The Riots: who’s right – Cameron or Blair?

 celebrity, civil unrest, community, crime, government, heroes and inspirational figures, human rights, morality, politics, Psychology, science, society, Sociology  6 Responses »
Aug 232011
 

Today what appears to be the final battle to overthrow Colonel Muammar Gadhafi’s regime in Libya is rightly dominating the news - as it probably will for several days, as stories of valour, celebration, desperation and atrocity are told from the streets of Tripoli. There will also be much speculation about what kind of Libya will emerge from the civil war - even whether the rebels can hold off splintering into their own warring factions. And, inevitably, since the West invested so much in the NATO bombs that so potently aided the rebel victory, there will be speculation as to what the West can do to help build a new Libya that is friendly to the West and accepting of its interests in North Africa and the Middle East.

In and amidst this focus on Libya, we also need continue the debate about what brought violent rioters and looters onto the streets of London and other cities just a fortnight back and what we should do about these issues.

Both David Cameron and Tony Blair had key articles in this weekend’s Sunday newspapers, setting out their positions.

Moral decline, moral panic and folk devils
As you might expect for a piece in the Sunday Express, Cameron was aiming squarely at the traditional grass roots Tories who make up a substantial element of the Express’ readership. In a piece so right wing, he’s almost certainly not comfortable with it, Cameron wrote: “…a social fightback means instilling in our children and young people the decency, discipline and sense of duty that make good citizens.

The first place people learn these values is in the home. That is why I make no apology for talking about the importance of family and marriage. Every government policy must pass what I call the family test: does this make life better for families or worse? Does this make it easier to bring up well-behaved children or harder? Family is back at the top of the agenda.

Children also learn values in schools. Every school should be a place where children learn manners and morals but that is only possible when there is order in the classroom. So we are taking action to restore authority and boundaries, with teachers able to discipline pupils as they see fit and heads having the freedom to set uniform and behaviour policies and enforce them.

But I believe we can and should do more. When we see events as shocking as the riots and so many young people whose lives have no shape beyond the shape of their gang, no purpose beyond the next time they get smashed on drink or drugs, it is clear that the need to restore values calls for something new. That is why this Government is establishing National Citizen Service.”

Though he doesn’t actually use the term ‘moral decline’ in the Express, the tone of the piece is about reversing it and the term is being widely attributed to him and other senior Tory ministers, particularly Iain Duncan Smith. Attributing the term to Cameron and Duncan Smith in the context of blame for the riots fits with the ‘broken Britain’ theme which the likes of Cameron and Duncan Smith have been playing since at least 2007.

With their emphasis on broken - even ‘sick’ – Britain, Cameron and Duncan Smith are playing the old ‘moral panic’ card, first named by Stanley Cohen (1973) in his famous study of media reaction to events like the mods-‘n’-rockers beach fights in the early 1960s. And when Duncan Smith goes on about gangs and gang culture, he’s making them into what Cohen terms ‘folk devils’.

Cohen identifies the process as the media whip themselves up into a frenzy, creating a moral panic and exaggerating the menace of the folk devils so everyone is terrified o them - and this forces the police, local authorities, central government, etc , etc, into strong action to tame the folk devils and quiet the moral panic.

Which is not to say that there hasn’t been a change in morality and attitudes towards “decency, discipline and sense of duty”. As I pointed out in the Blog post, ‘Is Britain really broken?’, in January last year there have been considerable changes in public morality and consequent behaviour over the past 50 years, with the result that many institutions of society - especially the family and education - have changed considerably. Behaviours that were once relatively rare - eg: taking recreational drugs, men and women cohabiting as an alternative to marriage, young women having children outside of marriage, people conducting same sex relationships openly - are now fairly common and some of these changed behaviours are now so accepted they have become the norm.

Nor is this to deny that there is a problem in a number of areas with gang culture. Much of London’s rise in gun crime over the past 5 years has been unequivocally linked to gangs. Clearly there were organised gangs at work carrying out some of the looting during the riots.

Nor is this to belittle any of what went on during the riots. A handful of people died, many more were injured - some very seriously - and many, many more were traumatised by their experiences. Property was damaged and, in some cases, destroyed; and livelihoods were wiped out.

But were the riots really just the result of a changed public morality? If so, why hasn’t the whole country descended into arson and looting anarchy?

Blair and the Underclass
Writing in The Observer allowed Blair to present a more reasonable and reasoned argument to the so-called ‘chattering classes’. His article, ‘Blaming a Moral Decline for the Riots makes Good Headlines but Bad Policy’, is clearly aimed at presenting the Cameron-Duncan Smith approach as over-simplistic. He writes: “The big cause is the group of alienated, disaffected youth who are outside the social mainstream and who live in a culture at odds with any canons of proper behaviour. And here’s where I simply don’t agree with much of the commentary. In my experience they are an absolutely specific problem that requires a deeply specific solution.

The left says they’re victims of social deprivation, the right says they need to take personal responsibility for their actions; both just miss the point. A conventional social programme won’t help them; neither – on its own – will tougher penalties.

“The key is to understand that they aren’t symptomatic of society at large. Failure to get this leads to a completely muddle-headed analysis of what has gone wrong. Britain as a whole is not in the grip of some general ‘moral decline’…

This is a hard thing to say, and I am of course aware that this too is generalisation. But the truth is that many of these people are from families that are profoundly dysfunctional, operating on completely different terms from the rest of society, either middle class or poor.”

Though he never actually uses the term, Blair is clearly referring to the ‘Underclass’ - those of (usually petty) criminal attitudes and behaviour, living beyond the fringes of society. Benefit cheats, prostitutes, small-time drug dealers, burglars, etc, etc, – the kind of characters you see on Shameless - are the kind of people who fit Charles Murray’s (1989) criteria for the Underclass. (See: Underclass: the Excreta of Capitalism in the Society section of the main web site.)

The fact that the looting was largely of luxury goods, not basic essentials, indicates that those looters were not the desperately poor; they already had the basics of life sorted - perhaps through fraudulent benefits claims and/or ‘black market’ jobs and/or petty criminal activity. These looters were people who wanted more and had no hesitation in using serious criminal means to get it.

So far so good for Blair’s theory of the Underclass being a large element in the rioting: the profiles fit.

That is, until you start looking at the statistics on the occupations of those who were processed through the courts in the week after the riots. The most common occupation cited was ‘student’. Despite the best efforts of Lib Dem Deputy Leader Simon Hughes to point out that there are some benefits in the way university tuition fees are to be funded from 2012, undoubtedly the next tranche of potential university students do feel pretty aggrieved. But what excuse do the current ‘students’ have for causing such mayhem? Other occupations noted included soldier, scaffolder, chef, lifeguard, postman, hairdresser, forklift driver, electrician, journalist and an Olympic ambassador. There was even the 19-year-old daughter of millionaire parents in the dock!

An estimated 1 in 5 of the rioters were under the age of 17.

Sorry, Tony! While there can be little doubt a sizeable percentage of the rioters were from the Underclass, there were many who weren’t.

Andrew Gilligan, in the previous week’s Observer, wrote: “There were broadly three groups of rioters – organised career criminals targeting specific high value merchandise; semi-organised youths wanting ‘pure terror’ and whatever they could lay their hands on; and those who got carried away in the excitement. Many of those turned out to be very far from the stereotype of the hopeless underclass.”

A context for the riots
To explore the issues of who and how further, let’s do a bit of scene setting - because, as Gilligan illustrates, it’s a hugely complex issue which neither Cameron’s article nor Blair’s get to grips with successfully.

The country is still struggling to emerge from recession. Public sector cuts are beginning to bite deeply, with hundreds of thousands having either lost their jobs already, about to lose them or worry they are likely to. The private sector, which was meant to pick up the slack of the unemployed from the public sector, is largely not doing this. The rate of business liquidation is still high and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands are being wiped off the stock markets virtually each day. Some ministers, like business secretary Vince Cable and justice secretary Ken Clarke are warning this misery could go on for years and years.

Everybody it seems who understands anything of finance and economics - except Ed Balls! - agrees the cuts are necessary. It’s just the details - how far, how fast - on which most of the major politicians quibble. David Cameron (and Nick Clegg), when first announcing the cuts, promised that everyone would feel the pain equally - that we were all in this together. Except now it seems the bankers who are widely perceived to have precipitated the whole crisis in the first place. They’re back to getting enormous bonuses…even when their banks are mostly-owned by the taxpayer! And then what about the ‘super rich’ - including the multi-six-figure salary civil servants? (Especially those who buy their groceries on their department credit cards!?) There aren’t many stories of 16-bedroom mansions being repossessed or Ferraris and Bentleys being returned to the showrooms because their owners can’t keep up the repayments….

And George Osborne talks of reducing the top rate of tax from 50p in £1 to 45p?!? Has the man no common sense at all? Osborne may well be right when he says that, in the grand scheme of things, the amount recovered by the Exchequer in that 5p difference has little real effect on the country’s finances but that it does scare off many top wealth generators to other more tax-friendly countries…but, George, it’s a matter of perception! While the common folk suffer, the Tories are seen to look after their rich pals and the Lib Dems are seen as weak wimps unable to restrain the Tory greed.

