Britain is the greatest country on Earth.” according to Liz Truss. When I last checked I found that I had lived in, worked in or holidayed in 65 different countries. A function of career, luck and preference and I enjoyed every moment. Some I enjoyed more than others, of course, and I suppose I could rank them according to that personal preference. But I won’t because it would be utterly subjective and a waste of time.

The claim that “greatness” can be objectively ranked when it comes to nations underlies Ms Truss’s bombastic nonsense. If Karen from Croydon did it we might be saddened and perhaps gently mock her faux-patriotism. For the Foreign Secretary to do it defies belief.

“There’s no place like home” is a platitude that people of all nationalities share. It’s harmless and understandable. We grow up in a place and a culture and it becomes our norm. When we lived in The Netherlands we had a boat which we took around the inland waterways – the canals, rivers and lakes. One summer we had visitors who came out with us for a particularly sunny day trip. One said to me how lovely it was, but (he said) it “wasn’t England”. Of course it wasn’t, but that rather missed the point didn’t it !

You cannot objectively measure national “greatness” though some have tried – “Deutchland Uber Alles” springs to mind. But then so does “Land of Hope and Glory” – most nations do it a bit. It’s mostly harmless bluster , except when it slips over into nationalism and we think we have a right to conquer. That leads to wars and empires.

Democracy” can mean what you choose it to mean. The opportunity for “we the people” to choose those that govern us might be a reasonable place to start. But if that’s the test Britain looks decidedly dodgy. Our Head of State is hereditary, our Upper House is unelected and our Head of Government has only the shakiest of personal electoral mandates to be in the job.

Democracy is arguably much more about protections against repression than anything else. Important freedoms like those of speech, the press and of action (within a mostly benign set of laws) are crucial. Here, though, we are subject to the judgment calls of others. We don’t (thank goodness) have the ancient Greek system of decisions being made by a show of hands in a public square.

So when we elect a representative to a Parliament or a Council we elect not a delegate but someone who we hope will vote according to their conscience and with our needs in mind. Sadly the Party whips often tell our representative what to do, not us. Hardly democratic.

I have lived in a couple of benign dictatorships – colonial Hong Kong and modern day Dubai. There were rather more freedoms in the former than the latter but no elections in either. And if you behaved reasonably you could live comfortably in both. The contrast between Hong Kong and the totalitarian Super State across the border was enormous. But so was the contrast between Dubai and the grotesque human rights abusing Saudi Arabia not far away.

Democracy is a fragile flower and the fact of elections does not necessarily protect us. Britain’s current autocracy has a huge parliamentary majority but only just over four in ten of those who voted actually voted Conservative. Hitler came to power in 1933 with only a third of the vote.

So Democracy and Free Elections are inseparable but holding the latter does not guarantee the former. We need to define Democracy much more widely than (just) elective democracy. Here a written constitution would help. In Britain to say something is “unconstitutional” has an element of value judgment in it. There’s no document to refer to to check. Even apparently permanent changes to our democratic systems, like the introduction of fixed time parliaments, can be changed at will.

Is democracy under threat in Britain? Or is a Government with a big majority simply using its power to make changes. Are any changes legitimised by that big majority? We have no constitutional court to refer to or to provide checks and balances. Parliament is sovereign – though the courts can rule on Judicial review. There are three main grounds of judicial review: illegality, procedural unfairness, and irrationality. But if a law is properly drafted and passed by a vote in Parliament a review is unlikely to succeed.

Sometimes, as someone once said, it’s helpful to go “Back to Basics” and if we do that to audit the effectiveness of our “democracy” it’s not encouraging:

▪️Can we refer to a document to check whether a proposed new law (etc.) is constitutional? We cannot.

▪️Do we choose all who pass laws and govern us ? We do not.

▪️Does every vote count equally? It does not. Some don’t count at all.

▪️Are there adequate and enforceable checks on the decisions of our Government? There are not.

