Victorious Hearts

It's been an interesting few months of late in which I haven't related my activities, opinions or thoughts. Over the summer I decided to stay in London and focus on my determination to get the career I wanted by 1st September.

Having foregone the pleasures of flying to Arizona to see Josh and from there to Melbourne to catch up with Kerri and see her folks I kept committed to my goal of being an open, passionate and enriching person in my daily work. Supporting various Soka Gakkai activities including the boys Future Group and booking to attend and support the Young Men's Summer Course on deadline day helped keep the vision alive, as did my dogged attendance of Landmark Seminar in Action courses every Monday evening without fail.

With all this in mind I begin work for Monday as a public sector sales manager for an employee benefits company and am really looking forward to being totally open, passionate and enriching in what will be a brilliant and stretching work environment.

Meanwhile, spurred on by an excellent Young Men's meeting at Masaru's, greatly enlivened by the presence of Joe Dempsey I took myself to the Burmese Embassy at noon today in support of peace and democracy in Burma.


The quiet corner behind Curzon street's yawning arc was filled with Burmese people, Amnesty International banners and odds and sods like me out to show solidarity for the cause of peace against the face of selfishness and hatred. Having avoided most forms of political protest in my life, I soon got the gist of standing and listening and clapping when permitted. By the time we all knelt in unison for a minute's prayer for all those in Burma I was still feeling a bit of a spectator, glowering into the TV cameras scanning our faces. But during those moments of reflection, as I accustomed myself to kneel and hold the palms of my hands together as if before the gohonzon the feeling of presence and peaceful commitment to change won over my own doubts and fears.

When I chanted yesterday I felt great compassion for the military leadership for the poverty and life denying hopelessness within their own hearts and sought in my prayer to reach out and transform their own poison into medicine. Today, at 1 o'clock in the afternoon in Charles Street, Mayfair my prayer truly did reach out to all in Burma, that all may be free from their prisons to live lives of joy.

It's worse, he does it with girls as well

So farewell George Melly,
Trad jazz man, surrealist and raconteur;
Keith's mum thought you louche
and Keith enjoyed your Profanisaurus

Was saddened to hear that George Melly is no longer with us. My dad remembered seeing him do his trad jazz thing whilst on national service and took a strong dislike to what he perceived to be a stream of ungallantly gynecological ribaldry directed at the waitresses and serving girls.

As a regular of Shepherds Bush's top restaurant the wonderfully chintzy Polish palace 'The Patio' it was always a delight when a deathless hush descended on the bigos and borscht as George entered, his sheer presence reaching out in time and space in advance of his rugged physical form, eyepatch in place, a boozy boho Pirate on shore leave.

On one occasion whilst dining with bear friends George was accompanied by a most astoundingly good looking , tall black man. We immediately thought dark thoughts about how embarrassingly obvious this was, how does George hold court and get to sleep with men way above his league at his age and with his reputation until sober reflection suggested maybe this was just a jazz encounter.

At another time whilst dining with my brother, George came in with a good looking Aussie blonde number on the right side of her thirties, both pissed to the gills, smoking and arguing continuously. Well less arguing than drinking and eating through a miasmatic fog of cultural confusion and anecdotage.

As Haliwell's Companion to Film would have it: 'Sample dialogue'

"And then I went to meet Princess Margaret Accompanied with Robin Day"

"Did you say Robin's gay?"

"Robin Day!

"Robin's gay??" Repeat ad nauseam.

On a club toilet door in deepest darkest 50s soho was written the grafitti "George Melly does it with men" to which some scribe had appended "it's even worse, he does it with girls as well".

Seeing Melly naked was a sight not confined to a few. One of his party tricks was to take his clothes off, get down on all fours, and rearrange his genitalia to impersonate a man, a woman, and then a bulldog.

For a full life lived with no regard to outward propriety or petifogging moralising, as a staunch humanist, Surrealist, fly fisherman and contributor to the joy and gaiety in all senses of the nation, and for leaving the universe in a better place than as he found it, I for one will be knocking one back for George.

Food Pornography as London Takes It

Had the good fortune whilst returning from a prospective job interview to choose to return on the circle line via High Street Kensington for a varied walk home (the stop and search down of anyone suspected of looking Asian opposite the copshop on Shepherd's Bush Road is also worth avoiding), to stumble in finally to Whole Foods Market

Set in the old Barkers store along the road from the Daily Mail/Evening Standard offices on Derry Street the three floor food emporium invites shoppers to indulge a foodie shopping nirvana beyond compare. Or if we agree that comparisons are odorous, it makes the Waitrose at the opposite end of the High Street seem like Somerfield.

The range of cheeses alone would force Sarkozy, let alone Barosso to lower head in hands and despair over how to govern a country, let alone continent with such diversity of dead milk in unusual smells and textures. Ditto the opening bakery, deli counter let alone meat, chocolate, and fruit and veg hall downstairs. I felt like Yeltsin or Gorbachev in the late 80s, dumbstruck by the world of choice represented by an everyday US supermarket compared to the GUM stores of Soviet Russia.

I didn't have time or incliation to head upstairs for the restaurants and Bramley pub but I did leave with head a spinning at the sheer quality, range, freshness and immensity of all on offer, rigorously maintained by staff working to the orders of a cadre of Whole Food drill sergeants/commissars.

So in short it's like being inside the Chocolate Factory - a world of wonderment, fantasy and sustainable, feelgood excess on the edge of Kensington Church Street. I'll have to come back to the store and ruminate between times on what this means in a world of haves and have nots. On first impressions this seems a happy concept that is well run and has the potential to improve our understanding of how food should be presented, marketed and sold.