Of course, it’s not that simple; but that’s the kind of message that takes hold not just in the real Underclass but among both those who are genuinely disadvantaged by the cuts and those who aren’t but perceive the way the Government is handling things to be grossly unfair. In Zygmunt Bauman’s (1988) terms, the club of the ‘Seduced’ is becoming more and more exclusive while more and more of us, even those don’t sink completely into the Underclass, join the ranks of the excluded ‘Repressed’, no longer able to afford a foreign holiday or buy the kid the latest PlayStation. While we suffer, through the likes of OK! and Hello! and various TV shows about celebrities and the wealthy, we can wind ourselves up with seething jealousy of those whose opulent lifestyles are not in the slightest compromised by the cuts.

Everyone sharing the pain equally…? I don’t think so, Dave!

In vMEMETIC terms, BLUE is disillusioned because people who pay their taxes, conform to the best nuclear family tradition, try to bring their children up ‘decently’ and vote Conservative - in other words, they do everything they’re meant to - only to lose their job through no fault of their own. That destabilises PURPLE, with money worries and a lack of purpose for the newly unemployed putting immense pressure on family life.

And, as anyone who has studied Spiral Dynamics knows, when BLUE order falls apart, the RED vMEME comes roaring through which means power, not order, determines what happens.

An explosion of RED
So now locate yourself, reader, in the late afternoon of Saturday 6 August outside Tottenham police station as the peaceful protest over the police shooting of Mark Duggan turns nasty, just as it seemed to be petering out. Undoubtedly there was real anger at the shooting of Duggan - rumours were flying around that he had been effectively executed! - and at the police being unable to give the protesters the information they wanted about the investigation into the shooting. From reports about him, Duggan’s profile would fit ‘Underclass gang member’ and the protestors could probably be categorised as a mix of Underclass and community/political activists.

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Burning police car, Tottenham, 6 August [Copyright © 2011 ITN/Channel 4

It’s not yet been revealed who it was set the 2 police cars on fire; but, as soon as the police failed to deal with those incidents, they signalled the weakness of BLUE. What followed over the next 3 nights in London was an orgy of RED destruction, self-indulgence and wilful criminality. The more the police failed to control it, the more RED felt free from BLUE’s shackles and able to do exactly what it wanted.

With the ORANGE instant and mostly monitoring-proof technology of Blackberry Messenger (BBM), rioters and looters were able to organise incredibly quickly, easily outstretching those police units that did deploy. Other units failed to deploy properly, watching impotently from hundreds of yards away as rioters and looters tore apart and burned shops.

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Police watching a burning bus, Tottenham, 6 August [Copyright © 2011 Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

Through BBM, the Internet and TV news, the ineffectiveness of BLUE to contain RED was flashed around the country. By the third night, there were copycat riots in various other parts of England - although in Birmingham and Manchester, there appeared to be little burning - more, it was just outright smashing and looting.

Where the BLUE vMEME appeared strongest in some of the London riots was not in the police attempting to maintain order but in the meticulous planning with which some of the looting was carried out.

In the week afterwards the Metropolitan Police came in for considerable criticism. Clearly the Met were caught out by the scale of the violence and there was confusion in their command - journalists David Barrett & Patrick Hennessy claim they were told by some frontline officers that they were instructed not to advance on rioters. Barrett & Hennessy also offer evidence that some officers were reluctant to battle the rioters without assurance that they would be immune from prosecution and/or being sued if rioters were seriously injured in the confrontations. That assurance was not forthcoming apparently. The bizarre situation where police officers were reluctant to do their job through fear of being suspended or sued by violent lawbreakers is the work of the GREEN vMEME, with its positive discrimination to protect the rights of all, including lawbreakers.

The short-term fix: stopping the violence
If we want to make sure nothing like the Tottenham riot of 6 August escalating into a series of riots and looting sprees over 4 days ever happens again, then policing needs to be much more robust. For a start, that means intelligence on those in both the Underclass and the professional criminal networks of whom there is serious reason to believe would jump at the chance of exploiting a riot to loot high value goods. As soon as something like the protest of the 6 August starts, they need to be picked up and held in cells until the protest is over

Then the police response to violent protests must be able to curtail them. Standing back while shops and homes are looted and burned is not an option. As soon as they do that, they signal BLUE has failed and liberate RED to do whatever it wants. If water cannon and rubber bullets are needed, they must be used. In the extreme, when the lives of innocent people are clearly at risk, then the police must be authorised to use live ammunition. If the police cannot curtail the violence, then the army should be brought in.

BLUE must not be perceived to have failed. If it has, then not only does it liberate RED to commit wanton mayhem – but those who are threatened by the mayhem are given the de facto right to take the law into their own hands to protect their families and their property. Vigilantism. When BLUE fails to protect, RED can also dominate in those who seek to fight off the lawbreakers – even though they may trash the law themselves in the way they defend themselves. (See the Society feature ‘When BLUE fails, call for Clint!’ ) We saw proto-vigilantism in the Turkish men who defended their shops with baseball bats and knives and in the Sikhs who rushed to defend their temple from rioters and looters. If not for the calming appeal of the magnificent Tariq Jahan, father of one of the 3 young men killed by a rioter’s car in Birmingham, vigilantism may well have led to some very ugly reprisals and further escalation of the violence.

Do the kind of tactics I am advocating impinge upon the human rights of individuals? Most certainly…but the protection of the community has to be of greater importance than several hours inconvenience for a handful of individuals. Would the kind of tactics I am advocating require additional legislation? Most certainly…then get on with it!

Do police officers still need to be accountable for their actions in what might effectively be a pitched battle? Of course…but, in the heat of battle, you need RED daring much more than BLUE caution. And it must be remembered that the rioters and looters deliberately put themselves in harm’s way. Police officers committing abuses on prisoners after a battle would need to be prosecuted in the usual way.

Would such tactics cost extra money? Of course; but as London mayor Boris Johnson has pointed out to David Cameron, he urgently needs to rethink the Coalition’s policy on cuts to the police forces.

BLUE order must be maintained.

The longer-term: healing sick Britain
Firstly, David Cameron has got to get his head around image management. As was illustrated last May-June by 10 Downing Street hiring a personal photographer for Cameron in the same week he first talked about just how savage the cuts were going to be, he doesn’t always think about how his behaviour may be meta-stated by others.

Allowing Osborne to propose lowering the top rate of tax in the same week as the riots was a public relations blunder of epic proportions!

People in general are much more likely to ‘grin and bear it’ if they really do think everyone is feeling the pain equally. Bankers’ bonuses and ‘fat cat’ public sector salaries being seen to be protected or even championed by government ministers is to invite dissent!

Secondly, as discussed in Underclass: the Excreta of Capitalism, we need to develop 2nd Tier perspectives on how Capitalism operates in the Western world because ORANGES’s combination of drive for profits and labour-reducing technology is putting more and more people out of work or into low-paid menial jobs - with some of those people sinking into the Underclass and swelling its numbers. The ever-widening gap between rich and poor is a recipe for violent disorder. As Gadhafi’s regime enters its death throes, it’s worth remembering that the ‘Arab Spring’ revolutions were initially ignited by poverty and economic hopelessness. Allowing that gap to widen ever further could well lead to more and more violence in the UK.

We need a country where reward in life is related fairly to contribution to society, where there are opportunities for everybody to contribute and where there are clear routes for social mobility. The Underclass then should be small in size, despised by the vast majority of citizens and relatively manageable.

Using the 4Q/8L model, we can see that addresses the lower right quadrant but we also need to address the left quadrants, focusing on culture and individual responsibility.

It’s not possible to turn the clock back to the 1950s and restore those values but we can - indeed, we must – restore the strength of the BLUE vMEME at a cultural level so that it is perceived as a good thing to take responsibility and to support the structures of society. That support should not be unquestioning but, if we are working towards a fair society, then questioning and drive for change should possible from within. As Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996) point out, when discussing spiral wizardry, in managing any kind of institution, you need to scan constantly for change - because change is inevitable. Therefore, you need to have strategies to accommodate and incorporate change, rather than suppress it.

In the UK we have a mixed message culture - typified by The Sun regularly engaging in moral panics and calling for draconian measures to deal with the folk devils (RED/BLUE zealotry) while also showing topless girls on Page 3 and female celebrities flashing their knickers in the Entertainment section (ORANGE unashamedly milking RED’s thirst for ‘naughtiness’ and excitement). If we are to change people’s values, then we need to be crystal clear in the messages that are sent out. If the mindset of many is governed by RED, then we can’t demand it instantly change it to BLUE. Clare W Graves showed years ago that changes in motivation don’t work that way. But there are things we can do to encourage vMEMETIC change. Eg:-

  • Reward those who marry – Cameron’s idea of tax breaks for people who marry is one way of doing it
  • Show in simple, layman’s terms the psychological science which demonstrates time and time again that, generally speaking and exceptions apart, people in long-term relationships with a partner are happier (overall), usually healthier and often live longer – and their children tend to do better emotionally, socially and academically
  • Make it cool to conform to ‘family values’ by getting the media to focus on public figures and big name celebrities who do exactly that – thus, making them role models for younger people

Designing the future of the United Kingdom – which is what we’re really talking about - is, however, a remit way beyond this Blog. That’s for the Centre of Human Emergence UK , the academics and the various think tanks, using a MeshWORK process. But what is needed is a common understanding of the sociopsychological forces which have brought us to this present state of being.

In their key articles in the Sunday newspapers, David Cameron and Tony Blair each saw some of the problems; they didn’t see the complete picture. Consequently they could only offer partial solutions which may not work much, or even at all, because the problems are all so interconnected. As Ken Wilber (1996) says, we must ‘transcend and include’ the partial views and solutions to create the full picture of what is going on. Only then can we create sustainable long-term solutions.

