Rob's Overactive Gob

Haven’t written here for a while. Apologies. I shall endeavour to write a few posts quickly, on the austerity clusterfuck plans. To start, here’s an amusing little exercise.

This austerity bollocks Part 1 – The idiocy of sacking low-end public sector workers in the name of austerity.

How does a government save money? It thinks it should fire low-end public sector workers. But it’s wrong. Here’s an interesting little piece of maths, by no means thoroughly rigorous, but it does illustrate an important point about cutting back funding for medium and low-paid public sector jobs in the name of austerity:

Let’s take the example of a teacher, and to make it easy for the government, not a low-paid starting teacher, but a smack-bang in the middle, fairly well-paid one:

Teacher’s pay : About £34,000

Income tax: Just over £8500 – that’s money straight back into government coffers.

So, actual pay from the government’s perspective is about £25500

Except that then there’s council tax. Somewhere about £1200, which is effectively recycled money, central government supporting local government.

So let’s call it £24300

Now, more of that is going to comeback one way or another, and here’s why.

Now, let’s say they have an average mortgage – somewhere around £8,000 a year. Effectively dead money for the government. Of course, if they share their mortgage, this will be less, leaving them more spending money to help the government out again (see below), but let’s do an example of one that spends a good amount of money on something that doesn’t attract tax, to make our example one which should, in principle, benefit the economics of sacking the teacher.

This leaves £16,300. Now, let’s forget about the complex web of pensions and such that will arise from this, not only because it’s a mess, but because it’s in flux. Let’s say they spend it all.

Now, some food doesn’t attract tax, but this is more than made up for by tax on luxury things like alcohol, and petrol, (even higher if they smoke, but let’s assume they don’t). It’s a pretty conservative estimate to say that about 25% of it comes in through indirect taxation, if you like, another £4100 straight back to government coffers.

So, this teacher is costing the public coffers something like £20,000 a year.

Still, that sounds like it’s expensive, right? We should cut back on that, yeah? Let’s get rid.

Problem – there’s high unemployment. If the private sector was growing rapidly, maybe they could drop into a job, but it isn’t.

So, now let’s sack that person:

Benefits:

Low-rental property, about £10,000 a year. This is dead money to the government.

Jobseekers allowance: about £3,700.

Council tax – recycled.

With such a low amount of money, a greater proportion is spent on food, but of course, some luxuries are expected. Let’s be ungenerous to our unemployed person, and say that they drink enough to offset the lack of tax on food, so their spending averages out to just under the standard rate of VAT. Of its £3700 spending money out, the government gets back about £700.

So, you can expect, as a government, for the unemployed teacher to cost you about £13,000 a year. Except, of course, it costs you more than that because, unlike an employed person, you are expected to provide support services to get them back into work, people to monitor them, interview them to make sure they’re fulfilling their obligations, training schemes to get them back into work, people to process their applications and buildings and facilities to do all that in. So, let’s give that a really conservative cost in order to offset the confusion about pension contributions – let’s pretend it’s free!

Conclusion – continuing to employ a teacher actually costs only £7,000 a year. And for that you get a teacher, someone who, you know, educates children so they can go fourth and flourish (or, from a government perspective, go forth and pay tax).

Now let’s apply the same logic to a lower-paid council worker, like some friends of mine who have recently been fired from ‘unnecessary support’ roles, essential ‘the fat that must be trimmed’. They did unimportant things like, you know, helping the homeless, the housebound and the mentally ill. They earned, on average, about £16,000 a year. Out of this they paid about £2500 in income tax, paid their own rent and council tax etc, and checked quite a lot of the rest of it back the government’s way through indirect taxation.

Yep, you see it already, don’t you? It costs about the same to keep them in work than it did to sack them. And if you keep them employed you get, you know, help and support for the elderly, infirm, homeless and mentally ill. I dare not even try to estimate how much extra cost to the government the consequences of not having this support in place incur, but it must be substantial – one way or another we have to cope with these people. It was worth doing. Now that same money is essentially being thrown away.

These aren’t scroungers. They were sacked. They did their jobs because they thought it was a good thing to do, not because they were rolling in money.

Now, this isn’t an argument to cut benefits. People on benefits have a shit life, trust me, I’ve been there. It’s scary and rubbish, easily enough to make you want a job. Yes, occasionally people work the system, but in any civilised country, you have to put up with the odd problem case if you don’t want people lying in the gutter starving.  Tax dodging costs society many many times the amount of money ‘scroungers’ do; tax avoidance and ‘efficiency’ many many times more than that.

That, my friends, is the idiocy of these austerity measures.

A starting nurse’s salary is somewhere between £11,500 and £13,500 a year. Do the maths yourself.

I’m ‘home’ – back in the country I spend the bulk of my time in, where all my stuff is and where I’m so familiar with the culture and geography that I can speak with an authoritarian tone – and have been for a while. Yet I don’t feel settled. In many ways I’m happier dancing about between hotel rooms and doing something between plodding about and exploring than I am sitting here on my backside waiting to get bored and frustrated enough to put metaphorical pen to metaphorical paper. I’m a fair traveller – pretty capable when things go wrong, good at surviving on little sleep and putting up with the aches, pains and exhaustion of hiking about in unwelcoming environments, and enthusiastic about new places: although I’m not terribly patient when it comes to airports, plane journeys and bus-trips. What I’m much worse at is returning to the everyday familiar. It all seems like one gigantic collection of unnecessary hassles – effort with no reward. Which, I suppose, it is.

But I shall stop moaning for the moment and finish this. I apologise for the length, but it gave me lots to think about, and a few amusing anecdotes along the way.

Kuching is a welcoming, diverse little city nestling about a river, custom-designed for all your modern tourist needs. Great little restaurants and bars, a relaxed atmosphere, enough tour companies to accidentally trip into a trip without it feeling like nothing else is going on – the local culture is inclusive and thriving. We arrive during the Chinese Mooncake festival, which comes complete with the amusingly odd temple karaoke that goes on well into the night at the fabulous shrine across the road from my hostel. A pleasant time is had by all, and we book a cheap little trip to go and find some crocs the next night.

This is a mistake.

We enjoy the next day, eating cheap delicious food from the hawker markets, wandering around the museums and gazing appreciatively at the adventurous architecture of the space-age government building across the river. Then we head back to the hotel to join the…

Worst. Boat. Trip. Ever.

I’d got used to the idea that we were travelling about in small groups, and ‘tours’, such as they were, were a matter of getting a guide to show a few of you about a place and share some choice morsels of knowledge with his charges. At first, there are only three of us in the bus, and I’m expecting much the same. However, we are then herded onto a huge double-hulled tour boat with another twenty people buried into the screens of their cameras. We zip off up the estuary passed mangrove trees (“those are mangrove trees!” chirps the ‘guide’ – “no shit”, I mumble into my increasingly bushy beard, noting how many other tour boats are following us) and head out to spot dolphins leaping. Which we do. Un fortunately, the reason they’re leaping in that there’s a dead baby dolphin, and the parents are unwilling to abandon it. I’m not really surprised, speculating (correctly, I think), that one of the flotilla of tour boats hurling about has twatted the poor little bugger with a propeller. Instead of withdrawing, however, the tour boats cluster around the dead dolphin, one pulling right up beside it so that their guide can reach over the side and pull it out of the water to display to the rest of us. I’m revolted, but the rest of the boat lean over the side to take lots of lovely pictures. The grieving parents, now trying to avoid the armada encircling their lost child, are essentially forgotten until, like scolded school children, the boats all fire up and scatter away – the launch owned by the local wildlife protection unit is charging up, headed by a woman so justifiably outraged she’s screaming ‘what the fuck are you doing?’ in her native American-English.

I am now trying to disappear into the fabric of the ship. Unfortunately, the plastic stubbornly refuses to absorb me.  Then we go to find a proboscis (cock-nosed) monkey. We find one. One.  A female (no cock-nose). This is declared enough for a success for our ‘guide’ and we zoom off again. This time we pull up to a dock in a little fishing village which is built upon stilts (it floods whenever the tide comes in). ‘These people are Muslims’, the guide explains, as if that’s something weird and alien. You thought the dead dolphin was the worst part of the trip? Prepare to be unpleasantly surprised. We are invited to peer into the houses and lives of these people, and almost everyone on the boat (other than me and my girlfriend) oblige, poking camera lenses into dwellings, photographing some children having a shower (I kid you not) and generally making me want to die with the shame of being associated with these people. They’re making jokes and grinning happily whenever they briefly lift their eyes from the display screens on their cameras. I skulk at the back, watching as the locals point and share quiet jokes. I wonder which of us is the most patronisingly displayed, the people in the village or the collection of European idiots wandering through, enthusiastically taking pictures of a water butt. Yep, a water butt. Because we don’t have those, except, you know, EVERYFUCKINGWHERE. My skin is crawling. I concentrate on a mudskipping lungfish and try to remain intangible. I feel like I should apologise to everyone in the village, but soon enough I’m back on the boat trying to scrub my mind clean by humming punk music and pretending I’m asleep. Night falls and on the way back they flash lights at the bank and everyone pretends they can see the flash of crocodile eyes. They can’t. I’m on the right side of the boat, and there are none. The reason, of course, is that the crocs hate the thrumming million-decibel noise of the boat’s engine – which they never switch off. We are then presented with fireflies. About five in a tree. A week or so before, I’d seen trees lit up like a chavvy car stereo, and a week later, I’d witness a display that puts Blackpool to shame (but then, what doesn’t put Blackpool to shame? Oh yeah – this boat trip). Still, everyone coos appreciatively, and tries to take photos of them (unlikely unless you’ve got specialist equipment). Some of them use a flash. I resist the urge to drown them for the sake of the genepool. People that stupid are a danger to our species future survival.

When we return to the dock, the ‘guide’ enthusiastically proclaims the trip as a roaring success. I try to remain polite whilst showing how disgruntled I am. I also resist the urge to set fire to the boat as we wait for a van to come and pick us up. Lesson – do not go on a cheap tour trips. Either pay enough money to do something properly or make your own amusement. These people are scumbags, and one of the many reasons why tour groups are hateful things. Yet everyone else seems satisfied, happy, even. I resolve to avoid groups at all costs from now on.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible.

The next day, we’ve organised a tip to visit the Iban in a longhouse. Even though we know that we’ve organised this with a reputable firm, I’m dreading some huge camera-eye gang of quiet old louts. As well I might.

The guide who is going to take us to the longhouse is Aki, a deranged, jovial man who puts us at ease as we begin a long trundle into the wilds. There’s just the three of us and a driver for a bit, and we quickly bond, stopping off now and again to drain bladders and chat about crops and pitcher-plants, the planting of rubber and secondary rain forests, how logging is being curtailed and palm oil controlled to some degree. Roughly things seem to be heading in the right direction, the needs of government, peoples and the old ways of life juggled and balance in a way that, if not quite successful, is, at least, not completely discouraging or disastrous. We stop for some food and Aki glances at another table jammed with a large gang of grumpy-looking wrinkly old Europeans picking at their food. He rolls his eyes.

The Belgians. Not that it matters where they’re from, particularly, but they’re also booked through the same company we are, to visit the same longhouse. They’re only staying overnight, (we’re there two days), and are taking substantially longer to get there, but they’ve got all of the trappings – an obsession with mealtimes, a collection of bum-bags, cameras, baseball caps and money-belts; an apparent average age of a hundred and two. Some of them are taking pictures of the scavenger cats that that worm in and out of our legs, ingratiating themselves for titbits. Others have taken pictures of their food. We’re told that the longhouse we’re going to visit only puts up with visits from the one tour company, but that money is money, and occasionally there are some big groups. After buying my father a Parang (the guys from the longhouse come here to sell the ones they make to each other, and there is a tradition we have of buying my father something horribly lethal from everywhere I go – this time it’s three-feet of razor-sharp machete cunning crafted from the leaf-springs of a pickup truck) we leap back towards the car to get a flying start ahead of the group.

We arrive at the top of a huge hydro-electric dam, at a rather impressive little longboat dock, complete with beautifully constructed toilet block and shaded platform, in which a load of chirpy, work-hardened fellows are lying about smoking cigarettes. They all cheerfully hail Aki – who’s clearly firm friends with everyone – shares a few jokes as we begin to load our stuff onto a boat (ably aided by the biggest Malay I’ve ever seen, subject to some minor genetic abnormality that makes him one of those amiable giants beloved of authors everywhere. It earns him the nick-name ‘Frankenstein’ amongst his peers, I later find out, but I don’t detect any malevolence in it. In a land where most of the guys are noticeably shorter than my five-foot-two-inch girlfriend, he’s a couple of inches taller than me at six-foot-one or so, and everyone treats him like their favourite kid brother). I wasn’t expecting the pretty dockside, and I’m even more curious when I see the ‘Hilton’ sign upon it. Aki explains to me that there is a long-house styled hotel resort of the lake. Later I see it – it’s a huge, vulgar thing perched upon the hillside, offering what must be the most inauthentic longhouse experience money can buy. Aki chuckles and says it’s not so bad – at the centre there’s a huge mobile phone tower, which means that the local longhouses can get a signal – invaluable now that so many of the families have members living away, working in cities, and children attending schools so far away they must live there in the week.

A quick sweaty hike and a lesson on how to make sheets of rubber from rubber trees later, and we arrive at the longhouse. It’s not a huge example, but it’s still bigger than I’d imagined, especially in terms of width. Suspended on poles that ensures that the differences in the level of the ground beneath it (and any water that might creep up there during a particularly excessive flood) is meaningless, each double pitched-roof partition consists of a big kitchen and utility area with veranda to the back, a big living room with bedroom above in the middle with a door going onto the wide communal corridor and gathering space to the front, which itself goes onto another wide communal veranda. The roofs run along the whole length, and each family has a division with the same configuration. It takes me a while to figure out where I’ve seen the pattern before. It’s like a long section of terrace housing with a covered street in front of it.

We settle down with the chief (who’s suffering with a hangover) and some assorted men and women who’ve taken the day off to meet us (and make preparations for the Belgians), smoke cigarettes, drink tea and chat for a few hours. At first it feels a little awkward, but we’re soon laughing and joking, and we’re made to feel very welcome.   I learn a little about how the chief is involved in local and national political decisions, how they resolve what few social issues and what little crime they have (basically, in both cases, everyone in the village just sits down and chats about it until a decision is reached about what they should do). The lads crowd round a barbecue discussing how best to cook the meat (were it not for the jungle backdrop and huge bamboo pipes stuffed with rice, it could have been Yorkshire), and Aki starts to giggle wickedly as he begins to prep a sauce so spicy it’s a wonder it didn’t dissolve the bowl it was in. All is well, it’s a tranquil, friendly place, the quiet only interrupted by roosters and laughter.

Then the Belgians arrived, and from that point on it’s chaos. Like wrinkly Darleks, they peer at everything through a single lens, and have little or no regard for the people they are pointing them at. At one point I watch the chief become confused and irritated in equal measure as he is pawed at and spun about whilst two of them take pictures of his tattoos. I’m surprised by his patience and wonder if he’s thinking back to the days when his tribe were headhunters. I am.

As entertainments, we all have a go with a blow gun and watch a cock fight (which is a bit weird, but the Belgians lap it up), then there’s dinner (a jostling melee for some of them that would make you believe they’d been starved for a week), and dancing fuelled by rice wine and whisky. An old couple try to befriend us, and I’m open to it until, not a moment after bragging that he knows Britain as well as any native, the male half of the couple asks me where I’m from and, confused, asks me where York is. ‘Yorkshire’, I joke. ‘Where’s that?’ he replies. After that I confine myself to talking to the locals.

After a night on a bed in the chief’s living room, the rain thrumming on the roof drowning out the snores, the Belgians bugger off, and Aki and the chief tell us stories about strange things that have happened to them in the jungle as we wait for the rain to ease off before heading out on a trek, (shortened at the chief’s advice as the river will be impassable to a feeble creature like me). I’m grateful, as it’s hot, heavy work getting up and down the steep hills, fording streams or balancing on wobbly poles like Indiana Jones, and the trails are treacherously slippery from the rain.  We have a lazy (and delicious) campfire lunch in the jungle, then hike back to the longhouse, Aki showing us the uses of plants as we go along, as well as some of the jungle trench defences from the incursion during the sixties. We also collect some huge pulsating beetle larvae from a rotting palm trunk – it’s hacked apart at bewildering speed with a parang. The smaller ones can be eaten live (they taste a bit like what they’re after – palm oil – with a hint of cheese), the larger ones we eat cooked later on (inevitably, more like chicken, with maybe a hint of squid). There’s another visitor when we get back, a German woman who is a wildlife photographer. She’s much more our speed, and tells us tails of a year spent alone in a car tracking Cheetahs. We have a much better evening, everyone’s more relaxed in fact the communal space is just as full as it had been the previous night and I start to appreciate the nature of the community and why the building suits it so well. Most of the things you can do in the evening can be done whilst sitting about chatting. The closest equivalent is a rather idealised and rosy version of the street life familiar to my parents and grandparents, the fading remnants of which I remember from my very early life. You know everyone who lives immediately about you, spend time with them, live alongside them, share your entertainments, ups and downs and make decisions as a group. Children know a larger variety of influences, there are extensive support networks, and everyone’s fates – indeed, their very thoughts – are deeply intertwined.

It makes me think about how isolated we are, and how new that is.

Another night passes and it’s time to leave, but there’s no rush. They’ve all decided to go planting (a romantic thing, I’m assured, as the boys dig the holes followed by a girl who plants the plant, and it’s an opportunity for young couples to spend some time together – and for the lads to impress the girls with how strong they are). The chief’s waiting for us by the dock and greets us warmly. My guide explains that the chief is surprised by us – we’re the only people who have visited him who do not take photographs. The chief smiles, nods, opens a big box of beer and passes me a can, then goes off to get about his day. ‘The chief says we’re to help ourselves’, says Aki, pointing to the box of beer and grabbing a can. ‘I’m not really that serious a Muslim’, he grins, and pops a can. When we leave, everyone waves. To say I’m chuffed is an understatement.

Back to Kuching and a night of drunken pool followed by a plane into the Indonesian part of Borneo. Due to the strangeness of plane journeys we’re stuck in a town called Pontianak for a day and two nights, but first we have to get through customs, which means purchasing a $25 temporary visa. The guidebook says they take sterling and Malaysian. They take dollars and Indonesian only, and we have neither. Though everyone seems nice enough, the grasp of English amongst those assembled is about as good as my grasp of the myriad local languages (i.e. rudimentary to the point of being effectively non-existent), and it’s some time before I can explain myself (my girlfriend’s input is essentially ignored, rendered invisible, inaudible and irrelevant because they aren’t coming from someone with a penis) and negotiate being taken under guard to a cashpoint on the other side of immigration while my passport and girlfriend remain behind as a guarantee that I won’t run off.

I would tell you something about Pontianak, other than that it’s named after a kind of ghost – but everything I could tell you is from a guidebook; or, rather, a very, very thin entry in a guidebook). It’s throwing it down by the time we’re settled into the hotel, and the next day is little better. As we’re tired, there’s very little to see, what there is to see is a long walk away (Pontianak is one of the most spread-out places I’ve ever seen) and the hotel is so very nice, we exploit the time to catch up with what we can over the internet and gather a little much-needed energy. So, back to the airport it is, and a sharp lesson in modernity – either you go into it whole-heartedly, or it’s a massively disrupting influence.

In the Malaysian parts of Borneo, the airports are thoroughly modern, shiny, and terrifically well-organised. That’s not really so surprising, as it’s generally thoroughly more developed and prosperous. The Indonesian parts of Borneo are… less slick. Pontianak airport is total chaos. We’re told to come three hours early, meaning that we get there well before the sun does, and already it’s busy. In most cases the only reason that I can tell apart the staff from the punters is that they’re not holding a box of their possessions bound up in cellophane. There are all of the usual airport trappings – security gates, scanners, check-in desks, monitors, luggage conveyors and rollers and so on, but nothing seems to be working quite how you’d expect. If the baggage scanners are working, no-one seems to give a toss about the three-foot razor-sharp knife in my bag. People freely walk behind the desks and shift people’s luggage about at random. The conveyor-scales are evidently broken – there’s an improvised set of scales in front of them which are consulted frequently, though seemingly at random, and a man crawls in and out of the hatch to transport the luggage through. The only monitor that’s display seems to be working is arrivals – hardly useful in departures – and everything else is labelled with hand-written notes or not at all. When we eventually reach the desk (it takes longer than it should take, as I have to hold two positions – my girlfriend apparently being something that can be ignored by anyone with a penis), we’re told to go away for an hour and a half, which we do, although I wish they’d mentioned that whilst I was still in bed. When we return they glance at our tickets and passports and fill out the boarding card by hand. There are about twenty boxes on the boarding card. They fill in two: my name, which they misspell to the point of getting my sex wrong, and a stamp for the destination. My bag goes into the weigh and drag pile (the various people operating that section have sci-fi powers of concentration). A puzzle regarding airport tax awaits us, another weirdly lax security check and we’re into the departure lounge. The screens work only on one of the four gates (all one room), and give us no information at all. I go for a cigarette. There’s a rat in the smoking room, but at least it brings a smile to my face; I quite like rats. We try to find out which gate is ours, but no-one seems to know. We determine to wait until five minutes before the plane goes and see what happens. There are no announcements for us, only for flights elsewhere, but as if by some sort of collective consciousness a queue begins to form. I surreptitiously look at other people’s passes, and I’m disappointed to discover that the stamp is different, but when a smiley girl appears to open the door, she tells me I’m in the right place. I shuffle onto a bus. The bus driver does a quick circuit and asks the passenger stood next to him which plane he should go to. The man seems to know. I’m less confident, so just in case, as we alight I ask the stewardess if we’re on the right plane. She nods and says ‘transfer’. I sit down. We take off. After a short flight we land somewhere else. I wonder if we have to get off to change planes. A lot of people are – then there is an announcement. After hearing the name of my destination through the mangled tannoy I realise that a few of us are staying behind. Yep – this plane is like a bus, and we’re to stay put until it arrives where we need it to be.

The town we arrive in – Pangkalan Bun – is a busy little splat of activity, and, after meeting our guide we jump in a car and bumble about for a while, working out way towards the docks while photocopying this and that permit and form and sliding a few notes into envelopes in that way that makes ‘official’ police and government fees feel just like the bribes they essentially are. Here and there we see large windowless buildings with tiny openings in the side – they are purpose-built nesting grounds for the swiftlets that make bird’s nest soup, a much more efficient solution than climbing up to cave roofs, I’m sure. We also notice a few recently burnt-out buildings. Government buildings, I’m told. Knowing the answer will be negative, but wanting to gauge the level of reaction, I ask if it was accidental. Everyone laughs. “I don’t think so,” says our guide.

We learn that there has been an election for the local representatives. Something very dodgy has gone on, and people are angry, but we don’t have the time to discuss such complex issues right then, so I determine to find out while I’m sailing up the river. In the meantime we spot a huge ferry full of immigrant workers over from Java, sent to find work in the palm oil plantations that whispers some of the truth of it.

We’ve hired a boat to take us on a lazy trip upriver to Camp Leakey – an Orang-utan rehabilitation centre up river in a large forest preserve.  On the way up and down we get to visit other centres and various projects, including a reforestation effort (there was fire). On the way, there was a chance to see lots of other wildlife, including crocs (finally I managed to see one although, despite the fact that due to crocs munching down on people there are signs everywhere telling you not to swim, the one I saw was only about three feet long) and more of my beloved cock-nosed monkeys. One last time – the male cock-nosed monkey (or proboscis monkey if you’re being technical) has a secondary sexual characteristic whereby it grows a huge wobbly cock-shaped nose; not only this, but due to its particular niche (eating leaves nothing else does) it has a big rounded torso which is ginger and looks a little like they’re wearing a life jacket, paired with white underpants and a permanent erection which is bright red and looks like a lipstick. Still they have a long-limbed grace that, coupled to a slight frown reminiscent of seriousness and concentration manages to help them look surprisingly human as they sit about on branches in a pose not unlike a person sitting in a chair. Best. Monkey. Ever.

Due a more relaxed attitude to interactions with visitors, and the fact that most of the orang-utans in the area are only second or third generation away from rescued creatures, they are a lot most social and less wild than the one’s we’ve encountered in the forests before. They’re a slightly different type too, noticeably harrier of body, with different facial features. As we progress up from brackish tidal area to freshwater, we’re taken to feeding platforms (sounds like more than it is – really it’s just a few logs to sit on and a raised platform where they can dump the food which is slightly more difficult for the local wild boar (the bearded pig) to thieve from. The Orang-utans are pretty indifferent to our presence and our fascination with their amazing, but very human climbing techniques – unless, that is, it’s the dominant male, and you’re standing in his way. Thus it was that I hear a panicked “move, move now!” as a tree bent nearly double above me and 160kg of furry red ape plunged towards me. Yeah I moved, and quick. He was big – not on the scale of the male Gorillas I saw in Africa, but definitely too big for me to be in the way. He bumbled off amiably enough, more interested by bananas than the increasingly pale guy scuttling up the path. “Wow, he’s big,” I pant to my guide, eyeing up the huge cheek pouches (indicative of his testosterone levels), tree-branch arms and huge plates of muscle across his back. I know from my reading that this guy’s arms and shoulders might be as much as ten times as strong as mine. Even the little females that budge out of his way as he crams bananas into his face have four times my arm strength.

“He’s not as big as Tom,” says my guide.

I meet Tom the next day. As we approach Camp Leakey, the waters turn translucent black, an infusion of fallen leaves exactly like strong black tea.  It’s quite beautiful. Somewhere up here is Princess, an Orang-utan who paddles a canoe. No-one taught her to do it, she just learnt by observing humans (although the suspicion amongst the rangers is that she only does it to show off). Percy, one of the young Orang-utans more interested by humans, is hanging around the docks. The boat’s captain grumbles and chuckles equally as Percy unhitches the ropes he’s trying to loop around trees. “Better put everything away you’re not carrying,” he advises, “Percy will probably steal it. Also, don’t carry anything in your pockets. Unless you want to lose your trousers.” Sound advice.

We wonder through the camp and about the forest for a while, as I quiz the guide about the local situation – he’s becoming increasingly confident with us, telling us little snippets here and there about what’s really going on. As we return to the camp there’s a policeman who’s come up to warn the boat captains that there’s increasing civil unrest in the town we’ve left behind, and I’ve learnt enough to know why – the guy everyone thought would win didn’t. The guy who won is thought to be in the pockets of the very companies that are gulping down the wilderness around me like the cookie monster on a chocolate-chip bender. There’s no time to dwell on this now, though because Tom’s about.