But it was still back to Brook Green's Tesco to pick up humble supplies for a ready steady cook £5 dinner (Black Farmer sausages with new potatoes, green beans, broccoli, carrots and onion gravy for those desperate to know).

Apols if Corn (Law)

Trawling for research on public sector information I came across the Better Regulation Executive's report 'Informing the Public in a multi media age'

The report suggests that all statutory notices local authorities and central government bodis (DVLA/DEFRA) are obliged to produce cost some £15 million in local government alone at an average of £35k. Some London boroughs spend some £110,000 in their local rags to let the readers of the Kilburn Gazette know which pubs are pushing for longer opening hours and why Mr Jones round the corner wants his kitchen extended in his Grade II listed maisonette.

Not good news for local newspaper ad revenues, but on the bright side you can see now departed Cabinet Office Minister Pat McFadden stream in high resolution

So far, so e-gov, so good. But what did appeal to the old was the following guff about Legislative Reform Orders.

Ministers can now make a Legislative Reform Order (LRO) to remove burdens arising from legislation (Section 1 of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006, LRRA) and make orders to ensure that regulatory functions are exercised in compliance with the Better Regulations Commission’s Five Principles of Good Regulation (Section 2 of the LRRA). The LRO must meet the preconditions set out in section 3 of the Legislative Regulatory Reform Act and cannot deliver highly controversial reforms.

LROs may be highly effective in streamlining recent legislation removing burdensome publication requirements such as, constitutional announcements e.g. the appointment of deputy lieutenants, Corn Law announcements, ecclesiastical announcements and similar less used elements of statute law, which no longer serve a beneficial purpose. Removing administrative burdens in this way will enable
departments that do not have a bill slot available to implement better regulation principles efficiently. Further work is required to identify more specifically those laws suitable for the application of an LRO.

Strewth, haven't they repealed the Corn Laws yet? What do these announcements have to say? Was it all a dream - will Sir Robert Peel awake in a shower in the style of Robert Duff from Dallas? As the popbitch board would have it - apols if corn...

Health and Wealth

As a sanctimonious recent ex smoker, having puffed my last Marlboro light during the occasion of Sara and Trevyn's wedding in St Mawr at the fag end of last July(during which occasion I also abandoned my digital camera I believe in the car of the game young driver who took the curvy road back around the estuary to Falmouth with an aplomb that plainly denied his inexperience) it still pains me looking into pub windows to think that those who want to light up are denied such a simple pleasure.

This happened twice yesterday alone, at the William Morris Wetherspoon in King Street where a game old bloke was rolling them up whilst holding court by the open window and taking the 220 down the Fulham Palace Road where a group of Aussies were having a relaxed drink accompanied by the ubiquitous white and gold packaged Marlboro lights.

Cigarettes and alcohol are such natural bedfellows as to be hendiadyic in their unity. Sitting around the pub with a pint and a cigarillo may not be the most productive or value creating way to pass an evening or a lifetime, but it's a judgment we as individuals should be free to make.

The weekend that I smoked my last was spent at my parents in Launceston. I heard on the Radio 4 midnight news that the guru of quitting Allen Carr had been diagnosed with cancer but was keen to have this fact serve as a springboard to further promote his life's work in combating nicotine addiction.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/5229048.stm
Mr Carr says he sees his illness as a way to encourage more people to quit.

"Since I stopped smoking more than 23 years ago I have been the happiest man in the world. I still feel the same way," he added.

As a means of using problems as opportunities to create value I thought so good, so Nichiren Buddhist and was inspired to purchase his how to quit book from WH Smiths the next day, which I promptly gave as a gift, together with my final pack of 10 Marlboro lights to my brother.

And although life's pressures got Nick back on the smokes after a few months cigarette free, I think by taking that action I learned to lose my dependency on cigarettes. Finally I had a choice in the matter in that I, Jonathan Werran choose not to light this cancer stick which is in my mouth, because I Jonathan Werran CHOOSE not to light this cancer stick which has irresistibly lodged itself between my lips.

So it's been nearly a year on the wagon and I feel better for not having the compulsion to do something i don't really want to do. And yes, the ban in pubs is welcome in that the temptation to do something I really don't want to do that I know is harmful to me and my life is thereby lessened. And I won't come home reeking of smoke and piously throwing a smelly jumper into the laundry ruminating 'and to think I inflicted this to everybody in my environment once'.

As an ex-smoker I'll always be part admiring, part yearning to be amongst the outcasts smirting outside the pubs and clubs. But what worked with Allen Carr was the fact that he didn't judge. As a reformed 5 pack a day man he knew what habits drive people to depend on the fags and he encouraged readers to continue smoking whilst reading and absorbing his book. To reform your life, it's necessary to develop a greater understanding of your life as part of the deal.

Which is why, although there isn't much I liked about departing Home Office Secretary of State John Reid or anything he had to say, I admired his standing up for single mums and others for whom a cigarette is a meaningful pleasure in a pressurised life at the bottom.

The Economist carries a timely piece on the law of diminishing effects of increasingly shrill, strident and bossy government health campaigns.

That stridency may be pointless, even counter-productive. There is no reason to believe that those who ignore measured voices will listen to shouting. It irritates the majority who are already behaving responsibly, and it may also undermine all government pronouncements on health by convincing people that they have an ultra-cautious margin of error built in.

