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Follow my resolutions for a new, improved future
Having broken my own resolutions for many years, I decided some time ago to make instead some new year resolutions for other people. No doubt they will be broken too, but that will hardly be my fault. Here they are.
For Dottie, the Princess Royal's bull terrier: to savage a few more overbred, overfed and exploited canine chums, royal or not. This country is plagued with neurotic, neglected pets that dump tons of excrement on pavements, parks and footpaths, spreading disgust and disease, before trotting home to an unnatural life in captivity.
For Patricia Hewitt, the trade secretary: to try to stop telling people how to run their lives, if only for a couple of weeks. This will be very hard for Patricia; she suffers from interference compulsive disorder, centring on other people's domestic lives, and the affliction has been particularly bad this year.
In June she told stay-at-home mothers they were a "persistent problem" and a drain on the economy, and should get out to work. However, therapy can, it seems, sometimes help. By October she was prepared to admit that the government should not dictate to women how to live their lives.
But Patricia must be careful. Relapses are almost inevitable with interference compulsive disorder and only last week she could not stop herself telling fathers to take six months' paternity leave (see G Brown below).
For Gordon Brown: to take six months' paternity leave to spend with baby John, as recommended by Patricia Hewitt (see above), starting immediately. Gordon is beginning to look scarier and scarier. He is quite capable of ruining this country. Even six months away would be useful damage limitation.
For Michael Howard: never to forget that conviction works. This is not a snide reference to his belief as home secretary -proved to be right, as far as recidivism goes -that prison works. It's a reminder that people do really prefer and vote for politicians with conviction; it is a mistake to jettison any. I've always suspected Howard of having real convictions -naive of me perhaps.
For Margaret Hodge: to resign immediately and stay out of public life. It is a complete mystery that her close friends the Blairs have not pushed her into doing the decent thing, if only out of self-interest.
Perhaps, like her, they truly cannot see what is wrong with her behaviour or why it was so wicked of her to accuse a former victim of child abuse in Hodge-led Islington of being "extremely disturbed" in a private letter to the BBC.
For Cherie Blair (multiple resolutions for a busy multi-tasker): to keep work life separate from No 10 life. To try to make it up to her daughter Kathryn for choosing and sending a family Christmas card photograph that was so ruthlessly unflattering to the poor girl. To pay full price for all designer clothes. To say as little as possible in public.
To all those trying to be "sensitive" about other faiths: try less hard. Daft examples from 2003 include the case of a head teacher of an infant school in Yorkshire, where two-thirds of the pupils are from Muslim families, who told staff not to read aloud to them any stories about pigs out of respect for ethnic sensitivities.
Recently, High Wycombe public library refused to allow a church to put up a notice advertising Advent carol services, for fear of giving offence yet held a party which, by contrast, was much advertised at the library, to celebrate the Muslim festival of Eid. Muslims do not welcome this treatment. They realise it is counterproductive.
For almost all quangos: to self-destruct. Of course they won't. They seem to reproduce uncontrollably. So I resolve that all quangos should at least report themselves clearly and simply on a single quango website -why was that good idea recently dropped? -so we can all see in awestruck horror just how many, how expensive, how wasteful, how unrepresentative and how counterproductive they are.
The Cabinet Office has now disseminated the former quango website over two websites. This makes it very difficult to work out what's what. Transparency, new Labour style?
For the Archbishop of Canterbury: to spend a long ecumenical retreat at a Trappist monastery under the rule of total silence. The sad fact is that whenever Rowan Williams, our bearded prelate, speaks out against division and disorder he tends to contribute to it.
When he insists on the right of the Church of England to criticise the elected government he reminds us all of something it would be convenient to forget, which is that, strictly speaking, for quaint historical reasons, we live in a theocracy.
This is very awkward. It makes a nonsense of our liberal view that religion is a private matter and should not intrude on politics, a view for which thousands have died in agony.
Also, it encourages people of other faiths here to think that in justice their religious leaders should have political power as well. They are already asking for it. That would be a disaster. Since many people recognise that, Williams is leading his flock towards disestablishment.
For President George Bush: to keep God out of his speeches. (see above).
For American cattle farmers facing mad cow disease: to learn from the awful example of John Selwyn Gummer, his infant daughter Cordelia's hamburger and the burning cattle pyres -to tell the whole truth about BSE and start vaccinating at once.
For the agriculture ministers of the rich world: to stop subsidising domestic farming completely. It beggars farmers in the developing world.