Although there’s a ban on tourists and guides feeding the Orang-utans, the apes are only a generation or two away from being heavily reliant on the camps for sustenance. Young orang-utans spend a decade with their mothers, and learn all of their habits, good and bad. Tom is no exception. He has his girl of the week with him (mating habits are basically rape when the girls are out of heat, a kind of one-at-a-time harem for the dominant male under better circumstances, and no responsibility for child-rearing by the males in any either circumstance), and he’s come to the camp because he’s peckish. They keep the food plain here, to encourage the Orang-utans to forage, but Tom needs to eat a lot. We stay out of his way, but close as he wanders up to the kitchens. Tom stands nearly as tall as I do, and weighs substantially more than twice as much, somewhere approaching 190kg. Each of his arms and shoulders must weigh as much as any of the guides by themselves. He leans against the kitchen wall, peering over the window. It’s such a human pose it’s easy to forget how wild he is – most visitors who come here would be lucky to glimpse him from a distance if they stayed here a week. The cooks quickly provide him with a bucket with some rice and milk in it. He scoops a little out a first, but that’s clearly a little frustratingly slow, so he peels the side of the bucket open as easily as I might tackle a banana. I wonder how much of the tiny budget this place survives on is spent on buckets.

Bearded pigs arrive, attracted by the food. They’re big, dumb and have tusks, and though I’ve learnt a trick of stamping at them to scare them off from the guides, they’re still pretty intimidating. Not for Tom; he just casually back-hands them in the face, and they stay away until their stupidity and appetite asserts itself one again and they start to come in. Eventually, bored with swatting them, Tom scoops a little of the rice-milk out of the bucket and places it on the ground near them then wonders off a short distance so they’ll stop annoying him. It’s wonderful, and I’m really starting to feel a little sense of how close a relative these apes are. That makes what happens next all the more harrowing to watch.

There’s a mother with a tiny child who steals out of the forest and fancies a bit of the rice and milk. Tom’s being giving an odd handful to his current squeeze, but he’s not having any of this – this is his food, and she is getting none of it. So, to like an abusive husband deciding to ‘teach her a lesson’, he begins to smack her about a bit. It’s fucking terrifying. The completely one-sided fight rolls towards me – I’m actually trapped by a couple of buildings, and have to climb over some stockpiled wood to stay out of the way, but it’s the sense of abuse that’s most disturbing. I realise that it’s ridiculous for me to be applying human moral structures to the situation, but they are so like us that my empathy with the female just screams through me.  I – and I’m sure everyone else around me – just want him to stop. There is no possibility of intervention – even if it was utterly inappropriate, one second of the treatment the female is receiving would probably kill me, and to no effect. She rolls into a ball, desperately trying to protect the infant she is carrying. After a few dreadful moments it stops. I don’t think Tom did her much actual damage, but she is certainly no longer interested in the contents of the bucket. Even the wild boars are looking more wary.

I’d encounter Tom again in the woods on the way back to the boat, after meeting many of the other local orang-utans and quite a few of the boars too at the feeding platform. On the way there, we’d encountered a grumpy, skinny female sat right in the middle of the path. “She’s unpopular with the others, they chase her off,” says a guide, then looks about to see if any of the other guides are about. After she refuses to let us pass, he sneaks her a banana. “We really shouldn’t do this, because they can become dependent and demanding, but the others are cruel to her,” he explains. Between her and Tom’s behaviour, and the moment later when the dominant female decides to block our route out seemingly motivated by little but boredom, a desire for attention and the amusement to be found in being awkward, I’m starting to understand just how close we are to these apes, in all ways.

We spend another two days in the forest reserve, one night spent watching thousands of fireflies light up the trees about with a fascinating display that makes an appropriate mockery of Christmas. We see many beautiful and fascinating things, and have a thoroughly romantic time of it, but I also talk to our guide and I’m starting to piece together a lot of what I’d seen myself on the river, from the plane, in the exhibits in the camps, in the books, on the internet, in the eyes and lives of the locals I meet along the river.

There are political problems everywhere, and in Malaysia there are political problems relating to the conservation of the forest of Borneo (not least the redistribution of wealth between the territories and the remoteness of the government from local issues), but in the Indonesian area – by far the biggest – they are turned up to eleven. There are conservation areas, but illegal logging – often by international companies – is rife. Palm oil plantations are spreading like cancer, and whatever the governments – both local and national – are saying they are doing to preserve the forests is a lie made of their encouragements for the companies. Often permission to clear an area is granted and the palms are never even established there – the real value, initially, at least, is in the price they can get for the hardwoods they chop down (despite the efforts of environmental groups, there is a hugely lucrative overseas markets – most notably in China and India – for heavy hardwood furniture, meaning that, as they become increasingly rare, some trees can be worth many thousands of dollars each). Chemical and mining companies spill poison into the rivers, with virtually no monitoring beyond the occasional reports from brave locals. Our guide is one such. He tells me that once he worked for one of the companies, until one day he followed an untreated chemical outflow to the river. He took pictures of it with his mobile telephone, and sent them to the local papers. Then, terrified by threats, he went to hide in the jungle for six months. The indigenous populations are shifted about, relocated at the convenience of the palm-oil companies or immigrant workers from other parts of Indonesia, as simultaneously the habitat they are dependent on for their way of life diminishes and they are forced to find work with the companies…

I could go on.

And I will, at least briefly. On the way back to the airport, we pass the lines for fuel rationing (guess which section of the population suffer the tightest regulations), and look out for the trouble. It seems pretty quiet. I strongly suspect a heavy boot might be the cause. I’ve pieced together some things that no-one wants to tell the white tourist guy in so many words – a lot of people suspect the elections are rigged. I don’t have any strong evidence either way, for the record.

My guide is something of an activist, it turns out (it’s not unusual – most of the guides I’ve met are deeply concerned with conservation issues and the politics around them, and becoming guides is work they can stomach; it’s just a bit scarier and more dangerous not to toe the line around where this guy lives). He has explained to me that what he’d really like to be is a photo journalist, working to try and get some evidence to bring some of these dodgy activities to account. He’s a very brave guy. He was saving up for a decent camera. Now he isn’t, in that last respect, at least – I gave him enough money to buy one. I tell him to be careful, but that what he wants to do is incredibly valuable. I hope he’s ok.

More planes await us. Jakarta airport (which varies from moment to moment between being one of the most serene airports I’ve ever visited and one of the most chaotic), where we try to book a hotel in Singapore. Should be easy, we’ve been doing this kind of last-minute booking on and off for weeks. No. What we don’t realise until after an hour of trying to book rooms in rammed hotels and hostels with strangely inflated prices is that the F1 is in town. When eventually we scrape a room out of what remains of the island’s accommodation, we need to rush to the plane and wonder at what awaits us. It is a thoroughly modern city, haunted by banshees.

Singapore is very much a return to civilisation – not the civilisation of Britain, but something brighter, shinier and slicker. Singapore airport, for example, is science-fiction made flesh in metal and glass. It’s friendly, (the girl behind the immigration desk flirts with me, there’s someone to help us organise getting a cab, when my girlfriend complains of a strained shoulder, someone helps us through and towards a car; it’s lovely, but kind of creepy at the same time – I’m British, I’m used to shabby places with unhelpful disgruntled staff). Reality returns however, as the half-blind cab driver asks us repeatedly for directions to our hotel. We forage about for maps as best we can. His eyesight is so poor he can’t read them. I’m starting to wonder if we’ve booked somewhere obscure, but no – it’s a perfectly respectable place. The next day, after I’ve spent some time exploring the city, it’s microbreweries and street life, all amidst the eerie shrieks of the F1 engines that bounce about the tower blocks like swooping, angry ghosts, something similar happens – drunk, I’m expected to instruct the cabby on which way the one-way systems around the city are set up. By applying educated guesswork (counting likely alternately-orientated routes along major roads from one known example on an unmarked map turns out to be a very reliable method, should you ever need to do this), I manage to get us home, to dwell upon why I am so annoyed by Singapore.

Well, it’s expensive for a start, and not just incidentally. It’s conspicuously affluent, and as we want to see the exciting bits (meaning, to some extent, I suppose, the ‘cool’ expensive bits), and there’s a lot of F1 related wealthy euroscum about, it’s actually pretty vulgar. The pointless draconian laws (chewing gum is illegal, for fuck’s sake) and quiet obedience I’ve gotten used to in south-east Asia coupled to a few quick encounters that illustrated to me exactly the problem that Borneo faces.

I’ve always been keen on the blurring of national boundaries (for me, mere historical contingencies that do little but feed the rather negative aspects of human psychology – namely, xenophobia and tribalism) in an effort to make the world a less divided and fairer place on the grand scale. One of the negative consequences of such a desire is the repression of local cultural diversity and the fostering of a global monoculture, and steps much be taken to ensure that this doesn’t happen. However, there are two trends that are competing to define the framework in which such an internationalisation of cultures might occur it seems to me that we are going about it in exactly the wrong way. Firstly, we could be fostering political structures that concentrate on securing rights, freedoms, fairness and representation on the global stage for as many people as possible. This is public politics, but however we might dress it up, it is an application of power. The second method, however, is just the raw application of power, not by publically responsible groups, but by individuals with power. Normally, that means money.

I’m in one of Singapore’s trendy overpriced bars, and two guys next to me – clearly involved in finance – are discussing deals. At first I’m trying to ignore them – they are clearly British ex-pat finance brats and arsehole of the highest order. Eventually however, their drunken shout debate starts to worm its way through my earwax. They are discussing the creation of some sort of land development portfolio – something an investor might buy, hoping to make a spot of cash as the developments ‘mature’. What are they buying up for this? Bits of places where people live where companies are expanding their industrial interests, especially in new territory, where profits can be maximised. Remind you of anywhere?

I have no idea if their investment strategy will be successful – for all I know, it’s just drunken bollocks, and no one does this at all – but what it illustrated to me is the way that the wealthy of the world and the systems that support them think about it. I overheard lots of similar conversations whilst I was there, not on that specific topic, but that thought of things in this utterly abstracted way. What the things which you own and invest in actually do is immaterial – they value lies not in interested ownership, but in utterly disinterested ownership, in raw transaction. It’s not an immoral activity, exactly, but it’s utterly unconcerned, purposefully made completely amoral. Except that, of course, the less moral and more exploitative the activity invested in, the more money it is liable to make. Amorality encouraging and investing in immoral practices in order to increase the disparity in the worlds wealth, coupled to a drive for expansion. This drive for expansion means that the attitude is effectively exported to places where the local people have absolutely no understanding of it, or any possibility of interaction with it. By various levels of abstraction I was in a place that was the brain that drove the arm that drove the hand that wields the axe that clears the forests I love so much. Yes, there is responsibility at the company level, and the individual level on the ground, and the governmental levels that allow this, but this is an application of power; huge, irresistible power, crushing all before it, magnifying a joke made over a power-lunch to the slashing of thousands of hectares of the rainforest.

Make no mistake, this is bringing about a global monoculture alright; the hard way. It’s knocking down irrelevant and essential arbitrary national boundaries too, but not in the interests of the people (or, rather, it’s very much in the interests of an incredibly tiny number of people, at the expense of the rest of humanity). The alternative method stuff is reduced to just running about after it, trying to mop up the fallout from the worst atrocities and giving the whole process a little positive spin. That’s the wrong way around, and if we allow the irresponsibility and exploitation to come first before the knowledge, education, freedom, responsibility, awareness and involvement, we shouldn’t be surprised if it ends in disaster.

‘But society requires economic growth, right?’ Fuck that. We need biodiversity, rainforests, a stable climate. Oxygen, for fuck’s sake. It took 300 million years to generate the environment I’d been exploring. It’s not going to be easy to re-establish it if we chop it all down because somehow we feel we need to let the financial sector bloom beyond all reason. That blossom is a mushroom cloud.

The phrase ‘Abraham Lincoln and the Bat Exodus’ is one which – akin to a piece of ‘found art’ displayed out of its natural context – is wonderful in and of itself, and when found, seemed rather mundane at first. We shall come to its natural surroundings shortly, but for now I shall let it hang, dangled before you, as if it were the start of some delightfully obtuse science fiction story or the title of an 80’s cult classic.

The first part of my ‘adventure’ (adventure to me; cosy all-too well arranged overplanned luxurious trip to a seasoned skinny deep-tanned be-dreadlocked travellers; frighteningly ramshackle, scruffy and outright dangerous botch-job to those who pay through the nose and rectum for an organised package tour to fewer of exactly the places I’m going and cruise about in sunglasses worth much the same as the entire contents of my backpack)  through Borneo actually occurred in the most civilised place I have ever been – with an exquisite meal in an up-market restraint in Kuala Lumpur. Six courses of food, each as perfectly-formed as computer chip to push and program my palate as close to orgasm as that facility allows, at a price that was – if relatively extravagant according to the rest of the trip – not uncomfortable to my future prospects. I fancy that, to pay for a similar experience in my home country, I would have had to sell all my possessions and pretend to some tight-mouthed besuited wanker that I intended to buy a house. ‘KL’ – as all the cool kids (and everyone else) call it – is a funny old city. It simmers under the sun, quivering as if the repressed sexual energy of fourteen million people is being harnessed to serve an infernal engine at its core. They seem friendly enough, for all that strain. It was then that I noticed Colonel Sanders – very late of Kentucky – staring out of every other street corner, car window, and even the monorail map. He has stealthily hunted us throughout the rest of our trip.

Borneo arrived to me in the form of Kota Kinabalu (‘KK’ to the cool kids and… oh, I already made that joke) a sort of amalgam of London and Bridlington, with a climate that is the very definition of sweaty. I only stay for one night – a pleasant evening spent gently poisoning myself with ethyl alcohol by the sea, staring at bobbing fishing boats and jungle-covered islands whispering the suggestions of the 120 million-year-old environment at my back. Everywhere around me are the actions of moisture. The sea lazily laps and all people prepare for the inevitable deluge that always sits mere hours away, but it is the stuff in the air that assaults everything the most. The centre of KK is quite swanky, but decay is always in the post – there’s nothing to do about it but sit and wait for it to arrive. Concrete and iron and all the similar conventions of the world must rot before it, and even the newest buildings already show the stain. I wonder if they do before they are finished. I wonder if the stainless steel and glass of the Petronas Towers will fare any better (I had started to notice it KL), or if we should just wrap everything in sight in cling-film and freezer-bags (which, incidentally, is what has been done to all of my possessions for the duration, on the advice of someone or another, via my girlfriend). As Always, my ideas come to nothing but the bottom of a beer glass, and after a night in an air-conditioned cell (four walls, a bed, enough space to just about open the door and the supreme luxury of my very own crapper), I am away to the actual reasons I am here – wildlife, scenery, being back in the jungle. First, the first – wildlife.

“Did you see that wildlife documentary?”

“Which one?”

“The one with the turtles?”

“Where they go back to the same island where they were born to give birth and then all the little turtles go running out…”

“Oh yeah!”

I watched that the other day, live. The mother struggling along the beach, the laying of the eggs, their collection by the rangers and protection lavished upon them, the release of little bits of rubbery clockwork into the ocean (the babies, who, for all their cuteness, reminded me of Zoids in scuba-gear), beneath stars so clear you can look into the core of our galaxy and truly know your own insignificance. Yes there were a few other people there, and, yes, there were fools with cameras that could be sold to double the number of turtle sanctuaries jostling about me, but the scathing reviewer from lonely planet who described it as ‘a circus’ to which I should ‘bring a book’ and as ‘unappealing [to] conservations and nature-lovers’ is an idealistic fuckwit.

The next day, it’s an Orang-Utan (never, ever just ‘Orang’ – that just means ‘people’, you, me, everyone else, and –Utan means ‘of the forest’ in much the same way as Oran-Ulu mean ‘remote people’, or, as one of them described it to me the other day ‘people from much further up the river’) rehabilitation centre – essentially my ‘I am almost guaranteed to see one here even if I’m the unluckiest man in the world for the rest of my trip’ slot. I saw a bunch, one with a child (and some annoying Macaques, which define the term ‘cheeky monkey’, and who were nearly beaten senseless by one of the Orag-Utans for nicking fruit). Then it was ‘river safari’ time, and a quick note of thanks to my girlfriend is in order here, who managed to arrange this for a price which, after I talk to some of the others around me, she managed to arrange using her mysterious powers of google-fu at a fraction of the going rate.

I’m living quite the life, eh? Well, I dress from charity shops, make as many things as I can for myself, repair my own car and eat almost exclusively from the discounted section of the supermarket so I can do things like this. Pick your own priorities.

Cock-nosed monkeys (or ‘proboscis’, if you want to be a pedant – as it’s a secondary sexual characteristic that only appears in the males and is the physical equivalent of a scream about their breeding prowess, so I stand by my own nomenclature), abound along the Kinabatangan river.  As do lots of other things. To give you a list would be dull, and of no value as there are numerous guidebooks that would be far more comprehensive, and wouldn’t insist on calling the Cock-nosed monkey a Cock-nosed monkey. Big, fat monitor lizards were something of a highlight, as was a cave the size of a cathedral full of bat-shit and birds-nests-of-soup fame (no, I’m not joking, but there are more caves to come, so be patient). Those of a twitchy persuasion (meaning bird-fanciers rather than Tourette’s sufferers) were in whatever passes for twitcher heaven (I’d imagine the angels are feathered all-over and everyone is equipped with a camera lens the size of an ICBM). The rest of us quietly agree that the highlight would be a crocodile eating a Macaque. That doesn’t happen, but plenty of other stuff does.

I go deeper in to the jungle, to a wonderful little preserve called Danum Valley. Here there be leeches. We play with them. And we track Orang-Utan. And we sweat and we climb bloody great big hills and we watch Gibbons and we find a stick insect that’s about half a meter long, and… and… I spend the hours of one day between 6.30 and 8.00 following an Orang-Utan through the jungle. Just following him as he goes about his day. They’re careful not to feed them here (such things result not only in dependency, but also the unpleasantries associated with intelligent creatures getting to know that you probably have food in your bag that’s a lot tastier than wasp-infested figs). Orang-Utan tend to come down to the forest floor to ‘drink’ – they get most of their water from what they eat, but they supplement it with young ginger shoots – and big males find following the kind of forest trials that we can a lot easier than ploughing straight through the underbrush. Because they’re not idiots. As long as you don’t get in the way, they don’t really care, so there we were. Following Abu as he went about his morning. The jungle is wonderful, and I am re-absorbed, remembering why I loved it so the last time – that, despite the heat, the exhaustion, the insects and the leeches, it’s so alive, it pushes in through your pores and jams life right into the core of you. You are a part of it, one symbiotic cell amongst countless trillions, breathing and pulsing along with its rhythms, and as long as you are there, it’s in you, and some of it will never leave.

See? See why I never ‘upgrade’ my car?

Anyway, as you can imagine, I saw a lot of other stuff too (I have, it has to be said, seen a remarkable number of different types of squirrel in the last couple of weeks, civets, apes, monkeys, lizards as well as many, many insects of wondrous variety – on the average bush in Borneo’s rainforests, there are as many ant species as there are in the entire British Isles). Still, this isn’t a game of competitive tourism (a childish thing I like to play to sound out if the other travellers around me are cock-head monkeys, and have made into the most sarcastic card game I could). Which brings us right along…

After another couple of days trying not to interact too expensively with KK, the highlight of which was watching the ’no tits’ edit of Conan (what is it about Abrahamic religions that mean that it’s alright to watch a person mercilessly injure another, or plough their way sword-first through thousands, but treat the perfectly normal naked body and sexual activity –something that we all have, and all do –  as if it were an appalling, jiggling atrocity so immeasurably awful that the human mind must be shielded from it at all turns? As we never get to see Conan actually express his sexuality, it kind of turns it into even more of a giant metaphorical rape-fantasy than it already is. It’s ridiculous, but the tortured cuts completing with distressed soundtrack wailing made it a good, cheap, laugh) and meeting an energetic ex British army officer called Jimmy in a bar. He now works as a jungle survival consultant and lives in a remote village hunting his own food and being manly. He’s like a cross between Bear Grills and Tigger, and gives us a few sage words of advice. We bump into him again in a rubbishy little town called Miri. I determine to base a character upon him at some point.

A short plane hop (we’re taking these little twin-engined Otter things in between places, as everything else means one way or another we spend roughly the same amount but take about a year to do all this) and enter Sarawak – specifically the Mulu National Park. Where they have caves. Huge bloody great big caves, formed over an age that makes your back teeth ache and so very, very pretty that you know part of your mind won’t ever quite retain the glory of its accidentally enrapturing delight. The city I live in is old, it makes a joke of a single lifespan. I drink in pubs that’s foundations are contemporary with Jesus. These places gleam with an age that scoffs at man. And they are populated by bats. Well, some of them are. Some of them have nothing but a few little blind things and snakes that perch on the wall waiting for them to fly by – I went on a little trip deep into the heart of the mountain that let my find one of these. A tough morning’s work, but well worth it. Mulu’s little series of bungalows and hostels (a hell of a lot cheaper than the resort and right in the heart of things), is, however, a little too much like the world’s coolest Butlins for my tastes (intoxicated as I am with the exquisite low-impact exclusivity of the Danum valley), most routes marked with sensible boardwalks or concrete paths. The wildlife just doesn’t seem as close, nervous, perhaps, of the high population of golden, tanned, muscular white boys reeking of privilege and affluence desperate to prove their manhood against the environment, their skinny, hard-cut aerobicised girlfriends in artfully-ripped designer Daisy-Dukes along for the ride. I do much the same as them (save for the more ridiculously macho climbs –  going up a flight of stairs in this heat is as difficult as Conan getting some sleazy love-action in the local edit), pulling my soft self up the slopes and ropes with pure bloody-mindedness and the promise of a cigarette at the top. The guides, more used to men of my flabby physique hiring boats and wheezing to a standstill half-way along  the routes chuckle as I squeeze the legacy of too much beer and sitting on my batty writing stories eight days out of each seven through gaps in limestone and tell me they have even deeper caverns and higher peaks to show me the next time I come, and have stopped being quite so amusingly fat. I don’t mention that I estimate I’ve already lost something in the region of ten kilos.

I wonder at my place. Clearly the beautiful youths cannot number me amongst the white-haired-last chance-to-do-something-before-one-of-us dies-crowd; sometimes they talk to me, for a start. Do they laugh at me quietly, fearful of their own future, that I might represent some fate they wish to avoid? Clearly, I am the same age as the hard-core adventure crowd, the serious-looking, stubble-you-could-start-a-fire-with euro hardmen, but far too jokey and pouring with sweat to be one of them. Neither am I the techno great-white hunter, proto-wildlife photographer with equipment that could pick out the Voyager probe on a cloudless night. Maybe they know me for what I am; but if they do, they are doing better than me.

One quiet evening after exploring some more caves – one that, from a certain angle, in a certainly light, has a rock that looks like the profile of Abraham Lincoln, I watch the three million bats pulse in helixes from the mouth of an enormous cave (it’s almost impossible to describe how big some of these caves are. The one deep in the mountain that I wouldn’t fit through the gaps to get to would easily accommodate forty jumbo jets; the one I witnessed the ‘bat exodus’ from has a maw some two hundred meters wide by one hundred meters high).

After more treks and more caves –  some, nervy, unguided treks along marked paths but still deep in the forest – we hop back to Miri, an oil (crude and palm) town where the owner of the bar I drink in parks his brand-new Ferrari outside (he has many similar vehicles available to rent, apparently, and later a punter drives it off and it is replaced with a Bentley Continental GT  – I wonder, given the nature of the roads out here, how far from the bar they could be driven).  Miri’s a bit rubbish, frankly, and we quickly set off on a last-minute trip to another cave at Niah. It’s a fair old trek with lots of stairs (although after the Danum hill trek and the caving, I’m pretty much used to having to replace all the water in my body twice a day), the first signs of human habitation in south-east Asia, some cave paintings, and probably the most awe-inspiring sight I’ve ever witnessed. A colossal, ancient cave. A tiny collapse in the ceiling. Bats and swiftlets dart about amidst a shaft of light shining at just the right angle to illuminate a huge column of stone like an office block covered in slowly-accreted curtains of glittering calcium carbonate. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find an occult ceremony being performed at its top. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t, although Conan (tits or no-tits) would have felt right at home here.

And so, beer, writing this, and off from Miri to the much more interesting Kuching. I shall update you all later.  There is much more I should tell you, especially about the crappy side of things – the scarred hillsides, logging boats and sense that all this is steadily being turned into a giant theme-park, but I fear I’ve demanded too much of your time already gloating over what a great time I’m having.

Oh, ‘Abraham Lincoln and the Bat Exodus’ was written on a poster at Mulu park HQ. I feel a comedy alt-history piece of flash-fiction coming on…

The mistake made time and time again is to search for that kind of reasons that concentrate on ‘deserving’. “Why has this happened to us?” asks one. “We’re decent people.” “They are attacking decent people! DECENT, NICE, GENTLE POLITE PEOPLE!” It’s as if the targets were the result of a higher reason, that mistreatment and arson should only ever be the result of some kind of punishment. It’s as if they’re asking the question not of the looters and vandals, but of God. Worse, that there appears to be no explanation of that type, the reaction is that those perpetrating these acts shows a lack of something – basic morality or even reason. ’They are just criminals’ they say, to make them something other than people. To make them the other, the enemy, something disgusting and revolting that we can just hate.

But they aren’t. They are people doing revolting things.  The dark truth is that this very attitude is the cause – not the ridiculous notion of ‘deserving’ this fate or that fate, but this identification of the ‘others’ – the non-decent people. The fact is that for a large number of people, joining in just isn’t possible. We won’t allow it. They are ‘the others’, the ‘criminals’, the ‘hooligans’. The ones from which we must protect ourselves, never wanting to dwell on the fact that for some people, there was never much of an opportunity to’ join in’ in the first place.

It’s something ‘reasonable’, ‘right’ and ‘good’ people say everyday with their behaviour, selfishness, law, the focus on profit and not people: “You are not one of us. We are the right kind of people. You are something else, something less worthwhile. You don’t get to have a nice life. You don’t get to have all of these lovely things we have because you don’t join in properly. You didn’t do what we said. You’re not nice or polite and we don’t want you around we won’t help you get out of the situation, we’ll just police you and manage you, assuming that you will always be nothing but a problem to us. You’re just not nice are you? You’re Chavs. You’re scum. Fuck you.” In this view the police exist to ‘protect us from them’, they are the enemy. We are in charge. Society serves ‘us’. The fundamental function of everything is to promote our lives. If people want to flourish, they must become like us. That’s why so many supposedly liberal people have suffered a little fright over this and are suddenly calling for the government to send in the army. They despise these ‘others’ these ‘rats’ that demonstrate how not everybody is just the same lovely nice person they are. How being a lovely nice person is something you can resent. Because at base, it’s not that they’re lovely and nice – it’s that they have a lovely nice life, and that as long as that continues, they don’t actually give two shits about anything else. Is it any surprise that those people alienated by this very approach, never quite right enough to be included, hit out at what’s immediately around them? People ask ‘why would they attack their own homes? Because this is not their home. This is just an environment around them. It has never welcomed them. Their only home is the pack of lads they run with.