Lose a cat, lose a father….

 heroes and inspirational figures, human rights, NLP, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, racism, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Aug 082011
 

Yesterday we – my wife, Caroline, and I – attended a service for the interment of my father’s ashes. A few hours later we picked up a new cat, a 6-week old male kitten we’re calling Basmati - ‘Basmati Rice’, geddit?! Baz, as we tend to call him, is settling in remarkably well and is a real delight after what seems to have been 6 months of loss.

Personally I would never admit to being religious or, in any sense, ‘spiritual’ beyond having a strong but rather vague conviction that there is something bigger than me ‘out there’.  On the odd occasion I do think about it, I tend to think of this ‘something’ in God-the-Father/Allah-the-Compassionate terms – which I attribute to cultural memes rather than any spiritual intuition. And I certainly consider myself far too rational to entertain anything superstitious!

Yet, for several years now, I’ve had the thought that I would lose Artemis, my cat, and Ted Rice, my father, within a very short time of each other. Of course, I could rationalise this by arguing that both were approaching the end of their natural life and had already lived significantly beyond the average age of their sex and species. (Artemis was 19 years old and my father 83.) Or maybe the PURPLE vMEME’s tendency to believe in signs, omens and superstitions was simply tuning into something that rational science can’t comprehend…? Certainly, it would appear from studies of primitive peoples such as the Kalahari bushmen (eg: Richard Katz, 1982) and Australian Aborigine tribes (eg: James Cowan, 1993) that at least some of their number can ‘tune into’ and be informed by something way beyond the ken of conventional modern science.

PURPLE was certainly the dominant vMEME in terms of giving meaning to both relationships…so maybe, just maybe, there was something intuitive in that thought that I would lose them pretty much at the same time…?

Artemis
I acquired Artemis on 5 October 1991. I already had a 7-week-old black male, Merlin, I wanted company for since (just like today!) I worked long hours. My girlfriend of the time knew I was looking for another kitten and alerted me to a kitten some friends of hers had found in a barn on their farm in the hills above Keighley. When I saw this (approximately) 4-week-old kitten, apparently abandoned by her mother, I thought she was the ugliest kitten I had ever seen: a blobby belly on short stumpy legs, ears bigger than her head, bulging eyes, a coat that looked like someone had thrown a range of creams and browns over her in totally random fashion and one half of her face a totally different colour than the other. (Split straight down the middle, like the villain, Two-Face, in the Batman comics!) But, as long-time friend Linda Scurrah commented many years later: “Artemis has grown into her looks. She’s quite beautiful now she’s older.”

Merlin, sadly, didn’t last that long – getting knocked down when he was just over 6 months old. But Artemis survived illnesses, sequential girlfriends and multiple moves, to become a true companion. I talked to her and, to some degree at least, I thought she understood my mood, if not the content of my words.

Pure Behaviourists take the view that animals don’t have cognitions but I am in no doubt that Artemis had certain basic expectations – schemas. She expected stroking if she made certain noises or approached us in a certain way. If she went and sat by her bowl around about evening meal time, she was indicating clearly that she expected feeding.

Some would say I am anthropomorphsing but I am convinced something akin to the PURPLE vMEME functioned in her brain. Throughout all the moves and all the girlfriends, Artemis coped with it all as long as I was there; but, if I had to stay away overnight, I’m told she would prowl the house looking for me and acting distressed. Sometimes, if I just looked at her when I had been ignoring her for a while, she would purr – apparently pleased that I was giving her attention. It appears I mattered to her – that, from her side as well as mine, there was some kind of desire for mutual affiliation. Indeed, I would be prepared to stick my kneck out and say Artemis craved affection. Eg: as she got older, I could still tempt her to a bit of play occasionally…but then she would lick the hand she’d just pawed, look at me in what I meta-stated to be a pleading way and start purring.

Artemis, 2006

I’d also speculate that there was some degree of RED operating in her very basic selfplex. Eg: if I was eating chicken, she would howl at me until either I gave her some or she would get frustrated and try to snatch it from my plate – even though she had her own food down that she was usually quite content with. She knew what she preferred and she would try to intimidate me in to giving her what she wanted.

Artemis was also choosy as to which of my girlfriends she was prepared to associate with…or not. Around 7 years ago Caroline and I were decidedly relieved when Artemis did take to her.

Other prominent temperament traits Artemis displayed included great caution and  nervousness – which may have contributed.to her longevity. Tied in with that,  she was a coward and would never defend her territory. That is, until she  started displaying mild signs of feline dementia and seemed to forget she was a coward, charging at much larger cats and succeeding in driving them out of the garden!

Like most higher mammal pets with their owners, Artemis would not hold  my gaze for more than a second or two – indicating that she accepted I had greater power. However, in the last 6 months or so of her life, Artemis did  take to holding both mine and Caroline’s gaze from time to time. But we  meta-stated it was not in an aggressive way but more as though she was  searching us for something.

Ted Rice
My father was proud of being a right-wing racist who thought the sun shone out of Margaret Thatcher’s backside. He considered the trade unions to be the single biggest threat to the wealth and prosperity of the British people and wanted them tamed again – like Maggie had done 25 years previously! Being a classical music man, he despised The Beatles and the long hair hippie culture of the 1960s. He thought young women should still be virgins when they married and that young men should have short back & sides and wear suits. So when my teenager self grew my hair long, wore jeans, listened to Jefferson Airplane and espoused many of the more idealistic tenets of the hippie culture….!

BLUE was so strong in his selfplex that he considered everyone should listen to the TV news every night because everyone should be informed – it was ‘the right thing to do’. My  mother’s PURPLE village gossip mentality seriously irked him and they had  numerous rows about her finding the housewives’ gossip on the street more  interesting than the state of the British economy or the progress of the latest war in Africa.

There was some partial emergence of ORANGE in that he had ambitions to be a director of the company he worked for and was then able to reinvent himself very succesfully as a health & safety consultant after he was made redundant.

But of GREEN there appeared to be no trace. As said, he was a racist…of the England-for-the-English variety. He was a sexist in that it was understandable if men were unfaithful to their partners but women had to be totally faithful. He had no truck with the idea of human rights, believing criminals deserved to be beaten up by the police and that prisons should be such harsh places that offenders would be terrified of going back to jail. Unsurprisingly he was a staunch advocate of capital punishment and believed corporal punishment should be reintroduced to schools. His limited view of social mobility was that only those who, by virtue of intelligence and/or sheer hard work, could rise above their birth class status should be allowed to get on with it; the state should certainly not award benefits to create positive discrimination for the socially disadvantaged.

For all our cultural and political differences, I was close to my Dad…arguably closer to him than I was to my Mum. Though many of our discussions ended in rows – because of the cultural and political factors! – I could talk to my Dad about the world and what was going on. (Any time I raised anything like a problem with a girlfriend, though, it was immediately passed on to Mum – it was her job to do the emotion work!) But problems at work, too, he would listen and offer his advice. He was immensely skilled in management techniques and provided a very useful sounding board as I tried to fathom my way through various issues. My career and the social, economic and political implications of the news formed the basis of most of our conversations – though increasingly his health problems became a pressing topic of conversation after my Mum died.

Ted, celebrating his 80th birthday

My mother, Betty, died in 2000 (from cancer). For a year afterwards, my Dad was depressed, becoming a virtual hermit and dropping almost all social contacts. Then he developed Myasthenia Gravis, a neurological illness which inhibits the neurotransmitter acetylcholine from working in the  synapses at the muscle platelets, effectively preventing the efferent neurons from sending messages from the motor cortex and the cerebellum to the muscles. A Bell’s Palsy-type face droop in 2001 was followed by a collapse of his lungs the following year, necessitating a 5-month stay in hospital – 3 of them in intensive care. After getting the Myasthenia under control with stupendous amounts of medication, mobility problems and excruciating arthritic pain led to 2 hip transplants. Dad then had a couple of reasonable years before gallbladder problems led to a series of collapses and stays in hospital. By January this year it was clear he was deteriorating, with kidney and liver problems eventually triggering the long, slow, downward spiral to the end. I doubt I’ll ever forget seeing him 2 days before he died, screaming in pain and the hospital staff not able to get the morphine into him fast enough.

For all my ‘psychology tricks’, as I call them, that experience has left a deep wound in me. If it was bad for me, what must it have been like for him?

The downward slope and the aftermath
Already on major medication due to her Arthritis, Artemis began fitting late last year. The fitting may have been a by-product of a botched operation to remove bad teeth that left her temporarily blind and paralysed…but it would have been very difficult to prove. With even more medication, we thought we had got the fitting under control. However, a really severe and distressing fit at Easter, with medication at maximum levels, left us with no other real choice. As Caroline said: “What would happen if she had a fit outside? She’d be at the  mercy of any predator that was nearby – foxes and so on.”

Artemis hated going to the vet’s in a cat carrier. For all the steep extra cost, I got the vet out to our house. It was important to me that Artemis died in her own home, with as  little pre-procedure distress as possible. As she went under, in the conservatory in which she spent so much time, with me stroking her…did it actually make the experience of her passing any less traumatic for her? If I’m honest, I have no idea…but she seemed peaceful. And it helps me…whether or not it helped her.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t give the same consideration - euthanasia – to my Dad. He took another 2 days to die. By the last few hours, they had finally gotten the morphine levels right and he did appear to die in peace…but the 48 hours before must have been a horrendous experience for him.

