2024: the most important year till 2025

It is with some shame that I realise that I have not blogged for a year and a half. Various things got in the way, which, given that my last piece was one publicising ‘Sturgeon’s failed state’ means that I missed writing about the very public and hilariously low rent downfall of easily the most toxic politician in the UK since Oswald Mosley, and one on whom I’d written a great deal previously. Twitter remained active however, so I still had some fun.

Annoying, nasty, racist, divisive and incompetent as he undoubtedly is, the flailing Humza Yousaf doesn’t quite have his predecessor’s unique malignity. And he’s going to get the boot fairly soon, anyway.

Which is one of my predictions for 2024. Here you go, they are not that original, unlike this one:

1. Trump will win the US election, despite the inevitable cheating
2. Labour under the wooden, waxed Keir Starmer will win the UK general election, but not with the claimed landslide. Labour will be so bad by 2025 that they will be hated by all
3. Accordingly, given that he needs the Scottish seats, Labour will evict the SNP in Scotland, and Humza will be deservedly shafted
4. The Conservatives will dump the manager-not-leader Rishi Sunak, who was parachuted in undemocratically in the first place
5. Kemi Badenoch will get his job and begin to revamp the Tories, a bit of time out of office is clearly needed.
6. Climate change will continue to not happen.
7. We will get a new pope.

With respect to points 4 and 5 above, here is Patrick O’Flynn (last November), one of the best commentators:

Faced with poll evidence of rising support for the Reform UK party, of which Nigel Farage is president, Sunak also came out with a lame weekend warning to voters that if they vote Farage they will get Starmer. For such a gambit to be effective Tory-leaning voters would need to think Sunak himself was materially preferable to Starmer. And mounting polling evidence suggests that many simply don’t. 

Although most have clocked that Starmer is as slippery as a bar of soap in a bath, they also know that he is no Jeremy Corbyn. If anything they think Sunak and Starmer are interchangeable: two high tax, high migration technocratic “centrists”, neither of whom will divert the country from its current passage towards hell in a handcart. 

But whereas their hostility towards Starmer is mainly ideological, increasingly their hostility towards Sunak is laced with a sense of outright betrayal. We may be reaching the stage when habitual Tory voters yearn for the humiliating defeat of the Tory party with just as much intensity as do habitual Labour ones.

He has a point. Belated happy new year!

“We shall not see their like again”

Sturgeon’s failed state

Every now and then, although my blogging frequency has decreased, I see something that is worth reprinting in full. Here is former Labour politician Tom Harris’ piece (@MrTCHarris) in the Telegraph, as highlighted by Tom Gallagher, a writer and historian who is essential to read on Twitter (@cultfree54) if you would like enlightened and cerebral understanding of the damage wrought to Scotland by Sturgeon, her gang, and her predecessors. Most of whom seem to hate each other now.

This is a very twisted group indeed. It’s often said that they view everything in life/politics/society as a vehicle to Scottish independence, which is odd in itself. I think that’s too simple, as well as too kind. Their real motivation is a twisted sort of authoritarianism controlled by a tiny gang, whose real motivations are furtive, sexualised and obsessively secretive (to the point of injunctions and above). They know this, the media know this – and have let them off with it. The public might be beginning to twig, even Sturgeon’s zoomers, whom she holds in contempt, while banking on their votes. Take it away Tom:

The political parties in Scotland should be grateful for the voters’ short memories.

It was Scottish Labour who shouted the loudest and longest about the transformative impact Home Rule would have on the nation. Local services like education, health, transport and the environment would be unrecognisable after a few years of local, rather than Westminster, decision-making, they said.

Yet, as its critics always predicted, the reality of devolution has proved disappointing. And despite being latecomers to devo-enthusiasm, it’s the SNP, who have since replaced Labour as Scotland’s dominant political force, who find themselves in the firing line for the many and varied failures of devolved policy.

Perhaps it’s because the unlikely promises made on devolution’s behalf were made so long ago. Perhaps it’s because those promises were made by a different party. 

Whatever the reason, Scottish voters remain supportive of both the institution of the Scottish Parliament, despite its failure to deliver the transformative change that was promised, and the SNP itself, despite their having been the policy-makers in Scotland for the last 15 years.

Given the SNP’s record in government, it can only be a matter of time before political gravity kicks in and voters choose to start holding the nationalists to account for what they’re actually delivering (or not delivering), rather than allowing themselves to be distracted by the constitutional debate at which the SNP are so expert.

Today, in many ways, Scotland is becoming a failed state. Economic performance is woeful. Drug and alcohol problems have surged, there is a failure to engage seriously with the challenges the country is facing, and the drive for independence has fractured society in an endless culture war.

In 2020-21, the Scottish Government had a punishing deficit of more than 22 per cent, compared to around 15 per cent for the UK as a whole.

The average Scottish worker’s earnings stood at £675 per week, according to House of Commons research published last December, compared to the English figure of £705.

In 2019-20, the last year before Covid changes had an impact on grades, the proportion of school pupils passing three or more higher level exams was 43 per cent, lower than any year from 2015 onwards.

Scotland lagged behind the rest of the UK in nine of 13 productivity indicators tracked by the Confederation of British Industry and KPMG in an index produced last December, which found high levels of workplace sickness absence, slower average broadband speeds than the rest of the country, and a decline in business investment as a share of GDP.

And in 2020, there were 1,339 drug-related deaths – the highest level since records began – followed by another 1,295 the following year.

Law of unintended consequences

The charge sheet of failure is a long one, as you would expect from a party that has been in government since 2007. Economically, growth in Scotland has generally lagged behind that in the rest of the UK over the last 14 years, and the blame or credit for failures and successes in the job market are frequently disputed by UK and Holyrood ministers.

But when it comes to those areas that are indisputably devolved, there can be little doubt that Scottish ministers have an awful lot more to explain than to celebrate. That much-heralded transformation of Scotland may well materialise one day, but we’re as far from it today as we were when Donald Dewar was hitting the campaign trail in favour of a Yes vote in the 1997 devolution referendum.

Donald Dewar, centre right, with cross-party support for the 1997 devolution campaign CREDIT: Edinburgh Evening News/PA

One of the proudest claims of the SNP government lies in the area of higher education: Scottish students still receive free university tuition while English, as well as foreign, students have to pay full fees. In fact this is a policy the SNP inherited from the previous Labour-Lib Dem Scottish Executive.