They are not demons. They are not the enemy. They’re irresponsible, violent and thoroughly unpleasant kids. One way or another, we have failed them, failed to include them, alienated and criminalised them, considered them as the enemy. Jammed into rotten piss-stained, drug-saturated blocks; desolate deprived dump estates to store those who are not to be included, but are just problems to be managed; where the only time you meet the police (the bully-boy force of the ‘nice’ people who are in charge), they are arresting your mates or beating up your cousin, where you’re excluded from school after school, and you never have enough money regardless of what you do, and you have to be tough or you are a walking target.

The rioters don’t know any of this in the explicit terms I am using. These guys wouldn’t even know who was to blame – neither the name of the person nor even the existence of their position. They aren’t ‘working out’ that this is what to do, but they are at the receiving end of all the horror of our political decisions. They are products of them, acting in total ignorance of what has caused the conditions of their awful attitude. We have made them into what we feared – people with no stake in society, who feel they have nothing to lose, who’s only pleasure is in making trouble, upsetting the status quo, making everything into the wasteland they inhabit. We have presumed them our enemy, and in doing so, made the very enemy we defined. Make this the shape for the energy of youth (particularly the testosterone-fuelled violence of all young men), and suddenly this makes perfect sense. I heard two teenage girl rioters being interviewed by the BBC. ‘We are showing the police that we can do what we want.’ ‘But you are attacking your own communities. Why are you targeting your own communities?’ the interviewer asked.  ‘No, just the rich people.’ They reply. ‘Shops and businesses. We are just showing the rich people we can do what we want.’ Another says ‘they’ve got no respect for us, when they start respecting us, we’ll respect them back.’ Some will grow out of this attitude, others never do. Either way, they just aren’t seeing it in the same terms as those who are trying to understand it. This isn’t a particularly well-thought-out series of acts, there’s no real guidance to it – it is a demonstration of power. A rolling statement – we are here, and we can act anyway we like, and you cannot stop us. They have identified with the way we have treated them – as something else, as the other, and they are asserting themselves.

There has been an edge of this as long as I have known life, and far before that too. Resentment of the lives of those around them, misery in their own existence, no sense of belonging to a community, a sense that the wider society actively rejects you; no pride, everything a harsh, shitty situation. Every town centre and council estate in Britain is has been at the edge of this every day for the whole of my life. It might be something of a surprise to those from the ‘nice’ parts of towns, but burnt-out cars and smashed-up shops and vandalised police cars are a pretty common sight when you live in the not-so-affluent areas. There are areas the police don’t go except en-mass for raids – essentially treated as enemy-held territory – and there have been for decades.

We have failed to correct this – something which has been staring us in the face. More accurately – we have refused to. Because we want to blame them – their parents, their natural inclinations; in some cases, even their race. What we refuse to do is address that their situation is what is to blame. And we refuse to address this because it is OUR FAULT.  It is disgusting that in a society as affluent as ours we choose to repress, abandon and condemn; let people rot with no prospects or opportunities, because it is convenient to us that they do. It is a disgrace that people live in such conditions. It is a disgrace that we make them our enemies. It is disgraceful that we blame them for their fate to hide our own responsibility.

Still almost everything I read is this – ‘we must take back control.’ ‘We’ here meaning ‘the good people’, the people whom we assume society is supposed to serve. The right, the just. Here is the truth – society exists to help its weakest and most vulnerable members. That is IT. That is what it is for. It is not a way of increasing your house prices or imposing one set of advantages onto you at the expense of someone else having a really miserable life. It is not a weapon to be used to give your children an advantage over someone else’s. The Conservative rhetoric will speak about how we need to get values like respect imprinted on these youths. How can we do them when we show nothing but contempt for them? The very last thing society is about is abandoning people to their fate just because you don’t like the look of them or the way they speak. We have failed to recognise this, and we are reaping the consequences. It is not surprising that the last time this happened, there was a similar mood to our politics. The last thing we must allow is for this to be used as an excuse for draconian, repressive measures and right-wing policy to become law. His will only turn these areas into little more than concentration camps. Vast prisons for the unworthy. You can’t solve this with a boot heel – or at least you shouldn’t. The very last thing you should be doing is closing community centres and youth projects and so on. People don’t destroy communities they feel part of. You want to stop this happening again? Stop making yourself enemies. Recognise that these people aren’t some abstracted ‘other’. They are us, and it’s about time we embraced that.

In the early eighties, my consciousness started to emerge, probing tentatively at the world, and, as is the nature of the process, promptly fell in love. Of course, being a small child, the target of my affections was not restricted to the mundane conventions of flesh and blood. My darling was called Columbia, and though I still have great affection for all of the Shuttle orbiters, Columbia was mine. The moonshot – arguably the greatest ever human achievement – was a brute fact when I was young (to a child, something that happened fifteen years ago is contemporary with Napoleon and/or Julius Caesar) and through the minute glimpses which are all that remain of those early, forming pieces of my life, the Shuttle was always there, a beautiful angel on a pillar of fire.

How many times have you heard someone say, ‘When I was a kid, I always wanted to be an astronaut’? There is a good reason for that. For many of us lucky enough to be born in the first world of the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s or the early 80’s, the single most exciting word in the English language was ‘space’. At the tail end of this group, were myself and my contemporaries. We were the Star Wars kids, living in a cold-war world where the darkest nuclear fantasies may have sat upon the tips of a million all-too real rockets, but our brightest hopes were also tangible. The Shuttle was our guarantee that when we rushed about the playground making zapping noises in our x-wings, it wasn’t all a lie. This handsome thing, a space plane bigger than a truck that looked like it was drawn in the margins of an exercise book during double maths – or perhaps lifted from the cover of a science fiction novel – was there. Impossibly potent, improbably beautiful; screaming from its launchpad, floating over the clouds in the quiet infinite night, then riding a path of fire through the sky only to glide serenely to its rest. I adored it more even than the other kids, being one of those who could tell at a glance which orbiter was which as my parents squinted to find any differences. This was a time when we had a grand choice of iconic engineering masterpieces to choose from: Concord, SR-71Blackbird, F-14, F-15 and F-16 fighter jets, super-fast Bullet Trains, enormous nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines, attack-helicopters, supercars. Our toys were all jet planes, fast cars and spaceships (or robots that turned into jet planes, fast cars and spaceships). We watched Knight Rider and Airwolf and re-runs of Battlestar Galactica. The king of them all, for me, though, was still the Shuttle, and only much later did I realise how many of my toys in some way reflected the design of it, the feel of it, the mood it had.

Of course, then came the Challenger disaster. My earliest distinct memory.

The sad fact is that if you’re only a year or two older than me, the Shuttle wasn’t the focus of your life. Space wasn’t the most exciting word. It wasn’t just that the terrible tragedy that claimed the lives of Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis and Judith Resnik that made us look away. It was that suddenly there was no progress being made. For three years the Shuttle was grounded, and those voices that had been saying that space was a dead-end, a high-risk, expensive and foolhardy indulgence, began to shout. Though the later moon missions had demonstrated that people only had a finite amount of enthusiasm for space exploration, the quiet following the Challenger disaster was the end of momentum.

Now, despite relying on technology on a day-to-day basis that depends not only on technological developments that arose from the space industry, but actual objects that the Shuttle carried into orbit, they see space exploration as a waste of time. Several PhD’s I’ve spoken to didn’t even know of the existence of the International Space Station. (You’ll probably be unsurprised to know that I consider it a duty to correct this appalling situation, but there are limits to what I can do). The sad fact is, however, that the Shuttle itself is somewhat to blame for this, as much by dint of its successes as its failures.

The first truly re-usable space vehicle, the Shuttle was supposed to be all things to all people. Not only capable of lifting heavy payloads into orbit, it was also to provide space for experimentation and crew-testing. More than anything else it was supposed to be used A LOT, and be a really cheap way of routinely pumping material into orbit. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. The Shuttle was quite expensive – not expensive in the way that the Apollo missions were, but it was not the cheap space truck intended. Heavier than expected (which is a big deal when your job is to lift other things into orbit) it also didn’t have the quite the cargo capacity it was supposed to. Though NASA insisted for a while that it be used for almost all launches, in the wake of the Challenger disaster, commercial satellite loads became smaller, and found cheaper disposable launch systems, and even the military had been forced to find alternative launch systems for its heavy payloads. The Shuttle had a much longer turn-around time than had been anticipated, and required a large support crew. It was supposed to launch once a week. In fact, the quickest turnaround ever (Atlantis) was 54 days. After Challenger, the record (Columbia) was 88. The Shuttle is very complicated, and this not only means that it requires lots of maintenance, but it’s often plagued by technical hiccups and so commonly misses launch windows. As I learned about engineering and physics, I came to understand that these problems mostly stem from the odd-piggy-back configuration of the Shuttle. In terms of firing something into orbit, it’s a nightmare – there’s a reason why it’s the only rocket in the world that looks like that. Worse still, there’s no obvious way to give the Shuttle an abort mode. The reasons for this are consequences of the requirement for reusability – essentially the problem is how to mount the main engines on an orbiter. Strangely, however, despite all these difficulties, both before and after The Challenger disaster, it also made getting into orbit seem routine, even when it clearly wasn’t. Even geeky enthusiasts like me felt no need to be glued to the television for every launch and landing. This, in part was because the Shuttle payloads were commonly rather uninspiring (sometimes classified, too). The Shuttle actually did achieve almost all of its aim’s, but not anything like as well, in any regard, as it might have. Later missions would be of much more interest, but by then it was too late. The damage had been done. Space was boring, something for geeks and weirdos.

Then there was the secondary impact of those costs and slow turn-around times. Probes and robotic exploration are one thing – a very great and important thing – but nothing quite fires the imagination as much as putting a human being somewhere. The ISS scores somewhat on this ‘public imagination’ thing, and dollar for dollar, it might seem to contribute more to the sum of human knowledge, but the fact is, a goodly proportion of human beings who are going to get behind any space program, are thrilled by exploration. There’s only one word that really grabs at them now, and it’s Mars. I can barely bring myself to say it – and it is hardly the Shuttle’s fault – but it could be argued that, had NASA not thrown everything it had at the Shuttle rather than pursuing a mix of a couple of Shuttles coupled to smaller launch solutions and possibly the continuation of the Saturn V program, we might have seen a human being walk on Mars by now. MIGHT.

But that’s not what happened, and like any lovesick fool, my affections blinded me a little to the flaws of my crush. I didn’t care. The Shuttle was what we had, and it had done so many great things. It hadn’t fulfilled its potential, but amongst its many achievements, we had a permanently-manned International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope – both incredible marvels of the modern age. Arguably, the Space program, despite being a product of it, ended the cold war, and the Shuttle played a huge role in that. Now the space programs of former enemies are so integrated that whilst America sorts out its new launch system, the bogeymen they once checked under their beds for are launching their astronauts up to the ISS (which, incidentally, might be the greatest symbol of international cooperation ever constructed).

Then on February 1, 2003 my heart broke. That morning, somewhere over Texas, my beloved Columbia disintegrated. When I visited the memorial at the Kennedy Space Centre, I looked over the names of those lives my love had taken, and cried for them: Rick D. Husband, William C. McCool, Michael P. Anderson, Ilan Ramon, Kalpana Chawla, David M. Brown and Laurel Clark. At the time of the tragedy, and though my adult self recognised that the real tragedy were the heroic individuals who died, the child I always will be wept for Columbia. My Shuttle was gone. I’d never even seen it in the flesh. It was just a thing, a collection of components, but I still loved it.

As time and money allowed, I tried to watch a launch – Discovery (my second-favourite, yep: I have an order). I saw it on the pad, but for technical reasons, the launch was cancelled time and again, and eventually I just couldn’t afford to stay (for the best I didn’t try really – the eventual delay was something like six months). I had my fun partaking in a simulated mission (your humble author can report that, as Mission Commander, he successfully landed the vehicle first time – just), gawped at the massive Saturn V, sniffed my way sentimentally through every exhibit I could find and lectured my poor patient friends about every aspect of everything I saw. I got to talk to a couple of astronauts, both remarkable, inspiring and modest people. They are almost certainly the two most satisfied individuals I have ever met. Inevitably, the subject of Challenger and Columbia came up. Both focussed on the fact that both accidents were preventable, that warnings had not been heeded, and that safety considerations had not been tight enough. Both remained utterly proud of the program and its many achievements, and that is how I came to understand the truth about the Shuttle.

A lot of the supposed negative impact of the Shuttle is just an illusion created out of impossible expectation.  NASA took a gamble with the Shuttle, and it didn’t quite come off as well as they’d hoped. Constantly under budget pressure, yet expected to maintain the spectacular achievements of the Apollo program, NASA did what it always had done – it threw itself with whole-hearted enthusiasm at what it could, and hoped to succeed. How could it fail? As they say a lot around NASA – ‘failure is not an option.’ Well, they didn’t fail. They just didn’t do quite as well as they had before – which was to surpass the hopes of a nation and achieve more than any other nation had ever done. By undertaking the design and construction of a reusable space vehicle with 70’s technology that was to fulfil every role that was asked of it, NASA’s engineers were more ambitious than we common mortals can understand. What they aimed for was at the far edge of possibility. What’s remarkable is that they got so close. What they created is a poem of engineering, flawed but wondrous. And had the administration paid only a little more attention to safety consideration, we might well have had another four years of missions, even more achievements to proclaim. And with only a little more money, nothing else would have to have been sacrificed to achieve it.

It wasn’t expensive, really. Even if they were to bill every taxpayer directly (of course, the U.S. government also collects taxation in a variety of other ways, in some cases on the profits of international companies – so it doesn’t actually even cost this much to each U.S. Citizen), the current entire NASA budget costs each U.S citizen just over $50 A YEAR (in reality, I was told by an astronaut that the average direct taxation to fund NASA for each U.S. citizen actually amounts to only just over $20). I recently calculated that Rupert Murdoch’s company has avoided U.S. taxes in the last four years alone to the tune of ELEVEN ENTIRE SHUTTLE MISSIONS, including all turnaround costs, wages and so on. We could more than double the entire NASA budget if just 4% of the rest of us were willing to chuck in a pound a week. The mistake was in NASA’s level of commitment to the Shuttle program, that it had to do everything, that it had to be right, that it was the only game in town and this was a matter of lack of funding, a lack of will on the part of the American government, who would rather throw money away in bombs and bullets than support their achievements.

It wasn’t a failure. It didn’t quite manage to achieve what it set out to – making runs to low-earth orbit easy, cheap and routine, but it achieved so much that this is immaterial. What it didn’t do is completely unimportant when compared to what it did. The Shuttle got more types of people into orbit than ever before. No longer did you have to be an airforce test pilot – you didn’t even have to be an American. Through 135 missions it built a space station, performed countless experiments, and gave us access to the deepest secrets of the universe through Hubble.

On the morning of July 21, 2011, Atlantis landed, and ended the Shuttle program.

Bye bye you beautiful thing. By comparison, everything else just looked like a controlled explosion.

Two days ago, Osama Bin Laden was killed, along with his son. Some accounts say that his wife was also shot whilst trying to protect him, but survived. Certainly others were killed, and the final details of the operation will only become apparent after further analysis. Inevitably there was an early announcement by President Obama (who, to his credit, was reasonably restrained), immediately followed by some less well-composed reactions from other western leaders (David Cameron’s desire to appear to be a hard-ass is rather unsettling) and various important persons around the world. So much so predictable, but for the lack of reaction from interested parties the middle-east – who, considering the significance of the event, are (so far) showing a level of restraint and reason that shames us by comparison.

It’s the reactions of others that has concerned me.

I remember seeing footage in the wake of September the 11^th of SOME people in the middle east celebrating in the streets. It made a lot of people angry and frightened. The primary emotion I remember was disappointment – disappointment in the nature of human beings and how much they pleasure they can take in the destruction of their fellow man, and how easily they are led into hatred, resentment and violence. Any fear I felt was not for me, but for the consequences of the destruction, for much the same reasons. The cause – in this case, the somewhat understandable resentment of American imperialism in the Middle East – was never going to be well-served by an atrocious act of violence dressed up as religious warfare. It was always going to end badly not just for the people of already oppressed and war-torn nations in the Middle-East, but also for anyone of Arabian ethnicity and Muslims of any ethnicity worldwide. The danger was that we conceptually formed ourselves into two warring sides, as usual, with no regard to the vast bulk of people who happen to be unfortunate enough to be associated with either.

That was exactly what Osama Bin Laden wanted. He wanted us to form two sides, not just to see him and his organisation as a small group of murderers misinterpreting and manipulating a religion for their own ends. He wanted us to show ourselves as an enemy, and, dutifully, ‘we’ – in this case, the politicians who represent us – obliged. Now I am watching footage of people in America chanting ‘USA! USA!’ and waving flags in the street, and I am sucked down back into disappointment with how easily some people succumb to hatred. That, in his death, is Osama Bin Laden’s final victory – footage broadcast worldwide of people rejoicing in the streets over an assassination committed by the American government, and, by association, her allies. His first victory came the moment we declared war on anyone at his provocation.

I can comprehend, even if I don’t approve of it, the pleasure taken in his death by those directly affected by the terrorist actions he encouraged. I can even understand that I might feel the same way if I were directly affected, that all of my anger and hatred would overcome my reason, but I also understand that this is not the way for governments and societies to behave, and I am ashamed of the way that so many people are so easily convinced to do something that is so obviously against their own interests. Personal motivations and emotional reactions have no place in politics and society. If we ever want to win the ridiculously named ‘war on terror’ it will certainly not be done by demonstrating our military might by killing many thousands of people (many times more than Osama Bin Laden could ever be held responsible for) or setting up puppet governments in order to exploit resources. It will certainly not be done by revelling in the killing of an individual who – misguided as this may seem to us – is an inspirational leader to many. It can only be won by demonstrating that we occupy the moral high ground, that we will meet threat not with anger, revenge, warfare, murder and imperialism, but with calmness, responsibility and support for those who do not hate us.

‘I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate’ – Martin Luther King Jr., a man who knew that progress is not made by tit-for-tat revenge and violent escalation, but by reason, inspiration, unification and negotiation. Controlling and foiling the actions of terrorist groups is surely more easily done if you are not demonstrating on a daily basis exactly the actions and attitudes they are accusing you of in their recruitment videos.

I understand that Osama Bin Laden is a man who encouraged others to kill, destroy and destabilise. I understand that he is at least partially responsible for the deaths of thousands. I refuse, however, to see him or anyone else as ‘evil’, nor celebrate him being killed as if killing people who are cruel, violent and destructive should be celebrated just because it make other people’s lives safer and easier. Revelling in the killing of others because you find their actions deplorable is exactly the problem that we should be fighting against.

I have now lost count of the number of times that I have heard someone say that they are glad Osama Bin Laden is dead ‘because he’s this or that’. As a society, we should not kill for revenge, we should not kill for resources, we should not kill out of some sort of abstract principle, and we should certainly not kill simply because someone or something is inconvenient. The only reason we should kill is because we absolutely have to, because we judge that not killing is worse, and would cause more harm than would otherwise occur, taking into account all of the consequences we can.

The only thing that would give me pleasure with regard to Osama Bin Laden is if his thoughts and teachings were discredited in the eyes of his fellows, that he was discredited in the eyes of his followers and those who might be swayed by his thoughts and actions. If this is not done, it matters very little whether he is alive or dead. I’ll save my celebrations for the day when this is done, when people demonstrate that they no longer want to make themselves subject to revenge and the old hatreds and absolutes. I will never, in my right mind, cheer the killing of others, even if I know it must be done. I don’t care what ‘side’ people say I’m on, be they ‘my’ government, the head of my government’s allies, or some or some murderous scumbag in Abottabad. I deplore the killing of people and the teachings and ideologies that encourage those to do it. That’ my side, and we don’t cheer when anyone is killed, even if we don’t mourn either.

I have nothing against William or Kate as people, but let me paint a little picture of what’s going to happen tomorrow…

A massive military parade is marching past a crown of citizens, each so desperate to demonstrate their patriotism that they dress in a flag so associate with bloodshed that it is a wonder it can bear any colour other than red, and up and down the country people are encouraged to organise street parties, all to celebrate a marriage in the family of an unelected head of state. The fawning national media gushes all over the event, refusing to broadcast opinions which are contrary to the official doctrine, and even independent media services and advertisers constantly insist that ‘everyone is celebrating’ for fear of associating themselves with those who would dissent. All protest against the unelected head of state (whose life and activity is funded by the state, despite the fact that they are one of the riches people in the world and one of the largest landowners in the country) is banned, as is the expressions of minority religious groups. Police line the streets, and ‘right-thinking’ subjects are encouraged to inform on their fellows to the security services – who, like the army, government and police, act in the name of the monarch. Inside the church, the family of the unelected head of state, (a group who also attract state sponsorship despite also including some of the richest people and largest landowners in the country) are joined by a collection of petty monarchs and dictators from regimes despised throughout the globe for their social inequalities and civil rights abuse, high ranking members of the military and the defiant remnants of a brutal global empire and the head of the government – himself not only born to wealth and privilege, but also part of the same family as the unelected head of state, and selected for his party at the urging of the same monarch. His government – which is largely composed of a minority of privileged people who all attended the same schools and higher educational institutions – has approved massive state expenditure on the event whilst simultaneously cutting help and support to the very poorest in society. The arcane ceremony is presided over by a member of the national church, one of the biggest landowners in the country, who’s head is – you’ve guessed it – the same person as the unelected head of state. Here and there, a few members of the public raised by dint of their friendship with a member of the ruling family, sit awkwardly gawking at the vulgar display of wealth, privilege and pomposity that serves no purpose other than to symbolise the social inequalities and hideously outdated class structure that has blighted the lives of its citizens for many centuries.

Welcome to Britain in the 21^st century. If it wasn’t crap it would be terrifying. We should be ashamed.

Angry at a Tory government on an ideological crusade to chomp up services, crush the poor, sell off national assets, act against human rights, and ruin education and the NHS in the name of fixing the economy, while enabling the richest to make even more money and enabling the wealthiest to get away with dodging tax? Disappointed with the Liberal Democrats for helping them to do so in a very one-sided deal to get a few of their policies through? Have you seen your cynical fears realised? Yep, me too. So, let’s get out onto the street and protest. Protest and protest and protest until they can’t help but listen.

This need for political change is no more pertinent than when that government you are standing against is a repressive regime known to use torture and human rights abuses to secure its position; when the regime you are opposing represses certain groups it has dominion over and acts against the interests of some to serve a minority of others. We protest in England to protect rights and privileges hard earned over generations. In Egypt they protest to establish the very same things.

The potential of what we’re seeing in Egypt and across the Arab States rightly make our squabbles, valuable as they are, pale into insignificance.

As I started writing this, the violence was escalating. Fortunately, it seems to have calmed quite a lot since then, and most of the people in Tahrir Square are now manifesting the most irresistible force of protest – becoming the immovable object. Which is not so say that everything’s okay. Though negotiations are occurring, sporadic violence continues. A couple of days ago, I saw a video of the Egyptian police shooting a boy in cold blood. So far, approximately 300 people have been killed during this protest in Egypt. The Egyptian army has shown remarkable composure so far despite the actions of the police and other thuggish forces loyal to Mubarak. The army, despite surface appearances, is the probably most important political group in Egypt, and what they decide to do may determine the fate of the entire region.

It’s much braver to protest against a government that treats human rights as something someone else does, as opposed to protesting in a country that, at least on the face of it, sees the need to uphold them. Regardless of the fact that Britain, America and a lot of other societies arrogant enough to think themselves advanced, sometimes treat human rights acts as a major inconvenience, the simple fact is that the vigilance of the people means that there is a much lower chance of you being shot, tortured, attacked or imprisoned indefinitely for expressing your politics. Of course, the sad fact is this chance is non-zero. Presumably, I’m not the only one who, whilst watching the men on horse and camel-back charge into the anti-Mubarak protestors in Tahrir Square, saw an echo of the British police’s ridiculous horse-charge upon the student protestors two months before. I am outraged by the people recently pepper-sprayed for delivering a letter, of the disabled man dragged from his wheelchair and beaten by the very people we pay to protect us and of all those injured, beaten and abused by the British police. I am, however, also aware that when I go to a protest, I know that I’m relatively unlikely to end up in a cell or a hospital. Which, for the record, is a very good thing.

Despite these important differences, there are parallels between the British and Egyptian protest, and not just in the visual phenomena – though the sight of a line of linked-armed people protecting the museum in Cairo did remind me strongly of the schoolchildren who protected the riot van with similar tactics during the recent protests. Perhaps most strikingly, the motivations of the protestors – or at least the concepts that we can pick from amongst the kaleidoscope of individual opinions that seem to unify them into action – seem approximately the same. These fruits born of social media seem to form, at least on the face of it, the new universal causes amongst the (generally, but not exclusively) young, internet-savvy people worldwide. Due to the ease of modern interconnection, even some of the very same people involved with one group of protests are now involved with these. Where once we looked for common ground with protestors around the world, the access to communities and ideas outside of traditional geographic and social boundaries have created a conceptual substructure that now really does unite people across demonstrations worldwide – the desire for political and social freedom, democracy, autonomy, rights, egalitarianism, education and all the other concepts now form the common ground of motivations for protest.

Unfortunately, we also know that more hideous protest movements such as the English Defence League often use the same methods, though they hardly share this common culture. Yet, on the face of it, what they are doing looks the same, and this is the problem.

Time and again, the reactions of people to protests have shocked me. Certainly in Britain, reactions to news of protests rarely seem to focus on the issue being protested. Despite the ridiculous bias in favour of the actions of the British Police, I feel it is more than the BBC and other media groups supporting the police and opposing protestors – or, at least that they’re feeding something more visceral. This is most disturbing because my generally favourable attitude towards protests seems to me to be so obvious, and I’m suspicious that whenever something seems obvious to me, that’s most likely an indication that I haven’t thought enough about why. In approaching this, I’ve started to wonder if that it is not just because, broadly, I expect to agree with the protestors, but something more fundamental. In much the same way that I react positively to the news that people are protesting and then prepare to revise my opinion on the basis of what they are protesting about, most people – even some of those who share my political principles – have exactly the opposite reaction. They see all protest as sharing the same structures – but not the ones I spoke of before.

