Life
At the beginning of the 21st Century, we know that our universe exploded into being about 15 billion years ago and that it’s been expanding outwards ever since. We know too that our own galaxy has about 100 billion stars in it, and that there are outside our galaxy another billion galaxies. That means that the total number of stars in the universe could be a figure written as 1 with 20 noughts (or thereabouts!). We know further that our own star, the Sun, an average sort of star on the outer reaches of the galaxy we call the Milky Way, nowhere near as brilliant as Sirius and nowhere near as big as Betelgeuse, was formed with its ten planets (at last count) about four and a half billion years ago. We know finally that life in its simplest form began on this third planet from the Sun about two billion years ago and that evolution, and a series of cataclysmic disasters, has brought homo sapiens through tortuous evolutionary paths to the position of dominance on the planet. We treasure that word sapiens – well, we ought to.
It defies belief that life, and indeed intelligent life, has not come into being somewhere else in this and other galaxies. It would be arrogant of us to suppose that we are unique in the universe. And it follows by the randomness of evolution that those forms of life will be fundamentally different from ourselves.
One day there will be contact: our radio signals have been leaving the planet for only about 80 years, a very short time in the overall scheme of things. For reasons of time and distance, we should concern ourselves with possible acknowledgements only from within our own galaxy, which itself has a width of 100,000 light-years. Any intelligent life out there will be either very much more advanced than ours, or much more primitive than ours: the chance of an exact parallel in time is infinitessimally small. The more primitive will not recognise an incoming signal and will not have the expertise to respond. The more advanced might well have blown themselves up. But one day it will happen. It will be the most momentous news item in the history of mankind. It will pose an interesting situation for the Churches.
Religion
All forms of life have birth – they are born – and they face death – they die. It has bothered many wise men of the past that perhaps things cannot be this simple. They have invented an after-life in different places and they have established different religions. Some of them in the past have been based on a multi-theistic concept, such as the Roman and the Greek. The more serious, monotheistic, religions, seeking a meaning of life together with a structure of social and ethical customs, have retained adherents numbered in their hundreds of millions – in chronological order Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. It is deeply satisfying that there is one tenet which is common to all of them – treat others as you would have them treat you. The religion which we call Christianity has over the last two millennia been split into a vast number of different branches but the centre is quite specific in retaining mythical events: a good man called Jesus Christ, born round about 6 BC, came to prominence when he was about 30 years old because he preached unselfishness, altruism, sincerity and humility. The gospel writers, starting to record his life some 40 or so years after his death, decided that it was appropriate to romanticise the important events of his life, particularly his birth – which surely must in reality have gone unnoticed – and his death – which certainly didn’t. The good unselfish man had become divine. I respect the believers, but speaking for myself, I have been unable since reaching adulthood to accept the supernatural aspects of the Christian religion. All I can say is that I shall strive to continue to live with my own brand of ethics.
If one has to define what one is in religious terms, I don’t know whether I’m an atheist or an agnostic. In some circles the latter is regarded as more elegant than the former. I cannot imagine what superhuman power let loose the “Big Bang” those 15 billion years ago: it could be that it was an automatic reflex from the contraction of a previous universe, but that just side-steps the question. One thing I must be certain of: a Creator, if he/she/it exists, will not be bothering unduly, 15 billion years after his creation, about the fate of 6 billion humans on the third planet from an average star on the edge of one galaxy out of billions of other galaxies.
One alarming feature of the main religions is that the more strongly adherents believe in their chosen precepts, the more fiercely do they react to those with different beliefs: this has made the interplay of world religions one of the more bloody aspects of human history. Even in the comparatively enlightened world of the 21st Century (CE) one doesn’t have to look far to see evidence of this: Protestants spit at Catholic children on their way to school in Northern Island; Muslims blow themselves up in a public place in the Middle East, hoping to kill or maim Jews; or, more recently, in major Western cities, hoping to kill those whom they perceive as infidels, ie non-believers in Islam. It is only too easy to compile a list of events in which the tenet of “treating others as you would have them treat you” is ignored.
