h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

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Hi Thomas

Welcome to h2g2..

I will try to address your points:

(a) "Blue collar workers" are those who do jobs in which it is normal to wear the kind of clothes that the French call something like "blueson". Often blue overalls, or boiler suits. They may be either unskilled or skilled manual workers. The "white collar" workers are those who are expected to look neat and tidy in clean, neat and tidy work-premisis.

(b) The time gap between Labour and Socialism I think owes a great deal to the fact that the challenge of education in England was not really grasped until the 1870's. The Scots were much more literate and many of the most radical journalists were Irish. But the English knew these as "warlike" nations with disastrous histories; so ,for example, William Lovett who probably drafted the famous Six Points of the Charter c1836, which became the foundation of the great Chartist Movement, was so horrified at the proponents of "Physical Force" and virtual anarchy in the great Chartist Congress that he decided that "the working man" was not yet ready to be worthy of political responsibility. He threw his energies into education. In their seminal history of British trade unionism 'the Webbs' treat this period as one of misguided revolutionary ideas.. Their heros were the people of the New Model Trade Unions who created this idea that the unions were/are an asset to "the establishment" since they have an interior discipline over their members, and these leaders formed a power block that the Webbs called "The Junta" that were an effective pressure group working for the "aristocracy" of the working class. They stressed that Trade Unions were essentially self-help "Friendly Societies" -- In France they use the concept of "mutuals" but mutuality is a principle, whereas friendship is not.

There is a very English suspicion of "isms".. I quoted recently for Catigern's benefit Professor Ashton's remark about gentle deflation at Oxford. He had boasted that he had written his Economic History of 18c England without using a single "ism" word. A colleague asked "Not even baptism?"

I think that Germany, like France, was/and is much more of an idea than England. England just is- and was never invented or consciously constructed-- unlike Great Britain in its ultimate expansion.

(c)Post-1918 the Labour Movement in Britain found new unity, because many of its leaders had opposed the war. As I explained in Towards actually in many ways working people were materially better off during the war, and of course Britain won, and the vote was extended to all men and mature women. The anti-war feeling was strongest up in the Clyde near Glasgow in 1914, and this region was supportive of the Russian Revolution, but Communism and even revolutionary Socialism was never very popular.

(d) Mrs Thatcher was Oxford too-- as was Harold Wilson.. It is possibly an environment that encourages people to have big ideas.. and some might well think that, though I left Oxford behind me, perhaps I had already been fatally infected with a capacity to dream of a better world, even if like Thomas More my "Utoponianism" is not as simple and naive as some people might think.

(e) As I have just reiterated this morning on the British Empire thread, much of post-1945 History was based upon the fact that the USA was prepared to pay whatever it took to subsidise Liberal Democratic Capitalist regimes, and the most elaborate military systems in the History of the World. This created full-employment and a range of earnings, while State action along the lines of the EU Social Chapter was also part of an answer to Communist claims that it looked after "the workers" better. Much of these factors no longer became operative when Communism collapsed. Both New Labour and President Obama's campaigning was based upon a perception that there is no real future in these countries for a "blue collar working class" and that "white collar" jobs should now be upskilled into middle class ones.

Labour's permanent underclass is rather different to the one that the Tories used to talk about; and they are incensed at proposals to really look carefully at the 2.6 million people who are registered as unfit to do any kind of work at all with an entitlement to live on public subsidies for life. A former influential Labour MP, Frank Field, whose radical ideas for tackling these problems has now been recruited to work on a team set up by the new Government. I saw an interview recently in which he explained that, with the current increase in unemployment, the newly unemployed were taking on agricultural jobs that had previously been done by migrant workers from Europe. Interviewing both them, and those who had always refused such work, he identified the fact that people who have grown up in families where working is the norm hate to be idle. Others find idleness the norm and the thought of work painful.