A lot of people seem to find protests scary, unsettling and just plain wrong. Further, I suspect that in most cases their loyalty to the police even in the face of strong evidence of brutality, arises from these same motivations. I’d propose that there are two areas of difference, one of which I have very little sympathy for, and one which I understand well. First, some people see obedience to authority as more important than harm caused to individuals or societies.  By and large, these people are lost causes as far as protest movements are concerned, and are, in fact, just the kind of ideologues we should be protesting against. The second motivation is more subtle, and is something all of us share to a greater or lesser extent – it’s a relationship between how much a person values stability, and how much they like change.

This isn’t some mere absence of fear.  I actively like and value change. Furthermore, the reason I find it so difficult to engage with the reactions of those who so commonly oppose protests is not only that don’t really care about tradition or authority, but that I don’t place very much value on predictability and certainty about the future. The disruption of everyday life, for example, hardly concerns me at all. It certainly never occurs to me in my everyday thoughts that someone might think these things are inherently good. My only concern is for the issues. If I think the change is for the bad, I want to stop it. When I think change is for the better, I want it to occur. Moreover, I’m prepared to resist them, and think that it’s important to do so. I see people protesting as something that can bring change. As such, when I see police kettling protestors, charging horses into crowds, beating up disabled people, or shooting people in the street, I am doubly outraged. Not only do I see the acts as horrendous in themselves, but I see them as a repression of a social process I find inherently valuable and worthwhile (and in any society where, somehow, it’s fine to torture people or shoot them for no reason, utterly necessary). I think that things could be a lot better, fairer and less harmful than they are, and I’m prepared to sacrifice a little social order and the odd broken window in the meantime to make it better.

Trying to place myself into the position of someone who is prepared to tolerate a little more social injustice in order to keep things stable is difficult, but not impossible, as the circumstances of situations do impact upon it. Even within individuals, there is a (non-universal) tendency, as we age, for idealism to be tempered with pragmatism (mostly just because we come to better understand the consequences of our actions) and investment in the status quo – whether that be financial, emotional, or in the form of children or just ‘work done’ – tends to lead us to resist its demolition. More bluntly, experience goes a long way – someone who has had a bad experience with protesting might well be more inclined to see them primarily as chaotic and dangerous. In the wider political realm, this is exactly the kind of thing that Mubarak has been playing upon for years. Although I don’t agree with it, I can see why a lot of countries – most importantly the US – supported the regime for so long; it wasn’t just convenient, it was a relatively safe bet for promoting stability in the region. Without supporting the decision, I can see that there were reasons (other than the cynical economic ones) to make it; I just don’t agree that it is the best option. It is the importance here of maintaining stability that adds to its weight, yet I think the reactions of people to protests as a whole are more symptomatic of their underlying inclinations.

If you strongly value stability more than change, protests are terrifying things. Their mere presence, disorganisation, rowdiness and lack of order already proves their anarchic intent long before the first baton falls or stone is thrown. The mere appearance of protests reinforces their inherent conviction that embracing uncertainty and a desire for change inevitably leads to frightening, riotous chaos. The moment they are confronted with a protest this result is not just some inevitable consequence, it’s already there. What to the first group is simply a bonfire made of protest signs set against the winter cold is an anarchic and violent act of arson. Shouting is already a verbal assault; pointing and running are the precursors to assault; chanting, the first act of warfare. From this perspective, a crowd in which a few individual people are hurling objects is an army on the brink of a co-ordinated attack.

So, when people say to me ‘but look at the violence!’ I tend to do two things, both slightly wrong. First, I point out that those that represent the authorities are commonly responsible for the violence. This would be a reasonable thing to do if it wasn’t for the fact that they identify the first act of violence as being the assembling of a huge mob to take control of an urban area. Then I go one stage further and ruin it, because what I want to say is ‘but look at the issue!’ The issue is immaterial for them.  Merely by protesting it, we’re undermining it. They aren’t interested in the cause, because, before they even understand what it is, they already think it’s probably not worth generating a scary situation. They’re even prepared to defend the actions of the police by pointing to provocation of the situation itself. They place themselves into their ‘scary situation’ and think about how frightened they’d be, thinking that the point of policing a protest is, at base, to make the scary situation end and get back to ‘normal’.

Certainly too much instability isn’t desirable because it can lead to warfare, violence and social disintegration, but if the tendency towards stability were to completely dominate the moral landscape, social progress would be slow to the point of being virtually non-existent. It is worth observing, however, that any of the states of stability the second group want to preserve were at some point made by the actions of those that embrace change; even our most austere religious inclinations were, at one time, revolutionary.

Some of the people who dislike protests place their faith in more conventional political routes. However, by and large, they essentially think we should just knuckle-down and get on with it. Unfortunately, in the case of many societies around the world, this attitude is incredibly harmful, as these sanctioned processes often don’t work, and sometimes simply don’t exist in the first place. Thus, without protest, there is little hope that even the most hideously repressive regimes can be revised or removed. However, these practical considerations are secondary to what I think is the most important point we can make to reconcile protests with those who are alienated by them. I think they are simply making a mistake.

My claim is that protests are stabilising influences upon society, and that this can be demonstrated to the satisfaction of those who currently perceive them to be exactly the opposite.

Stable societies and stable governments are not the same thing. A religious fundamentalist government, for example, might be extremely secure in its position as the ruling power in a country, but if it brings itself into conflict with its neighbours or the world at large is hardly a stable situation to be in. Likewise, if it finds itself coming into conflict with its own citizens, it isn’t stable either. One clear indication of this is that it has to force them to comply and its social policies are administered at the end of steel toecap. In fact, its very fear of holding democratic elections is another symbol of its instability. We can see examples of this all over the world, throughout history. We wouldn’t think of Mao Zedong’s governance of China as representing a stable period of Chinese history just because he remained in power for an awfully long time.

Separating the notions of stability of a society as a whole from the stability of individual governments or institutions illustrates quite a lot of these misconceptions. Stability is not opposed to change of these institutions – in fact, it can embrace them, or not, as it sees fit. We can see that being able to change governments rapidly and without bloodshed is, in fact, a property of a stable society. Being able to tolerate many dissenting political opinions also demonstrates that a society is stable. The use of extreme measures such as torture or harsh police tactics to control your population is a sign of just the opposite.  You don’t live in a stable, safe environment if you are in fear of the authorities.

Protests are at the heart of this. A society that can listen to the grievances of any group, large or small is a stable one. A society that cannot cope with the heartfelt opinions of its members is unstable.

This, however, does not mean that it can’t go wrong, as the revolution in Iran in 1979 shows us. This, however, brings me back to the portrayal of protests by the media. Disentangling the notion of a stable society from the stability of a particular government is a tricky business. The mistake, however, is to think that such a revolution occurred because one stable government was replaced with an unstable one. Quite the opposite occurred, in fact. In terms of the wider society, Iran was, and remains, highly unstable. That is what needs to change.

In Egypt, and across the middle-east, there are many social issues that need to be addressed. I don’t like the thought of the Muslim Brotherhood (or any religious group for that matter) getting a toehold in Egyptian politics. But the protests in Egypt are in fact showing us the destabilising influence of Mubarak’s regime. Even if it once serve stability, that can hardly be claimed now. The government in Egypt needs to change to help provide stability to the Middle East. International action needs to account for this, and spend all its efforts to ensure that the transition of power is for the benefit of the Egyptian people, not just some group that might hijack it, nor merely our own political convenience.

Which brings me back to Blighty. In Britain, there are numerous issues that need to be addressed. If we allow the current British government to destroy services, ruin the education prospects for our children and wreak havoc upon the poor to serve some abstract notion of profitability, society’s stability will diminish. I’m not suggesting that this is some kind of cure-all, but we need to help people understand that at least some of the protests are about maintaining social stability and are part of our society’s wider, responsible social conscience. Protest groups need to learn to engage in more sober political debate, to show those that fear uncertainty that protests do not represent chaos but, is actually a healthy expression of political descent, symptomatic – and, therefore symbolic of – a stable society, and that acting against protests demonstrates just the opposite. People who crave stability aren’t afraid of carnivals, festivals or street-parties – they might not attend them, or enjoy them, but they don’t resent them – because they realise that being able to express yourself in this way adds to the stability and social cohesion of our society, and it shows that people’s respect for authority in our society is such that they can party away all day and night in the street without any horrendous consequences. Thus, one of the solutions, oddly, might be more protests, as part of what constitutes ‘normality’ is just raw familiarity. If there are more – and more peaceful – protests, if it can be demonstrated that demonstrations are not the orgies of anarchic destruction some think them to be, then those that find them alienating and scary may start to listen to the causes. More fundamentally, seeing protests as part of the mainstream will only be achieved once protest groups stop seeing themselves in abstract contrast to the regular political process, and recognise that they are already engaged with politics. This doesn’t necessarily mean forming a political party, but it does mean engaging with huge sections of the community that, traditionally, protest movements are wary of. A person who has heard the causes of a protest being eloquently debated in broadcast news, or has read an insightful article or letter in a newspaper is much more inclined to listen to what a protestor has to say than someone who’s just had it screamed in their face. The use of new media is a great start to this communication process, but it needs to be built upon, because, when you get right down to it, the point of protest is to communicate with people who aren’t already convinced by your cause, not just motivate and organise those who are already involved, and this will require them to see the issue, not just the protest.

I’ll keep this fairly short – it’s just something to think about when the announcements about the cuts the coalition (or, as it seems to be becoming, Conservative) government are making come out tomorrow.

Perhaps you think today’s blog has a rather melodramatic title. I thought so too when I first wrote it down. Now, I realise that it’s precisely the drama we should see in political and financial decisions, but don’t. This isn’t the kind of situation where we’re going to line people up against walls and shoot them (or line them up in trenches and get them to shoot each other and then feed the remains back to the incoming troops, which is the punchline of a rather good story by Aldous Huxley that I’ve now ruined for you). But – these decisions are going to result in deaths, and lots of them. You don’t even have to throw them out on the streets or starve the population (as sad as it sounds, this will actually happen in a few cases, it usually does in such situations). The bulk of the deaths will occur due to secondary effects of the cuts. Through suicide, ill health arising from conditions of poverty and depression, the rising murder and violence rates (and simultaneous cutting of police resources), the impact of increased levels of alcohol and drug use. Slack psychiatric services failing to support those who might hurt themselves or others. The lack of social mobility arsing from poor educational and employment opportunities collapse the foundations for people’s notions of self-worth – simple, bloody grinding misery is enough to destroy people. Lack of legal and representative support. Lack of care services for the elderly. Lack of support for the increased numbers of homeless. This list will be long. These are real deaths, this is real suffering, and those making the decision to cut are responsible for them.

If you’re not taking this seriously, consider the state of the north of England during the supposed economic boom of the nineteen eighties. Look at the rates of poverty, crime, unemployment (worse than during the ‘great depression’), malnutrition, murder, violence, suicide, homelessness, illness and so on. If this is done badly, tomorrow could be the start of an even worse period of suffering. Do not believe for one moment that a different attitude could not be taken. Although the situation is not entirely similar, the last time we were in comparably dire financial straights due to world events – the end of the second world war – we set up the welfare state. Don’t think that I’m advocating the ideas of the labour party here, either – I’m merely asking you to assess these coming cuts, the necessity of their depth, and the specific ways they will be targeted, on their own merits. [I hate they way that criticism for one party is seen as support for the other – such a notion only serves the status quo. To illustrate: a similar situation is set up by Microsoft and Apple to frame the competition in this sector in terms that always serve one or the other – I can dislike Apple’s overly proprietary attitude and focus on style over content without blinding myself to Microsoft’s anti-competitive practices and how this restrains innovation. The two analyses are independent.]  I don’t even disagree with the notion of cuts. However, if one party sets things up to see if they’re worthwhile, and the other chops them back down again to improve efficiency (and that seems to be about the most generous reading of what people expect here) then it is imperative that the second party do so on the basis of rationality and utility, rather than tradition and ideology.

We, as a people nor as individuals, never decided to let the financial world rule our lives. It is an historical and cultural contingency that this small group of individuals with this peculiar practice can assert itself in a way that can cripple so many in the service of itself. Although we accept that there is a certain level of vested interest represented in the decisions made by any government, government should exist to serve the interests of the people. Not entirely crippling business is probably good for the people, but serving individual profit sat the expense of the quality of life – and actual lives – of its citizens is exactly the kind of thing that democracy, rule of law, and the various systems of checks and balances is designed to combat. These are the actions of despots, kings, and totalitarian dictatorships. In this specific case, the ideology and self interest would ensure the cuts would be structure to protect and serve people so greedy that they see it as a duty to themselves avoid taxes that might save the lives of many (despite their already immense wealth) at the expense of those they already cheat out of their very lives. We should not accept it.

So when these cuts are announced tomorrow afternoon, have a good long look. Who are these actions serving? Are they informed by a rational analysis of the minimum amount of harm that might be caused to the people as a whole, or are they informed by ideology? Are they being used to help us survive hard times, are they going to inflict hard times upon us for the sake of the political convictions and personal interests of those who hold power? Finally, who is this going to hurt, and who is this going to kill?

Politics isn’t a game to be played by those who are insulated from the harm that it can cause. It’s deadly serious.

The Pope’s visit to Britain starts today, just a few days after the anniversary of the September Eleventh attacks upon the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Despite the fact that there was a mosque on ground zero on September the eleventh 2001, actually in the twin towers (https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/nyregion/11religion.html?_r=1&hp) people are protesting the building of an Islamic centre because it’s vaguely near ground zero, and a Koran-burning nutcase is bringing Terry Jones’ good name into disrepute. I thought this might be a good opportunity to examine just one of the many troubling aspects of faith.

I am utterly sick of people telling me that, despite what I think about their actions, I have to respect that they are motivated by faith. I don’t have to do anything of the sort. In fact, I shouldn’t. I should consider whatever people believe to be unimportant, but be actively opposed to them acting on the basis of faith; as should you. Here’s why.

When we ask someone why they are doing something, we’re expecting them to give us a reason. This might be ‘because it will save lives’ or ‘because it’s faster’. We don’t normally accept raw, baseless beliefs as motivations. If you were asking someone how to get across town, you wouldn’t be inclined to follow their instructions if they merely believed that there was a road to the left, but you might if they’ve been down that road or have a map to refer to.

Beliefs in and of themselves, however, don’t always require strict justification. It’s one of the most basic agreements civilised people can share – to allow each other to believe what we like. Beliefs are, most commonly, ways of understanding things, tools we use to look at and interpret the world. As such, it’s quite valuable to a have a range of such perspectives in our collective arsenal – even if some of them are, quite commonly, a bit silly. It’s also, usually, quite a lot of fun. Truth be told, however, there wouldn’t be an awful lot we could do about it if we didn’t allow that, beyond programs of mass brain-washing (feel free to insert your own faith-school joke here). This attitude to belief is not something I want to question here. There is no reason to think that we’re trying to control what anyone believes if we refuse to indulge actions or policies based upon assertions of faith. Feel free to believe anything you like, (including that the moon is made of cheese), but if you expect anyone else to share your beliefs, or you do something harmful that’s motivated by them, you’d better be prepared to have some pretty compelling reasons [and remember that it works both ways].

We stray from this path now and again, mostly in the name of some abstract morality (which is usually just thinly disguised religious intolerance masquerading as morality anyway – what genuine moral problem can there actually be with nudity or swearing, belching, farting, talking about sex or death or any of the other things people get upset about?). In principle, however, we allow each other to dress how we like, say what we like and behave how we want, within certain limits that are based on the principles of harm and repression. This also includes the freedom to think that some of the things people do and say are bad or wrong. Or just utterly stupid and ridiculous; and to comment on that. Faith cannot be exempt from this.

It is in these limits of harm and repression that actions informed by faith become a problem. Not every act that is informed by faith is harmful or repressive, and not every act that is committed on the basis of reason is ‘good’. The difference is that people who act on the basis of faith sometimes try to use their faith as a justification that cannot be criticised. Criticising someone’s reasons for doing something should always be possible. Appealing to faith is not a special case.

My solution is simple – faith isn’t an excuse for any kind of action because it isn’t even a reason to act in and of itself. It needs a second component which makes it dissolve into the same state of affairs that everyone finds themselves in – that they believe it to be the right thing to do. In short, acts committed because of faith are acts committed by individuals who have complete personal responsibility for those actions.

Oddly, I don’t believe that this is at odds with most of the people of faith that I know. This may be because I’m quite difficult to get along with for zealots. Good. However, quite a lot of the Christians, Muslims, Jews and Buddhists I have known over the years recognise that there is a difference between having a faith and a faith having you. Seeing yourself as a personally responsible moral agent and religious person are not incompatible things. It is merely a matter of recognising the nature of your relationship to your faith. It is perfectly possible to recognise that, at least for adults with a decent standard of education, what you do is your responsibility, regardless of your faith.

It would seem pretty self-evident that, when answering a question of motivation with the phrase ‘because that’s what I (or we) believe,’ the believer is begging the question. It is perfectly reasonable to ask for reasons. None-the-less, you hear it time and time again, and people (even people whose job it is to ask question, like journalists) seem afraid to pursue it.

Human adults who are educated to a decent standard are responsible for what they do. Acting on faith is no excuse. I can completely sympathise with aspects of social determinism including religious convictions, and I can see why the responsibility for certain actions can be mitigated by circumstance, but the truth is inescapable. If you are reading this, that chances are that you have reached adulthood, you have a reasonably standard of education and are at least aware that there are alternative explanations for things. Even if it wasn’t true when you were younger, and even if there are some exceptional circumstances that may drive you mad and impair your judgement, whatever you decide to do now, when those circumstances do not apply, in your sober, reasonable state – that is your responsibility. I certainly have more sympathy for those unfortunate enough to be brought up in highly religious cultures (another missed opportunity for a faith school joke). When everything is a constant reinforcement of one viewpoint, it is easy to see how independent thought can be stymied. Which is why I come down harshest on well-educated, well-informed people from more open and tolerant societies. They have the greatest opportunities to remove this ridiculous pattern from their thoughts, yet so many still accept this strange notion that faith trumps everything.

Acting on faith is not restricted to the religious. Although I am in danger of invoking Godwin’s law here (just like the pope did earlier today), there are political and social ideologies that are just as dangerous to act upon out of faith. But we do not afford them any special status. We are allowed – in fact, encouraged – to criticise them. Imagine if, when I start to write the next instalment of this blog, which will almost certainly be about government cuts, someone said, in response, ‘well, you can’t criticise people’s beliefs, they have a right to believe what they want and practice their faith however they like.’ Harm caused in the name of faith is the responsibility of those who promote, perpetrate and support it. It is up to them to decide if they believe that the use of condoms should be discouraged in AIDS-ravaged counties. It’s their responsibility if they persecute gay people. They are to blame if they act to protect a paedophile. It’s their fault, because, regardless of how they dress it up, whatever decisions they have made, at some point it is they themselves that interpreted the information presented to them. A good example of this – and possibly my least favourite aspect of religions – is how people treat the supposed ‘wisdom’ contained in holy books.

Firstly, just because something was done or thought of a long time ago doesn’t make it any better than something younger. In fact, it is a reason to be suspicious. Other practices and beliefs that we know of in the ancient world aren’t treated with similar reverence. We don’t believe that we need to balance the humours when we are ill by removing blood (okay, some idiots probably do still believe this, but, amongst six billion people, there’s at least one idiot for everything). Neither does its ‘survival through the ages;’ which is rather a matter of historical contingency, the ability of the beliefs to engender fear and fanaticism, and the perniciousness of the power structures it creates (yes, I do mean the subjugation of women, but that’s not the only one). Likewise ‘lots of people believe it to be the truth’ doesn’t matter either. Lots of people, over the ages, have believed a lot of total cobblers to be the truth. People make mistakes, and when they realise they have, they should revise their opinions.

But none of these things is the central problem here. Rather, it is a demonstration of something I am doing – offering interpretations of the more abstract qualities of the works. The point being illustrate is that, regardless of how you approach it, it is impossible to not interpret the text. Sometimes the story those of a religious bent will tell of the creation of these documents, doctrines and dogmas is that they have been collected over time from the wisest and most inspired individuals (as if there was never any agenda imposed on them beyond a desire to be enlightened). Secondly, that the works are divinely inspired, that what they are saying arises out of a direct communication from God, or that the text was written by the divine agent using man as a kind of fleshy word-processor. (As if an all-powerful being would need such a thing – apparently ‘His’ assets don’t run as far as a pen). Perhaps they even believe that God guarantees that the fact that this means a fallible human wrote the text (and a different, equally fallible human translated it, in most cases, and another edited it together, in the particular case of the Bible) isn’t a problem. They may, thusly believe that, as some religious fundamentalist would have it, the text is the word of God.

That is their interpretation. They judge it to be the word of God. That’s it. ‘I think it is.’ To which you might well want to deploy a little sarcasm along the lines of ‘Well, I’m impressed by the amount of work you’ve put into that.’ Quite commonly, they will only say that they have faith that their claims are true. This is no different from not offering a reason. If they can give you good reasons, that’s a different matter, but simply saying that they ‘know’ in some indefinable way is just begging the question. You might well ask ‘how do you know?’ to which their reply will be something equivalent to ‘I just do.’  They may get there via ‘God makes it true.’ In which case it’s also fine to ask, ‘how do you know that?’  In which case, you they might say ‘I just do’, possibly via ‘the nature of God guarantees it.’  In which case, you might ask them how they can know the nature of God and so on. But there is no way to avoid it. Either they will come up with a circular little bit of reasoning, where they return to one of their earlier points to justify the previous one, or eventually the only thing they are going to offer is something equivalent to ‘because it just is, and I know it just is.’ These amount to the same thing. At root, it is their judgement. It’s what they believe, and nothing more. Once again – believe anything you like, but if you expect anyone else to share your beliefs, or you do something harmful that’s motivated by them, you’d better be prepared to have some pretty compelling reasons.

So, let us assume that, in and of itself, it is fine to hold that belief under the basic term of civility. It’s fine to believe whatever you like. But this has to be respected as simply that – something they believe for no reason at all. If they cannot give you any compelling reason why you should believe it too, then you have to dismiss it. It matters not a jot if you have a holy text to refer to or not. It doesn’t matter if you hear the voice of God, or were told by an angel. All of these things might be true. But they are irrelevant, because if there’s no reason to believe these things to be true other than a person’s interpretation, then they mean nothing, because at some point there is a fallible person involved, even if it’s just the particular believer spouting the opinions at the time.

‘Ah, but God works in mysterious ways,’ they might say. Which is equivalent to ‘I don’t know,’ but with a hint of ‘but I’m right anyway.’ Next time anyone says that to you, simply say, ‘Fine then, you don’t know whether God wants you to do this or not, I don’t know either, so let’s try to judge what we should do on a more pragmatic basis; like, say, how much harm it’s going to cause.’ And it’s the same for people who say ‘that’s how I was brought up.’ That’s exactly equivalent to saying ‘well, somebody told me that was right,’ or, ‘well, I’m just in the habit of thinking that way.’  No argument at all. If you haven’t taken the time and trouble to think of what your own opinion is, then your opinion is worthless. Regardless of how you dress it up, it’s no better than a guess. It is no opinion at all, and certainly not yours.

So, acting on faith is exactly the same as acting as an independent according to nothing more than your own inclinations. So, whether you start with ‘I think homosexuals should be persecuted because there’s a moral case for it,’ as soon as it turns out that your beliefs are a matter of faith, no matter how convoluted that is, your statement is equivalent to ‘I think homosexuals should be persecuted because that’s what I think.’ Not very nice, eh? Likewise, if you are going to burn Korans and thereby fan the flames of violence in the Middle East and beyond, that’s your responsibility. I don’t care if you say that you’ve heard the voice of God telling you to do it. It was you that chose to believe that voice was God’s (even if you aren’t lying about it, which I feel is more likely in the case of self-appointed ‘Pastor’ Terry Jones – a man, whom I am informed by someone who recently visited his ‘church’ has “Muslims are evil” painted on his mailbox).

Yet, variously, you hear people using this to justify all manner of horrors including the subjugation of women, acts of terrorism, war, the concealment of abuse including paedophilia, torture and enforced surgery, exposure to disease and innumerable other acts of awfulness. It really doesn’t matter how much conviction they have, or how many people agree with them, if they are merely relying on faith, they cannot justify why they are doing what they do.

At which point, you might be inclined to say ‘Well, I can give you a good reason why we shouldn’t be doing these things.’ And when they say that their faith tells them otherwise, and you have to respect that, you have a choice. Either explain all this to them, or simply laugh in their faces.

Anyone (within the restrictions I’ve previously described) who has nothing but faith to offer you by way of explanation for their actions is as entirely responsible for the consequence of those actions as if it was just their opinion. Take a moment to think about what that means for the Pope. There are plenty of places online or off where you can find out exactly what that means for him. I’m awfully glad that I don’t have that on my conscience.

You wouldn’t accept an argument for anything (let alone something as significant as murder, intolerance, racism, discrimination, or taking measures to ensure a lethal pandemic cripples an entire continent) if you knew they’d just made it up. ‘Because I think it’s right’ just isn’t good enough. You’d require some kind of a reason. Even if you didn’t agree, you could then, at least, be in a position to assess it. In short, we should demand actual reasons from those who claim to be motivated by faith.

It is important that we do. On September the 11^th 2001, allowing faith to be a reason to act resulted in a death toll of the attacks was 2,996, including the 19 hijackers. Not counting all those people killed elsewhere by poverty, disease and persecutions related to faith. I have a thought for the tenth anniversary of this atrocious act next year. Instead of indulging in faith-motivated protests and acts of violence around the world, let’s make September the 11^th 2011 ‘let’s stop murdering people for faith day’.

It’s difficult not to be cynical. The invitation to describe what happened after the election as the ‘ConDem’ alliance is irresistible. Something new and unusual has happened in Britain. For the first time since the seventies, and despite the polarisation of our electoral system, no single party has been elected to govern the UK. This placed everyone involved in an odd position – allow a minority government to rule until the next – probably very soon – general election, or negotiate some form of deal. The partisan nature of British politics means that a coalition government, though common throughout the world, was always going to be awkward. None-the-less, it happened. And finally, we have the details of the agreement.

Like a lot of people, I saw the results come in through a blur of alcohol and fatigue that culminated in a two day hangover. The hangover for politics was a little longer. I was horribly worried that the Conservative party would win outright with a clear, substantial majority. They didn’t. I knew Labour would do badly, but they actually did a little better than I thought they might. The real surprise for me was that the Lib Dems fell back. I was expecting them to do a little better than they had in previous elections, but instead they did a little worse. I’d imagine we could write that one off to last minute poll-booth panic.

