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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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).

]]> http://theadversary.yellowgrey.com/uncategorized/zanzibar/feed 0 http://theadversary.yellowgrey.com/uncategorized/goodbye-uganda http://theadversary.yellowgrey.com/uncategorized/goodbye-uganda#comments Sat, 25 Jul 2009 15:53:32 +0000 admin http://theadversary.yellowgrey.com/?p=36

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.