▪️Is the aggregate vote for political parties approximately matched by the number of Members of Parliament they have. It is not.

In short our government system is profoundly undemocratic and unaccountable. Many strands of public opinion are underrepresented in Parliament. Grace and Favour rather than elections determines the composition of our Upper House. The constraints on the freedom to act of our Government are feeble at best. We are close to being an elective dictatorship.

David Aaronovitch has a good piece on lies and truth in The Times today. Prompted, no doubt, by our daily struggle to believe a word some of our ruling elite tell us.

Truth has many faces. People presumably lie to advantage themselves in some way. But the use of selective truths can achieve the same outcome. The idea of the “Whole Truth” is established in our dialectic, as is the “White lie”. Some of us are sometimes accused of being blunt or insensitive when we tell a “home truth” – that is to say when we eschew the lie to tell the “uncomfortable truth”.

So truth though it should be binary in reality is not – there are shades of veracity that we manage every day. Your child sings you an excruciatingly untuneful rendition of “Away in a manger” – do you tell her it was terrible ?

But for some lying becomes a habit. And these are the people about whom we say “You cannot believe a word he says”. You get to know them and then you discount their stories. But again it’s quite subtle. The liar who tells the truth occasionally can confound us as much as the honest man who under duress tells a lie.

Accidental lying through ignorance is another variation. As is the telling of lies that all religious promotion requires. Not least the promulgation of the idea of the “life hereafter”. You lose a parent and someone tells you that they have been reunited in heaven with your other parent who died earlier. It may be comforting to hear this, but it’s untrue. It’s a lie.

The great cathedrals were built on a lie and great men did great things driven by a belief and “Faith” in fairy tales. And kindnesses are shown by sometimes withholding hard truths. Many faced indeed.

Danny Finkelstein writes more in sorrow than in anger in The Times today about the collapse of cordial relations across the Channel. The bipartite nature of this silly spat may ring a few bells – Trafalgar, Waterloo and all that – but it’s all old hat. It ain’t like that any more. Britain may have accidentally slipped into a lonely vigil of remembrance of things past, but France certainly hasn’t.

The triumph of the EU is that, as intended, old enmities have been buried. No more so, of course, than in the alliance between France and Germany. Twice in the first half of the twentieth century the former was invaded by the latter. That’s why from 1945 they decided “never again”. Encouraged, ironically in retrospect, by Winston Churchill.

The modern world requires some surrender of sovereignty to be peaceful and to work. As the Disunited Kingdom stands aside and impotently throws fuseless grenades across the channel the big boys on the other side get on with the task of building a Europe for our children, and theirs.

I’m too old, sadly, to have any expectation of seeing Britain fully back as a leading member of the European family of nations. But it will happen. Over the years our childish, sentimental, outdated, nationalist rhetoric will fade and we will remember who our friends are. The Entente Cordiale will be rebuilt and sanity restored. But it will take a leader of imagination and skill to do it. There’s a vacancy.

A book reviewed in The Sunday Times today suggests that the United States and its allies, including Britain, could have won the war in Afghanistan. This is a delusion, as history teaches us.

The ghost of General MacArthur still haunts us. He wanted to win another unwinnable war (in Korea) by blasting the Chinese into submission with nuclear weapons. The learning from that misadventure was swiftly forgotten and soon the GIs were off on another mission they couldn’t win in Vietnam. Even deadlier. But heigh ho let’s try again. A continuing mess in Iraq and the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan were to follow.

In seventy years have they learned nothing ? The problem was that whilst massive power and conventional weaponry worked in Europe in 1940-1945 for the allied forces that is the only theatre in which that worked. The war in the Far East was much more difficult and the island hopping (MacArthur again) was deadly and much more problematic. It took the obscenity of the Atomic bomb to win that one.