For international trade organisations of all kinds: to remove the immoral and hypocritical trade barriers against developing countries. Then they could hope to support themselves, and might come to resent the rich world less.
For local education authorities and school governors: stop selling school playing fields or building over them, immediately. Children need exercise, especially the fat children we breed these days.
For English National Opera: to stop producing operas in English, now that everyone accepts subtitles, as at Covent Garden.
For all senior managers in all public services: to adopt a new uber-target to abandon at least one target every working day.
For inspectors of schools, hospitals, prison and the like: to insist on unannounced, unexpected inspections only.
For all television presenters and reporters: to watch the Brass Eye DVD repeatedly. This very funny show might cure them of their silliest and most vacuous habits.
For the BBC: make fewer programmes. The only way for the BBC to survive is to maintain the highest possible standards, and the only way to do that is to cut production hugely.
The BBC does not need to fill every unforgiving hour with cheap populist rubbish.
Let others do that. The BBC could remain world-beating and indispensable if it threw all its money into being the best at a few things. After all, the only advantage of being in the civil service is that you don't have to compete commercially.
Happy New Year!
The Sunday Times | Sunday, December 28, 2003 | Comments (0)
First we lost our faith, then we lost faith in ourselves
'Tis the season to be merry. Advent is not supposed to be a time of lamentation.
If you are not one of the few who are watching and praying for the arrival of the saviour of the world, you can at least be one of the many who are looking forward to partying, feasting, holidays and even some genuine seasonal goodwill here and there. Yet to me this Advent has seemed unusually melancholy.
Gloom set in, for me, at an extraordinarily beautiful carol service in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, on the first Sunday in Advent. Outside in Trinity Great Court the night was cold and clear. Inside, the chapel was at first almost silent, filled with hushed people and with soft gold light from the candles we were holding.
Suddenly into the silence came an unearthly pure solo voice from the east end somewhere near the altar. Then it was answered by other astonishingly lovely voices out of sight at the other end of the chapel. If any moment on earth, or any earthly beauty, can be said to be heavenly, that was one of them.
However, like most people in this country, I am not a believer in the teachings of Christianity. And there is a curious kind of pain in trying to make sense of one of the most awe-inspiring parts of my -of our -inheritance, which I both know and love, but which seems ever more meaningless, if there can be degrees of meaninglessness. I suppose, at least, there can be degrees of a sense of loss of meaning.
It is impossible to know quite what to make of choral music like the unearthly singing in Trinity College Chapel, or the subtle, overwhelming thunder of a great organ toccata and fugue, or the undeniable power of the great requiem masses, or the best 17th century religious sonnets.
Some sort of automatic translation has to go on, filtering out what is not acceptable intellectually, or transmogrifying it into something other than what it claims to be. Something is always lost in translation, and perhaps too much for any meaning to endure. Perhaps before long these things, stripped of their religious inspiration, will be as inaccessible as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.
In any case, there in that chapel I was struck by an acute attack of the contemporary Dover Beach effect.
The original Dover Beach effect was described by Matthew Arnold in 1867, in his poem of that name, about the loss of faith -that huge intellectual and spiritual upheaval of the 19th century. He was writing specifically about the loss of Christian belief, and the sense of meaning that goes with it, and indeed did go with it, rather literally. He famously lamented the sea of faith, which once encircled the earth. Now, he wrote, thinking of a moonlit night under the cliffs of Dover, he could only hear "its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar".
Much later, now, after more than 150 years of adjusting to that profound feeling of change, I think we are suffering from a different and perhaps even more disturbing loss of faith -a contemporary form of the Dover Beach effect, a sense of the silence of the beach long after the tide has gone out.
It is not just that my young companion in the chapel was as mystified by the service as a young anthropologist might be when first introduced to the rituals of a far-flung and alien tribe, English and well-educated though she is. It was not just that she commented on how increasingly irrelevant such rituals seem to her generation, however beautiful.
But with the loss of specifically religious conviction we have also lost so much of the wider conviction that matters in a society, including a proper respect for our own culture as a whole, for our own traditions in general.
At the same time, by some strange perversity, we respect people who do respect their own traditions, or we imagine we do. In practice this means some of us all too often decry our own rituals, weakened as they are, and show preference for the rituals of others.
Every year now there are examples of this strange self-denigration, when otherwise conventional British functionaries decide that the word Christmas is offensive, that we must abandon nativity plays or that we must all talk of Winterval.