The attitude of many Labour polticians on the other hand makes me think of that modern parental phenomenon in which parents bring up their children in such a way that they become convinced that they are "not normal" and have special needs, so that the parents can make a whole life out of looking after their children( You probably now about it. It's called something "by proxy")...In the early Seventies I had some lessons so well organised that after a few weeks into the five-six week programme everything just worked perfectly without me. I became the problem, since I would feel duty bound to intervene.. and in some cases my presence encouraged pupils to try to get the answer from me rather than work it out..My radical solution was to just go to the staff room, just two doors away: because even the class discipline was better when I was absent. Not knowing when I might come back and see them misbehaving, in whatever kind of mood I might be in, was more of a deterrent for bad behaviour than thesight of me quietly settled at my desk busy with something.

(f) Regarding marketing Ms Merckle may now be having second thoughts about her cleavage.

(G) Regarding politicians like Winston Churchill, he said to David Niven when the actor said how relieved he must have been when the US entered the war after Pearl harbour, that he had anticipated that this would happen "because I study history". That obviously goes to the heart of my Towards Project. Modern historians do not see "a tide in the affairs of man" that reflects human goals, ambitions and aspirations.. What do people live for? What are they prepared to die for? And how pointlessly people in our societies kill? The great age of the murder mystery assumed that human action is driven by thought, calculation, passion or belief.

(h)John Ruskin is a very interesting man..Initially most famous as an art critic.. A "Scotsman" brought up in a secluded childhood not far from here. In fact this morning I drove my wife to a hospital appointment in Denmark Hill, where he lived, and Ruskin Park is right next to the hospital. Among things he is obliquely connected with is the Parks movement. A young woman named Octavia Hill was taking painting lessons from Ruskin in his house; and one day she was talking about her sadness at the terrible living conditions of some families in her part of London. Ruskin asked her what she thought could be done about it; and, because as he became older the small fortune that he had been left by his father- a sherry importer- weighed heavily, he gave her the money with which to buy a property and run it expressly to give poor people decent homes. Crucially, however, she insisted that her tenants should pay a reasonable rent- and on time. Where they had money problems she found work for them to do cleaning the buildings, renovating or repairing, which is almost the direct opposite of modern social housing policy. Octavia Hill was so successful that she bought a whole string of properties.

But her wider significance was her perception that what the common people also needed was green spaces and fresh air: and she pioneered the Parks movement. I would imagine the Ruskin Park itself must fit in here somewhere. Driving back this morning just after the school-rush I could fully appreciate that legacy of green spaces that goes right to the heart of a sense of English Peace.. We have a remnant of the great North Wood just 50 yards down our "dead-end" road, and, as I wrote on another thread a week ago, at this time of year we regularly get woken up by the crows, for Croydon got its name by at least Domesday as being "the valley of the Crows".

You see England has roots that are still flourishing, while there are "Jurassic Park"-type efforts to restore healthy life to Welsh, Scottish and Irish rootstock. But the Labour party was grafted on to them and inherited that Celtic feeling that really history demands a huge spoliation of England's wealth as an act of reparations for "the sins of the past".

Regards

Cass

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Thomas

(A) The Warrior- You note that you have referred to the "British Empire" not the English.. In my piece "The Rediscovery of Social Man" I explain that the foundation of England were the Lowland settlements, and I quote Charles Kingsley- amongst other things a Cambridge Professor of History- who could still see the relevance of the "Highlander" "Lowlander" divide. He used this in his introduction to his novel about Herewarde the Wake- the "last Englishman" to try to fight against the Norman Conquest and centuries of foreign rule. The mantra of English historians at the time was that the Anglo-Saxons had arrived as fierce Teutonic warriors to find the Britons had lost their fighting spirit under the Romans. But by the eleventh century the tranquility of Lowland England had sapped the fighting qualities of the English. Earl Godwin had kept some of that old ability and had married one of the young women in the family of England's Viking King, Canute. This produced a clutch of children including Gurth, Leofwine and of course Harold Godwinson. So the campaigns of 1066 were all about whether England was to be ruled by the half-Viking Harold Godwinson, the French-Northman Duke William, or the Viking Harald Hardrada.