But it turned out alright for Cleggy in the end, didn’t it? Well, maybe. It’s difficult not to be cynical. Because we’re unused to it, the power-play of a third party negotiating its way into a position of influence feels like some kind of coup. But it isn’t, it’s just politics.

It’s unsurprising that disgruntled Labour supporters should criticise the coalition. However, a great deal of the criticism for the coalition comes from grass-roots conservatives, who behave as if they won, and that they deserve to be in power anyway. They didn’t win anything – they simply got a few more votes than the others, leaving them as the largest minority. However, from the Liberal Democrat perspective, forming an alliance with anyone else would seem damn undemocratic. The whinging Tory faithful just feel like they won anyway, though they didn’t. You’d think they’d be grateful to Mr Clegg and his party, but no… The other dissenting voices are coming from the Liberal supporters. This warrants a little more examination.

I actually voted Liberal. I’ve found myself unable to support Labour since Iraq. I was quite afraid of similar disaffection throughout the country resulting in a Tory victory. I was hoping for a hung parliament, and I got one. I expected that the Tories would get the largest number of votes, and that some sort of deal would be struck. However, I didn’t expect a full coalition. I thought that some sort of agreement would be reached that offered them some limited support to get things moving, that in order to obtain this, the Liberals would demand a referendum on voting reform, and that subsequently, votes on individual bills would be essentially free for Liberal MPs. However, that’s not what happened.

Criticism has been levelled at the Liberals that what they did was simply a cynical play to claw some measure of direct political power. Well, of course it was. You might just as well level the same criticism at David Cameron – he didn’t have a majority either. That’s what all politicians do all the time. Anyone who thinks that politics works by some other mechanism simply isn’t recognising politics for what it is. I freely admit that at first, I thought it highly unadvisable for the Liberals to enter a full coalition. To a certain degree, I still do, but I am starting to understand the merits of it.

It’s difficult not to be cynical. Our new Home Secretary, Theresa May, no matter which way you look at it, has an appalling voting record on issues regarding homosexuality. The Cabinet is dominated once again by white men from privileged backgrounds (some of them Lib Dem). Yet it rapidly became apparent that some of the worst traditional excesses of the Tory manifesto – huge tax breaks for rich people, the immediate scrapping of the Human Rights Act and the like – were going to be curtailed by the deal. Furthermore, some of the more progressive Liberal proposals – such as raising the minimum threshold for income tax – were going to be adopted. But whatever this odd government is, we have to accept that we must judge it on the merits and problems it has in and of itself. If it’s too much for us to consider, for the next general election, which individuals and parties did the most good within the coalition, and instead judge them on the basis of some raw tribal loyalties, then that is our fault, not theirs, and if my fellow Liberal voters don’t like the idea understand this: they have acted in what they think is the most effective way to make Liberal policies a guiding influence on British politics. It may not work out, but it’s that judgment you are assessing, not some abstracted rubbish about ‘I voted Liberal and got the Tories’.

This, which ever way you look at it, is something of a small victory for Liberal voters. Being able to directly influence the decisions of the government will allow the Liberal party to push the Tories towards pursuing the ground common to both parties – notably, so far, some important proposals from Nick Clegg regarding civil liberties. Make no mistake – this would have not been pursued in any meaningful way by the Tories alone (‘call me Dave’ pretty much admits this in the foreword to the coalition agreement I’ve linked in below). You’ve got a party you didn’t want in power. But you were going to have that anyway – at least now they are tempered by the very party you did vote for.

So to that agreement. I won’t go through the whole thing, but you should read it. Here’s a link. http://programmeforgovernment.hmg.gov.uk/files/2010/05/coalition-programme.pdf It’s difficult not to be cynical. But I’m going to try, which is why I’m going to go start with something I like from the agreement – civil liberties.

This is, by far, the most impressive section of the document. Acting against individual freedom was a huge reason why many people fell out with the Labour party (second only, I’d think, to Iraq). Thanks, largely, to Lib Dem influence, if all of the goals they have brought to this coalition are achieved with regard to civil liberties – and the rest of it isn’t too disastrous – it will entirely justify their involvement in the coalition in the first place. If it is done well, it could be extremely important.

The problem is, it plays against many traditional Conservative concerns, and I worry that there may be something of a back-bench rebellion against it. If they act quickly enough they might just get this legislation through in a way that could be actually effective. However, this is the kind of thing that only a new government will get through without some serious dilution – it must be passed whilst principal remains high above jaded political realism. The proposals defined in this document could easily be squeezed into tokenism, or overwhelmed by new legislation. I hope for swift, definite action on the part of Mr Clegg.

The commission to investigate changing the Human Rights Act to a specifically British bill of rights is the most worrying aspect of this document. There’s been a lot of talk about rights ‘coming from responsibilities’, which, frankly sounds like a terrible excuse to remove peoples’ human rights under certain circumstances. Let us be clear – there are no circumstances under which a human being should ever cease to be classified anything other than a human being. Human rights have to be universally applied – it is the mark of a civilised society that, even in the case of the most despicable individual, we rise above our anger and hatred, so that we do not become that which we seek to protect ourselves from. The Conservative party wanted to scrap the Human Rights Act entirely – now it will be subject to a review. Not ideal, but better, certainly. I’m sad to see that the silly mass-appeal policies regarding further protection of ‘people’ from prosecution when dealing with ‘criminals’ and ‘intruders’ – something I’ve talked about before – did not meet the axe.

There is one extra little gem in there, though – the renegotiation of the extradition treaty between the UK and the US.

With Tory intransigence on Trident and, despite proposed savings in running costs, it seems to me that the defence budget is going to be far too tight for all the (admittedly often quite admirable) proposals in this agreement. Laudable, if slightly vague targets are also evident on environmental issues, which, again, give wiggle room on funding. You get the feeling on this issue that there isn’t going to be much done immediately, which is a shame, but it should at least provide some structural (and infrastructural) steps in the right direction. Quite a lot of these things, however, are clearly composed of programs that would have been done anyway, regardless of who was in charge, and, in fact, spring pretty directly from the measures taken by the previous government.

Transport is similarly well-handled, though the proposals rather more sober than previous manifesto claims. Where the funding comes from is, again, something of a mystery. There’s some nice, if thin and rather unadventurous stuff on equalities (a vast amount of which was achieved by the last government anyway) and a few sensible measures on justice.

In the ‘culture, Olympics, media and sport section’ there is little of any real interest or substance. Notably, though, it offers to ‘maintain the independence of the BBC’ without saying anything at all about protecting its budget or reneging the deal between Murdoch and Cameron to downsize it.

International development stuff is reasonable – in as much as it protects and tweaks what we’ve been doing already. Though some in the Tory party would have us slash it, I’d say that it is more than arguable that what we invest in this way in the world more than pays for itself in increased political stability, and therefore world economic and industrial stability, and consequently, our economy.

A similar attitude, (though with a bit more wiggle-room) is taken to families and children – essentially a few tweaks here and there to the (admittedly pretty reasonable) legacy of Labour.

No surprises in the short section on foreign affairs, although a nice commitment at the end to ‘never condone the use of torture.’ Awful that this has to be stated, but it must.

On banking, the document proposes generally agreeable (and voter-pleasing) policies making (admittedly vague) promises regarding further levies and regulations imposed upon the banking sector. It’s important to note that Vince Cable has been placed in charge of this, and although he isn’t getting it entirely his own way, the agreement goes far further that the Tories alone would ever have gone.

The section on further and higher education is almost unreadable due to the interference of text between the lines read ‘WE DON’T KNOW HOW TO PAY FOR THIS’ in overlapping ten-foot high block caps. If they choose to restrict student visas – one of the Tory thoughts on limiting immigration – this problem will only double as huge proportion of our university funding will vanish. With indications that top-up fees for the best universities will sky-rocket, I predict a turbulent future for higher education, especially in terms of the diversity of students in the better institutions. In part, the rest of the education policy is pretty uninspiring stuff. The idea that almost any group can get together and set up a school is a rather preposterous and obvious attempt to help eek out the education budget. It might well produce some rather odd situations – and almost certainly some rather undesirable educational environments.

The jobs and welfare stuff is dangerous territory too, and its vagaries still allow for the adoption of the most ridiculous Tory strategy to essentially withdraw benefits from people – a bullying tactic that could only ever be justified in the most extreme cases, but will doubtless be used ubiquitously should it pass, not least due to the financial pressures.

The section on social action is particularly intriguing. When reading it, you can’t help but think that it aims to get people to fill in for what is going to be cut from public services by doing much the same stuff but for no money – possible in communities with wealth and a time on their hands, not so clever in more modest situations.  The thought of creating a sort of non-military ‘national citizens’ service’ for school-leavers is intriguing. I wonder how it will be funded, and what it actually hopes to achieve; or if it’s just a way to get work out of teenagers for nothing without the inconvenience of having to send them to prison; or, if it’s just a way to bring down unemployment figures with what amounts to a glorified ‘Duke of Edinburgh Award’ scheme. I await details, but you can bet your life that it won’t be being applied with any seriousness to ‘nice’ children on the private school fast-track to university.

This all smacks a bit of a classic Tory theme – trying to eliminate the perceived ‘burden’ of the poor. Despite the fact that for every pound they ‘scam’ there’s ten lost to tax-dodging – which gets a couple of mentions, but in non-specific terms that make me worry that any real crack-down will be slow to come. This would doubtless upset a certain proportion of the core Tory vote – a group of people who seem to see tax avoidance as a duty. The ‘review’ on non-doms is a case in point of this wobbly attitude, although the raising of capital gains tax is a reasonable policy. In fact, thanks largely to LibDem influence, there is a massive improvement in proposed tax policies when compared to the Tory proposals. In particular, the dropping of the inheritance tax threshold rise and the raising, instead, of the base income tax threshold is an extremely welcome change. Annoyingly the silly, archaic married couple’s allowance is still in there – and the Lib Dem

’s abstaining won’t be enough to stop it going through. Notably, no mention is made of VAT, and other forms of taxation are likewise given a wide berth ahead of the upcoming budget, with the exception of the NI issues, which are in line with the Tory pledges. Unsurprisingly so, given the drum-beating – though that hasn’t prevented them from entirely ruling out a ‘death tax’ or some related form of funding for care of the elderly. Likewise, forget any long-term freezing of council tax beyond the next year, or any continuation of reduced stamp duty – I’d say they just can’t afford it. Indeed, reducing debt, they say ‘takes precedence over any of the other measures in this agreement’. So quite a lot of this document may well just be thrown away in few weeks time.

Funding for the NHS is an odd issue. Due to new treatments always coming through, the NHS budget always soars way above the rate of inflation. In this case, we could see the maintenance of the budget actually as a squeeze. On the other hand, there seems little else to do, and I’m not inclined to argue that anything substantially better could be done, considering the deficit.

With regard to funding constraints, I find it rather odd that they’ve proposed what amount to extra tiers of government in certain areas – more mayors, increased power to local councils, an elected official in charge of the police and such. These measures are going to be expensive and require careful, well-supported and well-planned implementation. Likewise, with regard to policing, the document makes many proposals that seem almost custom-designed to soak up funds. But budgets are going to be cut, it’s a simple as that, and ‘efficiency savings’ are not going to help much. Add to this the creation of a ‘border police force’, and I find myself becoming highly suspicious. There would seem to be only one easy solution to this – the one used the last time the Conservatives had anything to do with policing – increase police power. Let me get something straight, the police have enough power – they just don’t have the resources they need, and increasing their power doesn’t compensate for this, (whether it’s focussed on ‘border’ issues or otherwise).

Which brings us nicely round to immigration. They’ve kept the ridiculous notion of a ‘cap’ on immigration – despite the fact that it will hardly be able to control anything at all. I’ve discussed this elsewhere, but, suffice to say that I’m massively disappointed by its inclusion.

Then there’s Europe – a section that screams ‘Whoa! Hold on there!’ There is nothing here that addresses the Conservative party’s increasingly isolated position on the right of… well, everybody else in the EU.  This was always going to be a contentious issue between the two parties, and it seems that the Tories have got their own way. I do not believe that they have taken the right attitude towards Europe, and are, in fact, endangering our relationship with what is, under any analysis, the most valuable economic and social relationship we have. I will explore this more thoroughly another time, as the British isolationist attitude is, frankly, a disturbing and rather reactionary quality within our national psychology.

The section on Parliamentary reform is one of the most interesting, and I may consider some of it at greater length later – I certainly don’t have the time or space here. I like the idea of the public having a more direct influence on bills and debates through petitions, and the referendum on the alternative vote is going to prove most interesting indeed. The idea of ‘primaries’ is odd, and requires a little more thought, I feel.

But there are a few obvious problems; and, once again, it’s difficult not to be cynical.

Having a fix-term Parliament for the sake of the coalition is a sensible way to arrange the deal. It allows them to set specific goals and policies with an established end in mind. But the contentious raising of no-confidence votes from 51% of parliament to 55% is an odd one. It’s so obviously in the interests of the incumbent party that I wonder if it’s the first clue to the actual tenacity and authoritarianism of David Cameron’s ambitions. Couple this with his attack on the 1922 committee, and you might start to get suspicious of just how secure he wants to make himself.

Reducing the number of MPs is, to my mind, something that has its merits if it is slight, and makes each constituency more equal. But I strongly suspect that its actual goal is to fiddle with the boundaries of constituencies so as to return more Conservative MPs. Most parties have done this to a greater or lesser extent in the past, but that’s hardly a justification- no matter how many wrongs you add up, they still don’t make a right.

The aim to (FINALLY) have an elected second house is an important one, and should be welcomed, but the short-term ‘fix’ of appointing a mass of new Conservative and Liberal peers to enable the upper house to more accurately reflect the proportional vote is surely a mistake. Potentially a very expensive and controversial one if further reform to the Lords is slow to come.

So there you have it. The fact is, the upcoming budget is going to set the real tone for this Parliament. I only hope that we can get something good out of it before the axe descends. But, regardless of how it works out, in principle, I am very glad, for now, that this is the ConDemNation rather than one suffering under a purely Conservative government. I only wish that this co-operative precedent could be set in a less difficult economic climate. And that it hadn’t worked out that, the position the Liberals had to negotiate from was the Conservative one – the view, lest we forget, of a generally pretty selfish, moralising and traditionalist minority. If they come to dominate, and all goes horribly wrong, I only hope that people can see the action of the Liberals for what it was – a cynical power-play, yes, but one that might have prevented the Tories riding roughshod over us all. And if I goes really wrong, I do hope that the British public are intelligent enough not to forever blame the Liberals for what might well turn out to be one of the most unpopular governments in decades. And at this point, it really is difficult not to be cynical.  I’ll try – it’s going to be bad, but not as bad as it might have been.

There – that was almost hopeful, wasn’t it?

In the next few days, I fear we are going to see a change in British politics much more fundamental than a simple change in government. It is a change back from democracy to oligarchy. We should be worried, and we should be embarrassed.

Historically speaking, most democracies have, at some point or another, devolved into oligarchies. It is in their nature, especially in societies where money is allowed to determine access to resources so that the richest people tend to be the best educated, inherit wealth in both raw and money-generating assets (like companies), and power and privilege of all kinds, and are, therefore, hugely more likely to be found in positions of political power. Though this could give rise to a plutocracy, generally speaking it rapidly devolves to oligarchy as dynasties develop interests in specialist areas – some flourish in politics, others in business, and so on. You can see this structure in the U.S. But here in Britain, we have had, historically, a class system which utterly dominated all of our politics for the entire history of our democracy, based on nothing but birthright. Lest we forget, it was only in the last decade that the second chamber of our parliament was almost entirely composed of people who had no qualification or right to rule other than that they were born a Lord. Worse, it was extremely difficult, due to poor educational standards, the ravages of poverty and the sheer lack of opportunity, for anyone who wasn’t already part of the establishment to become a Member of Parliament.  The debates and contests took place between two groups of people who were, for the most part, educated in a tiny handful of schools and universities (more likely to educate the future rulers of foreign nations than the poorer sections of their own society – the ‘poorer’ sections here including anyone who wasn’t a member of the aristocracy).

Yet, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after hundreds of years of struggle, Britain finally started to see small numbers of politicians arising from amongst the people. Even though the vast majority of MP’s still came from the families of privileged few, the numbers of those from less privileged sections of society steadily rose. Yet now we have a situation where it is highly likely that the next Prime Minister of Britain will be yet another Etonian. As a proportion of the population, Eton educates less than 0.02 % of the British population. That means that, as a proportion of population, they should have about 0.10 seats. Yep, that’s a decimal place. Not even one. One tenth of a seat. Another way of looking at it is this – if everyone had a equal chance of becoming Prime Minister of Britain, and we are somewhat generous to their chances, then we should expect to return an Etonian Prime Minister roughly once every 25,000 years. If he gets in – as seems likely – David Cameron will be the nineteenth. Sitting in Parliament after the next election, there are likely to be at least 14 Etonians on the front bench alone.

If I told you that there was still a country where the families of those that had, historically, ruled the nation for a thousand years had just been voted into power, you would presume that there was some form of corruption at work. If I then told you that the head of state was an unelected monarch, you’d be worried, until I told you that this monarch was effectively powerless, at which point you might think that was quite cute and quirky. Until I told you that there were still members of the aristocracy that still had political power for no reason other than they were members of the aristocracy; that our democratically elected Prime Minister was fifth cousin to the monarch, and married to a daughter of the landed gentry; that a large proportion of his party were also members of the landed gentry; that, by blood and marriage he and a large number of the members of his government were related to those who inherited power in the second chamber; that the people who funded his party were also, quite commonly, titled members of the aristocratic establishment. Then I might tell you that, in this country, many of the major companies and much of the land is similarly owned by this one tiny group, and that they form the major part of the intake to all of the top schools and hugely disproportionate number of places at the top universities. Now let me tell you that, in this country, so skewed was society in the favour of this group that something that ought to be nearly impossible is the case – nearly half of the most powerful men in the country went to ONE SCHOOL – the most prestigious in the land. One.

This is the function of a peculiar – though not unique in the world – historical and cultural contingency. Despite all the many changes that Britain has undergone, it is still, sadly, the case that those who do well for themselves express this by buying in to the trappings of privilege that were established in feudal times. Worldwide, Britain is the place to flock to for those who wish to add a little bit of upper-class prestige to their lacklustre roots. The wealth of the world is poured into the coffers of Eton, Rugby, Winchester, Goldsmiths and similar prestigious schools so that the sons and daughters of the world’s wealthy elite can learn how to exude that odd presence of the European upper classes. To us it might seem rather silly, (and perhaps, even a horribly ironic consequence of European imperialism), but throughout the world, those who are educated in British public schools – and a smattering of other European institutions (and a lesser number of American ones) of a similar kind – are an effective oligarchy. They form a huge core of the worlds ruling families, and even when we are not beholden to these people directly, it is not unusual to be buying oil, ore or manufactured goods from them. The sun, indeed, still does not set on this quiet empire.

You might feel like I was talking about a situation from the eighteenth century. It feels like something that you should only be able to make jokes about, something that should be utterly irrelevant to the modern world. But sadly it isn’t. And in recent years, it’s become more and more relevant. Because, for the first time in history, the trend for the dominance of those born into hugely privileged circumstances to find position in the government has actually climbed. The trend was always downwards – never so much that there was anything like equal opportunity (in fact, it’s always be hideously loaded in favour of those who might, rather unfashionably be labelled the ‘upper’ classes; by proportion of the population, we should only have two or three MPs at most from this whole demographic group), but steadily, through access to education, media, resources and damn hard work, the proportion of those from less privileged backgrounds has been steadily, slowly climbing. Then came the last couple of decades. And then the last three years.

I do not absolve New Labour of responsibility for this either, before you ask. But it is likely about to get a whole load worse.

The simple fact is that, those who would say that a person’s background should be immaterial when it comes to assessing their ability to rule are playing upon one truth to try and prove another. It should not be our primary concern that David Cameron is an old Etonian, a relative of the Queen or anything else he might be, unless we see that this fits into a larger and more worrying pattern. They cite personal prejudice even as soon as Cameron’s background is mentioned. However, it should concern us very much if we see it as part of a larger pattern. I’m suggesting that it is. The personal prejudice here is working the other way around – the much, much scarier way. This group is acting only to protect its own interests, and the rest of us – the vast majority – should be terrified. If they behave in such a way that does not fit this pattern, then their origin could, and should be ignored. If they act to reinforce it, then it is our duty, as citizens, to hold them to account for it; just as if they acted upon policies and fostered structures that favoured white men at the expense of coloured people or women.

We ignore these things at our peril. Groups act to protect themselves, and never, ever believe that these people do not see themselves as a group. It is not surprising that when people get into power, their friends and families are elevated with them. It is corruption, but it is of a kind we (sadly) expect. However, the group in question here is, hideously, the very same group that have ruled this land, in one form or another, for centuries. No wonder they call themselves ‘Conservatives’. We have a duty to prevent the people who see themselves as the natural rulers of this country from actually becoming so. If we allow a group of people to structure society so that those who inherit privilege are allowed to further structure society so that it reinforces this situation, we will have gone back hundreds of years. We cannot afford to take one step back, because every tiny inch of ground made against the establishment has been so hard fought, and will similarly difficult to regain. And ‘call me Dave’ is about to steal a whole march.

Keeping things nice and simple massively benefits the Conservative party in political debate, and massively disadvantages everyone else. But it’s misleading, and, frankly, dangerous. The other parties have their faults and cynical strategies of their own, but the Conservative attitude – which I will here characterise as ‘nice and simple’ is particularly insidious and awful.

The received wisdom regarding political campaigning is ‘keep it simple’. It’s perhaps a slightly insulting attitude to take towards the intellect of the electorate, but insults are often more accurate than compliments, as is the case in this particular circumstance. People don’t take as much of an interest in politics as they should, and you simply don’t understand things if you don’t take an interest in them. Especially if it wasn’t rammed down your throat at school, which, in the case of growing up in Britain, it isn’t. Rather pathetically, it’s deemed to be ‘impolite’ to even discuss politics in Britain.

Keeping ‘the message’ simple works. Every party has to strike a balance between the complexity of the proposed solution and the depth to which the electorate understands the issues, for even if you are remarkably well-informed, it’s unlikely that you completely understand all the variables, and, anyway, there’s always a limit on the time that a politician has to explain themselves. There are other considerations, of course; if you haven’t already, you should probably read my piece ‘honesty, politics and the bloody weather’, below (http://theadversary.yellowgrey.com/uncategorized/honesty-politics-and-the-bloody-weather).

Yet, these considerations enormously benefit the parties to the ‘right’ (as difficult as it is to accept that outmoded distinction, it is, at least, descriptive of a group). Because they genuinely advocate simple solutions. The ‘left’ tend to be formed of parties that are formed in the understanding that political situations are subtle, complex things requiring subtle, complex solutions. In fact, the change in definition between ‘the left’ and ‘the right’ might well be best re-defined in that manner. The appalling lie at the heart of this is that it there is not a choice between simple and complex solutions – because simple solutions have complex consequences. Social and political issues are complicated. Given that they are formed from the interactions between the most complex things in the known universe – us – we should expect them to be. Which means that the parties that recognise this are at the disadvantage of living with that honesty – that they have to try and explain why it’s more complicated than the ‘right’ say it is.

But that’s not their only advantage in debates. There’s also ‘nice’. Which, unsurprisingly, perhaps, works at it’s best when you define it via negativa, by characterising ‘nasty’. Usually, without directly naming them for fear of controversy and bigotry. But do not think for a moment that the roots for this motivation lie in anything other than prejudice or fear. Simple solutions need a target group to blame and punish, and another to reward. Unsurprisingly, the Conservative party always want to try and make you feel like the ‘nice’ person they are defending. Someone in or at the edge of their core vote. Which, broadly speaking, are slightly above average in affluence, and highly conventional in lifestyle. ‘You are the nice people, and all your woes are not your fault. Your conventionalism is to be rewarded and praised. It is not your fault that your obedient behaviour is not reaping its proper reward, for you are virtuous. It is those others who are to blame, those who would hold us all back. They must be restricted in this unconventional behaviour, and punished for it, for they are villains, and a drain on us all.’

So – keep it simple and blame other people. It’s an appealing, successful attitude, but, like anything that exploits narrow-minded naivety and it’s hideously damaging.

This terrible structure works well even in relatively uncontroversial cases. For instance, ‘call me Dave’, when asked about the laws concerning people who enter you home recently said “We’d like to raise the threshold, to say unless the force you use is grossly disproportionate then you should have no fear from the law. Basically my view is if the burglar crosses your threshold they leave their human rights at the door.” Seems like a simple solution to help nice people, right?

The punch is the second sentence. No human rights? Really? Remember, this would be the policy to cover all circumstances. The first sentence, then, that’s there to make sure that we can still prosecute people if they do something truly awful. So, if a twelve-year-old girl breaks into someone’s house on a dare, the residents don’t have the right to, say, rape her to death. I can understand why ‘call me Dave’ would want to avoid that. However, it does seem to imply that, providing I’m a little frightened, I’m well within my rights to kill someone for trying to pinch my telly. Let’s just look at that again. Kill a person for trying to steal my television. Providing, of course, I’m not ‘grossly disproportionate’ in my use of force. So, no flamethrowers, then?

The situation is more complicated than it looks at first sight, but because we see a vision of a ‘nasty’, ‘dangerous’ person breaking into a ‘nice’, ‘caring’ person’s house as soon as any kind of burglary is mentioned does not mean that it couldn’t possible occur the other way around. But ‘call me Dave’s answer seems reasonable at first. It will be popular. Despite making it legally fine to lie in wait with a shotgun for the (admittedly annoying, but hardly villainous) 12-year-old-boy who keeps pinching your gnomes because he thinks it’s funny – providing, of course, you can convince the court that he gave you a bit of fright and you were worried for the lives of your family. Essentially, by being ‘simple’ and appealing to ‘nice’ people, he could end up legitimising something I’d call ‘child murder’. Fortunately for us, we have the European Court of Human Rights to help limit attitudes like this. For now.

But perhaps the best illustration of this is the arbitrary cap on immigration that the Conservatives propose. It fulfils both criteria ideally. In fact, more than simply endorsing the view that there is a group which isn’t ‘you’ which is to blame –immigrants, in this case – it also appeals, by implication, to outright bigots. And it’s a simple, reasonable-sounding solution. ‘We’ll take this many and no more.’ But it’s rubbish. For a start, if they were trying to apply it to EU citizens, it would be illegal. Of course, it couldn’t possibly be applied to illegal immigrants, as they wouldn’t appear on the records. If the cap were applied largely to student visas, our university system would fall apart – they are, after all, one of the primary sources of funding for our higher educational institutions. And if there was a skills shortage, say, in the NHS, and the cap had already been reached, it would be ludicrous to claim that we shouldn’t allow any more doctors to come to work here. And it would be utterly, inhumanly, disgracefully immoral to apply it to people genuinely in need of asylum.