But the law of unintended consequences has played its part in making this policy extremely troublesome for ministers – and even more so for Scottish students. 

The obligation on universities to provide free tuition for Scottish undergraduates has meant that such “funded” places have become severely rationed, while fee-paying students from abroad (and their cash) are welcomed with open arms. 

In practice this has curtailed the opportunities of school leavers from poorer, working class backgrounds, who now find it more difficult to find a university place than students from a similar socio-economic background in any other part of the UK.

In Scotland’s schools, the challenges are even greater. Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, voluntarily offered a seemingly courageous challenge in August 2015, in advance of the following year’s elections to the Scottish Parliament. 

So determined was she to close the drastic attainment gap between schools in poorer and wealthier areas, she announced: “Let me be clear – I want to be judged on this. If you are not, as First Minister, prepared to put your neck on the line on the education of our young people, then what are you prepared to? It really matters.”

She was right: it does really matter. Individuals’ life chances are often decided at school by exam results and the quality of the education they receive. 

But the inspiring rhetoric didn’t keep pace with results. After seven years of under-achievement, the Scottish Government quietly announced that the targets they had set for the narrowing of the attainment gap were being scrapped.

The SNP introduced the Curriculum for Excellence in Scottish schools in 2010, but nearly a decade later, the Times Educational Supplement reported that according to the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), a “decade of upheaval” had succeeded only in getting students back to where they started in reading. 

No longer can Scots claim to have the best education in the world, the Curriculum for Excellence having substituted metrics on student “wellbeing” for academic excellence.

Social policy virtue signalling

In other social policy areas, SNP ministers seem to be strangely vulnerable to the influence of external pressure groups – perhaps a consequence of SNP MSPs having no real political conviction other than their commitment to independence. No one ever joined the SNP to campaign for higher school standards. 

And so, seemingly from nowhere, there emerged the policy of the “named person”, not notably a policy that had previously been advanced by the independence movement and which immediately raised the hackles of parents groups fearing state encroachment on their own responsibilities to raise their children.

This policy would mean the Scottish Government identifying a responsible person for every child in Scotland under the age of 18, who would be responsible for that child’s wellbeing and safety. The policy was eventually struck down by the Supreme Court, which decided that some of the powers in the proposed legislation fell outside the powers of the Scottish Parliament and contravened the right to privacy and to family life.

Still, SNP ministers’ appetite for social policy virtue signalling was not sated. An essential element of the nationalist offer to voters is the concept of Scottish exceptionalism, the belief that Scots are innately more generous, more charitable than their English neighbours; in short, that they are better. 

An example of this was the Baby Box, a £9 million initiative to supply new parents with some bare essentials following the birth of their child. 

The laudable aim of the scheme (aside from publicity) was to provide a safe makeshift sleeping basket for newborn babies and so reduce the risk of cot death. But within a year of the scheme’s launch, the cot death charity, the Lullaby Trust, stated that there was no evidence that the scheme improved infant mortality.

Further, reusable nappies included in the box at the insistence of the Scottish Government proved to be the least popular and least effective item, with 90 per cent of new parents choosing not to use them. Still, SNP ministers insisted on renewing the scheme for another eight years, even before a £170,000 study into the Baby Box’s effectiveness – commissioned by the Scottish Government itself – had reported its findings.

But the most contentious of the SNP’s attempts at social engineering has been Sturgeon’s personal insistence that trans people should be allowed to self-identify as their gender of choice, eliminating the need for medical professionals’ assessment and the requirement to live in their preferred gender for two years before obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate (GDR). 

Women’s rights groups have expressed fears that such a move erodes biological women’s sex-based rights, a claim airily dismissed by the first minister and her lieutenants. With an overall majority at Holyrood, thanks to the SNP’s agreement with the Scottish Greens, the reform is guaranteed to be implemented, even though there is a chance that Scottish GDRs will not be recognised elsewhere in the UK.

Yet still the electorate doesn’t feel disposed to punish the SNP for their failings.

The most egregious example of this willingness to forgive is Dundee, the university town with Europe’s highest level of drug deaths. In December 2020, public health minister Joe Fitzpatrick resigned his post after the death toll was revealed to have risen to another record high. 

Fitzpatrick, who represents the city in Holyrood, then secured a majority that increased by 4,000 votes at the next Scottish Parliament election.

Dundee suffers from Europe’s highest level of drug deaths CREDIT: Jane Barlow/ PA

Economic omnishambles

SNP industrial policy has, if anything, been even less successful than social policy. 

It started out with a high-profile announcement that the Scottish Government would nationalise Ferguson’s dock yard in Port Glasgow rather than see it go bust. Two much-needed ferries would be built at the new people-owned company in order to serve the island communities of the west of Scotland.

But years after they were due to have been completed, neither of the ships has been delivered. Meanwhile the proposed cost of the vessels has risen more than 100 per cent, from an initial £97 million to more than £250 million. Now an almighty row has broken out in the Scottish Government as ministers squabble about who actually gave the go-ahead to the contract in the first place.

This has shades of the SNP’s first intrepid steps into the area of nationalisation, when they took ownership of Prestwick Airport in 2013, during the Scottish independence referendum campaign. After buying the failing airport for £1, ministers then paid the airport directors bonuses of £200,000, and have used £43 million of taxpayers’ money to keep the airport as a going concern.

A third botched nationalisation happened just a few weeks ago, when the Scotrail railway franchise was brought under public ownership – a development long demanded by the left, who believed that a simple change of ownership would be enough to improve services. Such expectations were dealt a severe blow a month later when an emergency timetable was imposed on all services and thousands of commuters found their homeward journeys peremptorily cancelled.

The SNP’s hostility to all things British is well documented, and with the prospect of a UK-wide census in 2021, Nicola Sturgeon’s party saw its opportunity to distance Scotland from a national exercise. Citing the Covid pandemic as an excuse, SNP ministers decided that the Scottish census would take place a year later than scheduled, decoupling it from the UK survey for the first time in history.