This is typical of the pattern of English History in a world in which wars and conflict are a fact of life, and those who you want to champion your cause may well have the Kind of belligerence that you wish to see directed against your enemies rather than against the "English" people, who traditionally just wanted to manage their own affairs as they could do very successfully. But in my reading of History, including Kingsley- and in current affairs I note that this capacity for managing domestic affairs in a spirit of peace and compromise is, and has not been, so easy to achieve in the Highland North of England, nor in the extreme South-West- Devon and Cornwall the land of the great sea dogs. From the casualty count in Afghanistan I constantly note how often the young men getting killed seem to come from these parts of Britain.

And of course the "English army" of the eighteenth century also made a great use of German mercenaries, as did most countries; while Frederick the Great was heavily funded by Britain who depended on Prussia to fight wars on land while we focussed on our sea power.

(B)What I have written about warriors is of course very applicable to Winston Churchill. It was a French book that pointed out to me that Churchill had the blood of the great and fearless Iroquois warriors in his veins. [They eventually specialised in building the New York skyscrapers because they would just walk sedately around the girders as the structures climbed high into the sky]... As you say no-one was interested in Churchill's ideas and understanding during his "Wilderness Years"... And that takes me on to your point about visionaries and thinkers.. I may ultimately turn out to be a fool, but I must confess to being reduced to tears by a marvellous TV Drama about Churchill's struggle to get his message across to an age that did not want to listen to it. It starred Albert Finney and Vanessa Redgrave and was called "The Gathering Storm". The second viewing moved me almost as much as the first... Not surprisingly I too have my "Black Dog Days".

(c) My Jurassic Park comment may get me into trouble, but one can draw some parallels with the attempt to revive Irish language, culture and literature in the Nineteenth Century with other contemporary endeavours to revive lost collective "national identity" like the Jewish, Italian and German ones. As happened in Germany under the Nazis this can too easily lead to a culture of fault and blame which excuses treating someone else as the root cause of past misfortunes. In the late Seventies we were told as official educational policy that, because of the racism that had been experienced by certain sections of the population, we as teachers should expect that there would have to be a period in which we were on the receiving end of abuse and racist remarks. Fortunately Desmond Tutu, the Anglican Bishop of Cape Town, has been infected with English values. He spoke so passionately before the World Cup, mixing his metaphors and saying that his Rainbow Nation had been an ugly grub, and was now about to spread its wings and become a beautiful butterfly.

Regards

Cass

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Thomas B

There were of course very strong family reasons why Churchill went into politics, and , though I was a political activist from about the age of 5, things happened that turned me very much against politics.. So my recent article on the Labour Party was something of an attempt to make peace with my past.. and another part of my childhood that I spent most of my life getting away from.

I remember the "Wilderness Years" series -- I think that it was Robert Hardy who played Churchill very well. I did think that Finney, perhaps a more volatile and troubled individual, brought out the Dark and vulnerable side rather more.. But I have not re-watched the earlier version recently.

As for the attempt to revive national identities, what worries me is the tendency to Utopianism that for example happened in Nazi Germany with the idea that some wise old ancients had the answers to the questions and challenges of life, and they only failed because of other people. The English see our neighbours as essentially unstable and all likely to fall into internal or external conflicts. England too had some of these, often connected to un-English rulers who did not understand the business of government.


Interestingly it was on my birthday date in 1834 that Britain and France finally managed to become allies instead of enemies. True this was as part of a Quadruple Alliance with Spain and Portugal; but I can not remember any earlier period of French history as a modern state when its internal and external relations were stable enough for Britain to feel that such a relationshiop was possible.

Even then that alliance owed much to the fact that Britain was still seen as the victor of Trafalgar and Waterloo; while the French were widely treated as political 'pariahs' after their attempts to carve out a French Empire at the cost of the spoliation of much of Europe.