Such hectoring may also be missing the root cause of the problem. According to Mr Marmot, who cites research on groups as diverse as baboons in captivity, British civil servants and Oscar nominees, the higher rates of ill health among those in more modest walks of life can be attributed to what he calls the “status syndrome”. People in privileged positions think they are worth the effort of behaving healthily, and find the will-power to do so. More directly, higher status itself protects people's health, he argues, not just by reducing their propensity to behave riskily, but also by changing their body chemistry in ways that protect them against disease.

The implication is that it is easier to improve a person's health by weakening the connection between social position and health than by targeting behaviour directly. Some public-health experts talk of changing an environment where the worst choices are the easiest to make, especially for those without the time and money to seek out better ones—supermarkets crammed with ready meals, happy hours in pubs, roads too dangerous for children to walk to school. Others speak of social cohesion, support for families and better education for all. These are bigger undertakings than a bossy ad campaign; but more effective, and quieter.

In Nichiren Buddhism we believe in the concept of 'esho funi' - the oneness of life and environment. The implication is that if you think your life is worthless, devoid of respect and meaning , then your immediate environment, how you live, where you live and what you do or don't do will reflect this as accurately as an untarnished mirror. If, however, you are enlightened to your own supreme worth as an ordinary human being and awaken to your mission to live an active life imbued with supreme meaning, fulfilment and purpose hey presto - your environment will, as if by magic, beging to reflect the meaning you are giving it.

"If the minds of living beings are impure, their land is also impure, but if their minds are pure, so is their land. There are not two lands, pure or impure in themselves. The difference lies solely in the good or evil of our minds. It is the same with a Buddha and an ordinary being. When deluded, one is called an ordinary being, but when enlightened, one is called a Buddha. This is similar to a tarnished mirror that will shine like a jewel when polished. A mind now clouded by the illusions of the innate darkness of life is like a tarnished mirror, but when polished, it is sure to become like a clear mirror, reflecting the essential nature of phenomena and the true aspect of reality." [WND, Volume 1, page 4]

Teaching everybody that their lives, just as they are and without any need for 'change' are deserving of the utmost respect and reverence, as in fact are all other living beings, human and sentient, is the fundamental purpose of Mayahana Buddhism. In the Lotus Sutra, Boddhisattva Fukyo (Never Disparaging) would show constantly total respect to everybody he met, bowing and praising them even if they were to throw sticks and stones at him.

“The heart of the Buddha’s lifetime of teachings is the Lotus Sutra, and the heart of the practice of the Lotus Sutra is found in the ‘Never Disparaging’ chapter. What does Bodhisattva Never Disparaging’s profound respect for people signify? The purpose of the appearance in this world of Shakyamuni Buddha, the lord of teachings, lies in his behavior as a human being” (“The Three Kinds of Treasure,” The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, Volume 1 pp. 851-52).

So if we could judge a little less, be less insistent on always being right, turn down the volume of the incessantly unheeded shrillness (as of today ex Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt's comments on the smoking abducted sailors in Iran being a case in point) and by our individual example show greater respect for ourselves, others and our environment, and it's a big if admittedly, then we might see society be enriched through happy, bodily healthy and spiritually wealthy people. Possibly worth giving it a try!

How To Prepare A Government

The wholescale change around the Cabinet table can only spell good news for permanent secretaries of the major Whitehall departments.

So bring us your tired, bring us your bewildered, bring us your confused recent appointees. Bring Kelly to Transport, Blears to CLG and Hain to DWP. Then have them encastled within their offices at the top with SpAds, PPS' and underlings. Have IT fix them up with usernames, passwords email accounts via GSIx and a departmental mousemat for good measure.

Give them a few weeks to settle down, wave them goodbye on their August hols to Cape Cod, Tuscany or the Dordogne. Keep things running in smooth order in their absence and on their return, ahead of the party conference season dust down all those great policy recipes that the departmental chef reaches for on such occasions. A national database, ID cards, return to the Gold Standard.

Wait a few years the mixed ingredients to rise. Look up from the gloopy messy mixture to the wider world to see if anybody out there in the general public has noticed or cared. Season to taste. Eat. Regurgitate. Repeat. Result.

Pro Celebrity Political Appointments

Was reinvigorating atrophied limbs at the Hammersmith Virgin Active (they must give them silver ring things or sumfink) this morning and as is the case when you're disenchantedly pounding away to music, the TV screens assumed greater interest.

On Sky Sports ex Scummer midfield hero and sweat dodger Matt Le Tissier was leading the field on a Spanish fairway with legendary ex Spurs and Arsenal goalkeeper Pat Jennings and a horde of n'eer do wells including Perry Digweed and Carlton Palmer trailing behind.

With only MTV and Jeremy Kyle's Chav Academy (?) separating this lugubriously paced yawn fest Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger (whose arms probably do still resemble Clive James' vivid description of a condom stuffed with walnuts) was sharing a podium with a demob happy, gurning and churning Right Hon Tony Blair.

Not wanting to listen overly much to whatever was being said lest it put me out of stride after hearing the words 'middle east' I'd happily hazard a guess it was just the usual daily rigmarole of our charismatic, Weberian leader sincerely reaching out directly to the people without mediation of the TV, press and political community etc to announce a new non job in bringing peace to the Arabs, Persians and Jews.

Didn't we have the perfectly coiffured tennis mad Lord Levy for such purposes? Maybe the ominously sounding and ill defined 'Quartet', (as in a string quartet or Alexander Durrell's 'Alexandria Quartet. I had a friend who continually confused him with better known animal loving brother Laurence and he was perfectly civil with it) have a grander, more cinematic vision for how these complex and tenuously fragile dialogues should most decorously be conducted.