The result was the lowest ever return rate, even after a number of extensions to the original deadline. Just 88 per cent of Scots bothered to fill in their forms and return them – six per cent lower than the Scottish Government’s own target and nine per cent lower than the result achieved in England and Wales. Even the First Minister warned that the data collected could prove “worthless” if the response rate was too low. And – statistical experts agree – 88 per cent is indeed too low.

Westminster woes

As with any large political party, especially those which experience an unexpected and vast increase in their public representation over a relatively short period of time, scandals have beset the SNP – something which its leaders were unused to during their many years in the political wilderness.

First there was the public spectacle of Sturgeon being pitted against her predecessor as First Minister, Alex Salmond, when the latter was charged with a series of serious sex offences. 

After a trial in early 2020 Salmond was acquitted on all charges, but his resentment at the lack of support he received from his former protégé clearly burned within him, and a full-blown parliamentary inquiry at Holyrood sought to get to the truth of various allegations made against each of the politicians by the other. The committee of MSPs appointed to lead the inquiry even concluded that Sturgeon herself was guilty of misleading the Scottish parliament.

Just a few weeks before Salmond’s appearance in court, Derek Mackay, Sturgeon’s finance minister, and for a long time her heir apparent should she choose to stand aside as SNP leader, was forced to resign his post after it was revealed he had sent a series of inappropriate texts to a 16-year-old boy.

But the party’s most recent travails have emanated from the 48-strong group of SNP MPs at Westminster, led by Ian Blackford. The Ross, Skye and Lochaber MP was exposed for his double standards following a meeting of his MPs where he expressed solidarity and support for Patrick Grady, the former group whip, who had been found guilty of sexual harassment of a party staffer.

Ian Blackford, left, expressed support for Patrick Grady after he had been found guilty of sexual harassment CREDIT: UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor/ PA

Blackford had previously tweeted that he and the SNP had a “zero tolerance” approach to such behaviour, but when Grady was recommended by House authorities to be suspended for two days, Blackford urged all his colleagues to support him, only repenting of this action after an audio recording of the meeting was leaked to the media. 

Even then, the party seemed more concerned with tracking down and prosecuting the leaker than with offering support to Grady’s victim.

Even Sturgeon described this behaviour as “unacceptable”, though in her next sentence she endorsed Blackford’s continued leadership of the group at Westminster.

‘Now is not the time’

Little of this causes the average SNP member to lose much sleep. They are less interested in the mechanics of governing and in individual politicians’ behaviour than in the party’s great mission: Scottish independence. 

The job of SNP leader is to campaign for that end. Sturgeon and her predecessor have been unusual in the history of nationalist leaders because they have also had the added responsibilities of governing. 

It was always the hope of more sensible figures in the movement that if the party proved capable of running a devolved administration smoothly and competently, they would attract the trust of former sceptics to take Scotland out of the Union altogether.

As the last few years have shown, an unambiguous display of incompetence in government has not dissuaded a significant number of Scots from supporting the SNP at every level of election. And yet the party has still, frustratingly, never persuaded a settled and large majority of Scots to support independence.

It remains the hope of activists, however, that the feat accomplished by Salmond during the last referendum – increasing support for independence from 30 per cent at the start of the campaign to 45 per cent by the end of it – could be replicated in the heat and excitement of a second referendum campaign, taking support for a separate Scotland from its current level of about 45 per cent to 50 per cent and beyond.

Which brings us to the First Minister’s statement to Holyrood last week.

Since 2016, she has claimed that Brexit has transformed the independence debate and provided the necessary “material change of circumstance” which she insists would justify a rerun referendum.

The decision of the UK electorate to leave the European Union, even as a majority of Scots voted Remain, gave Sturgeon the excuse she wanted to fire up her activist base and start demanding another referendum. 

But if Brexit “changed everything”, it was hard to explain why the polls seemed to suggest that Scots themselves had not changed their minds, that a majority had decided they would rather live in a UK outside the EU than in a Scotland that was back inside the trading bloc.

Nevertheless, claiming a mandate from the 2016 Scottish Parliament elections, at which her party fell short of an overall majority, the first minister started agitating for another Section 30 Order that would allow her government to start organising the second “once in a generation” referendum in three years.

But Theresa May, who had replaced David Cameron in Number 10, said no. This was an extraordinary development; the nationalists were by now used to UK governments doing whatever they demanded, whether it was independence referendums or more devolved powers. The eras of Gordon Brown and Cameron had truly spoiled the nationalists. But now they came up against an implacable brick wall.

When Boris Johnson replaced May in 2019, the answer was the same: “Now is not the time.”

Uncertainty and division

This was a dilemma for Sturgeon. Faced with a series of domestic policy failures and scandals, she needed the distraction of another referendum. More importantly, she needed to make progress on this one iconic policy. Otherwise, what was the point of the SNP being in office at all? At the 2021 Holyrood elections, her party again fell short of an overall majority, leading to an agreement with the independence-supporting Scottish Greens.

Last week, the first minister capitulated to her own members. Despite having insisted for years that she would not endorse a “wildcat” or illegal referendum, she announced that she had set aside October 19, 2023, as the polling day for the next vote. 

And, mindful of the limits of the Scottish Parliament to set policy in a matter reserved to Westminster, she announced that her plan would be referred to the Supreme Court.

If the court decided that the proposal for a referendum was ultra vires and beyond the legal scope of Holyrood, she would revert to Plan B: making the next UK general election a “de facto” referendum, which the SNP would use as a mandate to begin independence negotiations with the UK Government.

This is all miles away from the statesmanlike, moderate language Sturgeon has tended to employ in recent years. She desperately wanted an official referendum endorsed by the UK because that would be the only route to international recognition of Scottish independence, including a future pathway to EU membership. 

But such considerations are unimportant to too many of the First Minister’s activists, who would happily settle for a unilateral declaration of independence if that were the only way of breaking free from the UK.

In fact for many of them, that would be their preferred option.

But it’s now difficult to see a way ahead for Sturgeon. Although it is impossible to second guess the Supreme Court, judges are widely expected to veto her plans – especially since recent precedent has established that the Scottish Parliament cannot pass legislation that obliges, or even puts pressure on, the UK Government to act in a certain way. 

But even if, somehow, the court approves a form of watered down plebiscite, the vast majority of pro-UK Scots will boycott it, rendering the result meaningless and relieving Westminster of any obligation even to acknowledge it has taken place.