My actions during World War II undoubtedly harmed life, which is certainly not in that spirit either; but I believe – and it seems to be generally accepted – that the War was fully justified and had to be fought: an opposite result would have cast Europe back to a prolonged dark age without essential freedoms.
Health
Most of us suffer illness at some stage of our lives. I have had typhoid, Bells Palsy, shingles and more recently a hernia; and I’ve cut open my forehead and broken my Achilles tendon; but none of these has impaired my general health by one jot. So I’m one of the lucky ones. My dear Patricia, on the other hand, has suffered for at least a quarter of a century – and probably more before precise diagnosis – from a chronic condition for which there is no known cure. Palliatives have been suggested: she belongs to the Raynaud’s and Scleroderma Association and she takes their recommendations seriously: for instance, first a daily drug Nifedipine and then Diltiazem, together with a daily supplement called Ginkgo Biloba. They appeared to do very little to ease the problem, and in her eighties it’s now a small daily dose of a steroid. She will suffer all the rest of her life from the results of poor circulation: very cold hands and cold feet (even when the rest of us think it’s warm), difficulty in swallowing, dry mouth, aching eyes. The NHS keeps a caring eye on her condition with regular surveillance, in order particularly to ensure the problem does not spread to internal organs: that would be life-threatening.
Apart from specific problems of this sort which can’t be avoided, the main advice an elderly person should give to the young is – maintain your body. You maintain your house and your garden: maintain your own body. Feed it, water it, air it sensibly. Intake with moderation. Eat the food that you like, but not too much of any one thing. Disregard “expert” advice that such and such is harmful: some other expert will say the opposite. View with suspicion all “diets”. Respond to the calls of nature as soon as is possible. Keep your weight near the average for your height. Take drugs only as prescribed. Don’t waste your Doctor’s time with a headache or a tummy ache that you know you can fix yourself… Oh, and look after your nine orifices: they’re all vulnerable in one form or another and need to be kept clean and clear.
A year or so before I wrote this Chapter, the Secretary of State for Health sent out a proforma to millions of British citizens, asking what ideas we might have for improving our National Health Service. The proforma, when completed, was addressed personally to the Secretary of State: I couldn’t resist adding on the first line of the address “or delegated civil servant” – not being able to bear the thought of all those millions of forms finishing up in the Secretary of State’s personal in-tray. Anyway, I put forward two suggestions: (1) make full use of the private sector, at whatever cost, to clear backlogs and waiting lists, just as a one-off exercise; and (2) charge hospital inmates for their meals – why on earth should we expect them to be given to us free of charge? Since then, the powers that be have started to implement (1) but it seems they are extremely (and illogically) wary of (2).
Politics
Our country has not been well-served by its politicians in the second half of the twentieth century. Both main parties, whatever their intentions, have seen the standard of living of its people slowly fall back in comparison with most other first world nations. Much has been made recently of the United Kingdom achieving “fourth” place in terms of Gross National Product (GNP), having just passed France. Those who say this neglect to mention that the more meaningful statistic is that of GNP per capita. On that basis the UK lies 18th behind Switzerland, Luxemburg, Japan, Norway, Denmark, Singapore, United States, Germany, Austria, Belgium, France, Sweden, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Finland, Iceland and Bermuda.
Successive administrations have been responsible for the UK falling behind five of the original “six” of the European Union (that is, all but Italy) in so many crucial ways – education, health and transport. Both main parties accept that these three areas of work must be publicly run, either fully or in part: progress in all three areas has become progressively frustrated in Britain by bureaucracy and red tape, by lack of long-term planning, by short-term palliatives and by repeated shifting of policies and objectives. Compare our (deliberately) incomplete motorway system with the finished network in the Netherlands; compare our National Health Service with that available in Germany, to which it is now being suggested we send our longer-suffering cases (!); compare our pathetic rail network with that enjoyed by France where a 3-hour train journey from Paris to Marseilles is about to be launched. (That’s equivalent to London to Aberdeen.)