I was at my Mum’s death bed in 2000. I saw and heard the final intake of breath. (The first time I had seen somebody die in front of me!) Strangely I cried only once for my mother – on a misty November night in the garden 2 months later. I think my focus was so strongly on trying to hold my Dad together in the following months and years that my BLUE never really allowed my PURPLE the privilege of grieving for a loved one. When Artemis’ executioners left - because, being blunt, that’s what we did to her: execution – I sobbed inconsolably for days. My little companion – who at times had seemed unnervingly human and who I sometimes referred to as “my little furry daughter’  – was gone. Even now Caroline and/or I will break into tears, if something triggers certain memories of Artemis. She was such a huge personality and such a part of our lives….

By contrast, my Dad was much less a part of our lives. We  spoke on the phone at least once a week, I travelled to see him approximately once a month – and Caroline would come with me every 2nd or 3rd visit. Christmas dinner with him was an annual ritual.

So far at least, I’ve cried less for my Dad than I have done for Artemis. Again, as with my mother’s death, it’s been all action. As my father’s only child (and the executor of his will), it’s been my responsibility to arrange the funeral, deal with Dad’s financial affairs and apply for probate, and clear out his house, ready for sale. In and amongst these processes, there have been tears but the focus has been mainly on doing rather than thinking. Certainly finding photos of Artemis amongst Dad’s possessions was a trigger for both Caroline and I to shed some tears!

Mum & Dad, 40th Wedding Anniversary

One photo that certainly brought me to tears was the one of my Mum & Dad’s 40th Anniversary in September 1991. Dad was 5 years older than I am now and Mum just 2. They look to be still in their prime, before the cruelties of old age could tarnish and diminish them. My PURPLE feels a great ache looking at that photo. The end of Summer in 1991 was a good time for my PURPLE. Just a few weeks later I would acquire Artemis.

Maybe I‘ll do more crying for Dad – and for Mum? – once everything is done and there is more time for reflection…?

A change in life
I miss my Dad in some different ways to Artemis.

Artemis was in my life every day, working through a variety of situations, ranging from her being a demanding pain to a purring pleasure. Her suddenly not being there any more left a huge emptiness in our lives. One or both of us still think we see her out of the corner of our eyes from time to time. The schematic expectation is still, to some extent, that she is there – or should be there. Caroline and I still hold each other and say we wish we could have her back, we miss her so much.

But somehow the scope of the relationship with my Dad, while lacking everyday impact, was more. Perhaps because of the greater history…? Perhaps because, according to Dale Hay & Jo Ellen Vespo (1988), parents teach us to love them from a very early age…?

Maybe it was simply the cognitive level of the relationship which made it more…? Bizarrely, at the post-funeral bash, I found myself thinking I would have to tell my Dad how pleased I was that my Mum’s relatives were mingling so well with his…when I suddenly realised he wasn’t there to tell anymore! I will miss talking to him.

Then, of course, you can sort-of replace a cat. Not that we feel we could or would want ever to replace Artemis. She will always have a unique place in our memories. But we can get a new cat. We had talked about this possibility and, after my Dad died, Caroline sourced the little kitten who is now Baz. We deliberately went for a male and one who looks nothing like Artemis because we don’t want to find ourselves drawing comparisons. We want to preserve her importance in our selfplexes.

But you can’t even begin to replace a father. (Or a mother, for that matter….)

UPDATE: 14 July 2012.
2 days ago, on the anniversary of his death, after a days’ teaching, I drove from Harrogate to Garstang, to stand by the marker which is all that remains that is tangible of my Dad (and my Mum). It was a near 5 hours round trip to spend 40 minutes with them…but I’m glad I went. On a rare (for this year!) warm and sunny evening, in the tranquil, almost idyllic graveyard of St Thomas, alone amongst the gravestones and the markers, I found that, for the first time I could remember my Dad, without being disturbed by horrendous memories of those last 3 days of his life.

I found that, for the first time, memories came easily to me of when he was younger and healthier…of things we did as a family as well as when I visited them as an adult. For the first time too, I found I could laugh again at some of the memories – at some of the more outlandish and ridiculous things he had said and done. The horrendous final days were still there if I looked for them but they were fuzzy and indistinct – as if partially repressed - so I left them alone and enjoyed my little graveyard reverie of better times.

Over the past year I’ve often moved away from thoughts of my Dad and tried not to engage with them by distracting myself with something else. Interestingly I found remembering my Mum a more easy and pleasant experience. So I’m pleased and hopeful now that I’ll be able to enjoy my memories of Dad.

My intention is to go back to Garstang every year on or around the anniversary of his death and use that trip as a way of honouring him and Mum.

I guess I’ve found for myself some truth in the old adage that pain eases with the passing of time. (For many months, it seemed like it would never ease!)

As for Artemis, we buried her ashes in a little copse on the cliffs above Robin Hood’s Bay and carved her name into the branch of an overhanging tree. As we love the Bay and usually spend a week in a cottage there most years, as long as we can still climb the cliffs, we can visit that copse.

In a strange way, there’s also a connection to my Dad in her burial place. He had always loved Artemis and often asked after her. When he was no longer well enough to visit us, we bought him a little wooden cat, which had something of her ‘look’, to symbolise her to him. As the carving was of a cat all curled up and seemingly very much at peace with itself, after Dad’s death, we took the carving and half-buried it on top of Artemis’ ashes to serve as her marker.

Of course, the world is a busy place and so often we’re too busy to  give much time to remembering those we’ve lost. But it’s good for our PURPLE to remember those in our personal history who have meant so much and to honour our past.

Cameron & Clegg: where’s the vision?

 Afghanistan, business, charity, community, crime, education, government, human rights, mental health, racism, religion, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, substance abuse  48 Responses »
Jul 152010
 

2 months ago, in ‘”Liberal Conservatives”: new politics?’, I wrote about my hopes that the Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition might indeed be the start of the ‘new politics’ Nick Clegg says he’s always believed in. I talked about the need for 2nd Tier thinking in Government to take us beyond repeating the same old mistakes, ideological conflicts and embezzlement of the public purse.

A month on I’ve yet to see real signs of 2nd Tier thinking in anything the new Government does.

Yes, as Henry Porter wrote in last Sunday’s Observer (11 July), they’ve made a good start. “…the coalition has moved with degrees of fair mindedness and deliberation that are refreshing. To be sure, there have been blunders, like Michael Gove’s botched announcement on scrapping new schools, but it surely is right to suggest that doctors be put in charge of spending GPs’ £80bn budget, to remove the target culture from the health service and provide 24-hour cover. The withdrawal from Sangin and setting a deadline for ending combat in Afghanistan is welcome, as is the review of defence needs and spending. For once, our relations with the world appear to be conducted by grown-ups without displays of fawning or self-importance…..In two months, the coalition has announced the ending of the wasteful and, as it turns out, dangerously insecure children’s database, ContactPoint, as well as the ID card scheme. Immigration minister Damian Green put an end to the inhumane detention of thousands of children belonging to asylum seekers. Theresa May has agreed to examine the way the police are collecting and storing photographs and data about legitimate protesters, like 85-year-old peace campaigner John Catt who was classified as a “domestic extremist. She has also said that the automatic number plate recognition system that tracks and records 10 million vehicle journey per day will be placed under statutory regulation and scrutinised for the first time. CCTV cameras used to watch Muslims in Birmingham have been disabled. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act terror laws, used by councils to spy on members of the public, are to be reserved for counterterror operations. And in the last week the home secretary suspended section 44 of the Terrorism Act which allowed police to stop and search 250,000 innocent people last year alone, and [David] Cameron announced details of a full judicial inquiry into allegations that British intelligence officers were involved in the torture of terror suspects.”

 As Porter says, the “Coalition is popular” - and that may, in part at least, why there has been so little reaction against the massive cuts the Government is going to make – and is already making – in the public sector. (RMT leader Bob Crow’s call for a general strike is, at this stage at least, a very lone voice.) The Treasury’s demand, ‘leaked’ from the Cabinet meeting of 1 July, for most Cabinet ministers to prepare plans for cutting their budgets by 40% is, as some commentators have suggested, almost certainly scaremongering. That way, the real depth of the coming cuts – predicted to average out at 25% – will seem nothing like so bad.

While, as Henry Porter points out, the new government are already implementing a number of new policies, their ‘big idea’ undoubtedly is cutting the deficit; and it will certainly be the defining policy of the Coalition’s first few years in power.

Though I think the developing policy on Afghanistan is muddled and short-sighted – see ‘Why we must win in Afghanistan’ - much else the Coalition is doing seems headed in the right direction. Even the cuts.

We all knew there would be cuts. We’ve been told since before Christmas that there would have to be cuts; and Labour aren’t denying that they were edging towards the 20% figure for cuts in their own proposals. (Though Labour almost definitely weren’t planning to impose the cuts as hurriedly as Chancellor George Osborne intends.)

So why am I casting doubts on the quality of thinking in the new government?

Essentially, it’s because I’ve yet to see a vision being articulated.

Cameron & Clegg, in their co-written article for the Daily Telegraph (12 July) say they “…want to change our country for the better. We want to see the best schools open to the poorest children, a first-class NHS there for everyone, streets that are safe, families that are stable and communities that are strong.” That’s hardly a vision since it’s pretty much everything every politician tells the voters. Nor is a key strategy - that of slimming down and decentralising government – a vision.

When I say ‘vision’, I mean a view of how society should be.