And as for Plan B, does any party have the right to redefine what a general election is for? Who is to say why individual voters place an X in this or that box? This is a “strategy” that is barely worthy of the description.

Sturgeon’s chief complaint is that the UK Government is taking her at her word and refusing to endorse another referendum within the timescale normally accepted as a “generation”. But instead of acknowledging her powerlessness to do anything about the constitutional framework that restricts her actions, she has instead chosen to do what leaders should never do: she has decided to tell her supporters what they want to hear, rather than what they need to hear.

The consequences for Scotland are another year to eighteen months of uncertainty and division. The consequences for the First Minister’s party, in the longer term at least, could be truly devastating.

It would actually be easy to compose a long and savage rant about Sturgeon, Salmond, Harvie and the rest of this dysfunctional, amoral mob, but it’s perhaps more effective to coolly examine the facts, as Tom Harris has done.

Whatever the failings and dishonesty of Boris, Corbyn and all the rest that have figured prominently in the stramash that is UK politics over the last 8 years (since the amusing failure of the legitimate independence referendum), nothing comes close to the devastation wrought in every area of Scottish life by these incompetent and malign crooks.

The truth hurts.

Palm Sunday

James Ensor’s Entry of Christ into Brussels (1898) – a pencil and watercolour version sold in 2020 for 65,000 Euros.

When fishes flew and forests walked

   And figs grew upon thorn,

Some moment when the moon was blood

   Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry

   And ears like errant wings,

The devil’s walking parody

   On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,

   Of ancient crooked will;

Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,

   I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;

   One far fierce hour and sweet:

There was a shout about my ears,

   And palms before my feet.

GK Chesterton’s The Donkey, from 1900, a beautifully oblique summary of the day, with strange echoes of Robert E Howard’s The Tower of the Elephant, which was written much later.

Understanding the China crisis

Despite the horrors of Russia’s war on Ukraine, and the opportunity it has given weak Western leaders the chance to sound tough and refresh their old Cold War rhetoric, there is a point of view – which I share – that the real problem is the long term rival to our now enfeebled Western hegemony and mores – China.

Not an original observation, but it’s currently obscured by the fog off war, which I imagine suits China just fine**.

Not only are extremely dubious lateral flow tests and the useless but ubiquitous masks made in China (nice earners both), if you try and reduce your consumption of other Chinese goods on a point of principle, you will struggle. Some, like Apple, don’t even try. Why would they? If you’re a utilitarian/agnostic/pragmatist, you’ll find your slave labour at excitingly low salaries over in far Cathay. And why not?

Any snapshot of China over the last 50 years might be relatively reassuring, but the big picture, over the spans of decades, is one of long term planning crushing all rivals. Like the Catholic Church, the Chinese state really does now think in centuries, even if Zhou Enlai’s alleged and entertaining assessment of the French Revolution – “it’s too early too say” – has been exposed as a misunderstanding.

So it seems smart to try and understand China better. There are whole university departments devoted to this, but the cultural and linguistic differences, the physical distances and the impenetrable state don’t help. We need a guide. Which is the point of this post.

The great man himself

The Knife has long been a fan of the polymath mathematician, musician, historian, economist, investor, journalist and magus of the Far East, David Goldman. Understanding China is his thing, and he frequently explains his thinking – just Google it.

Last month provided a fantastic, erudite and fact filled podcast on this topic, in Law & Liberty. Here is the link and the transcript. There’s so much packed in here, but I thought that I would just list some fascinating excerpts, which give you a flavour. I’ve italicised some bits worthy of particular note, to me at least.

This issue is not going to go away. We need a coherent strategy, and fast. Like it or not, China doesn’t do friends….

It’s a pretty place, don’t you think?

1. Hong Kong has never been a Chinese city. It was a British city. It was founded by the British at the beginning of the opium trade. The majority of its population never wanted to be Chinese. So I think the biggest mistake Margaret Thatcher made in her glorious career was to cede Hong Kong and Kowloon to China when she didn’t have to. Most of the Chinese population hasn’t liked this. There is a significant independence movement in Hong Kong. From the Chinese standpoint, China’s like a Roach Motel. Once you go in, you don’t get out. The Chinese are always terrified that if one rebel province can secede, they’ll all secede. So they will use whatever measures they need to prevent that.

2. Remember, China is not a country. We tend to think of it as a country. It is a heterogeneous empire with 200 languages spoken in 90 major ethnic groups, and always at risk of falling apart. The Chinese Empire, whoever runs it, whether it’s called an Imperial Dynasty or a Communist Party, lives in terror of a rebel province that will encourage other rebel provinces. So that’s why China will go to war over Taiwan

3. Xi Jinping told this to Barack Obama during the APEC summit in 2015. There’s an old Chinese proverb: kill the chicken while the monkey watches. Well, the South China Sea is the chicken, and Taiwan is the monkey here. China is saying, “We’re willing to go to war over a bunch of empty atolls based on some glorious old map. Think of what we’ll do with Taiwan. Think of what we’ll do with Hong Kong.” So that’s China’s method of governance going back thousands of years. Sadly, there’s a continuity between what was always a very heterogeneous set of men who has a very cruel empire and what the Chinese are doing today. This is based on traditional Chinese governance. It’s not per se a function of Marxist-Leninist ideology.

4. Every Chinese I’ve talked to, ranging from senior officials of the Foreign Ministry to taxi drivers, when asked, “What are you going to do about the Uighur problem,” has said, “We’re going to kill them all.” China has had a policy of exterminating what it considers unruly barbarians on its borders for a very long time. Their attitude towards the Uighurs is that they don’t want to assimilate into China. You get the traditional Chinese choice, which is column A, you become Chinese, column B, we kill you all, and there isn’t anything on the menu.

5. The West has underestimated Asians for the past century and change. The Russians underestimated the Japanese during the 1905 war. The British underestimated the Japanese at Singapore. The French underestimated the Vietnamese at Dien Bien Phu. And I think we can say fairly that the American military in the ’60s underestimated the North Vietnamese Army. We simply have difficulty believing that a culture so different from ours, and one that was so impoverished and humiliated for such a long period of time could come back so quickly

6. They’ve moved in the past 35 years nearly 600 million people from countryside to city. That’s the equivalent of the whole of Europe from the Ural Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. Imagine building a new Glasgow, a new Rome, a new Lisbon, a new Helsinki. Build every city in Europe to accommodate that many people. That’s the biggest economic transformation in history.