Cass

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Thomas

Well I do not know what the tradition is in Germany, but the British Party system- and especially the Labour Movement that I was born into, was much more than politics; and the landslide victory that brought Attlee to power reflected a determination to really build on the spirit of war-time unity.

Hence, as I have said many times, Oxford Town and Oxford Gown- the City and the University- that had been separate Parliamentary Constituencies came together; and there was a mood of seeking to overcome class barriers. As far as I remember my parents were very much involved in helping to run social events, that combined fund-raising with getting together.

So one of my earliest pieces of Labour activism was acting as a cloakroom attendant in ballroom dances. It was also as a conscious Labour person that I went down on family errands to the Co-op shop to buy things, like milk tokens that we left on the doorstep,..repeating to myself our family's membership number. Perhaps prophetically I won a talent competition at the age of c10 at the Labour Xmas Party, at which I performed the recent hit "Don't Laugh At Me Cause I'm A Fool".

But obviously there were those tasks like addressing envelopes and and delivering leaflets at election time;and I chatted to Committee members including Oxford Dons when meetings were held in our house. O also remember going to tea at the invitation of some Oxford students, probably as a Labour outreach initiative to expose "working class kids" like us to college life. It was probably in the early Fifties that I first acted as a "runner" between the Polling Station and the HQ. I was carrying the details that would show who was turning out to vote, so that canvasers could see how things were going and go to where one last push was needed.

But I came to understand, and become perhaps obsessed by, the cruelty, hatred and violence of the world, most obviously outside Oxford but also much closer. Moreover over the years so much of the headlines and key-words of political discourse seemed to be like a cracked record- stuck in the Past. Our Oxford vision of a "rainbow" nation was future looking, and at a chidren's level reflected the visions of people like Tolkien and C.S.Lewis.

A couple of years ago I wrote a song:


"Back in an age when the world could smile
And Grimm tales were not grim
A child could roam an enchanted isle
A limitless within.

Blue skies then no mere boundless space
And stars twinkled twinkled far
And the wild-wood, the river bank and the water's race
Were doors slightly ajar.

Then childlike supple minds
Not fully formed
Could squeeze a passage through
Down rabbit holes and chinmey stacks
And wardrobe backs
To lands that were not yet true.

But wonderland knew the cosmic truth
Each time and season has its hour
And the wicked witch and the dragons tooth
Are just the dark side of endless power.

And somewhere,somewhere over the rainbow
The song says bluebirds fly
Birds fly over the rainbow
Why then oh why can't I?

Now like old Father William in a nonsense rhyme
It's time for me to act my stage
But I'd love to take you back to that Heaven's Smile
Of an enchanted age."

But the immediate post-war optimism was constantly challenged..

A child did not need to know what the words Hiroshima and Nuremberg meant in detail to understand that Hell on Earth was very real. I suppose these were almost Buddha moments- but perhaps in reverse. For it was really only when I roamed around on my own that the Heaven's Smile really came through for me-- as it did on my rainbow day in 1999... Our family, our Labour movement and our Oxford became fractious and fragmented

So, as I wrote in a song-suite anout 35 years ago looking back at my journey from child to man:

Verse one says:

"So I had to learn that my world was my own
And that if I was to stand up I must stand up alone
And that people could hurt me not once but again and again.
That was nearly the death
Of an optimist."

Verse two:
"And when I no longer lived in "my home"
Or had no home to speak of to call my own
Was there a place in the world I could learn to belong?.
And the world that I saw was sometimes so tragic.
Where were the dreams, the adventures , the magic?
The world did not suit me so surely the world must be wrong.
Or perhaps the thing that was wrong was within me.
And I was the one thing that could not fit in the world.
And the world would reject me and cast me aside.
And was life worth all the living?
The sighing and dying, the pain and forgiving?
How many times did I look for a corner to hide in?

That was nearly the death of an optimist.
That was nearly the death of an optimist."