The perfect example this year was the case of the public library in Buckinghamshire that favoured Islam over Christianity. That is not putting the case too crudely.
What happened was that High Wycombe public library refused to allow a local church to put up a notice advertising Advent carol services, yet held a party, which (unlike the choral services) was advertised at the library, to celebrate the Muslim festival of Eid.
The mind can only reel at this kind of idiocy. The reason given for suppressing the little poster about the Christian festival was that it might cause offence.
Passions might be inflamed. Yet though Christian celebration is offensive and inflammatory, Islamic celebration is not. Religious diversity must be respected, but not in the case of Christianity, it seems.
Prominent Muslims across the country have been horrified, and have said so publicly. This repression does not come from them. It comes from within the host community; in other contexts such denials have rightly been called self hatred.
What's striking is not the silliness or the injustice. It is the cultural cowardice and loss of self-respect that has allowed it. This was an outward and visible sign of our -by which I mean the host community's -loss of faith in ourselves. It is not trivial, and it may not be reversible.
The trouble with throwing out the unwanted bathwater is that you may lose not just the baby Jesus but the entire value and belief system that has grown up around him for 2,000 years, and which has shaped everything we held until recently dear, and everything which perhaps still makes this country desirable. Once inside a belief system, to change metaphors, the loss of faith corrupts everything, like a computer virus.
That, I think, is the explanation for the failure of nerve around us and in among us, and for the moral muddle which seems to oppress so many of us. It must be, I think, the explanation for the constant complaint, which I have heard from countless readers, that there are now so many things one cannot say.
That must be at least partly due to their loss of conviction, and their belief in their right to say them. It must be why so many self-interested politicians, and so many self-appointed leaders, go unchallenged, when in various ways they undermine the values of what we used to be able to call the host culture.
Matthew Arnold seems to ignore the obvious point that though the tide certainly goes out, bearing faith away perhaps, it also comes back in, bringing upon it all kinds of other faiths from the other side of the waters to replace the beliefs that have been swept away. That may be quite inevitable, for better or for worse.
And in any case, it may not matter much in the long run, because, as JM Keynes said, in the long run we are all dead. But it is sad and not a very cheery seasonal thought.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, December 21, 2003 | Comments (0)
Gandalf touches the hearts other religions cannot reach
Great movies have always had great power, but the power of The Lord of the Rings seems to be of a different order. The entire world, young and old, seems to be mysteriously enthralled; the films have already attracted a passion exceeding in some ways that of the mighty Star Wars, and the box office millions that go with it.
Unprecedented public adulation burst out at the British premiere of the third and last film in Leicester Square last Thursday, to the astonishment even of experienced premiere-goers. Altogether something strange seems to be happening.
For instance, Gandalf, or rather the great English actor who plays him, has been asked by mothers to bless their babies -rather as if they were tempted to touch the hem of his magical garment, as if they were spellbound.
Mass enthusiasm is not new, of course. People used to behave extremely oddly, and still do for all I know, about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; thousands would flock to nerdy mass gatherings equipped with iconic towels just like Ford Prefect's.
Star Wars mania has lasted for many years and millions of childhoods have now been formed by Star Wars toys and Star Wars make-believe, as well as by the films.
The heroic Gladiator also evokes tremendous emotion; I have seen it three times and even occasionally at low moments think of saying "strength and honour" to myself, like the valiant Russell Crowe.
We all love the sagas of heroism. But I think there is something more going on with The Lord of the Rings.
In one sense, obviously, the films offer pretty much what has gone before - mesmerising fights and battles between goodies and baddies in an escapist fantasy world where reality is replaced by constant excitement, constant novelty and a happy ending.
However, even though all these films are in the myth-making, or rather the myth-makeover, business, The Lord of the Rings (book and film) seems to me to offer much more than its predecessors.
I think that is because it is a better, richer myth that was created originally by a man who understood myth-making better and instinctively; for that reason it feeds in a much more satisfying way the deep hunger of millions of people throughout the world for whom other myths have faded and lost their power.
In a way this is all rather surprising. The sophisticated view of The Lord of the Rings (the book) is that it is mawkish and clumsy. JRR Tolkien was one of a group of extremely bachelorish dons (although not all of them were actually bachelors) at Oxford called the Inklings.