The need for a vision
Margaret Thatcher, for example, had a clear vision based on the philosophy of meritocracy. It’s all too easy to see Thatcher as being about depriving unprofitable heavy industries of state subsidies or busting the unions or deregulating the money markets. Rather they were key strategies to free up individuals to create and enjoy wealth. ‘Thatcherism’ was such a success that Tony Blair carried many aspects of it over into the early years of his government, with the British being the second richest people on the planet (based on gross national income per head) by 2006 (World Bank, 2007).

However, it was far from being a 2nf Tier philosophy since it left substantial communities in Wales, the Midlands, the North of England and Scotland devastated, with a consequent raft of social problems – including large scale unemployment amongst the indigenous working classes, many house repossessions, spiraling divorce rates, substantial alcohol and drug abuse and an explosion in small-scale crime (drug dealing, prostitution, burglary, car theft and mugging, etc).

In the early days Blair talked from time to time of creating a ‘decent society’ but there was never any real elaboration of what he meant. So Britain drifted on, the majority reaping the rewards of Blair’s neo-Thatcherism while a substantial minority got lost in the sprawling urban sink estates typified so well in the Shameless TV programme.

Now a great many more of us are faced with ‘sinking’. The newly-created Office of Budget Responsibility anticipates 600,000 jobs will be lost in the public sector over the next 6 years. Meanwhile leaked Treasury figures anticipate more than 700,000 private sector jobs will go in the same time period. When confronted by Labour’s acting leader, Harriet Harman, about these figures at Prime Minister’s Questions on 30 June, Cameron stated that employment would rise during the life of the Coalition…but he didn’t say how.

The remarkable Coalition is enjoying a remarkable ‘honeymoon period’ with the voters (in spite of some venomous attempts in certain parts of the media to hurry them towards divorce). Partly that’s because people are ready for something different from the party-centric conflicts of the past. Partly it’s because Dave ‘n’ Nick actually do seem to enjoy a genuine rapport. Indeed much of the Government seems infused with bonhomie – even George Osborne and his Lib Dem Chief Secretary Danny Alexander seem capable of  singing from the proverbial ‘same hymn sheet’!

But bonhomie isn’t going to go very far when people are losing their jobs and their homes and seeing their standard of living plummet - and there seems little or no hope of things getting significantly better. The truly scary thing about Osborne’s ‘cuts budget’ is that there’s almost nothing in it to stimulate economic growth.

On 30 June Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development’s chief economist John Philpott told BBC News: “The government thinks that just by …tackling the deficit, there will be a vent for growth because the prospects for investments and exports will be greater. If you look at both demand in the UK economy and more globally, there is a question mark over that and if that doesn’t pay off then we’re going to have a much weaker employment outlook.”

If the economy fails to grow sufficiently in the short-to-medium term to offset the social sinking caused by the cuts in the immediate-to-short-term, we risk becoming a different kind of Britain.

Thatcher – love her or loathe her! – had a pretty clear vision of the kind of Britain she wanted us to become. So what kind of Britain do Cameron and Clegg want us to become? Do they know? And, if they do, when are they going to tell us?

25%…25%!!!!
You simply cannot take 25% out of the public economy in anything but the very shortest term and not create massive change.

So where do we start? (After all, Clegg has promised widespread consultation over how and where to apply the cuts….)

Maybe you’re OK with having to take your own recycling to the council tip; and having your domestic rubbish collected only every other week would be acceptable…?

Getting the potholes in your road filled in only every other Spring…?

Class sizes of 35-plus and out-of-date textbooks instead of broadband-connected PCs in schools…?

How many police officers are we prepared to lose…? (Former chief constable Tim Brain estimates, for Police Review, that between 11,500 and 60,000 police officer, civilian staff and community support officer posts will be lost by 2015.)

According to Justice Secretary Ken Clarke, speaking on Tuesday evening (13 July) to judges at their annual Mansion House Dinner, the fall in recorded crime during the 1990s may have been precipitated by economic growth, high employment levels and rising living standards rather than imprisoning criminals.

If Clarke is right, then will the reverse prove true when we add another 1.5 million to the unemployed tally, some of whom will be police officers?

Having still not cleaned up fully the ‘human waste’ from Thatcher’s era, are we now going to add massively to the ‘human rubbish tip’?

Just what do you do with 3 million people with no jobs and few prospects, slashed to the bare bones benefits, a still dwindling jobs market and many losing their homes…? Faced with similar crises, Margaret Thatcher, the most unpopular prime minister since the end of World War II, took us into another war – the Falklands – from which she emerged victorious and untouchable for another 8 years, the public behind her so much she was able to batter the miners almost with impunity.

What will Cameron and Clegg do to reverse their fortunes when, as is all but inevitable once people really start to suffer, their popularity dwindles? (Only yesterday a supermarket till assistant told me she wanted “that new prime minister shot because he took away my second baby’s child benefit!”)

What kind of Britain will we become?
The challenges Britain faces as the cuts bite are more than simply coping with lower standards of living, mass unemployment, schools troubled more than ever and a likely substantial rise in small-scale crime – as if they weren’t daunting enough! We actually face a major change at vMEMETIC level in societal values.

Since the late 1960s much of the political agenda in Britain (and in the rest of the Western world) has been driven by the GREEN vMEME. Anti-racism, feminism, health & safety, rights for disabled people, employment rights, anti-ageism, human rights…to some degree or other, they’re all the creation of the GREEN vMEME. In its drive for egalitarianism, GREEN will even use positive discrimination to equal the playing field for those who are disadvantaged.

The problem is that GREEN is expensive. Where now will come the money for ramps for wheelchair access in buildings that weren’t built with the disabled in mind? Community Care is more costly than institutional care – so how long before the old mental asylums are reopened and people with mental health problems requiring supervision are herded back into them? How will the Government be able to justify the Equality & Human Rights Commission when the jobless are marching through central London?

One of the things Tony Blair probably was grasping for in his inarticulation of the ‘decent society’ was that we treat each other as equals and with respect and that we care for the less fortunate.

Treating someone with respect might be hard when they got the only job available and you didn’t - especially if your PURPLE clocks that they’re not of your ethnicity and, therefore, not of your tribe. (Just watch the popularity of the BNP grow among the white working class jobless needing someone to blame! Just watch as more Muslims become more devout in the desire for God to right the wrongs white society does to them!)

Charities can be expected to take on some of the support for the disadvantaged but charities depend on donations and it’s hard to donate when your company can’t pay its suppliers (corporate donations) or you’ve not worked in a year (individual donations).

With little nurturing of ORANGE’s wealth creating tendencies, much of the culture of this country will go down the Spiral, settling in PURPLE and RED. Expect increases in racial tension, crime and religious observance (of all kinds).

To some extent, it’s unavoidable. Whether from Osborne’s head-on dive into austerity measures or Alistair Darling’s slightly more measured approach, the cuts have to happen. However, the transition to a different kind of Britain they will bring can be managed and some of the more severe effects ameliorated – especially if there is understanding and management of shifts in values from 2nd Tier perspectives.

But, for that to happen, Cameron and Clegg have got to develop and then share the vision.

It is, of course, a little unrealistic to expect 2 men who were political opponents 12 weeks ago to get into each other’s heads so much in such a short space of time that they can develop a vision they can sell both to the public at large and their 2 respective parties. But, if we are not to slide unthinkingly into the kind of Britain many of us won’t want, then Cameron and Clegg have to get to work pretty damn fast.

I wrote in ‘Liberal Conservatives’ about dissonance arising from the challenges in holding the Coalition together possibly being the factor to drive them into 2nd Tier thinking. Now, as we face the reality of the cuts, it’s clear that there’s going to be far greater dissonance from far more sources than most people realised. It’s also patently clear that the need for 2nd Tier thinking in our leadership is far more urgent than I realised 2 months ago.

I’m still intrigued and excited by the Cameron-Clegg Coalition and still think it presents potent opportunities for real change in the way we do politics…but, guys, we need real vision very quickly.

Culture Clash – Why China Meets Africa’s Needs

 Africa, community, human rights, international relations, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  6 Responses »
Nov 262009
 

Written by JON TWIGGE

 

The following is a ‘guest blog’ by Jon Twigge, an ardent Spiral Dynamics Integral enthusiast and supporter of the Centre of Human Emergence – UK. Jon wrote the piece for his own blog and has graciously consented to it being published here as well.

It was a few weeks ago that I read on the BBC that the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, had praised the way that China deals with Africa.  Apparently, unlike the West, China invests in Africa and trades with it which helps it build up its infrastructure.  The West on the other hand, according to the Rwandan president, is more likely to offer aid and to tie it more to conditions.

Kagame – seen below with American president George W Bush – went as far to say that European and American involvement was polluting Africa.

Why would that be?

It immediately struck me, from a Spiral Dynamics point of view, that we are seeing a values clash here.  Essentially we have 3 different cultural sets of values that interact in different ways.

From a very simplistic and generalised point of view we could summarise the relevant aspects of the 3 different cultures.

Africa
Much of Africa still lacks good infrastructure and is based on agriculture far more than many other places in the world.  Tribal and power based organisation and values are still very common.

The next stage in Spiral Dynamics evolution terms is for Africa to build much more solid infrastructure and government.  This will allow them to build beyond the tribal and power based society towards a more centralised and organised government and control that will allow individuals the safety to work for their families and wider communities more effectively.

