The Elderly Interrailer

So here I am on my annual summer holiday on a TGV train between Paris and Bordeaux. This is something I have been meaning to do for years, to revisit an Interrail journey that I first did when I was 16 or 17, it is so long ago now I can`t even remember how old I was.  That journey really changed my life and had a role on how I was going to go on and view the world.  In those days, in the early 70s, foreign travel was nowhere as common place as it is today and even if Brits did go abroad it was normally for a week or so to the English enclaves of the Costa Del Sol so even if they were travelling "overseas" they could still get those British cultural staples of warm brown beer and fish and chips. Particularly for a lad like me, uneducated, from the South Wales Valleys and not from a particularly affluent background European​ travel was almost unheard of.  My older brother had visited Paris a few years earlier but that was seen as almost unspeakably exotic and bohemian. Looking back though these mists of time i am still somewhat baffled as to what motivated me to want to go on that journey. Advertising played its part as I remember there was a damp billposter  under a railway arch near my house which told of this fairly newly established scheme called interrail which provided cheap international rail travel for those under 26 in Europe and Morocco. MOROCCO FFS!!!! If Paris had seemed unspeakably sophisticated to me you can imagine how Morocco sounded.

Fair play to my parents I didn't have to hassle them that much to stump up the cash for me to go on my first interrail trip.  To be honest i think they saw it as an opportunity to get away from my local environment for a while as I was going off the rails a bit and also I managed to get two of my friends to say they would come with me so although  know they did struggle to finance it I think they thought they would be letting me down if they didn't. In the end although it didn't really help with me going off the rails for a while it was a seminal event in my growing up.  It took me out of my comfort zone of my own cosy environment and made me aware there were other ways of doing things, other ways of viewing the world and our way at home was not simply the only or even the best way.

I am only a few days into my trip but I already feel the spectacles of the 'other' altering the way I view things back at home. Reading my Facebook, Twitter and news feeds from back in the UK it strikes as a country obsessed with brexit and that not moved on one iota from where we were at during or even before the referendum. The leavers are adamant that they won the referendum fare and square and that we are going to leave no matter what.  The remainers on the other hand argue that the referendum argument was won on lies and anyway it was only "advisory" and should be simply ignored.  To me to be honest neither of these arguments sounds credible.  I don't know what the solution is to this mess the UK finds itself in but whichever way you look at it the country is split 50/50 and any solution needs to take both sides with it which neither of those previous arguments does. Believe it or not here in Europe people don't care about Brexit, they have other things in their lives and it hardly makes the news at all. Britain is in a crisis of its own making and only Britain can get itself out of it. To be perfectly frank I have gone past caring as I am disillusioned by the behaviour of both sides.  Although I am convinced the UK will be poorer on many levels through brexit I think I personally I will survive (although I will probably lose my job) but that is something I can live with. So, whatever side you are on just stop adopting a dog in a manger attitude and think how we can all move on from where we find ourselves at the moment.

Keyboard warriors of the world unite

A Brave New World?

Last week I attended a  talk in Swansea given by a gentleman called Mike Klein on digital activism. Mike who hails from the States but who now, very sensibly in my opinion, has made Swansea his home is the former presidential campaign manager for Congressman Dennis Kucinich. I have to admit to being a little sceptical about this whole digital activism thing prior to this talk but Mike gave me plenty of food for thought some of which I hope to share with you here.

Anybody recognise this?

Although this is a bit of a generalisation in the past life was more homogenised and centralised. People tended to live and work in one place, often for much of their lives and would get their news and information from a few sources as well: what was said at work, through the BBC and maybe the church. Today however we live in a very different world where people throughout their career often move from job to job and where populations are a lot more geographically mobile and where we are bombarded with information and views from many additional sources such as the plethora of television channels and social media platforms. In this multicultural, multifaith, multi voiced brave new world it would seem reasonable to argue that traditional forms of social and political activism need to be rethought.

