The TV was covered by programmes about VE Day.  Can’t see what is special about 70 years from the war (surely 50 years or 75 should be the markers) but anyway, there we were.  I flicked between two programmes, one about the factory that made bombers and the men that flew them, and another about the effects of the bombing of Germany on the civilian population.  The contrast was telling.  Anarchists used to say that a bayonet was a weapon with a worker at both ends, and so, just war or not, was a Wellington bomber.

I have managed to steer clear of most of the election coverage in the media, for very much the same reason that I never watch BBC Question Time or Prime Minister’s Questions on TV.  The tone of debate is generally appalling – adversarial and completely free of any evidence except that plucked and teased into shape by party hacks.  An example can be found in the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ analysis of the Labour and Tory manifesto plans for the economy.  They find that, after five years, the National Debt will be 77% of GNP if Labour win, and 72% if the Conservatives win.  There is a debate to be had about which is the best approach, and you know where I stand.  But can anyone but an ideologue truly believe that the Tories will lead us back to the 1930s, or that Labour will unleash an economic disaster, on the basis of that ?

Another example.  The day after the election leadership debate, neutrals tended to feel that the leader of the Scottish National Party was most impressive, Cameron effective but not overwhelming, whilst noting that Miliband’s poll ratings had improved.  However, the Sun featured a front page which said this was the day that Miliband lost the election.  The Mirror, to no-one’s surprise, said that Miliband had come out on top.

Some of these reactions are simply cynical.  Private Eye, for example, reports that the Sun headline was published before the actual event took place – whatever actually happened, Cameron was going to win.  But, sad to say, I suspect that most of people’s views about winners and losers at the debate were sincere.  Socialists really did think that Cameron was slimy and evasive, Tories similarly felt that Miliband was unimpressive and irresponsible.  Lenny Bruce reported the same effect at the famous Nixon v Kennedy debates in 1960: Republicans thought Nixon trounced Kennedy, and vice versa.  These are examples of what is known as confirmation bias, people’s habit of interpreting information in a way that supports their pre-existing beliefs in order to avoid cognitive dissonance.  One experiment gave two groups of people the same articles and statistics about murder in different states of the USA, covering those which had the death penalty and others which did not.  Those who were opposed to the death penalty thought the evidence showed that capital punishment did not reduce murder rates; those which did thought that the facts showed that it did.  In another famous experiment in the 1990s, Lee Ross, a psychologist from Stanford University, took peace proposals authored by Israeli negotiators, labelled them as Palestinian proposals, then asked Israeli citizens to assess them. “The Israelis liked the Palestinian proposal attributed to Israel more than they liked the Israeli proposal attributed to the Palestinians,” he said.  Mark Twain is alleged to have said that he never saw anyone’s mind changed by an argument, and it is hard to say he was wrong.

Of course, arguments based upon moral beliefs need not depend on logic.  You may believe people should keep any money they earn, or that they should be taxed to provide support for others.  That’s a value judgement, and you can’t argue one way or the other.  What might be germane to this debate is evidence that high taxes reduce a nation’s wealth, or (by contrast) current levels of taxation have no effect on effort: but that wouldn’t be decisive to the underlying judgement you make about how we should behave, or how we should regard personal property.

But most arguments are not like this.  Parties don’t differ about whether it’s good to have an efficient economy, or high quality education, a strong army, decent support for the old and disabled, or a fine health care system.  The argument is about how best to achieve those agreed goals, and this is where evidence and logic need to come into play.  That’s why confirmation bias – people’s inability to look at the facts in a disinterested manner – matters.  It is worrying for those of us who would wish to believe that one of humanity’s greatest glories is our ability to use science and logic.  What is the way forward if we believe that, generally speaking, truth is preferable to falsehood, and that evidence can be adduced to show what is correct and what is wrong ?

Here’s my suggestion.  Before a debate starts, people should be asked – and you should ask yourself – “what piece of evidence would change your mind on this ?”.  This would not work for many, I know: there are still those around who blame the credit crunch on Gordon Brown, and many US Republicans think that allied forces did find WMD in Iraq.   And some simply deny truth – see the anti-vaccination morons.  But for others, it would be good fun to keep the answers on record for a few years.  Did introducing a minimum wage, or restricting fox-hunts, or ending duty-free concessions at airports and ferries, cause mass unemployment, as we were told they would ?  Did Viagra bankrupt the NHS ?  We have certainly been around long enough to show that (e.g.) those who said that quantitative easing would cause runaway inflation are wrong.  Mind you, those that said it so forcefully mutter and walk in the opposite direction when challenged – or say “it will happen yet”.