The lack of long-term planning and, in its stead, the use of short-term palliatives are surely an unfortunate feature of democracy. Each administration has to be limited as to its time in office: we dare not take the risk that a dictatorship will be benign. Our own time limit is a maximum of five years and inevitably a Government party is aiming to win the next election. There is no way out of this dilemma, but at least our constitution should be changed to insist on a fixed term as in many other democratic countries, in order to remove the suspicion of deciding dates to unilateral advantage.
The workings of our two Houses of Parliament are hopelessly out of date. The procedures of both Houses should be automated with press-button voting. The green and red benches have a long and distinguished history, but they really do have to make way for individual members’ desks. As to the Upper House, it is time to stop tinkering around the edges with Bishops and hereditaries, with rewarding from the Lower House and blatant crony-stuffing, and move on to a fully-elected US-type Senate (two per county?).
Successive administrations have derogated the institution of marriage by their various tax and allowance policies. As night follows day, so “living together” is looked on more favourably than a formal bonding, and millions of children grow up in unstable homes. Successive administrations encourage the birth rate, particularly in needy families, with their policies on child benefits. A thoughtful planner would surely suggest that benefits should taper off after, say, the third child.
It was Beveridge who, during World War II, foresaw the need for the so-called “Welfare State” and it was the post-war Labour Government which started putting it into place alongside the newly established National Health Service. Over the following 50 years, like so much else, Welfare has grown out of control with an extraordinary list of 50 odd benefits and associated bureaucracy. The Social Security Budget, which it is now called, has reached £140 billion a year, some five times the Defence Budget. Even a rational Welfare thinker such as Frank Field has to be put out of harm’s way lest he interrupts the relentless expansion. We must surely have highly intelligent civil servants who can design a Welfare package in such a way that:
yes, the better-off help the poor;
and yes, the fitter help the disabled;
but also in which:
no, the industrious do not necessarily help the lazy;
the thrifty do not help the spend-thrift; and
the responsible do not help the irresponsible.
Furthermore, bearing in mind all the massive computer power available to modern Governments, it should surely be possible to automate all legitimate benefit grants into a national database linked to the Inland Revenue, in such a way that calculations of negative income tax may be made. The savings in public manpower and expenditure would be considerable. Furthermore, in view of the lamentable record of Government initiatives in computer software, there is surely a need to create a software “czar” tasked with efficient, comprehensive and accurate performances.
It seems that, as we enter the 21st Century, our politicians – or perhaps, our civil servants, persuading our politicians, whichever – are determined to excel themselves in stupidity: for instance, proposals for rewarding truants and criminals and penalising victims… The MacPherson Report which, describing the Metropolitan Police Force as “institutionally racist” and thereby drastically harming morale, contains one of the most extraordinary sentences you could read: “An incident is racist if it is perceived to be racist by the victim or by any other person”- !! – what a great incentive for prejudice, racism, xenophobia and all sorts of other phobias – and what a dismaying atmosphere in which our police have to work… Again, as we enter the 21st Century, the first word in the formal name of our country – United – begins to lose its significance as concessions are made to the Scots and the Welsh which are too eagerly received by local nationalists. A process has been set in train which could end in the breakdown of the Union… Undergraduates enter University without basic skills in writing and calculating and to whom “parsing” is a foreign word… And in the wider arena of Europe, our politicians fail to grasp the inexorable erosion by the French (since 1966) of Nato and US influence in European military affairs.
With very few exceptions, our politicians lack integrity, humility, dignity, gravitas, sincerity .. and numeracy. “Charisma” is the quality most sought after. Substance is submerged to image and presentation. Perhaps there are many who feel the same way as I do – as witness the appalling percentage (43%) of the electorate who, by abstaining, voted in 2001 for “none of the above”. And as to the 2005 election, we are faced with the startling fact that the party securing the highest total vote in England finished up with 90 seats less than the party with the next highest total vote: a result which surely points to the need for considerable independent work from the Boundary Commission.