But this is not to discount that the Fatah party could benefit from the sort of tax loopholes that gave Alvin Stardust freedom to enjoy a life safe from fear of joining the panto circuit.

And better Quartet rather than the ghastly mishmash of Aliens Quadrilogy - it's Tetralogy don'cher know for that sort of thing, see Parades End in its original four volumes rather than the trilogy Graham Greene reduced it to.

But in all reality this is what it's come down to - Post Celebrity Peace Making to shore up George W Bush's position against a fractious Congress and Senate in the heat of an electoral campaign where support for the status quo in Iraq supported by hope for the success of the surge, as evinced by George McCain's travails, simply doesn't work.

Tony Blair's sincere desire for peace and reconciliation between the people of the three Abrahamic faiths must not be discounted. His track record in bring reconciliation and a semblance of normality to political life in Ireland is proof that he can do this sort of thing.

It's just his all too human inability to understand that who he is, somebody who appears to listen only when seeking to win over support but is bolstered by a sense of being always right and never wrong in any event, let alone what he has done or suffered to happen in actual middle East policy makes him wholly inappropriate for the task.

He'd be more profitably employed getting those first drafts of the autobiography 'I was right, they were wrong' typed up, pick up the Congressional Medal and hit the lecture circuit so that BAE don't have to resort to renting out the new pad behind Marble Arch.

This job is best left to the professionals. I saw at the same time as Blair and Arnie a man of total dignity and self-knowledge, who has forged a successful portfolio second career, who never cares or cared what the world thinks of him or of being right, a man who lives in the present to give the world a better future by giving it his all in a tumble of limbs and effort.

Ladies and gentlemen, I suggest as special envoy tasked with restoring peace to the middle east the one and only Carlton Palmer.

1 Season in 1 Day

After a morning planning with HQ leaders up at Women's Division Leader Caroline Joyce's (SGI-UK can feel like the civil service for numbers of meetings, hoffenlich we are moving society forward in a better direction faster, that has to be the hope) caught up with Kerri (who'd bought tickets as a New Year present) in King Street and spent a jolly hour on a number 9 bus from Hammersmith to Hyde Park corner.

So yes, whilst Glastonbury was like the third battle of Ypres with casualties aplenty up to their chins in Somerset mud I, with the bold elan of Alan Partridge donned a literal Crowded House T-shirt, to, er see Crowded House play Hyde Park.

And rather pleasant it was too in a feelgood unabashedly corporate rocky way in the company of Diane and her brother William. Fortified by a high street picnic of those rather good M&S jumbo sized drumsticks (surely the foundation of their recent revival?) mini scotch eggs and other comestibles the afternoon proceeded with refreshing bouts of
Tuborg (lager of choice normally only found in Denmark or African airports).

Of the support acts, The Ghosts's set was driven with a sense of easeful gusto which even the ADD afflicted support guitarist couldn't quite deflect.

The Feeling were dressed for the big stage as a white or black combination eerily suggesting 'Modern Romance' fronting Smash Hits circa 1982. But they were natty all the same and in Dan Gillespie Sells have a front man of matinee era looks, think Errol Flynn in the Adventures of Robin Hood. Musically very adept and wearing it well, they bring to mind Terry Pratchett's asservation from a few years back that any cassette tape left in a British car would by a process of magical osmosis eventually become 'Queen Greatest Hits Volume I'. Less musical inspiration than cognitive musical therapy but as mentioned they dressed smartly and put on a strong show.

A reformed Crowded House appeared just when it seemed that the hubristic challenge that we were dry and they were wet and muddy could reap no Nemesis. Neil Finn's timing was such that inevitably the sun broke through refulgently only once the call and response to 'Weather With You' was at its peak. After a trawl through the back catalogue and a new song the inevitable downpour did its worst with Neil rushing for an acoustic guitar to belt out Mary Hopkins' 'Those Were The Days My Friend' as roadies lashed the stage with bin liners to prevent electrocution.




And so home to Hammersmith by way of a taxi driver aware that we were too sodden to care he was taking the long way round to warm house, hot food and an escape from headline act Peter Gabriel and whatever beard/hair combination he's confronting the world with.

Through the eyes of children

Catching up with old friend Chris George, a professional photographer by professio (now he's ditched the world of telecomms sales for that of a fulfilling life) and walking from London Bridge station across the South Bank we came into a gut wrenchingly moving exhibition 'Through the Eyes of Children' .

Through the Eyes of Children began as a photographic workshop in 2000, conceived by photographer, David Jiranek, and inspired by the founder of the Imbabazi Orphanage, Rosamond Carr - an American woman living in Rwanda since 1955. Using disposable cameras, the children originally took pictures for themselves and to share with others, exploring their community, and finding beauty as the country struggles to rebuild.

I'd recommend you see the exhibition for yourself - it's close to the Oxo Tower. It moved me to a degree of anger and tears that having just come in off the pavement I hadn't prepared myself for. The plight of a family of five having to share a single thin blanket for warmth at night, a single bucket for food, washing, cleaning and other functions, young lives ruined or stunted beyond measure is a crime against all humanity.

And yes, we have seen it all before and are inured by and large to continued failure or neo-missionary despair when Sir Bobs and Bono do their thing for widescale media coverage.

But human life is not played out in front of cameras and TV crews; it lives as it is viewed through our own two eyes and perceptions. I guess that was the point of giving disposable and then digital cameras to the young children of the Imbabazi orphanage.

When you realise this is the daily worldview of lives that should be awakened every morning to a thousand possibilities for living, and yet glimpse the sheer humanity shining through poverty of a bleakness we simply can't imagine or even believe what is being presented to us on the walls of a Southbank gallery on an evening in June, when you realise this you understand that such human injustice against the happiness of all humanity must not be tolerated.