Essentially, given a moment’s thought, it’s ridiculous.

But it will get them votes. Because it’s a simple solution to problem that allows voters to blame someone else for their woes.

Similarly, claiming that you should re-distribute money to fund an inheritance tax break for the wealthy when you are going to have to bring in strong austerity measures is awful. Funding a tax break for married couples is so old-fashioned you can smell the tweed, but it appeals to their core voters in a nice, simple way. Nice people get married. We should reward that. Get’s a clap from ‘nice’ married couples every time. Yet the fact that the money to fund that is likely to come from the child trust funds – a great idea that helps children regardless of what their parents do – is, frankly, a bloody disgrace. Who are the implied ‘nasty’ people here? Unmarried people. Especially unmarried parents. By a roundabout means, then, the Conservatives are having a crack at their old favourite hate figures, single mothers. Their ‘3 strikes’ benefit policy is another clear example, clearly demonising all unemployed people as lazy freeloaders, but that policy is clearly hideously unfair after a moment’s analysis, especially when compared to the plans of the other two major parties. I could go on, and I’m sorely tempted to. But I will leave you in peace soon. Just a couple more thoughts.

The kings of blaming other people and coming up with simplistic, unworkable solutions with little thought to their moral consequences are the far right. People like the BNP. People on the ‘far right’. Like the Conservative’s allies in Europe.

The Conservative party are patronising you, and hiding their real interests behind this ‘nice and simple’ veneer. If you want to know their real motivations, and whose interests they really serve, you need only look at their tax policies. And here’s why the Conservative party are, in many ways the most dishonest and awful of all of the parties on the right – they don’t have the excuse of ignorance. They are all well-educated, well-informed people. More so than any other party, in fact. Which means that they know the consequences of what they are suggesting. Which means that they are misleading people as a whole in order to serve the minority groups they represent.

People want things to be simple. They also want to feel that they are the nice ones. Unfortunately, wanting something true doesn’t make it so. And saying that that’s your standard doesn’t either. You see, regardless of how you vote next week, the chances are, you aren’t the ‘nice’ people that these ‘simple solutions’ are going to serve. Because their definition shifts to suit whatever they want it to protect the core interests they serve. And, unless you are one of the tiny minority who the Conservatives do serve (in which case, there’s a high probability that you are a member of, or a donor to, the party), you’ve just allowed them to convince you that they are.

It used to be that, as far as free speech went, you knew your enemies – the church and the state. And you knew your cause. You were serving, (although sometimes by indirect means), the truth.

There are many people who treat free speech as if all forms of discourse were equivalent in the most basic terms. Freedom of the press is seen as exactly identical to freedom for individuals to express their opinions. This position has been defended time and again by political theorists and philosophers and commonly appears as a theme in many constitutional documents and appears to inform the spirit of article nineteen of the universal declaration of rights. This is because, classically, individuals and the press have a common enemy when it comes to freedom of expression. Both need to be protected against the state, for much the same reasons that people and the state both need protecting from the church. People suffer when anyone or anything is allowed absolute power to define meaning and truth, and anyone who speaks against is named a heretic or an ‘enemy of the people’.

Despite the easy way people believe these the freedom of the press and that of the individual to be identical, as a society, we do not have a completely free press. The reasoning is entirely pragmatic and, sadly, completely necessary. Where one voice, no matter how discordant, can be easily indulged, the presses are rather, a powerful choir, capable of dominating the debate to the point where individual opinion, even if it be truth, does not matter, because people’s account of truth can be manipulated by the information they admit into the sphere of debate they control and presentation of that information they do allow to contribute to the debate.

The modern presses, just like the state of old, has the power to define the meaning and truth of events. They set the agenda by which truthful statements can be admitted. Considering this, I wish to dissuade you from the notion that there is an equivalence between the rights to free speech of an individual, and the rights of the media. Instead I invite you to see the media world as closer to an institution like a state than an individual. Indeed, in the case of large media conglomerates, I invite you to see them not as akin to individuals, but as corporate institutions, more powerful and domineering than many states.

Firstly, make no mistake, I am not advocating censorship, and never would, even in a diluted form. I suggest to you, the reader, that the entertainment, news and media culture, by focussing our attention on trivial human interest stories, weather, and moral outrage over swindlers is, in fact, a form of censorship, of the more insidious variety. It structures the whole agenda of meaningful information in a way that serves its own interests.

Just look at the MMR scandal. Here’s a recent tweet from Ben Goldacre (of ‘Bad Science’ fame (@bengoldacre) “My MSc embryology class was asked what some causes of autism were. The only response was ‘vaccines’. *facepalm*” This is, quite frankly, appalling. Despite the fact that, according to any of our modern measures of truth, the MMR vaccine has been proven to be entirely unrelated to autism, such was the media’s power to define the truth that even people educated to a high standard in the specific area cannot frame the debate in any other way than in accordance with the received, incorrect, public opinion.

In modern commercial media, truth is subordinate to the aim of truth-telling. In giving someone the truth, in defining it, the agenda of the provider of the information takes precedence. In fact, telling people the truth is fairly low on the list of many priorities. Certainly it falls far below the desire to entertain. Their motivations cannot even claim the dubious nobility of personal, religious or political agenda. There is one cause of this peculiar modern censorship. The accrual of money by whatever means necessary. You cannot expect commercial institutions to tell you the truth about anything. All you can expect is for them to present you with something that will interest and entertain you enough so that they can make money from you directly or indirectly – through payment for the paper or news service in question, or (more commonly now), through their commercial sponsors.

But it doesn’t just apply to discourse regarding ‘the news’, or political or religious belief. It also applies to any form of creative art, or, indeed, scientific research. An ill-informed article about some alleged conspiracy over climate change, or an article that vastly over-estimates the dire impact of immigration will always sell more papers, attract more internet attention and keep more viewers watching than a more measured article. A newspaper or internet service that just blatantly lies will make more money than one that doesn’t. Thankfully, we have laws regarding this. Still, though, the manipulation of the truth – especially when it comes to the omitting of salient facts to the contrary – is tolerated in the name of free speech. Thus does grossly exaggerated opinion presented as fact come to dominate our very thoughts.

Such is the power of the large media corporations that speaking out against certain analyses can make a person feel like a heretic. Most commonly, however, people speaking out against certain positions are simply censored. Their opinions and views are simply never reported. They are defined out of the debate, regardless of the truth of their claims, the lies and failures at the heart of the received opinion or the possibly dangerous – often extremely so – consequences of allowing the situation to continue.

Yet, even in principle nobody believes that we should take everyone’s opinion as equally valid. One of the beauties of an individual’s right to free speech is also that it is necessarily accompanied by our right to speak out against it. We can check facts should we wish, and hope that the truth will carry our arguments through. When it come to individual claims, then, in ideal circumstances, we would like to be able to judge them on the basis of truth. Surely this is the standard by which all opinion should be measured. There are some structures within other realms that seem to allow for this. In academic circles, for example, the excepted standard for the validity of a given article is peer review. Now, this isn’t always perfect, certain cultures existing in certain subject areas that do, indeed , repress valid research. However, compared to the citizen’s individual ability against the power of the media, it seems astonishingly effective, and edifying. There is a clear reason for this. Academic circles, despite their occasional wobbles to the contrary, are interested in finding things out. They are concerned with finding out the truth of things. If they were concerned, primarily, with making money, things would be very different indeed (as the commercialisation of certain type of academia has shown time and again).

However, this doesn’t work in other spheres, such as music, film and television, primarily because there is commercial interest. Wherever there is money to be made, you will find people who will go to almost any lengths to see the balance of culture tip in their favour. This has never been so clear as it is now. When the same company that owns the paper that a film reviewer’s column appears in also produces the film being reviewed, you cannot expect a fair and balanced account of its merits. Worse still, cinemas, often being parts of large chains themselves, will not show or promote independent films. Which often means you can’t see them. Commercial radio stations are businesses whose job it is to sell advertising space and attract sponsorship. Consequently, they tend to play only well-known music, as this is the safest way to attract an audience (which makes them dull). But it is worse than this, because this problem is compounded when channels and stations are owned by media conglomerates. Pressure is applied to them both overly and covertly to promote individual pieces of music, and not others. Essentially, for very sound and sensible financial reasons, a form of censorship is being applied, even to the extent when annual award ceremonies are used to present these feeble pop-puppets as ‘serious artists’. If anyone complains, they appeal to free speech! It is, after all, their right to broadcast whatever they want. Minority interest music, and music which is overtly counter-culture, or even just perceived as slightly risky, is simply not played, as a matter of policy. Sometimes, such is the power of this retail sector alone that certain media companies will restrict their artists freedom to say what they like (Wall Mart have done this via record companies to recording artists in the past). Yet nobody seems to care about this manipulation of information and censorship; even those who scream with outrage every time the state tries to ban the odd song or movie. Yet being exposed to music, film, literature or any art that you don’t know, in unfamiliar styles or genres is an important part of personal growth, and vastly important to society. If the only music were, by governmental restriction, only allowed to produce, inoffensive state-approved music that never strays beyond the depth of a radio-friendly four minutes, there would rightly be a terrible outcry. But for fear of not being able to produce or promote music, or have it broadcast by corporate media, this has actually come close to being a de facto restriction many times. Worse still, the tendrils of vested interests of the biggest corporations extend right up to the highest institutions of government. The big media corporations can apply pressure directly to government on the basis of media support, or paint subsidiary and sister corporations in a more favourable light to their competitors. Quite commonly, the public is completely unaware of the undeclared interests.

To a degree this is starting to sort itself out due to the internet. However, if you are reading this, the chances are that you are pretty internet-savvy. Due to the fact that this page is never promoted by any media companies (any only very occasionally by any other means), the chances of anyone finding it are miniscule. It is the case that myself and many of my friends now pursue information across the web, and are starting to consume our art in a similar way (music has come along way in this regard). We don’t do this exclusively, though. And we are still, hugely in the minority. Even then, much of the media we actually interact with are just derivative versions of big media. And they’re often just as riddled with falsified facts and distortions as the worst newspapers. And it’s easy to forget that most of the people around us still consume everything through traditional media sources. It is this that still defines the game.

So, what alternatives are there? We need to preserve the ability of publishers to print things that may be against the interests of global media corporations, but also governments, churches or anything else they feel is appropriate. Yet we need to make truth their standard, and so free ourselves from their quiet tyranny. To a degree, the internet is starting to act as a correcting factor, by means as various as comedic demonstrations of power such as Rage Against the Machine Facebook campaign to twitter’s influence in Iran. But it is a constant fight, and it rarely seems capable of accessing the real focus of the media companies power – the ability to frame the debates in a way that serves them.

But there is an institution that has, for decades, managed to buck the trend, and exists in stark opposition to the notion that news and media should service the interests of companies first and people second. It is far from perfect, but we, in Britain, are very, very lucky to have a working alternative model. The BBC. The BBC is a public institution, but is not under the direct control of the state. As a public institution that is not directly under the control of the state, it is free to criticise anyone, with very little in the way of vested interests influencing its behaviour. Occasionally, as any institution does, it attempts to serve its own interests (further independence from the state and de-commercialisation would serve it well here), but as it has no vested interests outside of what it does, this is much more minor consideration. As a broadcaster or wider media, it exists not only to entertain, but also to showcase new talent and less mainstream alternatives, and can serve minority interests. BBC Six Music and the Asian Network were exact demonstrations of this, and it is tragic that the big media corporations have already got their way to the point where these are cut back.

The media companies’ motives are clear – by curtailing the BBC, they can get a larger share of the market, and so make more money. Yet this truth is rarely spoken by them. Instead they frame the debate in terms of commercial success – very few people listen to x, or fewer people like y than like z. This, of course, is completely irrelevant – providing some people are interested –people who wouldn’t be served by the commercial channels available – the BBC is doing its job. They produce some of the finest television programs made anywhere in the world. Their documentaries are legendary, world-wide for their accuracy, impartiality and quality. Through the world services, they are a voice for integrity and honesty in almost every corner of the planet. And the only people (in principle) who they are responsible to are those they service – the public. Should they lie to us or manipulate us, we can directly influence them because the British people fund them, as a public, as a whole, and can hold them to account. To a lesser degree, so can the state, and quite rightly – the publications of big media companies pounce on any question of their wrongdoing. The BBC, of course, can do this right back at them should they fall. They make the  media companies occasionally actually do what they claim they are doing for a living. It is accountable to us in the same way that any public institution that is not directly under the control of the government is, such as the courts. And, like the courts, informs one of a valuable nexus of checks and balances that ensure that the system as a whole is subject to less corruption or the domination of those with vested interests. The BBC has the power to do this, and nowhere is this power more important than in news journalism.

Is there any wonder that certain British newspapers relentlessly campaign for its removal? Without the BBC, there would be nothing to stop them save the liable courts or outright state censorship. In their campaign, they target the most obvious irritant that is a consequence of the BBC; the license fee. – a small sum of money that everyone who owns a television must pay, by law.  It’s an irritant, sure, but if we wanted to  maintain the current journalistic standards in Britain and through out the world, it would surely cost us more in endless court cases and government investigations – many of which would also not carry the authority of a BBC report, being a direct function of the state and, therefore, subject to more suspicion.

But it isn’t just this. Britain has one of the most vibrant music scenes anywhere on earth. This, in no small part, is due to the fact that we are not entirely subject to commercial radio. Further, we have some of the best television in the world – rivalled only by the USA, I would say – and this is a direct consequence of the existence of the BBC. Firstly, because by producing a high standard of television, it raises the bar for any competitor, and, secondly, because the advertising revenue that the commercial channels can command is divided amongst fewer people. It brings up the standard of everything. And it’s not just here. The world would be a very different place, much easier for states to manipulate, were it not for the BBC’s worldwide broadcasting services and internet content.

The BBC is not perfect. There are questions about some of the way that the BBC spends its money. There should be. But most of the focus, in my mind, should be upon the things the BBC does in order to make itself more like commercial channels – the expensive big names, the expensive reality TV shows. The misunderstanding of this occurs only when we allow the big media corporations to frame the debate as if it were all about ratings rather than public service.

In short, the BBC offers us a model which is a viable, working alternative to institutions that act against free speech while pretending to act in its name. We would be fools to let any government chop it up and serve it to the big media corporations. Not only would it damage our society, but have global ramifications for free artistic expression and the standard of truth.

Yesterday afternoon (depending on where you are, I suppose), Barack Obama announced that there would be regulations placed upon banks whereby the riskier investment activity would be more tightly controlled, and would have to be separated from the  more vital and socially supportive activity of banks. Furthermore, bank sizes will be controlled so that the collapse of a single institution can’t collapse the world economy. Uncontroversial, you’d think – except that a lot of people have made a lot of money with the way things currently are. And still are. The stock markets reacted predictably, and a lot of people stated to complain. Especially bankers.

There are many social structures that we have created to facilitate human interaction. One of these is banking. At the most basic level, banks exist to enable those with money to lend it to those without, with the hope that they will use that money to flourish, and so be able to repay the lent sum with interest, thereby making more money for the person who had it in the first place. Everyone’s a winner, right?

Well, fairly obviously, given the events over the passed two years, no.

Let’s put this plainly. Some time ago, the governments (and, therefore, the people) in almost every country in the developed world, were held to ransom by a small group of people so intent on making money that they were prepared to risk the financial provisions we all make to provide for us when we can no provide for ourselves. Not only that, but the places we live and companies we work for. So far do the tendrils of this industry extend that, if allowed to collapse, it’ll take everything with it, through the developed world and beyond. Because we’re all involved. These are the same companies that lend us money for our houses in Wolverhampton and Wyoming. These are the companies that have our savings, traded across the globe. They own everything we do, and have connected it to everything else.

Given that, you’d think they’d try to act responsibly, but no. In fact, this structure has a form almost opposed to stability. These ‘masters of the universe’ (self named – and if you ever needed proof that these institutions were being run by the kind of egoistic megalomaniacs you should be ashamed to share a genome with, there it is) see it as their duty to take control of as much as possible and then take the biggest risks possible in order to generate the biggest profits possible.

Are they doing this for you? No. they are doing it because it makes them money. Huge amounts. Steady, sustainable growth is completely possible, but undesirable. Sudden, rapid growth, which enables you to gobble up everything around you, makes you more money and sod everyone else. They use this structure to be savage.

And how do they justify this abhorrent behaviour? They tell you that it is natural. They appeal to principals such as ‘survival of the fittest’, and use terms like ‘dog-eat-dog’ to try and paint the global financial system as some sort of savage environment. And it is. But only because that’s how they behave. In and of itself, it is nothing. It has no existence independent of us.

So then they appeal to human nature. We know, at base, human beings can be vicious, savage, self-interested things. But we also know that we have the capacity to love, to be artistic, to care for their neighbours, to create nothing but beauty. Human beings can be Adolf Hitler and Attila the Hun, but they can also be Mother Theresa or Buddha if they are allowed to be. And civilisation is surely a collection of structures that allow this; structures that help our better aspects to flourish. We could all be savages beating each other to death with rocks and eating what remains, but we have institutions and cultures precisely to allow us to be better than that, to find our capacities for caring, our sense of community. The point of civilisation is that we don’t have to be that heartless, brutal thing. And whether your weapon is a rock, a policy or a laptop displaying current share prices, if you act without heart, if you are that radically senseless thing, you are as much of a brute as the BNP thug in footy shirt or the sweary teenage muggers you look down your nose at. Being rich and well educated doesn’t automatically make you a better person.

Why, then, should we allow the brutish, uncaring attitude to so dominate one of our most important social structures? Well, we shouldn’t, it’s as simple as that, and that’s why it needs to be regulated. That is embracing the idea of community – controlling the actions of the vicious and selfish to benefit the whole. This is also human behaviour and just as ‘natural’ for being precisely that.

When we let the banks bully us, that is a bad system. When we let a system turn us upon each other, that is a bad structure. It should be restructured, or removed. Sometimes we have to recognise that certain social structures are bad and need to be revised. They do not exist independently or spontaneous, like some creature adapted to its environment, and they are not shaped by forces beyond our control. These are our structures, and we can change them and remove them as we feel like it. If something is against the very notion of social utility, if it is acting against the very purpose of civilisation, then it needs to be changed.

It is often said that the banks have made a huge amount of money for Britain. In the most basic analysis, they have. More specifically, however, they have made a huge amount of money for a very small number of people. The ‘trickle-down’ economic model (Thatcher’s failed approach) would have you believe that this, in turn, should slowly make everyone richer, as these few rich people will buy more goods and services, all of which will flourish, thereby employing more people, increasing wages for the upper echelons, who then in turn spend more money and so on and so on. Also, they pay more tax, right? So we should be able to pay for better public services? No, because, largely, it doesn’t work like that.

The rich pay so little tax that it’s laughable. Indeed, there is a whole minor industry – tax accountants – who exist solely to make sure that they pay as little as possible. Quite a lot of them use international banking to avoid paying tax on their savings. Many of the companies that trade in this country aren’t even registered here, and pay us no tax at all. And even the money they spend, like it or not, is very commonly spent in ways that can’t possibly benefit the community as a whole. Expensive foreign cars? Nope. Buying property abroad? No. Buying a property as an investment to let, or outright for one of their children? No. Like buying a second home in Cornwall, all that does is drive up house prices, stopping anyone as modest as say, a teacher or a nurse from being able to do anything but rent… from someone who just bought an investment property… Going on fancy holidays is generally only good for the airline companies and occasionally a travel agent. I’m all for spreading the wealth to exotic countries, but in this context, it can hardly be used support the argument that it’s significantly benefiting ours.

In short, then, we aren’t getting much for the damage that these people do. The argument for higher taxation is there, but people always say ‘well, then the talent will take itself abroad!’ So what? Let them go. Many of the companies and people are already registered outside the UK anyway. In our current economic model, we have extreme wealth and extreme poverty. The average standard of living in comparably developed countries with higher levels of taxation is almost always higher than ours. Our low-tax low-regulation Reagan-Thatcher model has attracted talent only in the sense that it’s attracted people who have a talent to be brutish, savage and exploitative. If you want to attract actual ‘talent’, sponsor investment programs into alternative fuel technologies like the Danes do. The current structure of banking is a bad structure that does not benefit our society as a whole, all it does in its current form is ensure that a few of the richest people in the world continue to get substantially richer.

So, broadly, I support the ideas that Barack Obama has put forth. The idea that we should try our best to ensure that important things like you and your wife’s pensions are protected from the potentially volatile investment markets is a no-brainer. But I think there’s something else here that we’re not discussing.

The savings that we put aside for our old age should not be used primarily to benefit one small section of society. That kind of thing is not what banks are for, it’s what governments should do, and this Anglo-American ‘everything must be floated on the stock market’ attitude places us at the mercy of the savage. We should separate the provisions for our old age entirely from this game of rich ungentlemanly gentlemen. We need to come up with some alternative to our current pension schemes. We haven’t always done it this way. Why we should ever think that we could trust banking institutions with something so vital is beyond me. Despite, theoretically being partially owned by almost everyone, they are almost impossible to hold to account. The idea that we should connect something so vital to something so volatile is ludicrous. It’s our world, not just theirs. It’s a bad and foolish structure that doesn’t help us. Let’s change it.

The Iraq inquiry, the snow and the forthcoming election campaign – what do these three things have in common, apart from all being very popular things to blog about? They are all examples of the consequence of our demand that politicians lie to us. ‘Our demand?’ I hear you cry (ok, only in my head), ‘but surely what we want is honesty from our politicians!’ No it isn’t, or if it is, you are one of a very rare breed. Or perhaps you are lying to yourself. It’s not unlikely, most people do all the time. Especially about this.

I haven’t blogged for a while, since Africa, in fact, and though many things have happened since then that may have briefly woken me from my blogmatic slumbers (yep, that’s a Kant joke), such as Nick ‘Fat-Hitler’ Griffin being on Question Time, but I’ve been rather busy. I’ve driven up and to and beyond the Arctic Circle for a start, which brings me back to the weather.

In this country (and many others), people tend to whinge and moan about things that are their own fault (or nobodies fault), blaming everyone and anyone else they can. Part of this is that terrible inheritance from primitive culture that fiddles away with our neurons – ‘but what have we done to deserve this?’ as if everything is some sort of divinely-allotted reward or punishment for virtue or lack thereof rather than the simple series of basically random events that it is. [Once and for all let us lay this to rest. Whether you believe in the Christian-Freudian-father-god, the spirits of the earth or karma, people are not rewarded and punished on the basis of their behaviour by anything other than our rules. We know this, because Donald Trump, Simon Cowell, Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher and every other conniving two-faced selfish manipulative horror of a person that exploits everyone else around them, providing they don’t break the law too much, have a pretty nice life full of money, respect and satisfaction, whereas selfless care workers, heroic veterans and charity workers tend to work without reward of any kind from society or life in general, and very little respect. Both groups have the same chance of ending up dying of cancer, and due to their inability to protect themselves from the world with a money buffer, the nice people tend to get raped, stabbed, burgled and mugged more often. Virtue, if it has any reward, is simple peace of mind, knowing that instead of exploiting and shattering the dreams of hopeful people for your own end, you’re helping them. But the bastards sleep well at night too. Generally next to a supermodel.]

However, the focus of these strange opinions we so often voice as far as this little rant is concerned is the lies we know we are telling, and those we are inviting others to tell us. Here’s one: ‘Why weren’t the government better prepared for the winter weather?’

Because they shouldn’t be.

We know this. Most reasonable people know that, given the limited budgets of councils and government as a whole, things must be prioritised on the basis of likelihood. At least half of the people who go on and on asking the question ‘why weren’t we better prepared for the winter weather?’ already know the answer. Because buying, transporting, collecting and storing the huge amount of grit, diggers trucks and snowploughs that only might be necessary means that you can’t spend the same huge wedge of cash on a new fire engine, fifty units of blood, a policeman and a nurse. In fact, it would be utterly irresponsible for the government as a whole or your local council to have spent that money preparing for this winter. The next point made by the Great-British man-in-the-street-alliance is usually ‘well, they cope with it well enough in Scandinavia don’t they? And they have a decent health service.’

Yes they do, on both counts. Because they have higher taxes. Which the  Great-British man-in-the-street-alliance is unwilling to pay. But also, they have a predictable winter. They use their ploughs and gritters and such every year without fail for months. Vast parts of the country would be entirely shut off for weeks at a time without them. Of course they are prepared, and yet even they sometimes get caught out, too.  We need them only for a few days once every few years, and the consequences of incapacity are a hundred times less serious, because it usually goes away pretty quickly of its own accord. It’s just not the same return for the same investment. So we invest less, and put the money into more useful things.

Now, as a consequence of this, we should think, when some little village gets snowed in ‘ah well, hard luck, but I guess that MRI machine will more likely be of use still anyway.’ But we don’t, and we know we won’t. We might just think ‘ah well, I guess someone might have seen this coming, but given that they didn’t I guess I should probably not drive for the next couple of days, or if I do, take it really steady’, but in the vast majority of cases, we’re not even that realistic. Oh no. Mostly we expect this: ‘It is the government’s job to perfectly predicts and cope with everything that happens so that I can get on with my life in an uninterrupted way as if nothing at all happened.’  Which is insanely unrealistic. But it’s what most of us, at our core, seem to be demanding.

Little wonder then, that any politician of any grade in any position of power will always tell you that they are prepared for every eventuality. They know they’re not, we do too, but we conspire to make them say that they are. Likewise, any opposition politician can make grand political capital by stating the bloody obvious all the time – that things are going to happen which those that are in power aren’t prepared for. This little web of lies is informed by the democratic system itself; in order to attract votes, you have to be seen to be better than the other guy – in this case, in terms of competence, (although in some contexts, such as attracting votes for the BNP, ‘better’ can equal something as awful as ‘more racist’ or ‘anti-gay’ in the eyes of some).