I mentioned politicians’ tendency to lack of numeracy. I quote a recent case: in the process of raising their own pensions, MPs voted in majority to change their formula of fiftieths per year of service to fortieths per year. I remember vividly at least one justification for the increase – “we don’t serve so long as MPs these days.” Follow that up to its logical extrapolation! (The military, by the way, use eightieths, and only above the age of 21: I was flying in Bomber Command before my pension started being calculated.)
The Monarchy
Most of us are appreciative of our good fortune in having a Monarch as Head of State. There, indeed, reside all those characters of integrity, humility, dignity, gravitas and sincerity which we long for in our politicians. HM Queen Elizabeth II is a wonderful example to us all in how to carry out one’s duty. For 50 years she has served this country of ours alongside 10 Prime Ministers and 10 different administrations. For 50 years she has done everything that is expected of her with finesse, dedication, steadfastness and efficiency; and all against a background of rapidly changing mores. It is no exaggeration to state that she is the most famous and most widely recognised woman in the world. Long may her reign continue. The alternative – of some retired and feckless politician – is too awful to contemplate. And what would we call the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force? They are the only such Services in the world for which the name of the country is not necessary.
Global Economics
It is naïve and foolhardy for a Chancellor of the Exchequer of any Party to assert that he has squeezed “boom and bust” out of the system. More than ever before all countries are interdependent in economic terms and one of the unfortunate but inevitable features of capitalism is that global economic growth goes in cycles. It is the responsibility of organisations like G8 to ensure the cycle has minimum amplitude, but with the best will in the world they cannot guarantee a permanent straight line. Through the years 2001/02, for instance, it became clear that the USA, Japan and Germany were all three on a downturn. For a number of different reasons, including terrorism, highly significant natural disasters and the extraordinary buoyancy of China and India, the future, as I write, is delicate and our brave Chancellor might have to eat his words.
The UK is particularly vulnerable at this time since little more than a fifth of our GNP is associated with manufacturing, that is, industry which provides goods for export in trade with the rest of the world. An increasing percentage of the GNP now comes from the service industries: a global downturn will quickly have a spread-over effect on to that sector.
A fundamental problem for all the developed world is that some measure of increase in the G(for Global in this case)P every year – say 1.5 to 2% – is essential just to keep employment figures steady: slip to only 1% increase and unemployment will begin to rise. Are we all wise enough, co-ordinated enough, far-seeing enough, to keep the engine going at the right speed?
Education
Throughout the entire length of my adult life, arguments have raged about how to teach. I remember exactly how I was taught in the 1930s and it was admirable – desks in serried ranks, blackboard and chalk, high standard of teachers and no changes of staff, no computers, no gimmicks, just teaching… and the cane if you were deliberately disruptive. Soon after World War II, the “progressives” got hold of the agenda and things have never been the same since. It is heartening that each year we are told that more and more children are passing their A Levels successfully; but we have to balance that up with the fact – and it is fact – that many undergraduates cannot spell, haven’t the faintest idea of grammar and the parsing of a sentence and cannot perform simple arithmetical processes. There is something wrong here. The minimum action that is surely called for is to institute a simple test of English and Arithmetic for entry to University, in addition to the required examination grades.
We may well need some of those who fail this filter to think about taking up plumbing, carpentry and electrical work. [A 2002 letter in one of our national broadsheets: A solicitor hires a plumber and discovers he’s going to be charged £100 an hour; “but I’m a solicitor and I couldn’t charge that much”; “yes, I know” says the plumber “I used to be a solicitor.”]
