best
I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest”

It’s high time we grounded the Spitfires. High time we started looking forward rather than backwards. The past is a foreign country – we did things differently then. Yes there was heroism and at times no doubt people did believe that we were a land of hope and glory. But study that past closely and you’ll find that glory was often tarnished. But the more important question is not to try and record and define what we once were – though that is worth doing. No the issue of the day is to decide what we want to be.

British “Patriotism” is nearly always defined in symbols of the past. But if I am to have national pride I want to have it because of what we do in the here and now, and what our future plans are. That my father was brave in 1942 or my Grandfather in 1916 is a source of retrospective pride. But it means nothing today.

If I was German I’d have no problem – how ironic is that ? The achievements of successive post war German governments, culminating in reunification after 1989, would make me proud and patriotic. In my lifetime Germany has gone from a cesspit and a defeated pariah state to become an economic, political, cultural and uber-civilised state of which I would be proud to be a citizen. If only !

Would I rally to the Union Flag if asked – well yes, if I believed in the cause. But I emphatically do not believe in “My country right or wrong” and over the years I’ve said so. Though I was young at the time I thought Suez was nonsense. I actually supported the Falklands War at the time which I now regret but it did seem, at the time, something I should be “patriotic” about. I opposed Blair’s wars though strongly and said so . And the last ten years of preposterous faux-patriotism and jingoism around Brexit have made me sick.

So if you want me to be a patriot don’t talk to me about the Empire or about events that happened before I was born. Give me something to be proud of now. It happened at London2012 where I was a Gamesmaker. We did it well and I was proud of that. But then the Union Flag which I’d waved in the Olympic Stadium became tainted.Suddenly patriotism became negative – it became the preserve of those who opposed rather than a celebration of the positive. Most of all the jingoistic absurdity of “Sovereignty” entered the national vocabulary.The arrogance of the premise that only we British could take good decisions – not Brussels but only Britain. That in the EU we participated collectivly in the governance of Europe became, absurdly, a negative.

So in post-Brexit Britain have I anything to be proud about? I have not. Too many of my fellow citizens are bigots or bozos. I have a Government of breathtaking incompetence. My country is the laughing stock of the world. And almost every week there is some distant “triumph” to celebrate. These celebrations are doomed attempts to imply that we still matter. Trouble at the Mill? Send up a Spitfire. Need to take people’s minds off the ghastly daily realities. Give the old codger who walked 100 times around his garden a Knighthood.

Rally round the flag boys, rally round the flag.

Boris Johnson read these words from Philippians 2 in Westminster Abbey today :

“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.”

It is, of course , possible that Johnson was set up and didn’t realise it. But if you wanted to find somewhere in the scriptures a text which best referenced the malignant personality and failed leadership of our woeful Head of Government you really couldn’t do much better than this.

“Selfish ambition” and “conceit” are the drivers of Johnson’s life and he is where he is because of them. He is an under-achiever throughout his adult life except that his ambition and self-regard have somehow delivered him privilege and high office. What has he done to deserve this? You will struggle and fail to find anything tangible. His private life is littered with deception and moral turpitude and his public life is much the same. This is a man you would not trust as far as you could throw him.

It was once the case that politicians who had grown up amongst privilege and advantage recognised this. “Noblesse Oblige” was sometimes a characteristic of Etonians but as author of “The importance of being Eton” Nick Fraser put it in 2005 “Etonians are the ultimate pragmatists, totally free of ideology. Other than the imperatives of getting – and gaining – power, no conspicuous motives inspire them”

But with the pragmatism there is rarely humility and never, ever, a tendency to “regard others as better than yourselves”. Eton is the top of the scholastic pile and it’s pupils know it. They may not always call those lower in the pile “Oiks” – as Johnson and Cameron called George Osborne (St Paul’s and Magdalen) at Oxford. But they know there’s no one better than an Etonian.

“Looking to [his] own interests” is indisputably what Johnson has always done. Marriages are abandoned if he decides that the pleasures of a new partner are what he wants. Loyalties, both private and political, are abandoned almost at a whim. Fidelity and honesty don’t enter into consideration – screw the “interests of others”.