Mayor Culpa

So it appears (according to Peter Riddell) that Blair's great desire to restore accountability to local government (remember the glory that was the 1999 Modernising Local Government White Paper??) which resulted in Ken Pigeon Hater, Robocop and H'Angus the monkey restoring sanity to Peter Mandleson's beloved Hartlepool is hated by HM Treasury and therefore another one victory for the Brown wreckers.

So far, with the exception of Ken Livingstone in London, only 12 elected majors have been approved out of 32 referendums held throughout the country, but they have proved to be popular. Nine of the eleven mayors who have so far sought reelection have succeeded, including four independents.

Mr Blair sought to revive the idea after the 2005 election, but the Treasury has never been enthusiastic and last autumn’s White Paper was distinctly cool. Mr Blair, however, remains optimistic.

Which does invite the question as to how exactly do they self express enthusiasm at the end of Horseguard's road?

A difficulty of local government has been the perception that it is the province of weirdo busybody jobsworths put up by national parties. Restoring personal accountability for leadership has given us fun and the chance to indulge in chapeau munching the size of London.


Cameron is right to be heading down this path of liberation from fear and complacency which is local government administration. Long live the people's republic of Tooting indeed!

Great post on the soap opera and sheer downright fun that was the 1999 London mayoral election .

Richard Rorty RIP

Observed in the Times obituaries that philosopher and literary theorist Richard Rorty has passed away. Although someone confessedly interested in ideas on life I normally struggle through actual works (other than say Fontana series on thinkers, Betrand Russel's History of Western Philosophy) and swiftly end up falling into that somnolent land effected on a glum winter's day on the blue covered area of the old overheated British Library reading room. My mind can take endless facts, dates etc but theory after theory after theoretical framework in dense sentences sometimes is too much.

I was encouraged, however to read 'Contingency, Irony and Solidarity' a few years back and it did enliven me through its argument that literature is a surer way to revealing truth than any other art or science. Addressing the theme of human cruelty, how it arises from our rational facility to posit metaphysical questions and the ability for each of us to believe our own self-justificatory narratives, the work came alive when touching on the work of Orwell and Nabokov. Rorty urged that the acknowledgement of another's suffering is sometimes the greatest act of compassion we are capable of.

Building on the concepts of pragmatism set out by his hero, Dewey, he argued that instead of seeking ideas which correspond to some fundamental reality, we should settle for ones which help us carry out practical tasks and create a fairer and more democratic society.

Rorty noted that his initial hope of achieving a single vision of an historical truth by becoming a philosopher had ultimately proved to be “a self-deceptive atheist’s way out”.

Rorty did not regret becoming a philosopher though. It prevented him, he thought, from imagining that there was “a luminous synoptic vision” of the truth. His own vision of the truth, like Dewey’s, was of a community in which everyone thinks that it is human solidarity, rather than knowledge of something not really human, that mattered.

“There are no transcendent answers,” he insisted. “Each of us must reach our own conclusions about life, and try to respect the differences among us.”

Characteristically, Rorty took a close interest in conflict. He thought that when groups found themselves at odds with each other, philosophical discussion would usually not help in resolving their differences. It would never “convince bullies not to beat him up” or “capitalists to cede their power to a co-operative, egalitarian commonwealth”.

Groups had very different vocabularies, he suggested, and the best one could do was to show the other side how it looked from your point of view while at the same time imaginatively identifying with the other’s pain.

It was, then, the artist and the poet who could best elicit peace between groups by demonstrating that there was vulnerability to which all human beings can relate.

Hear hear. Or in Auden's words:

"What they call history
is nothing to vaunt of
being made as it is
by the criminal in us.
Goodness is timeless."

Government 2.0 - anyone buying the data-mash up??

To that sad small minority of anoraks interested in the reuse of government information as a means of providing better, more effective, accountable and and demand shaped public services, the Cabinet Office's paper 'Power of Information' makes a valuable contribution.

The BBC report gives a good outline of the main issues of the report co-authored by Tom Steinberg of Mysociety.org fame and Ed Mayo of the national consumer council. Good to see in the index that they were adeptly assisted by James Crabtree.

The principle of keeping up the pressure on public bodies to make available for public benefit the various datasets that are created and stored as part and parcel of their public service remit is a good thing. The continued and complacent presumption prevalent in public service life, that information created at taxpayer expense must be paid for over and over again is one to be fought and won.

If the report leads to the folding or decommission of one further '.gov.uk' website it will have served more than its purpose. For my money, the value added repackaging of public sector information can only be demand led from a bottom up approach. The main publishers are only looking for a big hit idea, or more reasonably for one big idea that works for somebody which can be endlessly imitated (or they'll go home sulking with their football, vide the gnailing and washing of teeth caused by the Dr Foster contract with Department of Health).

Something simple in design and execution that serves a need and actually empowers civic leaders or those with a commitment to improving their communities, enabling them to communicate with, connect and further assist those in their midst whom they don't even know should be the vision. And where, for example, users need help navigating central government functions, an overlaying level of support could be delivered through electronic fora.

As a tool in support of genuine and popular localism guaranteed by trustworthy individuals and information, maybe the more parochial the better, provided that the data-mash ups of public sector information (health/education/crime/benefits/amenities) can drill down to the postcode level as they have demonstrably done for upmystreet.com and uswitch .

Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend.

Rehumanising Public Services

Have just finished reading Simon Jenkins' Thatcher and Sons a witty and engagingly abrasive account of the public service revolution of the past 30 years or so.