China
China has already got strong infrastructure in many areas, although this is of course by no means universal.  This has allowed them to more recently engage in rapid commercial growth in many sectors. China has a booming economy with rapidly expanding exports and is looking to build strong trading partnerships with other areas of the world.

A strong relationship with parts of Africa is ideal for China to expand their economy into with large investments looking purely towards their own commercial growth and success.  This investment fits in very nicely with Africa’s need for inward investment to help them build up their own infrastructure.

There is in fact a natural resonance between China and Africa with China sitting just one level ahead of Africa on the Spiral journey first described by Clare Graves.  With a mix of values close enough together to allow profitable interaction the relationship can blossom.

The West
A much more complex set of societies than either of China or Africa, the West has a mix of different values driving its industry, growth and social equality.  As the strength of liberal equalitarianism acquires ever greater power in western society, more and more rules are added dictating what is right or moral including in business and government.

Despite a healthy clash in the way that the values of the west re China are expressed, Communism vs Democracy, the underlying vMEMETIC values being expressed are close enough that the western consumer is happy to buy the results of Chinese industry and commerce.

The Clash
However, when we try to put the West together with Africa, we see a different kind of relationship arise altogether.  Without a healthy African industrial engine producing goods the western consumer has nothing to buy from Africa.  In the wake of a strong trading relationship Africa is seen, to western eyes, as needing help.  After all, Africa’s lack of basic infrastructure and western values is interpreted as a lack of civilisation.

Western governments and NGOs alike try to help Africa with charitable monies and aid.  However, seeing this basic lack of civilisation the aid is often tied with calls to get organised and put things in order.  Human rights and democracy come high on the reform agenda.

The trouble is, generally much of Africa is simply not ready for these things yet.  Based on the need to meet the life conditions that they find themselves in, there simply is not yet room in their lives to take on board these idealistic western values.  First they must build infrastructure and secure their industrial future.

Too much uninformed western interference and demands are indeed counterproductive and polluting.  Surface implementations of western morals and values in cultures that do not yet have social stability can only lead to even more corruption and failure.

A Difficult Road
From a liberal western point of view this is indeed a difficult dilemma unless the nature of the Spiral of values is recognised.  We have to put aside our ideas of absolute equality and rights to allow Africa to grow its own way.  Eventually, given time and support, and a stable infrastructure and then economy Africa will find its own ideas of equality and rights for all.

If we do not learn these lessons then in time, our relations with much of Africa and the Commonwealth will be replaced with African/Chinese relations.

We should listen more closely to Paul Kagame, before it is too late.  Otherwise democracy may one day follow the same fate that the British Empire did and be left behind in terms of world relevance.

Why we must win in Afghanistan

 Afghanistan, American Foreign Policy, cross-cultural, government, human rights, international conflict, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  11 Responses »
Jul 152009
 

The West simply cannot afford to lose its war in Afghanistan. As the soldiers’ bodies come home in ever-increasing numbers, pressure will inevitably grow for a withdrawal. Already an unpopular war in continental Europe, it will become increasingly difficult for the American and British governments to keep their resolve if media and public pressure focus on the costs in terms of lives and money and there is little sign of real progress.

Unfortunately military experts anticipate 2-3 years of hard combat and several more years of Western military presence if the South of the country is to be stabilised. But, if we don’t pay those costs, then the Taliban are likely to take over government again in Kabul. It is thought that, in spite of their apparent significant defeat in the Swat Valley, their eyes are set next on Islamabad and the prize of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Even if Pakistan doesn’t fall, Afghanistan will continue to flood the West with heroin (in spite of the Taliban officially being against opium production!) and it will almost certainly go back to being a training camp for al-Qaeda terrorists.

What do we need – another 9/11 or 7/7 – to remind us what British and American troops are fighting and dying for?

Part of the problem: the nature of the Taliban
When the Americans smashed the Taliban in 2001, they were perceived by many Afghans to be liberators. The Taliban’s 5 year regime had been brutal, repressive (particularly for women and non-Muslims) and economically disastrous.

What should have been the opportunity for the West to be seen as helping the Afghans rebuild their shattered country was fumbled when George W Bush decided to bring down Saddam Hussein. American energy went into first of all justifying an assault and then pursuing a war that turned into a bitter, costly and lengthy occupation. Not only did the reconstruction of Afghanistan go very much on the back burner; but increasingly the war in Iraq was seen as an anti-Muslim war in most Muslim countries – with the result that many young Muslims from relatively moderate backgrounds were radicalised. The mess in Iraq helped breathe new life into the Taliban who began to creep back in force while the Americans were too busy trying to prevent outright civil war in Iraq.

What also helped the Taliban come back was that the government structure the West helped set up and is now trying to sustain is demonstrably corrupt – arguably from Hamid Karzai down. It needs to be remembered that many officials, especially in local government, were once the bandit leaders of the Northern Alliance which the Americans used as their ground troops in 2001. Using the Northern Alliance that way certainly saved thousands of American soldiers’ lives but it also opened the door into legitimate government for those who were ruthless robbers and murderers. In Spiral Dynamics, terms the RED vMEME was given the opportunity to use BLUE structures for its own ends – so all but inevitably it lined its own pockets! In the South of the country locals say they prefer to use Taliban judges rather than their government counterparts because they are more honest.

In the South (and across the border in Pakistan) the Taliban are increasingly becoming indistinguishable from the Pashtun people. The Pashtun tribes are a good home for the Taliban. For the most part, rural, poor and religious, the Pushtans have little in common with the urban elites of Kabul – looking to gain from the Westernisation of their country – or the other tribes from the North. The Pushtans are primarily dominated by PURPLE tribalism, undoubtedly led by leaders with strong RED while the mullahs peddle a RED-BLUE hardline form of Islamic zealotry. The BLUE-ORANGE-GREEN values the West wants to promote of respect for human rights, gender equality, religious moderation and one person/one (secret) vote Democracy simply don’t fit with the Taliban/Pushtan mindset. The values mismatch is huge.

When the Americans smashed the Taliban, they drove out what little BLUE culture there was in Afghanistan. As we know all too well, when BLUE goes, RED steps into the vacuum. No wonder Afghanistan is a violent and corrupt place! When the Taliban started to creep back, they offered some sense of order against the corruption and secularisation emanating from Kabul. If the Americans had hoped ORANGE-driven modernisation would take root in Kabul and spread from that centre, it was a clear lack of understanding that, for healthy ORANGE to grow, there needs to be foundation of strong, healthy BLUE. Although they were very different countries, the collapse of Communism in the USSR and Yugoslavia did not open the door to ORANGE’s MacDonaldisation strategies; instead the loss of that BLUE superstructure let loose RED gangsterism and PURPLE tribal enmities. If anyone in the White House or the Pentagon had thought it through, what has happened with the resurgence of the Taliban was, in fact, predictable.

The problem with the convergence of  ‘Taliban’ and ‘Pushtan’ is that the Pushtans comprise around 40% of Afghanistan’s population and are the largest single ethnic group. That’s an awful lot of people to fight.

Part of the Problem: the West is confused
What do we want in Afghanistan – other than for our soldiers not to be killed and our much-needed money to be haemorrhaging away? (It is estimated that the war will cost Britain £3.4 billion this year alone.) And once our objectives are clear, do we know what we have to do to achieve them?

Beyond ‘winning’ – presumably meaning breaking the Taliban for good? denying al-Qaeda the use of Afghanistan? – and getting out, it’s not entirely clear just what the objectives are. Certainly, as in Iraq, not enough thought has been given to the post-invasion reconstruction – and what thought has been given has been based on erroneous assumptions. Ie: that with a little money and a little effort, we can make them just like us – capitalist consumers. It’s a mistake the West has been making repeatedly ever since Walt Rostow (1960) came up with his 5-stage Modernisation Theory for saving the Third World from Communism.

What Spiral Dynamics shows us is that we have to work with where people are at – and, if the Pashtuns aren’t ready yet for gender equality, then we need to put that on the back burner until they’re ready to grow into it. Offending their values is just going to get them reaching for their AK47s.

Our objectives need to include helping develop an Afghanistan where the tribes can co-exist peacefully, where people can take pride in being Afghan, where there is respect for a universal and fairly-applied legal system. Gender equality and one person/one (secret) vote Democracy can come further down the line. What matters now is that people feel safe, have respect for themselves and others and there is confidence in the government and the law. And, of course, that law needs to be compatible with a form of Islam that emphasises charity, faith and order. Such an Afghanistan would be distinctly unappealing to the Taliban who feed on dissatisfaction.

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg recognised some of this when he said NATO should not be over-ambitious “by trying to import overnight a Western-style democracy in a country that has never had a functional government” but instead should aim to stabilise Afghanistan “to provide a space for the state to grow.”

If we are clear on our objectives, then can we implement the strategies to achieve them?

Because it contributed significantly to the relative calming of Iraq, the concept of high visibility patrolling the streets with the overtly-stated aim of protecting the ordinary citizens from the insurgents (Taliban) is being tried now in Afghanistan. High visibility, of course, means easy target – and that’s one of the reasons the British casualties have increased. (Apart from the fact the troops claim to be significantly under-resourced – attributed by many commentators to be result of big cuts in defence spending. (A lack of big picture thinking in BLUE-ORANGE short-sighteness!)

Lord Paddy Ashdown, himself a former royal marine, thinks the protect-the-citizens strategy is an error – saying: “The army’s job in a war is to find and kill the enemy.”