Essentially, we are inviting, if not demanding, that people lie to us, and lying brings us nicely around to the Iraq enquiry and Tony Blair’s impending testimony. Of course he was lying. It was about using terrorism as an excuse to secure future oil supplies and demonstrate the might of the world’s biggest superpower. It was a bad plan, but then, as it was dreamed up by right-wing extreme-capitalist religious fundamentalists, we probably shouldn’t be surprised. If he’d sat down and said to the country, ‘Look, you’re not going to like this. I don’t, really, but I’ve thought about this a great deal and the Americans have this plan to secure our oil supplies for the next few decades and try to bring some measure of stability to a region that hasn’t seen much recently, at first by establishing a military presence in the area, and later by placing a friendly power in the region. We hope that in the long term we can make up for the damage we cause by improvements to infrastructure and institutions, but you should understand that this is not guaranteed. What we do know is that if the current situation continues, things will never improve, and will like become drastically worse, and, unfortunately, we can see no simple or pleasant solutions. Ours isn’t an ideal solution, and it isn’t without risk. In fact, it might make things worse, but on balance, I’ve decided that it’s best if we support them. It’s going to be unpleasant, and lots of people are going to die, including some of our soldiers, but we really think it’s worth doing. I’ve set up a website so you can see more information about the history of the region, and previous mistakes that governments of the past have made to lead us to this unfortunate set of circumstances. Please go and look at it.’ I still wouldn’t have agreed with him, but I’d have appreciated it. But no. Because we ask our government to protect us from thinking about things like this, what we got was a big fat pack (or dossier, if you prefer) of easy to swallow lies. Such is the nature of this institution of lies that we even end up lying to the U.N. Not clever.

The forthcoming election campaign will be a continuing and massive festival of conveniently avoided truths, spin and outright falsehood right up to election day. At which point it will continue, but (probably) with the cast reversed. Everyone present will lie day on day about how they will use your tax money better and cut budgets without cutting frontline serves by eliminating ‘waste’ (that only tall tale is one of their favourites – as if they weren’t just replacing a couple of dozen guys at the top capable of changing nothing but a few broad-stroke policies but were somehow going to change every institution right down to replacing individual bin men – as everyone actually knows, institutions of a given size are wasteful to a given degree and when you tighten up one area, it just means something else goes slack, especially when the same people are working there, managed by the same people utilising much the same resources for exactly the same purpose). We might as well all just scream ‘lie to me, please lie to me’, or rename the election Britain’s ‘best comforting bullshitters contest’. Who do we thing is the most comforting and charismatic liar? Who’s going to make us feel better? It’s pathetic, quite frankly, and we’re exactly the people who are being pathetic about it. Because there are important decisions to be made, ones that are going to be made one way or another (and not always the same by each party), and when we are more concerned with who’s going to make us feel better about what we know is really going on but don’t want to listen to, those decisions are inevitably going to result in the deaths of innocents, the persecution of people, the exploitation of populations home and abroad, the destruction of our natural environment. The sad fact is that we might as well best sticking our fingers in our ears, screwing up our eyes and singing.

Part of this is that we really couldn’t have referendums for everything, because you can’t boil complex situations down to simple choices very easily. For example, ‘Would you rather pay a lot more for petrol over then next few years and have us throw lots of tax money at fuel research and then make you buy a new car in a few years, or would you like us to make it really expensive to own a car and massively improve public transport, or would you prefer it if we made your lives cheaper and easier but killed a few hundred thousand people in a different country? Tick A B or C.’ Perhaps that’s only a question that could have been asked in America. Let’s try this instead. ‘Would you like keep up good relations with the world’s most powerful country and kill a few hundred thousand people in the Middle East, or would you like to upset them and risk ruining relations (this might have some serious economic side effects resulting in your recently-graduated daughter being unable to pursue a career in finance)?’ Or, ‘Would you like us to ensure that we can cope with a freakish snowfall, or would you like some more ambulances?’ ‘Would you like us to prepare to cope with every possible freak flood event or would you like five new hospitals?’ ‘Would you like us to put air conditioning in everyone’s home in case we have a freak heat wave again, or would you like a police force?’ Nope, none of them a quite right. ‘Would you like us to ban imports from countries that exploit their people in might-as-well-be-slave-labour conditions and take a shot in the pension fund and cheap clothes departments or don’t you care enough for us to bother?’ Better, but still not right.

Even if we had someone better than me formulating the questions, the British and the Americans – and indeed, I suspect, all of the world’s – populations are nowhere near educated enough or well-informed enough as a whole to be allowed such direct access to democracy. We’d have capital punishment back within twenty-four hours and a crippled economy within the week. This is why we empower people to lead us, so that they can dedicate all their time to becoming suitably well-educated and well-informed to do it. However, if we have to rely on people to lead us, that doesn’t mean we can’t have honesty. What I resent is the relationship with have with the truth behind the decisions they make. They lead to the kind of silly bloody lies that have resulted in things like Iraq. All we need is to be told the actual reasons for the decisions they make, and eventually we’d come to understand (and, of course, for the opposition to say what they’d have done instead of making cheap political capital out of everything). Then, if we felt that they were being too bastardly, we could vote them out, and at least we’d know what we were responsible for.

You might say, I suppose, that in these new, more honest circumstances, any party that did lie would instantly get in. No it wouldn’t, because after a while we’d know. They’d be the one’s obviously lying. Most of us know that NOW, let alone of they were the only people offering free ten pound notes.

However, we are the ones that need to do something to demand this honesty. Firstly, and primarily, we need to stop demanding unrealistic things from our leaders. We need to stop pretending that we don’t know what we know. If we are going to get decent answers, we need to ask decent questions? We know there are cuts in services coming. We know that if we want to maintain things we need to be taxed. We know that there’s no magic ‘waste-saving’ solutions. We know that sometimes we go to war for resources, we know that sometimes it is in this countries best interests to support the Americans, and sometimes it isn’t. I realise that this isn’t going to change quickly. So let’s start small, work our way up, let them know that we know and stop conspiring to ask our leaders to lie to us. So, first and foremost, can we please stop being so unrealistic about the bloody weather?

I started to climb Kilimanjaro, and I didn’t get to the top, which essentially means that I went for a four day hike at 4000m for no good reason at all. Ho-hum. I was effected somewhat by altitude sickness (of the vomiting variety, largely), and though I felt I could have reached the top, I chose to turn back. Part of me feels like a failure – the pathetic macho part of me, of course. The part of me that is currently insisting that I point out that I felt entirely capable of reaching the top. Indeed, apart from the altitude sickness, I didn’t find it particularly difficult at all. Still, I decided not to climb to the summit, and here’s why.

Boring background first. The company we had paid to take us to the top had sub-contracted to a local tour company. They, in turn, had then hired some local guides. They had only used them a couple of times before, but as they had been successful, they employed them again. A cheerful chap from the sub-contractors introduced me to our rather quiet guides – two young men who I shall name from now on only by reference to a variety of incompetent comedy duos. The reasons I have for doing so will quickly become apparent.

After a long and rather uncomfortable journey in a van where nobody talked to us (save for the single word ‘permit’, and an invitation to purchase chocolate that – having been told that it was provided – we confusedly refused, thereby condemning us to scavenge our own up later on the mountain) as various unexplained errands were run about town and people were picked up and dropped off. I thought for a while that we were in one of the many taxi-bus hybrids that patrol Africa’s cities, but no. Eventually we arrived at the mountain, and the lads piled out and began arranging things while we were abandoned with little explanation to sit for an hour or so on a bench. Then, suddenly, we were off, at a steady uphill stroll, somewhat cheered to be finally on the move. We tried to engage our guides in conversation, and failed – they simply smiled enigmatically and muttered something unrelated to the topic. At first I thought it was just social awkwardness, a lack of familiarity. It wasn’t.

The boss (who wouldn’t be coming) had assured us that if we wanted to split up because we walked at different paces, we could, and that one guide would accompany each of us. This did not happen. As I walked on ahead, Laurel and Hardy stayed behind with my girlfriend. In some ways I was grateful as it gave me some much-needed time alone. I had no particular reason to worry, and after I waited for them to catch up, my girlfriend seemed happy enough. They were chirpily chattering to each other in Kiswahili, and I thought nothing of it – after all, it was just the first day, the path was easy to follow, and I couldn’t possibly have gotten into much trouble. Weirdly we were served a pleasant hot lunch at a table by the side of the path (a situation that made me feel very uncomfortable indeed, but perhaps charmed some), and, once again, though we tried, we failed to engage any of our companions in conversation. As we walked along, they told us a few facts, then repeated themselves over and again, despite our questions. I started to wonder if they knew anything at all about the mountain. Soon, however, I started to suspect that they simply didn’t understand me. Eventually we just fell quiet, and I wandered off to enjoy the forested slopes, and I had a pleasant afternoon’s climb. We even saw some local wildlife in the form of monkeys. Which I pointed out. Perhaps we should have guessed from the oddness of this first day, but sometimes it takes time to bond with people, and, truth be told (and despite all our warnings), it was pretty easy work.

You should understand that climbing Kilimanjaro, for most people, is like getting straight ‘A’-grades at GCSE at some posh private school. It sounds impressive at first, but when you take into account how favourable the circumstances have been made, it doesn’t tell you very much at all about how much work you did or talent you have. There’s so much support that really the result was damn near inevitable anyway, and all you did was turn up and do as you’re told – easily hard enough work to make it feel like an achievement – but if you don’t get the expected result it points to some problem you have that couldn’t be solved even with the judicious application of the best experts in the game motivated with big wads of cash. Some groups carried their own toilet tents. It’s really not the kind of respect you deserve if you do it by yourself, carrying most of your own gear and maybe getting a couple of porters mostly just to point you in the right direction (or, to carry on this analogy, you went to a crap school and still managed to do well despite having to look after your younger sister’s kids while you revised).

Where this similarity ends is with the possible consequences of failure. Bad teaching at some inner-city comprehensive school means that you end up with no qualifications. Having bad guides when you’re wandering about at the better part of six kilometres straight up in the air can mean serious illness, long-term damage and even death. It’s unlikely, but not so much that you can afford to ignore it.

As day two led me through steadily thinning trees and up onto the moorlands, I started to become suspicious of our group. Breakfast was… well, it was unpleasant and heavy, but they told us that we should eat up because we were going to walk right through to the next camp before lunch (later we would find out that they were doing this largely just to make their own lives easier – you need to eat along the way because you need the fuel, and everything hits you harder when you’re running on empty). So a steep climb was accompanied first by indigestion and later by fatigue with a spot of fun in between. We became increasingly suspicious that our guides didn’t understand what we were saying to them after it took us twenty minutes to explain that we wanted some boiled water for tea. I slept badly, only getting a couple of hours. When I awoke and told my guides they seemed mystified, although it is a common effect of altitude. At this point we should have telephoned (yep, they work all the way to the top) and asked for new guides – ones we could talk to – but we didn’t. I regret this now, and wish I’d have acted, but then, they say hindsight is 20-20. On the other hand, I’m not sure I trust the opinions of people who would look at the world through the perspective given to them by an arsehole. Which is the same reason that you should never trust anyone who respects the opinion of David Cameron.

The next day I cheerfully hiked off my tiredness, climbing up to the lava tower, way passed four kilometres. Breakfast was bad, but lunch was foul. My girlfriend got altitude sickness quite badly and felt awful. Fortunately, we climbed down a little to camp, through weird terrain so like a Star-Trek set that I kept thinking that a wobbly jelly-monster would lurch out at me. I felt quite well up to the afternoon (well enough, in fact, to draft a text message to send from the summit), and cared for my distraught girlfriend, but then the altitude started to get to my gut. Vomiting is not an uncommon thing for me, but it’s exhausting when you are having difficulty catching your breath. I lay down for a while, but I couldn’t face the food on offer. Our guides said and did virtually nothing. The night was horrible, and I was sick the next morning also. They tried to insist I ate, which I couldn’t, and tried to feed me lemons. They also fussed about me, massaging my kidneys and slapping me on the back whilst I was being sick. I was too weak to tell them to fuck off. In between times, they fussed about me in way that made me feel uncomfortable, but couldn’t explain anything to me. I’d have insisted on leaving if it hadn’t been for three things.

Firstly, they found another guide who could speak to me and explain that I could probably get better by taking some diamox. He was a more regular guide for the company we were with, and a godsend. On the language thing – it might appear for those not familiar with Tanzania that I’m displaying typical British snobbery at expecting my guides to have understood, if not spoken reasonable English, but in Tanzania it’s not difficult to find people who speak good English. It’s an official language of the country, and most people speak it to some level. A lot of people speak it very well indeed, as you’d expect – just as you’d expect a Peruvian to speak Spanish or a Brazilian to speak Portuguese. Even the street-touts spoke it far better than our guides (who would get even simple things – for a guide – like ‘camp bed’ and ‘water bottle’ mixed up, and, more worryingly, times and distances). Almost all guides we met spoke excellent English (it’s part of the job, after all). That our guides were unable or unwilling to speak it was really distressing. The ‘third man’, a kind of guide-in-training and general assistant to us couldn’t seem to say anything other that ‘hot water is ok’ and ‘dinner is ok’. We simply couldn’t communicate. But this new guide could, and he told me that he’d advise our guides as to what to do. I’m sure he did – he honestly seemed like a good guy to me. I’m also equally sure that they took no notice at all.

Secondly, I was told that it was a short, easy day, and that it would be easier to descend, should I feel the need, from where we were going rather than where we were. I don’t know if this was true, but it certainly wasn’t an easy day with no food inside me. And thirdly, my girlfriend was feeling better, and she knew how disappointed and ashamed I’d be if I turned back. It’s true that I did not want to fail, and I steeled myself, retrieved some dextrose tablets, and set my jaw.

So we set off up ‘breakfast wall’, (actually called the Great Barranco wall, not that our guides ever mentioned this). It was a long day for me, but only, I feel, because I hadn’t eaten. Towards the end I was cheered when one of our guides pointed to the camp not far off. It looked to be less that couple of kilometres, a half hour walk until rest and lunch. They didn’t, however, tell us of the huge steep-sided valley in between, and seemed confused when I was depressed by its discovery. At the bottom of the valley I got decidedly ratty and started ranting about how pissed off I was with them and how I simply wanted to follow the valley back down the mountain. Not only did they ignore me, they had no idea what I was saying. We climbed up to the camp and I overheard them trying to talk to my harassed girlfriend, telling her that I couldn’t continue if I didn’t eat. The state of the food did not improve, and I had to eat outside because of the stench, forcing as much down as I could. We’d been told that there would be a specific program of food designed to complement each day’s activity. We had even paid a premium to have food of improved quality. What we received was the same foul menu relentlessly for each meal. None-the-less, I managed to beg some toast and fruit out o them, and ate as best I could. Meanwhile, my body was bringing itself to terms with the altitude, and I got my first decent nights sleep. In the morning, I felt better, and considered my options.

I felt easily well enough to continue, and my stomach (despite their best efforts), had settled. The terrain was not giving me much difficulty, and I had only a short way to go that day. And I really didn’t want to turn round simply because the people around me were unpleasant and unprofessional. We struck onwards and upwards, and rapidly reached our next camp. The guy who had given me advice the previous morning even sought me out on the trail. We sat down and he gave me some advice regarding what I should take over the next few hours, and on the summit assault later that night as Tweedledum and Tweedledee sat about staring into space.

We bought some Mars Bars at three dollars each from a man at the next camp and settled down for some much needed rest. Not that this seemed to interest our porters or guides, who played music and ran about like noisy children. Dinner was a another unpalatable horror, and Noddy and Bigears came in to brief us on our midnight summit assault. They asked us about our kit, and shook their heads and sighed when we didn’t have several things they a) hadn’t checked for and b) weren’t on the kit list anyway. They then advised us to take a different drug schedule to that which the other (nicer and wiser) man had advised. In fact, despite being present when he’d advised me, they seemed completely ignorant of the conversation taking place at all. This led to something of an argument as they tired to get authoritative with us. We decided we’d lie. Able top talk openly in English with no fear of being understood (at least without formulating twelve different sentences to the same effect every time), this deception was not difficult to accomplish. They told us to meet them at 11.00 at the mess tent where there’d be tea and biscuits and such, and we dutifully retreated to our tent for rest. Rest which was then made impossible once more by the noisy activity of the rest of the party, up till around ten when we had to rise to pack and get dressed. And I was starting to feel sick again.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. My oxygen and sleep-deprived brain was starting to reduce me to an emotional wreck. I became horribly paranoid, ratty and easily upset. When we’d packed, dressed and got up dutifully for eleven, we found the camp deserted. They eventually roused themselves twenty minutes later. By that time we were both very cross, and I was starting to vomit again. Once more they sprung into action with their painful manipulation of my guts and back-slapping, then asked us if we were ready to go.

I was in two minds, and neither of them were thinking clearly. On the one hand I felt dreadful, and I was exhausted and upset, but on the other, I’d come this far, and I really wanted to reach the top. I also did not doubt that I could. We had a long time to do it, and though the cold was going to be bitter, the terrain did not seem too harsh. Even if it had been like doing three of our previous hikes in a row, I’d have been able to do it, nothing so far (except for the altitude) had really tested me at all. My girlfriend was also in two minds, and tried to talk to the guides to build her confidence – it was an exercise in futility as they seemingly had no idea why she was upset. None-the-less, she could see that, despite my discomfort, I was determined to go, and we were just about to set off when another bout of vomiting took me, and she started to insist that I stopped and came back to bed. Grumpy in one part, but relieved in another, I crawled into bed, the assault abandoned. I rested for a while, and felt better, and then (of course) started to become upset once more, regretting my voluntary failure. It was at this point that my girlfriend revealed to me the actual reason she’d not wanted to go up. It was something that my weakened mind had not considered.

Angered by their ineptitude, particularly with reference to how they handled my sickness, she’d started to consider what might happen if we became sicker as we climbed. There are many possible consequences to altitude sickness, none of them pretty. When we’d booked the trip, we’d been told that we’d be guided by experts trained to pick up on the signs. Morecambe and Wise had displayed no expertise. Even if they had it, it was impossible to describe symptoms to them. I had been about to place our fate into the hands of two men hardly qualified in either of our opinions to take us to the top of a flight of stairs, let alone Kilimanjaro.

Unwilling to spend a moment longer with the chuckle brothers than we had to, we hiked back down the entire mountain the next morning (some three or so times the distance we’d have covered to the summit, albeit with descending altitude on our side). We scrapped bitterly with them at points as they seemed unable to give us any accurate indication of how far away things were. They fussed about it, trying to be attentive, even tying our shoelaces for us, trying to secure their tips, but they only succeeded in irritating me further. The ride back was tense to say the least. We slid into our hotel bed sheets somewhat relieved to be comfortable, but mostly annoyed.

We did not really know what to expect when we talked to their boss the next day. However, he soon told us his position. ‘There is a problem with these guides. I know because the porters would not talk to me. I had to take each of them aside individually, and they all said different things. Sop you tell me.’ So we did – everything I’ve described here and more – much more, in fact, but I am tired and depressed by thinking about it, and I really can’t be bothered to list it all here. He told us he would fired them, suggested we ask the company for our money back and offered us a free trip up the mountain with a different bunch if we could ever afford to get back to Tanzania, to prove to us that this was not the standard his company provided. As he was so thoroughly upset by it all, and seemed so genuine, I have not mentioned any names here. Should our refund not be forthcoming, I shall.

I will try to sum up the trip next week, and make further musings upon my experiences and impressions of Africa, providing something suitably important and interesting doesn’t happen in the meantime. Maybe I’ll post twice. Listen, though – if you even fancy climbing that mountain, don’t let this put you off. Most of the teams seemed very expert, and you will make it. The sense of failure and defeat that haunts me now is just a hangover from my more masculine inclinations. The schoolboy that failed at sports became an adult that has always fought through all the physical trials his feeble flesh tipped towards failure with grim determination, swearing that he would not let the taunts that still echo in his ears ever return. This man feels a little diminished by this experience, but I’m not going to be pathetic about it either. There are lessons to be learned. I shall learn them and move on.

As I first began to write this, a big bull Elephant wandered into our camp on the rim of the Ngorongoro crater and drank it’s bellyful of water from the tank that supposedly fed the kitchen. Slightly nervously we crowded around snapping pictures, hoping it didn’t kill us all in a fit of pique or some elephantine equivalent. Presently it rejoined its little group. There were two others, and so I abandoned writing this and went off to watch them. They tolerated our presence for a while until one couple got too close and one of them reared up, raised its trunk and prepared to charge. We fled – I fancy enough adrenaline was in my system so that if there is a record set for the 100m cross-country dishevelled dash, I gave it a fair go. Later that night came the incident with the bush pig, but all in good time…

I am in Africa, and not for the first time this week, part of me had be reminded by that elephant of what I really am – a fragile, little monkey with a disproportionately massive head and fewer natural defences than almost anything I can lay my eyes upon. I am now safely ensconced in a hotel, beer in hand, and have just gone toe-to-something-indescribable with a huge insect. Had I not been armed, I suspect it might have won.

I’d though that on Safari, save for a few close encounters, we’d largely be scanning the horizon with binoculars to patiently watch Africa’s most famous residents, but it wasn’t like that at all. The first few shots I took of distant elephants, barely five minutes after entering the park were essentially rendered pointless less than an hour later as they blocked the road in front of us, as unconcerned by our presence as a powerful six-tonne beast with no natural predators should be. Our week-long safari started in Tarangire National Park, and was no disappointment. This first day alone, the number of elephants we espied amongst the baobab trees must have numbered in the hundreds. The numerous pictures I took are only a tiny catalogue of the many things we encountered there, and there were lots of firsts for me – zebra, wildebeest, elephants, giraffe, ostrich, impala, to name just a few – but three moments really stick in my mind. Firstly when, surrounded by elephants, they started to signal to each other. Two breeding herds were getting a little close to each other, and the tremendous bass rumble and trumpeting that occurred was astonishing. The noise, up close, is felt as well as heard, as a shaking of the air in your chest, rather like the pumping from a bass speaker at an outdoor concert.

Secondly, the sighting of my first lion. Distantly, it lounged on a tree branch. Our driver, a charming, deep-voiced and very knowledgeable man, told us that such was rare in this park. It’s not that there aren’t very many lions, there are, but the grass is long, and so, like the things they hunt, you rarely see them regardless of how close you are.

Thirdly, as we dashed back through the park in our specially prepared Toyota Landcruiser (there are nearly as many of these as there are elephants around these parts), we turned a blind corner and nearly ran into a herd of elephants. A warning rumble and we were face to face with a large bull elephant, its trunk looped protectively over its bared tusks, prepared to charge should its warning message not be understood. It had turned with a speed that belied its size. Just for a moment I thought it might attack. Two tonnes of steel is nothing to one of these. Fortunately, it decided we had been told and turned away without turning us into a sculpture of meat and scrap metal (possibly entitled ‘know your place’).

Lake Manyara, a small, beautiful park with a central soda lake at the edge of the colossal wall of the rift valley (look that up if you don’t know what it is) awaited us the next day, home to a large colony of flamingos, baboons, monkeys, more elephants and huge, hideous Marabu storks (that also populated our campsite) that I found quite appealing in their horridness. Hippos, too. Actually, I saw a lot of hippos over the course of the next few days. I strongly dislike them – they are ugly and fat, like bloated, sunburnt American tourists with no dental plan. But they are not ugly in an honest, appealing way like warthogs or vultures, there’s just something rather revolting about them. And they’re nasty buggers too. And they smell really bad. And they swim and frolic in their own faeces. Anyway, such was the profusion and density of wildlife that we started to make a game of spotting things. Giraffe were the favourite of the day, and my girlfriend won that game by a huge margin. In the evening, I got talking to a South African man, who immediately engaged in a game of competitive tourism (not the card game that, I have to say, is coming along quite well, but the mundane, bragging variety). Of course, we’d come at the wrong time of year and were going to the wrong places, and could have done it so much better and cheaper a different way. He was a nice enough man really, but I couldn’t help but note that, for all his knowledge and expertise, he was also on safari in the same place at the same time I was. I prepared myself for the drive to the Serengeti the next day, and enjoyed the protection of the campsite – something that would be lacking from here on in.

This whole area is defined by the volcanism associated with the rift valley. Kilimanjaro is a volcano, Ngorongoro (which we would pass the following day) is a caldera. The Serengeti is a vast plain defined by the ash-fall that made its surface a concrete plain that trees find hard to penetrate, meaning that only grass and scrub-bushes can cling to its thin soil. This strange environment has enabled the weird species that inhabit it to proliferate and find their huge and numerous forms. It also allowed one type of specialised primate to develop, one that would come to dominate the entire planet. The hominids.

On the way to the Serengeti, we pass along the crater rim of Ngorongoro. It is covered in cloud, and we seem to climb forever through the mist, the temperature decreasing from ‘staggeringly hot’ to ‘quite cool’ in proportion to the altitude. Through forest we emerge into a landscape that increasingly reminds me of home – or the Yorkshire Moors at least. Our guide and cook shiver, but I’m beginning to feel more at home. We stop for a toilet break (rough roads – ‘the African Massage’, as my guide puts it – play merry havoc with full bladder), and I comment on this. ‘It’s just like home,’ I say, insightfully, ‘only we have fewer Zebra.’ In that strange way that people have of becoming very rapidly familiar with their surroundings, I confess that I’d ceased to take much notice of them. As we descend through the cloud cover, we catch first sight of the crater – it’s as if someone in the far future has decided to create a huge walled-in wildlife theme park on the Jurassic park model. I can’t see any of the animals, but a youth periodically spent in the tender care of David Attenborough’s documentaries has filled me with the capacity to recognise the environment for what it is. There will be more of it.

‘Quite cool’ rapidly turns back into ‘scorching’ as we approach the Serengeti. We take a much-needed lunch in Olduvai Gorge (or, as it is actually called ‘Oldupai’ Gorge – it is named for the fibrous plant that grows there, and the word was misheard as ‘Olduvai’ by a German who discovered a hominid skull there in the 1930’s). By this point, I am half man, half dust, and I attend a brief lecture and spend some time wondering around the museum that details the work of the Leakeys and their invaluable contribution to the knowledge of the origins of man. Look this up too if you don’t know about it. It will be time well spent, and it is a whopping great nail to bind down the coffin lid upon the mouldering corpse of creationism. There’s a sign that reads ‘welcome home’.

The Serengeti (properly pronounced ‘Seerengeti’, I’m reliably informed) is exactly as billed – apparently endless, plains rolling to the horizon, a vast and easily accessible photosynthesis cell. We have missed the vast herds of wildebeest, they have already migrated north. But along the Seronera river, life remains. The cats, highly territorial, never move, else they must fight for new territory, and it is better to be patient. Some prey does not migrate – too old, or simply disinclined (apparently this is less uncommon than you might think).