Recasting the drive to increased centralisation and in many cases nationalisation of previously autonomous local institutions of health and education in the familiar Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, the progenitor of the Millenium Dome (it goes to prove that nobody is immune from public sector quicksand, the 'Euan effect anybody?') makes in his final section a strong and persuasive case for a further transformation focused on stronger local accountability of public services .

Given all that was heard but not seen of ‘New Localism’ and the adopted vocabulary of communitarianism pre ’97, it could be questioned as to whether after ten years of further entrenched central government control and consequent emasculation of local authority discretion and autonomy it is worth the candle of calling for a more humane devolution of powers.

The big unknown is the extent to which Burke’s small platoons of Englishmen and women are capable, after 70 years of welfare statism, of taking responsibility to stand up for their local communities and fostering the qualities of leadership, trust and accountability that government at central, regional and even district level is simply incapable of engendering.

In the big picture, Jenkins is best in rationalising the enigmatic spirits that drove Margaret Thatcher's, her own formidable courage in breaking the mould of economic defeat by overthrowing Heath, weathering the storms of opposition and aided by Geoffery Howe at Treasury the dire and painfully necessary monetarist budgets of '81 is balanced by a striking absence of gratitude to her family let alone party or any other rung of society climbed in the progress of her life and career.

Major, Blair and Brown have further ntrenched the Thatcher revolution in public services, extending privatisation and triangulating between the citizen an increased involvement of the private sector in the delivery, running and infrastructure of public services.

Striking also is the fact that none of the leaders of the country over this period have had sufficient understanding of how to operate the levers of power or feel comfortable in utilising the collective wisdom of successive Permanent Secretaries and Cabinet Secretaries.

Unlike the French 'enarques' and maybe just as well, there has never been any danger of the United Kingdom being competently run to mediocrity by an all powerful technocratic caste of political administrators.

Sir Humprey has in the main been sidelined. Until Blair and Brown found a servant they both felt happy working with in the adept form of avowed Manchester United and lifelong Labour voter Gus O’Donnell, the role of Cabinet Secretary was a bypassable redundancy. Sir Richard Wilson, the seemingly placidly equine successor to Butler was incensed enough to bark, ‘You've merely led, never managed' at Blair when the sofa government of unminuted meetings led to another Whitehall paralysis.

Instead the centripetal power of Central Government has propelled the public services into a vertex of perpetual growth, continual change, creating an enormous and dissatisfied workforce regimented by a culture of Gogolian audit and inspection.

In consequence ministerial responsibility encompasses to the minutest degree success and failure of what in the rest of the world would be local matters for local people to decide.

This omnipotence when twinned with a deliberately stunted level of local accountability has engendered a scenario in which the villain of the piece, a paranoid, inhumane and overbearing HM Treasury, unceasingly delivers the worst outcomes for all concerned.

Convinced that local government, NHS trusts and the wider public sector are incapable of delivering efficiency and savings, a ‘know it all’ Treasury has itself proved to be a most hapless negotiator: susceptible alike to being hog-tied by blue collar unions into national pay settlements, so distorting regional pay-scales to the disadvantage of local economies to signing off GP significant salary increases without producing any discernible benefit in patient services.

In Jenkins’ words ‘The consequence has been the remorseless march of big, intrusive and incompetent government’. How best to bind the Leviathan of central state control that through ID cards and other measures purportedly in the name of foiling Al Quaeda terrorism, seeks to devour the freedoms it was established to protect?

The dynamic localist revolution if it does succeed will have to break through at grass roots level the consciences of individual mired in the current political status quo, in which the British tolerate ‘warm compenstated servitude, slavery mitigated by the welfare state’ and have a choice of elected dictators to centrally manage the levers of government every 5 years or so.

Citing de Tocqueville, Jenkins invites parallels between the atomisation of British society today and post revolutionary France where: “Every man is a stranger to the destiny of others. His children and personal friends form for him the entire human race. As for the remainder of his fellow citizens, he is beside them but he does not see them…while above them rises an immense and tutelary power, that of the state.”

The public service revolution is like its Marxist predecessors virtually unceasing. Cameroon and Brown would both be equally capable of further delivery focused reform, calibrating finer a range of performance indicators, targeted ring fenced grants and passported funds, and all at the politically acceptable cost of 40 pence in the pound of centrally raised tax and the subsidised cowardice that is council tax.

Whatever the outcomes of the Lyons consultation, it is unlikely either politically for the fear of another Poll Tax fiasco, or fiscally on account of HM Treasury’s paranoid control freakery that funds for the delivery of local services will be locally raised and targeted.

A restoration of the link between accountability for the funding and delivery local services is the main plank of a putative localist revolution.

If the people of Britain are as keen as their peers in Western Europe to assume control for determining how public services, including health, education and elements of social services are funded and delivered at an accountably local level, will require a sizable leap of civic faith into civic action.

This does require the vision thing, the rediscovery, in daily public life by people of different backgrounds, holding individual aspirations and interests the ability to learn to work in unity to ensure that public services common to all are simply the best they can possibly be.

Not a return to socialism, not a continuation of failed absolute statism but a recognition that people can be trusted to take responsibility for the best interests of themselves and their immediate environment. In essence a repersonalisation of public services and reconnection with the concern, compassion, wisdom and courage that make life in human society fully worth living.

Aside from finding willing and capable community leaders, the present division in local authorities between unitary county councils and district will also require redress. Town councils may be given greater powers and unitary city and metropolitan authorities might be redrawn but with structures largely intact.

