Britain

The State of American Politics in May, 2016

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…my feelings right now as expressed in song, prose, and poetry.

Bob Dylan:  I threw it all away

For I’, substitute ‘we’:

Once I had mountains in the palm of my hand
And rivers that ran through every day
I must have been mad
I never knew what I had
Until I threw it all away

Procol Harum:  Broken Barricades

Now gather up sea shells
And write down brave words
Your prayers are unanswered
Your idols absurd
The seaweed and the cobweb
Have rotted your sword
Your barricades broken
Your enemies Lord

British general Edward Spears, describing his feelings in the aftermath of Munich:

Like most people, I have had my private sorrows, but there is no loss that can compare with the agony of losing one’s country, and that is what some of us felt when England accepted Munich.  All we believed in seemed to have lost substance.

The life of each of us has roots without which it must wither; these derive sustenance from the soil of our native land, its thoughts, its way of life, its magnificent history; the lineage of the British race is our inspiration.  The past tells us what the future should be.  When we threw the Czechs to the Nazi wolves, it seemed to me as if the beacon lit centuries ago, and ever since lighting our way, had suddenly gone out, and I could not see ahead.

Yet it was only two years after Munich that Britain demonstrated its  magnificent resistance to Nazi conquest.

From an English or Scottish ballad

I am a little wounded but am not slain
I will lie me down for to bleed a while
Then I’ll rise and fight with you again

Lie down to bleed a while, if you need to–but not for too long–but do not give up.  The stakes are way too high.

“Britain’s political class risks losing the authority to govern”

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From an astute commentary by Robert Salisbury, former Leader of the House of Lords. Almost all of the essay applies as well to the USA and other western countries.

Our own country is caught by all this, as it was in the first half of the 19th Century and in the middle decades of the 20th. We were able to adapt to survive: in the 19th by extending the franchise and in the 20th by expanding public services and mass prosperity. As a result British governments regained the authority to govern. They did so by reforming the institutions of representative government the country already had, thereby responding to the demands of an electorate emboldened and liberated by technological change.
 
Today, governments are once again losing the authority to govern, and for similar reasons. Another major financial crisis might lose them it completely; but a new crisis might not even be needed. Whitehall’s failure to control immigration, its puny efforts to tackle the housing question, the feebleness of our defences, the incompetence of our transport and energy policies might, whether jointly or severally, tip us over.
 
In the past, the country has been sustained in times of crisis by a solid body of electors who felt they had an interest in the existing structures which kept them, on the whole, safe and relatively prosperous. That body’s support is no longer so solid. The IT revolution is largely responsible. The speed of communications make governments and Parliamentary procedures look flat-footed. Increasingly the public is at least as well-informed as the Whitehall departments who are telling them what to do. It is virtually impossible to keep anything secret and anyone who betrays a confidence is regarded as heroic. The more rules we have, the more the public feels they are used as a means of flouting their spirit.
 
Worst of all, social media stimulate one issue politics and make the simple solution credible. You and I know that competent administration is boring and usually demands compromises. We also know that effective legislation needs careful preparation, much internal and external debate, a mind-numbing command of detail and a lively warning mechanism against the law of unintended consequences. The same applies to parliamentary scrutiny.
 
Any sensible electorate would be only too pleased to delegate this necessary day-to-day grunt to a Whitehall and Westminster it trusted and, although interested and argumentative, get on with the rest of its life.
 
Sadly, that is not where we are.

The candidacies of Trump and Sanders are in large part responses to public concerns about the problems Salisbury describes. They are inadequate responses, likely to fail politically and on their own terms and eventually to be superseded by other responses. The pot will continue to boil at greater or lesser intensity depending on who gets elected and what follows. It seems unlikely that the underlying problems will begin to be solved unless the voters develop a realistic understanding of what needs to be done, and start electing politicians who are both willing and competent to do it. It may be a while.

Wonderful Old London Memoir

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From Memoirs Of William Henry Knapp at the Spitalfields Life blog, a trove of London history:

My first working years were very interesting as well as being hard-working and, as a man today beyond the sixty mark, I can think of the romance attached to my first job necessitating my calling at some of the most important buildings, firms and institutions in the City. Some are demolished or out of date but just a few remain and I can recount from memory a few of the places and firms.
 
My old firm was on Ludgate Hill, next St Martin’s Court, which is bordered on one side by the well known City Stationers, W. Straker. While I have him in mind, I must tell you that his first start in life was sitting in a small window in the left hand corner of St Paul’s Church and printing visiting cards at so much per hundred while you wait. In his case, one can quote the old adage, ‘nothing succeeds like success.’ What a character he was, good features, curly grey hair, immaculately dressed. If he ever wore a hat, it was of the sombrero type worn at a rakish angle, with a silk coat, plush waistcoat and very pronounced black and white check trousers. In his spare time, on bright days, he would parade the pavement near or about his premises and people naturally asked, ‘Who’s that?‘ He was a city character once seen could never be forgotten.
 