I suppose the best safeguard is to have a personal sense that you’re not right all the time – in the words of Cromwell (not a great self-doubter, I know) – to think it possible that you may be wrong.  Maybe jot down the things you’ve changed your mind about over the years, from the idiocy of gay marriage to the integrity of Robert Mugabe.  Ask yourself what would make you change your mind on a much loved prejudice.  A personal understanding of the dangers of bias is one of the best weapons against it.  Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson wrote a wonderful book “Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)”, which I thoroughly recommend.  They conclude that “drivers cannot avoid having blind spots … but good drivers are aware of them”.  Or, to quote Carlyle, “the greatest of faults is to be conscious of none”.

Stick with me.  This is going to start with what appears a meaningless piece of nostalgia, but it will then expand to cover a profound analysis of modern capitalism.  Well, that’s the hope.  It will help if you were watching commercial TV in the 1950s.

OK, off we go.  I’m a blood donor.  My dad started me going whenever the qualifying age was, because I was the same blood group as him (consoling, I guess) and that is O negative.  It’s not madly rare – about 7% of the population have it – but its great advantage is that it is the universal donor.  My blood is so featureless that anyone can be transfused with it without bad things happening.  Or so aristocratic: I’m talking here about the stuff they bunged into Princess Di when she arrived at hospital.  It’s truly good stuff, and I’ve given 81 pints of it.

So, there I was sitting drinking tea after my donation and eating free NHS biscuits.  I was actually eating a Penguin, which was very nostalgic, and I mentally told myself to “P-p-p-pick up a Penguin”, remembering the old advertising slogan.  Then the NHS volunteer emptied some Club biscuits in the basket – and something hummed in my head along the lines of a kids’ choir singing  “if you want a lot of chocolate on your biscuit, join our club”.  And there I was, thinking that they don’t do adverts like that on TV any more.  We have become a service economy, and the adverts we get are for gambling, or compensation, or comparison sites.  The occasional car company sponsors a detective thriller, true, and local double-glazing companies can bellow at you in the afternoon, but generally, there are many fewer adverts for things any more.  Now, I’m not against a service economy.  Recent GNP figures may have shown that the government’s desire to rebalance things in favour of manufacturing and the regions was the predictable flop.  But generally, I know that it is a sign of economic advancement that we move from agriculture to manufacturing to service industry.  But the adverts we increasingly see are simply transfer payments – not creating wealth at all, but transferring it between gamblers and bookmakers, between successful litigants and unsuccessful, taking a rake-off as you switch people from one energy supplier, holiday hotel or car insurance company to another.

The first TV adverts I saw was when I was in hospital as a ten year old.  We had a BBC TV at home – that’s how televisions started, with one fixed channel – and hadn’t upgraded to ITV.  At the time, the idea of subscribing to a commercial service – commercial, my dear, appalling – would have been distasteful for teachers like my parents.  So I needed a mastoid infection (see below) to be able to lie in bed and see – not just Robin Hood, William Tell and The Buccaneer – but advertisements.  Proud galleons breasting the roaring forties to bring you Senior Service cigarettes, encrusted blocks of ice with SR toothpaste in them, marching guardsmen singing “Murray-mints, Murray-mints, too good to hurry Mints. Why make haste, when you can taste, the hint of mint in Murray-mints” – an unanswerable question.  I can even remember the famous 30 second drama that promised “you’re never alone with a Strand”, trying to sell a cigarette because it will give lonely men companionship but instead conveying ostracism.  Real things, even if they gave you cancer.

I watch cricket from India sometimes, and their stadia are bedecked with advertisements for real stuff – concrete, motor cycles, flour, hair cream.  UK sports stadia are sponsored by corporations doing no one quite knows what, or full of brazen nonsense pretending that Adidas or Barclays Bank loves the community.  It’s a symptom of an economy that is serious, not about creating wealth, but in just raking in cash, and there is a difference.  The TV adverts are there to remind us that people who make stuff are very second division behind those who make money.