It is more than likely that the nanny state will shriek down the inability of power to be devolved, of the perils of waste and mismanagement inherent in devolution. Given the £6bn Working Family Tax Credits fiasco, £26bn Connecting for Health and more answers lie closer to central government’s door than they’d care to notice. But more to the point, the remote outsourcing to regional agencies to deliver Whitehall’s will has simply not led to happy outcomes in delivery, efficiency or accountability.

The future delivery of successful public services will entail going back some way into the past of civic and local pride to deliver public services that are both personal and accountable.

The risk averse, arse-covering of Whitehall audit committee culture must end and responsibility be devolved down to communities and groups capable of accountably ordering, managing and delivering services. The personalisation of public services will be based on humane qualities of elected accountability, personability, responsibility and trust.

And the reason for this is that small platoons of organised people, entrusted with responsibility will invariably stand up to do their best for their communities. They do so admiralbly well enough on the continent, and in those parts of the world wherein English government was transplanted, namely the United States and white Commonwealth, so why not return to its roots here?

Jenkins opines: “Democracy can only be based on tiers of autonomy, on people trusting people who trust other people, on a hierarchy of trusts. Only thus will we allow others to exercise judgments and accept risk on our behalf. Otherwise public service degenerates into a miasma of league tables and statistics.”

And as Onora O’Neill writes in the 2004 Reith Lecture: “When individuals and the professionals are denied responsibility for risk a part of their humanity is diminished. The individual is socialised. You may increase openness and transparency in government, but this does not increase trust. Indeed if anything trust had receded as transparency advanced.

“Perhaps we should not be surprised,’ said O’Neill, ‘that the technologies that spread information so easily are just as good at spreading misinformation and disinformation;. Trust in self government depends on trust in confidences, even secrets, bred of personal acquaintance and professional respect. People long to trust others but if they have bred in them a ‘culture of suspicion’ they will not do so.”

To rewrite WH Auden, ‘We must trust one another or die’

Wise men say, Only Fools Russian??

Not wanting to steep my toes too much into the threatening complexities, weapons pointing, dialogue avoiding evil into which Russian/Western relations seem to have been given by our diplomats permission to degnerate into, I'd like to hope that my behind the scenes activities last week in supporting SGI Russia will have been helpful in fostering the much needed human revolution in a land which has suffered so much from every other Western imported revolution to date.

The Russians were having their first ever national course at SGI-UK HQ Taplow Court .
It being a dank holiday weekend, a hardy group of some 40 pioneers exchanged the glories of an early Russian summer with temperatures in the high 30s for what was at times rain so unremittingly bad as to make one question whether global warming could ever shift the perception expressed by Lord Byron that the English weather is a quaint idea occurring annually for a month between July and August. Suffice to say the inner sunshine won out through vigorous, vibrant chanting of daimoku 'nam myoho renge kyo', gongyo and what seemed to be a most intense series of lectures, training and instruction.

It is my sincere wish that SGI Russia continues to grow and thrive in transforming into medicine the poisons of a society that, as much as any other throughout the world if not more so is crying out for a humane and active life philospophy capable of leading people to happiness.

The geopolitical hurly burly over targetting parts of Europe (probably as simple as using a TomTom SatNav) as exchange for the US independently stationing a missile shield against Korean or Iranian ICBMs reminds us once again that in a nuclear age the stakes for mankind's tendency to mindlessly wander down the three evil paths of anger, greed and foolishness are as high as ever.

As Robert Service (admittedly dressed like one of the Wurzels in a less than fetching rustic scarf and mustard suit number) counselled on Newsnight, a bit of the Michael Winner realpolitik 'Calm Down Dear, it's only a Chechnya/human rights/beating up the neighbours smokescreen' is in order.

Russia would prefer to sell us petrol, minerals and buy up the more exclusive areas of West London than turn Central Europe into a radioactive dustheap. The West in return would prefer peace, stability and the ability to focus on coping with the ever increasing pressures of globalisation and public service reform. After all we have learned and absorbed from the dark century that was the 21st, it is rather pitiful to see what should be maturing societies who are demographically moving downstream squaring up to each other. It's as dignified a spectacle as a punch up at the local Gala bingo hall - am I alone in thinking we could do with better global leadership than this??

County Court Judgment Day - The Revenge of a Bankrupt Middle Class?

Today's papers were leading with some good strong negative worry pieces on the slowdown (read, meltdown) of housing prices outside London and the rise in County Court Judgments
as up to 1 million UK households face court action over debts, lured by the siren call of easy credit to the tune of a whopping £1.3 trillion.

The piece states that

figures showed that many ordinary families are now affected by serious financial problems - even though they may not be on the brink of insolvency.

The truth of the matter is that most households have no idea how to manage without living on the never never. With the only solution to the intractable supply and demand of housing in areas of the country people wish to live in being the long slow demographic slide a la Russe, awaiting expectantly the demise of the baby-boomer generation for whom home ownership was another nice smug adornment to life rather than the be all and end all it is now, the question of why suffer this increasingly law of diminishing returns for human happiness must be posed.

What force of ingrained middle class rectitude keeps the coping classes (read Alice Thompson's excellent Torygraph piece on the bulging ranks of middling managers who keep the rich truly rich and the poor truly poor to the life conditions they expect)
beset as they are from increasing taxes without any growth in quality of public services, incessantly rising interest rates and cost of living, driven into less salubrious affordable habitations (non white Russian flight from Chelsea to Putney) from abandoning their serfdom and embracing, well, embracing a life of freedom and possibilities?