Johnson wouldn’t even see the hypocrisy of reciting the words from Philippians 2 today. Words are just slogans to him without the uncomfortable need to ensure that they are true for himself, or said with genuine moral meaning. Momentarily there maybe the conceit that what he says is principled but should he need to contradict them – well there’s always another principle to choose.

The American political journalist Michael Gerson says that political hypocrisy is “the conscious use of a mask to fool the public and gain political benefit”. Today the mask slipped but no doubt tomorrow the sycophants will provide another one and Boris Johnson will live to pose and lie for another day.

“…believe that the history of the relationship between Britain and its colonies needs to be constantly reinterpreted” Trevor Phillips in The Times.

Imperial Britain did not have a “relationship” with its colonies. It invaded them, killed First Nations peoples, sent slaves to them, sequestered their land, exploited their natural resources and governed them in what was essentially a totalitarian and wholly undemocratic way.

Garry Sobers himself has written that a black man needed to be a three times better cricketer than a white man to be selected for the West Indies. His childhood in Barbados was one in a racist society deeply divided between the white man with the house on the hill and the black man cutting the sugar cane.

The imperial model of British exploitation and racial division was replicated everywhere though in the Dominions of Australasia and Canada once the natives were dead of disease or discrimination (or corralled into camps) the white invaders became the majority and, being white, were permitted to govern themselves.

The problem is not our tendency to re-write our imperial history but our failure to tell it. The building of the British Empire was one of the most significant features of the second Millennium but the story is inadequately recorded and taught. There is no “Museum of Empire” telling the story anywhere and surprisingly few good academic histories which comprehensively tell the story.

There are apologists for Empire and even those who will tell you it was a good thing. They are being challenged and the preposterous row over patriotic songs at the Proms may have woken a few people up to the iniquities of Empire. The use of the “Black Lives Matter” slogan and the phenomenon of “taking the knee” the same.

When the world officially condemned colonialism and effectively outlawed it via the United Nations declaration after the Second World War an end was put to what was for centuries a scar on humankind. But the legacies of Empire live on in many countries, including Britain. That many of the children of Empire have prospered is hugely to their credit and that some once colonies have emerged as successful countries in modern times likewise. But English exceptionalism, that arrogant presumption , based on Empire, that in the hierarchy of nations Britain is at the top prospers still in our post Brexit world.

History does not need to be rewritten it needs to be debated and told, glorious or otherwise. What happened needs to be related both in the context of the norms of the times when it took place and from a modern perspective. We cannot trade back, what happened happened. It cannot be disguised by flag-waving jingoism – we need to “learn from the Germans” and confront our past and where appropriate atone for it.

There is an extraordinary article by the Right Wing Editor of The Spectator James Forsyth in “The Times” today. I responded to it by saying that If I want to read puff pieces praising Boris Johnson I’ll go straight to the press releases of Conservative Central Office – I don’t need the middle man. And if I want updates on Green energy I’ll read scientists not political hacks. And the idea that political interests can be “genetic” is as wrong as it is lazy journalism. It’s nurture not nature !

In Northern Europe there is a dependence on Natural Gas for home heating which is unlikely to change for the foreseeable future – certainly 50 years probably much longer. What we can do, and are doing, is burn our gas more efficiently. Conservation via improved efficiencies and home insulation is far more practical than some fantasy about burning hydrogen in boilers! And as well as using less we can, and are reducing emissions.

Boris Johnson will spout any old rubbish that he thinks people want to hear. I don’t think that he “really does mean it on Brexit” because there is scant evidence that he has any coherent beliefs about anything except himself. His “views” are those of those who advise him. If Dominic Cummings thinks an environmentalist pose is politically advantageous he’ll write the speech.

This is is a Little Englanders article praising one its kind. And the idea that Britain can “push other countries to go further” on environmental matters is utterly preposterous. For example the British Isles are connected into the European Gas grid and rely on that grid to manage gas supply. A country on the fringes of Europe is not going to have much influence on the thirty other independent countries it has turned its back on. Europe’s continued focus on environmental matters will be driven collectively by the EU and debated in the European Parliament.

Whilst the correlation is not perfect there is a good overlap between Euroscepticism and Climate Change denial. On the political Right to be pro Brexit often means that an individual also derides those argue for urgent action on the environment. And a Britain impoverished by COVID and by Brexit is unlikely to be able to afford the huge investments required anyway.