CS Lewis, the creator of Narnia, was another member. As a group they have always struck me as the least attractive kind of English male coterie of the prewar era; cocoa drinking, whimsical and sexless, or distracted only occasionally by feeble bat squeaks of sexuality that were hardly audible through the mists of their pipe-smoking misogyny.
Those inclined to look down on the book of The Lord of the Rings (and I am not one) point out disdainfully the unaesthetic, kitschy folksiness of the hobbits in the shire, the dreadful verse throughout, the self-conscious oscillations of the language between Mummerset Lowspeak and cod Early English Highspeak, and embarrassing inventions such as Tom Bombadillo and the Ents, all of which could have been conceived only in the mind of someone missing several hormones and a great deal not just of taste, but also of appetite for adult life.
I don't see how one can argue with that. But I have always loved the books anyway.
What counts about them, despite all that, and what makes the films great is the story. And the story is a powerful collection of elemental myths that are woven together in a way that is spellbinding.
This is not a matter of assemblage. It is not easy to put myths together, like painting by numbers. We know there are huge amounts of powerful material out there, somewhere in our virtual memories, which can have strange and great power over the imagination, across cultures and across time. You do not have to be a follower of Carl Jung or to believe in some sort of collective unconscious to be convinced of that.
Many writers and directors have been tempted, very self-consciously, to try to make use of this power. For example, George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, is known to have consulted Joseph Campbell, the American guru of myth and archetype and author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Star Wars is clearly based on such thoughts to the point of giving me, at least, a sense of pastiche.
The difference, I think, with The Lord of the Rings (book and film) is that Tolkien was deeply learned in myth and in ancient lore and language and had been obsessed with it, devoted to it, for decades.
It had become part of him; through his obsessions it had become in some sense real to him; he had internalised it. Obsession is the father of belief. And without wanting to make rather obvious generalisations about creativity, I think that process is essential to (although not enough for) the creation of something of great power.
It is missing in the other faintly comparable myth-making blockbusters, because they all lack a grand obsessive as a myth-maker. You have in some sense to be obsessed to persuade others to believe, as the princes of organised religions have learnt to their dismay.
Myths are the stories we tell ourselves about what we are and how to be, and about earthly and unearthly power. And in a world where organised religion and moralists of all kinds have become suspect or moribund, myths and fables and parables can still deal with the power of good and evil, natural or supernatural, in the form of entertainment.
The Lord of the Rings is unselfconsciously about all these serious things, some of them deeply unfashionable, such as hierarchy, example, command, self sacrifice, self-denial and honour. It is also about the more glamorous virtues, about heroism, loyalty and bravery in the face of unspeakable fear, about true love and true friendship.
It is about being resourceful and being miraculously rescued, about faith in the power of good, and it is centrally about how even a small and unimportant person can become heroic. It is a parable about enduring hope, even in the face of gathering evil.
People long for that and always have. Religious people often say that we all have a God-shaped hole in our hearts; as an agnostic I would say that we all have a constant, barely recognised desire for myth and even for real magic. In any case, these days myth reaches the places that organised religion cannot reach any more, in the post-Christian world at least.
The Lord of the Rings is, in effect, a contemporary religious experience. Hence the women asking for Gandalf's blessing for their babies; in some sense they believe in it. And so do millions of others, in some sense; something very strange is happening.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, December 14, 2003 | Comments (0)
The bug that's resistant to drugs -and NHS reforms
There is a certain perverse satisfaction in the thought that the whole creaking Kafkaesque edifice of the National Health Service, with its managers and targets and its labyrinthine bureaucracy, inefficiency and cruelty, could be brought down, and suddenly, by a microscopic bug. The bug is methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA -the hospital superbug -which hit the front pages yesterday.
Hospitals are losing the fight against the antibiotic-resistant superbug. Official figures reveal that the number of cases here has reached a new high. Britain's record is shocking: the worst in Europe. Sir Liam Donaldson, the government's chief medical officer, has admitted openly that "we have not made as much impact as we want ... we are not as good as other countries. If they can do it, why can't we?"
One glaring difference between them and us, of course, is that not one of those countries has a vast, centrally managed state monopoly health service like ours.
Their health services are fragmented, localised, partly privatised and very, very much better.
However, John Reid, our secretary of state for health, responded entirely predictably to the superbug crisis by announcing new infection czars at every hospital in England. (In fact such posts already exist: presumably they are going to be sexed up.) This attitude is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
MRSA is extraordinarily powerful. It can and does kill people and, as it is becoming ever more resistant to antibiotics, it threatens to kill still more.