But that Heaven's Smile that lightened up my Oxford days joining town, gown, and the blissful countryside of Matthew Arnold's Scholar Gipsy spoke to me of the study of History as the way to understand the dynamics that seemed to be tossing Humanity around. Was it not while at Oxford that Newton carried out his great prism experiments, showing how it was possible to break light down into its rainbow colours, but how it was also possible to join them all back together to produce the miracle of pure white light.

Now what would Andrew Host have made of all of that.

Regards

Cass

Thomas

This is the continuation of that response

************

Somewhere on my shelves I have my copy of St Augustine's Confessions and still boldly underlined is a phrase that leapt out to me in 1962 "Let them weep in this valley of tears". For that is what the world of people appeared to me to be. As I have said before, very briefly in my childhood what Matthew Arnold called Oxford's "sweetness and light" encouraged me to believe in the potential of Humankind to make a success of this world. But Arnold in that same speech said that Oxford was surrounded by a vortex of wild forces of change. That vortex invaded my Oxford, and my life became one of a World that seemed to be all Hell and Purgatory.


Climbing up out of it became an urgent matter of self-survival, and once I had climbed out into a survivors space it seemed that the best I could do was to try like Dr Faust to help others out as well.. But this does involve being prepared to radically re-think those things that drag people down into Hell and hold them there.. Dr Faust said that his wife must not look back. You must leave behind all that may attach you to the chains and ties that will pull you down. For really it is not possible to believe that anyone else or any agency will bring you up out of Hell you must do it yourself and by your own efforts.

Now to some extent both the Europe of Christendom and the Europe of the State have been partial answers to St. Augustine's valley of tears. Christendom turned life on Earth into a purgatory and offered the chance of better in the next world. The State created institutionalised violence that created wealth from internal and external activity and offered material compensations and rewards that mitigated and to some extent appeared to tame and domesticate Hell.. But the State was born out of Hell and has a great propensity to bring things back down to Hell when State encounters State on a bad day.

To some extent, however, as William Blake thought when he saw the lands around Oxford as a "new Jerusalem"-- England's green and pleasant land, the English modified both Christendom and the State to their own values of peace, tolerance and mutuality- as I have explained in my "Roots of the modern world thread". To this end, however, they were compelled to create interfaces to complement our relative seclusion in the British Isles, and this has meant enlisting what I have called "The dogs of war" in order to cope with the reality of the modern world. Even Dr Faust going down into Hell may be forced to counter evil with force and violence, if the evil is immune to goodness.

But, as famously during the darkest hours around which the OP was framed, during a terrible world history in which struggling Humanity has been scrabbling around in its valley of tears at least there was a glimmer of hope kept alive in England ideas of peace and freedom and happiness. It is just a small flame and is not on its own enough to light up the world: it is just a way up out of Hell.

But when I came to London to face the monstrous dynamics of the "boiler house" of the modern age, and walked South London with my alien eyes what I saw I summed up in another song in 1968:

*******************************************

Man look around across your crumbling town
Your buildings they are all on fire
The tarmac too is melting under you
And you're sinking into the mire.
Can you understand you're walking desert sand
You've got to get across together
Every man that's lost
Mean's more miles to be crossed
And you'll be walking forever.

The mountain's they rise high neath an eternal sky
You're trying to get up to the summit
Each man you let fall will then drag down you all
To the deep the dark and the dumb pit
Your cozy fires of hate
Have spread out from your grate
You'll start to clammer soon for safety
Where is the arm that can mean no man no harm
Why won't it come and save me.

The fire is spreading fast your next works may be your last
See the flames as each new building crashes
Drift to the day when they're all burned away
And you're living in a world of ashes.

*****************************************

Not surprisingly I sang that to myself a few times after 9/11 that seemed to bring my vision into a material reality.


So of course I could deal with the terrible things that the British did to the Irish, and that the Irish did to the British, as well as the often well-intentioned initiatives from both sides..

And just how difficult it was in that environment of Hell for those who wished to make things better at the purely human scale! For part of the Irish tragedy was this idea that if Ireland had its own State, just like England had its own State that would be an answer, when the English had been obliged in the Hell and violence of the Age of the State to progressively give up more and more of the kind of State that had made English [as opposed to this new no-existent British] life possible.