The wars of the second half of the twentieth century , and beyond, have not leant themselves to American strengths – bombing of civilians and tank and infantry battles. The enemy has had the good sense to stay flexible and flee to the jungle or the hills and regroup as necessary. You can’t defeat an enemy who won’t come out and fight.

The war in Afghanistan was never winnable and it’s hubristic to suggest it was. We should never have been there in the first place and never have stayed as long as we did. Where have all the soldiers gone – gone to graveyards every one…? 🌺 🌺

Prominent story in The Times today about how Rishi Sunak is planning large tax cuts. Suspect it’s a dead 🐱 as our Government has hugely increased both expenditure and tax (NI). The Conservative dream of a lower tax economy is a long way away.

It is intellectually and economically illiterate to predicate tax cuts without simultaneously addressing public expenditure – in detail. Indeed you have to start with the latter. The main public debate (if there is to be one) needs to be on what we as a nation want to provide in the way of public services.

Major areas of expenditure like the Health Service and Social welfare have inbuilt cost escalations determined by the ageing and increasingly longer living population. They also underdeliver because of historic cuts mostly from the austerity of administrations since 2010. There is catch up necessary to reach an acceptable standard of public services now before you commit to cover the inevitable higher costs of demographics in the future.

As well as the need to fund higher running costs there is the need to make capital expenditure commitments to replace old and inadequate infrastructure. Especially transport where, for example, our rail system is tired and failing.

The public/private debate is often simplistically ideological. It really doesn’t matter who provides public services so long as they are well run, affordable and accountable. That is clearly not the case with nearly all of the privatisations of the 1980s and 1990s. New partnership models are needed to address this iniquity.

Only when you know where you are, where you want to go and what this will cost can you look at how you pay for it. Public expenditure and tax are two sides of the same coin.

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard – former Deputy Chairman of Royal Dutch Shell

“…would just like to contribute three sets of facts. First, overall refugee numbers are currently running at about half of where they were 20 years ago. We are not the preferred destination in Europe. We are, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said, well down the list of preferred destinations.

Secondly, yes, small boat numbers are up, partly for the reason the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, adduced—the fences, patrols and heat sensors around the train tracks and marshalling yards mean that people are now driven to the even more dangerous sea route. But the principal reason clandestine numbers are up is that official resettlement routes are shut. Our schemes, in practice, no longer exist. We have closed the Syrian scheme, we have scrapped the Dubs scheme, we have left Dublin III and we have not got an Afghan scheme up and running. The largest group crossing the channel in the last 18 months, by nationality, were Iranians. In the last 18 months, 3,187 Iranians came. In the same period, one got in by the official route. How many came from Yemen in these 18 months? Yemen is riven by civil war and famine. None came by the official route —not one.

My third set of facts is as in the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. The Home Secretary [Priti Patel] says that 70% of channel crossers are

“economic migrants … not genuine asylum seekers”.

That is plainly not true. Her own department’s data show that, of the top 10 nationalities arriving in small boats, virtually all seek asylum—61% are granted it at the initial stage and 59% of the rest on appeal. The facts suggest that well over 70% of asylum seekers coming across the channel in small boats are genuine asylum seekers, not economic migrants.

That is hardly surprising because the top four countries they come from are Iran, Iraq, Sudan and Syria—not Ghana, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Lilley. These people are fleeing persecution and destitution, and the sea route from France is the only one open to many of them. Why not have a humanitarian visa, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said? The noble Viscount, Lord Waverley, gave the answer to the objection of the noble Lord, Lord Lilley. Those who had a valid claim for asylum would not be at peril on the sea.

Unless we provide a safe route, we are complicit with the people smugglers. Yes, we can condemn their case and we mourn yesterday’s dead, but that does not seem to stop us planning to break with the refugee convention. Our compassion is well controlled because it does not stop us planning, in the borders Bill, to criminalise those who survive the peril of the seas and those at Dover who try to help them. Of course, we can go down that road. But if we do, let us at least be honest enough to admit that what drives us down that road is sheer political prejudice, not the facts, because the facts do not support the case for cruelty.”