This may mean nothing to you, but it made me happy:

I was at my routine out-patient appointment (mastoid ear, if you’re interested), and the nurse asked whether I had taken the day off work, and I said I was retired, and she said what from, and I said college Principal, and she said where was that, and I said Parson Cross College in Sheffield.  And she said “I got into nursing from an Access Course at Parson Cross. It was a wonderful place”.  She explained how her dad was made redundant by the steelworks closures, and so she couldn’t complete her secondary schooling but came to college as an adult later.  She told me about – and named – the teachers who had supported her, and made a difference.  And she said she keeps in contact with friends from her college days and – again – “it was a wonderful place.  It changed my life”.

And that’s why I’m glad I worked in further and adult education. Don’t believe a politician who says “you only have one chance of a good education”; you have plenty.  Ask Clive James, or Jamie Oliver, Or Colin Firth, or Jimmy Chu, or Willy Russell (and so on for pages) who qualified through further education.  The only reason people might not have a second chance is if politicians cut adult and further education, which they are doing remorselessly at the moment.  I’m saddened that adult education is one of the unseen casualties of austerity.

It is a pity that the debate about raising educational standards – an effort that no sensible person can be against – becomes fogged with dreamy thoughts about making things the way they were (or how journalists and politicians imagine they were).  The latest example of this is to be found in the latest Sunday Times, which advocates making children learn poetry by rote, and included a list of poems that should be learnt.  The list included Wordsworth’s autobiographical work “The Prelude”, a book I know something of having been put to it for ‘A’ level.  I am not an expert on this, having got a very moderate English grade after spending a couple of terms in hospital: I do know, however, that it is very, very long.  The good old internet (invented after the standards had slipped so woefully) confirms that the “The Prelude” is 7882 lines long.  The problem could be that the Sunday Times’ experts had never read the book, or never met a child, but it has to be one or the other. The only institutions that value such heroic feats of memory are Islamic madrassas – it’s how you become a hafiz – and we know of their contribution to the modern world.

To repeat.  I am in favour of rising standards in education, and (another debate, I know) I do think that general knowledge is a part of high standards.  I am often shocked by the brainless replies of radio & TV quiz contestants.  Have we really got to a stage where (after conferring) a team agrees that the Mona Lisa was painted by Picasso ?  Indeed we have.  But I recall a recent edition of University Challenge where teams of four could not name the Prime Minister at the time of the 1929 Great Crash, thought Delft was in Northern Ireland and believed Herschel worked in the twentieth century.  Oh, perhaps I need to add that this was a celebrity edition, with teams of (yep) middle aged journalists and politicos representing their former institutions.  There are many ways to approach raising educational levels, but nostalgia isn’t one of them.

Twitter is a wonderful thing, but it can lead you to some very odd places.  A few months ago I made a remark to the effect that recent events seem to have suggested that Hayek was wrong to suggest social democracy was the enemy of freedom – for it is in social democratic countries that the greatest freedom of thought, speech and lifestyle is to be found. Well, now !  It turns out that the redoubtable Dr Hayek, though dead for years, still has faithful acolytes to carry his torch.  I found myself, at the age of 69, acquiring trolls – not only demanding proof that Hayek was unsympathetic to progressive taxation and the welfare state, but replying with aggressive rudeness when I did so.  A lesson learned.

Recently I found myself in another weird universe.  The start was pretty normal – someone providing a link to a speech by the former head of Israel’s intelligence service Mossad, who apparently suggested Israel needed new leadership with a more conciliatory tone .  In itself, not an exceptional view, you may feel, though perhaps a surprising proponent of them.  However, the comments made beneath the tweet led you into an extraordinary world, populated by people who either think Israel should not exist, or that it should be greatly expanded.  Both sides leant on the idea of looking back at history to a time – often a very, very long time ago -when the borders of nations in the area were different from now.  It did not prove much of an effort to find a time when Jews had much more than the present, or much less; or when it was all Arab lands.