Does that go some way to answering your question?

Cass

Thomas

And from a historical point of view, I think that the virtual impossibility of the "Irish Question" was really created by James VI/I's decision to treat the Irish question in terms of a long-standing Scottish one, without the same geographical factors. Books that I have on Scottish history (which like all books are not the whole truth) indicate a long-standing Stuart tradition of treating the occupants of the Higlands and Islands more or less like vermin. And this was compounded when the Lowland Scots became extreme Protestants and the Highlanders remained Catholics.

In Ireland the terrain seemed more suitable to colonial conquest and plantation and suppression. As with similar plantations in North America it was the land and natural assets that were prized and the people really could be regarded as vermin that would be better off dead or pushed off into less potentially valuable spaces.. The argument used by men of a God who blessed their individualism and initiative was that they at least would use God's Earth in line with God's wishes that man should work the Earth and make it fruitful.

But the English had a hard enough time unravelling the problems that Stuart rule brought about within England.. The Restoration and the Glorious Bloodless Revolution were seen as miraculous enough.. One might compare the issue of the victory against Nazi Germany not resolving the issues concerning Poland and Czechoslovakia... Politics is unfortunately the "art of the possible", only people themselves can really change history by changing the nature of the hearts and minds of mankind.

Cass

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Thomas

You will no doubt have realised by now that my childhood was turned into a Hell or perhaps more accurately a purgatory with our home life a perpetual uncivil war with at times a temporary truce for sometimes 3 hours at Christmas..

Fault, blame recrimination for things done and undone ( later as a husband I wrote a song to apologise to my wife for all such failings) ... But I saw well enough that ideas of guilt and blame are so often excuses to throw the responsibility to accomplish necessary change upon "the other one"... when what was needed was that whoever was able to take the initiative to move life forward should do so.

I learned over many years that when such storms break there is really nothing much you can achieve.

But I did hope that eventually as I grew up my personal success and achievements might change the situation..and I might be listened to somewhat differently.. In fact, my elder sister who lived all her life with our mother, says that I am the only one of her children that she ever talked about to other people.

Yet she could never move on and clung to her bitterness and hatred more or less it seemed to the end of her life..The last time we ever met we had a blazing row about it, when she pointed out that she had never walked out on me as my father had done.. A point on which I corrected her reminding her of the number of times that she had packed a small shopping bag and gone out of the door saying that she had a mind to throw herself off of one of Oxford's many bridges.

I was in th south of France when my sister phoned to tell me that she was perhaps terminally ill in hospital, and I arranged to go down to visit on 21 April. On 20 April it seems that she deliberately detached herself from the life support systems and died. At 89 she had had enough.

Life is moving on along our journey, and we do not control the landscape or the weather. The trouble is - and this comes back to the "Towards" project- that I believe that historians no longer look out for that light at the end of the tunnel.

That light I believe can be found in history if written with an eye on the future.

Regards

Cass

Thomas B

Just in case I left you in too dark a place, I should add that I am convinced that my mother's last act was one motivated by love, especially for my sister.

Cass

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Thomas

Many thanks for that.. and for all your support. It is greatly appreciated.

Perhaps I should also add that my London in 2010 is a totally different place in my eyes to the one that I wrote about. Of course then I was an alien and outsider, while now I go around and see so many places that are redolent with happy and/or at least vital memories. Perhaps it is a perception, but it is also true as someone that I met last week remarked "You can not be English because you just talk to anyone and you are so open".. She herself has an Italian background that she says is her excuse.. It is nevetheless true that I can find London a cheerful place because I usually try to emanate cheerfulness and positivity myself.

Perhaps even more significantly, however, is another new friend, a young woman of Afro-Caribbean origin who has just finished a degree on journalism and is as delighted to be able to speak freely to a white Enhlishman as I am to speak to an educated and articulate young black person who wants to change things.. I await developments.

Regards

Cass

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Thomas

No real point in responding now you have clocked off..