At the extreme end of St Martin’s Court stood what we boys called the old London Wall a mass about forty feet by ten and possibly the position of the ancient Lud Gate, one of the many gates protecting the City. I well remember with the tools of those days it took considerable time to demolish it.

Some Hopeful News

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Conservatism Is Winning In The States

What Alexis de Tocqueville observed over 150 years ago remains true today—states are laboratories of ideas. It’s here on the state level where ideas are created, fought over, tested, implemented, and either succeed or fail. When it comes to conservative ideas in the states, we are winning.
While presidential candidates were insulting each other’s appendages, West Virginia became the 26th Right to Work state. While the FBI was investigating candidates, North Carolina  passed major tax cuts. While pundits cried that both major parties had lost their way, Missouri passed paycheck protection. Conservatism is winning in the states. Don’t let it go unnoticed.
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There is no state that highlights conservative victories better than Wisconsin. Just five years ago Wisconsin turned a billion-dollar deficit into a multi million-dollar surplus. Act 10 may have grabbed headlines across the country as protestors occupied the capitol for months, but the story did not end there.
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Over the past year conservatives have passed reforms less controversial than Act 10 but just as important to taxpayers across the state. Last year they passed Right to Work to guarantee workers the freedom to join a union or not. Wisconsin reformed the prevailing wage law, which will save our local communities millions of dollars on the cost of building new schools and roads. Wisconsin reformed the marriage penalty to reduce taxes on working families, froze tuition at the UW for the forth straight year, and passed occupational licensure reform that gives a hand up to some of the hardest working Wisconsinites.

A newly-released Gallup survey indicates that a solid majority of students at America’s colleges and universities supports free speech on campus. However, a strong contingent of students wants to limit “hate speech” and speech that intentionally offend people based on some aspect of their identities.

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A full and extensive report about the poll, which Gallup conducted for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, shows that 78 percent of U.S. college students believe their campuses should be serious, grownup places where students experience all manner of speech and myriad different viewpoints.

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Other findings within the study showed that students with Republican and independent political leanings were far more tolerates than their Democratic counterparts. It also found that a majority of students (54 percent) believed their professors and administrators were also stifling free speech on campus.

Those are hopeful signs. The most important changes begin at the grassroots level. To my mind, the single most tasks facing the American people are reigning in the vast behemoth that is the federal government and reforming public education. That the majority of college students are not yet ready to toss out the Bill of Rights is a positive indicator. But schools are increasingly petri dishes for incubating leftist and far leftist ideologues, and the indoctrination seems to become more radical as time goes by. That needs to stop. Yesterday.

Meanwhile, in nuclear power development, a long discussed idea of deploying factory built and tested small reactors seems to be capturing imaginations around the world again. The Chinese had plans several years ago to build SMRs from Westinghouse, but I have no idea how that is progressing, if at all. The UK now seems interested as well. I’m interested in seeing how well this technology works out but it seems completely straightforward and doable to me. The US Navy has been using small nuclear reactors safely and effectively for more that 50 years now. And as reactors become less custom one-off designs and more of a standard product, safety and reliability should increase and cost should come down. For reactors to ever be fully accepted by the public, however, the designs must fail-safe. Which is to say that the nature of the process is one where if there is a facility failure, the physics of the reaction process simply stop.

There will be a competition to identify the best value design of mini reactors – called small modular reactors (SMRs) – and paving the way “towards building one of the world’s first SMRs in the UK in the 2020s”. There is no shortage of contenders, with companies from the US to China and Poland all wooing the UK with their proposals.

With a crucial UN climate change summit in Paris imminent, the question of how to keep the lights on affordably, while cutting emissions, is pressing.

SMRs aim to capture the advantages of nuclear power always-on, low-carbon energy while avoiding the problems, principally the vast cost and time taken to build huge plants. Current plants, such as the planned French-Chinese Hinkley Point project in Somerset, have to be built on-site, a task likened to “building a cathedral within a cathedral”.

The Things That We Are Asked To Give Up

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So, as I am devoting all my energy and time to finishing the first draft of another book, I have been following with lashings of sorrow, pity, dread and the merest splash of schadenfreude developments in Europe. Germany, which seems to be cracking under the weight of a full load of so-called refugees, Sweden, ditto, Brussels, where the concerned citizens appear to be too frightened to continue with a protest march against fear, and the governing authorities appear to be more concerned about the legendary anti-Muslim backlash than the certainty of Islamic terror unleashed in some European or English city.

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