Break for thought. I’ve recently been shown a marvellous dynamic map of Europe’s borders since about 1000. In 1066, France owned England.  In 1200, England owned France (and kept a claim on it for another 600 years).  You’ll notice, as you run the timeline, Poland is either a European super-power, or doesn’t exist at all; and at the end of the Second World War, it shifted leftwards by 200 miles or so.  Hungary booms and busts, and maintains its resentment at losing Transylvania to Romania.  German was once made up of scores of minor princedoms.  Alsace and Lorraine switch between France and Germany.  Yugoslavia lives and dies.  And, let’s be fair to Shakespeare, there appears to be a time when Bohemia had a coast.   This isn’t just a European experience, of course.  Paraguay kept picking wars with its neighbours which would end in losing vast swathes of territory (and horrific numbers of lives).  Indian partition, and he creation of  Bangladesh provide another example.

What’s my point ?  It is that an argument based on historic borders is usually unhelpful and often idiotic.  We start from where we are, in a world where most boundaries have changed, and we try to find a way forward where conflict is avoided, exaggerated claims are discounted, gainers outnumber losers, and those who lose most are compensated.

What’s the chances ?

Lying behind all the kerfuffle about tax evasion lies a problem which is more profound.  This doesn’t mean I believe the issue is trivial, just that the governments of the world could solve the problem of tax dodging individuals and companies inside a month if they put their minds to it.  Taxing companies on turnover without any allowances would cut out the export of profit to low-tax jurisdictions.  Making all personal tax returns public documents – as I think has been achieved in Scandinavia without their obvious collapse into a North Korean tyranny – would crack the problem of evasive individual behaviour.  And declaring to the taxman the possession and size of overseas bank accounts is not something that would bother me, and I have one.  Compared to solving the Middle East conflicts, or curing malaria, or securing clean water for Africa, eliminating tax dodging is, as the young people say, a no-brainer.

No, the problem which is being obscured is the inequality of wealth.  We are seeing press and TV comment on the tax evaders – often critical and apparently radical comment – which takes as a given that it is OK for individual people to own millions, and in some cases, billions of pounds worth of assets, whilst the general standard of living is static or falling – and has been so for some groups for twenty or thirty years.  There is controversy about why this is happening – is it new technology, the wider use of South East Asian imports, the rise in unemployment, the increased dominance of finance industries, immigration, government capture by special interests – but no-one is, I think disputing it.  Thomas Piketty drew predictable hostility by pointing out the arithmetically obvious fact that if the rate of return on capital is higher than the growth of national income, wealth will flow to those who own capital.  And that is, unambiguously, what is happening.

Here’s a thought.  Might the ability of corporations to devote disproportionate resources to management salaries and bonuses, to impose obviously unfair zero-hours contracts, to destroy historic pension arrangements, to hide and off-shore profits, to maintain pay freezes at a time of rising corporate profits have something to do with the lack of trade union power ?  The ability of employees to resist adverse change has been substantially weakened – in a sense, the workforce has been unilaterally disarmed.  As in the days before trade unions, a single employer faces a disorganised group of employees.  Trade union numbers have been falling every year since Thatcher came to power – from 13m in 1979 to 6.5m today.  Part is down to privatisation, as public bodies typically have higher rates of unionisation than private.  Part of this is due to the legal disempowerment of unions, making it less advantageous to be a union member.  The US campaign against unions – laughably described as ‘right to work’ legislation – is based on this idea.  The reason that changes in the law – and Cameron promises more – are less controversial than they are (and should be) is mostly down to the national memory of misbehaviour by some union leaders in the seventies and eighties, especially Arthur Scargill.  I wonder if he ever considers his role as he maintains a reclusive existence outside Barnsley: probably not, given his capacity for reflection.

So, would it be possible to make progress by raising trade union power – by, say, following the German example and having compulsory workforce representatives on the boards of companies ?  As a friend said when I raised this possibility – “good luck with that”. (later insert – This became a Conservative policy, and I tweeted that it would never happen, and it never happened)

p.s. the day after writing the above, I saw this article via Twitter.  And then, this diagram:

An idea whose time has come ?