You "young people" must "have a life" apart from the web.. Come to think of it, so must I..My wife has been definitely feeling a bit revolutionary for the last couple of days.

I hope that you will have had a pleasant evening etc by the time that you are back on line.


Regards

Cass

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Thomas B

Good morning.. You have adduced correctly over my wife...

As for the article having recently read the last volume of Tony Benn's Diaries I got quite an insight into the less public side of politics.. For someone brought up to it like Benn Westminster really is their village. Moreover it provided interesting particular insights into the Labour Party. I think that I knew that Blair had been a young worker for Neil Kinnock. At least one of the Milibands was spending part of his school holidays at 16 helping Benn to get all his papers in order;and David Miliband was working as a political assistant to Tony Blair probably during his undergraduate days, and then professionally afterwards.

As a believer in human relations I cannot criticise people keeping in touch and taking an on-going interest in how everything is going. So I see Tony Blair's continued interest in David Miliband, and the ongoing career that TB must have envisaged for him as a youth and young man. I suppose some of us are more ready to intrude our advice on other people.

In fact my experience of the Labour Party suggests that these social values are not strong enough. This was a lesson that I learned in my childhood when Labour unity was broken on my seventh birthday in 1951, a rift that brought the fall of the Attlee Government.. And more powerfully when that rift [I now realize] ended up getting my father in court and convicted of criminal charges, which meant that he was asked to resign as local Labour Treasurer; and the "respectable" people with whom we had been working especially within the social life of the local party for as long as I can remember dropped us like a stone. I also realise now that it was probably my mother's sense of shame as much as anything else.

I recognised this phenomenon in a French book by Paul Henry Levy entitled "Les Aventures de la Liberte" which was a study of the French left for about 100 years..It was noticeable that the French left treated the ideological discussions as something like a war, and that anyone who differed from his former "friends" found him- or her- self immediately attacked as a traitor and worse.

For there is this contradiction in Socialism that perhaps inevitably it got swept up in the prevalent tide of Statism and Economism, two forces that are almost totally destructive of a living society. As a movement dedicated to saving the working people, or in fact the poor and down-trodden, it inevitably will tend to attract people who believe in the promotion of greater equality by a combination of they themselves stooping down to a lower level and helping those "pitiable" people at the bottom to rise up towards a half-way house.

I am reminded yet again of Sir Walter Raleigh's "Grief draws not the dead back to the living but the living to the dead"..

These compromises are inevitable and, as you have mentioned my children, their parent's decision to work in this challenge of the inner city did have implications for their childhood. There is an obvious difference between those going down and those who are either struggling their way up, or expecting the hand-out to also be a hand-up.

But this is the reality that labour politics has to deal with and inevitably small in-crowds of "kinghts of the round table" who are going to dedicate themselves to the greater good are bound to emerge.

Mr Mandelson, however, is an interesting case, and I associate him with "the Third Way".. When I started teaching in 1967 pupils would ask me whether I was right wing or left wing, to which I replied that I was neither. I used the historical comparison of Columbus. Everyone wanted to get to Asia and there were those who believed in the northern route and others who believed in the southern route. Columbus had studied both and more widely and decided that, as the whole point was that the Turks had command of the eastern route, if there was an answer it might be to the west. He was wrong of course, but he opened up a whole dynamic that changed the world.

In the same way I was interested in the signs that the way out of the Cold War impasse of MAD was to look in a radically different direction. As you know by then I had been working on this already for about 14 years and have continued ever since. I believe that people like Mandelson and before him Gould, are also convinced that there are other ways around the impasse of old Victorian ideas, but that in the absence of a proper Historical re-evaluation of those ideas that lets them be seen coherently in a different light, all that can be done is stumbling around in short-termism, exploiting possible avenues as they arise.

I think that my willingness to be flexible and adaptable has often made my suspect to other people.. As someone said of my brother "We do not know whether you are one of them or one of us"..

Ultimately we are all one of one.

Cass

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