Actually we need both strategies. Protectors of those who are reasonable and want to be safe and proud. Killers of those who are determined to kill us and cannot be reasoned with. But no more robot drones wiping out innocents at wedding parties! Thankfully, all of this – including avoiding civilian deaths – is endorsed by the new NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal.

We must find ways of removing the dissatisfaction that the Taliban feed off. Strong support in Afghanistan for an Islam that emphasises charity and justice for all. Rebuilding the physical infrastructure. Redeveloping the economy, including crops that are a viable alternative to opium poppies. Creating hope. Building a sense of national identity. Etc. Etc.

As part of building a national identity, we need to find ways to demerge ‘Taliban’ and ‘Pashtun’. As a people the Pashtuns have a proud and ancient heritage, their traditional Pashtunwali code of honour promoting self-respect, independence, justice, hospitality, love, forgiveness and tolerance. It’s a stain on that code that they allow the brutal and repressive ways of the Taliban to influence them to such an extent. Like many peoples in our troubled world, the Pashtuns need to rediscover themselves.

Some of what is needed in Afghanistan, I have mentioned above. But what is needed really is a full MeshWORK analysis, looking through 4Q/8L at the health of all the vMEMES in play and then deciding what needs to be done. Multiple strategies will need to be employed simultaneously so that nothing is missed. And, as much as possible, the decisions and actions need to be undertaken by Afghans – otherwise they are the work of an occupying force. And, if the decision-making isn’t ‘democratic’ but the Afghan way (tribal/feudal), then we westerners need to allow them to be that way.

Yes, it will be hellishly expensive – in both money and lives – but we are in a war and wars are costly. The sooner Britain and the United States – and Europe, for that matter –, accept we are at war, the better. Plus, it is a war we have to win. But it is a war of hearts and minds as well as bullets and bombs.

Obama a 2nd Tier thinker?

 American Foreign Policy, cross-cultural, human rights, international conflict, schemas & memes, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  2 Responses »
Feb 252009
 

Since shortly before his election last November, I’ve seen a number of articles putting forward the view that Barack Ombama is an advanced thinker. I’ve even seen it proposed by some on the Spiral Dynamics e-lists that he is a ‘2nd Tier thinker’. Even that the TUQUOISE vMEME is activated in his head.

 

Alongside the jubilation in many parts of the world at his election was the expectation that now things would be different – things would change. Obama would make America better and that would help make the world better. I doubt there has been so much excitement and so much expectation of an American president since John F Kennedy. The anticipation has been of almost of messianic proportions!

 

And Obama got off to a great liberal electorate-pleasing start. On his second day in office, he signed the order which will effectively close Guantánamo Bay. From there, he went on to do another electorate pleaser – by blocking the bonuses of many of the ‘fat cat’ bankers whose greed has all but brought Capitalism to its knees.

 

And now he’s stumbled. Badly.

 

Last Friday’s decision to stand by the position of George W Bush’s administration that the so-called ‘enemy combatants’ held at Afghanistan’s Bagram Airbase have no legal right to challenge their detention is astonishing – especially since the decision was made public on the day Secretary of State Hilary Clinton made it clear she would raise human rights violations with the Chinese government on her visit there.

 

How can the United States castigate China on the issue of human rights when it is plainly denying them to its own detainees?

 

Last Summer the US Supreme Court gave al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects held at Guantánamo the right to challenge their detention there. On the back of that, the relatives of 4 Afghan citizens held at Bagram petitioned the Washington DC District Court that the US military was holding them without charge and repeatedly interrogating them without any means for them to contact an attorney.  The Bush White House supported the military’s response that the detainees were ‘enemy combatants’ whose status is reviewed every 6 months, taking into account classified intelligence and testimony from those involved in their capture and interrogation.

 

When Obama took office, a federal judge in Washington gave the new administration a month to decide whether it would stand by Bush’s argument. In a 2-sentence filing last week the Justice Department said it agreed that detainees at Bagram Airbase cannot use US courts to challenge their detention. Effectively Obama’s White House has said the detainees have no constitutional rights.

 

Or, as Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, put it: “They’ve now embraced the Bush policy that you can create prisons outside the law.”

 

The risk of dissipating goodwill

I’ve actually no idea whether Obama thinks in TURQUOISE. Since politicians in elections usually talk bollocks in their efforts to get elected, I’ve not paid Obama’s words that much attention prior to him taking office – preferring to see what he actually does once his hands are on the levers of power.

 

And this is a myopic blunder of enormous proportions that might seriously derail Obama’s train before it’s even got fully out of the station, crashing Obama’s reputation with it.

 

Human rights attorney Tina Monshipour Foster summed up the disappointment: “The hope we all had in President Obama to lead us on a different path has not turned out as we’d hoped. We all expected better.”

 

And what message will the Bagram decision have on the millions of people in other countries who’d hoped for a new America that really would be the good guy it claimed to be, rather than the dangerous, overbearing bully it had become during Bush’s second term?

 

Obama’s election generated an enormous amount of goodwill right around the world, particularly from Muslim moderates and liberals trying to restrain their anti-American radicals. How easily could that goodwill be dissipated if Obama is perceived to have the same contempt for Asian and Arab lives that Bush was?

 

The fact that Obama is black/mixed race will actually work against him if he sanctions actions which are perceived to be racist. He will be the ‘Uncle Tom’ who sold out to the ‘Crusaders’.

 

If Obama does think in the 2nd Tier, then there will be a healthy dose of pragmatism to balance out his idealism. 2nd Tier thinking would have no hesitation in sacrificing a few for the good of the many. There may be tears in its eyes and a heavy sigh of the heart but it would do what needed to be done. The CIA and the military may well have presented evidence to Obama to convince him that they can’t just let very dangerous men walk free out of Bagram.

 

But keeping them outside of any recognised judicial system in a place associated with torture and other human rights abuses under the Bush administration is not the answer.

 

Guantánamo was a public relations disaster for the Americans. How many more recruits al-Qaeda picked up as the memetic allegations of mistreatment and torture (often evidenced) spread around the world time and time again will probably never be known – but after 8 years of the Americans’ concerted action against it, there seems to be no shortage of passionate and embittered young men (and women) all too ready to die if they can kill Americans (and Western Europeans) doing so. As for wiping the Taliban out of Afghanistan, they are now acknowledged by military experts to be stronger than at any time since the  invasion at the end of 2001.

 

The fact that the Americans could only muster enough evidence to convict 3 Guantánamo detainees in any kind of recognisable legal process while the Pentagon today announced that 1 in 10 of the detainees freed so far has been involved in anti-American/terrorist activity certainly shows the failure of the detention process at Guantánamo. The Pentagon has tried to present the 1 in 10 figure as recidivist – ie: they were going back to what they did before. An alternative interpretation was offered on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning by human rights lawyer Philippe Sands: some of those 1 in 10 will not have been previously involved in terrorist activities – if the Americans had proof, then why weren’t they put on trial? But they will have been so radicalised by their treatment at Guantánamo that they have since turned to terrorism. Of course, strongly suspecting something and offering a degree of proof acceptable in a court of law are not the same thing – but Sands’ argument seems equally, if not more, valid to me than the Pentagon’s.

 

With Guantánamo closing, more and more attention is likely to be turned to Bagram which already has an extremely toxic reputation. By supporting Bush’s policy on the Bagram detainees, Obama really does risk being tainted with its poison.

 

Speaking to vMEMES

There are ways of presenting messages which can speak to multiple vMEMES. Just think of Hilary Clinton’s statements about her talks with the Chinese. Yes, she was most definitely going to raise human rights violations with the Chinese – thus, appeasing GREEN to some extent – but that was not going to get in the way of the United States and China focusing on bettering trading relations between the two economic giants – thus, pleasing BLUE in its need to manage systems – as one strategy in turning the global economy back on the right path – thus, stimulating ORANGE’s striving to achieve targets. Plus, there is a promise of a trickle-down of greater financial security for PURPLE’S safety needs. Clinton – not usually someone to whom 2nd Tier thinking is ascribed – actually pulled of a good balancing act, hitting a number of buttons quite effectively.

 

Last Friday Obama – who, in his methodology, had seemed such a unique and effective communicator in the election campaign – looked a dullard by comparison.

 

For all I know Obama does have TURQUOISE in his vMEME stack. He may turn out to be a great American president – perhaps he will become as inspirational a statesman as Nelson Mandela. But he needs to consider how his actions are perceived.

 

It is one thing to know what to do in the interests of your own people. It is another to consider how your actions may be perceived by other peoples and what effect that perception may have on those peoples’ attitudes towards your people.

 

Obama’s blunder puts me in mind of the blunders of another man to whom TURQUOISE thinking has been attributed at times: Prince Charles. The man is a true visionary – a would-be philosopher of sorts – who has made a positive difference in the lives of thousands upon thousands through the work of the Prince’s Trust and been involved in developing models of sustainable farming and rural life. Yet he has alienated politicians he could have influenced, with his nagging letters and is caricatured in the media as an eccentric who talks to plants and maltreated his first wife. The phrase “too heavenly-minded to be of any earthly use” would be unkind but his seeming inability to get the right messages out to the right vMEMES has significantly undermined what he could have achieved.

 

Obama needs to recalibrate and recognise his need to speak to multiple vMEMES. He also needs to recognise his blunder and find a way back from it before he replaces Bush as the best recruiter al-Qaeda ever had.

Don’t implement Macpherson!

 community, human rights, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Aug 132004
 

It seems Conservative Party leader Michael Howard has once again indulged in an announcement of policy deliberately designed to court controversy and to wind up liberal thinkers.