Power
In my lifetime the world has seen a huge increase in the demand for power. Gas and oil are being extracted from the planet at an increasing rate. The doomsters who say we shall run out by such and such a year have never been right, because new finds serve to confound them. However, the cost of new finds escalates, and some time this century, the new finds will fall behind the increase in demand. It therefore behoves all far-thinking governments to plan for alternative sources. Whereas the gas and the oil might be described as “capital” assets, there are other sources to be grouped under the word “interest” assets: they are wind, tides, direct sunlight and hydro. But they are most unlikely to satisfy demand on their own. It is therefore a priority for governments to set in train all necessary scientific work in order to harness power from our seas: in other words nuclear fusion, the same power as the terrifying H-Bomb, but controlled and benevolent. There will be massive problems on the way, but they must be solved this century. If they are not, dear grandchildren, you will face an uncertain future.
Defence
It seems right to deal with Defence as the last important issue, doesn’t it, because that is where recent governments have put it. Our defence forces – the Royal Navy, the Army, the Royal Air Force – have an enviable reputation around the world for proficiency, managerial competence and standards of training. Dozens of different countries around the world choose to send elements of their officer cadre to our Training and Staff Colleges. It is a reputation which becomes increasingly difficult to sustain when commitments exceed capability. Each year, the Defence budget in real terms goes down, the commitments go up and our Armed Forces are stretched beyond reasonable limits. One grand Review after another in the Ministry of Defence has only one aim – to reduce the budget and keep the Treasury mandarins happy. In that financial climate, we must contain commitments. As an example, I believe it was wrong for us – and indeed, for NATO – to intervene in Balkan affairs, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia. We should not get involved in other countries’ civil wars. Conversely, I believe it was right for the US and the UK to bring down the regime of Saddam Hussein; but they should have foreseen the need for the United Nations to take over the subsequent establishment of a replacement regime, if only to obviate the inevitable unpopularity that was bound to stem from prolonged occupation.
In the broader international arena, we should do everything in our power to foster unity in NATO and frustrate French attempts to break it up and rid Europe of US military interest. The US initiative to build a defence shield against nuclear weapons from rogue states (eg Iran and North Korea) needs UK support in the context of early warning: we should give it unreservedly. At the same time, it would be unthinkable for the country which was the second to build a nuclear deterrent force – soon after WWII with the RAF, 25 years later with the RN – to dissolve it. And … having dealt successfully, in conjunction with the Americans, with Fascism and the Cold War through the 20th Century, we must now make sure we know how to deal with the very different threat of global terrorism.
If Johnny came back…
Finally, consider once again the 55,000 officers and senior NCOs who gave their lives in Bomber Command during World War II. Let us call one of them Johnny Aircrew. Maybe he was a member of the 43 crews who didn’t return from a raid on the V2 base at Peenemunde on the night of 17/18 August 1943, just one of the 1400 nights on which Bomber Command operated. Suppose Johnny were to be able to come back and see his country at the start of the 21st Century…
Johnny was mightily impressed with the far greater affluence around him, but startled by the degree of inflation over the years (he started converting every price into shillings) and bewildered to find that Rolls-Royce was owned by a German company. He was astonished by the widespread range of incomes: by combining and comparing a number of different news reports, he could calculate that, say, £100,000 would be earned by a supermarket packer over 13 years, by a Government Minister in 1 year, by a large company’s Chief Executive in 1 month and by a footballer in 1 week. Johnny also noted that it was likely that the footballer and others like him in the sports and entertainment businesses were not styled as “fat cats” by the tabloids: that was a term for the Chief Executive who might well be providing employment for tens of thousands and contributing to the nation’s economy.