A lot to take in already, but Goldman makes three key explanatory points:

7. China’s enormous wealth and population are based on fertilized river valleys which could produce eight times the caloric content per acre with rice that Western European or Middle Eastern cultures could produce with wheat. So enormous wealth, but also enormous susceptibility to flooding and famine. So massive infrastructure to control floods has been the foundation of the Chinese Empire. When we look at things like the $2 trillion Belt and Road Initiative where China proposed to build infrastructure all across the Eurasian continent and basically lock it in to the Chinese Empire, that is the old Chinese imperial model extended into an external policy.

8. The second thing to understand about China is imperial bureaucracy. For thousands of years, the smartest kids in the provinces that sat and taken an examination to become government officials, used to be called the mandarin system. You can see pictures from over 2,000 years ago of young Chinese sitting in an examination hold taking the mandarin exam. This is now the university entrance exam, the Gaokao, which is taken by nearly 10 million Chinese every year. About six out of 10 of whom get to go to university. If you look at the math questions on that, I doubt one in 500 American high school seniors could answer them. I know a little math, and they made me sweat.

9. Chinese society is based on the extended family. It’s hierarchical. The emperor is like the big paterfamilias of the nation, and he has smaller paterfamiliases under him. The foundation of the Chinese economy has always been an extended family farm led by one paterfamilias. So you’ve never had a civil society where people have peers. No Chinese has ever sat on a school board or a little league committee. Everything’s always come top down. There’s no sense of rights and obligations as we have under Roman law, no sense of the divine spark of the individual as we have under ancient Hebrew law. What you have is a set of loyalties to hierarchy. That, in a thumbnail, is what Confucianism is about. So the Chinese have no experience of self-governance. In place of democratic governance, you have a selection of supposedly the smartest people, or at least the best exam takers in the country

Doesn’t sound too attractive for the average punter. It doesn’t sound like the UK, Europe or the USA either. But there’s more…

10.  The Chinese don’t have friends in Aristotle’s sense of political friendship where you have a peer group that governs a city, and you have to form friendships in order to solve governance problems and advance policies. Everything in China comes from the top, so the Chinese tend to kiss up and kick down. You don’t question the order that comes down from the top because it’s bad for your health. You could become a kidney donor real fast. And the people below you, you simply tell them what to do. You’re the paterfamilias. They owe you loyalty. You’re supposed to be benevolent under Confucian philosophy. But in fact, you have absolute control. As I’ve said, there is no subsidiarity. There is no civil society structure. Everything is up and down as opposed to parallel

11. The whole idea that China was going to evolve into a Western style democracy simply because they got more prosperous ignores the fact that this is a culture that’s been around for 5,000 years, which operated radically differently from Judeo-Christian cultures. This is the purest form of paganism.

12. The Chinese are probably the least spiritual people in the world. They believe in fate and themselves. When you say, “Well, what’s Chinese religion?” Well, you can say that there’s Buddhism, there’s some Daoism, there’s some household gods. But the Chinese really are down-to-earth pragmatic. How do I advance my family? How do I get rich?

13. We got very complacent after we won the Cold War. We decided we were so powerful that we could rest on laurels and coast. We could, under the Clinton administration, turn NATO into a responsibility to protect kind of social work organization. Or the George W. Bush, we could go out to support democracy to the world. I think that was a big mistake.

14. Every pharmaceutical company in the world is setting up shop in China because the data the Chinese have is a vast mine for researching new drugs, interactions, genetic defects, and so forth. The Chinese computer scientists aren’t any smarter than Google. I think Google’s probably the best computation company in the world. But if you think of artificial intelligence as the engine, data is the fuel. And China, where there’s no guarantee of personal data protection, has the biggest trove of data for medical research in the world.

As a surgeon, that’s beginning to remind me of the Pernkopf dilemma…

We shoot ourselves in the foot, a lot, when it comes to China:

15. The problem is not so much that we don’t have smart people. It’s that the US tech sector made a conscious decision to become dependent on China for the production of hardware. And of course, the Chinese, who excluded Google and other US companies from the Chinese market, has spent vast amounts of money developing their own software, their own computation, and are now in position to compete with us in the software field, as well. I think this was terribly short-sighted. 

16. If you look at what our (in the USA) kids are doing, we graduate, I think, about 40,000 mechanical engineers a year. That’s not half what Germany does. A tiny fraction of China. The smartest kids aren’t going into manufacturing because the smartest companies aren’t investing in manufacturing. Really ambitious kids at US universities want to either go with a software or a Goldman Sachs, so they study mathematical finance or computer science. The danger is we end up being, if you pardon the expression, geeks in a new Roman Empire. I think we need a very strong signal from the government, including very strong tax incentives and, in rare cases, subsidies for manufacturing investment. We have to get our best talent thinking about manufacturing, particularly the kind of artificial intelligence, computer-driven manufacturing, which the Chinese call the fourth industrial revolution.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though, Goldman attempts to unpick the foreseeable future, and he retains faith in Western ingenuity and enterprise, if not the current modish idiotic political scene. Is China our enemy? Because if so, the much quoted but rarely read Sun Tzu can help us here:

It is more important to outthink your enemy, than to outfight him

The opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

One need not destroy one’s enemy. One need only destroy his willingness to engage.

OK, handy advice, but back to Goldman. Does China hate us?

It’s like meeting a tiger in the jungle. A tiger isn’t wicked. It doesn’t hate you. It just looks at you and thinks protein source. China is the old pagan world. The concepts of good and evil don’t exist in the same way they exist in the Judeo-Christian worlds. Loyalty and obligation substitute for good and evil. So we will never be friends with China. It’ll take a very long time, if ever, for China to decide that the Judeo-Christian concept of human society is superior to theirs. They’ve been around for thousands of years, and they change very slowly. Our system is better. I believe in the sanctity of the individual as the highest good in society, and that’s entirely absent from the Chinese system. But the Chinese idea of, “Let’s have a meritocracy of the cleverest people who run everything from the top,” occasionally does better than the messy brawl of democracy, unfortunately.