Official figures suggest 5,000 deaths and about 100,000 infections a year, at a cost of £1billion, although other estimates are much higher. The symptoms of MRSA are very unpleasant -boils, wounds that won't heal, fever, pain, pneumonia, meningitis and even blood poisoning. It is not disputed that a main cause of the alarming spread of MRSA is poor hygiene in hospitals.
There are other factors, of course. Doctors and patients have been abusing antibiotics for decades, despite constant warnings. As a result, many bugs have developed resistance to antibiotics, entirely predictably.
It's also true that hospital procedures are increasingly complex with more operations, catheters and drips, all of which present increased risks of infection. But you have only to go round hospital wards, as I have done, or listen to patients, to learn of a degree of filth and squalor that would disgrace many Third World hospitals.
For years I have been writing about this, prompted by my own observations and by many hundreds of angry letters from readers all over the country. They describe urine and faeces left on lavatory floors, and uncleared blood and vomit splattered here and there. They write of dust, hair, litter, used syringes, trays of half-eaten food and general filth on ward floors, of dirty or unchanged sheets and unsterilised equipment.
They complain of nurses who wear their uniforms outside the hospital, who have hair trailing from caps across their patients and who don't wash their hands between treatments. There are doctors who take the same hand from sick patient to pen, to computer and then, unwashed, to the next patient.
This is commonplace in NHS hospitals and it is a perfect breeding ground for infection of every kind. Yet in all too many hospitals, despite the billions pouring into the NHS, management and clinical staff alike seem completely powerless to control basic hygiene.
The spread of the hospital superbug is a perfect paradigm of what is wrong with the NHS and the proposed solution is a perfect paradigm of what is wrong with the government's attempts to reform it.
The real solution to the superbug crisis is (in large part) quite simple. It involves cleanliness in the wards. But the NHS cannot deliver simple solutions.
Its management, its ideology, its culture and its size all demand complicated solutions.
The government's reforms propose more management -in this case some infection or "bug" czars. This is tragically misconceived. The entire system is failing and more management will simply make it fail more expensively. The NHS is too large to be manageable. Sooner or later, like the Soviet Union, it will collapse under the weight of its own unwieldiness.
I don't want to make party political points: the Conservatives bear at least as much blame for the decay of the NHS as the Labour government does. As a result of years of mismanagement and misguided reform, what has happened and what the superbug crisis at last proves to us all is that on the wards, where things really matter, nobody has the authority to insist even on minimum standards of hygiene.
Too many staff are ignorant of minimum standards and management is either incapable or blind to it. Is not this enough to convince the public that the NHS is sick with an infection resistant to all treatment?
In the NHS, managers are busily managing somehow not to manage, as Harriet Sergeant argues in a pamphlet published last week by the Centre for Policy Studies. She points out that the much-vaunted new matron, created in response to popular demand to bring back the old-fashioned hospital matron, was intended under the reforming NHS plan to have the authority to do something about "poor cleanliness" and MRSA. In practice she doesn't.
There seems to be very little she can do about contract cleaners who don't clean properly. Management made the contract and management, not matron, has authority over the cleaners. Why managers cannot respond to matron's most basic hygiene requirements or why matrons cannot insist on them is one of the many mysteries of NHS management. Incidentally, it is absurd to claim that contracting out is of itself the problem; many people contract out their cleaning out extremely successfully.
As for NHS staff, even when matron might want to reprimand a nurse or a porter there is a powerful culture throughout the state sector which prevents her.
"Telling people off" is not done. In the old days a good matron would reprimand - and effectively teach - not only nurses but doctors as well. But the egalitarian nursing reforms of recent years deliberately set out to undermine the old-fashioned hierarchy in the wards, and they have succeeded.
Besides, as a horrified matron told Sergeant, when the latter suggested threats of a fine or dismissal for a nurse who would not observe proper standards, such a threat would be "harassment". And she went on: "Anyway, we would have to sack all our nurses and where would we get replacements?" A nurse manager from infection control, standing nearby, sympathised. "Doctors are far worse," she added.
Often it is something small, even something minute, that enforces long overdue change. MRSA might just be that catalyst for the NHS. The superbug is resistant not only to antibiotics; it is also visibly resistant to the government's reforms.
It might be the death of them and of the entire moribund organisation. Then perhaps we might get national health services, and hospitals, that are healthy.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, December 07, 2003 | Comments (0)