Johnny detected that there seemed to be a lot of impatient people around him; and he read of “rage” – road rage, air rage, football rage, racist rage – and he wondered what they were so angry about. (He would never think it sensible to serve alcohol at a cabin altitude of some 8,000 feet – perhaps that explained the air rage.) He noticed, also, a marked shortage of attention span and attributed it to what he thought was junk TV, untuneful pop music and the most extraordinary plethora of magazines in the newsagents shops and of boring websites on the internet: magazines with visually indigestible onslaughts of colours, typefaces, headlines, pictures, dogs dinners of little items on this and that, so that the mind and the eye skip unsatisfied and barely informed … and on the internet: websites pulsating with irrelevant images, reminders, invitations, offers & commercial detritus of every sort, often impossible to reach the information you want without exhausting the mind in the effort of filtering out all the distractions you don’t want. He saw enough advertising in all the media to judge that much of it had been designed by morons. And he was surprised that the people who watched what he was told were “soaps” became so bound up in their doings that fictional personalities and happenings became “news” all mixed up with fact.
Johnny was surprised that so much was being written of “global warming”. The weather didn’t seem to him to be any different from what he remembered. Certainly it was a good thing that the dirty fogs of the 1930s had apparently been cleaned up. But then, when he came to think about it, the media of the 21st Century did seem to set out to shock, to exaggerate, to get hysterical about everything: in one other area for instance – the financial world – if a figure went up by a few percent it had “exploded”, down by a few percent it had “collapsed”. Because girls’ success in A Levels was 91% and boys 89%, a great outcry arose – with a plus/minus 1% error on each figure, they’re both the same, for Heaven’s sake. Headlines, particularly of the tabloids, consistently broke all reasonable bounds of dignity and common-sense and often went so far as to prejudice ongoing legal cases. Hysteria – yes, that’s what Johnny thought seemed to be evident all over the place in so many different fields: what had happened to the famous British upper lip?
Johnny was dismayed to realise that the status of marriage had obviously taken some hard knocks: the word partner was very popular and the words wife and husband had almost disappeared. He was appalled to read of mothers as young as 12 years old, and that half of all the births in the country were now what he would have called illegitimate.
Johnny noted that people didn’t talk much these days about “duty”, “responsibility”, “obligations”. But they were very keen on “rights”, their benefits and what “the State” (ie everybody else) could do for them. “Integrity”, “altruism” and “eloquence” had become very old-fashioned words indeed. In their place were dishonesty, selfishness and (y’know) sloppy speech.
There were many things that Johnny just couldn’t understand at all. He couldn’t understand what the letters PTSD meant. (When the phrase was explained to him, he thought of his own experiences and still couldn’t understand what they were getting at.) He couldn’t understand why so many people in responsible positions were eager to pursue “compensation” for what Johnny would have considered one’s duty. He couldn’t understand how it was that soiled underwear was “art”. He couldn’t understand why tiny minorities were allowed to hold up essential road improvement programmes… Having learnt that there existed an organisation called the “Bomber Command Association” and that its patron was Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, he couldn’t understand why anyone should want to print and paste on lampposts “Queen Mum, hurry up and Die”. Most of all, he couldn’t understand why anyone should want to cover a statue of Winston Churchill with graffiti and urinate on it.
He read that Emma Soames had reminded us a day or two after that Churchill incident that members of the Danish Resistance had laid a wreath at the Cenotaph on their way to Bladon to lay another on the grave of her grandfather. Was it Schiller who wrote that “the most frightening thing in the world is ignorance in action”? Why did they do it? Why? Johnny could tell them why he did what he did – along with thousands of others – so that the spoilers could have the freedom to spray their silly graffiti.
Tell them, Johnny thought, that their country used to run the greatest empire and that, with some Amritsar-like exceptions, compared to others it was the most benign empire the world had ever seen. Tell them also that their country surrendered its imperial role with dignity and tolerance, a tolerance indeed which today highlights the need of communities to strive for a multi-cultural society. Tell them that their country saved Europe from tyrants over the last two centuries; indeed that 60 years ago, backed by her old Dominions, she saved the world – not fiction, fact. Tell them that their country has the most admired literary heritage in the whole world. Tell them that their country has given to the world a global language. Most significantly, tell them that, except for the host country Sweden, their country has secured the most Nobel prize winners per head of population than any other country: indeed, more than twice as many as the United States, twice as many as France, more than twice as many as Germany.
Tell them.