This is not the time to have Joe Biden at the helm, or a bunch of EU technocrats. However, you play the hand with which you’ve been dealt. The first stage, which we have barely begun, is to understand with whom we are confronted. David Goldman is one who knows. The final word to him:

The energy and intelligence of the Chinese people is impressive. I am not a panda hugger. I’m not a Sinophile. I don’t like Chinese culture. I find it brutal, and from a Western standpoint, in many ways repugnant. But it’s nonetheless impressive, and underestimating it would be a terrible error.

This is where the Uighurs live. The ones who have yet to be killed that is.

**This excellent piece from David Cameron’s old pal, Steve Hilton, appeared the day after this blog post. Recommended.

From Lord Kelvin to Devi Sridhar

Penicillin, the postage stamp, the TV, the steam engine (therefore the industrial revolution)…

…we’re going to need a bigger list…

…economics, geology, the telephone, the exploration of Africa, the tyre, most of the bicycle, logarithms, the theory of electromagnetic radiation, the laws of thermodynamics, the development of Far East trade and Hong Kong, the undersea telegraph cable, anaesthesia, large swathes of philosophy, numerous war heroes…. are you getting the picture yet?

Correct. Scotland, a small population in a largeish country, much of it barely inhabitable, certainly punched well above its weight. There’s a lot more than the ‘rapidly assembled from my head’ list that you have above. Many refer to it, rightly, as Scottish exceptionalism.

So what the hell happened?

The current Scottish establishment, almost entirely bereft of that kind of talent, like to drone on about such exceptionalism, but if you go to Scotland and examine the evidence in 2022, it’s not there. It is long gone.

It’s been replaced by a needy, vicious, hate filled and bigoted Nationalist political class, whose stupidity can be summed up by their obsession with pushing Gaelic – a language which virtually none of them speak – to the point where a dim SNP staffer used Google Translate to celebrate ‘Thermal Injuries Night’ on the 25th January just past.

The worst thing about this, is that the voters put them there. A lot of luck with constituencies, a lot of rigging the media and the public sector, a desperate coalition with the sleazy and moronic Greens, but still voted in, just.

Where is that spirit of Scottish exceptionalism?

Well, The Knife has a theory. It was itself an exception. A prolonged one. Go along to the Science Museum in London, and marvel at the genius of James Watt, who essentially invented the Industrial Revolution. You may see this little sign by one of his mighty steam engines…

“I am heart sick of this accursed country”, a place where he couldn’t move forward and have his work recognised. So he left, and never looked back. Just as Watt was leaving, Scotland was beginning to blossom, notably in literature and the Scottish Enlightenment. After that came the deluge.

Adam Smith, James Hutton, David Hume, Lord Kelvin, James Maxwell, Walter Scott, John Logie Baird, James Chalmers, Alexander Graham Bell, David Stirling, James Simpson, Alexander Fleming, William Jardine, David Livingstone, Mungo Park, and many many more.

What happened, and when? The supply of these talented people, acclaimed across the globe, appears to have dried up, unless you want to include various overrated actors and a slew of very bad writers.

It’s not too hard to say when this Golden Age began, there were glimmerings in the mid 18th century (well after the enduring 1707 Act of Union, hated by Nationalist idiots), by the early 19th century it was in full swing, right through till the end of the Second World War at least. When it ended is more contentious, as is identifying the guilty parties.

Consider this, the famous but essentially useless Scot, Gordon Brown cynically developed a client state of voters in Scotland who would be dependent on government largesse for everything, and in his mind, would therefore always vote Labour. A cruel trick, which required to keep people in near poverty for it to work. He couldn’t see Salmond in his rear view mirror, basically playing the same card, but with tartan trimmings and a few middle class aspirations. Brown became Chancellor in 1997, so our closing date is before that.

A small tale might help to clarify things. When the oil industry in the early 70’s was looking to ramp up the North Sea drilling, it needed a land base, which inevitably was going to bring huge prosperity with it. The best North Sea port, with terrific access and moorings is Dundee, at the mouth of the Tay estuary. A blessed spot, in fact. BP were in town looking at the prospects for laying pipelines from the rigs to the shore using giant drums from which the pipes were unrolled. A demonstration of the technology was taking place and there was considerable excitement. At which point a dock shop steward turned up and asked a subcontractor which union his men were with. The answer was that they were mostly not in any union. The immediate reaction was ‘everyone out’, the dock closed down for two days, BP took one look and headed north to the distinctly inferior Aberdeen facilities, and that city came to enjoy huge wealth and investment. It’s a true story, and one that should be properly explored and retold. Why would the city shoot itself in the foot, leading to years of relative neglect and poverty? Where was the spirit of James Watt? It was a Labour council and government at the time, busily creating their passive client state, and the mindset which Brown later came to exploit. The same mindset now gleefully manipulated by the irredeemably statist SNP.

Off to vote (yes, genuinely)

This was the era of the Clydeside shipyard disputes. As this handy piece points out “By the late 19th century the Clyde shipyards were building the most sophisticated and technologically innovative iron and steel ships in the world.” – part of that Golden Age. But by the late 1950’s, union militancy, overt communism and foreign competition had made the same shipyards too much trouble to be worth it for employers. All this is bound up in the politics of the age, in particular the visceral and counterproductive hatred of Tories in parts of Scotland (see also 2022). Whatever you think of the politics, or the nobility of the ‘work in’ to keep the yards open, the fact is that the Golden Age was passing. The attitudes had changed.

As noted above, the bullish Gordon Brown, having displaced the nominally Scottish Blair, was completely blindsided by the aggression of the Nationalists and had his client state stolen from under his nose by Salmond, and kept there by Sturgeon, for whom the Covid pandemic was a perfect opportunity to more deeply embed that sense of dependency on the government (not the UK one), and combine it with a weird sense of entitlement. Billy Connolly saw it for what it was: “Braveheart is pure Australian shite. William Wallace was a spy, a thief, a blackmailer – a c**t basically. And people are swallowing it. It’s part of a new Scottish racism, which I loathe – this thing that everything horrible is English. It’s conducted by the great unread and the conceited w***ers at the SNP, those dreary little pr**ks in Parliament who rely on bigotry for support”. He wasn’t wrong.