I was once one of those people who was pretty happy to be described as a Guardian reader.  In favour of equality – check.  Against capital punishment – check.  Wary about the glory of markets – check.  Dubious about academies – check.  Not owned by a Tory magnate – check.  I retained an affection for the old rag even when I eventually gave up taking it because it did become an endless succession of moans about the awfulness of the world.  I used to buy it once or twice a week as balance to the Times (5 of whose last 8 lead stories have been about the awfulness of Labour) or Telegraph (editorial policy for sale to highest bidder).  I still do that actually – avoiding the Tuesday education special, to prevent opening old policy and career scars – but not sure I would want anyone to call me a ‘Guardian reader’ any more, for a number of reasons.

The first one is the way it has unquestioningly placed itself in favour of revealing government secrets.  Now, I’m no admirer of the blanket use of the Official Secrets Act, and would like to access to a wide range of information on policy issues, where that puts nothing at risk apart from some Minister’s career.  However, I am not naïve, and I do feel that some matters do need to be kept confidential.  I also think that democratic countries have enemies in the world.  No point in being needlessly adversarial, but sometimes you have to be needfully adversarial.  A foreign policy which was based on the idea that we have no enemies, only countries to whom we have not made enough concessions, seems likely to lead into deep trouble.  The recent article revealing that UK intelligence has tried to recruit North Korean spies seems to be an example. I (a) do think we need intelligence services – isn’t the critique of Iraq that our intelligence wasn’t good enough ? – and (b) do think that North Korea is an enemy.  A real story would be if our government was not trying to gain more information about North Korea.  Some of these stories have been actually dangerous to the very people who risk their lives helping us as informants.

The second problem for me is the consistent anti-Israel line.  Again, I am not a one sided fan of Israel, and Benjamin Netanhayu seems a particularly loathsome individual.  However, it is a democracy, and (unlike any Arab nation) has integrated its refugees into its population, finding jobs and homes and an education for all those expelled from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and so on, rather than putting them into refugee camps.  The Gaza episode was appalling, but it is difficult to see what else a country can do when a neighbour is lobbing rockets into it.  I also believe that abolishing Israel would lead to more human suffering than not doing so: I gather that makes me a Zionist.  The story yesterday – quite a big story – condemned Israel for imprisoning an adolescent girl for throwing stones at soldiers.  It even told us that throwing stones at soldiers was a practice approved of by Palestinian opinion, a curious paragraph in an article pleading her innocence.  Her family say she didn’t do it.  Hmmm.  The issue of adolescents in custody, and their interview by police, is indeed an issue, and it is one we have had to take a long time getting right in the UK, and we’re not there yet.  But if my daughter were to be arrested by any police force anywhere between Turkey and Australia, I think I would choose Israel.

And then we get extraordinary articles like Owen Jones’ effort recently, entitled “Is ISIS the ultimate evil ? They would like you to think so”.  Who, one wonders, are ‘they’ ?  Wicked western leaders who believe in democracy, the rule of law and welfare states, I guess.  And how much effort do they need to persuade us that men who behead, rape and burn their victims are actually not so nice ? Do we really need a beauty contest involving the SS, President Assad and the Spanish Inquisition ?  Jeez.  I was delighted to see I wasn’t alone when I read Tim Lott’s article – I could go through it and tick each point he makes.

There’s much still to cherish about the Guardian,.  Polly Toynbee is consistently good, and so is George Monbiot: it is the only paper that will question the modern religion of austerity.  Steve Bell is a great cartoonist.  But I’ve moved from being a fan to a neutral observer.  When I first wrote my will, many years ago, I asked that a barrel of beer be bought for the “Guardian” newsroom for the pleasure they had given me over the years.  That paragraph is no longer there.  Sorry, lads.

My favourite sports show how very English I am – rugby union, and cricket.  There is a wealth of wonderful writing on cricket, but not much on rugby.  The Six Nations Championship started this weekend – a cracking match between England and Wales, a tense one in Paris between Scotland and France, and in Rome, the unrolling of an unsurprising script as the Irish wore down the Italians.  The TV channels have to pretend they were all equally and enormously exciting, which they weren’t.  Maybe I should start with a primer on rugby union, similar to the ‘American football for beginners’ guides that were around when Channel Four started broadcasting the NFL twenty or so years ago.