“We should openly embrace liberal, tolerant but common-sensical positions on the “culture” issues, and emphatically reject the “wokeism” of a small though vocal minority.” So says Tony Blair in The Times today

For Tony Blair to use use the facile term “wokeism” suggests we truly are lost. To glue together liberal attitudes under the simplistic insult “woke” is what the Express and Mail reading illiterati do. The lack of precision and the clear intent of the use of the word – to abuse – ought to be avoided by someone of Blair’s eminence.

Oversimplification kills discourse. Our beliefs and attitudes ought to be complex, changeable and distinctive. I subscribe to nobody’s manifesto but my own and that is a moveable feast. Some of my views may be describable as “woke” others certainly not. I follow no template nor bible.

Years ago Blair debated with Christopher Hitchens about Christianity. The battle was in part about Faith. Blair approved of it, Hitch didn’t. Hitchens was rational man, Blair bought the fairy tales. The presumption that you can group attitudes together into some woke guidebook is a very religious one which is perhaps why Tony Blair apparently believes it.

The problem , of course, is that the use of “wokeism” is of our binary age – the Age of the lack of nuance you might call it. Are you for us or against us ? The middle ground, the admittance of uncertainty are condemned. It’s black and white innit ? So we have reductio ad absurdum all around us. The premise is that you can group views together under a composite label which you then stick on people you don’t like.

Blair’s descent into populist insult damages his mostly sensible advice to Labour. He rightly regrets the swing to the ideological Left that happened under Corbyn. But to condemn “wokeism” is a cheap shot. He ought to be above it.

Oh to be German. After 16 years of outstanding leadership from Angela Merkel, who never put petty partisanship before her national and European goals, there will now be a modest change of tack. The timing of a subtle shift in a liberal direction is perfect. But Germany will not move from the centre ground nor will it cease to play a leadership role in Europe.

Compare this with binary Britain where we have invented a new insult (“Woke”) to describe beliefs and character that perfectly match those of Merkel and Olaf Scholz. And where dimwitted ideologues with gormless nationalist rhetoric drive us daily into ignominious irrelevance.

As Germany takes another confident step forward we have disappeared into a sentimental cloud of post imperial confusion. What we have traditionally done well (The City, The Arts, Tourism) is threatened by our economic travails and our unique insularity. We could learn from the Germans. We won’t.

Fine article by Alice Thompson in The Times today about, among other things, the use of “Woke” as an insult . As with so many areas in our divided society we are daily assaulted with binary judgments and if we are perceived to be “for” or “against” something someone will abuse us. There is little room for nuance.

JK Rowling is a liberal, decent, talented woman who presents a perfectly coherent and balanced view of sex and gender. And yet because her view is nuanced rather than strident she is traduced by those for whom theirs is the only truth.

I suspect many of us do have legitimate but a bit dogmatic views on some subjects. “Legitimate” is a value judgment of course and a tad intolerant. In the public eye at the moment is the so-called “privatisation” of the NHS. This is a binary over-simplification. Healthcare is a classic public/private partnership and always has been – even under Bevan ! Getting the balance right between “in house” and “contracting out” is part of the task of managing the NHS. My excellent local hospital has a large boiler house run for it by a specialist company. Extremists argue because it’s NHS property and on NHS land it should be run only by NHS employees. This is nonsense, but the example can be extended to other areas including the clinical. Say this to a health Union and you get into trouble !

I describe myself as “Woke” on social media as a bit of a provocation. I do it because if you look at the dictionary definition of the word it is highly complimentary. That it has been adopted by the Right as a term of abuse is strange and rather puerile. But in reality reducing one’s beliefs to a single word is a nonsense. Most of us have a complex personal portfolio of beliefs (and prejudices) all our own. I suspect (hope) that there is nobody who quite believes everything that I do! Even if I found one he’d probably be an Arsenal supporter.