A dead end for Scottish exceptionalism. So, returning to the thesis of this short post, we have a period of about 200 years – the mid 18th to the mid 20th centuries, which everyone recognises as having shown Scotland – whilst part of the UK – as an extraordinarily productive and vibrant society. That died off in real terms 50 or more years ago, yet we’re still being urged to believe that these giants walk amongst us, and will lead an independent nation to freedom. The mind boggles.

These days Scotland often imports her intellectuals and ‘leaders’, so we get a crazy and lazy Canadian as the Greens’ head, absurdly with a voice in government, and an arrogant and profoundly politicised American, Devi Sridhar, as the ‘scientific’ mouthpiece for Sturgeon and Covid, promoting a completely unworkable and failed policy of Zero Covid. Yes, that actually happened.

Lord Kelvin (William Thomson, born in Northern Ireland, but a Scot in reality) was professor of Natural Philosopy at Glasgow University for 53 years, and in his second law of thermodynamics he stated that the entropy of isolated systems left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease, with entropy being the key word “a state of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty”. This applies as much to society as it does to physics, I would suggest, and that is where Scotland is now, in a state of increasing, rudderless, entropy. There is no better recent example of this reckless and unserious chaos creation, than Sturgeon’s pandering to the tiny Green groups who keep her in power, by undermining what’s left of the North Sea oil and gas industry – a complete volte face from the pre-referendum plan, and an act of staggering gold medal stupidity considering Putin’s very predictable weaponising of fossil fuels. James Watt’s ‘accursed country’ is being born again.

This is a somewhat negative piece, but the evidence is all around us. Scottish exceptionalism died a long time ago. Don’t kid yourself otherwise. The voters are content with that for now, perhaps, but the game is up.

Ash Wednesday

An old favourite of this blog (search ‘Ash Wednesday’), this little masterpiece by the unexpectedly numinous – considering how whimsical he often was – Spitzweg, was painted in several versions.

One came up for sale at a relatively bargain price in 2018, though it’s a bit too dark, I’d suggest.

Here it is afresh, in all its glory, the shaft of sunlight adds to the sense of sensual deprivation, and the long haul, now begun.

Carl Spitzweg, Ash Wednesday, 1860. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart

Unlike the feasts at Easter, as Lent ends, there is no actual biblical subject for Ash Wednesday and Lent. The time Jesus spent in the desert (portrayed astonishingly by Pasolini), is as close as it gets. These days it’s still often very well attended, along with the inevitable #ashtag. It’s real.

Shrove Tuesday

Here we go

A little bit of feasting and celebration before the profound and challenging – at least it should be – season of Lent

Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, Carnival (carne vale, farewell to meat). Today is that day.

Although Russia is suffering understandable reputational damage, Putin is not Russia, and that country is imbued with these ancient traditions. Here is a Shrovetide scene by a modernish artist Boris Kustodiev, who died in 1927 having been rendered paraplegic by TB of the spine. He was from Astrakhan, far from Moscow, and had quite a career in commercial illustration and stage art. It’s set before the Spring thaw, whereas today in the UK it’s (relatively) hot sunshine. He’s good:

Shrovetide, Boris Kustodiev. 1916. Russian Museum, St Petersburg

Perhaps more traditionally, here’s one of the many prints by ‘followers of Hieronymus Bosch’ – Bosch being one of my heroes. The Netherlanders always did gluttony and feasting well. No doubt there’s a lot to unpick here.

A follower of Hieronymus Bosch, 1567. St Louis Art Museum.

And it all kicks off tomorrow – farewell to meat.

Mammon lives

It’s not unusual to read the word Mammon used in a pejorative sense to describe unbridled material greed, usually morphing into a critique of capitalism. I more or less subscribe to capitalism as a good thing, using the JFK dictum that “a rising tide lifts all boats”.

That said it seems to be further morphing into the new world order of Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Soros (probably the worst), Blair (allowed to peek in), and the now notorious yet mysterious Klaus Schwab, author of the appallingly titled Great Reset. There are many others. They will thrive, you will comply. They will own everything, you will own nothing (unconvincingly denied). They are globalists, citoyens du monde, you are a petty nationalist.

So it’s satisfying to see my feelings regarding these deeply unpleasant and menacing characters depicted in art. Mammon is both a metaphor for financial greed and also from a pantheon of gods with undesirable characteristics. Step into Tate Britain, as one should, when in London, and you will encounter the near life size portrait by the underrated George Watts. It is masterly.

Mammon, 1885

Whereas, more recently, go on Instagram etc and you will encounter Wayne Barlowe, remarkably technically gifted, but with a less classical style, although he’s brilliant in his field, one which stretches from Frank Frazetta to Bruce Pennington.

Wayne Barlowe: Mammon

Which of these Mammons most resembles the repulsive and secretive billionaire Klaus Schwab, who like George Soros, is a child of the Nazi hegemony?

Klaus – big on uniforms

#Democracy is just a phase?

You don’t have to be particularly perceptive to note that democracy is in bad shape. Covid has allowed untalented people-hating politicians of a certain amoral nature (not immoral) to flip into authoritarianism very rapidly indeed.

Pick your own, but out of the top of my head I’ll give you Ardern (New Zealand), Trudeau (Canada), the utterly repugnant Sturgeon (Scotland), Drakeford (Wales), whoever runs Austria, the various Australia states and their federal government, and, of course POTUS himself, as the Joe Biden Disaster continues to trash the USA, its institutions, its ethos and especially, its Constitution.

Notice however, that I kept Boris out of that list (immoral, not amoral), because he did the unprecedented thing. He gave up some power voluntarily, just before Christmas 2021. He was right on every level to have done so. Perhaps, as a classicist, he’d read Polybius. He’s kept on going too. Refreshing, and the data confirms that he was right. Unlike the list of egregious crooks above, he reverted to making it about health, not control freakery. Good for him.

No wonder that if you add that to Brexit, nearly the entire media-political class are trying to get rid of him without the voters being involved. Not really democracy, is it?

Which brings us back to Polybius, a very perceptive historian from over 2000 years ago. These days he’d be cancelled and would end up on the increasingly influential GB News. Polybius’ analysis did not revere democracy in quite the same way as we do, or used to. He actually used the word itself slightly differently to our common usage, but his categorisation is spot on. It wouldn’t last, he suggested, or had intrinsically bad and destructive qualities. I’d say that is what we’re seeing right now, the winner being uncertain. Many of the world’s most influential and powerful nations are not democracies at all – see Xi, Putin and the gang. Tyrannies and oligarchies. The oh so tempting oligarchy of chancers like Sturgeon and Trudeau.