JG Ballard's recent works 'Millennium People and 'Kingdom Come' again shed that remarkable author's compassionate gaze on that aberrant and unhappy breed of men, the English middle and lower middle classes. In the former book, residents of a gated community in West London decide to strike out against their oppressors, the smothering inanities of middling England, bombing Tate Modern, sabotaging Cat of the Year show in Olympia, storming Broadcasting House before the authorities cow them to return to their bourgeois burdens of finding money to pay school fees and change to pay the meter for the privilege of parking outside the front door. Kingdom Come is a retread of this millenerian theme, with the spiritually dispossessed hinterlands of the Thames Valley beyond Heathrow finding solace and sense of an English identity in the twin passions of organised hooliganism and consumerism.

It could well be that having your IVA and it or going boldly bankrupt it is the only practical way for the English middle classes to raise two fingers to a society whose outlines grow less familiar and with which it seems less wise or rewarding to seek engagement. Whilst this is clearly not a case of turning the poisons of society into medicine, this loosening of the hitherto tightly bonded helixes of personal responsibility, propriety and ownership that had twisted the English propertied classes into shape and structure could be far reaching.

In chapter two of Joyce's 'Ulysses', the Ulster born headmaster Mr Deasy asks Stephen Dedalus what the proudest boast of an Englishman might be. The Empire, asserts Stephen which Deasy corrects as being able to state 'I paid for this myself' is. Over a century on from that snapshot of Dublin on June 16 1904, the proudest boast of an Englishman is 'I went broke and bust on my own terms'

Can happiness be taught??

I found happiness in the Daily Telegraph comment section earlier in the week and not just because Simon Heffer is abdicating responsibility therein.

Blair biographer Anthony Seddon proposed that the teaching of how to find happiness should be on the curriculum at school. As Mr Seddon is also Master of Wellington College this deserves to be taken with due consideration.

Unless blessed with a home environment and a sense of self capable of growing in harmony with various other teenage growth spurts and transformations, school days aren't necessarily the happiest days of our lives.

In my own case, I was merrily permitted through GCSE and A levels to nurture an alarming neurosis that left me ill equipped for university and life beyond. This isn't to deny my responsibility for my actions, I was an intensely intense sullen wretch and refused to take any of the positive courses available to me from taking up extra tuition for History or Latin at Oxford to playing ping pong instead of bunking off behind Bathwick hill to smoke and idle PE lessons away.

The nurturing of a sense of responsibility at these difficult ages is vital. As Seddon explains:

Lessons are centred on the development of personal responsibility by each child. Pupils learn how to manage their own bodies, minds and emotions, and how to rely on themselves, rather than on other people or drugs, including alcohol.

The aim is to embed lessons and habits that will last for life. Children are taught how to relax when they are worried, how to make the right decision when a variety of courses is presented to them, and how to manage themselves when they feel lonely or low without resorting to pills.

Relationships with others, the greatest cause of both happiness and unhappiness in life, are also studied in detail. The pupils learn how to identify and treasure true friends, and how to avoid relationships which are damaging and destructive. The aim is for pupils to emerge aged 18 not only with excellent academic results, but also as rounded human beings.

It all depends ultimately on what kind of society we want to build. We need a new education debate about the purpose of schooling. For too long, we have been debating the structure of schools rather than their aim. While the politicians have fiddled, schools have descended towards exam factories.

For me at least, the only teacher at school who was able to listen and at least acknowledge that within my self alienated persona was somebody capable of loving thhemselves and others but refusing to show it was Dr Frank Thorn, head of sixth form and Latin, beardy weirdy, the 70s suit and kipper tie wearing Francophile powerhouse of sharp intellect and soft good humour who for me has embodied what humanistic education should be.

The pioneer for this approach to teaching happiness is Dr Martin Seligman when he was president of the American Psychological Association. He asked why so much psychology was devoted to examining illness and aberration, rather than looking at the factors that lead to a healthy and happy life. From his questioning came "positive psychology" and the teaching of wellbeing at his own university, Pennsylvania, and at Harvard, where it has been the most popular elective course among undergraduates.

SGI President Daisaku Ikeda writes from an active buddhist humanistic perspective on the purpose of happiness in an increasingly stress filled society.

His belief is that we need to fight the smaller self and develop a broader conern for the lives of others.

He cites the well known buddhist parable....

One day, Shakyamuni was approached by a woman wracked by grief at the loss of her child. She begged him to bring her baby back to life. Shakyamuni comforted her and offered to prepare a medicine that would revive her child. To make this he would need a mustard seed, which he instructed her to find in a nearby village. This mustard seed, however, would have to come from a home that had never experienced the death of a family member. The woman set out from house to house, asking each for a mustard seed. But nowhere could she find a home that had never known death. As she continued her quest, the woman began to realize her suffering was something shared by all people. She returned to Shakyamuni determined not to be overwhelmed by grief.

According to Ikeda,

Hans Selye, who pioneered the field of stress research, offered the following advice based on his own experience of battling cancer: First, establish and maintain your own goals in life. Second, live so that you are necessary to others--such a way of life is ultimately beneficial to yourself.

Now, more than ever, we need to develop the qualities of strength, wisdom and hope as we forge expanding networks of mutual support.

In the end, the key to living in a stress-filled society lies in feeling the suffering of others as our own--in unleashing the universal human capacity for empathy. There is no need to carry the burden of a heavy heart alone.

So let's see if we can't embed the lessons for living strong lives based on a sense of an indestructible sense of self!

It had to begin somewhere

hello blogosphere, hello flowers, hello trees

well it had to begin somewhere so here goes