The latest in Howard’s increasingly-desperate Dirty Harry-esque hard right wing policy announcements would have the Tories not implementing a key recommendation of the 1999 Macpherson Report – namely that police officers have to document all instances of ‘stop & search’ that they carry out. Howard’s proposition is that, assuming the search of the person stopped indicated no further action was required, the average 7 minutes required to document the action would deter officers from investigating potential suspects.

On one level it was an entertaining piece of political theatre – very RED! It is also seems to confirm the view of some commentators that Howard is either incredibly self-referenced or else caught in some form of groupthink that insulates him from any common-sense opinions external to his closest advisers.

At another level, Howard is tapping into the sense of many that the country is ‘going-to-hell’. “The clear distinction between right and wrong has been lost in sociological mumbo-jumbo and politically correct nonsense,” he said when making his policy announcement. “There is now a palpable sense of outrage that ‘so-called’ human rights have tipped the balance of justice in favour of the criminal and the wrong-doer, rather than the victim and the law abider.”

The crumbling of rigid BLUE morality under pressure from ‘do-gooder’ GREEN is a common theme in a number of analyses of what’s going wrong with Western society. It’s an issue that Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck has drawn attention to several times in the past few years; and it is reflected in my own ‘A Downward Spiral…’

Beneath Howard’s moral concerns, however, he is, perhaps unwittingly, giving cause to the deep xenophobic PURPLE tribalism that always lurks beneath the surface in any kind of multi-culturalism in society, ready to undermine it.

Doreen Lawrence, mother of the murdered black schoolboy, Stephen Lawrence, at the centre of the Macpherson Report, seized upon this aspect straightaway. Within hours of Howard’s announcement, she was denouncing the policy to journalists and broadcasters. If the Tories carried through this policy, she stated, it would put community relations with the police back by 10 years.

The Nature of Racism
Lord Macpherson found the Metropolitan Police to be riddled with ‘institutional racism’. His proposal to document stop & searches – with the searched person retaining a ‘receipt’ from the searching officer(s) – was one of a number of recommendations aimed at de-institutionalising that racism and driving it out of the force.

In Spiral Dynamics terms, ‘institutional racism’ means that the ‘higher authority’ and organising structure of BLUE have effectively licensed and enabled the racism that is natural for PURPLE. (see: Is Racism Natural…? )

Let’s be clear here: PURPLE is not racism. Racism is one of the manifestations of PURPLE’s not-of-our-tribe ethic. Not-of-our-tribe sentiments are not just about colour of skin but can relate to any aspect of ethnicity. More than 500 years after the Wars of the Roses, the lingering distrust between some Yorkshire people and some Lancashire people is due to PURPLE thinking. The PURPLE vMEME is active as a principal driver in the desire of many Scots and Welsh to be distinct – even independent – from the English. And when the monolithic BLUE structures of Communism crumbled in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, repressed PURPLE tribalism produced a whole series of vicious ethnic wars and reintroduced the world to ‘ethnic cleansing’. PURPLE is an element of what’s going on in Darfur, even as I write.

Wherever one set of people distinguishes their collective Identity from another set of people with feeling (rather than intellectually), then the PURPLE vMEME is at work.

This ‘not-of-our-tribe-ism’ by default denotes the ‘other lot’ as lesser beings and this makes PURPLE very vulnerable to manipulation by more complex vMEMES. Slobodan Milosovich’s RED warlord use of tribalism in Kosovo and the British National Party’s very BLUE intellectual justification of racial division are just two examples of the way PURPLE gets used in this way.

The GREEN-BLUE Conflict
In the same way that racism is a manifestation of PURPLE thinking, egalitarianism is a product of the GREEN vMEME.

So GREEN egalitarianism stands opposed to PURPLE ‘not-of-our-tribe-ism’. GREEN, being a far more complex vMEME, can use the BLUE legal structures to repress PURPLE not-of-our-tribe-ism. Hence the raft of equality-oriented legislation in Western societies in the latter half of the Twentieth Century as GREEN thinking increasingly dominated intellectual debate.

It is this GREEN using BLUE to repress undesirable PURPLE that underlies Lord Macpherson’s proposal to document stop & searches.

The scenario would be that the police officer’s I-can-do-whatever-I-want-to RED, including indulging my PURPLE not-of-our-tribe-ism by harassing young blacks – and all under a facade of BLUE authority – is constrained by subjecting the officer to real  BLUE accountability: the documentation of the stop & search.

Unfortunately, statistics show time and time again that young black males are convicted of a very high percentage of crimes committed in areas where they live or are in close proximity to. Leaving aside prejudice in the judicial system, there are a whole series of sociological factors (unemployment, lack of opportunity in the white world, imported cultural traditions, etc, etc) linked to a whole series of psychological factors (confusion of cultural Identity, low self-esteem, poor self-efficacy, negative identity, etc, etc) which explain why a disproportionately high number of young black males end up with criminal convictions. But the inescapable fact is that a significant number of young black males in inner city areas do commit crimes.

Purple/RED rap culture actually celebrates this and the ORANGE entertainment industry promotes it in films and music.

Thus, the media stereotype of the young black ‘gangsta’ becomes an element in the demographics of the ‘fear of crime’ – and it is the fear of crime which Michael Howard’s policy announcement is playing on.

One of the downsides of the ascendancy of GREEN thinking in intellectual debates has been the progressive undermining of rigid BLUE morality in Western society – embodied in the permissive hippie culture of the 1960s but actually beginning in the 1950s. The decline of BLUE morality has led not so much to the ennobling freedom of the human spirit, as many hippie ‘gurus’ intended, but to the unshackling of RED lusts and self-indulgence, with the energy focussed on instant fulfilment – all exploited to the hilt by ORANGE consumerism. The knock-on effect of all this has been the undermining of traditional PURPLE ‘family values’ – including some of the rituals and taboos that form the fabric of a healthy and functional society.

Just some of the results of this are a virtual epidemic of broken marriages and one-parent families, gangs of unruly teenagers terrorising estates, wide-scale drug abuse and alarming rises in crime rates – with ‘gun crime’ now an established modus operandi in many inner city neighbourhoods

No wonder the ‘blue rinse brigade’, who comprise a substantial section of what’s left of the Tory vote agree totally with Michael Howard’s assertion that “The clear distinction between right and wrong has been lost in sociological mumbo-jumbo and politically correct nonsense.” Howard is absolutely correct in that statement…but he’s only got part of the bigger picture and making police officers less accountable, with the potential for re-unleashing PURPLE/red abuse of young black males, is hardly the answer.

Taking responsibility
What is needed, as Don Beck has frequently stated, is the need for more BLUE structure in society.

We can’t put the GREEN genie back in the proverbial bottle and you can’t turn the clock back. Nor should we. The large-scale emergence of GREEN thinking has brought with it many benefits. Without GREEN, women would still be ‘chained to the kitchen sink’, blacks would still be officially second class citizens, blue/ORANGE capitalist industry would still be polluting the planet with complete abandon, and there would be an awful lot more wars.

But we can re-emphasise BLUE values to redress the balance somewhat. Tony Blair is onto some of this when he talks about rights and responsibilities. He’s also on the right track when he talks about being “tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime”.

At a BLUE level we do need effective and efficient policing. We also need to punish wrongdoers – and for them to be seen to be punished as a deterrent to others. Michael Howard has dusted off the litany from his days as Home Secretary that “Prisons work”. Reoffending statistics make that supposition highly dubious; but I will never forget a police inspector in South East Wakefield telling me: Prisons do work for the first three months on a person’s first incarceration. After that they learn to adapt.” So perhaps we need much shorter sentences in much more unpleasant conditions? The kind of experience no sane person would want to repeat in a hurry? The kind of fist-in-the-face encounter that RED does actually learn from…?

The problem with prisons is that GREEN, with its concern for ‘human rights’, has driven much of the agenda in recent years. While prisons are far from pleasant places, few convicted felons are actually terrified these days of a further sentence. GREEN needs to be in a background monitoring role, making sure prisoners can actually survive the experience both physically and psychologically and then resourcing them for life beyond the prison gates.

At a PURPLE level we need to encourage couples to work at marriages, to regard ‘playing away from home’ as taboo (especially for men) and to learn how to be responsible parents. (Even OFSTED – the Office for Standards in Education – has started to turn its attentions to parents as the next ‘big step’ in improving performance in many schools.)

And we need to restrain ORANGE’s manipulation of RED’s desire for indulgent thrills and instant excitement by glamourising violence and promiscuous sex. (When was the last time you saw a television drama portraying a middle-aged couple, happily married for 20 years, having full-on, naked, uninhibited, multi-orgasmic sex….?)

As to racism, we need to create a bigger PURPLE Identity that all the tribes can buy into. Creation of such an Identity almost certainly requires macro-working the Spiral to involve the RED, BLUE and ORANGE vMEMES.

An example to model which could give us more ideas on how to do this might lie with those youths who were shown in the audience at a televised England vs Pakistani cricket match last year. Undoubtedly of Asian extraction, their faces were painted in the red and white of St George and they were cheering on the England players. When questioned by reporters, they revealed their parents or grandparents came from Pakistan. Somehow these young men had made the transition in Identity that made them see themselves as ‘English’.

Michael Howard’s problem is that he keeps trying to out-BLUE Tony Blair. What he should be doing is learning to out-Spiral Blair!