In the past ten years, particularly since the launch of the IPhone in 2007, there has been a massive change in the way we use and interact with the media. In 2016 71% of the UK population owned mobile phones, up from 39% just four years earlier and among under 35 year olds the figure in over 90% and as of 2015 the smartphone is the most popular way to access the internet   Research has shown that more than a third of all adults (34%) use their smartphone within five minutes of waking up, a figure that rises to almost half (49%) of those aged 18-24.

A386 anyone

It would seem that the traditional model of people catching up on what is happening in the world by switching on their radio or television in the morning or reading the newspaper on the way to work is rapidly being replaced by people switching on their mobile phones and accessing their social media accounts. Any political or social movement that fails to engage with this change is at risk of going the same way as traditional newspapers seem to be going.

Love him or loathe him, and no prizes for guessing which one I do, but President Donald Trump has utilised this change in the media to great effect. Just 7% of the US population use Twitter although nearly 90% are aware of it and although I don't have hard statistics to hand I am pretty sure I am on safe ground to argue that the percentage that have read a Trump Tweet is also around the 90% mark as his Tweets are often faithfully reprinted word for word in various other forms of media.  I'll ask you to reflect yourself; now you may or maynot be on Twitter but it's a pretty fair bet that you at some point have read a Donald Trump tweet. Twitter has given him to opportunity to bypass the traditional filters and spin associated with more traditional forms of media and talk directly to the people and whatever you think of that it has worked, he made it to be president even against the odds.

Labour and The Left in general are not in a good place at the moment, there is no denying it but it would also seem true that we are bound to lose the next war if we use the same weaponry, tactics and strategy as we used to lose the last one.  Times they are a changing and while there is still a place for the old door to door door knocking and face to face interaction (for as Mike pointed out in his talk quoting that clansman of mine Tip O'Neill "all politics is local") the day of the keyboard warrior is now upon us and getting our message out there using these new forms of media is more important than ever otherwise we will become left behind and be seen as out of touch, particularly by the young who are our hope for the future.

Brexit bill: Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

Again I feel motivated to write this blog through some of what I feel is the unmitigated tosh that I have read and heard over yesterday’s vote on the Brexit bill and particularly the comments from certain sectors condemning Jeremy Corbyn’s three line whip on Parliamentary Labour Party members to vote in support of the bill.

Now let me get one thing clear at the start of this blog; I am a committed and ardent remainer.  In my opinion the simple in/ out referendum should never have been held, in many ways in itself it was an affront to democracy. The issue of whether the UK should or shouldn’t remain a member of the European Union is an extremely complex and nuanced one and one that simply could not have been effectively addressed by a simple in/ out referendum and certainly not by a referendum which in the end, let’s be honest here, was not about the EU but became about immigration and feelings of alienation from the political class. Again don’t get me wrong here, I do have serious misgivings about the EU, Just look at my earlier blogpost from June 2013 “A Blue Flag With Yellow Stars” and I am fully cognisant of the “Lexit” argument as to why we should leave the cosy, neo Liberal Capitalist club. Ultimately however the reason that I am an ardent remainer is that when you take all the pro and con arguments into consideration a Tory engineered Brexit, I am convinced, will leave the poorer people of the UK and Wales in particular worse off and I cannot see any benefit to the UK that will offset that.

OK so I have nailed my colours to the mast; I am a committed remainer, albeit a conflicted one. That said I am fully aware that we lost the vote and it is no good pretending otherwise which it seems to me some other remainers want to. This then brings me to the conundrum that Labour and Jeremy Corbyn are facing at the moment. To me it seems they are between a rock and a hard place. Labour campaigned for remain, don’t let anybody tell you different; but the vote was lost to the Leave camp. So now what are Labour to do? Ignore the views of the electorate of this country, many of whom are Labour voters and do all they can to block the Brexit process. It seems to be in doing this the Party will stimulate a political backlash from people who feel that their views, which they believe in passionately, are being discounted as unimportant. The other option which Labour seem to be pursuing and which seems far more pragmatic to me is to accept the vote has been lost and to put in process an approach which seeks to negotiate the best possible outcome to Brexit for the majority of people in this country.  