We spend the bulk of three days prowling around for wildlife, although the first and last days have something of a mad dash quality to them. In fact, such is the pace of the first day that I sleep like a tranquilised leopard the first night (I pick the leopard because I’d image they give them a big dose, as they are well known for violence, and they sleep a lot anyway), which is probably for the best, because our campsite is right in the middle of the Serengeti – not a fence to be seen anywhere. Wildlife of all kinds can just wander in as and when it feels like it. Midnight dashes for the toilet are something of a risk. We are told that we should check for the reflections of eyes in the dark. Small herbivores and monkeys are alright, as are jackals, but not hyenas, and big herbivores can be a bit grumpy. And, to quote, ‘Don’t go out if you think it’s any kind of cat, and if it’s an elephant, don’t go out, and don’t flash it’s eyes, as they have very poor eyesight and it might get confused and upset and wreck the whole camp’. We have a few nervous moments in the first night, but don’t see or hear much, perhaps due to being largely comatose.

Competitive tourist South African was right, we do see ‘a shitload of lions’. From cubs to lazy, magnificent males and the desperate charge of a huntress (she missed the warthog she chased). All the usual suspects were present – I have particular fondness for the various vultures we saw (they are one of the ‘five uglies’ – wildebeest, vultures, warthogs, Maribu storks and hyenas – I am a big fan of all). We also see six cheetah, five all at once (a chance, on the basis of the survival probabilities to near-adulthood of cheetah kittens according to the park authority figures, of sixteen-thousand-to-one that they were there at all, let alone that we saw them), and one on the final day that we were privileged enough to see hunt (due to a tip-off by a gooseberry giraffe that loomed over the field and stared at the cheetah, the gazelle it was after sauntered off). We also saw the elusive leopard up close (lazing in a tree). Our guide had only see one twice before, and then at a distance. And on the second day, I saw my long-lost crocodile.

Now let’s talk about hyenas. I quite like them from a distance. They romp about with their staggering gait like the hunchback inbred cousins of the animal kingdom, their preposterously powerful jaws making mincemeat of flesh and bone alike; mostly things that have been killed by something else, but also things that are too weak to defend themselves. You know, things that are easy to kill. Like the injured. Or the old. Or the young. You know, relatively defenceless things. Like small lions. Or me.

So, the second night comes around, and I’m excited from the day’s activities, and well-rested from the night before. So I don’t really feel all that sleepy. And, eventually, both of us are going to need a piss. And I can hear them, the hyenas. Their whooping cries are close, either side of the camp. We are also aware of some kind of large animal roaming the camp (turns out that a herd of buffalo wandered through, and had it just been them, I might not have been as terrified as I was…), and the sounds of the rest of the camp’s human residents diminishes to frightened whispers fairly rapidly. Myself and my girlfriend, bladders fit to explode, cower in our tent for a while. The sounds of the hyenas have briefly abated, and we nervously poke our heads out of the tent. Nothing is immediately evident to torchlight nor moonlight, and we dash to the toilet. There is an eerie quiet about, and something is wrong, but we tell ourselves we’re being paranoid. Non-the-less, some odd terror grips us on the mad dash back to the tent – interrupted by me tripping over a guy rope and colliding with a tent and the floor – is informed by something horrible on the edge of our senses. Though only a graze, I’m bleeding – tiny drops of liquid, but also, more frighteningly, scent. I feel like I am being watched, judged, and very quietly pursued. In the dark of the tent, our breathing is quick and shallow. We hear the whooping of the hyenas moments later, closer now, and think that must be it, and that, after all, we were being paranoid and foolish. Then I hear the growl.

It is low and deep, and phenomenally loud in that choking darkness, and horribly close; just a few feet from the tent. It was completely, definingly predatory. Whether it was hyena, leopard or lion I will probably never know, but it was there, and it was utterly terrifying. Sleep was no longer a possibility, but I have to say that I have rarely felt more desperately, vulnerably alive than I did that night.

We wandered once again into the dark for an early-morning game drive, all our movements nervous dashes between symbolically protected areas. To ward off the fear we made up a song, to the tune of ‘by the rivers of Babylon’:

By the Seronera river,

Where we laid down,

Yeah, we wept,

When we were eaten by lions.

Although I strongly suspect hyenas. We also heard their ‘laughing’ at a range too close to share their apparent amusement. There were several other verses to the song equally dripping with gallows humour. Our guide, normally pretty blasé about the wildlife, was also fairly spooked. He didn’t seem at all surprised by our tale, and it was a chill while in Landcruiser before our collective mood lifted. The cheetah helped.

We set out that evening for the Ngorongoro crater. By night the camp is so cold we must sleep in jumpers and hats. In the morning we descend into the glorious crater. Clouds have simply rolled in and sit, boiling at the mountainous limits of the crater, pouring through the forests that cling to the improbable slopes. A huge soda lake occupies the centre, bone-white. It is unearthly, vast, beautiful, and awe-inspiring. Huge herds of wildebeest and other herbivores roam the basin, stalked by packs of lions and the odd cheetah. We, however, are in pursuit of a rhino.

We scan the horizon for rhino, but it’s chilly and windy, and they tend to hide amidst the grass (as implausible as that sounds) in such weather. We watch wildebeest flee lions, and watch lions pad in slow pursuit, or laze the day away. The highlight of the day comes when we see a more successful group devour a zebra they’ve brought down. Though their blood-splattered faces rooting about in the corpse of another creature might seem grotesque to some, I found it rather beautiful. Alas, no rhino. We rescale the crater rim, however, thoroughly satisfied with our week, and I sit down to write my account. An elephant invades the camp, and we return to the beginning of this entry. Another visited again later, testing the foolhardiness of some drunken Americans, one of whose life was probably saved by the shouted warnings of a guide. And so we come to the bush pig.

I’m afraid that it’s another midnight piss-run story. Much of Africa’s life takes place after dark. After the elephant invasion, we’re pretty sure that there’s wildlife about. We can hear it moving about, but it’s unlikely to be anything particularly nasty at this altitude. My girlfriend nips out for a piss, and spots an aardvark and a few bush pigs raiding the bins (at the time we think they’re warthogs, but it turns out that, though physically very similar, they differ in habitat and habit). Some time later, it’s my turn, and I can hear them snuffling about the camp, searching for leftovers. I know they’re close. As I open the tent flap, I startle one right outside the tent. It hurtles across the camp. It’s big, and it has tusks, but seems suitably wary of me, so I nip off to perform the duties of necessity and return, chasing the big, plump, betusked shadow about the camp with my torch. Seemingly it follows me back.. I dose off, and the rest of this was related to me in the morning.

Evidently bored for a while with the pursuit of edible human detritus, the bush pig lays down. On the side of our tent – we have a large windbreaking flysheet that it seems to find amenable. In her half, conscious state, my girlfriend feels it’s warmth through the tent wall, and moves up against it to ease off the chill, dragging me with her so that she is warmed between two plump, hairy beasts. Happily we abide for a while, divided by canvass until the bush pig regains its enthusiasm for foraging and heads out of the lee of our tent. And so our journey, bar another jittery passage by Landcruiser came to a close. Our guide seemed amused by the bush pig story. Apparently they can be quite nasty.

From this bar we can see Kilimanjaro. It is suitably huge and imposing. I’m excited by the prospect of climbing it, but I am also fearful that I won’t make it. To try and fail would be a shame, but not to try at all would be shameful. I wish I was fitter, and that I didn’t drink so much. I wish I hadn’t injured my foot descending into an earthwork in Uganda for a piss a few weeks ago. I wish I wasn’t a smoker – I’ll need the lung capacity. I wish recent cooking hadn’t given me some weird bowel disorder. Again. If I get to the top, it will be a triumph of shear bloody-mindedness over the limits of my flesh. Here’s to that, and one of the most exciting weeks of my life. Cheers.

Apologies, but this is a long one. I haven’t had the opportunity to update in a while.

A warren of crumbling 19^th century buildings bakes beneath the tropical sun, reminiscent of the scruffier parts of Venice, sans canal. Touts carrying everything from cashew nuts and ‘spice boats’ (bags of local spices arranged into the shape of a dhow) to football shirts and sunglasses vie for your attention as you skip between patches of bright sun and deep shadow. Shop owners cheerfully invite you too look at their wares, ‘guides’ constantly harass you, trying to pick up commissions from hotels, veiled girls giggle and scurry about, boys chase motorbike tyres, men sit about chewing the fat or shifting an seemingly endless amount of freight through the narrow street, and anonymous women trudge between places to mysterious purpose. All dodge the tooting scooters and ringing bicycles that dive recklessly through the narrow gaps and sharp, blind turns. This is Stonetown, and you need to contact your bank manager.

Everything here is expensive. Think England for price, but not quality. It seems that most of the mzeungu (white people) are either wealthy enough to be unconcerned, assembled into organised gangs of schoolchildren and super-annunated schoolchildren, or blinking backpackers as bewildered and impoverished as I. There are many tours to go on which will cost lots of money I don’t have, expensive restaurants and coffee houses, the odd bar, a port, and stretch of sand overlooking the bright blue sea (in the twilight, a group of boys incongruously practice Caipuera – not sure of the spell here – each night). Behind, like a hive that’s humming is felt rather than heard, are the shops and markets of the local population, accessible but dismissive of my pale conspicuousness.

Our introduction is not the best – the hotels are mostly full, and it takes us a hour or so carrying our bags through the heat to find one. Trying to find a cash machine that will accept our cards is another three-hour trial hiking beneath the blazing sun, but eventually, with a little assistance, we prevail. So we seek refreshment both alcoholic and more solid.

If there is one place I could recommend in Stonetown, it is the ‘Silk Route’, a curry house and bar that I attended on my first day (recommended by a fellow traveller), and where I sit now, writing this, the day before I leave. They mix a good daiquiri, and serve the most amazing curry I have ever tasted (which puts it pretty high on my list of all-time meals). Zanzibar’s strange history, with influences from Africa, colonial Europe, the Middle East and India, is reflected in all aspects of its culture, from the style of the buildings (weirdly piled upon one another are courtyard houses, colonial townhouses, villas, palaces and strange negotiations between all three) through the people and their beliefs, to the food, – and it all comes together in seafood and spice. Pick the right restaurant, and you will be treated to one of the finest combination of flavours it is possible to taste.

However – the hotels know what they can charge. The bars and restaurants know what they can charge. And in Stonetown, you cannot easily go native. We quietly tire of the constant pressure upon out wallets, and, failing to be able to afford the myriad tours that would otherwise occupy our time (to be frank, they have an uncomfortable feel anyway – programmed events that reek of awkwardly packaged, shabby and inauthentic ‘fun’), we are introduced by a man who attaches himself to us for a while (hoping to be paid, of course – he will eventually be disappointed with the meagre funds I have available to pay for unsolicited guides) to another man who hires us a car. His name is, apparently, ‘Ali Keys’ and according to his sign, he is ‘not as disreputable as he looks’. This oddly comic slogan warms me to a man whose strange cynical enthusiasm borders on insanity – Ali Keys would be well cast as the lead in a version of ‘Only Fools and Horses’ set in Stonetown. He hires me a car at a suspiciously cheap rate, and I insist on seeing it. It is a vast petrol-powered SUV that looks like it has crashed into – and possibly flattened – several hundred less robust objects, and has done more than two hundred thousand miles in the process. Fortunately, the four-wheel-drive system seems intact, the doors lock, the engine sounds good and there is tread on the tires; and it is a Toyota – and is therefore indestructible. We arrange a rendezvous for the following morning, and our real holiday here can begin.

The thirsty monster hauls us and our backpacks up to Kendwa at the north of the island, and as dilapidated town gives way to villages, tall palms and people who live by means other than ours, we relax. We find a lagoon where there is a turtle sanctuary, and we feed, pet and swim with these friendly, somewhat alien beasts. The eldest, nearly ready for release, is twenty-eight. His shell is as big across as the bonnet of a city car, but I am assured that the older ones can be twice that. The man who looks after them tries to discuss football with me, but he knows more about the English leagues than I do, so he begins to tell me jokes. My favourite was, ‘Do you know why turtles live for a hundred years? They don’t smoke, they don’t drink alcohol, and they only have sex once every forty years’. When they do, apparently, though, it lasts for a week. He also shows me a pair of pythons, only two meters long (he tells me that they will grow to six). One has recently had its dinner – we know because there are two rat-shaped lumps in it.

We hired a tiny, scruffy room near the beach, which is cheap and still not worth the money, and explore. We book a trip to go snorkelling at Mnemba nature reserve, and go off to explore. The water is an impossible blue, the ground coral sands white as good paper, but as Kendwa beach gives way to Nungwi, I am reminded of what I am. Piles of stinking Eurotrash in tans and shorts languish about hotel fronts, the strange palm-roofed faux-beachhouses they inhabit are an artifice too far. Like lizards they suck in the heat to toast bodies already ruined by excess and narcissism. Their breath seems to conjure bungalows with white walls and volleyball, pizzas and beverages to make them fat. The locals, many of them Rasta’s, fight off this strange incarnation of Babylon with unceasing reggae.

Some of the other locals (many of them flirty cheerful Maasai, who are sometimes artists selling their pictures and carvings, or more commonly, distributing a mass-produced equivalent) have surrounded the beachfront with shops, and though they are polite enough, I can’t help but feel crowded by their avaricious eyes and the hideousness of the white folks they attend.

At one point, away from the tourist’s areas, lost, driving amongst labyrinth of village streets, I hear mighty hammer blows ricocheting across the beach. A short walk away, there are groups of men building Dhows. They look at us grumpily from the corners of their eyes as I watch them work. One moment…

These men build boats by eye and feel. Not just small ones, either. The tools are basic, comprising a few chisels, the odd saw, hand-drills, hammers and large iron nails. Having found a suitable piece of wood to build the main ‘keel’ of the ship, they then find other pieces suitable for the rest of the frame, and the hull and so on. Each piece is measured by eye, cut at and chipped into shape and fitted according to the skill of the maker and nothing more. No plans are made nor measurements taken other than in the mind of the craftsman and the tradition he has inherited. It is a prodigious skill not easily acquired. Most ‘apprentices’ study – unpaid, mind you – for many years under a master boat-builder before they are presented with their own set of tools. It is a process of I admire immensely, a type of human activity, of artistry, long lost to us in the world of computer-aided design and precision manufacture. And it is not just some cute quirky thing I wish to patronise from three feet behind my Japanese fuel-injection system now romanticised into my Pentium-power box of wonder. These boats can last eighty years. Not so long ago, they used to make examples that weighed in at two hundred tonnes, unloaded. The skills they possess are wonderful.

Glorious sunset gives way to drinks and bed, and the morning brings a chill wind and rain for our nautical excursion. We are aboard the boat for an hour and a half before we reach our destination, and I weather the journey well, but some combination of the rolling of a Dhow sat in the choppy water and the ludicrous pantomime actions required to squeeze my portly body into a wetsuit do my stomach harm. By the time I’m in the water, and I have involuntarily swallowed a mouthful of the Indian Ocean, I am feeling like someone has tricked me into drinking a glass of oil and then repeatedly punched me in the gut. The reef is fascinating, but I am glad to return to the boat and whilst the others eat their lunch, I lie down and settle myself while everyone but me (I’m not sure why) shivers. We are lucky enough to see some dolphins, which cheers up everyone. The afternoon goes better. The profusion of sealife is astonishing, myriad scintillating colours and strange forms. Our guide points out moray eels, parrot fish, lionfish, angelfish. I spy giant clams, racing flatfish, schools of iridescent peculiar things hiding amidst the folds of coral, urchins, long, thin things that appear to swim backwards (just a disguise) and starfish of scarlet and blue – some are as big as me – and countless other examples of wondrous strangeness. The journey back is easier, and though we are disappointed not to have seen any octopus, rays or sharks, the day is declared a success. Next time we have the opportunity, we swear we will dive. We’ve done it before, but as I am far from being at home in the water, we are not yet qualified, and regardless, we couldn’t afford it here. The prices are ludicrous.

We swap sides of the island for the evening, and find a very agreeable place to stay for the evening. The next day brings the desire for the road, monkeys and mangrove. We see Colobus and Black monkeys (the former, we walk amongst and are surrounded by – they are disinterested by us, much more interested in eating, general frolicking and all other manner of monkey business; the second I only catch sight of from the car), and I nearly run over a giant elephant shrew (apparently, I was very lucky – to see it, not nearly run over it). Then we enter the mangrove swaps. I am at once stuck by a familiarity and comfortable discomfort I have only felt once before, in the jungles of the Amazon. It is peculiar, for I have no reason to be at home in such aggressive, unwelcoming environments, but I do. The mangrove has its own peculiarities. A profusion of crab species seem to occupy the niches that ground-dwelling insects occupy in more conventional arboreal environments, and there are only a few (four, actually) species of tree, their long, tough buttress roots providing an opportunity for me to demonstrate my own primate heritage. I must further examine my need for these densely packed, teeming, aggressive and thoroughly woody regions of the earth. For now, perhaps it will suffice to say that I left the mangrove with some regret, and we rejoined the road, heading to the southernmost point of the island.

Civilisation reasserted itself with the glee of capitalism as we were chased through Kizimkazi by people offering to chase down schools of dolphins on my behalf. I would honestly rather they left them alone. Encountering dolphins as I did, spontaneously, appeals to me far more than paying someone to chase them about with a motorboat. We don’t stop, for fear of being buried under a tidal wave of cheery dolphin-botherers, and carry on down a long path to the sea. What we find there – an exclusive resort for the rich – is a hideously pristine complex of infinity pools and beach houses bigger than the average British home. They charge us extortionate amounts for some refreshments, and we barely escape with our integrity intact.

We soon reassert it, however, with the help of some Rastafarians. Jambiani, Paje and Bwejuu on the eat coast have beaches that are common to my sight only from calendars. Long stretches of cobalt blue and aquamarine out to the horizon and white sand are interrupted only by fishing boats and the occasional beach hut. These are the places less frequented by bloated white tourists, and those who are present are in conspicuous. Local boys play an endless, boundless game of football upon the beach. It is unearthly, like someone has photoshopped the world. We stay in a place called Kimte, a inexpensive hotel run by Rastafarians. They are friendly, jovial lads who are fans of Paul Simon and UB40 in addition to the more expected reggae. A campfire and a very chilled evening later, we retire, and awake to watch the sun rise over the perfectly presented Indian Ocean. The best breakfast served on the island later, we plunge once more towards Stonetown where, quite clearly, we will run out of money.

I made up a game last night called ‘competitive tourism’. It is a card game where the object is to accrue bragging rights on the basis of where you have been and what you have done. I made it by ripping up a cheap notebook. It was a cheap evening’s entertainment – imagination and humour are free. Now, I’m sitting in the Silk Route, and I’ve just had another exquisite meal and a Hemmingway-load. Tomorrow we leave for Arusha, to go on Safari and poke a lion in the eye (ok, maybe I’m not actually going to do that).

My final days in Uganda are marked primarily by contrast – most notably between myself and where I am. Jinja, a town at the head of the river Nile at lake Victoria, is nothing like the camp I stay in. This is a little preserve for the rich, (generally) white, and adventurous on the outskirts of town. Upon our arrival we get with the program of activities. Quad bikes and a guide are hired and a large groups of us zoom about the countryside for a few hours creating a vast cloud of red dust in our wake. The villages we pass through are poor in a way that my mind associates with relief appeals. Those tired images from the Television is some of it, but there is something buzzing in my brain, an alarm bell fed by memories of the bill-boards by larger roads – images of strapping young men holding aloft branded cement or the endless mobile telephone advert featuring glamorous, pale women. They are conspicuous by their absence here. The children all wave and excitedly gather round. The adults, not so much, and I think I know why. I feel like a cross between a hooligan burning through a council estate in a stolen moped, a patronising minor celebrity and (I am dressing in overalls and a goggles) a sort of earth-bound Biggles. We are astonishingly filthy upon our return, and joyful as it is, when I book the white-water rafting for the following day, a certain melancholy is descending on me.

A bungee jump in the morning soon wakes me up and I’m soon white-water rafting. It is an astonishingly beautiful setting, the water is a high as the river guides have ever seen, and we charge through the headwaters of the mighty Nile. The scale is astonishing- we are like ants clinging to a stick in a rough mountain stream. Despite many grade five rapids over the course of the day, I emerge unscathed. In the quieter areas we swim, and my girlfriend and I grin at each other say ‘we’re swimming in the Nile!’.

The next morning, my girlfriend has a morning bungee with a ten-year-old girl who is too light to jump solo. We say goodbye to the friends we have made on the truck – we were very lucky, and I hope that we see many of them again – and settle down in the bar to snooze a useless day away. It has been two weeks since I had more than five hours sleep. In the quiet, the melancholy fills me once again. Hidden beyond the bar are the lines of tiny, scruffy buildings each desperately crying for cash with constantly fading flashes of colour. Behind each of those, a hillside dotted with struggling farms teaming with poorly-fed children. The roads are lined with bill-boards, some proclaiming aid projects, others crowded with unsubtle adverts like ‘you are not a man unless you own a house – get a mortgage with [random bank]’.

As a rainstorm turns everything into noise and water, I chat to a Ugandan man about racism in England and America. His brother lives in Leeds. The conversation drifts about as he describes his shameful treatment by the Methodist church and a racist policeman he met from Alabama as afternoon bungee is rained off. It is the morning of the next day before I plummet riverwards twice more, forwards and them backwards into the swollen, swirling Nile. It’s a hell of a good way to wake yourself up. I find the staff at the adventure camp mostly likable, but they are apart, as am I. With people treating the world as an adventure playground, just because we can. We trying dutifully to help, our activities feeding money into the local economy, supporting projects, but we are all tourists. Better than rulers, I suppose. After a long delay (TIA), we return to Kampala.

Kampala by day or night is hideous up close. For the most part the people seem nice enough (they don’t hassle me at all, as it happens), but the places itself is like a constant, failing war against entropy. A sea of typical single-story tin-roofed dwellings crests into a few towers towards the centre, and a few of the newer buildings stand proud. A friend I made in a bar in Jinja has offered to take me out tonight and show me the nightlife. I have to be up at five to catch my plane, but, truth be told, I just don’t want to go out here. It’s horrible. There are a few nice restaurants and bars – Kampala has its prosperous people and western wallets just like any big city, but it’s all really quite charmless. Nicer places are guarded by men with guns, and sometimes metal detectors (which, being white, I am simply waved passed) on the door. It’s an odd way to be reassured. Last night we walked through the city streets to find our hotel – not in the bad part of town, but not in the nice part either – and I caught the real smell of it here. You can tart up one or two places, and I could haunt only these, I suppose, but the real life in this city is a grubby, dirty thing of gutters, stinking traffic fumes, desperation and aspiration. Cracked, close streets and already-decayed modern buildings hide malls which are warrens of tiny cabins full of glittering things to buy – mobile telephones arranged like jewels, fancy clothes behind a fading façade, ‘ethnic’ items for the tourists. Postcards that do not show the beggars with crippled legs. Outside squats a woman selling bananas, she looks defeated. A young man wanders around with a pile of silk ties in his hand, ready to sell to anyone who crosses his path. Another has a pile of socks under his arm. A glamorously dressed woman guides her heels between piles of mouldering refuse, and it all clicks into place. A monument to Ugandan independence bears a sign reading ‘no loiterers’. The guns that guard the places that are sanitised for my eyes and assumed necessity for the protection of the wealthy locals (and the banks) are old, relics of civil war, perhaps. I have no wish to see only the parts of this city that they guard, and I have no desire to look upon the rest of it any longer. I am glad to have experienced this place, but I have no wish to stay.

And some of this is because it feels so much like home. The city is dirty and hot, the accents strange (I wonder how we can share a language and yet I seem so unintelligible to them – strangely I can understand them with relative ease, but they sometimes look at me like I’m speaking Martian), and perhaps it is just the common language, or the food (everything with chips; burgers, pizzas, kebabs, even toasties) but this place really feels like the dirty edge of England. It is the attitude and mood of the people. It is the businessman in the café. His sunglasses cost more than everything I am wearing. This, in turn is more that the worth of the shop half a mile away. It is the hugely expensive four-by-four he drives. It is the apple Mac in the desk in front of him. It is his wife, that woman in high heels, spotless, glamorous, dark skin against beautiful modern fabrics. Fashionably slim, not hungry.

In China, I could not integrate because I am white, and it is the same here. My mere appearance makes of me, by turns a celebrity, a source of money, a potential mark, something to look down upon, despite how easily most of them slip through my eyes. Despite the spectacular backdrops, the human world here looks like the dragging heel of Britain. I wonder what they look like to the wealthy Americans, and to the rich English (the vast majority of the white folks you meet) – people who cannot understand the poor in their own countries, let alone these people. I think they just look passed them, see them, perhaps, as a problem that must be solved, or a resources, or an unfortunate side effect. Or an exhibit. Yet, I can feel that the people around me share the same fight that is waged in the trailer park, housing projects and council estates of Europe and The States, but so much worse. The disregard of the plight of your fellow man, the blind self-interest that has been engendered in these people. That is what I feel, that is what makes this feel like home. The nasty parts of home. China was heading that way – the erosion of community and the ideal of selfishness was becoming evident, but there was a strong, proud history too. In Cuba, Havana felt like this (though everywhere outside did not), but the regime, the relative prosperity and its isolation led to a distinctiveness and a certain joy. In South America, I saw a culture that had been violently crushed by Christianity, and then eroded from without. It feels more like that here, but worse. Still some of it shone through in South America. Not so here. What little remains of tradition is reduced to dances for tourists and ethnic arts; charred remains of countless waves of colonialism, war, civil war, each time chewed over by Christianity, Islam and (increasingly) Capitalism.

The needs of the people I see is primarily education and medicine. I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea that ‘we’ should swoop in like patronising angels and try to sort it all out – but ‘we’ have been coming here, patronising, exploitative or otherwise to pretend that this is anything separate from our world. Occasionally we see campaigns for birth control. More commonly we see Bibles and churches and religious schools. These people are desperate believers. A sign upon a church newspaper (I jest not) reads ‘God has a wonderful plan for you all’. It doesn’t explain what that plan is. Faith is of no use here, and neither is patronisation of any kind, especially that which might lead to passivity. There is so much ignorance and the grinding actions of basic hope. It is of no use. I wonder where the money goes – the papers are filled with constant accusations to the government of the misappropriation of aid – but not only this. There is wealth here being generated, but then dutifully siphoned into the pockets of Shell, Nokia and the rest in accordance with the unspoken law of the modern world. This situation will not change until the wealthier cultures stop insisting that the best thing is to be able to buy, and if you cannot, then you should pray. But this is not a matter of a new aid project or mission. The root cause of the inequalities and cultural dysfunctions I see here lie in our own homes. It is our society, and the way we organise things that must change. We must find some way to flourish that isn’t at someone else’s expense.

Goodbye Uganda. I may return, but for now, I am glad to have been, but I will not miss you. You are beautiful, but you make me feel ashamed.

Tomorrow, Zanzibar.