The Greeks postulated a direct relationship between the human soul (psyche) and political constitutions. The Greeks divided the human soul into three parts: nous, the intellective, reasoning part; thumos, the spirited part, concerned with honor and justice; and epithumeia, the appetitive part, concerned with basic human desires and especially subject to the passions.

They believed that various polities each reflected a part of the human soul. In this taxonomy of regimes, the noetic part of the soul was seen in rule by the one; the thumetic part of the soul in rule by the few; and the appetitive part of the soul in rule by the many. Each form of rule had a good and bad version, the former based on rule for the benefit of the entire polity and the latter rule on behalf of the ruler or ruling class alone. Thus, the good form of rule by the one was kingship; the bad form, tyranny. The good form of rule by the few was aristocracy; the bad form, oligarchy or plutocracy. And the good form of rule by the many was politeia or a balanced constitution, which the Romans translated as res publica and which is most properly rendered as commonwealth in English; the bad form was democracy or ochlocracy: that is, mob rule.

This taxonomy led the Greek historian Polybius to suggest that all political regimes were subject to the “cycle of constitutions” (anakuklosis politeion). A kingship begins virtuously, but over time, the rule by the one on behalf of the whole deteriorates into tyranny. The virtuous few, the aristoi, depose the tyrant and reestablish well-ordered rule. But over time, that aristocracy deteriorates into oligarchy. The oligarchs are then overthrown by the virtuous many, but the balanced constitution that is put in place inevitably deteriorates into unruly democracy, after which the cycle will repeat. This cycle of constitutions was the central problem for the Greek founders of the science of politics: essentially, that good forms of rule become corrupted and tend to descend into bad forms.

These days, we tend not to think in terms of cycles. Indeed, the essence of modernity is the idea of linear progress. But the Greek taxonomy of regimes is useful in examining what has happened to the United States. The U.S. Constitution established the good form of rule by the many: a self-governing republic or commonwealth. As such, it established a “balanced” structure of government, in which the executive branch, in essence, represented the one, the Senate represented the few, and the House of Representatives represented the many (and the judicial Supreme Court represented the mediation between those elements and the law itself). But its foundation was ultimately democratic, in that both the executive and Senate, as well as the House, were elected by the many, albeit indirectly.

But for a variety of reasons — not least of which has been the rise of the “administrative state,” an unconstitutional pseudo fourth branch of government in violation of the principle of separation of power — the United States now exhibits the characteristics of oligarchy. Oligarchy, you’ll remember, is what the Greeks considered the bad form of rule by the few, in our case a ruling “elite” that includes not only unelected bureaucrats ruling in their own interests but also corporate leaders in tech, finance, and media. This oligarchic elite establishes rules from which they themselves are exempt.

Of course, all complex societies have a “ruling class,” which can be either aristocratic or oligarchic. The United States has prospered when its ruling class has been aristocratic. In such cases, the interests of this aristocratic ruling class have coincided with the interests of the nation as a whole. But problems arise when an aristocratic ruling class devolves into an oligarchic one, the interest of which diverges from that of the republic and its citizens.

The above is from a very smart piece in the Washington Examiner by Mackubin Owens, a combat veteran, political adviser, historian and academic. I’ll further quote from a review of the latest book from another classicist and historian, the great Victor Davis Hanson. His book title is The Dying Citizen:

…liberal citizenship can easily be undone. A citizenship based, not on blood and soil, but on the idea of liberty, is an astonishing but fragile achievement, always in danger of falling apart into the primordial, tribal, condition of man. In dismantling the idea of the liberal citizen, the left does not offer a post-liberal idea of citizenship; it rather returns us to the pre-liberal condition of tribalism.

We’re seeing it in real time, across the world, and the established tyrannies are loving it.

Polybius at the back

#Trump: the Russian-Norwegian connection

Many composers are known for just one famous composition, even if their other stuff is great. Edvard Grieg, son of Norway (with a Scottish link) had two or three. Not bad.

Grieg, wondering how he’ll be remembered. Well…..

Number one has to be his now somewhat hackneyed but still remarkable Piano Concerto. Even if you don’t know it, you’ll know it. The Lyric Pieces are perhaps his most beautiful compositions, but really for piano cognoscenti. Morning from the Peer Gynt suite is a staple of Classic FM programmes, again a bit worn out from overuse. Which brings us to the mighty In the Hall of the Mountain King, from the same suite. It never grows old.

It’s an orchestral piece, obviously, but it has been transcribed for piano with absolutely no loss of the whirling thrill factor that makes it so addictive. The Russian Mephisto, Grigory Ginzburg, did the honours, and very few pianists can play it as it was intended with the requisite control of speed and Slavic panache. A Friend of Putin, the taurine Denis Matsuev, is one of them. See what I mean?

A M A Z I N G

Long before the arrival of Matsuev, there was an Eastern bloc pianist who had suffered grievously under Nazism, then communism and the Russian yoke, the elegant and charismatic Hungarian György Cziffra. Like Matsuev, he had technique beyond mere mortals, and like Matsuev, he could improvise brilliantly. This is like Jimi Hendrix with The Star Spangled Banner:

Cziffra was a noble, tragic figure. Matsuev is a cynical part of the Russian Establishment, but here he is, brilliant as ever, back with Grieg, this time as a jazz improvisation. Remarkable..

Why am I writing all this? Well, partly as I haven’t blogged for months – too busy, a bit jaded, some of the fire has gone out of politics, even with the relentless exploitation of Covid – and I was waiting for something to pique my interest. Previous readers may recall that I am proud – justifiably IMHO – of predicting Trump’s 2016 victory even before the nomination. Trump’s epic presidency has been a defining event of my adult life, even though I don’t live in the USA, and him winning in November 2016 before the Deep State really fought back, was one of the most fun things that I can recall. For that reason I periodically treat myself to a YouTube Trumpen King video (there are quite a few). The sheer mounting excitement of the music hits the spot like nothing else. Salty liberal tears ahoy!

So, my thanks to Grieg, Matsuev, Cziffra and, naturally, Trump. Take it away, Maestro….!