To be honest I despair when I see 47 Labour MPs have voted against the Party directive. Surely if the events of the past eighteen months for Labour have taught us anything is a disunited party is not appealing to the voters and that members of the Parliamentary Labour Party should show a bit more humility in respecting the views of their constituency members and supporters.  While I can maybe understand it for those MPs who represent areas that strongly voted remain but when you see the likes of Owen Smith and Chris Bryant who represent constituencies that voted strongly to leave vote against their Party and their constituents it beggars belief that they cannot see that this falls right into the hands of UKIP and their ilk who accuse Labour of becoming a party of the metropolitan elite that no longer represents the views of the working people of the UK.

OK these are not good times for Labour and I am not going to cast blame in any one direction other than to say that we all need to take a hard damn look at ourselves. Those that decry and blame Corbyn and accuse the party of selling out on the Brexit cause, rather than just moaning and complaining tell us your plans of how we move forward from this difficult situation and do what Labour says it will always do, take everyone with us and leave no one behind.

The maximum wage: Why it matters.

I have been moved to write this blog following some of the comments I have seen on Twitter and elsewhere following Jeremy Corbyn raising the prospect of a maximum wage and the Oxfam report on global inequality as some people seem to think that in a so called civilised society that vast inequality is somehow inevitable and even desirable and certainly not something that needs to be addressed.

In their ground-breaking book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009), the authors highlight the "pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, (and) encouraging excessive consumption".

They, and other academics argue on the basis of strong evidence within and between countries, that health inequalities mirror income inequalities and that inequality is in itself a determinant of ill health. As a consequence some academics, such as Professor Danny Dorling, argue that we should be addressing maximum pay in private and public sectors and reducing the ratio between those on the lowest and highest pay. Such responses were recently mirrored by a suggestion by Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party, that the UK should explore the possibility of introducing a maximum wage. The mere suggestion of this policy seemed to stimulate some to apoplectic rage as if entitlement to the wealth of Solomon was some sort of inalienable human right.

Since the early 1980s, economic inequality in the UK has grown astronomically. The richest 10 per cent of households now own 40 per cent of the UK’s wealth. This is 850 times the wealth of the bottom 10 per cent. If income distribution was the same as it was in 1977, the bottom fifth would get £2,000 a year more, the top fifth £8,000 less. Given this growth in economic inequality, it is perhaps unsurprising to see a similar growth in inequality in health outcomes. Although life expectancy is generally increasing in the UK, as it has done for the past 100 years, inequalities between the rich and poor is widening.

Analysis by The Equality Trust has found that in the last 20 years alone, the gap in life expectancy for those in different local authority areas has increased 41 per cent for men and 73 per cent for women. This most glaring of inequalities manifests itself in the most basic of inequalities i. e. that of living a long or short life. For instance male life expectancy in East Dorset is 8.9 years longer than those in Blackpool. The gap is just as dramatic for women where those in Purbeck live over 7 years longer than those in Manchester.

Even more alarming are the differences in healthy life expectancy (the number of years likely to be lived in good health) as these inequalities are even more marked. For instance there is now an 18 year difference between women living in Richmond (72 yrs) and those in Tower Hamlets (54 yrs): two communities that are only 15 miles away from each other.

These are just the inequalities in the UK I am sure that I don't need to do a detailed break down of   the inequalities that exist globally but suffice to say that the longest life expectancy in the world is Monaco on 89.52 years while the shortest is Sierra Leone at 50.1 years.  Inequality is killing us in droves and surely, as a species ingenious enough to put people on the moon, we can at least attempt to come up with a solution to this blight on the human race and not lambast those who raise the subject as "communists" that subscribe to the "politics of envy".

There is no more basic inequality than being alive or dead and if we are going to accept the frankly obscene inequality that sees eight  men being richer than the combined wealth of half the world then we must also accept that in doing so we are going to condemn vast swathes of humanity to unnecessary suffering, sickness and an early death. The choice is ours.