Start here. A rugby union side has 15 players.  They are divided into 8 forwards – the pack – and 7 backs.  Broadly, it is the job of the forwards – big, rumbling psychopaths – to get the ball, and the job of the backs – dainty, skilled athletes – to use it to score points.  As the old joke has it, the team is made up of the piano players and the piano shifters.  Actually, things have changed a bit in recent years.  The forwards now get to run with the ball a lot, aiming to exhaust the defence, not by running around them but by running over them.  Never used to be like that.  When I was playing (guess which group I belonged to. Clue – 17 stone and size 18 neck), I guess I received a pass a year.  The other change is that the backs are no longer dainty: it used to be said that the great asset of the game was that it was good for all physiques, short and fat, tall and thin.  Not any more.  There are some exceptions, but many of the backs have become the sort of six foot, seventeen stone bruisers who would have been sent into the pack in the past.  They are, however, different from the forwards in the fact that they can catch a ball off their toes, and do an even time 100 metres.  Much of the modern game involves teams trying to find a ‘mismatch’, where a sprinter from the backs is up against a bricklayer from the forwards he (or she) can run around.

The thing about rugby union that distinguishes it from American football and rugby league, is that the game carries on when a player is tackled to the ground.  This is the source of some awful tedium, as the ball disappears into a heaving mound of humanity; it is also a source of frustration, as the referee discovers some bizarre offence that no-one else can see as the forwards burrow and wrestle.  But this continuity is also the source of the most exciting events in any sport anywhere, as play follows play without interruption, with twenty or thirty uninterrupted passes and tackles, as the ball is ‘recycled’ from the breakdown, and spins first to one side of the field, then to the other.  When this is combined with the other unique feature of rugby – that the game cannot end until the ball is out of play – you can have extraordinary endings, with the losing side playing on for minute after minute, throwing passes left and right, in a desperate attempt to secure a score before being tackled off the field.

So, have a look at a match and see if you can seem the different roles play out.  Regrettably, you will not get much help from the press.  Rugby journalists tend to be impressed with forwards who can run around athletically, catch and throw extravagant passes, without realising that is not their job.  They are there to get the ball from the opposition, wrestling often in dark areas.  It is salutary to look after a match to see the ratings that different journalists give to various players.  Like TV talent shows, it seems you can’t get below 5 or above 8, no matter how good or bad you are.  Here are the ratings given by the Guardian (G), Times (T) and Sunday Times (S) on Friday’s match.

So, there you have it.  Billy Vinipuola was England’s best or worst forward, according to who you read.  But then, so was James Haskell (who really was outstanding).  In the Guardian, Gethin Jenkins gets the same marks as Dan Cole, who pushed him all over the field.  Ben Youngs, who ran the second half, gets marked below his opponent Rhys Webb.  Toby Faletau was the best or worst Welsh forward.  Dave Attwood was man-of-the-match, or pretty ordinary.  There you go, expertise in action.  Ho hum.

The idea that our Coalition Government (a) has to do unpleasant things because (b) things were left in a mess by their predecessors is just tosh. Sadly, it is tosh that I think will win the next election, but for those wishing to know the truth, there’s a fine article by Prof Simon Wren-Lewis in the current London Review of Books, debunking the austerity nonsense.  It is extraordinary that anyone is left arguing the austerity case – let alone the need to have further cuts in public provision – when there is not a respectable voice defending it any more.  By respectable, I exclude George Osborne or those that attended the Tory Black and White Ball last week.  Paul Krugman in America also points out the lack of any evidence that government cuts are expansionary, or higher borrowing will drive up interest rates.

I won’t spend a lot of time repeating what the Prof puts so well, but it would be wonderful if the press and voters could agree:

• It is not possible for a country with its own currency to go bankrupt. The idea that Labour, or anyone, “nearly bankrupted the nation” is idiotic.
• The 2008 crash was caused by the behaviour of financial institutions, mostly in the US, and had a worldwide resonance. It was not caused by Gordon Brown*.
• The 1997-2010 government did not have a bad record on public spending, and the UK national debt to income ratio is no worse than international comparators, and better than many.

To which I would add

• Reducing the budget deficit is not the major economic issue at the moment. The issue is raising incomes and growth, and the way that is done is by increasing demand (fiscal policy) and by improving productivity (much harder, but basically more capital investment and raising vocational skill levels).

*I’m not a mindless Labourite. I resigned from the Party in January 2008 because Gordon Brown was cosying up to financiers and industrialists.